What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from AndyHackers.com, and you're listening to the
Andy Hackers 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 of their companies and in their personal lives,
and what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here, as always, is so that the
rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own profitable internet
businesses. Today, I'm talking to Anne-Laure of Nest Labs. Anne-Laure, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
You are the founder of Nest Labs, where you work on several different products. Why don't
you tell us a little bit about each one?
Currently, focusing on three main products. So there's Maker Mind, which is my newsletter,
which I started this summer, which has currently about 5,000 subscribers, where I write at the
intersection of neuroscience and entrepreneurship, because I'm also studying neuroscience part-time
on the side. Second product is Teeny Breaks, which is a Chrome extension that reminds people
to take breaks and gives them suggestions of mindful things to do during these breaks,
which are all backed by science with links to the corresponding research papers. And the last one
is MakerMad, which is a publication for indie hackers and indie makers. The ambition is basically
to be something a bit like TechCrunch, but where we celebrate makers making actual money,
rather than raising big rounds.
Cool. So I noticed every one of these is either maker-related or mindfulness-related. How do the
two of those intersect for you?
Yeah, so definitely. I've always been interested by how the brain works. I decided to go back
and study neuroscience last year. So I'm in the second year of my master's. Lots of this stuff
I study at university is actually super useful as an entrepreneur, too, in terms of managing
my mental health, taking care of myself, and being productive, but in a way that's also
mindful. So I can achieve my long-term goals rather than burning out, basically. So this is,
I guess, why lots of the stuff I work on is at the intersection of both.
So when you say you want to achieve your long-term goals rather than burning out,
you sound like somebody who has burned out at some time in the past and realized how
crappy it can be. What's the story behind that?
Totally. You guessed right. The very first time I burned out was at Google, actually. I used to
work there. That was my very first job. When I joined, I suffered from something which I didn't
know the name at the time, but I read about it a little bit later called imposter syndrome,
which I think lots of people are familiar with. Didn't understand how I ended up working in a
company with so many smart people. And I was always scared that someone would realize that
I didn't really belong there. So as a result, I worked really hard, probably too hard, but I was
saying yes to absolutely everything. I was working very long hours. I never had a drop of coffee in
my life before then, but I started drinking coffee just to manage to stay awake. And it took me
quite a long time to realize that something was wrong, that I was not actually, I was being very
productive and doing a good job, but I was not sleeping anymore. So not a good thing.
Talked about it with a colleague who went through something similar and told me about imposter
syndrome and about the anonymous group that Googlers had then on Google Plus called imposter
syndrome. And where there were hundreds of people sharing their stories and going through similar
stuff. So that thing made me feel a bit better just realizing that I was not the only one going
through this. And then also reading strategies as to how to tackle it. And so I worked on it with
my manager as it happens, not the only one going through this on the team. So there was probably
bigger issues there, but that was the first time I had to deal with this. And then again,
when I left Google, I launched a startup and went through something similar. So this is also
part of the reason why I'm writing so much about these topics today. Because it personally helped
me a lot to read that other people were going through the same thing and to read about
strategies as to how they managed to deal with this. So I'm also trying to help other makers
going through something similar. It's interesting how much running a startup is sort of a mental
game. A lot of it is just internal. And we talk all about the external challenges. How do you get
more customers? How do you grow your Twitter account? How do you rank high on Google? But
like 80% of it is just how do you do the thing that you said you're going to do and actually
feel good about it? I was just at an event with some founders last night, and we were talking
about how easy it is to give other people advice, because it's so clear what their problems are.
But then we look at our own startups and we're like, wait, what if I followed my own advice once
in a while? That'd be pretty good, right? But it's kind of the case where we know what to do,
which is so hard to do it often because it's this internal psychological battle.
Tell me about the startup that you founded after you left Google.
Yeah. When I was at Google, I was working on the digital health team. Some of the products
that we were looking after were Google Fit, which is the equivalent of Apple Health,
but for Android phones and Android watches. As a part of this role, I worked a lot
with health specialists and doctors, et cetera. Something that became clear to me after a while
was that we were focusing a lot on exercise, getting people to walk and run, et cetera. But
lots of why you're healthy or not healthy is based on what you eat. And I also have a history in my
family of people who struggled with this and became quite sick as a result. My mom is diabetic
and my grandma is diabetic too. We took a test, so it's not genetic. It's just because they ate
very badly for a very long time. So that's the sad thing about it. It's preventable, basically.
I left Google to start a company in that space, helping people eat better, and in particular,
helping people who don't necessarily have a lot of knowledge when it comes to nutrition. So helping
the people who really needed the help, because lots of startups in that space at the time were
targeting people who were already very passionate about this and who could probably deal with it
on their own. So worked on that, and it was really fun and tiring, but two things that didn't go well.
So the first one, and this is also why when I discovered indie hackers afterwards, it just
made much more sense. But we didn't have a good monetization plan. We didn't really know how we
were going to make money. So we had this, we're going to save the world approach, but without
really thinking about sustainability in terms of business. So that was one big problem. And the
other problem was that I decided to work with a technical co-founder at the time because I didn't
know how to code, and I didn't know him very well. And you know how to say starting a company with
someone is a bit like getting married. I basically got married after a one night stand. So just didn't
work out very well. We're good, but we didn't have compatible working styles. We're just not
the same vision. And so we broke up, which is apparently one of the most common reasons why
startups fell. So pretty unoriginal here. But we broke up in the end. So that was the second issue.
But I think even if we didn't have that issue, the fact that we didn't manage to figure out how
to make money was one of the biggest ones. I often say that a business can be pretty much any kind
of project that you want to work on as long as it has a way to sustain itself from its own revenue.
And you can easily go too far in either direction. A business in your case where it's a really great
project that you feel really good about, but it can't sustain itself. And then people go the other
direction where it's like this pointless thing that doesn't bring anybody any joy, maybe brings
harm to the world. It makes people less happy, but it certainly pumps out a lot of money.
What was your plan after you decided to call it quits on this business?
This is around the time where I basically didn't know what I wanted to do at that time. I went from
I'm going to save the world to I have no idea what I'm doing. This is also why I decided to
start studying neuroscience because I went back to the drawing board and I was like, okay,
business-wise right now, I really don't know what I want to do. So I decided to go back to what I'm
interested in in general, what I'm passionate about in general, the stuff that I really enjoy
reading about and learning about. Even when it comes to nutrition and the way people take care
of themselves, that comes back to how the brain works. And I found this program that you could
take part-time at King's College in London and decided to join that. And it was very interesting
because before for my first startup, I basically picked a problem and decided to work on it.
Whereas this time, I just decided to learn as much as possible about a topic that I'm really
passionate about and see what comes out of it. And so this is how I ended up where I am today,
working on what I'm working on and building the products that I'm working on, because I'm starting
from knowledge that I'm building rather than building a solution and figuring out afterwards
if it actually solves the problem that I want to solve.
So I first met you a little bit over a year ago at Juslan's ND London meetup in London.
He was on the podcast a few weeks ago talking about how he got that meetup off the ground.
Do you remember what you were working on back then as you already started Nest Labs?
I had started Nest Labs at the time just as a consultancy, because I was studying. So when we
met last year, I had started, it had been like about two months that I had started my master's.
So it was really, really new. And at the time when we met, I was dividing my time between
studying for school and freelancing, basically.
So you basically had these two jobs, you decided to throw in a third job, which is to become an
ND startup founder once again. How do you juggle working as a consultant, working as a student,
and starting now three different products?
I think the reason why it works so well for me is that they're actually all very intertwined.
So I can use stuff from any of the three into the two other ones. So everything that I study
at school, for example, I reuse in my articles, in my products. So teeny breaks that we mentioned
at the beginning of this conversation, for example, all of the research that the product
is based on is research that I studied at school, for example. So with clients, I started doing just
marketing, but I'm doing more and more consumer psychology projects where I really help them
understand their users, which is also something that I can do now that I've done a bit more
research at school. So I think if I was working on three very different things that didn't have
a link together, it would be much harder. But it's not the case. I have those three things that
work really, really well together. I don't have a very clear line between one project or the other.
I always work on the three of them.
Okay, so you've got maker mind, you have maker mag and you have teeny breaks. Which one did you start
first?
Teeny breaks was the very first one I built it during the 24 hour startup
challenge that was organized by Pat Wells last year. I don't know if you remember.
I do. So teeny breaks is a Chrome extension that helps makers take
mindful breaks. What does that look like exactly? And what are some of the plans you had when you
first made it and how you could turn into a business?
Yeah, so I didn't have any plans. I just wanted to participate in the challenge and do something
meaningful that I thought would be interesting. So the way it works currently is that it's a Chrome
extension. And every time you open a new tab, you have a tip basically telling you, hey, take a
break. And this is what you can do. And there's a link to the research paper that shows why
this is science based. And if you're the nerdy type, and lots of people in my audience are,
you can go and read a little bit more about it. There's currently no monetization plan for it.
It just took me 24 hours to build. It lives on the Chrome store. So I don't pay anything for
posting. And people seem to like it. I see it more as part of the portfolio of products that I want
to build to just help people be more mindful of the way they work. So I'm just going to keep it as
as part of that. And, and I think that's kind of the beauty and the way I approach things by having
several products is that if there's something I truly believe is good for the world and good for
people, but I don't have a clear way of monetizing, it's completely fine to have this because it
doesn't cost me any money. And I have other products that are profitable.
I noticed that your first business, you were working with a technical co-founder and on
teeny breaks, you coded it yourself. Did you learn how to code at some time in between these
two things?
I did start learning how to code after what happened with my first startup.
I decided after what happened with my first startup to never again, be in that situation
where I partner with someone for the wrong reasons. And I wouldn't be against the idea of
having a co-founder again. But in the future, if that happens, I want to partner with someone
because I really believe that they can bring something to the business. I trust them.
I admire them. And I think that together, we could build something better.
Not because I feel like I would be totally unable of building the product myself and that I need to
rely on someone that I don't know very well to do it. So this is the reason why I decided to learn
how to code.
I think that's the right way to do it. You don't really want to be dependent on somebody else.
You don't want to bring somebody in because you absolutely need their skills because you can't
code. So you need to work with this coder who you barely know. I hear the same advice given to
startups trying to raise money. You don't want to raise money because you need it. You want to go
to investors and have the luxury of picking really good investors to work with at a time where you
don't really need money. So I think operating from a position of desperation or neediness is
usually not the right approach.
Exactly. Yeah, all about being in control, I guess.
Yep, that's exactly it. You want to have control. So eventually you took your coding skills and you
went on to build a second product called MakerMag. Tell us a little bit about how the idea for
MakerMag came together and what exactly it does.
So for MakerMag, it was in December last year. And we were talking with a bunch of makers
and indie hackers. And we just realized that all of the news in Wired and TechCrunch and these
kind of magazines were really all about how much money a startup had raised versus how much money
they were making. That there was indie hackers, which is an amazing community. But there was no
actual magazine like with just like people writing stories for other or the people were covering
the news basically of what's going on with bootstrap founders that achieve amazing milestones
that were not really about closing around, but about closing a deal with a customer.
So we decided to launch this all together. There were about 70 people who joined on that project.
It was a bit messy, but it was fun. I was in China for work at the time too. So it was a bit hard to
coordinate, but we put together the website. It was very scrappy, just like WordPress super quick
off the shelf design. We spent more time working on the our values and what we wanted the magazine
to be about than the tech basically. So we decided that it would be participatory in the sense that
anyone would be able to write on it. So you didn't have to, it wouldn't be like three or four
so-called journalists. Any maker could write about themselves or about someone else,
that it would stay free for the community. And that we wouldn't have any type of programmatic
ads. So in terms of money, it would just be like sponsors. So no tracking to respects everyone
privacy. And yeah, those were basically like the principles that we decided on. And we launched in
December and since then we've been publishing articles every week. We have a monthly podcast
and a newsletter.
And you are doing what, $1,500 a month in revenue for MakerMag?
Yeah, we have a few sponsors. And what's really nice is that a few of our sponsors are
just regular sponsors basically. So every month, they basically support MakerMag. And then there
are the occasional sponsors for specific campaigns or stuff like that that we work on together.
So we could talk about MakerMag probably for hours, the idea of putting together a new site
with 70 collaborators and saying, but I want to spend a little bit more time on your third
and most recent product, MakerMind. So MakerMind is a newsletter. How does it work exactly?
Yeah, so I realized a few months ago that most of my audience, if not all of my audience,
was on Twitter. And with everything that has happened with Medium recently and lots of people
being locked on certain platforms, I kind of wanted to diversify the platforms where I could
connect with my audience. A second thing is that I wanted to start writing again about topics that
I really cared about. And I do believe, and it's not just me, Mediuming, it's just the case that
it makes it easier to learn stuff if you write about it. It's called the generation effect. So
the writing about anything you learn will make it easier for you to remember later. And since I
have to study lots of material at school, I figured that I could both build a new audience
on my own platform, and also take advantage of the generation effect by making sure that I would
just learn and remember stuff better by writing about it and blogging about it. So in July,
I committed to write one new article on my website every weekday, so five articles a week,
all about neuroscience applied to entrepreneurship. And I've been sticking to it since July.
I'm posting these on my blog and on Twitter. And every Thursday, I send a digest to the
subscribers so they can have all of the links and also a little intro so they can have a little bit
of context around the content.
So I love the fact that this idea plays so well with everything else you're doing. Like you said,
the reason you can be so productive is because all of the things you're working on are pretty
related. So you can do research at school for your neuroscience degree and then come home,
write one of your daily blog posts about what you learned and how it intersects with being a maker,
publish it to your newsletter, maybe even publish it on Maker Mag, and tweet it out to your Twitter
audience. In the first, I think, month after you launched, you were able to grow from pretty much
nothing to 2000 email subscribers. What do you think got you to grow so quickly early on?
Yeah, I've been really happy about the growth as 2000 subscribers in the first two months and
5000 in three months, basically. But I do think the consistency helped a lot because
if you look at the popularity of my articles, it's the, you know, the parrot role, right?
It's like 20% of my articles drive 80% of the traffic. And so far, I still haven't figured out
the recipe or what the magic that makes some articles go completely viral. I had one article
that I posted on Hacker News that got 30,000 views in one day. And I read it and I read other
articles I wrote and I'm like, I don't know why this one fits so well. So by writing every day,
I just increase the odds that something is going to be popular. So I yeah, that's the that's
literally the only strategy that I've been having. I just write every day and make sure to post it
on Twitter to post it on Hacker News to, you know, post my milestones on indie hackers,
I just make sure that people can find the content. And it's a bit like going fishing,
where I just wait and I see and sometimes, you know, catch something basically.
You mentioned that you're now at 5000 subscribers, you posted a milestone on indie hackers about
that in October. So just a few weeks back, you had a whole little timeline of how you grew Maker
Mind to what it is. And one of the points that you made was that Maker Mind is unique. There are a lot
of newsletters about mindfulness, there's a lot of newsletters about productivity. There's not
that many about the intersection of neuroscience and both of these things and being a maker as well.
How do you find an audience if you decide to pick something that's so niche and so specific that
you're totally unique? Yeah, and I think you kind of like, you know, mentioned it in the question,
but that's the thing is that what makes it unique is the fact that it's at the intersection
of two topics. But those two topics are topics that are very popular. So I'm actually getting a
subset of people who are interested in entrepreneurship. And that's a lot of people and
people who are interested in mindfulness. And that's also a lot of people. So what's nice is
that it's unique enough to make it easy to differentiate and to pitch to people. And so
they kind of understand it very quickly. And they can see the value in it. But at the same time,
it's not too niche, where I would really struggle to find an audience. The other thing too is that
I'm writing this for myself. Everything I write about is stuff I'm interested in. And the type
of people I'm connected with on Twitter or online, or the kind of people who are also interested in
similar topics than I am. So the fact that I'm writing for myself makes it easier to write stuff
that I know is going to be interesting to people who follow me online. Makes perfect sense. And if
you basically don't need to reach, you know, hundreds of millions of people, you can always be
sure there's going to be at least 5,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 people who are kind of the same as you
who are interested in the same things that you're interested in. Exactly. You found your first paid
sponsor earlier this month as well in early October. And now you've got your first sponsor
for six weeks. And that's how you're planning to monetize Make Her Mind and turn it into
a business that's capable of just joining itself. How do you go about finding a sponsor
for a newsletter? Because it seems like you've done it twice now. You did it for Make Her Mind
and now again for Make Her Mind. Yeah, it's all been inbound. I've never ever
done cold outreach or anything for Make Her Mind or Make Her Mind. So I do marketing. The content
itself is marketing, basically. So I don't want my answer to sound like just build it and they
will come because I don't believe in this. But putting your stuff out there is just inbound
marketing, basically. And so if you make sure that enough people see it, you will attract the right
people and the right sponsors. I also find that that makes the relationship much easier with the
sponsors because they reached out to me because they think it's a fit. So I don't necessarily need
to do any type of hardcore pitching to convince them that it's the case. So in both cases for
Make Her Mind, we have Blockstack as a sponsor, we have Makerpad as a sponsor, all inbound. And for
Make Her Mind, for sponsors, an app called Ivy, they found the newsletter when I launched it on
product hunt and they reached out and when they gave me the description of their product, I was
like, yes, that makes total sense. It's a mindful productivity app. So it's just perfect for my
audience. And then I have another sponsor coming up and saying targeting entrepreneurs and promoting
mindful entrepreneurship. So it's all been inbound. So the only advice I would give to people that at
least worked in my case is just to make sure that you're super visible and putting yourself out there
and having a clear value proposition so any potential sponsor can very quickly see that
this would align with the type of audience that they're trying to reach.
You've mentioned that you didn't quite believe in if you build it, they will come. So you've
actually been pushing your content out there so people would see it. Tell me about some of these
channels where people find out about what you're writing about and the different strategies you use
to succeed on each one. Yeah. So for people who know me, they probably know that I'm
very prolific on Twitter, maybe too much. But I post a lot on Twitter. What I really like about
Twitter is that if I share something and people like it, they're going to be sharing it with their
own audience. So it has this ripple effect that you don't necessarily have on other social networks.
So this is why I'm a huge fan of Twitter. Then I started posting on LinkedIn on Mondays. I do
a mindful Monday digest where I put links to all of my most popular recent articles.
So people on LinkedIn can see them too. And these are public on LinkedIn too. So if enough people
like them, they can get picked up by the algorithm and more people are going to see them.
I also post on Facebook groups. So every time I have, I don't do it all the time because
I find it a bit time consuming. And also I don't like using Facebook in general. So I only do it
for the ones that did very well on other platforms. I post them there. There are some
mindful productivity groups and entrepreneurship groups. So I post there. And then the last one I
post to is Hacker News. I post systematically there. No idea why some work and why don't,
but the ones that worked brought me so many subscribers. Also another ripple effect is that
there are lots of people who curate content for their own newsletters and their websites and their
blogs based on what's trending on Hacker News. So I also get all of that SEO juice
afterwards from other people resharing my content. So not only are you consistent with writing every
day, but you're consistent in publishing that writing and submitting it to pretty much any
channel that you can find. And Laura, we have come to the end of our hour. But before we go,
I would love to get your advice for early stage indie hackers who are just now getting started.
What do you think they can learn from your story? I'd say work in public. Just share what you're
doing. Share your milestones on indie characters, tweets, post on Medium, your own blog, whatever,
but don't expect people to just find you if you're kind of like working in the dark. So
just put yourself out there. Can you tell us where listeners can go to find out more about what you're
up to at Makermind and Nest Labs overall? Yeah, not going to share my Twitter handle because I
made it when I was 12 and it's impossible to spell. But people can go to nestlabs.com.
N-E-S-S-L-A-B-S.com. And there are links to my Twitter, my newsletter and everything I'm
working on there. Thank you so much, Enlor. Thanks.
Listeners, if you enjoyed hearing from Enlor, reach out to her and let her know. She didn't
want to share her Twitter handle, but I will certainly be tweeting about this episode.
So just look me up. I'm at CS Allen, C-S-A-L-L-E-N on Twitter. And like the tweet or retweet it when
I tweet about this episode with Enlor. Also, if you are interested in getting more from the podcast,
I now have a newsletter for the podcast. So head over to ndhackers.com slash podcast,
subscribe there, and I will send out my own insights and thoughts on each episode when
they come out. Thanks again for listening and I will see you next week.