What's up, everyone? This is Cortland from AndyHackers.com, and today I'm doing something
a little bit different and actually sitting across the room from my guest. I'm talking
to Patrick McKenzie, better known in some circles as patio11. How's it going, Patrick?
Doing well, thank you. Hi to you, everybody. My name is Patrick McKenzie, better known
as patio11 on the internets. And yes, I have totally memorized that introduction so that
I'm not too nervous when I start talking about things.
So Patrick and I both work at Stripe. We're both sitting on the fifth floor of the Stripe
office. And we've got a lot of stuff to talk about. You're actually one of the founding
influences for how I got into starting businesses online and one of the most inspirational people
that I've met. You're one of the first people to start writing transparently about yourself
on the internet. And for the people who are listening who don't know who you are, can
you give kind of a brief intro of your background and where you started and how you got to where
you are now?
Sure thing. I kind of feel like occasionally that I am totally pretending with regards
to actually knowing any of this stuff. But a brief background on when I genuinely did
not know anything. I have lived in Japan for approximately the last 12 years, got there
shortly after university. And when I was 24, I was working in Japanese day job that was
not really challenging or giving me opportunities for professional growth. And so I decided
to do a side business mostly as a project to learn about running businesses and to have
a little more freedom to actually make engineering decisions that mattered and engineered by
training and trade, but was in the balls of a megacarp doing nothing really fun.
And so I made a Java swing app called Bingo Card Creator, which made Bingo cards for elementary
school teachers. And it's been described by some of my friends as hello world attached
to a random number generator, which it pretty much is. And I did this in about a week and
then started taking payments via the credit option there was for taking payments back
then accelerate and eventually PayPal in a little website that I had built for this Java
swing app program in literally notepad. And I made $24.95 about three weeks after launching
and then about $2,000 in the first year of running the business. And then it took a while,
but eventually four or five years later, it was eclipsing the amount of money that I was
making at the day job. I quit to run my business full time, started a second product called
Appointment Reminder, ran a consulting company where I was doing kind of marketing and sales
for other software companies because it turned out to be kind of good at that. Probably have
a comparative advantage on it versus actually writing software. And then that went pretty
well for a while. I started a different business with two friends of mine called Starfighter
to do recruiting for engineering teams. That business ended up failing in August of last
year. Then I sold Appointment Reminder and joined Stripe.
So your history is, as I remember, you're one of the first to start writing transparently
online about having a business and about charging customers money, generating revenue, and talking
about the behind the scenes of Bingo Card Creator. What got you into that? Why did you
start sharing all the details?
So I think a number of these trends kind of go in waves where there's sort of a generation
of people who are coming up at the same time that I was coming up. And I might be one of
the first people in kind of that generation to write a lot transparently about the mechanics
of running the business and revenue numbers, et cetera. There's kind of like a mini trend
in that generation, one that follows us. But shockingly, there were folks running businesses
over the internet. Even a few years before I and my buddies came up, there was a guy
named I think Brian Ramison who ran this business making ski shooting scoring software. That
was really transformative for me. And he wrote a two pages or so about the running the business
of ski shooting scoring software. And I'd also been reading Joel Spilsky's blog and
loved everything he was writing. But I bucked myself into he's not exactly a role model
or a person I could see myself eventually being. That is the genius shining on the hill
over there next to the New York Stock Exchange that has a business that employs 30 people,
something that I would never ever be able to do.
But ski shooting scoring software, yeah, I could write that if I had ever shot ski before.
But something on that level of complexity, selling $2,000 of software over eBay, I could
do that. And so one of the reasons I started my blog was that, well, I was living in Japan
and not getting much practice on writing English and didn't want to lose that ability. But
another reason was in the crazy odd chance this actually turns into something and I make
$2,000 selling bingo card software over the internet, I would love to drop some bread
crumbs for the next person to see that that is possible. So one of the things that makes
me happiest about this whole business career over the last, goodness, it's been almost
11, 12 years now, is that folks routinely write me and say that the last 3 million words
that I wrote on the blog and Hacker News comments and tweets and et cetera actually did move
them to make a business. In many cases, much more successful than any of mine were.
Yeah, I think more and more founders are considering writing transparently. Just like
you were inspired by Joel Spolsky and Skeet shooting guy, people have been inspired by
your writings and nowadays it's pretty common for people to write transparently. There's
also resistance to it. What do you think are some of the advantages and disadvantages that
come out of sharing things like your revenue metrics, sharing what goes on behind the scenes
at a business?
I think this is a situation that depends on who your businesses are, who your target customers
are. Folks often thought that I was doing the writing about revenue metrics or writing
about the operations running a bingo card business for the purpose of getting directly
in front of customers for the bingo card business, which is not true. My customers were mostly
middle American teachers. They don't care about writing software. That's why they would
pay me money for it. It was always kind of like a side project slash hobby for me, which
became very, very valuable when I was actually selling stuff into the market of people who
would reasonably try to read about SEO advice or how to do emails for SaaS companies from
someone who had something to sell in that market.
In terms of whether it's a good idea tactically or not, number one, one of the inspirations
for me starting to write about my revenue numbers was A, my revenue numbers were minimal,
so if someone knowing them didn't know skin off my nose, but B, since no one was doing
it at the time or rounds to zero people were doing it at the time, it was kind of what
Seth Godden would call a purple cow phenomenon, where since every other cow you've ever seen
is not purple. If you ever see a purple cow, you will totally remark about the fact that
holy cow, that's a purple cow. I've never seen a purple cow before, but if you just
see a spotted black and white cow, that's just a cow and cows aren't remarkable. You
don't talk about cows to your friends.
I kind of feel that given that you can go to a graph on Buffer or a series of graph
on baremetrics.com and see the revenues are like 25-ish SaaS businesses all displayed
in a single place where they all kind of look samey. The graphs are different. If you genuinely
care about any one of those businesses, it's interesting. Merely the fact of exposing numbers
is no longer in itself interesting. It's just like, oh, that's a cow. You can probably either
kill it or milk it, one of the two things. I would encourage people to look for something
other than mere transparency to cause their business to be remarkable if being remarkable
is a core driver for their business.
That said, in addition to the marketing benefits of it, I've often found that forcing the discipline
of writing on myself to write down plans and to check in a few months later on whether
those plans actually worked may be much better about both planning and executing. It kind
of created a self-documenting record for my professional growth over the years, which
turned out to be really useful when I was doing conversations about doing consulting
engagements later or conversations about theoretically getting a job later. It's like, well, I happen
to have this thing that was published in the middle of 2010 about what I knew back then.
There's a results post from 2011 and then a study drum beat of these over the next five
years. You can see that I'm somebody who routinely makes plans, does experiments, and gets results
with them. That is a useful attribute to have people associate with you.
That reminds me of Dwight Eisenhower. Dwight Eisenhower said, if plans are worthless but
planning is essential, just like the process of planning in and of itself helps you clarify
your thoughts and maybe you got the first part wrong because the plans can later on
help you build your resume or sell yourself to other people.
It's odd. I thought that when I was young and stupid, young and naive, I'll call it
instead. I thought that having evidence of failure associated with yourself would be
a very not survival thing. When you're in school, F is literally failing grade. You
can't get more than one or two of them in a year or you get knocked off the golden track.
When you're in a large company, nobody ever got fired for IBM thing. It's definitely
a factor in being closely associated with failure. It's a really bad thing. I've been
associated with any number of failed experiments over the years and wrote about them just like
the successes on the blog, but no one remembers those. It's crazy. They only remember the
parts of the distribution where the outcome was like, oh, and I tripled the revenue of
the software business. Even when I tell people in the same conversation, yeah, I've done
a variety of experiments as a consultant. In one case, I tripled the revenue of the
software business. In another case, it was a no-op. They paid me a lot of money and nothing
happened as a result of it. The only thing people remember from the sentence is, wait,
so you can triple the revenue of the software business? I would tell them, no, no, no, wait,
probability distribution. You're paying for the totality of probability distribution,
but yeah, they hear the successes and remember the successes.
I think entrepreneurs are optimists. If you come in and talk about how you're going to
help our businesses grow, then it lights something up. One of the, I think, perennial problems
or divides or conflicts, I should say, and people learning how to get into entrepreneurship
and to get into internet businesses is whether they should dive in or whether they should
take the time to read and learn. On one side, you've got this situation where, okay, if
you just dive in head first without reading what people who've come before you've learned,
then you end up repeating a lot of their mistakes and you end up just making mistakes that would
have been avoidable and you get behind. On the other end, there's a humongous number
of entrepreneurs or would-be entrepreneurs who simply haven't started yet and are spending
tons of time reading books, reading blog posts, but have yet to write that first line of code
or to put an idea into action. When you started being a card reader, where were you in this
process? Did you already acquire a bunch of knowledge from business or were you just pretty
green?
I had been passively reading about things like online marketing SEO AdWords for a number
of years, partly because it was theoretically connected to the day job. Since I was very
under challenged at the day job, I felt carte blanche to read about that during work hours.
But I had no experience running a business, didn't have an MBA, had no education about
accounting, bookkeeping, et cetera, and would have considered myself very, very green.
The thing that I've noticed in dealing with a lot of entrepreneurs over the last 12-ish
years is that there are some folks who for a multi-year period, two, three, five years,
will continue just passive content consumption without ever attempting to actualize it or
put it into practice. And that's definitely a failure road, getting something out there.
I certainly agree with make your own mistakes rather than repeating the mistakes of other
people. So if you can spend a few weeks learning about things like how to validate a product
before coding it, that will probably decrease the amount of time you spend going down blind
alleys but get something into the market. Your pace of learning goes way, way up after
you have something into the market.
I don't know what the right ratio is. I sometimes quote people like 98% trying your own stuff
and 2% reading about other people's things, which I think is probably approximately correct
but maybe in the early days it's 90-10 or 80-20, but it certainly isn't too 98.
What are some of the things that you learned at Bingo Cart Creator when you were first
starting out?
This has become almost my catchphrase, a bit of advice that someone gave me in literally
the first week. I wrote a post on a forum and said that I was considering the price
points $14.95, $19.95, and $24.95 for the software. Which did I think I should go with
given that it was new to the market. I had vanishingly a few features. I was worried
the software was buggy and teachers don't have a lot of money.
This is the construct that I had about how pricing decisions were made. Someone who was
older and wiser in the software business told me, charge $24.95, see what happens. The way
that I've rephrased this thought over the years is always, always, always charge more.
Particularly for folks who have the capability of actually bringing things into the world,
we see because there's no magic involved in bringing something into the world that since
there is no magic and since it is free for me to create software, it must be free for
people to buy software, which is the opposite of the truth because it is totally impossible
for them to create the benefit of software without paying for it. They're willing to
pay a lot of money for it because software is fundamentally magic if you can't actually
make it. As a result, a lot of companies that are started by software people or for folks
who do teaching as their line of business, they undervalue teaching. For people who do
writing as their business, they undervalue writing. Creators undervalue themselves constantly.
At a lot of places, some of the most impactful advice that you can give them for the least
amount of work involved is just double your prices.
If you are selling software to business and you're thinking, okay, should I be charging
$19 a month for the lowest tier of my SaaS business or $29 a month? 29. Go with it. Nobody
who, like in a business context, mind you, but in a business context, anyone who can
pay 19 can pay 29, but that's 50% extra to your bottom line immediately. Actually, more
to your bottom line because expenses might not scale linearly, blah, blah, blah, MBA talk.
Don't have to worry about that right now. Just always charge more and have a few ways
to charge. If you think that 29 is a scary number for you right now, throw too much higher
price points on the page and see who bites with it. You'll be shocked. My stock pricing
that I tell anybody to start with if they don't know what to do for a SaaS business
is to do the three-tier model for SaaS businesses. Have a entry point for small businesses at
$29. It would save $49 these days, but since most of you won't agree with $49, do $29.
Then have one at $99 and one at $249. You can figure out what the difference in feature
set slash customer support slash whatever it is to justify those prices, but whatever.
Assert that you are capable of delivering something that exists at those price points
and then figure out what that something has to be and then put that on your pricing page.
People will buy the $99 offering. People will buy the $249 offering. You make a lot more
money at $249 a month times a small number of customers than you do at $29 a month times
a small number of customers. You get to the point where the business is self-sustaining
much, much faster. When you get to the point where the business is self-sustaining, you
can do things like buying inputs into the business, hiring people, even just hiring
a few hours of help on the design side of things if you're not a designer or getting
a lawyer to review things or yada yada to help you accelerate the growth of the business
and start making much more interesting decisions than pricing is.
Another one, pricing is not really an interesting decision. It should be revisiting it occasionally,
but the amount of stress that people go for about pricing early in the business relative
to their go-to market strategy or how do I get this in front of potential customers is
way out of whack.
Yeah, somebody I interviewed recently on IndieHackers said that if their price point is not too
high for some people, you're probably charging too little, which struck me as wise advice.
You probably don't want to target the absolute bottom barrel of your customer segments and
it's hard psychologically for a lot of people for the reasons that you listed. Programmers,
we don't think that the code that we write is worth very much because we wrote it and
how could it be worth paying for if we were able to whip it up out of thin air by ourselves.
Similarly, from a psychological perspective, it's hard to have customers emailing you telling
you that what you're selling them is too expensive, which is inevitably going to happen unless
you sell to the cheapest possible customers who are probably not the best segment.
And a data point to support that is on IndieHackers, if you just go through all the businesses
on the website and look at who's doing the most revenue, the B2B companies selling to
other businesses are doing twice as much in revenue, the median and the average, for literally
no other reason than they're selling just at a higher price point.
I think a good thing to remember is that someone who writes you an email and says, I did not
buy because of your price is not a customer. That's axiomatically true, but it's like
there are many, many businesses which charge more money than some parts of the theoretical
market for them will pay. I will never buy Tesla way outside of my price range. Tesla
is a great business. There are plenty of people who are willing to pay whatever that absurd
amount of money that they charge is and they don't have to sell to me for it to be a great
business for them. Similarly, given that there are companies, and pretty small companies,
mind you, which pay $800 plus a month just for somebody to come into their office and
take out their garbage so that they don't have to worry their employees about bringing
garbage cans to the curb themselves, like any 14-year-old can organize themselves to
do, $800 a month just for trash takeout, that your software is certainly worth $50 a month
to somebody. You just have to figure out who that somebody is and how you can reach them
at scale.
I thought a really good way that you put it at MicroClamp a couple weeks ago was you asked
everybody in the room basically to raise their hands if they've ever sold some sort of services
or product to a customer for six figures. It was essentially a reference to every programmer
ever who works at a job getting a six-figure salary. You're effectively selling your services
and your time to this business who's really your customer. Can you speak to other lessons
that might motivate beginner entrepreneurs that might – I know that a lot of people,
for example, are intimidated. They think, okay, I don't have the sales skills to be
able to start a business or I don't have the marketing skills to start a business or
I don't know how to come up with an idea. Is there anything that you found particularly
inspiring to get people who have doubts to take the leap?
I think understanding that almost all of us come from a point of not knowing what we're
doing until we actually do the thing is pretty important for most of you. I don't have much
leadership or sales or management experience prior to jumping into the business world.
My leadership experience prior to becoming CEO of my last company was I ran a wild guild.
I had that in my bio for why I should be CEO of the company because what else was I going
to put there? You just make it work over time. You don't have to be an expert at day one.
You will quickly find that there's actually many more business owners in the world than
most people who read the tech press assume because most businesses don't look like what
you see in the tech press. But there's many less business owners in your social circles
than there are say programmers in your social circles or designers in your social circles
or probably even people who can sing well in your social circles. Even after a few weeks
of doing it, you'll know a lot more than most of your friends do. Then you have to stop
taking advice from your friends on it. That's a weird decision point for a lot of people.
That's the thing. One of the reasons I love indie hackers as a community, I love hacker
news as a community, I love other watering rolls on the internet, is that our naturally
occurring social circles are just terrible at this kind of stuff. I love my family deeply.
When I told my father I was starting a business, my father had started a business himself and
was actually reasonably experienced at it. He heard the outlines of, oh, I'm going to
sell software over the internet for $30 and I think I can eventually sell a couple hundred
copies a month. Actually, no, I didn't tell him that. I told him I could eventually sell
eight copies a month. He was skeptical of being able to sell eight copies a month since
I had no brand name behind me and told me that I should just go get a job at Google
instead. We both look back at that conversation 10 years down the road and he apologized to
me for it occasionally. I'm like, no apology required, but it is a fact that most people
in our lives don't have the context necessary to give meaningful advice on this kind of
stuff. Find the people who do have that context and get the advice from them.
Yeah, that rings very true with me as well. It's difficult to find a community of people
who actually understand what it is that you're trying to do and who will give you advice
that's worthwhile. That's also why I like the forum on Indie Hackers and Hacker News
as well because... And Micro Conf was amazing. I had never been to a place where I could
just talk to people about SaaS metrics and hundreds of people could have an hour-long
conversation with me about that topic without falling asleep.
I think that a thing when you're looking for people to model off of or people to engage
with directly and looking for advice is that if you can imagine kind of like a success
spectrum or a ladder, you don't want to go at people who are at the top of the ladder
even though it would feel, okay, I want to eventually be like Elon Musk. I will ask
Elon Musk what I should do today. I don't necessarily know that he's a great example,
but a lot of people look up to him, so whatever. But the advice that Elon Musk would give you
is likely not something that you're able to operationalize right now. What are his big
concerns like how to run multiple companies at once, how to manage a team of 60 plus direct
reports? You neither have that circumstance nor the background to even be able to appreciate
or operationalize the advice. Instead, you should go to the people who are like one or
two rungs up on the ladder from you. If you haven't launched yet, talk to the folks who
have launched and have $2,000 of revenue a month or $5,000 of revenue a month, and what
does the past look like between have not launched and $2,000? Then after you get up to $2,000,
go to the people who have $10,000 or $20,000 and say, okay, what is the general, what struggles
do you get between $2,000 and $10,000? Spoiler alert, marketing and sales. Then after you
get to $10,000, what are your struggles then? Spoiler alert, hiring. If you ask people those
kind of questions, you're much more likely to get advice, which they actually remember
what the hard parts were. They can appreciate the fact that you have the limitations you
had because they recently got to them yourself. If you ask Mark Zuckerberg for advice, it's
like, well, if you start from a position where you have a billion dollars in the bank, here's
how you spend that billion dollars most effectively without perhaps consciously remembering, oh,
yeah, there was that time once that I was also in a dorm room and $600 was a lot of
money to me and I shouldn't tell you to buy a server for $5,000 as if that was nothing.
So yeah, definitely advise sending emails to people who are approachable from where
your position is. Also send emails to people. This is something that I've never been very
confident with myself, but I've seen other people do it and it is a thing that serves
them well in the world. Very few people will get a cold email from someone who says, hey,
I'm an entrepreneur. I have some specific questions which I think could benefit from
your experience. Here are the specific questions we have any time, that would be awesome. A
few people will say, damn it, I hated getting this email. Get off the internet, kid. BTW,
I'm going to talk about you to all my CEO friends so that we blacklist you from the
world for life. The worst thing that happens is they're busy and you get no reply. But
most people who run businesses really, really like running businesses. That's not just the
job, that's also a bit of a hobby and they love people telling them that their advice
would be meaningful and that really important bit here that it would actually be acted upon.
This is why sending someone an email, hey, I want to pick your brain about something is
generally sends terrible signal because pick your brain is like, well, I'm just going to spend an
hour of your time and then totally file all the comments that you made, but not actually do
anything. But if you say I have a specific challenge, I've put a reasonable amount of
thought into it, but I think that you could give me additional feedback and that that would be
useful. And then two weeks from now, after I've implemented your advice, I'm going to tell you
how it worked out. That's totally crack for most entrepreneurs. They would be really happy to have
that interaction. And that lets you kind of develop a more enduring relationship with someone.
Another thing that I wouldn't have given as much credit to 12 years ago, but relationships
are really important in this. I've made some lifelong friends in the entrepreneurial community.
Also made a number of folks who as you start up new adventures, the folks who are currently
very businesses or one or two runs down the road will also be having growth over the next
couple of years. And your new adventures might be in a position to help each other out to do
things together to your company might be a client of my new thing or you might invest money in my
new thing, et cetera, et cetera. So making friends is a useful skill to have.
Yeah, your story about how when people reach out to entrepreneurs or people that they want to learn
from, they should actually be helpable and be in a position where, okay, the person giving them
advice feels like it's going to be asked upon. It reminds me so much of Nathan Barry who was on
the podcast a few episodes ago and he did, I think at the beginning of his business, Convert
Katie and she would what he called the web app challenge. And it was just a blog post stating his
goals. He wanted to make $5,000 in monthly recurring revenue after six months. And he had
a kind of a track record of actually building and launching things. So people knew this wasn't just
an empty goal that he wasn't just saying it was going to do, but he's actually going to do it.
And consequently, even though he was like, you know, much less of a known quantity then than he is
now, a lot of very influential and experienced people were super happy to like take him under
their wing and just like give him personal feedback and advice on his challenges. So that's
also something that I've seen and I'm sure you've seen way more of it with all the blog posts and
things that you've written over the years of people emailing you. And just the difference
between the ones that you want to respond to and you can give helpful feedback to you and the ones
that you can't, it really helps to make it clear that you're someone who's acting on the advice
that you're requesting. Yep. BTW, I feel comfortable saying this because Nathan is a friend of mine,
but Nathan had a really rough go of it on Convert Kit for a period of years. I think it was like
three, four years before that business got to the point where it was more than a part-time
income for one person. And he had a different business he was running, which was doing pretty
well, and eventually decided to just dive full feet in on the Convert Kit, the SAS business,
and really start actually actualizing some of the advice that he'd been getting over the time.
And between that time of uncertainty, should I really be doing this? It's been kind of failing
in slow motion for the last couple of years through today. He built a, it's a multi-million dollar
business right now and has a team of very smart people working on it, very, very successful. And
none of that was something that was taken for granted at any time. It was not obvious that he
would be able to pivot from being good at doing one thing, which was selling online books and
courses to running an online SAS business. SAS businesses are harder in a lot of ways. If you
had seen the internals of Convert Kit for the first months, six months, 18 months, two years,
they did not, it did not look like a wonderful business. And he was, you know,
wrecked without at times, like all entrepreneurs are wrecked without times persisted through it,
not just persisted through it, but actually like made meaningful changes and how they were
approaching the business. And it worked out very well. So yay.
One of the interesting things that I like to talk about and think about really is how so much of
what we do in life is in response to mistakes that we've made in the past are, you know,
obviously, sometimes those are over corrections. The biggest lesson that you said you learned
during Bingo Card Creator was effectively, you know, about the importance of raising prices and
not selling yourself short. What lessons did you take from Bingo Card Creator into your next
endeavor at appointment reminder? I think chronologically speaking, technically appointment
reminder came after doing a bit of consulting. But be that as it may, one of the things,
so Bingo Card Creator had a lifetime value per customer of exactly what I was charging for it.
It was sold on a one-off purchase model. So when I raised the prices to $29.95,
if you used it for five years, I was only ever going to get $29.95 from you. That was freaking
brutal. I had 8,000 customers that I was supporting. And at the start of the month,
my revenue was zero. And I really, really wanted to have a recurring revenue model built into my
next thing. I have reasons why I didn't do it for Bingo Card Creator, particularly as I knew as it
was going to transition off that business. But it was like, okay, since I'm effectively running
a SaaS these days anyhow, because eventually it had a server side component that kind of swallowed
the entire application. It was run entirely inside a browser anyhow. I'm certainly going
to charge in a recurring fashion for this. And then the lifetime revenue for a $29 account
for appointment reminder didn't have a $29 lifetime revenue. My turn rate for those accounts was on
the order of 7% BTW high, but roll with it for the moment. So their average customer lifetime is
about 14 months, so 14 times 30. Lifetime revenue in excess of $500. I hope I did that math right.
I used to be on math team. You wouldn't know it. Okay, in excess of $400. And $429 are very
different places. If your lifetime revenue is $29, you can't pay $50 to acquire a customer.
But if your lifetime revenue is $400, you can pay $50 all day long. Let's accelerate customer
acquisition. And the lifetime revenue of some of our clients at appointment reminder, not merely
predicted lifetime value, but realized lifetime value in terms of we cash those checks was in
excess of $6,000 to $10,000 for some of our clients who never once talked to me, never sent
an email, never picked up a phone. They just purchased it with our credit card from the
internet and used it happily. And that was not the only thing we did for sales. But those
businesses exist out there in the world. So I would bias towards creating a business like
that if you want to eventually get to the point where something can be sustaining as
your primary source of income.
We kind of skipped over it. But you did go into consulting for a while between BCC and
appointment reminder. Were there any mistakes or learnings you took away from consulting
that you also brought with you to appointment reminder?
It would have been great if someone had told me to charge more. You should charge more.
So when I was working on a Japanese day job, I worked at a company that was theoretically
speaking a consultancy. It's called a systems integrator in Japan, but whatever model like
an engineering consultancy. I'm just an engineer. I have no connection to the business side
of the business, but I knew what my charge out rate was. It was approximately $100 an
hour. I didn't make anything close to $100 an hour, but I thought if I start a consultancy,
I can make 100% of my charge out rate, 100 bucks an hour. Awesome. And I spoke to importance
of having friends who are a few steps down the road from you. I made a buddy on HackerNews,
Thomas Tacek, and he told me, you shouldn't charge hourly for consulting. You should charge
weekly for consulting. So whatever your rate is right now, just multiply by 40. That's
your new week rate. And people who can't buy hourly blocks, they have to commit to a week.
And so I started doing that. I started selling four grand a week engagements. And after like
one of those, I decided that four grand was way too low relative to the value I was creating
for larger software companies and said, okay, my new rate is eight grand a week and people
still bought it. And the next engagement, I was pitching to a company and they sent
me a one sentence email, quote me your rate for two weeks. I said, well, my rate for one
week is eight K. So two weeks is 16 K. I had my finger over the send button and said, wait,
what's the worst thing that happens if I type in 12? They say it's too high, but I'll have
another one of these emails coming from somebody else in another week or two. So backspace,
backspace, backspace, 12 K, 24 K respectively hit send. And then I had a panic attack because
I thought who could charge $12,000 for a week? I don't even know what I'm doing. How are they
going to react to that? Am I going to lose a friendship over this blah, blah, blah? I
got a reply black five minutes later. Wow, that's a healthy rate. Okay. And that's the
last time that consulting client ever like even mentioned rate is a discussion. So, you
know, six months later, new engagement, my stock rate is $20,000. Okay. And then, you
know, a year or two after that, my stock rate is $30,000. Pricey. Okay. And I did have one
engagement kit green lit at 50 K a week, but that didn't actually happen. My, my highest
actual realized rate was 30 K. I put, um, can't go into this in a lot of detail for
all the obvious reasons, but I did put $125,000 a week for 10 weeks on a proposal once I got
a very far way down the line on that proposal, but didn't happen. Wow. So that's way more
money than I ever charged as a consultant. I really, I was just a contract web developer.
And I saw that advice on Hacker News from time to time about how you should charge not
by the hour, but by the day or by the week. Uh, and I didn't never really internalize
it. Didn't really find purchase. It's, it's really important because you get to, um, to
recenter the conversation from, uh, the only thing you are buying is my time to you're
buying a business outcome that I can describe and buying this business outcome will probabilistically
take about two to three weeks. So is that business outcome worth X amount of money for
you? If it is, then we get me in here for two to three weeks and I predictably deliver
on it. If it's not worth it, then it doesn't matter what my rate is. We should find something
that I could do for your company that would be worth my rate. Or if there's nothing, if
your company doesn't operate at a level of sophistication or level of scale that my rate
works at, no worries. I have a blog, feel free to read it. I'm going to go talk to someone
who does have a sophisticated enough company to make use of my services. There's a really,
really hard thing to say. Um, particularly when you, if you're coming from a place of
scarcity and I need to sell X number of hours this month, or I will fail to make my rent.
But one of the nice things about, uh, this model is that, uh, if you get one or two higher
rate engagements and you get a little bit of runway and you can start being really choosy
about what the next thing is. So like hypothetically, many of you might be young or in parts of
the world where a small amount of money is enough to live on. And you might think, okay,
if I only really need three grand a month, then charging four grand a month is, you know,
that's pure gravy for me, but you should charge much more than four grand a month because
if you successfully do it once, then that gives you a few months of runway to line up
the next client. And you can walk your rate up a lot because you can be choosy about that
next client. And then, you know, virtuous cycle there of whatever goal you want to ultimately
optimize for in your business or life. You, you have a lot more ways to optimize for it.
If you get more money, I'd say mindset shift that is difficult for a lot of entrepreneurs
because man, uh, the middle class does a great job of indoctrinating kids on like a, Hey,
you're a good student. You're a good kid. You shouldn't talk about money. He's like
an evil thing that we associate with venture capitalists and yada, yada. But, um, fundamentally
when you who are in a business for yourself are negotiating for another business, you're
in a value creating transaction for both sides. And there's just a matter of, okay, which
of the business at like, what is the way that we divide this new pie that we're creating
together? And you have no less of a right to that higher than the other business does.
So B2W, the other business has a competent professional in the room who is already negotiating
in behalf of their interests. So you need to do. And since there is nobody in the room
on your side, except you, if you're a solo entrepreneur, you need to be the person who
is kind of like aggressively going out after your own interests. Because if you are a wallflower,
they will happily walk all over you and not even realize they're doing it with it. Because
that's kind of the nature of business to business interactions.
I think what strikes me the most in what you said about charging the rates that you did
and charging it, you know, by a, you know, a prolongated time period, like by the week,
so you can redirect the conversation in terms of the value you're provided to the business
is that it's directly parallel to selling a product or service as an entrepreneur. Ultimately,
one of the pitfalls, I think a lot of people fall into you. And if you're an early stage
entrepreneur, you're just getting started, it's worth watching out for is not really
understanding why people are paying for what you're paying for, paying for what you're
building, what you're selling, or why anyone would use it. But what Patrick just said is
effectively you need to think in terms of the value that it provides to them. Ultimately,
what you're building should be solving some sort of crucial or valuable problem for them.
And I see this problem all the time in the Andy Ackers form when people come online and
share a landing page that they've thrown up. And it doesn't talk at all about why customers
might want to use it. It just lists, okay, here are the features of what my thing does,
and forces customers and visitors to make the mental leap of how this product will actually
increase the revenue that they're making for their business, etc.
Yep. Businesses don't buy features, they buy benefits is the way that we phrase this for
a lot of folks. And yet, almost every SaaS company will ship in version one of their
website features.html, which is kind of unfortunate. Ultimately, it's what's in it for me. What
am I going to get at adopting this both for my business and useful thing to know when
selling to businesses? You're selling to a person in the business and that person has
their own set of incentives, which might or might not be the business's global incentives
and you have to sell to their incentives. But you figure out what motivates someone
to purchase your thing within a business. Tell them that if they buy your thing, that
motivation does get achieved, that gets exercised. And then figure out what the set of features
you need to be able to credibly make that story are and then build those features rather
than building features you think are cool to build, cool to implement, or should be
bought by a rational business.
That's great advice. And I want to talk a little bit about things that tend to block
early stage entrepreneurs. I think there's a very long list of things that cost people
to fail and I want to get your rapid fire advice for how to get around these things.
So first thing, coming up with an idea. Coming up with an initial idea is difficult for most
people. Even more difficult often is settling on a particular idea once they have a list
of four or five. What are your tips for people who might be at the idea phase and struggling
to decide what to work on?
Broadly speaking, in terms of figuring out an idea for things that someone will buy,
I'm going to give one potentially controversial piece of advice, but feel free to run with
this until you understand why you are a person who doesn't need to run with this.
Sell to businesses rather than selling to consumers. Businesses have much, much, much
deeper pockets they are easier to sell to. If you're selling to consumers, you're locked
in at price points that are low because consumers don't have much money and so you have to get
good at marketing and sales and sell tens of thousands of units to make whatever your
magic number is. Whereas if you're selling to businesses, you only have to sell in single
digits to hundreds of units to make whatever your number is. So sell to businesses first.
In terms of what will businesses buy, look at the things they already buy, whether that's
a person's time or other solutions or very manual processes and figure out which of these
would be transformatively better if I applied my unique skill set to it.
For example, this is not the way to think about it, but a way that I came up with the
appointment reminder thing was I saw Twilio made it possible for regular developers like
me to send out phone calls and SMS messages. I made a list of every phone call and SMS
message that I could think of a business doing in a predictable fashion and I eventually
picked one to build a business around.
Building from like, okay, here's my capability. Here's what I can do with the capability.
Pick which of the best things to exercise the capability in from a business perspective.
Probably not optimal because if you were to look at needs first and then figure out, okay,
what capabilities do I have? What do I lack but which I could gain easily, that's probably
a bit more optimal. But look at things people are buying. How do you know that businesses
care about backups? Well, you can reason from first principles that losing all your data
as a business will suck, but reasoning from first principles can be hard and difficult.
An easy way to know that people care about backups is that there's many backup companies
out there that pay a lot of money for it or rather are paid a lot of money for backups.
You figure out, okay, what is the better take on backups that doesn't hit the pitfall that
these companies hit both from a product perspective and a sales marketing perspective? One that
one could come up with for backups is that everyone knows they have to do backups, but
they don't really operationalize it because it's time that they have to spend thinking
about backups and they don't spend time actually testing the backups to make sure they work
and therefore they feel insecure about their backup strategy.
So you think, okay, my take on this will not be merely encrypted backups. People already
do that. It won't be merely backups living in the crowd. People already do that. But
it'll be, how do I sell like peace of mind as a backup thing? How do I sell the surety
that we're writing in the back, that we're backing up the right things as a part of a
backup offering? And maybe that involves like a lot of your time as the entrepreneur going
to companies and saying, okay, I will do consultative approach with you where I figure out where
are the databases, where are the documents that you actually need to back up and I will
set it all together myself and then operate the service for you. You never have to think
about this again and I will send you a report every month. And that you can charge a lot
more money for that than simply saying, well, five gigabytes of backup storage is five bucks
a month. The price of hard disks is going to zero. The price of people who can make
decisions about whether a MySQL database should be backed up or not is going to several hundred
thousand dollars. You can kind of have a happy little arbitrage in the middle there.
It's funny. I think some of the most common advice that people encounter online is that
you need to do something completely different and they take this to mean that they can't
solve a problem that's being solved by some other solution. They need to find something
that's never been solved before. When in reality, looking at things that people are already
paying for is one of the best ways to, best indicators that there's an actual valuable
problem that you can contribute to.
The vast majority of companies who are out there sell something that some other company
has sold before. Think of your dentist. Have you happily paid your dentist money? Yes.
Did he invent dentistry? No. There's thousands and thousands of dentists out there and your
dentist makes quite a good living doing what every other dentist does. At the scale that
most people in indie hackers are operating on, where $2,000 a month or $20,000 a month
is life changing to you, you do not have to be the only person executing on your business
in the world to pull $20,000 out of the economy. The economy is massive. If you're selling
to businesses, you're selling to the economic engine of that economy. They have more money
than you can even conceive of. It is easily possible for 100 people to occupy different
parts of the backup ecosystem and all make great, great businesses out of that. Even
for bingo cards to elementary school teachers, which is a terrible market in a lot of ways,
so I could go for an hour on that question. There were probably six firms that were bigger
than mine. People only know about bingo card creator because I have a big mouse about it,
but yep, there's somebody in Texas who is just happily grinding it out every day and
making mid six figures from that and good on them.
Problem number two, let's say someone's come up with an idea, they have zero customers.
How do people find their first customers? If you're still in the idea-making stage,
how I find the customer's question should be really tied into the idea-making stage.
A great idea without a plan to get in front of people is not a great idea anymore. Given
that you've been able to sell your services to at least one company over the years, similarly
because you've had a job at some point, thinking back, okay, one question is, will the job
buy this thing? If not, why? If you're building something that is completely orthogonal to
every corporate experience that you've had or every career-oriented experience you've
had, I question whether that is a very useful decision, but it might work for some folks.
If you can find someone that you could convince to use it via email people that should be
using it and saying, hey, I'm trying this thing, will you beta test it for me for free
for a month? And then if it works out, would you pay $50 a month? If you can just start
cold emailing people, that's really useful. If you don't know who to cold email because
you don't know who the market is for the thing you are building, don't build that thing.
Don't run a backup company without knowing who buys backups. That's just going to be
a terrible, terrible use for your time. Throwing up a page on the internet about your thing
and then waiting for folks to discover it can work, but it takes a very long time.
I would suggest that you press the flesh in the beginning stages when you have nothing
but time rather than just waiting for folks to find you. Go to the folks who sell something
that is complimentary to yours or similar to yours but not quite duplicative and ask
them who they don't sell to or who they don't sell your thing to and ask for referrals.
For example, this is a great way to get started if you are a consultant. If you are a Ruby
on Rails consultant and you want to do e-commerce sites and there exist other design firms in
town, go to all of them and say, hey, I'm a Ruby on Rails consultant specializing in
e-commerce sites. Do you ever get someone asking you to build an e-commerce site where
that is not something that your shop does? If they say yes, say great. Please send them
my information and they will be happy to do that because it costs them nothing to tell
a lead. Actually, talk to Bob over here. He does exactly what you want to buy and it's
a better experience for their leads than saying, actually, we don't do that. Best of luck.
Nobody wants to hurt their reputation that way.
Overview, know who you're actually selling to and be willing to reach out manually in
the early days.
Yep. Some of the most successful entrepreneurs that I know have the most tolerance for just
consistently turning the crank on cold outreach. Patrick Allison sends hundreds of cold emails
in the early days of Stripe, probably sends hundreds of cold emails even these days. I
guarantee you he gets replies saying, you're not really Patrick.
Okay, so problem number three, finding a co-founder, especially if you're not a technical co-founder,
you're not a programmer. How can people do that effectively?
My first question here is why do you think you need a co-founder? Because if you think
you need a co-founder because Paul Graham wrote an essay that you need a co-founder,
then A, that advice is contextualized to applying to Y Combinator, which if that is in your
near future, then maybe you should prioritize up having a co-founder, but if not, might
not be as required as you think it is. If you need a technical person to develop a thing
that you want to sell, question A is why are you, well, is it possible for you to sell
something that you could actually deliver by yourself? If it is not possible to sell
something that you could actually deliver by yourself, do you have enough skill to be
attractive to someone who is capable of building the thing if you are not capable of building
it yourself?
So, for example, could you demonstrate superior sales skill to be able to actually be comfortable
with getting on the phone with folks and convincing them to do things that you want them to do?
Like, for example, sign a letter of intent to buy software that does X in a number of
months after it is developed and commit to paying $10,000 for the software if it is developed
with those specifications. If you go to a developer and say, I have six letters of intent
locked up, companies are willing to pay me $10,000 apiece for the software, we just need
to build it together, then that is pretty attractive to a developer. There is a pot
of gold at the end of that rainbow and the business goes up and to the right from there.
But if you just say, I have an idea, it is on a napkin, then you have only produced evidence
that you are capable of producing napkins. Napkins are cheap. You can go and get one
from a McDonald's and smear ketchup stains on it. That is exactly as worthwhile as a
napkin with a business model idea on it.
Also, I would encourage founders to be realistic with themselves about what their true skill
levels are. Don't have the imposter syndrome that many of us have. But if you describe
yourself as, yeah, I am a business founder, I get deals done, that is my core competence.
If you can't convince any engineer to get into business with you, then you are not getting
that deal done and maybe your competence level at getting deals done is not as high as yourself
writing on it. So be realistic about that.
There are ways to get things built for amounts of money which are lower than people sometimes
think is necessary. For example, if you are capable of doing good project management and
really tightly scoping projects and paying for a few failures, it is possible to go to
the eLances of the world and get offshore teams to build out products for you. That
might or may not work out for you. I am not bullish about it as a technical person. I
think that most projects there fail. But I know folks who have successfully project managed
their way to having a saleable product and not spent a huge amount of money on that.
But if you don't have that project management skill or you don't have even the small amount
of money required to hire a development team to build something for you, then you should
know that the market rate for a technologist to join you as a technical co-founder is 50%
of the company, given that there are two of you.
This is often a surprising thing to folks with a business background because they expect
from their corporate career, wait, the suits make all the money and the engineers make
nothing. Guess what? That is not the market you are in 2017. The market rate for founding
companies is that someone with the business sales, etc., background who spends all their
time dealing with the investors, who raises the funding for the company, who puts the
deals in place, deals with the lawyers, yada, yada, gets half the company. The person who
builds the thing gets half the company. If you are not willing to give away half the
company for something that is valuable, you have to find some other approach.
The primary takeaway there is 50-50 split. Bring actually valuable and demonstrable business
skills to the table and having an idea, especially writing that idea in a napkin, does not count
as a valuable business skill.
Point number four that trips up a lot of entrepreneurs is staying motivated. I personally think this
kills more businesses than anything. Just founders quitting when the going gets tough,
quitting when they can't find their first customers, quitting when they can't come up
with an idea. How can people stay motivated to push through all the hard parts?
I generally agree that motivation is one of the very few limited resources in running
a business that actually matter. There is basically only two, motivation and money because
running out of either will generally kill your company. There are ways to stretch through
a short-term lack of one or the other by trading off on other various parts about your life,
but it's not sustainable on a long-term thing.
Running a business is hard. Between now and some period in the future where you look back
and say, oh yeah, I think I'm at some level of success, there's going to be a lot of sucky
things that happen. You should probably be honest with yourself on whether you are capable
of tolerating sucky things and whether you are capable of continuing to work on business
in a directed fashion even when the business is not generating strong signals of success.
By the way, businesses can sometimes be very hard to work on even when they are generating
strong signals of success. Everything can be going right and then you have an argument
with your co-founders or a client's relationship go disastrously wrong or you get a tax bill
for 80 grand that you don't have in the bank and then suddenly everything is on fire again.
A lot of founders would tell you that the experience of running their business is just
going from one fire to another for a period of years, even the ones that look pretty successful
when seen from the outside. In terms of tactical things, you can do to maintain motivation.
I like establishing a cadence where you expose yourself to the things that you like about
the business that motivate you. Whatever that is for you, for me, I love seeing analytics
data. I love seeing how many hits I got today. I would start my days out with that. Man,
123 hits today. That's five more than I got yesterday. It's a great day already. Then
start working on things that you are not as intrinsically motivated to do. For me, that
might be writing emails to customers or what have you.
Some other folks have different motivations in life. I know some folks who are intrinsically
motivated by sending emails to people and yet really it does not provide a boost of
energy for them to have to go off to the writing cave or go off to the code cave for the rest
of the day. If that's you, start the day with writing emails. Start every day by writing
emails. Write emails even if no emails need to be written and then work on the other things.
You need to have a north star for what you are optimizing for at any given point in the
business. I often describe myself as having business ADD, always getting pulled in a bunch
of different directions. That was fun for me, but probably not optimal for my business.
You should think, okay, right now, for the rest of this month, the thing that I am primarily
working on is getting new customers. Specifically, I am shooting for 20 new accounts that sign
up for this plan. I should be directing almost all my efforts to getting those 20 new accounts
rather than spending 20% of your cycles on getting new accounts and 20% of your cycles
on product improvements not linked to getting new accounts and 20% of your cycles on going
to that conference and 20% of your cycles on this thing. You kind of have to move with
just an intensity, as some folks around here would say. Take care of yourself. It is outrageous
how more successful my businesses are when I am doing things like going to the gym regularly
or eating vegetables, not subsisting entirely on a diet of sugar and coffee. I discounted
that advice from all the gym rats in my life for many, many years. I thought, oh, the meatheads
don't know anything, but they are fundamentally running on the same hardware that I am. I
have adjusted in my old age about that and yet have not been to a gym a year and a half
because I am stupid and don't even take my own advice some of the time. Hopefully, I
will fix that next week.
It is tough to get into habits that are healthy like that, but I can attest to how much better
they make your life. If you feel healthy and the other parts of your life are taken care
of and your relationships are healthy as well, it is easier to focus on the hard task of
running a business.
I think that is something that relationship, by the way, is something we systematically
undercover in particularly the startup community. Some unhappy people have built companies,
but people with widely out of balance, out of control lives generally do not build very
successful companies. The exceptions are exceptions for a reason. I think that there is far too
much valorization of like put off having good friends or a romantic relationship for several
years and let your friendships put your family in the backseat for a bunch of years. You
can always get that back eight years from now after the business is successful. I think
that is just a sucky way to live out your life for the eight years and totally not guaranteed
even in the case where your business is successful. If you come to the end of that eight year
period and all of your relationships are in shambles, then what do you have to show for
it? I have had ups and I have had downs over the last 12 years, but I have a loving wife
and two healthy kids. Even when the business was failing, I am like, well, I am sucking
right now granted, but I am still married. I still have a child. What is the worst ultimate
downside here? I get a job that I will probably like and indeed I got a job that I probably
liked, but I think we systematically undervalue relationships in the community.
Speaking of something that we undervalue, I want to talk about writing. You are a very
effective communicator. You are a methodical thinker and a prolific writer. In my opinion,
writing is obviously fundamental. It is a fundamental skill for running a business.
It is something that you are going to find yourself doing a lot of and it is extremely
helpful in lots of areas. What are your tips for people who are entrepreneurs and might
not be the best writers? What do you think they should learn? How do you think about
writing and communicating?
I don't know if I am necessarily the most methodical thinker. I think I can fake it
very well on the internet. There is a bunch of things that I feel like I have been faking
on the internet for 12 years which eventually might have transitioned into being true. I
don't know if fake it till you make it is actually useful operational advice, but definitely
it is a nagging down monster in my head. It has said for a number of years that I am not
as good at X as people attribute me as being at X.
If I can interrupt for a second, I think there are certain ways that you see the world that
you uncover problems that other people I found don't talk about that often. For example,
you look at how engineering works and how engineering hiring works and you will realize
that hey, engineers are simply not negotiating their salaries and you will grow off and you
will write a foundational piece, a pillar piece if you will on how to negotiate and
why it is worth negotiating that will measurably change people's lives. I think that ability
to recognize problems that have solutions that can be written about or productized is
valuable. How do you go about thinking what to cover and what to focus on?
I am flattered for that. It might be this is the case where I don't see that it is valuable
because I am capable of doing it and other people see it as valuable because not hardware
that everybody gets. I think being generally well-read is a useful skill. The only reason
I know anything about negotiation is I wrote a few books on it, talked to people who are
good at it and started to apply that in various contexts. As I realized, wait, coming from
now that I am actually doing negotiation on a regular basis in consulting, looking back
to that one time I did a salary negotiation. Oh my God, what was I thinking? Then when
I saw other hacker news and other engineers on hacker news giving people advice about
salary negotiation, like name a number first so that everyone knows what you are thinking.
It is like, oh my God, what are you people telling each other? I have to write something
here because the world is broken. People are wrong on the Internet to quote the XKCD cartoon.
I wrote 10,000 words on salary negotiation for engineers. You can probably Google up
by Googling that. 500,000 people or so read that a year. I know it has generated millions
of dollars in extra salaries. Awesome for engineers. Sorry for my buddies in Silicon
Valley, but you have the money you should be paying me to deal with it. Anyhow, getting
better at writing. Write a shed load. I think that people think that homeopathic amounts
of writing for their business will be enough. Like, okay, I have got to write 800 words
or so of copy for my landing page and then I got to write an email. It is another 200
words, 1,000 words. Man, that is a lot. That is like an assignment from grade school. I
have written 3 million words over the last 10 years to the extent that I am much better
than people who wrote 10,000 words over the same interval. Well, yeah, I have a lot more
experience and have been able to try out a lot of things and make a lot of more interesting
mistakes and then find more things that work for me and double down on them. Write more.
Way to become a better engineer. If you are doing rounds to zero coding, coding more,
coding more, coding more is probably one way to do it. Surrounding yourself, people you
want to be like is another way to do it. Some of my best friends in business are kind of
like birds of a feather flock together where we all have our own takes on like what a good
written voice is or what our form factors look like. I write long, long articles when
I write. 10,000 words is middle of the road to me whereas I have friends where they might
phrase it as ain't nobody got time for that. Yeah, nobody except people who read it and
then buy from it but whatever. When they write, they write 800 word articles and that works
for them but we can bounce ideas off each other at an okay. Does this turn into the
phrase work or all my semicolons in the right place and the more important questions I'm
like strategically, why am I writing this thing that I'm writing? When I started, this
is the benefit of 3 million words. When I started, I had no clue what I was writing
about. I would just write about literally it was a blog. What do you do on a blog? You
write about what you did today and so I would write about what I did today and I did that
for about two years and I realized that the things that were really landing with people,
the stuff that I could look back a year later and say, hey, that thing that I wrote was
actually useful. Folks clicked on it. Folks linked to it. Folks cited to me as changing
their decisions. They were consistently around a few topics and like my updates on how I
had done Rails programming. I was dealing with this issue with cookies. We're not consistently
among the highest and best work and the topics that were really landing with people were
the intersection of marketing and engineering. It's like, hmm, if I know that 20% of my writing
gets the best results and it's consistently on those topics and I consistently have kind
of like a skeptical-ish engineer's take on marketing who's like the general frame that
I wrote them in. What if I did that for substantially 100% of my writing? Would that work out?
And usually it was nowhere near substantially 100% but like 80 plus instead of 20 minus
and that decision worked out pretty well for me. Finding out what your beat is or what
you want to cover will take a while but start writing more. You'll get closer to it as you
have more experience and have tried more things. Also figuring out where among the panoply
of different things that you have to do for your business, your comparative advantage
is. Let's see, if I started my business in 2006 and I was part-timer and it took me a
long time to figure out anything but about 2009-2010, it was pretty obvious to me that
A, I was better at writing than most people and B, that was like producing outsized returns
for the business. So I kind of doubled down on that for a while. Ironically, in the last
couple of years, I've spent a lot less time writing publicly and I'm still known as a
good writer and some of the things that I wrote back in like the 2010-2012 time span
are continuing to do dividends for the business. That's kind of one of the benefits of putting
work out there publicly that you can benefit from for years. A micro-tip about writing,
write things that people will want to read many years later because then you don't have
to get on like the content creation cycle where it's like Instagram and you Instagram
something and then folks see that in the moment but a week from now it might as well never
have happened unless you get a reputation for having the best posed Instagram shots
of food or whatever people actually do on Instagram. I have no idea, it's not even installed
on my phone. Sorry, that's not me being anti-Instagram hipster. That's just a reflection of my priorities
in life. If you do content creation like that where you're setting yourself up for a treadmill
and the only reward for being on the treadmill is like congratulations, you get to continue
pedaling on the treadmill, look faster with more people watching you. That seems suboptimal
to me. Rather than getting on the treadmill, I would rather produce artifacts that contribute
some amount of business capital or career capital over the course of the next several
years that people will consistently cite and that will allow you to build a platform for
doing later adventures off of.
Read more, write more, double down on what's working and write for the long term. Okay,
well I think that's a pretty good place to end the interview. Next time you're in SF,
we'll have to do this again and talk about a whole different set of topics.
We definitely should. Thanks so much everybody for listening and my email address. If you
want to email me for anything personal, it's patrick, P-A-T-R-I-C-K at calzumius, K-A-L-Z-U-M-E-U-S.com.
If you have anything Stripe related, it's patio11 at stripe.com. Please feel free to
email me. I love getting emails from the internets. It's one of the things that I most enjoyed
over the last 10 years. Please, specific questions are awesome. Operationalize the advice we
gave earlier. Yeah, but write me any time.
Thanks Patrick. Thanks so much.
If you enjoyed listening to this conversation, you should join me and a whole bunch of other
ND hackers and entrepreneurs on the ndhackers.com forum, where we talk about things like how
to come up with a good idea and how to find your first paying customers. Also, if you're
working on a business or a product of your own, it's a great place to come and get feedback
from the community on what you're working on. Again, that's www.ndhackers.com slash
forum. Thanks and I'll see you guys next time.