What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland Allen, and you're listening to the Indie Hackers Podcast.
On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense
of who they are, how they became the people they are today, and how they make decisions
at their companies.
The goal, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples, their learnings,
and their mistakes, and go on to build our own successful companies.
Today I'm talking to David Smook, the creator of a very popular tech publication called
Hacker Noon.
Now, David is one of my role models, and I think it shines through in this conversation
because I end up asking him an almost relentless barrage of questions about how to be successful
at producing content online, and pretty much mine him for all the information that I can.
So I think you'll learn a lot from this episode, I sure did.
David is an interesting character, he's got very explicit and carefully considered beliefs
about pretty much every part of his business.
And so far, it's worked out very well for him.
Now, before we jump into the episode, I just want to quickly mention the website, ndhackers.com.
We've got full transcripts of every podcast episode, if you want to read along, including
this one, just go to ndhackers.com slash podcast.
We also have a thriving community of developers and entrepreneurs who are helping each other
start their own companies and overcome individual challenges.
Again, that's ndhackers.com.
Now, without further ado, David Smook.
David, how's it going?
What's new?
Hey, Cortland.
First, I just wanted to say thanks for having me on Ndhackers.
You've done a great thing, and it's really cool that I'm now a bootstrapped person that's
capable of being on this show.
Oh, no, you clear that bar easily.
I think you're one of the more successful bootstrapped founders that I've gotten the
chance to talk to.
I don't think that's true.
I don't know.
I'm getting some good stuff out there.
I'm still playing catch up in my mind.
Yeah, it's funny.
I think that feeling never really goes away.
There's nothing that I've done in life where I couldn't look ahead and see somebody who's
doing more than I am, faster than I am, better than I am.
Yeah, if I was born taller and more good-looking, I think I would think differently.
Yeah, you and me both.
Anyway, it's good to have you on.
We both run media sites, so we've got a lot of good content media, bootstrapper-y, Ndhacker
stuff to talk about.
I'm excited.
I remember when I found your site, it must have been a little before you joined Stripe,
but I mean, I was impressed.
It's pretty cool that we're going to collaborate here.
Yeah, it is really cool.
On my part, I've been reading Hacker Noon for quite a while.
I think I was reading it before I even realized that I was reading it, and then eventually
I recognized, hey, I've been to the site like 10 times now, and it's pretty consistently
great.
Thanks, man.
Yeah, so I guess I should actually introduce you.
You run AMI, short for Art Map Incorporated, and that's the company behind numerous publications
of which Hacker Noon is just one.
Why don't you give us an idea of what AMI is and how it all works and why you started
it, and also some of the stats behind your readership.
Yeah, so we're a blog network.
We have 20,000 contributing writers, a quarter of a million daily readers, 600,000 subscribers,
and over 10 million monthly page views.
That's huge.
One of the core of our growth was we help top influencers get their story out there,
and we keep their story as their story.
A lot of times when you contribute to larger sites out there, the Forbes of the world,
you now deal with an editor.
They pigeonhole your headline into something that's the category they like, and your message
gets watered down.
My mindset was more of there are so, so many smart people in the world and so many people
doing interesting things.
If they just talk about what they're doing and we publish it and distribute it, we're
getting kind of a win-win relationship where they get enhanced distribution and we host
their story and get their traffic.
We're trying to grow that as much as we can.
It's taken a lot of twists and turns.
It's not like we started and we said, what's the quickest way to get 20,000 writers published?
In working with a lot of great people, I started to see what contributing writers wanted and
didn't want, and how you can treat writers differently so that they can have a winning
relationship on your site.
Every writer is different and every story has an interest and they're putting out there
for a different reason, but a lot of those reasons get bucketed into different things.
Do you guys prioritize tech writers, and if so, is that why Hacker Noon is your biggest
publication?
As we grew, tech in a lot of ways made the most sense.
That's where you already have people that are used to typing all day.
They're already documenting what they're coding, people that are happy to talk about what there's
companies doing and get the story out about how they did it and they understand that can
be a win-win relationship.
Hacker Noon grew the most in the network and part of that is how the philosophy of the
tech industry makes more sense to putting out stories than the philosophy of the manufacturing
industry.
Well, if you were to ask somebody in the manufacturing industry whether or not it's a real job to
own a network of blogs, probably the majority of them would say no.
That might even be true in some tech circles not too long ago.
I want to dig back in your history and try to figure out how you became the sort of person
to start AMI and to start Hacker Noon.
I want to understand your soul, so indulge me if you will.
Let's imagine a path that sort of winds its way through the woods and at the very end
of that path is the point where you start your company AMI.
What is the beginning of that path look like and what are sort of the first steps you took
on your journey?
My soul, you are going for the wow.
One thing that came to mind when you were saying that, it's like, what is a job?
Definitely is very time dependent.
Before this, I worked for a tech company called Smart Recruiters.
I remember whenever I was doing social media marketing in the blog, I remember hearing
stuff behind other people's back of like, that's a job.
Even something that we would consider very common, but the bigger thing is the idea of
who's in control of your text and what text you read and what text goes out there about
your story and your company's story, that is gigantic and as long as there's been words,
that's huge.
Whether it's the person working your storefront or it's the person writing your website or
it's the person writing your brochure or it's the person sending your letters and your emails.
To me, that's the job.
The job starts with the text and putting out good text.
What's the beginning of my soul?
I grew up in the countryside in Pennsylvania in a very pro-Christian, pro-baseball community.
It's pretty tough.
There's not that many people being very freethinking there.
It instilled a lot of hard work and it's so beautiful.
It's Ridge and Valley region, so you're just walking up and down.
I actually grew up on a cornfield circle and I was surrounded by houses in cornfield.
I'm curious, is this the culture you grew up in?
Is that something that you fully embraced as a kid or were you rebellious against it?
I definitely always had the ability to jump back and forth between introvert and extrovert,
at least I thought I did.
I think I can fit in in almost any room, but like I said, it's a tough community.
It's tough to be in the countryside in Pennsylvania and there's just not much new business.
There's not much new way of thinking.
It's kind of the same jobs there's been for a long period of time.
I briefly worked for the newspaper there and all the stories were structured a certain
way.
The way they determine what is news and what is not news, I did not necessarily agree with,
but it was a great education process of like, they believed it took 60 people to run a newspaper
with a 15,000 circulation and 10 of those people were reporters and 40 of them are in
business development selling ads.
Even before that, I worked in there when I was 17, 18, moving stacks of newspaper in the
mail room where I worked the 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. shift and the whole job was just grabbing
a stack of paper off the printing press, putting it on the strapper, strapping the stack of
paper and then putting it in the right place for the delivery person to pick up and deliver.
I kind of saw how newspapers work from the inside out from 18 to 23 working part time
on and off at the Lewistown Sentinel.
I think for a lot of people, it's very easy for the experiences you have early in life
like that to sort of constrain your thinking.
You work for a big newspaper, you see how they produce content and you think, okay,
well, this is how content needs to be produced.
How much of your career since then has been, do you think, constrained by what happened
there or maybe the opposite, like a counter reaction to what you saw going on or working
on a newspaper?
I mean, I would start positive with inspired by and you know, like even though I said like
what's publishable and what's not, one of the things they do and all small papers do
is they're bringing in advice columns from around the AP from national advice columns
and republishing them in the local newspaper.
This is a very powerful idea that I've taken throughout my different sites.
It's like, if you republish something to a new community, it's new to them.
So it's like, it's one of those things where I've always looked for trending sources and
good story sources and want to republish them and bring them into my community and make
my community closer to, you know, what a tech news outlet should be.
And part of that is just, hey, we're going to republish the top story from the next web
every week.
And it's just something we do because that's a story I would read on my own.
So I mean, that education and republishing plus the one of the fun things about that
job was whenever we would republish the advice columns, I would get to retitle them.
So I was always writing like these little titles and pulling out like this obscure quote
from the fourth paragraph, because that's what I found interesting about the column.
And I mean, I pushed the limit with some of my titles, which was really fun.
Actually, that was like the retitling game.
You know, it's like how good at you are calling like a spade a spade, you know, how can you
do it?
So that's like something that's like, can always be iterated on and like, just depending
on the mood you're in, you can, you know, write a better title or not.
So you've been, you've been in content since you were a teenager, you've been fudging around
with titles and editing content.
I've been in content since I learned what words were.
What do you think are some things that you might have believed way back then about content
and publishing that today, having run AMI for, for years, you no longer believe?
Hmm.
I've definitely softened on republishing to build on what I was just talking about.
Like, like I said, if it's new to this community, it's still a value add.
And the idea that like, you can only read the New York times on the new yorktimes.com
and you can't read it in any app, like, I don't know.
So that, that part of it of like the consumer will read the way the consumer wants to read.
So then you have to get your stories into their reading habits.
So there's, there's an element of that, that like, I've just become a little more sympathetic
and empathetic towards the reader and their preferences.
So that, you know, has led me to soften like, Hey, Google wants all stories in one place
because that's how, how the world works, which like, there's some, definitely some truth
to that side of the argument of like, better organization of the internet is one story
is in one place, but that's not the reality of how people read today.
Other things, I mean, I've definitely just in publishing a lot and thousands and thousands
of stories, how quickly you can get to the 80% of a good story is more important for
sustainable growth than moving a story from the 80% to the hundred percent.
Because first of all, the hundred percent perfect story is impossible.
And it's just like, if you can move a lot of stories that are 50 and 60% good up to
80% and get to that floor, you know, you can be a more successful operation because it's
also like I've worked whenever you work with a lot of founders, and I'm sure you've seen
this in your interviews, there's a perfectionism that, you know, each project will never fully
reach.
You know, it'll never be as perfect as it looks in my head.
The next story I want to write won't be as perfect as I, you know, imagine it could be.
So like for myself, um, and you know, making peace with this is like focusing on how to
get to the 80% versus trying to get to that 100, which is really impossible.
And it's not like I don't want this each story to be as good as they can be, but there's
a matter of like how to spend your time and how, you know, people I pay should spend their
time and it's been a learning curve for sure.
There are a lot of parallels here between, let's say, building an online product or service
and publishing content, like what you've been doing, understanding how people read is very
analogous to understanding how people find products and why they use them and what's
valuable.
You've learned an incredible amount working with content over the years, and I'm curious
what phases of your career you learned different things.
So how did you go from working at this newspaper to eventually working with online content
and publishing?
Well, I've always been super pumped about the internet and like, just from the perspective
of how easy it is to get words out there, that's always been, you know, very exciting
to me.
And I saw it very early.
And, you know, we're, I mean, I was, I think I was 10 or 11 when I got Iced EQ and AIM,
you know, in our first computer.
So I was like, that stuff's always been exciting.
I mean, moving from the newspaper, I decided I wasn't going to live in a small town anymore.
And San Francisco seemed to be the best city for young professionals.
I basically just looked at, hey, maybe San Francisco, maybe Denver, maybe Portland, maybe
New York City, just kind of said, like, hey, what city can I go to?
And I drove across the country.
I had some friends in San Francisco.
So that kind of made it a little simpler in terms of getting set up with the newspaper
job.
I basically had a three, four, if I really dragged it out, five months, you know, runway
worth of money type of deal where I was like, hey, if I can't find a job within this timeframe
in this environment with all these opportunities, maybe I should just go back to a small town.
That was kind of, you know, the challenge I put upon myself.
And luckily, I found a company called Smart Recruiters.
And I was the first marketing hire there, joined them right after seed funding, and
they had a team of six, seven people.
And I got to work directly for the founder who was a great marketer.
People say he's a great product person, which he is, but he's also a great marketer in my
mind.
His name is Jerome Ternik.
And a lot of the success there was we opened a lot of the early success of growth and internet
awareness.
And just our first touch point with a lot of the recruiting industry was we opened up
the blog to anyone to publish about any recruiting expertise.
So instead of saying, you know, here's the outline of the company story and 10 blog posts,
it was more just like, if you can share your recruiting expertise, you can get my editing
expertise in our audience.
And that was the trade I made a couple hundred times.
And then when I left Smart Recruiters, I kept doing that trade with, you know, my media
applications.
It's fascinating how you can sort of learn a particular trick and then take that and
sort of just parlay that into future businesses and it never really stops working once you
hit on it.
I mean, you had a mentor at this company who you say is an expert marketer.
Are there any lessons in particular the CEO taught you while you were working there that
you carried forward later on with your other publications?
Yeah, he was good at turning it on.
I mean, I guess, I don't know if I'm an entertaining interview, but I always thought he was an
entertaining interview, you know?
So it's like, hey, I may have this big product problem going on with the product, or I may
have a big decision to make, but you know, I can always just kind of stop and talk about
my business, which was I'm thinking about now because that's what I'm doing.
The other thing I learned from him was there's an interesting way of thinking about weekly
reports, you know, because he kind of like, I'm naturally very unstructured.
And I like to like keep all these different things moving and do things that make them
accelerate.
But sometimes I can get lost in terms of thinking about, you know, what was achieved this week
and how does it help, you know, the bigger business goal?
And how will all these small goals add up to the bigger one?
So that was definitely very helpful thinking of seeing how he would break down his business.
And then we say, okay, this is marketing.
What does it mean if we gain 20,000 Twitter followers, you know, and just start to put
that in regards to like, how many opportunities does that actually create?
So there was definitely a learning of like, how to divide a business so you can measure
its progress and then specifically how to divide marketing.
Also just the personality, like, it's better to be your personality and put something out
there than do nothing or try to do something but don't feel good enough about it.
It's like, there was definitely an element of like, hey, this is the reality of where
we're at.
I remember we got rejected to be a speaker at some conference.
And we just, this is really silly, I haven't thought about it in a while.
We just put up a camera and we did a fake keynote of him doing the talk and tagged them
and put it in their community forum and put it all over the place.
And it was like half jokes and half like serious, but it was like super fun.
It's like, okay, he just let me do that for an afternoon.
You know what I mean?
Like here I am, the 23 year old 22 year old marketing person that he just hired with no
marketing experience.
And he wants to take the founder's time for an afternoon to film a fake keynote and see
it, to troll this conference that didn't let us in.
And it was like, it was stupid, but it was like, sometimes that stuff like either hits
or it doesn't.
And even if it doesn't hit, it's like very fun to do and increases, you know, your enthusiasm
for your work, which will have, you know, a lot of residual benefits.
How long were you a smart recruiter before you decided to leave and was the next step
after that starting art mapping or was there another bridge in between?
That was the next step.
I was at smart recruiters for three and a half years.
We grew from about six, seven people to about 120 while I was there and saw it through like
series A and series B. So at that time, a lot of people, after I left and I left more
out of like, I was just kind of, I don't know, I felt like I hit a point where my growth
was stalled, you know, and it's like, I did a lot of great stuff there and I'm very thankful,
but it's like, if there is an element that you should always have in your career, like,
are you learning more today than you did yesterday, you know, and evaluating the returns.
But because of that experience, people wanted to hire me at similar stages, like, hey, I
just raised seed funding for this recruiting tech startup or this marketing tech startup,
and I want your expertise.
So it essentially became a marketing consulting and service business where I would take on
clients.
It was a balancing act, but it was, I would do six month contracts and split them between
cash and equity, because I also wanted to build a small portfolio of startup equity,
even if it was, you know, tiny stakes in the company.
I wanted to bet on myself and take the idea of like, hey, out of the people interested
in working with me, am I capable of evaluating the ones that will grow?
So it was kind of, they're evaluating me, but I'm evaluating them too.
So I wanted to do that for more, a lot of it was, you know, focused on me, like, I wanted
to spend my time working directly for entrepreneurs who were doing it and like, oh, I just raised
the money.
How do I get my voice out there?
What stories should I be telling?
You know, how do I scale my narrative?
So what's my messaging?
What am I in three words?
What am I in a sentence?
Which is like very close to how you do headlines.
That was that.
What ended up happening was we started art plus marketing on medium as a blog.
And as that one grew, I was more interested in that publication than my clients.
I don't mean to sound like I don't like my clients, but the stories themselves just became
more interesting.
And the idea that like Craig from Craigslist could contribute to one of my sites, that
seemed like a real business to me.
You know, that seemed like something that like, if I put everything I had into this,
it would be a better business than the one if I put everything I had into these startup
marketing services and consulting.
So it wasn't a pivot that happened overnight because, you know, I am bootstrapped and we
did have clients and it was something where I just kind of tailed off my clients or stabilized
them and, you know, had a certain amount of time on marketing contracts and a certain
amount of time on growing my own media.
And I think that's how a lot of pivots happen.
You know, it's not like you wake up tomorrow and you're a different person.
You know, and the business is like that too.
It's like, oh, this thing I just tried as a side project is now the primary source of
growth.
But this other thing I had going is still doing stuff and making money.
And I still want that to happen but, you know, then the next day it's like, well, the one
that's growing grew even more today.
And you know, that happens a month in a row every day.
Right.
And you're like, okay, I just have to keep, you know, putting more into that.
So I don't know, pivots are pretty fascinating actually.
But that was my primary pivot and it did not happen overnight.
I think the story of going from an employee to sort of a consultant who's working on a
per client basis to being the founder of an actual product or service or a website is
extremely common.
And it makes a lot of sense because every step of the way, you're sort of, you're not
taking any like gigantic unreachable leaps.
You're sort of getting to the next level where you learn the lessons that you need to help
you out.
And I'm really curious about this first transition from you working as a marketing employee to
you deciding to go out on your own, which is a huge step for a lot of people.
A lot of people never build up the confidence to take that leap.
They're sitting at home wondering, do I have any good ideas or am I good enough to actually
execute?
Were you at any point in time worried that you aren't going to be able to succeed?
And if so, how did you overcome that?
And if not, where did that confidence come from that you could branch out on your own
and just things would work out?
I was definitely concerned.
I mean, when money goes up or down, when it's harder to pay for things, like, that stuff's
all real, you know, and you can have like a great day of work, you get really into it,
you worked for 12 hours, and then suddenly your two main clients have late payments and
you're wondering about how you're going to, you know, pay for your bills.
And you're over here, like, as you're trying to do work for the client, you're also trying
to nag them about like, please pay on time, you know, like parts of my life depend on
parts of this.
And they're like, well, you know, so I mean, the money stuff is obviously a concern.
I mean, what's the worst case scenario, you go into debt, you know, and I've been able
to avoid that, which has been nice, but it's been a real challenge.
Yeah, I mean, I think the confidence, I mean, I was always confident I could build something
of value and I was confident in my work that I did for other people.
I was confident my work at the startup was very influential to growing the bottom line
of the business and I could explain how it was.
So if I did it on my own, I would get paid more money.
So a lot of the logic became, I would come back to that as a simplicity of like, one,
I believe I can do it.
And two, I have done it before, you know, so yep, especially as people get pretty specialized
at these tech startups, it's not the quality of work that will hold them back.
It's the acquisition of new business and the framing to get that new business like, you
know, some of these tech startup people are just so specialized.
They only have 100 companies that would be willing to pay them, but they'd be willing
to pay them a ton and they'd be willing to pay them a ton more than what they're getting
on a salary basis.
So I mean, it's definitely something you can come back to and it's, and to those people
that ask the same thing to me, I always tell them, get your first client or two while you
keep your job, get something where you booked 20 hours with them, you know, and just see
what it's like and keep your salary coming in if you're concerned about money.
And after that first client or that second client, you'll either know that like, hey,
it's more comfortable in my job.
Or you'll just have the evidence that you can, you know, do this as your own business.
I think another cool part of your story is, I don't know, throwing spaghetti at a wall
is the right way to put it, but I do like Jackson Pollock a lot.
He would just throw paint, like from far away at a very large canvas, and then he would
go up close and he would cut out the part and that would be the $20,000 painting.
Well, there you go.
I mean, you start different publications, you write a lot of content, you don't necessarily
have to be some sort of mad scientist genius and predict in advance everything that's going
to work out.
But when you see, like you said earlier, one particular publication is growing a lot faster
than some other work that you're doing, you can kind of latch on to that.
And I think one of the cool things about how AMI is structured is you've got dozens of
different publications that are featuring different types of content.
How much are you learning from one publication to the next and applying that to other things
that you're doing?
A lot.
And they can link to each other, their distribution channels for each other, plus in terms of
how stories rank, how titles work, how length works, like just getting more data about related
things in publishing is very helpful.
And it's also like you can point people, and sometimes it's also like, hey, you're writing
about cryptocurrencies.
Do you go to keepingstock.net or hackernoon.com?
And in the beginning, either one.
And then as Hacker Noon grew, it attracts more people that want to have stories like
the stories published in it.
And now all the cryptocurrency people want to publish on Hacker Noon.
So they learn a lot from each other.
And this year, I'm also trying to put a little more emphasis on consolidating and putting
more resources into the things that are working like Hacker Noon and opening up more ways
for my readers and contributors to gain value.
So if we had the same conversation a year ago, I would be telling you about the new
types of paints I'm buying.
But now I'm telling you about how I'm looking at the paint all over the wall more closely.
Yeah.
I wanted to ask you actually, obviously the advantage of having different publications
is that you can learn, but the disadvantage is that you spread yourself a little bit thin.
You're not pouring as many resources into the things that are working.
How do you know when the time comes to switch from testing the waters to doubling down on
one particular thing?
The truth of the answer is you never really know.
So there is an element of like, you have to make a choice and you're leaving out other
opportunities to pursue the opportunity and here's why.
So as long as you can say that to yourself, you can make more positive steps in that direction.
But there is an element of like, it's hard to admit the things.
It's hard to kill things.
It's hard to say like, this is done and this site didn't make it.
But some of your sites won't if you try and make a lot of sites.
Just like some of your features.
I mean, I don't think it would be that much different than a product manager being gung-ho
about this feature and then the way people use it they don't like.
And well, you may have put 300 man hours into it by some talented developers, but the best
solution still may be to kill it.
So there is an element of just having balls and like going for it.
Yeah, totally.
And I think a lot of the stress and the emotional turmoil of running a startup is often just
lies in the uncertainty.
So if you, for example, don't know what's going to happen, then it's really easy to
I think given to the emotions of, okay, are you feeling good or bad in this particular
day?
Because if you have some sort of semblance of a strategy and you can trust in that instead
of being entirely emotional, additionally, I think, you know, hearing from someone like
you who has a ton of publications under your belt, a ton of experience trying out different
things and it's still hard for you to know whether or not it's the right decision to
shut something down.
But the other thing I want to add to that is like, it's defining your core competency.
So as you say, I have a lot of different publications just because they live on different URLs.
Really the core competency is on creating demand for stories, improving those stories
and distributing those stories.
And that remains true across all of them.
So getting better at that core competency and that workflow where people find value
as opposed to saying, all right, now we have an audience, I'm going to throw 20 events
a year.
Yeah.
Which is like totally a legit move for another media company.
You know, that's how they get a lot of money.
You create an event, you have a ticket base value, but now suddenly my core competency
is logistics and organizing an event, which it is not.
You know what I mean?
But that would be leveraging the Hacker Noon brand and from afar, that would be David specializing
more in Hacker Noon.
But the reality is that's David moving away from his core competency.
I would just emphasize as other people try to evaluate what to kill and what to save,
think about that core competency and that core spot that's adding value to other people.
So let's talk about the beginning of Hacker Noon because I haven't had anybody on the
podcast who's run a media company like AMI.
So I'm curious how you've been on the podcast.
But I think it would be interesting to see how you scaled AMI because that's something
that I've never done.
Andy Hackers has always been one or two people.
You grew AMI from just yourself to how many employees is it now?
Well, I'm the only full-time employee, but we have a lot of part-time employees.
Jay Zalowitz helped founded Hacker Noon.
He's a part-time editor now.
My wife is helping me improve all of my business process, and she's part-time basically business
development and client management.
Then we have Dan Moore, part-time on PS I Love You.
Then we have a small army of political satireists, part-time on extra newsfeed.
Then we've had a number of part-time social media people and just kind of experimenting
with different types of content.
But my goal is like thousands of part-time people.
I don't really like the employee-employer relationship.
I didn't like it a ton.
There's like a comforting thing to it, and it has this inertia that like, oh, my employer
will take care of everything, and I just show up nine to five, and my health insurance is
covered.
There are some good things to it, but I think the way the workforce is moving is that you
maximize the number of streams of income you have and create more small relationships.
So that's kind of the way I see that going.
I think that's fascinating, and it could help a lot of early stage founders who don't necessarily
even have the budget to bring somebody on full-time if they could figure out how to
sort of master this situation with part-time relationships.
But I'm very curious what Hacker Noon was like when it was just you.
What were your sort of day-to-day responsibilities, and how are you keeping the blog going?
At what point did you decide, hey, I really need somebody helping me out with this?
So with Jay's outlets in the beginning, we were actually called the Hacker Daily.
So it was medium.com slash hackerdaily.
So we were on their site before we branded, and I came up with the name Hacker Noon.
And we had been testing different ways to recruit writers on Medium and across the internet.
So we figured out ways that would create demand.
Some of it, we wrote some scripts, some of it was identifying what's trending.
And it became a matter of how much I can read.
So the amount of people to bring on is directly related to the volume of reading required.
Were you doing editing as well and helping people make their pieces better, or were you
simply reading it and saying, yes, no, good enough, not good enough?
We were doing light editing, so we didn't want to dive deep into pieces.
So I was trying to avoid that.
And in the beginning, you have to do it more because you want to up the quality.
But yeah, I was trying not to spend too long on each piece, mainly because the spaghetti
or the paint theory, we needed to test a lot of public testing, a lot of types of stories
in order to find what works.
And also, I thought it created a more interesting destination to have 100 people tell their
text story than to have two people tell it really well.
Yeah, people, I think, look down on quantity, but you get a lot more variety when you have
different perspectives and different writers.
And it just goes back to what you were saying earlier, it might be better to get a ton of
stories to 80% good than to get just a few stories to 100% good.
At what point did you decide that it can't just be me and Jay, that, okay, we need more
people here?
How big was Hacker Noon at that point?
And how much reading could you really do?
Well, basically, I was siphoning resources from my marketing services.
So I had other people writing for me for clients, and I was siphoning those people onto the
publications and to work on the publications.
So there was this, I don't know, maybe six, eight month phase where basically the publications
are all losing money, and everything I invest in them has no return.
And the marketing service is getting more profitable, but I'm taking labor away from
it and putting it into the publications.
What was your master plan at that point, where you're like, I'll turn it around eventually?
Well, the thing with media outlets is there's a critical mass problem.
And everyone wants, people want to advertise and pay you once you have the audience.
It's like a chicken and egg.
And I just saw the direction we were going.
In my mind, the demand was going to be high enough that this would be a destination.
And underlying all of this, if you're building a business, you should think about can it
run without you?
And as the primary talent of a marketing company, 95% of our clients were coming to work with
me.
So if I were to leave tomorrow, we would lose the clients and we have no business.
So that idea became very important of like, hey, if we're growing our own domains and
our own properties, and I get hit by a bus tomorrow, you know, we can sell this business
and my wife and kid can have some money.
You know, and like, that's not like that's like the motivation of why you should do your
business.
But there is an element of like, when you're gone or when you're not with the business
that the business should have value or it's not a business at all.
It's just, you know, you, which is what I was finding in the marketing service and marketing
consulting.
And I could have went the other way of like, hey, I'm going to grow a large labor force.
And if I disappear, people are basically aqua hiring all these talented marketers.
But I didn't really want that either, because I'm not yet a great manager, you know, and
that wasn't really playing to my strengths.
Early on, when you're when you're trying to figure out how to grow this thing, you spending
a lot of time recruiting authors and getting the best people to write, he mentioned, you're
trying to get to this point where you hit critical mass.
How are you thinking about getting the critical mass, are you thinking more about distribution
and how people are going to find Hacker Noon stories?
Are you thinking more about just the content that you get on the site and that if you get
good enough content, the distribution matters far less?
Content definitely came first, but you should all like always improving distribution was
important because that's a lot of the the better the distribution is, the easier it
is to recruit content and get content.
So in a lot of ways, it's one, you're just both questions are describing one thing.
And the better the content is, the easier it is to distribute.
I mean, I was looking at like following, you know, core metrics, you know, I wanted to
increase time on site, I wanted to increase the number of people subscribed, and I wanted
to increase the domain authority.
In my mind, all these news feeds are great for virality, they are awful for building
a business on, because a news feed is never going to be static, not even not just in terms
of the content, but the way it filters content.
Users in my mind do not have enough control over their newsfeed.
I think on all these sites, it should be very simple to filter by chronological or chronological
by location.
But anytime you give control of the newsfeed from the product to the user, it's harder
for the product to monetize.
So there's always bad incentives in my mind with the newsfeed.
So over the last year, we've really prioritized Google and making Google our top source of
traffic and having a long lasting destination in terms of like, instead of centralize sensationalizing
headlines for Facebook, go after direct, reliable headlines for Google.
Interesting, because I've always thought about content, well, readers very often being lumped
into sort of two groups.
The first of whom are your subscribers and the people who are sort of loyal Hacker Noon
readers.
The rest are people who come across an interesting headline on Twitter or Facebook, or might
Google you and find an article, but you seem to have found that people who Google and reach
Hacker Noon are completely distinct from people who reach you over Twitter.
How much time do you spend thinking about these three different groups and who's the
most responsible for contributing to the readership at Hacker Noon?
I mean, like I said, I'm trying to make Google the biggest group.
I want to be found for, I want people to type in stablecoins and find us.
But yeah, you definitely also want to reward people that have been there from the beginning.
And we, I mean, one of the bigger challenges we faced in this, as we tried, I look at media
as a reflection of what's happening in an industry.
So over the last year or two years, cryptocurrencies have really taken off.
And the ratio, while we still publish just as much content about software developing,
and even we publish more content about software development and programming and coding, but
because we now also publish more content about cryptocurrencies, we had some angry early readers.
They're like, hey, I used to come here all for tech, venture capital, software development.
And now there's all this cryptocurrency, blockchain of applications and Bitcoin.
And it's like, that's the reality of how the tech industry has changed in the last one
to two years.
You know, there's been multiple quarters where there's been more investment in cryptocurrencies
than in venture capital and in volume of investment in total amount of money.
So that means shouldn't the news coverage shift that way too?
But some of the early readers didn't like this, you know, because they're used to coming
here for one reason.
And I basically say to those people, you know, only subscribe to our RSS feed of software
development, only visit these feature pages, don't come to the homepage, you know, and
it's, it's a tough thing.
But to me, I'm being fair to what's happening in the industry and a more accurate reflection
of what's happening in the industry by publishing a lot of cryptocurrency content.
But you know, some readers don't feel that way.
And I always ask people what content they want, you know, in terms of like, anytime
a reader writes in, I basically asked them to suggest headlines because, you know, I'm
curious what they want, but you can't just publish based on your existing user base,
the internet and the world is gigantic.
And if you're just going to keep catering to the same 20 people or the same 20,000 people,
that community has to be enough for a sustainable business.
And you have to ignore other opportunities, which I didn't feel like I was, you know,
mature enough as a business to do that.
So you've got a lot of factors that go into deciding the content that you publish, it
needs to be of a certain quality bar, it needs to align with where you think the industry
was going.
And as you just said, it can't just please your current user base if that market is not
big enough for where you want to grow.
I asked the people on the Indie Hackers Forum, if they had any questions for you.
And Rudy Arup asked, how do you select the people who write for Hackernoon?
How do you get them to write for you?
And I'm curious, how does that play into where you see the industry going?
Are you now ignoring, you know, authors who you might have focused on a lot more earlier
because they're not writing about crypto?
No, not at all, in terms of ignoring, I mean, a lot of what I'm trying to do is build a
large whitelist, for lack of a better term, basically, once you've published something
of value or a few things of value, you then can use the Hackernoon distribution channel
with your own, like 100% what you want to write.
So basically, I think top contributors kind of earn their space.
One very important thing for me in terms of recruiting writers, most contributor networks
don't allow a strong call to action at the end of their posts.
It'll be, you know, this is by this person, here's their bio.
My mindset is, you just contributed 800 words for free because you wanted to get the story
out.
Right after word 800, you can put a call to action to whatever the hell you want.
You earned it, this space is yours.
So that, it's a small distinction, but it's really important.
It's something you can't do on Forbes.
It's something you can't do on other contributor networks, something you can't do on the old
Huffington Post.
So that's been pretty important.
And I mean, the reality of contributors contributing again is, did they have a better experience
than publishing elsewhere?
Did they get more readers?
Did they get more response?
Did they get leads for future business?
And once they do, it becomes a pretty simple decision of, you know, I want to distribute
my stories through Hackernoon.
What about early on when you guys didn't have the reach that you have now?
How are you, because I imagine you get a lot of inbound requests for writers who want to
submit and take advantage of your distribution.
But before that, how much time were you spending just sending cold emails?
And how were you finding out who you wanted to write for your site?
A lot of cold outreach and putting that as a primary responsibility.
But also the Medium Network was very helpful, you know, especially as they were in a similar
spot where they have less content and the best content will get surfaced to more people.
So I mean, I have to be, I am, you know, very thankful for that help of early distribution
in the beginning.
Before that, you know, I was distributing blog posts professionally for a blog.
When I left Smart Recruiters, that blog had, I think, 250,000 readers a month.
So it wasn't at the level I'm at now, but, you know, it was still a level where I understood
the basics of distributing a blog post and getting the word out on social media.
So a lot of it's not groundbreaking, it's just doing it a lot.
A lot of people listening in are thinking about starting startups or maybe they have
a startup and, you know, they keep hearing this phrase, you should be doing content marketing.
You need to get content out there to attract people to your product.
And they have absolutely no clue what that means.
They don't know the basics of how to build a successful blog.
What mistakes do you see people making with their startups and how can they do a better
job attracting people to their websites with good content?
Well, they can start by publishing on Hacker Noon.
No, I mean, right now it isn't the point where...
Well, actually let me ask you, because I think that's a big thing that a lot of people are
worried about.
Like, should I have my own blog?
Should I be posting on Medium?
Should I be posting on Hacker Noon?
You absolutely should have your own blog.
But you should contribute to sites like Hacker Noon.
I mean, our Alexa ranking is around 3,000 in the world.
So if we say you're trying to be the Airbnb of education, if you type in Airbnb of education,
surprise, surprise, you get the Hacker Noon post.
So in terms of like ranking for your two to five word identifiers and your two to five
word terms, I mean, if you can write a valuable story around that, you know, we're helpful.
But people should always have their own blog.
They should be thinking about sites like Hacker Noon as sources of inbound links.
And getting back to the initial question, I think one of the biggest problems...
The things that founders and early stage startup people should be optimizing for is how to
reduce the barriers to produce one story.
So whether that means you have a charismatic CEO who isn't a good writer, but can talk.
If that's true, you should focus on podcasts and you should transcribe those podcasts and
then you have written content, you know, or if like you write something, but you're unhappy
with it.
How do you get that idea to someone else who can take your two paragraphs and turn it into
five paragraphs?
So it depends on the individual person.
But the biggest thing you should be solving for is how to reduce the effort of producing
one story and how do you quickly get from one story to...
Because you just have to produce more to understand what content will resonate, what your voice
is as an individual, what your voice is as a company.
So solving for things that reduce the barriers to getting one story and doing that over again
is a better strategy in my mind.
What are some of the mistakes you see people making when they make a submission to Hacker
Noon?
Are there like commonly people writing about topics that aren't interesting, people making
mistakes in their headline?
The other thing if people write about the wrong topics, they see it in the results.
It's like people will pitch me with their press release and it's for this great thing,
you know, but I'm like, this isn't going to perform well with us.
Your writing is too dry instead of the press release about the talk.
Give me a story from one of the speakers, you know, and give me that first person element.
I mean, in terms of overall mistakes, you know, some people try and get too heavy on
links, not heavy enough on story and with tags, people just like too generic.
I think being more specific is better and in the title more specific, I think.
So I a lot of times my edits will be around specificity and like just trying to because
generalizing is generalizing while writing is basically a form of laziness.
It's like I want to get from here to there.
And it's easier if I put it in the passive voice and just move it forward as opposed
to like saying what I did in an action.
So a lot of what I'm trying to do is push people that way.
And you know, more of what happened to me is I always find very interesting.
But yeah, it's hard to say like, just definitively, this is the one thing, you know, people should
be doing differently.
Right.
And it sounds like people get a lot of value by just writing a large quantity.
And then ideally having some sort of sounding board, like maybe submitting to you and getting
your feedback, or just putting it on medium and seeing how people react to it versus publishing
one blog post every six months, it doesn't work out and throwing your hands in the air
and saying, I don't know how to write.
Yeah, that's there's a lot of truth in that.
I mean, these people are writing emails all day, you know, it's like, they know how to
write.
It's but then the element comes when it's a public thing written.
It's like, Oh, no, I need I need a team.
It's like, you really don't
I wouldn't be so sure that people know how to write because they write emails because
I get some horrendously long, boring, not to the point emails and it's
Yeah, I would be down if you want to do a workshop about how to write better emails.
I'll help you.
That would be great.
It's not what the world wants, but it's what the world needs.
Let's talk a little bit about growing Hacker Noon itself, because you are now at the point
where you're getting hundreds of thousands of daily readers.
That's a far cry away from where you started.
What are some of the biggest turning points and things that you've learned to allow you
to grow your readership?
The viral posts definitely, like for one viral post, it'll attract hundreds of imitators.
And you can't always tell what a viral post will be.
But you definitely want to keep promoting your best stuff and you know, like what it's
like to learn JavaScript in 2016, after we publish that and there are YouTube videos
about it and all these sites picking it up.
The submissions for JavaScript went through the roof, you know, and you see it happen
with cryptocurrencies and blockchain.
The overarching point I'm coming to here is that I let the market determine my editorial
line more than most sites.
And if things do well, that's the market telling me, you know, this is where it's headed.
This is what people want to read.
So that's definitely been, you know, very impactful.
The other thing is talking to contributing writers and learning more about what they
want.
You know, should we be optimizing for consulting opportunities?
Should we be optimizing for, hey, we're going to create all these republishing relationships
and the top stories on Hacker Noon will get published elsewhere?
You know, so talking to them has been very important in terms of like shaping what our
work should be.
It's been a funny thing of like, who's your customer?
Is it the contributing writer?
Is it the sponsor?
You know, is it the reader?
Whenever you're running a content driven operation, it's not a simple question.
Who your customer is is not, it's usually not one thing, one answer as it should be
in you know, most businesses.
How have you gotten the editors to work with you?
Because I imagine a huge part of scaling is, as you said, just being able to read all these
submissions that you're getting, what is your pitch like for an editor?
I look at editors as all like a one to one relationship.
What's going on in your life and what's going on in the work I need done.
So I haven't systemized editors to the level that I'd like.
I want to onboard more editors and I want to get better at it.
So in that way, I don't have a complete answer because I don't think I've solved that problem
yet.
But I do always value expertise and subject matter over expertise in English grammar.
So that's always been something I value.
I also value are you good at being a public leader of this, you know, as opposed to like
the editor.
A lot of the old job of the editor was like, everything is about making the text as good
as it can be.
It's like, well, in an online era, that's really the editor is as much the leader of
the Huffington Post, it's as much as about what she tweets as about what she publishes
on Huffington Post calm, because now she's telling the rest of the internet, the direction
of the company.
And that may not quite be 100% true.
But the sediment is definitely true, that their leaders of your operation and what they
say will dictate, you know, what people perceive your content and your editorial line to be.
What is the process like of somebody who I'm just curious about the details, like I send
down a submission to Hacker Noon, who reads it?
How does it get to the hands of an editor?
How long is the turnaround?
Who gets paid?
When and where?
So we try and be within zero to two days during the week, zero to three days on weekends.
And we do not always hit this.
When submission volume goes up, some stories get lost in the shuffle, we have to apologize
to people, it's always painful, you know, it's like you see this great story and you
see it like a month later, you're like, I am an idiot.
But we've gotten better in terms of like, just making sure everything is read.
I mean, most of Hacker Noon is still read by me.
Jay Dalowitz would be the second person, Ling, my wife would be the third person.
And with top people, like I said, like they kind of have a, someone still has to publish
for them.
But the top contributors were on a relationship where they can publish essentially almost
whatever they want with us.
And this helps us scale, it helps them grow.
And a lot of people come to us because they're unhappy with the, a lot of the top contributors
will come to us because they're unhappy with the timing and the level of editorial that
other sites want.
So in that way, I think it's a win-win relationship.
What other question was in there about the process?
I'm also curious about how the editors fit into this process.
So you've got you, you've got Jay Dalowitz and your wife, I assume one of the three of
you will read any initial submission and then do you decide to forward it off to an editor
to edit it?
Or do you just edit it yourself?
Mainly ourself.
Yeah.
And like I said, we're trying to more reframe and hit our standard styles.
And a lot of times, you know, if it's not close, it's better in my mind to give them
one sentence or two sentences about what's wrong with this whole piece, then try and
go through and get it up to standard.
So there are, there is an element of just like, hey, you're not, you're making these
generalizations and not citing your source.
If you want to write this way, make sure there's 10, 8, 10 links in the acquisitions or the,
you know, the argument you're saying, and something like that, I find a better use of
time than going through and picking the 10 times they suggest something, say it's a fact
and don't cite it.
How many stories do you just outright reject?
I mean, that's, that's, that's basically the move there where we're putting it back in
their court.
And usually at that point, they won't come back to us that a lot of times that contributor
is lost right there.
They're just like, okay, you know, the amount of work I put in versus the amount of work
you want for a good story is there's a gap.
So publish elsewhere.
And that's, that's pretty simple.
I mean, but I want, I want the submission rate to be high.
I'm not trying to be in Ivy league school and go around and brag about how we have a
3% acceptance rate.
You know, to me, that's not success.
You have the wrong people applying.
I never get why this is a tangent, but I never get why universities always bragged about
acceptance rate.
It's like, that just means you don't get the right people applying.
It doesn't mean you're like some elite thing.
With you, if you don't accept good writers, or if you accept a lot of bad writers, then
Haccoon is going to suffer tremendously.
So I think you've got your incentives a lot more aligned.
Yeah.
The best thing to attract the next good writer is good writing on the site.
So I've got another question from somebody from the Indie Hackers Forum named Gregarious
Hermit.
What a name.
They ask, what a name.
They're looking for a simple idea to work on.
They want to know if you had to bootstrap a new blog from scratch on your own, what
would the topic be about?
Ooh, that's a good one.
We're always looking to make new blogs, Mr. or Mrs. Hermit.
I mean, there's more and more emerging on cryptocurrencies and blockchain right now.
But in terms of you choosing a topic, a lot of the success is going to come down to how
dedicated you are.
You could literally make a successful blog on any single topic.
There's no topic that you can't turn around, get traffic, and make some money on.
So I mean, I would start with yourself and what you find interesting, and it doesn't
necessarily have to be your life's purpose, but it does have to be something you're more
obsessed than you think you should be.
That's where I would start.
And what was your first steps?
I'm curious what your first steps would be.
Let's say you start this blog on something that you're obsessed with.
Would you just immediately start emailing authors to contribute?
Would you start doing research on channels where people who read about your blog, you
can potentially repost stuff, or would you go straight into search engine optimization?
How do you get this blog off the ground?
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of different ways you can do it, and those are a lot of viable
steps.
I mean, I think splitting between writing yourself and cold outreach would probably
be the 50-50 split I would do in the beginning.
So you're writing yourself, and that could even be like, these are types of stories I
would like to publish.
Because when you write yourself, you're also going to write your outreach.
By saying, this blog is, and being able to answer that, well, that's probably going to
go on your about page, and it's going to go on your outreach.
So that type of writing is going to serve both purposes, and it's going to grow the
quality that you write on the site, and the ability to recruit people to write on the
site that makes sense.
So yeah, if I was starting from scratch, I would go to the 50-50, writing yourself and
cold slash warm outreach, I would definitely start with your network, and people, it can
be very depressing to send many messages and get few responses.
But if you've already put work into your career and have a network, you're not going to send
as many messages, but your response rate is going to be exponentially higher.
So wrapping up here, because we're approaching the end of an hour, but I would like to know
just generally, you see a lot of writing submissions.
I'm sure you deal with a lot of entrepreneurs as well, because how can you publish the stories
from entrepreneurs?
If there's one thing that you think entrepreneurs who maybe haven't taken their first step should
know, or if you could go back in time and give yourself some advice before you started working
on your first business, what would you say?
It's a good question.
I would start with willpower.
Regardless of everything else, will you be able to just keep working on this for six
months and a year and two years?
There's a lot in life that I think literally comes down to persistence.
And if you want to be doing it, you can do it.
I think it makes a lot of sense.
Your analogy about throwing paint at a canvas, if you quit after the first glob of paint,
what are the chances that that glob is going to be the right one that sells for a lot of
money?
But if you keep sticking with it for six months and you're throwing paint, throwing more and
more paint, you're a lot more likely to hit on something that works.
That's very true.
And the other one I would add is just like, can you actually picture your first couple
customers?
Because the other one that bothers me is when people have four ideas, they pitch the investors,
they raise this little seed funding and then they burn the cash and they disappear.
So I've always been on the side and why I like indie hackers, it's like this is a revenue-driven
thing.
And as you make more money, the business gets bigger and you can pay more people.
So that element I've always liked.
I think it's been...
There's a lot in Silicon Valley where it's easier to get a couple hundred thousand dollars
than it is for the entire rest of the world or most of the rest of the world.
But either way for the company that gets it or the company that doesn't, it still comes
down to how much money you're going to make this month and how are you going to do it.
So I would also put the emphasis on revenue.
And that's why I kept taking marketing contracts because the part of the business I thought
would be the long-term solution didn't have the short-term revenue.
So I think in that part of my journey, I'm happy with how I did it.
And I'm glad that it's paying off now where people believe in Hacker Noon and want to
pay Hacker Noon.
Yeah.
I think that's very sage advice.
I agree with all of it really.
And Hacker Noon has just done so well.
Every time I look, you guys seem like you've grown, you're getting more traffic, putting
out more stories.
So congratulations on everything that you've done so far.
Thanks so much for joining me on the show and sharing some of your wisdom.
Thanks for having me.
And we'll have me interviewing you on Hacker Noon shortly.
I can't wait for it.
Thanks so much, David.
Enjoy the rest of the day, Cortland.
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