What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process.
And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and
the strategies they're taking advantage of, so the rest of us can do the same.
All right, well, I'm here with Val Hinoff, the founder of a company called Thanksbox.
How's it going, Val?
It's going pretty great.
Cortland, thanks for inviting me over.
I'm looking at your revenue graph on your IndieHackers product page right now, and it's
saying that you passed, what, like $18,000 a month as of the end of July.
Is that accurate?
Yeah, that's pretty spot on.
It has been the best month so far.
Yeah, that's huge.
Especially considering that your growth's been kind of crazy.
Back in April, your revenue was $9,000 a month, so you basically doubled in the last four
months.
Yeah, yeah.
It has been a wild ride.
It's sometimes weird to realize that it's only been 15 months or 16 months since launch.
When I first launched it, I thought, oh, it would be awesome if a year from now it's making
like 5K a month.
And it's passed out by so much that if you come to me a year ago and tell me it'll be
making this much, I'll say you're lying.
Yeah, it's pretty crazy.
And you're bootstrapping this, right?
You haven't raised any money from investors?
Yeah, yeah, completely bootstrapped from the beginning.
And what about other people helping you out?
Do you have a co-founder?
Do you have any employees you're paying?
So I have a small group of really great freelancers that have been with me since the beginning.
I've been lucky that from the very beginning I have a very good designer.
I was lucky enough to work with her on a previous startup I did.
And when I shared the idea of Tankbox with her, she jumped on board and she's been treating
it as her own project ever since.
She's the reason Tankbox looks as good as it does.
I also have some people helping me with marketing, some people helping me with Google Ads.
Really all of the skills that I lack or jobs that I don't really enjoy, I try and find
someone that will do them better than I would.
And that's been my philosophy since I started.
And it's also part of the reason why Tankbox took a bit longer to get to profitability
even though it had really good growth from October last year.
It's so smart to have a team of people who help you out.
I think a lot of indie hackers and solo founders kind of get sucked into this mindset of being
really proud to be by themselves.
It's really awesome.
I did this all by myself and there's a sense of pride there.
And I get that.
I felt that too.
But on the other hand, other people are helpful and they can do the jobs that you don't necessarily
like to do or that you're not that good at and they free up a lot of your time.
It might have taken you four or five years to get to close to $20,000 a month in revenue.
But if you have a professional designer helping you out and some freelance devs helping you
out, you can get there much faster.
And yeah, that costs money but they're helping you make more money.
So in a sense, they can theoretically pay for themselves.
That's 100% especially in the areas where, like I said before, you don't have any skills
like I'm a horrible designer.
If I tried doing this myself, it really wouldn't have worked.
In addition, when I started Thangbox, I really didn't have any experience building websites
like my background is in mobile apps.
So what I actually did was I talked to a really good body of mine who I'd used before who's
a really good web, like full stack web developer.
And him and I agreed on our profit sharing agreement where he set up the first version
of Thangbox, you know, including database, content, everything in exchange for a share
of the profits once it reached a certain stage.
And I'm happy to say that now we have actually that agreement is now active.
So he's actually getting a share of the profits every month for a year.
Yeah, that's such an innovative way to go because I mean, obviously, early on, you probably
don't have that much money developers are expensive.
What are your expenses like overall?
I mean, you're making $18,000 a month.
That's what like over $200,000 a year.
How much of that is like profit only into your pocket?
How much of that are you paying to your freelancers and your for your servers and other costs?
It varies month to month because Thangbox has grown quite quickly the last year.
So I've had to scale my costs quite a bit.
But for the last two months, I would say that between the third and a half of that ends
up as profit for me after I pay everyone else and pay all my expenses.
Unfortunately, over the last three months, I have had some unexpected expenses that have
reduced that a little bit.
My biggest expense is Google ads, which are my main acquisition channel.
You know, it is what actually kicked off Thangbox's growth in October last year, you know, but
by that point, I launched it in May.
And you know, it grew a little bit.
I had people referring each other.
It's when I first noticed like how good networking effects were with it.
But it was really hard to find people that I didn't know.
Like for the first six months, I knew everyone that was using it.
So it's only after I did like a major overhaul of the landing page, really simplify the proposition,
made an explainer video, then the marketing person I had helping me at the time said we
should try Google ads because everything else we tried.
We tried social ads, we tried, you know, LinkedIn, Twitter ads, we tried running a competition
like none of it worked.
And then like the moment we started with even like a five bucks a day Google ad budget,
we saw huge traction.
So since then, I've just been, you know, increasing the budget and increasing the budget because
I've just been seeing the effects.
Yeah, totally makes sense.
If you've got a machine like Google ads, we can pour in money, you can put in $100, and
then you get like, you know, $120 in revenue from your customers.
That's like a magical box of Prince money, you might as well keep putting as much money
as you possibly can into there until it sort of evens out.
But let's let's dial it back a little bit and talk about like what your product is.
Because I think the idea for thank box is really cool, super useful, and it's really
easy to understand.
So on your website, you describe thank box as quote, the easier way to celebrate somebody,
what does that mean?
Exactly.
I got the idea of thank box.
Back in 2019, actually, I've worked as a freelancer and contractor for a lot of different companies,
usually on site, you know, before the COVID times.
And I would see this in all the teams I worked at, you know, someone in the team will have
an occasion be it, you know, birthday, or they had a kid or they're getting married,
or maybe they're leaving moving on to another position.
And in the UK, there's this big thing where that person gets a card organized, they maybe
get some money from their co workers.
And we do like a big thing when they leave or, you know, when we celebrate their birthday.
But I noticed that whenever this was this happened, like the car would always get bought
last minute, like you try to discreetly pass around the office, we always had some people
working remote, which couldn't even contribute.
So you know, it was always a hassle for the people organizing it, even though the person
who actually got it really enjoyed it.
Right.
So at that point, I thought, you know, there must be like a nicer way of doing this online.
And you know, that's when I thought, okay, maybe there, maybe there's no opportunity
here to do something.
And I explored, you know, other solutions that existed at the time, and none of it,
none of it worked the way I wanted it to work.
I said, we're competitors, but they're just not like, they're not good enough.
They're not ideal for what you wanted to do.
Yes.
Yes.
They weren't doing the, they didn't have the same vision as I did.
And also none of them at the time combined the cash collection, which is a big feature
of Tankbox with the group card.
This has been a feature that I felt has differentiated Tankbox since the very beginning.
The fact that alongside, you know, getting a car with nice messages, you can also collect
cash for the person's occasion, which then they can claim is like a gift card to Amazon
or whatever.
Right.
Right.
So this is a problem that I've experienced too.
I mean, not just at work, like personal birthdays and celebrations, like we'll pass around a
card.
It's awkward.
You're trying to make the person like not see the card, but it's like hard to do it
before you get to the event because everybody's there.
Stripe does something similar to this too.
We have something called like a Stripeversary.
So basically the anniversary since you've joined one year, two years, whatever, you
know, we'll give you a pin and like a card, or at least we did before COVID.
And so a lot of companies do this.
It's not just like a UK thing.
It's kind of like a universal like celebratory thing.
Pass around a card, get everybody to sign it.
And people just like to personalize notes and messages they get from their friends and
their colleagues.
Yeah.
And as you said, now with COVID, you've kind of stopped that or maybe it's much hard to
do.
That's the reason why I started building this in March.
You know, like I said before, I had the idea before in 2019, but when March happened, you
know, in the beginning, I was, you know, sitting one day and I realized people won't be able
to do this anymore.
We need a way, companies would need a way to do this online.
So I got my act together as fast as I could.
And you know, two months later, the first version went live.
So what happened in between these like two periods of time?
Because you had the idea in 2019 well before the pandemic started.
And then, you know, the pandemic hits, March comes along, you take it seriously.
Why didn't you work on Thinkbox more, I guess wholeheartedly before that?
I don't really have like a good enough reason to this.
The one that I have is that I was briefly involved with another startup at the time.
I got taken on as a technical director and I was helping them scale.
But by March, I kind of saw that I had done all I could there and there was much more
work to do.
So I kind of felt the freedom that I have the time to actually start on this.
And all the while, I'm still contracting full time, you know, I'm still doing stuff to actually
bring in money for the family.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's super cool.
I mean, it's basically what happened was COVID was such a catalyst to be like, this is such
an obvious idea now that people don't even have the ability to get physical cards.
You might as well go back to the side projects you already started working on, you kind of
sort of put on the back burner.
And then, you know, as you described earlier, you figured out all these grow techniques
and here you are, barely a year later, and you're making close to $20,000 a month.
Yeah, that's a good way to sum it up.
I want to talk about your background.
I want to know how somebody gets to your position.
I mean, you grew up in Bulgaria, you're born there when it's like sort of coming out of
its totalitarian roots.
And now you're running a small indie startup, you know, sometime in between those points
in time, you learn how to code.
What's the story there?
How did you go from from being born in Bulgaria and dealing with this like tough government,
which wasn't really even capitalist at all, to now being like, you know, I guess as capitalist
and as enterprising as you could possibly be, running your own small indie startup and
being a software engineer?
Well, you know, funnily enough, I think my parents had much much to do with this.
I was born in in 91 and during the 90s, it was the transition period for a lot of eastern
block countries to capitalism.
And my dad and my mom were one of the first entrepreneurs, you can say, in Bulgaria.
You know, they made a company that dealt with it equipment, you know, the important that
they imported it equipment and sold it in Bulgaria.
And they were they were lucky and they were really hardworking.
And they managed to create a really good company, which still stands today.
So as I was growing up, I saw, you know, that entrepreneurial spirit, right them.
And I think it was it was something that stuck with me for a while, even though, as I was
going through my teens and in my early 20s, I didn't have I didn't have that need to create
a company.
I felt like as my thinking matured a little bit as I got better at programming and coding
and working for other products, that that, you know, need or that wants to create something
kind of naturally came to me to the point where, you know, it did really become a need.
You know, I want to create something myself that earns money, essentially how my brain
works.
And do you know that you wanted to be a software engineer and code stuff?
Well, I actually went to university to learn computer game programming, because that was
like a big passion to me when I was growing up.
And I actually briefly worked games.
That's the reason why I moved to Scotland to study it here.
And I briefly worked in games.
But then I realized that making mobile apps, you know, Android and iOS apps was such a
good well-paying gig that I transitioned to I transitioned to doing that.
Following that, I actually made my own app called Bargain Bytes, which was a small app
for tracking whenever there's sales on games on platforms like Steam.
And you know, even without any marketing budget, you know, just posting it on Reddit and a
few other places, I got it to 20,000 users, which was the first thing that made me realize,
okay, you know, there is a way to grow your own product.
You know, obviously, it wasn't a paid product, it was just a free app.
But it was a good, it was a good confidence booster to say, okay, you can make something
that other people want.
It's crazy when you build an online business, and you see like, okay, if it's something
that people want, and you put in the right places, you can get 10, 20, 15, 100,000 users
in the door.
And just trying to imagine the equivalent of doing that for like a brick and mortar
business.
It's almost unimaginable.
Like, can you imagine like 20,000 people coming into your store?
You would have to be like one of the most highly traffic stores on the planet, but like
online, you can reach everyone, you can reach anyone as like a solo developer building apps.
And so I'm not shocked that you saw that kind of result.
And also, I think it's pretty common for people who get interested in video games and stuff
as a kid, say, Oh, I want to be able to make these.
And then once you start building, you know, stuff on the computer and learning to code
to realize that actually, web development and mobile app development is a little bit
more lucrative, a little bit easier.
And maybe you should do that instead of designing games.
Yeah, I 100%.
And you know, from what fold from there was the introduction to the web being in the mobile
app space made me realize that doing an Android or an iOS app as your your startup, especially
for a boot shopper is not the best idea purely because you're at the mercy of Apple and Google.
And I know, you know, quite a few people that have made really good in the apps that then
for some reason got shut down by by because they, you know, they tripped some machine
learning algorithm, which then remove them from the store.
And that's and that's that person's revenue completely gone.
So you know, when it came to building something myself, I thought it needs to be on the web
because there at least you have some some control over your own destiny.
So how did you learn a web development?
I think this is something a lot of people want to learn.
I mean, the basics HTML and CSS, you can learn just by googling it and you could probably
even if you've never had any experience coding, like figure those out and like, maybe a week
or so of just tinkering around like the basics.
But then getting into like JavaScript, and servers and deploying code, like all that
stuff really trips a lot of people up.
How did you learn to do that kind of stuff?
So this is where the start of 2020 really helped me out.
You know, as I mentioned, I, I was contacted by this other startup who wanted some some
technical help.
And that's because they had built this whole website and back end, using this outsourcing
company who done a horrible job.
So that's when I contacted my friend Joe, who I knew had experience with the stack and
the stack at the time was Laravel PHP in the back end, and HTML and some view, just pure
HTML and some Vue.js in the front end.
And I told him, look, can you teach me this so that I can help these guys?
And he did, and during that process, I kind of picked up a lot of the skills.
So the first three months of 2020, I was kind of preparing myself almost for time box without
even knowing it, because I was learning all those skills.
And then when I actually decided to do it, again, I contacted my friend Joe, who I knew
had a ton of experience with this.
And I said, can you build the first version while I work with you so that I can really
quickly pick up the skills I need to then be able to do it myself?
And I think that is probably one of the best ways of learning is to just find someone who's
been through that road, who knows all the gotchas, who can do it in the best way possible.
And just basically stick with them, copy them, shadow them as you learn.
I went from zero web development skills, zero database web hosting skills to pretty okay
in about four or five months.
Yeah, that's crazy to have someone who's willing to do that with you.
What did the process look like?
Were they just kind of learning on your own and just asking them questions?
So were they like sitting down and actually teaching you and holding your hand through
the process?
So when thank box started, I'd already learned a little bit about the stack that we'd use,
because we just use the same stack, we'd use Laravel and we'd use Vue.js in the frontend.
So when Joe started building it in exchange for the profit chain agreement, later on,
I would just be all over his git commits, trying to figure out, okay, why are you doing
this?
Why not do it this way?
He was always super great at answering and telling me, no, you should do it this way,
you should do it that way.
This is what we should use for CSS, et cetera.
So yeah, I mean, I am completely lucky as to how that worked out.
Yeah, I've always said that one of the best ways you could possibly learn how to code
is to instead of just trying to learn code in the abstract, don't just sit down with
a book or like a website, but have a project you're trying to build, something you're actually
trying to accomplish, and then try learning to code by building that project.
And so since you had thank box, you're actually making real decisions that you care about.
And you have this external motivation that's not just like, I want to learn, but it's like,
no, I need to put this button on this page, I need to make this thing this color, I need
to let people sign in.
And so even when you get frustrated from learning, you still need to make this thing happen.
And so you'll keep pushing, and you'll keep learning the specific things you need to do
to actually make your website better, instead of learning a bunch of like, random abstract
concepts that you're not sure whether or not you're going to need to use in the future,
etc.
So you also sort of kill two birds with one stone, because you're both learning and building
something.
So even if your startup fails, at the end of the day, you can say, well, I learned how
to code and it was a worthwhile endeavor, because of that.
That's 100% true.
This is what you actually said there, again, was how I de-risk this proposition from me
in the beginning, because, you know, I'm actually not that much of a risk taker myself, you
know, I try and stay cautious when I can.
But when I started this, I thought, okay, what's the worst that can happen, you know,
the worst that can happen is, you know, it could fail in terms of not really being a
viable business, but I would have learned how to make a website, which in addition to
my existing skill set of, you know, mobile development, is a great addition.
I've always felt like, even if whatever I'm doing doesn't work out, I can fall back to
my skills as an engineer to get, you know, a decent paying job for my family.
That's exactly right.
That's why so many software engineers become indie hackers, because not only do they have
the capability to do it, but also it's just less risky when you know you could go get
a high paying job if this project doesn't work out.
And so like, if I look back on like my journey, starting lots of different projects and apps,
most of which failed, what did I learn as a result, I learned a lot of marketing, I
got much better with this computing and social media, I learned front-end engineering, I
learned back-end software engineering, I learned all sorts of stuff about servers, I learned
how to design, because I was doing these things for every single project.
And so I think it's a great way to de-risk whatever you're working on.
And also like, you know, it's not for everybody, like not everybody wants to learn how to code,
not everybody wants to, you know, develop a particular skill set, but if you do enjoy
the process, I think you have such an advantage over people who don't, because you're learning
something that like is kind of fun for you.
When you get up in the morning, like, you know, the project you want to work on is kind
of exciting for you.
And if you don't have that spark, I think you're at a disadvantage because you're competing
against other people who do have that spark.
In addition that I would say that I also had like an extra spark of building a product
in a technology that I wasn't that comfortable with.
And I really enjoy having that big in their mind, you know, when everything is new, when
you're constantly learning, it's like you get the little bit extra hit of dopamine.
Whenever you learn something, you know, not only are you doing something for your product,
you're pushing it forward.
But as you learn stuff and figure out there's, you know, there's a better way of doing things
that you know, now compared to a week ago, it just feels that much better.
So let's, let's fast forward to your startup journey.
Thinkbox wasn't the very first idea you came up with, you actually had another startup
that I've read a little bit about called curated as one of the first things you did with your
sort of coding skill set, what was curated and how did that project go?
Curator was an app that I built with a partner of mine.
And it was a social media app for sharing your favorite content.
So think, you know, your favorite books, your favorite podcasts, your favorite other type
of media, you know, like games.
And we had the idea ages ago, and, you know, we were both really good at making apps.
So we said, okay, let's make a social app, you know, very naively, like that is the easiest
thing in the world.
And, you know, funny enough, we actually built, I think, a really good product.
We actually managed to get it featured on the Google Play Early Access page when it
launched.
So we, we had like a direct channel sending us sending us users over and we thought, you
know, okay, we're gonna make it big, we're gonna raise a lot of money, this is gonna
be great.
The problem was, though, we were making all the mistakes that almost every early in the
hacker makes, you know, we first off, we spent six to nine months building it before we even
launched it because our scope was so big, then when we launched it, we didn't have any
idea how we were going to monetize it, because you know, figure out monetization later, right?
And even though we got featured by Google, it almost played a bad joke on us because
here were all these users coming and we thought, okay, you know, we have plenty of users, but
we didn't know how to manage our metrics or even, you know, tracker metrics properly.
And it took us way too long to realize all those users were just churning because the
product wasn't good enough.
So even though we tried, even though we realized it and we tried doing, you know, some things
to fix it, at the end, we just realized we're just burning money without a clear idea of
where this was gonna go.
So we spent a good two years on it before, you know, we just kind of met up in a cafe,
we kind of both looked at each other and said, I think we should probably kill it.
And you know, it was hard.
It was painful for, you know, for a few months, I was, I felt quite down, but I was determined
to learn from the mistakes that we did there.
So you know, I actually launched Unbox about six months after we curated.
And you know, when I started working on it, said, I'm going to work on a project and it's
going to have a payment button right at the start, right in the beginning, because I want
to make something that actually makes money and it's not just a free download.
Yeah, I think one of the other benefits you get from being sort of a serial entrepreneur,
besides like, you know, getting to like stack these learnings, learn how to code or how
to design or whatever, is learning lessons from like startup failure.
And then when you start your next company, making sure to never repeat those mistakes
again.
You know, in Indie Hackers, I had a long list of things that like, I had sort of sends I
committed in the past.
And I think no matter how much startup advice you read, no matter how many podcasts you
listen to, you never really know like which advice is going to be easy for you to follow
or hard for you to follow until you actually do it.
You know, once you actually start going through the trenches, you realize like, oh, building
an MVP is really easy for me, I always keep projects small, oh, charging a lot high price
is really hard for me, I find it really scary to charge a high price, and so on and so forth
for every piece of advice you get, like some of it's going to be really easy for you to
follow, some of it's going to be really hard.
And so when you build this list of the things that are hard for you to follow, you can kind
of avoid those mistakes.
So one of the things you do with ThinkBox is you put a price tag on it from the beginning,
what are some of the other sort of resolutions you made when you started ThinkBox that were
sort of based on the lessons you learned from the failure of your app curated?
So the biggest one was keep scope small, you know, make a really small MVP and launch it
as soon as possible.
Basically I said, okay, we're going to make this first version in a month.
That was a bit too optimistic.
But you know, in two months, it was actually it was actually launched, which was crazy.
And the next thing was, you don't have to polish everything, you know, especially in
the early days, you know, in the first few months after launch, I had some really crazy
bugs that, you know, when when they happened, I thought, oh, this is the worst thing.
But because I had so few users, it really didn't matter.
The important thing was the product was launched, people were liking it, and they were giving
me feedback.
And I think that obstacle was the biggest one to overcome for me as an engineer, you
know, who, you know, we always want things to be to be nice to be bug free as as much
as as they can.
But I had to change my thinking to be more of a product person and say, okay, this is
good enough.
Let's just launch it, see what happens and maybe then refine it.
Yeah, like ultimately, if you're an entrepreneur, you're basically wearing every hat.
In the business, like going to the opposite stripe a couple years ago, I remember just
like looking at so many different people doing so many jobs, like this is the marketing team,
this is the communications team, and within every team, there's like 10 or 15 people doing
a particular thing.
And then like, under them, there's like 10 or 15 people doing a particular thing.
And it's like, as a founder, you could do all of these people's jobs put together, which
you can't possibly do to the level of detail that they're doing it, which means you have
to know how to cut corners, you have to know, okay, what things can I like not do, you know,
okay, I'm a software engineer, I have to build this app.
So like, maybe I can't really do unit testing, or maybe I can't really handle every single
edge case, or maybe there's certain features I'll just do manually.
And I think that's like, in some ways, part of what makes starting a new company hard,
because you don't want your product to be embarrassing and crappy and to be like be
missing all these things.
But it's also kind of makes it fun because it's this optimization problem where you're
just constantly sort of figuring out what you can cut what you cannot do.
And if you're not absolutely ruthless, because the answer is almost always you can cut more
than you think, you're gonna end up spending, you know, six to nine months building a product
before anybody sees it.
And that's probably the wrong way to go.
I can remember so many times where my team and I were, we're talking, okay, we want to
do it, we want to do this feature this way, but it's going to take two weeks.
So why don't we do it like this, this more cut way where it's just going to be, you know,
a day of work, and we're just going to call it v one, and we'll return to it later.
And so many times v one was enough, you know, we didn't, we didn't need all the extra bells
and whistles later on, or when we ended up needing it was when the product was what had
already matured to a much greater point where we could have anticipated when we started.
I remember I wanted to do a meetups program for Andy hackers, and I was like, okay, well,
to do meetups, we need like a whole form on the website for creating a meetup, and you
could put in the location and name and have attendees and invitees, and then they need
email notifications.
Like we need all these features for meetups.
And then I talked to Patrick about, he's like, well, why don't you just ask people, you know,
if they'll host meetups?
Like, okay, let's not build any of that.
Let me just make a post on the form.
And I asked like, who will do this?
And I set up like a little form on a type form or something.
It took like 10 minutes.
And then I like hundreds of responses and people were just like, went off to the races
and did their own meetups.
I didn't need any of the code, any of the features is all completely unnecessary.
So it's, I love that constraint.
Like if you just say, Oh, what can I do in one day, or what can I do with like one post
or one question, or like, what can I do in one hour and just do the most you can do in
that like constrained amount of time, which is often going to be way less than you think
you need.
Sometimes it just turns out to be more than enough.
And you know, probably you're actually getting more usage of that feature than you would
have if you can, if you can build it in the complicated way, because it's so simple, right?
I think that's, that's another key thing that I have been trying to have as my North Star
from the beginning is keep the product as simple as possible.
You know, if you can avoid adding like a configuration option for users, do it.
One example I'll give you because it's something I just changed was, so with, with, with thank
box, you create a group card, right?
And it's really simple.
You create, you don't even need an account.
You know, in the beginning, I thought, okay, people need to register before they make their
thank box.
And then I thought, why would people need to register?
Like they can just leave their email address and they can just send them a link to manage
it.
And that single decision has been really influential in the success of it, because people oftentimes
don't even realize they have an account because I still create an account with them for them
with their email address, but they go into the website, they click create a thank box.
They enter their email and, and the details of the person they want for, and they're instantly
just in the product using it.
It helps to, to, to figure, to figure out, okay, how can I simplify this even more?
Another example is people can send, can send the card or they can schedule it.
You know, for example, you know, if you're sending a car for someone's birthday, you
want to send it at say the 18th of July at eight o'clock and 18th of July is my birthday,
by the way, which is why I know that in the beginning I thought, okay, do I actually need
a time zone picker for this?
Like maybe people want to, you know, schedule in a particular time zone.
And then I thought, you know, why let's just use the user's local time.
They're probably making a card for someone in the same time zone.
Let's not over complicate this.
And that feature stayed that way for 10 months.
And only now that I have, have actually decided to put in the time zone picker because I have
users all over the world with multinational companies who tell me, well, we're in Hong
Kong, but we want to schedule a car for someone in London.
So I only created now because I see a need for it rather than before when I didn't.
Here's this sort of like famous business school quote, it's like people don't buy a quarter
inch nail, they buy a quarter inch hole or something, or a quarter inch drill, it's a
quarter inch hole.
In other words, people don't really care about your product.
They're only buying your product to accomplish a particular goal.
And I think as software engineers and indie hackers, like we tend to focus way too much
on what we're building.
Like we're going to build this app and it's going to have this feature, this bell and
this whistle.
And like, nobody cares.
Nobody is buying the design that you're making, they're not buying the product you're making,
they're just trying to buy a solution.
And if there's any way you can give them the solution, as you pointed out, without even
building the product, they're going to be happy because the product just gets in the
way.
You know, they want like as little product as possible, as simple of a product as possible
to be able to get their problem solved.
You know, one of my favorite books that I read on my startup journey is called Building
a Story Brand by Donald Miller.
And in there he says exactly this, it's that your user should be the hero in the journey,
it shouldn't be your product, you know, your product should be the wise advisor to the
hero in their journey.
And he said that a lot of products, they try to position the product itself as the hero,
like oh, you know, you should try our product, our product is awesome, rather than saying
you have a problem, you're the hero, we want to get you to your happy ending.
Here is a little tool that will help you along the way.
Yeah, I love the analogy to whatever anybody talks about storytelling, sort of compared
to Star Wars and the sort of hero of a thousand faces or whatever it's called.
And so if like you can picture yourself as you're saying, it's like you're the guide,
so you're Yoda, and your customers are Luke Skywalker, right?
They're trying to defeat the Empire, they're trying to rescue their sister, whatever.
And all you care about is just like leveling them up to make them feel awesome and to be
awesome.
And like the goal is not for you to be awesome, you're Yoda, right?
Like you might just like, you know, should be willing to sacrifice yourself for the hero
if it comes down to it.
And I think that's hard to do as a founder.
I mean, I think we're all sort of psychologically wired to position ourselves as the hero of
the story.
You know, when you sit down to do a startup, you're probably thinking about like how successful
you're going to be and how awesome it's going to be for you and how you're going to make
all this cool stuff.
But if you can get like get out of that mindset and just think like really hard about how
you can make other people awesome, how you can make them want to brag to their friends
about how awesome they are, then like as a side effect, you will become awesome because
they'll brag about you and how cool you made them and how easy you made it for them to
solve their problems.
So I love this.
I should get Donald Miller on actually an interview about story brands, a sick book.
It's it's it's so great.
You know, I want people, you know, when they use the same book to say, Oh, you know, it
was so easy to organize a card for a card for John.
We send it around everyone.
Oh, by the way, it was this protocol, the sandbox, I think we're going to try it again.
And this is an actual quote that I have had someone else tell me because I I say I sent
a survey to people to first time buyers to just ask them, you know, where they had from
us.
And so many people say, oh, you know, I heard about thank books because I received one or
we use that in my last company or, you know, we use it for some other coworker.
Yeah, so this is what I'm aiming for.
And you have you're in one of the best possible businesses because you're in the business
of gift giving and, you know, people talk about making products that are viral, making
products that, you know, others want to share.
But if you're like, creating gifts for people, those are inherently viral, like people create
a thank box specifically to share it with the recipient, you know, and not only that,
but they get every single other person who signs a thank box is now aware of thank box.
And so, you know, if your average thank box is signed by 10 people and given to one recipient
and on average, every user you have tells 11 other people, you know, about thank box
is awesome.
It doesn't really get much more viral than that.
Yeah, this is what excited me in the beginning, you know, it's the built in networking effects.
And you know, ever since, you know, Facebook and all the other social networks were a thing,
how hard networking effects are to are to do and to build into the product.
And you know, when the idea of thank box came to me and started actually working, I thought,
okay, this is sick, because if it works out well, and it's a good product, right, like
the distribution is built into the product.
And it has been paying huge dividends.
So let's fast forward to the or go back to the launch of thank box.
It's March 2020, you realize, hey, there's a pandemic, everything's shutting down.
I've got the side projects I've been working on.
That's perfect for this point in time.
But at that point, like you hadn't launched it yet.
Or was it publicly available?
No, I, I quickly put together like a landing page, just collect some emails, but nothing
was publicly available.
So the first step was trying to figure out how to build it and how much it would cost.
Because you know, I spoke with my wife in terms of the budget we could put towards this
as as a family and realized, okay, we probably pay for a designer and a little bit extra,
but we couldn't afford like a full time developer, which is, you know, where the whole profit
chain agreement came to be.
And I was really lucky to be able to be able to actually do that with with my friend.
Afterwards, I was thinking, okay, how do I actually get the word out for this?
I didn't have a huge Twitter following at the time, I don't really even right now, to
be honest, but I had worked in so many different teams within Scotland, which has a pretty
good tech community.
So I just started talking to people that I worked with before, they look, this is what
I'm building, you know, what do you think about it?
Would you guys give it a try whenever you have an occasion?
And you know, a lot of people responded positively.
So I knew that, okay, when I launch it, there is someone that I can that I can show this
to.
And funnily enough, on the day of the launch, which was, I think, the fourth of May or something,
someone within an hour, because I had I had tweeted about it, made the first time books
and we didn't know that our bought it, and it was an old university buddy of mine who
worked at Ubisoft, you know, the big game, the big game company, and he was following
the progress, they had someone leaving that day, and he bought the first sandbox.
So it was like, cool, instant validation, the very first day of launching, which was,
you know, an amazing feeling.
That's super cool.
It's not often that you get a paying customer that quickly.
And I think part of it is for your, your, your pricing model is like, it's pretty simple.
It's transactional.
You pay, I think, what, $7 or like five pounds or something for one basic thank box, maybe
double that if you want the premium version.
And that's it.
You're not subscribed to anything.
It's not recurring.
It's not anything complex.
It's not that big of a purchase decision.
It's like, I want this person to have this gift.
I have this problem.
I have a time limit like they're leaving today or the birthday is tomorrow.
Like I need to get it signed immediately.
And they just pay.
And that's it.
Yeah.
And I think this, you know, this lower level of entry has helped it immensely, because
I don't even I don't even ask for payment upfront.
You know, I actually believe in trying out the product for as long as you can.
So I let people create their thank box without paying.
And then they only pay pay when they're ready to send it.
And surprisingly, I have like a really small, relatively small percentage of thank boxes
that don't sell.
Like 25% of thank boxes created don't sell.
So that means that 75% of all thank boxes created, which are free to create end up selling.
And I think that's purely because, you know, people get into it so quickly, they start
sharing the link.
And as soon as you have a couple of messages, you know, it's the sunk cost, it says, okay,
you know, we have to go through this because people are already right, leaving messages.
And you know, there's the there's some traction there.
Yeah, yeah, super smart.
What's the cutoff point?
Like I come to your website to create a thank box, I just sign up for your website.
So like, I'm there.
I didn't have to sign up basically some to the home basically create a thank box.
So it's like, okay, put in the recipient's name, you know, give it a title, happy birthday
or thank you or good luck or congratulations or get well soon.
And then you just like, you know, put in your name and your email address.
At what point do you need to pay?
Is it like before you start getting signatures or before you send it to the recipient?
It's when you're ready to send it.
So either when you want to send it right now or when you want to schedule it to go at a
specific time.
You know, a lot of people end up creating it.
And if they've used the thang box before they they schedule it immediately.
So they pay and schedule it immediately.
And then they start collecting messages.
But you can collect as many messages as you like before you actually send it out.
So before you actually pay it, I have had to do a little bit of, you know, clever thinking
to prevent people abusing the system.
Because the link you share to everyone else is the link to all the messages in the thang
box.
So eventually you can just create it and share it with the recipient.
And actually, I haven't figured this out until like six months into it.
But I saw people actually starting to exploit this.
So I've put in a limit in that if the thang box isn't actually paid.
So you haven't scheduled it yet.
Whenever you share the link, only the first five messages are visible.
And there's a little kind of banner that says, if you're the creator, you know, send it or
schedule it and everything will be visible.
And that's been a good balance, a good trade off, you know, for the almost zero barrier
of entry that the product has.
It's kind of like, like the way that like social networks work, especially in social
networks that feature your friends like Instagram or Facebook.
It's just like it's so compelling to see that there's somebody that you know, who has a
message for you, and that you can't see it, like you'll do almost anything to see that
right, especially if it's like a friend or relative.
And so if you see like, okay, there's five messages, but there's like 10 more messages
from your co workers, like you're gonna pay whatever amount of money to probably see those
messages.
So I think that's like a really smart way to cut it off.
Okay, so at this point, you've distributed ThinkBox to people that you know, people that
you sort of reached out to, you're getting some initial traction.
Two months into launching ThinkBox, you, you know, had a day where you sold six ThinkBoxes
in one day.
That was like a super big milestone.
That was an epic day, that was an epic day.
You know, there's a few milestones like that, I remember, you know, obviously, the first
sale was a big one.
And then this one where, you know, I had never sold that many in one day, maybe by that point
I had sold two.
And at that point, I figured out, wow, you know, if I can sell six, maybe I can sell,
you know, 20 in one day, or maybe I can sell 50.
I started getting really, really excited about the future.
I bet.
I mean, at this point, probably people that you're who are using the app or telling others
about it.
I mean, as we discussed the fact that like, you have to share to even use the app, you
have to tell others about it.
But then you probably tell other people additionally, hey, I use this app, it's really cool, you
should try to check it out.
Where were these early customers coming from?
Was it still you, you know, pushing your marketing as hard as you could in these different channels
or were people actually virally spreading it?
In the beginning, I spread to almost everyone I knew within the tech ecosystem around where
I live and people started picking up, you know, some companies could actually were actually
starting to send a card every every week or every month because they were so big.
That first sandbox that was made that I mentioned by my friend at Ubisoft resulted in the team
at Ubisoft, like random people using it every two weeks.
So you know, even the first one triggered the viral effect for the first six months.
Now, even though I was kind of figuring what my positioning is and what my and what my
acquisition channel should be, the networking effects were slowly compounding, which kind
of put me in this good position of knowing that I have actually achieved a certain amount
of product market fit.
You know, the product works well, it could be improved, but the product works well.
It made me just realize, okay, you have to focus on distribution and how to get more
people through the door.
Because you know, even though you have 100 users that have, you know, that are starting
to compound with networking effects, you know, it's a really relatively small seed to just
rely on that.
So this is the point where you overhauled your landing pages and you made an explainer
video and you're trying all these different ads that didn't work.
And then eventually you hit on Google ads and Bing ads being like this really amazing
growth channel where you could actually put money into these machines and people would
come and pay for Thinkbox.
Do you remember how much like what the economics were like when you first started paying for
ads?
Like how much were you paying for an ad?
And then how much were your customers paying you?
We had a really low cost of acquisition, which was about two bucks.
And considering that a Thinkbox costs, like a basic Thinkbox costs $5.99 and 75% of all
Thinkbox's sale, you know, the math was really simple.
You know, if the CPA is less than 75% of what a Thinkbox costs, then just pour more money
into it.
I could have done more complicated financial modeling, but I'm really not great at that.
So this rule of thumb seems to be good enough for me.
So yeah, in the beginning, the cost per click and the cost per acquisition were really low.
So we just put in as much as we could at the time.
Obviously now there's a bigger budget.
But now also the cost per acquisitions have increased quite a bit on Google ads, which
has made me try to look at different channels I could be using as well.
Right.
What's something that like you wish you knew when you first started advertising that you
didn't?
Because I know there's probably a lot of people listening who have their own apps that they've
never even tried advertising and you probably are a little bit intimidated to jump into
this whole new arena of marketing that they've never tried before.
The first main thing is have good measurements in place.
Have a way of tracking those conversions.
Things like Google ads, it's relatively easy to put in a script that just tracks when someone
came in from the ad.
And then if you have a good analytics in place, you'll be able to track them through.
I even go a step further and for every user that I have in the app, I actually track what
channel they came from.
So then I'm actually able to measure, okay, on average, people that come from Google ads,
how many tank boxes do they buy?
How likely are they to actually go through with a purchase compared to like a user coming
in from another place?
And also don't be afraid to start small.
In the book Traction, which is a really good book which you've probably talked about before,
they say to experiment with different channels, maybe putting like small amounts if they're
paid just to see if they stick.
In the beginning I tried, like I mentioned, I tried social ads and I tried maybe like
50 bucks on Twitter, like 100 on Facebook, 200 for a competition, like still relatively
small amounts just to see if they work.
And when I saw that there was zero heartbeat there, I moved on to something else.
Yeah, you got to test different channels and it's worth dabbling a little bit.
And I think sometimes people get discouraged because they get too deep into a particular
channel.
They run like 10 Twitter ads or something and none of them work and they're like, the
advertising sucks.
Well, maybe some like channels, like you want to skim along the surface at the high level
first and try a little bit and before you go super deep, you know, and it seemed to
work out for you with Google and then something got to change this year, just looking at your
revenue graph, like I don't know, things seemed like, you know, they're kind of cruising along
but not increasing massively, just kind of steadily month to month.
And then in April you made $9,000 and May was 11 and June it was 15 and July it was
18.
What happened in April that kind of kicked off the sort of rocket ship growth?
So in May, I increased my ad budget almost twofold.
And the reason for that was that I actually managed to win a startup competition in Scotland
where they gave me 10,000 pounds worth of funding.
I applied for the competition saying that they would be used for advertising.
So the only thing I can use the money for is essentially advertising.
So I said, okay, I'm going to use this to, you know, increase my ad budget for as long
as I can, because I also wanted to make use of COVID, even though that sounds kind of
bad, but COVID being a thing has really helped thank box along the way, you know, we've been
riding that wave of people not being able to send physical cards.
So at that point, I had no idea how long the pandemic was going to last.
I thought that maybe by the end of the summer, it would have subsided.
So I thought, over the summer, I'm going to use this budget to increase my Google ads
by twice the amount they were before and see what happens.
Thankfully, I think I'm on track that even after I spend the money from this grant, I
should be able to sustain the level of spending I have right now.
That's awesome.
Because I know you have competitors like there are other companies doing this, just even
searching for like online group greeting cards or something like that.
You get Cudo board, you get others.
How are you beating them at this ad game, given that they are probably well funded,
they're huge?
And like, how long do you think this can last?
Well, the truth is, I'm really not, you know, the share of my ad spend versus other companies
in the space is less than 10%.
But the market is so big, even though there's companies like the ones you mentioned, who've
been in the space for a long period of time, there's still no established leader.
Even though I am competing with them, I know that I'll never be able to match their budget.
But that's okay, because I know that I have a good product that even having like a small
percentage of the market use will still make it profitable for me because I'm bootstrapping
because I don't have any outside time because I don't, I don't need to have a billion dollar
exit.
Yeah.
Do you feel like your goals are changing?
Is your company gross?
Like, do you think you, you know, if your revenue doubles, you're 40k a month, you know,
you're going to have greater ambitions, are you going to branch out into different things?
What do you think is going to happen?
The goalpost is always moving, man.
You know, when I originally started this, I thought, I thought, Oh, you know, wouldn't
be cool to make $100, you know, 100 bucks a month.
And then you make 100 bucks and then you think, Oh, maybe 1000.
So it's, it's, it's definitely always moving.
You know, I, I find myself challenging beliefs that I had about the product from before purely
because it's reached a certain scale now.
One example is the product is purely digital.
You know, you get, you get a link to your card.
It's all, it's all online.
And a lot of people have given me feedback saying, you know, it would be quite nice if
you had like a physical thing to keep.
And in the beginning I was like, you know, I don't want to do, you know, physical products.
Don't want to handle shipping, all of that.
But you know, now I'm kind of starting to, to change my mind and said, okay, maybe, you
know, once I do everything else that makes sense in terms of features for the product
to increase, to increase growth, I could look at this and see if there's a way to do this.
Maybe just in the US or maybe just in the UK, you know, so I quite like that in this
journey in that you have to challenge your own beliefs as the product matures.
I love it.
So you've been through a ton Val, and I think it's pretty crazy how fast it's been.
I mean, the 18 months is not that long to get to the revenue you've gotten to as a solo
founder.
What do you think people who are just getting started can take away from your story?
What are, you know, one or two big lessons that you've learned about building an online
business that others would benefit from knowing as well?
So the first thing I would say is keep it as simple as possible, you know, especially
if you are in a B2C space like I am, but even if you're in B2B, make the product as simple
as possible.
It'll help you create a much cleaner MVP.
Secondly, there's some mistakes that you just have to make.
Like you said, you can read all the startup books in the world.
You can read all the advice in the world, but sometimes you just have to go through
something to learn from it, and it's just part of the journey.
And thirdly, I'd say have fun.
Building a startup is hard.
It's one of the hardest things you could do.
So don't put yourself down.
Don't be too hard on yourself.
When things don't go your way, remember that you started this because you have a passion
and because you want to build something and because you want to have fun.
Keep it simple and have fun.
Val Hienauf, thanks again for coming on the show.
Thanks for having me, Kortland.
Can you let listeners know where they can go to learn more about what you're up to with
Thankbox and other things on the web?
Yeah, sure.
So you can find Thankbox at thankbox.com.
I'm on Twitter at ValCanBuild.
I'm pretty active on indie hackers if you just search for the same handle there.
And I have my own blog over at ValCanBuild.tech where occasionally I would post an interesting
article for my journey building Thankbox.
Cool?