What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses,
and I'm trying to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How do they get
to where they are today? How do 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 am talking to Robert James Gabriel. He's
the founder of a company called Helperbird. Robert, welcome to the show.
Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.
Yeah, thanks for coming out. So tell us about Helperbird. What is it exactly?
So Helperbird was a side project that initially started about three years ago. And what Helperbird
is is a tool for any browser to help people with learning difficulties, such as dyslexia,
dyspraxia, a light sensor disorder, or even people who have epilepsy. And what Helperbird
does, it allows the user to have complete customization over the web. And what do I
mean by that? Some users can find the background colors a bit harsh, so they can customize
it to a blue color or a green color. They can change the fonts, the color of the fonts,
add overlays, text to speech, speech to text, add a built-in note system. You can remove
all distracting images and ads, and kind of customize the web to your own needs. And we
also do a thing for epilepsy, where we remove flashing images as well. So you can mix and
match all these features and make the web easier for you to make it easier to learn,
to kind of browse the web a lot easier.
And I know that Helperbird started off as a side project. You've grown it to five figures
a month in revenue. Are you full-time on it yet?
Yes, full-time as of November last year, November 2018. So before that point was a lot of when
I got a little bit of time after work or, you know, just doing a few support emails.
And then about, yeah, just after I kind of started on a full-time, we got a surge in
users and it was just over good SEO. And that's what I put the real credit down to and just
the constant updates. So every two weeks, I try to release new features. And then January
2019, it just ballooned up to 29,000 users.
And then the next one to 39,000. And then it's just been growing, growing, growing.
I've made a lot of mistakes along the way. And it's some users have left, they've come
back and I've got email saying, oh, you messed up a couple of months ago. But so it's been
a fun ride. And that, yeah, so it's been about just over a year now of being on a full-time.
Very cool. So we're going to dive into some of those mistakes you've made along the way
and some of the successes too, which it sounds like there are quite a few of. But first I'm
interested in just your motivations as an indie hacker. Why did you start working on
Helperberg?
You're actually the first person to ask me this question. And so about, about me, kind
of 2018, I was feeling very burnt out and very down from like, you know, not managing
my work life and not managing my personal life. And I just needed a break. So I decided
to take a sabbatical from the place I was working full-time as a software engineer and
a manager. And I decided to travel the world and kind of regrow and reload and rediscover
what I loved, which was engineering and helping people. And along the way, I was doing these
different side projects and like different apps and just kind of exploring the world.
And I went to France, Greece, Spain, or across the US, across Canada, saving up all this
money. So I was very privileged in that way to do it. But along the way, I made this Netflix
app. And with that, all it did was it scraped, used a Puppeteer script and it scraped all
Netflix's hidden categories, hidden menus, there's whole site and made a Chrome extension
that would allow you to browse these very easily and save your favorite hidden categories.
So if you love movies with Steve Martin, that are horror, they have a category for that.
But two months later, it got bought out. And it was thanks to your site and thanks to Product
Hunt from them discovering it. And that was a true. And in that itself, it kind of relit
something in me. And I knew that I always wanted to work for myself. And I was always
like browsing in the hackers. And I was always browsing Hacker News and Product Hunt and
Reddit. And then I discovered like, when I went through school, I didn't have the tools.
If I hadn't mentioned it already, I'm dyslexic. And I didn't have the tools or the support
really until I was about 17. And that's very late to properly get the support you need
to be dyslexic or any type of learning difficulty. And I was even told to drop out of school
because I was considered dumb or wouldn't be successful. So at that point in November
in Spain with my fiance, I decided to register the name helperbird.com, which was a pet project
of mine up to that point where all it did was change the font. And kind of overnight,
I started like talking people dyslexia started, you know, kind of understanding what the needs
were. And then a personal family friend gave me an idea of a bunch of different features
I should add. And then January came along and there was 20,000 people after discovering
it just from good word of mouth and the constant updates and the good SEO. So the reason I
kind of went on it is because I know what the issues of people who have dyslexia have.
And I don't want anyone to grow up with those struggles or issues or don't have that level
of support. And that's why the price is actually quite low. People are telling me I should
increase the pricing, but no, it's very affordable for every kid every school because they don't
have a high budget.
Yeah, on your product page on Andy Hackett, you talk a little bit about growing up with
dyslexia. And you said that as somebody with dyslexia, he was told to drop out of school
before I was diagnosed. As my teachers told my parents that I wouldn't become anything.
You say that you wish you were making this up. You understand the struggles that users
have online. And it just gets me thinking about the feedback loops of encouragement
and discouragement and how when you have people telling you that you're not going to
succeed and really discouraging you, then it kind of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy
where you might not try as hard because you don't think you can do it. And the opposite
is also true.
I was lucky enough to have a lot of encouragement from adults when I was a kid. A lot of people
telling me that they thought I could accomplish things and could do things. And as a result
of that, I think I tried harder because I expected it of myself. How do you sort of
turn things around when you've had so much discouragement from a young age and make something
of yourself that you're proud of?
It's actually very funny. Similar to what you said was I had one teacher in particular,
my physics teacher, of course, still is a science teacher, who's very kind of mentoring
me and like encouraged me to always go forward. And he actually got me into like programming
at an earlier age, just after I got diagnosed. And he kind of helped me and got me internships
and got me like right into the right path. Because before that point, as you said, with
that loop of encouragement or discouragement, you can go down a bad path. And I'm very lucky
that there at least there was someone in the educational system to help me. So with him,
with him in particular, his name is Sean Foley, if he happens to listen to this, he got me
into programming, he drove up to Dublin, which is a four hour journey, he brought like a
student up there to go to competitions, and we ended up winning the school like 10,000
euro in a scholarship off a program I wrote. But the reason I bring that up in particular
is I had a teacher, not even two months earlier, who told me I didn't deserve the A I got on
our state exams because I wasn't my English wasn't good enough. But she didn't know my
English grammar was ignored because I had dyslexia, you're just looking for the content,
not the grammar, the spelling, right? So she came up and apologized to me, not even after
the award came true. And she goes, I totally underestimated you. And I shouldn't have said
that to you and stuff like that. So it's some people just aren't educated in terms of some
difficult learning difficulties in schools. Yeah, it's really tough. Well, I look at some
of the things you've done since then I'm on your personal website, Robert, Gabrielle.net
Jeff, and you've got a list section that says apps and projects and you say in your spare
time you work and maintain all these different apps. And there's nine of them plus more on
GitHub, you've got helper bird, you've got an app called open dyslexic. You had the one
you mentioned earlier that got bought Netflix hidden categories, sync, snip, marked on editor
for crunches app after app after app. How are you so prolific? How do you create so
many things and see them through to completion? So a lot of those are boredom or in particular
is just I want it was not when I look for an app, if it's not there, I'll go off and
try to make it. And if more than 100 people like it, I'll start developing it or spend
half a day a week doing it. But in most cases is if the issue is annoying me, I know it's
annoying someone else. And that's why especially with Chrome extensions are so quick to get
up there and out to a huge market. So that's why I always encourage people to do it. There's
two up there. If you don't mind me telling this story that got me cease and desist letters.
One of them I was listening to the Rooster Deep podcast about four years ago and they
talk about the Xbox one. I don't know if you have one, but you can do well, you can record
you know how you can record your videos and photos and your screenshots. They were talking
about they wish they could have a website where you could see your friends or easily
download them on your computer. And at the time you couldn't. And this was 2am New Year's
Eve or the day before New Year's Eve and I was on the Xbox website and I noticed the
API was not private, meaning it was open without a authentication. So I created a little website
lap that allows you to put in anyone's gamer tag and then it will show all our videos,
show all their photos for any gamer tag, even if you're friends or not. And I tweeted the
founder of Rooster Deep and he tweeted it out and just went mini viral. And I posted
on Reddit and then Reddit started tagging Major Nelson, their community manager. And
he goes, Oh, I still have this screenshot. I don't think the Xbox team is going to like
this. And not even a week later, the API got shut down and a week later, the season assist
letter came in and I have a frame of my parents room back in Ireland. And then another one
was this was last year. I don't really like having like too much social media on my phone,
but my brothers and sisters all use Instagram messaging to stay in contact. So I created
a Chrome extension that would allow you to have direct messaging on the desktop version
of Instagram. And from there, it got very popular, very quick overnight as, cause that
feature is missing and got off the plane in Greece. And I got this huge letter. You must
take this down immediately. This is against our copyright or terms and conditions and
that that one was scary. So that one went down immediately. So it's a lot of, but the
one story I'm kind of, the reason I told you these two is just from when you create new
projects, it's always from issues that you personally have. So in that case, I want to
direct messaging. So I went off and made it, you know, it's really common to see founders
starting things because they solve their own problem. But I also talked to people probably
every day who tell me that they can't come up with any ideas. They don't have any ideas
and are looking for problems in their life, but they just can't seem to find any that
are worth solving. What do you think is the difference between you and people who struggle
to see problems in their life that they can build something for? That's actually a very
good question. And I can't give you a proper answer, but what I could give you is an answer.
What I think is, is that it's curiosity. And I think people have different levels of curiosity.
My parents, if they end up listening to this as well, will remember times when I ripped
apart phones when I was 12 years old, just to see how they worked or painted them over.
And I just love taking stuff apart and seeing how all the mechanics work. And in that case,
if I know there's an Xbox feature, again, I will look through all the network logs until
I find that open one and develop it first. So I do think it's down to curiosity. Not
necessarily motivation, but curiosity. Because people can be motivated at different levels,
but curiosity is a different thing that people have different levels with.
So let's talk about curiosity as it applies to Helper Bird. What were you curious about
when you first started Helper Bird and what were some of the first steps that you took
to bring it to life?
So it started in, I think January, 1915 was the first pet project stage where I was starting
an internship with a project management software company called Teamwork.com in Cork. Going
from college to an actual working environment in an internship is a huge jump. And they
gave me a month of time to just get familiar with the stack and get familiar with the code
base and any tools. So I decided to make a very simple Chrome extension using Knockout.js
at the time and using SaaS and different technologies. And I saw this open. I said, I have dyslexia.
I might as well try to find a font. And I found the open dyslexic font. And I just made
this Chrome extension. All it did was inject the code on the page and change the font.
That's all it did. Very simple, looked horrible. I wanted to learn how to publish it, so I
published it. Then I forgot about it and just never actually used it myself, to be honest.
And like two months later, my friend came up and I happened to log into the dashboard
and I saw there was 2,000 users just using it. No promotion, nothing. And I went, whoo.
And the next version, I just cleaned it up and added a bit of performance and just set
up an email. So if anyone had any issues, but no one really did. And then Abby, I can't
pronounce his last name, who created the open dyslexic font, which is a free open source
one. He came along to me and asked me that I want to help develop the official font Chrome
extension because it was getting riddled in bad reviews because it didn't have a feature
of being able to turn it on and off. It was if you installed it in Chrome extension, that
was it. So I went off and then rebuilt it. And all I did was add a toggle button. And
it grew from, I think 42,000 users to, I think as of last night, like just under 250,000
people are using that particular one. And that's where I saw that there was a lot of
people out there who were looking for tools. From there, I decided to do more research
and I got family friends involved. And I have even a friend from back home who's helping
me out with the website and some of the marketing for it as well. So we're kind of going from
strength to strength at the moment and adding new features. And the one thing I do have
to say to people, and I see a lot on product content on indie hacker and the question keeps
arising. And I know it is a bit harder to say once you have customers or users is do
listen to them. And especially when you're at that early stage where you can rapidly
put out stuff is even one new feature can help bring on 10 more users. And once you
have an established user base and establish some of the features, you can start making
like priority levels then of what is more efficient than others. And I know that differs
depending on the scale of the app in itself.
You're working on this on the side. And in fact, it wasn't even a business for you didn't
seem to have a revenue model up front. You didn't expect anyone to use it. At what point
did you start thinking of it as something that, you know, might be a higher priority
than your other side projects. And that might be something you could turn into a business.
So it really kicked in on like September 2018, kind of when I said this is six months now
of me kind of traveling the world and just, you know, relaxing and talking to people and
doing workshops and just, you know, getting back into the coding world.
And this is like three years after you first launched helper bird.
Yes. So it's been around for a while. But it was kind of if you go through like, like
the way back machine, you'll see all the horrible designs and all the mismatch colors. And before
I actually sat down and designed it, it was in September, I was like, I could take this
forward. Because I said if I was to properly focus one year at it and see how it goes,
and if not, I can always rejoin a company, hopefully, or, you know, if I gave gave it
my all for one year. So in October, we were in France, and I decided I'm going to buy
it. And I started like designing the website, and I didn't buy the name. Very lucky no one
took it. But then in November, the start of November, I bought the name mid October, November.
And from then I said, Okay, you know, I'm just going to charge three dollars for it
for life. But that isn't a very sustainable revenue model in the long term. So the current
revenue model only came in the last three months after proper kind of mixing and matching
the pricing and kind of discovering what that sweet spot was. And we discovered it was the
$4.99, a cup of coffee a month, or $50 a year for all features and all upgrades and unlimited
users if you do the educational pricing as well. But it was October, it was October,
November, and I decided I'm going to sit down and spend one year and it's been one year
more or less as I was speaking to you. And I think it's one of the better things I bet
myself on.
Yeah, it's been a pretty amazing year. I mean, you were talking about your user numbers
and your growth earlier and breaking, you know, 20,000 users, 30,000 users. I'm looking
at your product page on any hackers right now. And October, you posted a milestone where
you said you broke 50,000 users, which is just crazy. How do you grow an app so fast?
You know, for a long while, because one of the things I'm proud of over some of the other
educational apps is that we do zero tracking. We're copping FIPA compliant. And then what
that means is that you don't take any information, you don't store any information, you don't
analyze any information, you just don't, you don't know what the user is up to. So I don't
actually know how people are using the app unless they talk to me. So when they're on
live chat or the email me, I'll ask them, do you have any feedback? But in terms of
growth, it literally does come down to good word and me just constantly tweeting, constantly
talking to people constantly kind of organically plugging it. And just even talking to people
who are on like subreddits or even on forums saying my kid is suffering or I don't know
what to do and I'll give them it for a year, or I'll give them for two years or give them
free for life. Because for me, it's all about giving a good personal relationship because
I know what these kids have gone to or even these fully grown adults and, you know, giving
it away to 10 people, they'll tell 10 more people who are willing to try it out and who
are willing to spread the word. And that is probably the real reason it's grown. And we've
had articles written without even pressing for it. And it's just being kind of good natured
and honest towards people has definitely been the main reason for the growth, especially
as you said, from 50,000 to 65,000 in a month, just my socks are off my feet when I saw that.
And because we do zero tracking, I can't actually tell where they're coming from without me
plowing through Google search and good doing tools. In the last week, has Helper Bird been
mentioned anywhere?
You mentioned that there have been a few things you've invested in, for example, Google search
and SEO has worked out. And just thinking about the way that Helper Bird first picked
up traction, when you basically weren't even using it yourself, you checked in on it and
it had 2000 users a few years ago. You know, I wonder how much that was just people finding
it through the Chrome Web Store search.
I do have to put a lot of credit in that. And I think because I was luckily when I did
Helper Bird even as a test, like as a side project, I did a lot of key words unintentionally,
like dyslexia accessibility tool. And so if you search those were like number one across
all of them. And I do think that has a lot to do with it in terms of people just organically
finding us through the Chrome store. So I think it was a stumbled upon mistake.
How about nowadays, you doing any sort of content marketing like to intentionally, you
know, write articles that could help people and maybe get the app found on Google?
Yeah, you know, funny enough, we're doing we're starting to do that, but only if they're
actually useful, not keyword stuffing, because I think they that looks awful as a brand.
So especially in the last two or three months, we've taken a brand a lot more seriously,
especially with my friend who's who's helping me out. You know, we're making sure all the
branding is consistent and things like that. But yeah, we were going to start writing more
articles. But in college, I wrote a piece on accessibility and colouring and fonts.
And that thing still gets about 500 visits a week alone. So that drives a lot of traffic,
just in terms of SEO.
So tell me about your friend who's helping because at some point, you brought your friend
on but it was you for quite a while. How did you decide to partner up?
So my friend Rokas from Cork, I met him during college, and we are working on several other
little projects together, you know, we'll build this piece of software, we'll build
that piece of software. And I decided to focus on how prepared full time. And then about
July of this year, he asked, he wanted to like experiment on a bigger level, in terms
of sales and marketing and hell, but a wet and web development as well. I said, of course,
you can join on and see how everything goes. And he's been a great help. In terms of, in
terms of software testing, and from the website testing, and even like generating ideas how
to go forward. So, you know, he's gonna be at my wedding pretty soon. So, you know, friends
for life and it's been a great ride to be with him on it as well.
Yeah, it seems like everything's is kind of blowing up for you. I mean, you're growing
your team, you're growing your user base, you're growing your revenue, you're full time
on this. What's the future look like? What's like the ultimate goal for Hopper Bird? And
what do you imagine and like your best dreams?
So we have some very exciting stuff I can't just say, but in about a week's time, I'll
send it on to you to some very exciting news in the next week. And then in the future,
we're hoping that we're going to spread across more schools and more users and then have
an iOS app potentially in the future. Because that's the one major thing that people are
screaming out for is an iOS app. And the way we have it set up is you pay once and you
have it across every device. And the goal, the end goal is to have be the number one
tool for accessibility for anyone. So be an old person, be an elderly person who just
needs font, the font increased, we'd be the people go, oh, you should get Hopper Bird.
Kind of like when you say, oh, we should Uber there. We kind of want to be that into that
scale, but on accessibility and tooling. But for the moment, we're going to try to keep
a remote, like a remote team first, because I believe people, for my philosophy, anyway,
people work their best in their own comfortable situations. And I know, I found it struggling
to work in a cubicle. Because, you know, you get distracted by chats, and you only end
up doing like three hours at work, where I prefer to work in an actual cafe for headphones
on and, you know, do five hours or six hours, and then like you do an hour or two of calls.
Yeah.
So I think people have a, you know, and you build up a lot more trust that way. So I do
think it's remote first in the future. And that's one thing I'll hope to do as we grow
out the team. So I'm trying to keep the team small, tight, but I think about five or six
people and hopefully in the future, as we need.
Yeah. Yeah. Sounds fun to do a remote first company. And I know you spent what, a year
and a half just traveling the world. Are you planning to go back on the road or are you
going to stay settled down?
So we were, I'm getting married on February 29th. So as I say, I can only forget it once
every four years and we're going to do a bit of traveling and go down to Japan and then
come back to the States then at that point and kind of settle down somewhere. But where
that is, is a, is a good question. I'm not sure quite yet.
Yeah. So earlier I promised we would talk about some of the challenges you've gone through,
not just the good stuff. And we talked about a lot of good stuff so far. What have been
some of the hardest parts of running and growing Helperberg?
So one of the major issues about running a Chrome app or an extension app is what I didn't
realize until the error happened is if you didn't properly test the app, like I did,
there was a very nasty bug that if someone paid, it would lock some of the system, lock
some of the code away so they couldn't use some of the features even though they're after
paying. And that was because of a prettier change and some of the poor lines of code
that were, that were doing the if statements were still coming back invalid or null. So
that might seem like a big issue. Just push out the patch. But the issue I discovered
is that the Chrome extensions actually roll out different patches and updates over a course
of a week. So if you do version 1.1, only like a quarter of your users are actually
going to get it the same day. And then the next 10% might get it a week later. And then
the, it will be spread out over a couple of weeks. So then you have an issue of this nasty
bug is slowly being spread out. And even if you roll out a new one, it takes a while not
to go out. Yeah. And I got so many complaints, users left, and it was a real learning lesson.
And I, yeah. And again, I just told people, I'm sorry, I'm after messing up. Here's a
free month. This is a genuine mess with won't happen again. And I put in procedures now
using like code validators and stuff just to make sure this doesn't happen in proper testing.
That really shook my boots. And then there was another situation too. And this is a big
struggle. I think a lot of people listening might actually have is when you try to get
promotion or try to get your app out there or your, you know, your project out there,
there's a lot of places aren't willing to do it for free because they think if you're
going to make money off it, they might as well make money off it as well. And how do
you come across as genuine like, Hey, I made this, will you help me support it without
going? Hey, give us $1,000. We'll write you up a blog post. And that was a big struggle.
That was an absolute big struggles. We did initially email a few places, but you're coming
back, you know, we want $1,000. We want $2,000. We want half a revenue of true referrals and,
you know, it's or no, we don't do paid articles. And that was a big setback because, you know,
when you don't have a lot of money to do marketing, how do you go about it? And the one thing
I do tell people is just, as you mentioned, just write blogs and just get involved in
communities. And that's why I love indie hackers as a whole is because even you, even people
asking questions can really help. Another issue, a big issue was again, the Chrome developers,
as much as I love them, and I was even down at the Chrome summit, don't do a great job
when they make changes or alert people soon enough. So we had a Chrome extension that
had our old version had a 16 by 16 icon. And then the updated version of Chrome for Windows
didn't support 16 by 16 pixel icon. So then we had a blackout of about 5,000 users who
couldn't open up the app. And every time they open up Chrome, it will go with this Chrome
extension couldn't load. And we got mass on installs. And I don't think most of those
users actually came back. So there's a lot of errors and cautions and issues there are
dealing with taxes is also been an interesting one, because it was a person you registered
just as myself in like self tax. But then as it grew, and more people started coming
in and different colleges and different high schools and different users from all around
the world, that is a scary thing to deal with. So setting up the proper structures to deal
with all those has been a lot of it's been over my head. But luckily, we've had someone
to come along and help to set that up. And we even were using a straight palantius or
Atlantis to set up the US based one.
It's funny, because a lot of these challenges are just challenges you have is growing pains.
You're used to working on small side projects for yourself. And so you're not testing everything
and everything's not bulletproof, you just release changes willy-nilly, but then you
suddenly find yourself with a huge user base. And it's like, risky, you have to change your
habits and change the way that you're used to writing code. Do you feel like you like
running a bigger company? Do you like the sort of added responsibility? Or do you miss
sort of running the smaller side projects?
It's funny, when I was working at teamwork.com, the CTO and CEO, Dan Mackey and Peter Carpenter,
when I was an intern with them, I was number 13, I think, employee. And then when I left,
it was like 220. So I saw that scale happen. And I learned a lot from their philosophies.
And I didn't really appreciate it until this started growing. And I know they listened
to this. So they're gonna say thank you, first of all. But I didn't understand why they were
doing certain things until I grew into these pains. And I appreciate it more. And I do
like the scaling a lot more. It's more challenging. But I do have these old side products I do
work on, besides help revert in my spare time. But I know I enjoy the growing pains. And
it's interesting. And it's, you know, I always try to make sure I do 50 50 in terms of development
and you know, growing pains and management and CEO or founder type stuff.
What have you found to be the most helpful for you? And your journey and just supporting
you as a founder learning things that you don't know yet? Their books that you read
and mentors that you turn to?
Yeah, I find, you know, some might sound cliche is friends and family, especially for periods
where I'll be on contactable for like three weeks, or very hard to get a hold of them
just guiding me through and saying, you know, I then give me honest feedback, or like saying,
Rob, I think you're going down the wrong path here at this feature or this strategy. Or
even my pal Rokas say, just give me feedback. I don't think this is right. Or I think this
is the right direction. And then I had former work colleagues who I go to and even in the
hackers as a whole. And I know this sounds like a plug. It's, it's generally a good site
because you don't read a plug in the act that you want.
Oh, I didn't want to do it too much. So when I go under, I find every question of the hood
on people have given different feedback and different levels of growth from small people,
the big people, I even saw one person who sold to past 1 million and recurring revenue.
And I was just amazing. And you know, there is writing a blog post. And that does a very
rare thing to have. And the most amazing thing I found with indie hackers versus the rest
is how friendly everyone is. And generally friendly versus where if you go into some
other sites, you're ripped to shreds for just asking a simple question with taxes or, you
know, you're an idiot, you should have known this. And yeah, so I do put a lot of credit
there. And I do put a lot of credit to product hunt as well, because product on the last
few months, I've noticed have a used to be a lot of friends, upvoting friends from communities.
And they've kind of balanced that out now, where I don't know how their algorithm works
now. But it's a lot more fair. And I think even seeing what people are actually building
and their feedback they're getting is valuable for when you're growing your own, because
again, there's different levels of scale there. And I tried to listen to a lot of how I built
this with Guy Roz, I think that is so fascinating. And you learn a lot from founder stories there.
I'm sure there's a lot of people listening to this who are founders or aspiring founders
who also have dyslexia. And I've never had anyone on the podcast who has dyslexia or said
they have. So I would love to have you share some advice for founders who are struggling
with dyslexia or other learning disabilities and how they can, you know, go ahead and build
something that's successful or really do their best and feel good about it.
So the only bit of advice I give people is that you should never be ashamed of it. And
I think that runs through with any disability or quirk people might have, is that if you
tell people you have dyslexia, they'll never say it again, they'll never make fun of you.
If anything, they'll think you're more inspirational and dyslexia stands considering all the other
famous entrepreneurs that had it like Steve Jobs or Richard Branson, just the two at the
top of my head, you should never give up. And, and I mean that even I make spine mistakes
all the time. And I even misspelled my fiance's name on our boarding passes recently. And
we had to call up the airport quite quickly, is that even if you make the mistakes and
you own it, people will always be more inspired and trustworthy of you is that you made mistake
even be a spelling or be more honest, people respect you a lot more. And with that respect,
it gets you further in places, especially even if you're talking to someone online going,
Hey, I'm sorry, I misunderstood this message. But here's here it is, it might be a little
bit late. And that's a lot better than not replying back at all in that situation. And
the other thing is, is just consistency. And I saw this thread on indie hackers about people
launching on product on are launching on indie hackers are launching on other places and
giving up when it doesn't go well, or only goes okay. And that's what I always tell people
to try to stick to that. In YouTube, they say I like an upload schedule, but in software
or even products just stick to an update schedule. And I try to do it every two weeks. Some days
I miss it a little bit. But every Friday, every two weeks, there's a new update, even
a small one, a big one, just something. And I think with that, I've noticed that we're
encouraged by the SEO a lot more. And people are saying, Oh, this is constantly being maintained
and updated. And yeah, a lot more trust. I found the same thing with the podcast consistency
really works. And I love the fact that you pointed out that people find it easy to give
up when things don't go well, it's back to that feedback cycle, you know, you launch,
no one uses it, you start a business, it doesn't work out. And it's easy to get discouraged
and stop. But if you've got this feedback, or this sort of consistent schedule you're
working towards, and you're not sort of reacting to how people react to what you're putting
out, but you're reacting to your schedule, so it doesn't really matter what the reception
is, you're still going to release something new in another two weeks. And I think that's
a great way to get more shots on goal and keep going.
Yeah, and it's actually you start you talked about like, issues or mistakes or problems.
And just one more I thought I'd throw in is if you people listen, go on to product that
we actually launched three times over the course of a year and a half. Because you're
low every six months. The first one, we got 100 up votes, which is very good in my book,
we didn't end up I think we ended up number five in the day. The second one, we only got
40 and it was awful. And but and then it wasn't any real traction. And the third time we did
we ended up with 500. And it was just again, consistency and just learning from the mistakes
that were previously done, which were we rushed it, we didn't explain ourselves correctly,
the copy was mistake. We didn't have enough features. And it was by the third time came
around. That was the one that kind of set the goal alight or set the match of life.
Well, listen, Robert, it's been inspirational to hear how you've learned from your mistakes
and gotten to where you are today. And I wish you the best. I'm looking forward to more
of the milestones that you're posting with your insane growth. Thank you on any hackers.
Can you tell listeners where they can go to learn more about helper bird and also follow
along with your story. So if you want to learn more about helper bird, you can go on helper
bird calm, we're helper bird on most social medias. And then if you want to follow me,
I'm Robert J Gabriel on everything from Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, happy to answer any questions
and my DMS are always open. It's like talking to people. It's the gift of being Irish.
All right, thanks so much, Robert.
Thank you so much. And thank you for having me on listeners. If you're interested in receiving
the newsletter for the indie hackers podcast, I send it out every Monday with each new episode,
just get my thoughts on every episode, my takeaways, and what I thought was interesting.
That's at indie hackers.com slash podcast. Thanks so much for listening and I will see
you next time.