What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense
of what it's like to be in their shoes.
How did they get to where they are today?
How did they make decisions, both at 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 Louis Nichols.
Louis, welcome to the show.
Cortland, thanks for having me.
Excited to be here.
Excited to have you on.
You are one of the oldest members of the IndieHackers forum.
We were just talking about how you've been on the site for three years now, and I've
seen you launch several different projects and side projects and stuff.
Today, you're working on Sales for Founders.
Tell us a little bit about what that is.
Sure.
So, it's an online course, which I've been putting together over the past couple of months,
which kind of, as it says in the name, teaches bootstrap founders how to do sales.
And we focus mainly on the journey between I'm a new bootstrapper and I have an idea
or maybe I don't even have an idea yet, and all the way up to getting to somewhere around
the 10K and MRR mark, which is generally the thing that most founders seem to be working
towards.
Yeah, 10K and MRR, that's well beyond ramen profitability.
That's all the way at the point where you can pretty much replace your job, for example,
as a full-time software engineer.
That's a huge range to be walking people through from zero dollars in revenue with a pre-idea
phase all the way up to replace your job amounts of revenue.
How do you even conceptualize what that roadmap looks like?
Sure.
So, the reason I chose 10K and MRR, it's kind of arbitrary, I guess, in the sense that all
businesses are really different.
But also, I think there are basically kind of four stages that I've seen to sales and
to building a business.
And I think the first stage where you're trying to find that idea, that product that you're
even going to build to sell to people, that's kind of the first challenge.
And then the way you approach that is very different to the way that you approach finding
your first one, two, five, maybe even 10 customers.
You just have to get them on board any way that you can.
And then somewhere between 10 customers and about 10K and MRR, you tend to change the
way you do sales again.
And you tend to put some kind of process, some kind of structure in place.
So that's kind of the cutoff point that I wanted to stop at because after that, it becomes
less about doing sales yourself and becomes more about removing yourself from the picture
involving other people.
So what's your revenue like for Sales for Founders?
Your product page on IndieHackers says $8,300 a month.
Is that up to date?
Well, it isn't really a monthly revenue because I've opened enrollment three times.
The first time I think I made, I don't even know, it was open for 17 minutes.
I think I made about $2,000, maybe $3,000.
Sold out of places.
The second time, it was more like $10,000 and that was open for two weeks.
And now this is the third time.
It's just closed again and I think we made around $30,000.
Wow.
$30,000.
Yeah.
So I think when I created the course page, it averaged out to about 8.3.
So that's what I put in.
But I guess you're built more with SaaS in mind for right now.
Yeah, exactly.
The product pages on IndieHackers are definitely built with monthly recurring revenue in mind.
But however you want to do it, I think averaging it out for three months makes perfect sense.
What's cool is you're taking founders through this journey, but at the same time, you're
going through this journey yourself.
So you're building this course.
You had to go from idea to launch to early sales all the way through beyond 10K MRR.
Let's talk about the beginning of your journey.
How did you come up with the idea for doing a course like Sales for Founders?
Sure.
So there were two reasons, I guess, two bits of impetus.
On the one hand, I'd been through this a couple of times myself before.
So I built a couple of businesses in the past and I have a newsletter that I run for founders
helping them, this kind of stuff.
I've been pretty active on IndieHackers over the past couple of years.
So I was getting to this point where I had maybe five, six founders on an average day
who'd reach out and ask about something sales-related.
So I kept getting the same questions again and again, and I was kind of fed up of answering
the same emails, to be perfectly honest.
So I was kind of seeing people having the same problems and I really wanted to point
them to somewhere else.
So I really wanted to point them to, for example, one place that I would point people to is
Rob Fitzpatrick's mom test, which is a really great book, but it doesn't cover everything.
It only covers kind of the first bit of the journey.
And there are other places you can kind of point people to that cover some bits and some
of the stuff they talk about is great, some bits maybe not exactly the way that I would
recommend doing things.
So there wasn't really one place that I could point people to.
And then what I realized at the same time is that for another idea that I've been working
on that I really want to do a course for that at some point in the future, and I wanted
to kind of find a way to learn, I guess, how to do a course myself.
So I thought, well, why not kind of put this information that I kind of know, like the
back of my hand into a course, learn how to do a course while I'm doing it, because I
know the content so well, that it's going to be easy on that side.
And that's kind of how it came into fruition, I guess.
You've worked on stuff in the past that's a lot more scalable than courses that was
a lot more product-like, a lot more subscription-y.
And that's kind of the dream of most people who are starting internet businesses.
They want to build something that basically can scale well beyond the labor that they're
putting in.
But courses are kind of the opposite.
So you're almost going backwards in a way where you're now putting in a ton of work.
Does that worry you at all?
Are you concerned about the lack of scalability with courses compared to building software?
Not really.
I like what you say there, by the way.
Everyone says that to me.
I've taken the opposite path to the one that most bootstrapper states.
Most people go the other direction, they start with a course or something and then move on
to a scalable SaaS product, which you've gone in reverse.
I've done the opposite to what everyone recommends you should do.
So that's very weird.
Going from a VC-backed SaaS all the way back to consulting and doing an info product, I
guess.
It hasn't really been...
I haven't really worried about scaling so much.
The course does scale.
Each iteration of the course that I've done has been built from...
The first version was very hands-on.
All the teaching was live.
It wasn't really worth it if you broke down the amount of money I was making per hour.
There was no way I could scale that.
But by talking to people, by learning what their problems were and seeing how I was teaching
it, whether it was working well or not, then the second version was kind of half hands-off.
There was a mix of evergreen content and some one-on-one stuff.
And now this version is basically all evergreen.
So it scales pretty well.
Yeah, I like the way you're doing it in these iterations where it's becoming more and more
scalable, more and more profitable with each iteration as well.
You had this point early on where people were emailing you and asking you the same sales
questions over and over, and you were kind of fed up with it.
What kind of questions do founders want to know about sales?
Yeah, so the point wasn't so much what kind of questions people were asking because they
were asking very activity-driven questions.
So how do I write a good cold email?
What's wrong with this cold email?
How can I get people to talk to me?
How can I close a deal?
Why aren't people buying that kind of thing?
How do I come up with a good product idea?
How do I find people to talk to?
But the real trouble I've had with the course or the real reason I kind of also really wanted
to do the course and why I'm taking so long to make it work properly is that, like I said
before, there's already a lot of good information on sales out there.
So if you want to write a cold email.
No one, even though I've got some really great people in the course talking about cold emails,
all of that information is available somewhere online.
The problem that founders tend to make is that they misdiagnose the problems they're
having.
So for example, people won't reply to their cold emails and they'll think that's because
they're writing bad cold emails, where nine out of 10 times they're either emailing the
wrong person or they're emailing them like the wrong value proposition, right?
So they're trying to sell them something that they're just not interested in.
So they can spend as long as they want trying to improve their cold email.
It's not going to help them.
And that was kind of the thing that I kept seeing over and over again was, well, look,
your problem isn't actually the problem you think you have.
You're wasting your time.
I've done that before as well.
Let's put together something that's going to help you work out what your problem really
is.
Yeah, I love the way you put that.
This has come up actually on some recent episodes of the podcast, this whole problem cause solution
framework where instead of just rushing headlong into a solution for a problem you have, take
a step back and figure out, do I actually understand the causes of this problem?
And the internet makes that hard because it's throwing solutions at you left and right.
There's so much information out there.
But if you pick the wrong solution, because you don't understand accurately the cause
of the problem you're having, then you're basically going to get super frustrated when
it doesn't work and everything you try doesn't work.
So it's super important to diagnose your problems correctly.
Pretty much nails it.
So the first version of Sales for Founders, you launched on May 1st of 2019.
I'm looking at your timeline now on IndieHackers.
He said, you launched an alpha version of the Sales for Founders course and you sold
out all seven spots in under 17 minutes to make about $2,000 in revenue.
How do you sell out seven spots in 17 minutes for the very first version of your course?
Spend three years helping people with the kind of problems that you're fixing in the
course, I guess, for free.
You know, I had a newsletter of, it's not a massive newsletter, I suppose at that point
there were maybe 3000 people on the newsletter, which is quite big, but I only emailed very
few of them.
I only emailed the ones who had reached out to me with sales questions in the past, which
was, I think, maybe 180 people.
I just said, look, I'm doing this thing, you've shown interest in sales in the past.
If you want to sign up, it's here, this is how much it costs, click the link if you want
to buy.
First come, first served.
And that's basically how it worked.
So you were charging them, what, like $300 a person?
Yeah, I think it was $299, I think.
Yeah.
$299 a person and all seven slots got claimed within 17 minutes of you sending out this
email to your list.
I want to go back in time a little bit and dive into the details behind how you grew
this list.
How do you build an email list with 3000 subscribers?
I don't know.
I never did it on purpose.
I just wanted to learn how to write, I think, because that's what I really liked about Indie
Hack, because I came from this kind of VC back world where I was working ridiculously
long hours for, you know, all the time for a couple of years straight.
And I'd never had any time or really any opportunity to help other founders, I think, you know,
I was helping my team and worrying about my own stuff.
And then kind of I left that and I had a lot of time all of a sudden.
And that was when I was kind of becoming disillusioned with kind of the VC back world at the same
time.
And that was when I kind of saw Indie Hackers and saw all these people making, I guess,
the same mistakes that I'd just been making and felt very strongly that someone had to
save them a lot of time and pain, even if it took me five minutes of keyboard bashing
to do.
And I guess it was just kind of one comment after the other.
And then a lot of the people where I saw like a trend of them having the same problems again
and again, I would turn that into a blog article or something like that.
And I guess people just wanted to sign up and read about that.
I never really, I wasn't building an audience to build an audience, definitely not.
But nevertheless, you ended up building an audience of your own.
You kind of inadvertently followed my favorite advice for how to build an audience on the
internet, which is be helpful.
That's it.
That's all you have to do.
Be helpful.
Most people are not that helpful.
They're trying to get help.
But if you're on the opposite end of that spectrum, and you're giving help, then you're
going to stand out like a sore thumb.
And people are going to come to you and of course, they're going to sign up for your
mailing list because you figured out what it is they want.
And you're giving it to them.
And on Indie Hackers, what that looked like is you talking to a ton of early stage founders
who didn't know how to come up with an idea and didn't know how to sell and get their
product in the customer's hands and didn't know if they should build a landing page and
all that kind of stuff.
And so of course, your audience is full of early stage founders who want your help with
this kind of stuff.
And this doesn't really come all that natural to most people.
Most of us are just trying to get help.
But you're just a naturally helpful person, I guess.
I think it was partly just me having the time and realizing I was kind of burnt out when
I came out of the VC bat stuff, obviously, I just spent a couple of months not really
knowing what I wanted to do.
And having Indie Hackers there at that time kind of and seeing these people struggling
with the things that I had struggled with before, it just kind of, I guess, pushed a
button somewhere inside me and I really wanted to just tell people and there was no ulterior
motive.
Like all the time, it's kind of ironic that I'm doing the Sales and Founders course now
because I've always said founders, especially bootstrap founders, are the worst people
to try and sell to because they're time rich and cash poor.
So I was telling people all the time, don't sell to these founders.
And now I am, which is-
I'll look at you.
Yeah.
At some point, to be able to make the course free, that's my ultimate goal, is not to
have to charge for it.
But until I kind of get to a point where I can afford to do that for the next couple
of months, I think it'll have to be paid.
Give me an overview of where Sales or Founders is going.
Like what's your roadmap?
Because it started off with you doing these live group coaching sessions and also one-on-one
sessions over video chat.
What's it going to look like in a year or two from now?
Yeah, I don't know, it's going to look like two years from now, to be completely honest.
What I'd like to happen is I'd like to be doing less and less of the actual teaching
myself.
So already this time, I've realized online courses, it doesn't have to be all one person.
It isn't cheating to ask for help.
At a university, you wouldn't expect one person to teach all of the courses.
It's fine to go and get other experts who know much more about specific topics than
you do.
And it's just for me to kind of help them put it all together into an easily understandable
digestible format.
So I'm looking forward to bringing on kind of even more experts and helping them to help
people.
I'm starting to work with some kind of sales enablement and just kind of bootstrapper tools
like Close.io, who I know you had Steli on the podcast recently, and hopefully they can
get involved a bit more as well.
And then we can kind of push the price down and make it as cheap as possible for people
to just have that one stop resource, I guess, where you go and you say, look, I don't need
to know everything about sales.
I just need to know enough and very quickly to be able to solve whatever I have in front
of me.
And the aim is within six months, within a year, I'd like this to be kind of a free resource
that you can go and pick up as a founder and just helps you work your way through it.
How do you make money in that situation if your course is free for readers and users?
Well, I don't from this, but I mean, it's helpful to help people.
Those companies, hopefully, especially if I'm helping them, they will grow bigger.
And I'm OK at sales because I've done a lot of it.
And I was very bad when I started off, so I had to kind of learn it the hard way.
But what I'm actually really good at is marketing, like conversion rate optimization.
And that's what I've been doing a lot of consulting on.
And that's what my next course will be about, about social proof.
And so I know I'm going to make a lot of money from doing that.
So if I can, I'm not really worried about making money at the moment, I just want this
to kind of help people.
See, this is a perfect example of you just being helpful on the internet, because your
course is already making money.
It's not like it's a question mark, can this make money, but you want it to be free just
because.
And it's also not completely branded around you.
I think I see a lot of course creators where it's all about them.
It's their face front and center, plastered everywhere.
It's the first name, last name course, where yours is just sales for founders.
And it's not really about you.
It's about the material and the education and the students and the community where they're
helping each other and even bringing in other people to help you out.
So even the way you're doing your course is you being helpful on the internet in a relatively
selfless way.
I think a lot of people go about this kind of the opposite way to the way that I did
and that they kind of, I mean, they really build up an audience around themselves first
and then work out something that they can sell to people who are in their audience.
So it makes sense for them to put themselves first, right?
Whereas for me, I think this kind of stands alone by itself without me.
And most of the people who are signing up, they hadn't really heard of me before.
It was recommended to them as someone else, you know, they're not here because it's me.
So that makes it easier for me.
And I don't think it does really hurt me because I mean, it's not like I'm internet famous
like Patio Levin would put it.
Like it's fine that it's not connected to me.
It doesn't really help for me to be the figurehead of it.
Yeah, but it definitely helps for you not to be the figurehead because then it's like
you said, more scalable and you can sort of extract yourself from it and grow the team
and not necessarily have it completely depend on your involvement on a day-to-day basis,
which is great.
Yeah, for sure.
And it's nice, you know, if I can bring in other people, other experts, it's useful
for them to be associated with it as well.
It gives them more of an audience.
They can help share it because it promotes them as kind of the expert for their topic,
their subject.
So, you know, it's that kind of, I guess it's just good sales at the end of the day.
It's just creating that kind of win-win situation where it helps everybody.
And that's what I'm trying to do.
Yeah, you're helping your collaborators, they're helping you in return because they probably
have their own audiences they bring to the table and they take a lot of work off your
shoulders.
It doesn't have to all be you.
It's also better for your course if there's different people contributing.
If it was just sales for founders, according to Louis Nichols, that would be great.
But if it's sales for founders, according to all these different sales experts, that's
even better.
I think about this all the time with Indie Hackers.
It started off as just interviews on the website.
Now it's interviews on the podcast, I'm interviewing you.
It's not just the Cortland Allen show.
It's not just me sharing my story over and over and over again.
That would be extremely interesting.
I'm sure everyone would love to hear that, but it's much better to hear from lots of
different people.
I think if you can sort of own the stage where other people come and perform rather than
being like one of those many thousands of performers yourself, that's a huge advantage.
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense.
I like the way you put it.
So May 20th, we're skipping ahead on your timeline now by 19 days.
So a few weeks after you launched the very first live version of your course, you launched
what you call the first real cohort of Sales for Founders.
And this one, you charge just under $2,000 of participants, so you jacked up the price
by like 7x.
You got eight participants to sign up, and you also updated the course.
This is a lot to do in three weeks, so give me a rundown here.
What evolved, what changed in that three weeks from your very first $300 course to your second
iteration that was $2,000?
Sure.
The first version, it was basically just four lots, it was a Slack group, and then four
lots of kind of one-hour group coaching sessions, which we did over three weeks or so.
And then for the second version, I realized, okay, I can kind of put some of this already
into kind of evergreen content and so into worksheets and videos and text lessons and
stuff like that, bring in some templates and stuff.
But I also realized that, well, actually, I did it the wrong way.
So I thought that I could help everyone kind of on like, have you ever seen the Lean Canvas,
the Lean Start Canvas?
Yeah.
A little worksheet.
Yeah.
I thought I could try and do the same thing for sales.
So how to go from zero to 10K in MRR and kind of teach it in 12 weeks.
So kind of week one, we'll look at this, and there'll be a one-on-one lesson, week two,
we'll look at this, and there'll be a one-on-one lesson all the way through.
And it was a terrible idea.
It didn't work.
People were kind of falling off because some of them were slower, some of them were faster,
some were working full-time, some were doing it a couple of hours a week.
Some of them just had longer feedback loops because they were selling into enterprise.
So it was kind of a catastrophe in that sense.
But it was so much more hands-on that obviously the price had to be higher to do it.
So the problem was that it was crafted like a funnel.
And you had these week-by-week lesson plans, and people would sort of drop off from one
week to the next.
And by the end, you had fewer people left in the course than when you started?
Well, everyone was still there.
Yes, we were still doing the weekly one-on-ones, the coaching stuff, just a lot of people.
Some people came into the course kind of already thinking about week five's content and ended
up on week seven.
And some people came in at week zero and ended up at week three.
And some people kind of repeated week zero 12 times in a row, very stubbornly, as some
developers do.
Makes sense.
So this is basically an ad for why you should iterate on your product.
Because essentially, if you had just decided, hey, this course is going to be this big,
massive thing, then I'm going to spend three to six months putting it together and then
just launch it, and that's going to be it, then you wouldn't have learned all these lessons.
But here it is, like, barely three weeks in, and you've already done two iterations of
your course, learned a whole bunch, and then tweaked it and tweaked it again and figured
out what works and doesn't work, which I think is the best way to do it.
What are some other lessons you learned in these first couple iterations, and how did
it change since then?
Yeah, and I mean, that was a total mistake, by the way.
I didn't realize I was doing that at the time, but it worked out really well, and I recommend
anyone else doing a course to definitely do at least one or two live versions first.
The first people you'll have in the course, when you do one-on-one coaching with them
and stuff, you're basically being paid to do sales, to do product development.
Some other stuff that I learned was one thing that I really underestimated was the value
of having a lively community.
So we have a Slack group, which is pretty lively, where everyone's helping each other
out, where we're asking for feedback.
Because I'm a developer, I had to build a small tool for us to use to track accountability
and stuff.
So that is being used, and it works pretty well.
It keeps everyone accountable, keeps them motivated, keeps them coming back and working
on their stuff.
And at the beginning, I thought this was going to be completely hands-off.
I'll give them a link to the course.
They can go and work on this stuff, and maybe some people will email me.
It has just been so useful for everything, really, for people's progress, to give them
this community where they can chat and keep each other motivated and keep each other going.
Things that surprised me about the course was that when I originally did it, my aim
or my hope was that the value, or most of the value, would be in the evergreen content
I was providing.
So in the actual lessons and templates and stuff.
I think they are working really well, and they're always getting better, especially
now that the external experts are coming in as well.
But I really underestimate just how valuable the community aspect would be as well.
So I now think of it as kind of, there are four real challenges that the course will
solve for someone coming in.
So you have kind of working out what you're doing wrong, which is, I guess, the big problem.
You have working out how to solve that problem.
Then you have the accountability and the motivation as well.
And there was no real way before, unless I was kind of acting as their mini CEO to kind
of hold them accountable and keep them motivated.
But having this Slack community and this little tool that I built has just helped so much
in keeping everyone coming back every day and kind of encouraging each other, helping
each other out, giving feedback, sharing stuff for each other, giving introductions.
And what I've recently seen, which is kind of, I feel almost like a proud father, is
the other day someone asked a question in Slack and I saw it was about a cold email.
So I thought, okay, when I'm finished in the gym, I'm going to have to go back and kind
of answer this with my stock answer.
And I got back and two people from the very first iteration of the course had said basically
everything that I wanted to say.
So cool.
And yeah, it was a very proud moment for me.
That's how I feel about IndieHackers too sometimes.
I'm sure.
Obviously it's a community.
You go to the website, it's just thousands of founders helping each other get started.
And I don't have to do any of it.
I could sit at home watching people help each other and it's, I don't know, the power of
people helping each other is so much more efficient than this sort of top down.
You have to teach everybody everything, yourself method.
Yeah, for sure.
It's having the community and having people helping each other out in that way, it allows
you to scale yourself in a way that, like you said, the beginning of the call, you know,
it feels like you can't scale yourself in that way, but it turns out that with a community
there's, you know, you almost can't to a certain extent.
Let's talk about the side project that you built during all of this.
It's called, do I need a landing page.com?
And the whole purpose of it is to help founders answer this question of whether or not they
need obviously a landing page.
And I think if it's perfectly with what we were talking about earlier, doing this root
cause analysis, trying to figure out what the source of your problems is before you
go out looking for a solution in this particular case, assuming that the solution is you just
need a landing page.
Why don't you tell us a little bit about what this project is and why you built it?
Sure.
So it comes again from, from indie hackers where you have all these people asking for
feedback on their landing pages and some of the landing pages are absolutely beautiful.
Some of them are really good as well, I'm sure, but very few of them, if they've been
made before the person already has customers are going to be very effective.
It will be basically a waste of time in most cases, because if you don't have any customers
yet, if you haven't sold to someone, then how are you going to kind of navigate through
their objections?
How are you going to convince them to buy?
How are you even going to be sure that what you're selling them is the right thing for
them to be buying in the first place?
So kind of with that background, most of the time when I was giving feedback on someone's
landing page, I was thinking, well, you know, really, you shouldn't be building a landing
page yet.
You should be doing more boring, less fun work of talking to people and, you know, selling
to them and working out what they want.
And that's going to save you so much time because, you know, when you have a landing
page and you haven't sold to people yet, you don't understand their objections to value
proposition and that kind of stuff, you know, when someone goes to your landing page, they
give you binary feedback, right?
It's either yes, they buy or no, they don't buy.
And you can see kind of how they scroll and maybe some stuff they click on, but it doesn't
really give you any context.
Whereas if you go and do sales and, you know, talk to people, then you understand why they
didn't buy.
You can ask them follow up questions.
You get so much more information.
You know, one sales call is worth 100,000 landing page visits kind of at day one because
there are so many things that could be going wrong and it's going to take you so long to
kind of eliminate those different concerns by kind of an A-B test approach.
Yeah, I think that's one of the least intuitive things for new founders and it's worth repeating
over and over and over again that the fidelity of information you get by actually having
a conversation with somebody is so much higher than you get by building a website or a product
and just watching people either sign up for it or not sign up for it.
You learn almost nothing, which makes it super hard for you to iterate and improve on what
you're doing.
It's kind of the genius behind your course, too, because you're launching your thing and
trying it out with people.
But because you're doing a course that's really hands-on with you teaching and it's not like
sort of hands-off course where you just put the materials online and see who signs up,
you actively get a lot of feedback, too.
Yeah, for sure.
And I think, you know, if you look at the way that the Bootstrap community has kind
of evolved its best practices over the last maybe 10, 15 years, you know, I think it kind
of, I can't remember the exact quote, but it's something about, you know, the end product,
the end community is kind of, is obviously a result of the people who created it at the
very beginning.
And a lot of people who came into Bootstrapping in the early days, you know, they're developers.
They didn't fit in well to, you know, working with authority, working for a bigger company.
They didn't necessarily want to do a lot of talking to people.
So they were building this framework, which maybe isn't the best way, the quickest way
to build a company, the most reliable way to build a company, but it is the best way
if you're that kind of person who doesn't like talking to people and who prioritizes
not talking to people over making lots of money quickly, right?
So I think you have to kind of view the best practices around putting up a landing page
and stuff kind of in that light of, yes, this is a good way of doing things, but it's been
built for people who are like this, if that makes sense.
It does make sense.
You've got to do what's right for you.
And on a related note, you posted about this on your product page on any hackers, you had
a post that's called forgetting to stop and smell the roses.
So today I had an important realization that one of the biggest killers of early stage
startups and side projects is a gradual loss of motivation.
How do you avoid losing motivation as a founder?
Yeah, it's a good question.
So I think there are a couple of different answers to that.
And I want to look at two of them, I think, that I think are really important.
So one of them is a big mistake that I see a lot of founders, especially technical founders
making, which is to focus, as I guess they get taught a lot, to focus on a problem.
And what we do as technical founders when we see a problem is we get really excited
about defining that problem and finding the best possible solution for it.
But the thing is people don't pay for the best possible solution to a problem.
They pay you to provide or to create value for them.
So it may be that you get super excited about solving this problem with your app.
And it turns out a couple of months later that the best way to provide value to the
customer isn't actually with an app at all.
It's by doing something different.
Maybe it's an online course.
Maybe it's a different kind of app that doesn't let you use React or whatever you wanted
to work on.
Maybe there's no machine learning.
Who knows?
Maybe a to-do list app isn't the solution to your problems.
So what happens then is if you've been focusing on solving this problem in a way that you're
excited about, you then get very demotivated and you lose momentum and you go and work
on something else.
Or even worse, you keep working on the same problem.
You keep building the same app, but just try and find some different audience who do need
this product, which is crazy because 50% of the time, at least, there is no audience that
needs exactly the product that you've been building because there isn't an audience for
every product, right?
So what I'd like to kind of recommend people do instead, if they can, is to focus in the
early days on the pain and on the person that they're helping, the person they're providing
value for.
Because if you spend time talking to them, getting to know them, really understanding
how you're helping them, then you will be more motivated by solving their pain and helping
them than you will be by some fancy framework you get to use, which makes it much more likely
as your business evolves, two years, three years, five years down the line, that you'll
still be happy working on it.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
It's so important to just enjoy the actual process, like the day-to-day things you do
working on your business.
If you don't enjoy that, then what's waiting for you at the end of the road might be six
months of happiness or something.
But if the two years you took to get there were miserable because you didn't really enjoy
what you were doing, is that really even worth it?
Probably not.
So totally with you there.
People should think more about how to enjoy their business.
And sometimes that means making sacrifices and making changes to your business model
just to make it enjoyable for you.
I talk to my good friend, Lentai, all the time about this because she's super obsessed
with making sure she has a business that she enjoys.
She was on your podcast as well.
There's lots of stuff she doesn't do that you quote-unquote should do as a founder,
but she doesn't enjoy doing it.
Ben Tostle from Maker Pads the same way, he just won't do certain things if he doesn't
think they're fun to do as a founder.
And maybe that means he grows a little bit slower, maybe that means things don't go quite
as well as he wants them to, but at least he likes his life.
And what goal is there other than that?
Yeah, and I think you're talking about Ben Tostle.
I was speaking to him recently, and I think he was really, really mature and clever about
the way he did it.
And I wish I'd been like that the first time that I went out and started my own product
in that he started with, I can't remember what Maker Pad was called in the early days,
but he started solving the same problem roughly two or three times.
And every time he stopped once he got to an interesting amount of revenue because he realized
that wasn't the kind of company that was going to motivate him.
That wasn't the kind of product that he wanted to be running.
And he was so, I don't want to say lucky because I think he did it on purpose, he was clever
to realize or mature to realize that after two or three months and not after two or three
years and to be able to keep changing and iterating until he reached something that
he did enjoy building.
Which I think I wasn't that kind of...
When I was doing my first couple of projects, I was nowhere near mature enough to realize
that.
I'm many projects in and I'm still working on the whole maturity thing.
A lot of people listening in, Louis, are on their very first couple of projects.
What's your advice for them and what do you think they should know as brand new founders?
I guess I'm going to kind of wuss out slightly and just say I think the most important thing
is to start talking to people, to start working out how you can help people.
I know it's what a lot of people will say and I guess it's kind of one of those things
you're expected to say.
But I've done B2B, I've done VC backed, I've done Bootstrap, I've done e-commerce, I've
done marketplaces, I've done a lot of different products, a lot of different types of products
selling to a lot of different types of people.
And whatever I'm doing, I feel like I'm confident and I have a good chance of succeeding because
I focus on putting the people first and understanding them and trying to help people.
And I think that's just the most, if you think about kind of starting a project or a startup
as kind of de-risking by kind of removing layers from an onion, I think that's kind
of the first most important one to focus on.
Focus on the people.
Well, listen, Louis, it's been so great having you on the show.
After three years of having you on the website, hopefully I can have you on again to catch
up at some point in the future.
But until then, can you let listeners know where they can go to learn more about what
you're up to with Sales for Founders and any other courses you might happen to be working
on?
Sure.
So you can follow me on Twitter if you'd like to see what I'm working on.
It's at Louis Nichols with an underscore at the end, Nichols with two Ls.
And if you're interested in learning sales and how to get from 0 to 10K in MRR, you can
head on over to salesforfounders.com.
All right.
Thanks so much, Louis.
Thanks for having me, Kautlyn.
It's been great.
Quick note for listeners.
If you're interested in coming onto the podcast, like Louis, to have a quick chat with me,
go to indiehackers.com slash milestones and post a milestone about whatever it is that
you're working on.
It could be pretty much anything.
People have posted about launching or finding their first customers.
They posted about growing their mailing list or hitting $1,000 on Twitter.
They posted about getting to $100 or $1,000 or $100,000 a month in revenue.
The sky is the limit.
So whatever it is you're proud of, come post it on indiehackers.com slash milestones and
the rest of us will help you celebrate.
And what I will do is at the end of every week, I'll look at the top milestones posted
and reach out to people to invite them to come onto the show for a quick chat.
So once again, that's indiehackers.com slash milestones.
I'm looking forward to seeing what you post.