Cortland here. In this crossover episode, I sat down with Chris and Ethan from the
Run With It podcast and shared three different business ideas I have for
IndieHackers in 2021. If you enjoy the episode, do me a favor and subscribe to
the Run With It podcast. Just search for Run With It and your podcast player.
Enjoy the episode.
Ethan, how you doing, man? I'm doing good. I got a tie on today. Just felt like they've
been sitting in my closet for probably two years without being used, except for
me. The listener can't see you, but you look like an accountant today. I thought I
looked like a Blues brother. Blues brother's good, too. I believe that. We've got
Cortland Allen on the episode today. He's listening to us make fun of each other.
Cortland is the founder of IndieHackers.com, a resource for independent
creators of all sorts of applications and different products. Cortland, I'm
excited to have you on here. Yeah, I'm excited to be here. I've got some half
baked ideas to dissect with you guys. We love half baked. Love it. Alright, so let's
talk about this first idea here that you've got that you brought up, a podcast
operating system. Should we give a little preface for the listener? We're probably
going to drill through like three business ideas in this episode, something
we don't typically do, so be prepared. Are we giving a preview of the other two or
are we just gonna make them wait and see? I think they can wait. Yeah, why don't we
just jump in? Why don't we just jump in? So this first idea, I just wrote down
podcast OS. So backstory, as you two know, tons of people are starting podcasts. I
think there's something like almost a million podcasts that are actively being
published to you right now. I have no idea how many are dead. And people
were talking, you know, even just a year or two ago, like, is this a fad? Is this
gonna pass? I don't think it is. I think it's here to stay. I think it's like one
of the big legs of media. I think people have smartphones. We're all used to our
phones. We're walking around. We want some sort of entertainment or something to do
when our hands aren't free or when we're driving and we can't really use our eyes,
look at a screen. And I think the big three things are podcasting, audiobooks,
and just music. And right now, podcasting seems like it's bigger than
audiobooks. Like I think podcasting just crossed like a billion dollars in total
ad sales this year. So it's big. And a lot of people are starting podcasts. So people
don't really know what to do. People don't know how to start podcasts. They
don't know how to consistently run their shows. They don't know what format to do.
They don't know how to book guests. They don't know how to do a bunch of
different things. And so I would bet a fair chunk of like these million
podcasts that are active right now, just like rarely publish episodes, don't get
any downloads, and they're just struggling. And they're probably gonna be dead by
this time next year. Only to be replaced by new podcasts.
It's interesting what you were saying about it being here to stay. I totally agree
with you. It kind of reminds me actually, I'm noticing almost like a correlation,
I can't say for sure, but Bitcoin, right? I remember Bitcoin, the same time that I
first started to get interested in podcasting, Bitcoin was like coming up
and there was some interest in that. But there's like a surge and then it kind of
wanes, and then there's a surge and a bigger surge. And I feel like podcasting
is maybe in a, it's in a wave of popularity now. It may wane, you know,
sometime in the next five years or so, but it's also gonna increase over the
long haul. I think what's absolutely for certain is that people are going to want
unique and entertaining audio experiences. Whether that will be in the
form of podcasting, like I would bet on it, but it's gonna be something. And so I
think podcasting is here to stay. Anyway, my idea is I think there should be
almost in the same, like some sort of like operating system or program for
podcasters to help them grow. So, you know, if you're a salesperson, you got a CRM
tool. If you're a recruiter, you have an ATS, an applicant tracking system. If you
are a programmer, you use like an issue tracker, like every profession has some
sort of tool to kind of help them do their job. Podcasters, you got like these
ancillary tools for like very specific purpose things. Like we can record this
podcast on Zencaster. We could talk to each other on Zoom and I might go to my
podcast host to upload things and I might go to Chartable to check my metrics.
But there isn't really any tool to help me kind of sit and manage like the day
to day of what I'm actually doing when I'm trying to prepare for my podcast,
book guests, manage ads, learn what to do, etc. I was gonna say I'm most interested
in the CRM aspect of this. You know, you look at Salesforce, of course, it's not
gonna be a Salesforce per se, but you know, multi-billion dollar company,
really successful. And then there's all these little bespoke CRM softwares, you
know, for say real estate agents and you know, any profession these days, plumbers.
And you can make pretty good money building a bespoke CRM system that's
very customized for a niche. And so what does that mean? What do I think of when I
think of CRM for a podcast? Especially I'm thinking about a way to relate to
your listeners. It's customer relationship management. Like, could I
know, for example, that Joe in Montana listened to the podcast episode for five
minutes, but then he dropped off and then but Mary in Idaho listened for 20
minutes where she dropped off. And I can start to think about how can I engage
with these people differently? Maybe I have them on an email list as well. And
I'm sort of tracking and fostering a more custom relationship with each
individual. Is that part of what you were thinking?
Well, I think that level of data actually would be too noisy. Like
Cordland's podcast, I think you get 150,000 or some downloads per month. And
you probably are not going to go in or would want to go in every week and look
at that level of data. And for a new podcaster starting out, you probably it
would be helpful to get some feedback, but you don't necessarily have enough
listeners to get a strong signal for is this valuable feedback is do I really
want to cater to Joe in Wisconsin or whatever his fee, his suggestions for
what we should do.
So I'm talking about something like way, way simpler than like what you guys
were saying. Because I'm imagining like you're an indie hacker out there, like
you're trying to get something off the ground in the next few weeks, you don't
have very much money. And you're trying to like just get started with something
really simple. So it's like, I say CRM, not because like, I want you to like
manage the relationship with your podcast customers or something. I'm
saying CRM is in like, it's kind of the place where the salespeople live. And
it's configured to do what they need. Podcasters don't have a place like that.
So it would be the analog. Good example would be, and I kind of stole the name
from this newsletter OS. So there's an indie hacker named Janelle. And she
noticed brilliantly that like a lot of people are starting paid newsletters.
And instead of starting a paid newsletter herself, she just wanted to
sell a tool to these people who were writing paid newsletters, because
everybody wants to start a paid newsletter, but it's really hard. How
are you going to come up with topic ideas? How are you going to find people
to read, you know, and distribute your newsletter to, etc, etc. So she went into
Notion and she created kind of a template. And she just did a ton of
research on like, how can you make a successful paid newsletter and she put
it all into one giant template. It's got like 30 or 40 different like sub pages
on there and tables, little databases. So if you want to start a newsletter,
instead of starting from scratch and figuring everything out yourself, you
just sort of like pay her 50 bucks for her template. And it's got like all the
research and all the little structures in there and you can just like start
writing and any ancillary sort of information you need, it's there.
So you can kind of grow your newsletter faster without going over the same
pain points. Everybody else has. She, I think launched this in November, late
November. And so it's been like three weeks and she sold over 500 copies.
So she's made like 25 grand from this, just because there's so much demand
from people who want to start a paid newsletter. And there just isn't
anything even remotely similar for podcasters. So if I was starting this,
I would start with just like that, like one sort of combined resource, where
as a brand new podcaster, I can go and it's going to tell me everything that
I need to know about booking guests, recording episodes, coming up with good
questions, scheduling, editing, all that kind of stuff. And it's not just going
to be like a blog on the internet, but it's going to be a resource where I can
actually like type in the names of the people that I'm looking for, type in my
questions, and it'll sort of guide me and educate me as I do that.
So that's smart. That's starting with an info, info product, and then expanding
into some sort of software where you have a continuing relationship with the user.
Exactly. And if you made like software, you could do like some really cool stuff.
Like there's this idea of a productized service where, you know, you have a
service business, but you want to scale yourself. So you start like adding some
automated stuff in there so you can service more clients. And that way, maybe
you can provide a service to like 10 people instead of three. Whereas I'm
thinking this might be like a service-ified product. It's like a little
further on the other end of the spectrum where it's like, it's really a product.
Like you can kind of sit down and just work in it. But as the person who owns it,
like I can continue doing research. So for example, maybe every quarter I release
like a new batch of really great podcast questions to ask your guests. And like,
in your little dashboard, you see like, Oh, there's a new batch of questions.
Click it. You can buy it for like $29.99, right? Or you don't, you know, you don't
have to buy it, right? So I could continually do work, continually research
and basically sell you stuff from within this dashboard while you're working and
kind of help you out with growing your podcast.
I definitely like the idea of like a mission control. And I don't know if that's
exactly where you're going with it.
That is exactly it.
Yeah. So, so a place where I can go and it might even track step by step, the
little things that I need to keep track of like, Oh, have you done one thing to
improve your podcast interview process this week? Yes. You know, and like little
graphs and charts and things like that, that don't just show you how many
listeners you've had and whether you've published an episode, but like more
granular. So you can really have those dopamine hits each time you do something
that's pushing you forward.
Exactly. For example, like tracking metrics. I think that's mostly a solved
problem for podcasters. I wouldn't try to start a business to compete with
chartable because they already have so much momentum. They've already built so
much software there. Like I would build this dashboard to be the place where you
live. And then I would like set up a partnership with chartable and be like,
Hey, can you expose your API? We'll show a little chartable graph and our dashboard.
We've got, you know, 10,000 podcasters in here and that'll also turn them on the
chartable. So like, I'll provide leads to chartable, maybe even take an affiliate
cut and like sort of feature your charts in our dashboard. But I wouldn't try to
build that software from scratch.
So in terms of action steps, I'm thinking maybe you buy newsletter OS, you see what
she did and you say, how can I apply this to the process of a podcast? You create
that, you sell it to people, maybe a similar price, $50 a pop. If you can't get
that going, you do a little bit more research to find it. Once you get that
going, you develop some relationships and partnerships with existing tracking
applications, the software, and you just kind of grow from there and develop
individual products. Any more like tips and tricks for getting this off the
ground? Or is that kind of the basics of it?
I think there's a lot of ways to start. Like I would probably start that way.
Cause I just like building stuff and I like the idea of products. Some people
might be more educators. So I talked to Tara Reed, who's sort of like a no code
educator, and she got her start by working on one startup, which she built
without code. And this is like 2014 when nobody knew what no code was, it wasn't
even a term. And she just gave a talk about how she was building her startup.
And everyone was like, hold on, you're building this without code, teach me how
to do it. And she's like, okay, I'll teach you for $900. And she had like five
people who were like, okay, deal. And then after she taught them, she had like 30 or
40 people who were like, okay, we want the same thing. And so she shut down our
business and started teaching people how to build apps without code. I wonder if
there's a, if there's room in the space now for people to teach people to build
podcasts, successful podcasts, because a very similar to building an app without
code, very similar to building a newsletter. Podcasting is kind of a
career right now. Like people aren't just starting podcasts or fun, they're
starting podcasts because they're pretty sure they can get a lot of listeners and
then get advertisers and then make money. And what's cool about this situation is
whenever people think they can make a lot of money from something, they're
willing to like spend a ton of money to learn how to do that. So maybe a different
approach would be, okay, you're not going to build anything, you're just going to
spend like, I don't know, six months to a year like being a podcast coach. And
maybe that means you need to do a ton of research, a ton of help. Maybe you're
just like a mentor or, you know, a motivational sort of guide at first. But
eventually you learn your shit, you get really good. And you could probably like
sell people on like, hey, I'm going to help turn you into like an amazing
podcaster. It's literally my full-time job. I do nothing other than work for you
and probably charge people like hundreds or thousands of dollars ahead. And then
maybe from there, like you build out an operating system or dashboard or
something, whatever you want to call it, based on your learnings. And you've got
like all these credentials. Cause you know, you've got these successes under
your belt and this great testimonials and you can build a product. So you could
start with like a notion document. You could start as a teacher. I'm sure there's
other ways you could start too, that are super easy, that don't require a whole
bunch of stuff.
Zach Babcock, he, uh, previous guest on the episode on, uh, run with it. He, um,
he's doing exactly that where he has systematized how you launch a podcast and
how you grow a podcast. And there are aspects of it that, that, uh, we were on
the receiving end actually is, is, uh, we got pitched and a little clumsy I'd say,
but, but yeah, I mean, he's charging, I think five grand to get all that set up.
So there's this idea that I, people say it all the time, like don't sell businesses
or don't sell to consumers, sell to businesses. And I think it's the worst
advice ever. It doesn't make any sense. It's like, it's like telling somebody,
like only eat green foods, don't eat any Brown foods. Brown foods are unhealthy.
And it's like, well, like that's not very granular. Like that's not why a food is
healthy or not. Like whether, what color it is, like it depends on the nutrients.
And I think for business ideas, it's the same. It's not about like selling to
consumers or businesses. It's, it's about selling to people who are motivated to
pay for what you're selling. And like I was just mentioning, like consumers are
willing to pay a lot of money, even more than businesses for certain things.
Like people will pay like $40,000 a year for an education. And so I like the fact
that this guy's charging $5,000 to take his podcasting course or whatever.
It doesn't shock me because people will pay money if they feel like they're going
to learn a skill that's going to make the money in the future.
Yeah. A couple of things that are coming up for me, this whole idea, which has
come up, even came up on a recent episode where we talked about SaaS boilerplate
creating a SaaS boilerplate, this idea of selling shovels, right? And being meta.
So anytime you go meta to an idea, you gain a little bit of what you might
call anti-fragility in the words of Nassim Taleb. So Eben Pagan, who's, who's
kind of really well known in the internet marketing world, he's even gone so far
to name his company Go Meta Media, because he's noticed this pattern.
Every time he goes meta, he creates a better business. But I saw an interview
with Nassim Taleb recently, give the restaurant industry as an example.
The restaurant industry is anti-fragile. It's going to be, or it's at least
robust, and it's going to be there for a long time. But it's only because there's
fragility among the individual restaurants. And a lot of restaurants are
going to fail. And some restaurants are going to be successful. But you can't
have the overall success without the failure of a number. And so anytime you
go meta, you can avoid being one of those failures and take advantage of the
anti-fragility of the entire system.
Yeah, one of the ways I look at it as is just kind of two ways. Number one, like,
can you save people time, but not just like abstract time, time towards
something that they find really valuable. So a lot of people will, for example,
create like, I don't know, something really simple, like I'm gonna make an
email plugin that will let you check your email 10 times, like 10 minutes
faster a day. And like those 10 minutes are worth a lot. But people are like,
well, checking my email isn't that valuable. So like, I'm not going to pay
you for this tool. But if you create something that says like, I'm going to
help you build a SaaS app, like five times faster, I'm going to help you like,
get your company incorporated like five times faster. People associate
building a SaaS app with something valuable or building a company with
something valuable. So they're willing to actually pay you if you can like
accelerate people towards these activities. So I like the idea of a SaaS
boilerplate. Another way to think about it is a safe people time doing
research. So kind of what inspired me to start Indie Hackers was this website
Nomad List, where it was started by this guy, Peter Levels, and he wanted to be
a digital nomad and like travel around the world, just work from whatever
country living in, you know, Airbnb, or like little hotels or whatever, and just
like living on the cheap, seeing the world while working. And it turned out
there were like a few hundred, maybe a few thousand other people who wanted to
do this. But there just weren't any resources online for doing this. It's
like, where do you want to go? Like, how do you even know if the place you're
going to go is safe, if it's going to have fast internet, it's going to be
cheap, what the best time of year is, etc. So it just took a ton of work. And
like his whole sort of value proposition was he did that work for you. He just
went out, he crowdsourced a bunch of information, he put it on one website, he
kept it updated. And now suddenly, if you want to do this, you're going to save a
ton of time and research and pain, because you don't have to do all the
research, you can just go to one place. And that's like literally the entire
idea behind indie hackers as well. It's like, hey, if you want to become an
early stage founder, don't go like scour the web looking for these obscure
stories, come to one resource where I put it all into one place. So I think any
time you can like give people a ton of resources in one place, especially if
it's something that they really strongly are compelled to do and are willing to
spend money to do, they'll usually pay for it, or at least use it and rave about
it to their friends. So we talked about the starting steps of launching either
an info product or curating a list of products, even coaching their little
clients. So I think there's lots of ways to go around it. Once the software itself
is built, I'm thinking, how much would I pay for something like this? And I don't
think that I pay more than 20 bucks a month. I think I think the value could go
higher, 50 to 100 depends on the level of sophistication of whoever you're serving.
So I think if you if you structure this as an info product, I would do what
Janelle did and literally just charge a flat fee to get you in the door. If I
was adding like little updates, it's something I think people don't do enough
is upsells, right? Like when you get people in the habit of actually using
your particular thing and they're coming back, especially if you own the place
where they always are, like that's such a valuable channel to own because you can
sell other stuff. It's like I was saying, like you could, for example, every month
come out with a new package of like really great podcast questions or
something. And people could easily subscribe to that. And maybe it's
optional. Maybe people don't want it, right? So my first goal would be to like
actually create some sort of system where people are habitually going there
to manage and run their podcast. Every time they have an episode, they load up
my dashboard and they work from that. Every time they're preparing for an
episode or trying to find a guest, they load up my dashboard and they're
preparing for that. And then I would later on upsell them to ancillary tools,
maybe do some affiliate marketing by plugging in chartable or a different
podcast host or something and gradually build up sort of an empire. But I would
start very small and I wouldn't be against starting with something that's a
flat fee, especially if I was like trying to bootstrap this and I didn't have any
savings. Because again, like Janelle just made 25 grand in a month because she's
sold it for a flat fee for 50 bucks, right? If she was trying to sell it for
like $5 a month or $10 a month, it would probably take her, you know, six months
to a year to get to 25 grand. But like right now, if she quit her job, she could
have, you know, three or four or five months of runway because she did it that
way. So I like starting with just a flat fee. Yeah. And the folks though with the
recurring revenue when you're marketing to aspiring entrepreneurs or aspiring
founders, they'll churn. They'll leave after just a couple of months. So rather
than that $50 one-time info product to purchase that to be honest, 90% of
people probably wouldn't use. They'll just cancel after two months and you only
get 10 bucks from them. The other thing that comes to mind along that, along that
same line is it seems like there's this big chasm between that initial group of
aspiring folks and people who are admitted to the other side and are
continuing with their podcasts. And you have to price and service them
completely differently. And it seems like... I would probably focus almost entirely
on like super early stage podcasters. People who are just getting started
because I think it's much harder to change somebody's habit than it is to
like be their initial habit. Like I was just reading an interview on Indie
Hackers that we did with a guy who like started a social media marketing
dashboard basically. And it's like a SaaS tool for managing your social media. And
he started this like a year and a half ago. There have been dozens of social
media dashboards created over the last 10 years. So it's like how is he able to
grow his revenue? I think he does like four or five thousand dollars a month
from five thousand customers. And it's because he just targeted Indie Hackers.
He wasn't like, I'm gonna go into this agency and completely change the way
they do social media with my brand new tool. He's gonna be... He was like, I'm gonna
target people who haven't done any social media at all. I'm gonna tell them,
hey, here's how you get started on Twitter. So I'm not changing anybody's
habits. I'm just gonna target like the super early stage customers. So I like
starting that way. And then maybe later on, you know, a year or two into it, when
you've got a ton of features, you figured out what works, what doesn't, you figured
out what's good. Then you start targeting, you know, more established
podcasters. But I would start off small. Another really cool thing about the way
Janelle started is you've basically had people pay you to be on your new email
list, right? Building an email list is incredibly difficult depending on where
you're building it. So now all of a sudden you have how many people was it?
And you said 500 people or something like that. They all signed up. Now you've got
a list of 500 people who all just paid to be on that list. And then you can keep
updating them with information and then find out what products and services they
need and so on and so forth. Yeah. Are we are we ready to move on to the next
idea? Well, let's wrap this one up. So this idea basically copy what Janelle
did. Look that up on Indie Hackers. You can see what she did and copy that for
the podcasting space. Create an info product for podcasters to be able to
launch their show and speed up that process. Make it easier for them.
That's a fantastic opportunity. People pay for it. So the next idea that you
brought to the table here, Kortland, was something they had around creating a
system that will help indie creators sell whatever they have to offer by
bundling it excessively with other creators content or with their own
content? Or give me a little bit more detail about what you're envisioning. So
broadly, I think what's happening right now is, are you guys familiar with the
creator economy or the passion economy as it's sometimes called? Slightly. I
haven't actually heard this term passion economy before, but so it's going by as musicians and
yeah. So the idea of the passion. So the idea of the creator economy is you've
got all these people who aren't necessarily traditionally like creators.
Like they're not like software engineers that can't build software and yet
they're able to create something online now thanks to these big platforms. So
like YouTube, Patreon, Twitch, Substack, like you can create some like form of
content usually and make a living. Which is really cool because now like millions
and millions of people who would never have had an online business have like
some sort of online business based on a platform. And then the idea of a passion
economy is like pretty similar, but I'm sure you've heard of like the gig
economy. There's like a million different economies. The gig economy is this sort
of idea that like Uber and Instacart are going to take over the world and there's
gonna be Uber for X and Instacart for Y and everyone's gonna be kind of this
gig worker and like everybody's excited about this like eight years ago. But now
we're all like oh that would be like some sort of dystopian hellscape if
everybody was just like summonable. You know click of a button on your app and
like no one had any you know creativity. Because like one Uber driver is basically
a commodity. It's completely fungible with another Uber driver. And so the
passion economy is the rise of these platforms that give people more
creativity and what they do. They're not just like one person who among many it
will be something like I don't know 99 designs where you browse designers and
you actually find a designer whose style matches yours, right? Which is not what
you're doing when you're looking for Uber drivers. And so I think the
opportunity here is like you should probably again build tools for people
who are part of the passion economy. So the second idea is bundling. So if you
think about all of these people who are putting out content, people are putting
out newsletters or putting out trying to grow the YouTube channels or trying to
grow their paid podcast. Some people are on OnlyFans. It's just really hard to
get distribution. Like the number one difficult thing for these people isn't
creating the content. It's getting anyone at all to watch it or use it. And so I
think there's a lot of value in trying to create a distribution channel or
marketing channel for these people so that they could use it. And so a really
good example would be the Humble Bundle. It's like this video game basically
bundled. They got bought by IGN a few years ago so I don't even know if it's
still around. But for like five or six years they they were really big. And what
they did was they would take indie video games which are video games made by just
like one or two developers usually. And they said like hey indie people your
games are like really not doing that well. What if we bundle them all together
on one page for like a week and we offer them at like a discount and like we'll
just get a ton of gamers to come in make a huge press event about it and like
people will come buy all your games. And yeah you're selling it at kind of a
discount but like at least you're gonna be selling games instead of not selling
games. And so almost everybody who had like these indie games was like oh yeah
sign me up this is a great idea. And Humble Bundle got huge. They were
eventually doing deals that were with like millions of dollars in sales. And
like every indie game dev wanted to be featured on a Humble Bundle. And so I
wonder if you could do the same thing with all of this indie content that's
coming from these people who are part of the passion economy right? Like somebody's
got a really great paid newsletter. Someone's got like a really great paid
podcast or something. You know maybe you do like the sales week right? And you
only do like a podcast and a paid newsletter and a YouTube channel or
something that are all about sales. And you offer them all like a discount. I bet
you could probably get some creators to sign up for that. And I bet you people
who are interested in these things will be like oh shit like one-time sale like
I might as well subscribe to these three things. I'm never gonna get this price
ever again. I'll call out too just in terms of creating things that support
people who are creating individual products. Like you've had Sahil
Lavinia on your podcast before who started Gumroad. He said he started
Gumroad as a weekend project and now it's making $350,000 a
month. That was a little while back. Now it's making $790,000 a month.
And he kind of started it as you know his own little indie creator project and now
he's supporting other people. So there's a lot of money to be made in supporting
people who want to make some money off of their creativity. Yeah he has a wild
story where he actually raised a ton of money for Gumroad early on and then it
just didn't go that well. He ended up like kind of almost shuttering the
company firing all his employees like trying to give his investors their money
back. He moved to like small town like Provo, Utah. Kind of like find himself and
then like came back with a vengeance and ran Gumroad for a while. It's kind of
just like a solo founder. But now he's like built it back up. Sort of
bootstrapping it and I think the reason why it's making like $800,000 a
month is because of this huge push for the creator economy where people are like
oh I can make money online and not have to work a job or even learn how to code.
Sign me up if I can write a book or something and sell it on Gumroad.
I'm gonna do that. So in terms of starting this one, so I suppose if you
just want to start basically you can just be on the lookout for individuals
who are creating things that could be bundled together. Maybe just you reach
out to them and say hey you've got a newsletter, you got a podcast, you got a
software, how about if I try to sell them all together as a package are you all in?
If I make the sale, I make the sale. If I don't, I don't. Are you just willing to
give the discount? You could just start with a few small projects like that. That
could be a good way to get going. I think the challenge of trying to build
something that other businesses use as a distribution channel is that you have to
figure out distribution yourself. Like you have to get really big another in
order to like be an attractive sort of proposition and so I think it would be
very important who you select up front. Like I would probably target these
creators who like aren't so big that they don't need you but are big enough to
have like some super fans. Like I would go on Twitter and see like what are
people raving about? What are people buying a lot of? Like for example, Daniel
Vassallo has a course I think that's like how to get big on Twitter and I'd be
like okay well a lot of people are getting big on Twitter right now. Is
there anybody else who has a similar course? I would try to make sure I only
like for my first few bundles package something together where the people have
at least like a moderate to large audience and the things they're selling
are something that people have a lot of demand for. Because if you bundle
together like four or five different products that nobody actually wants, then
no one's gonna get excited when you bundle together because nobody wants it.
And also if you like you bundle together products from creators who don't have
any audience whatsoever at first, then they're not gonna be able to help you
get the word out. So I think what you want to do is create like some sort of
big like just huge press event. You want to like drive a ton of traffic to your
website all at once in your very first bundle. You want to launch on product
hunt, you want to be on any hackers, on Hacker News, all over Twitter and you
want to collect as many emails as possible. So that way for your subsequent
bundles, you basically have this huge email list you can email out to an
addition. And so you get this flywheel going where every bundle you get more and
more traffic to it because you're growing your email list and more people
are aware of kind of what you're doing. You can even create some sort of like
anticipation like countdown timer for the next bundle or something or like
you know maybe like time limits you know sign up now you'll get even a bigger
discount off the next bundle etc. But I think a lot of it just comes down to like
trying to maximize that press event because if you don't get a ton of
traffic, then you're not providing value to the people who you are bundling their
products to. The whole point is trying to get them sales. One of the aspects of
humble bundle that I'm curious you guys opinion on is there's a charity aspect
of it and I wonder how much that figures into their success and how often people
are buying it because they're like no I don't actually care about all these
games but maybe I'm paying a little bit more but you know it's going to charity
so whatever. Yeah I think that was a core part of their sort of ethos. So I did
Y Combinator with the humble bundle guys and that was just kind of like who they
were. They were like big into that kind of stuff which I recommend to anyone
starting any sort of business right like you should try to solve like pretty
boring straightforward problems like people want to buy games like that's not
some innovative new problem that was never before solved but like I think the
way you solve it you should put a lot of your personality and your ethics and
your beliefs into because that's what makes you stand out. Boring problems,
unique personality driven solutions. So you can do a charity aspect. I think the
way humble bundle did it was kind of like pay what you want and then when you
paid you would say like I want this percentage to go to charity. I want this
percentage to go to the empty creators and I want this percentage to go to
humble bundle. There's also other platforms that do similar things that
aren't necessarily about bundling but they're about deals like AppSumo for
example. I don't think they have any sort of charity aspect to what they do it's
just straight get a deal you know and you attract different kinds of
customers if you do that. So I would look at like you know who do you want to
spend your time around like what kind of people do you want to attract and I
would shape your business based on that. And AppSumo does an incredible job of
getting people excited about these things you know. I know so many people
who I don't know why I have that I just bought it on AppSumo. It looks like a
great deal. People like deals you know. If you make a platform that's all about
deals like you're gonna get deal hunters you will compulsively buy anything
that's cheap. Another action step here I think that's useful is to study some of
these people that are more experienced with affiliate marketing or joint
venture projects because I'll probably have a lot of insights on how to make
those things work. You might even consider partnering with someone who does
a lot of projects like this. Things like this are going on people are sending
them up individually. It's just not a system that you can totally tap into but
if you recognize the patterns that work then yeah I've got a lot of power behind
you. I think you could do some cool creative marketing too because again
like the sort of common thread behind all the ideas that we're talking about
today is like you're trying to like make people better. You're trying to
specifically like make people money. So if you did some sort of like indie
course bundle where you're trying to get people you know to take these courses
for cheaper like people don't take courses for no reason. They take courses
because they want to like learn how to code or learn how to build apps without
code or learn how to make YouTube videos or edit podcasts or something and so you
could just do a lot of marketing that shows success stories. That's what we do
with indie hackers. We kind of show off like here is someone who's an indie
hacker. Look it's Janelle. She just made $25,000 on a month right? When you hear
stories like that it's crazy inspirational and the first question
you have is like how did she do that? And if the answer is that like they found a
tool they found a course on your website that they got for super cheap you know
and you have all this material about people who are succeeding because they're
taking these courses then I think that's a great way to sort of drive traffic to
what you're doing. So I'm gonna bring this in it's actually interesting I found
this research in your next idea which we don't have to say what it is yet but I
found this article on entrepreneur the website and it says thinking about
learning to code these courses can help you grow in 2021 and then it's a it's a
list of courses at the top of the article it says disclosure our goal is
to feature products and services that we think you'll find interesting and useful
if you purchase them entrepreneur may get a small share of the revenue from
the sale from our commerce partners and then literally the article clicks to
another article which has a bundle of learning to code different projects by
different types of people that teach you how to learn to code. So very
interesting how these things are already being done and it can be as simple as
just getting these resources together and then taking a cut of each. The other
thing that's interesting to consider is as you're doing this each of those
individuals is gonna have a list ostensibly of their people and that's
kind of one of the powers in these joint venture projects is that now not only
can I market this newsletter to the newsletter people the podcast people I
could market to them as well and you you agree with each of the people that's
doing it we're gonna do a bit push together it's not it doesn't just become
about you the person who's battling it comes about all the individual is
sharing it with their individual communities and spreading the word and
and again building a community around it this is a when I first launched anti
hackers I started off by interviewing ten different people and getting them to
share their story about how they created their own business and then when we
launched it it wasn't just kind of the solo effort like okay I'm gonna launch
it like emailed all of them we coordinated on the launch who all
uploaded it on Hacker News and I shot to the top like instantly and so I love
this idea of like sort of you know combined forces especially if you're
combining forces the people who already have big audiences because they're
selling courses and teaching people online that's such an amplifier for your
early stage marketing efforts to piggyback on that I think one of the one
of the things that's been most interesting in launching this project
Ethan I've been doing the podcast for 15 months or something like that how
willing people who are ahead of you are to help you out if you're taking action
so if you're out there and you have one of these ideas and you're like I don't
know I'd have to it sounds like it's a big ask for these folks to promote my
stuff if you if you hustle and you demonstrate that then people like
Kordland and others out there will will help promote it yeah yeah don't don't
yeah email people asking for them to help you when you have nothing to show
but if you're actually like building stuff you put together a newsletter
you're like growing your Twitter like you're right you know maybe you can't
code your no coding stuff like if you actually proven that you're invested in
something like people will trust you and if you haven't proven that you're
invested in something you just kind of want a bunch of help before you've taken
any steps like no one's gonna invest any time into you it's incredible echoed in
one of Cheryl Sandberg book I think it's lean in and she talks in that book
about how she sees this pattern in women that they're they were they're looking
for a mentor and they're just kind of thinking do I just go up and ask
someone to be my mentor and she kind of says so first of all it doesn't just
apply to women applies to all kinds of different people and this idea that I'm
just gonna approach someone and they're gonna be my mentor and she says no you
people mentor people who are mentorable who are doing something that's exciting
to them that they want to be a part of making it happen right so once you're
taking action what's your on track then there's a pattern that people will come
out of the woodwork even to mentor you and help you I think that's a great
segue for this third idea that Courtland is put out here teach people to code
via building an online business right get in motion by starting to build an
online business and you learn the code along the way let's talk more about that
yeah so this is a very abstract idea that I've had but like the guiding
principle behind it is again we've been talking about this entire episode people
want to make money people are incredibly driven to do things to make money people
will drive to an office and sit there and do something that's like pain
inducingly boring for 10 hours a day and then drive back home every day for their
entire life because it makes them money and so if you want to start a business
and you want people to use what you're doing like you should help them make
money and like one of the things that I think a lot of people want to do nowadays
is they want to like write code people want to learn how to code more people
than ever are trying to learn how to code and like that statement has been
true every year for the last like 15 years and I don't think it's gonna stop
I think still fewer than 1% of people on earth know how to code and probably a
significant percentage of them don't know how to code well enough to do
anything but when I go look at all these websites and books and courses teaching
people how to code they're very abstract they're like learn how to write like a
for loop you know learn how to do this random thing and the ones that I think
are doing the best are the ones that are most closely related to like now that
you're doing this to make money like this is gonna get you a better lifestyle a
better job etc so for example Lambda school where you can go take Lambda
school for free and then they don't you don't basically pay them unless you get
a job and then you pay them a percentage of your salary and they're
constantly doing what I was saying earlier they're just putting out success
story after success story like here's someone who just went from making 25 K
a year as a janitor to making 105 K a year as an entry-level software engineer
right people see that and like I want to make money and they actually go to
land school and they actually finish and so one thing I think people should do
and it's the kind of the the heart of the idea is if you're going to teach
people to code stop having them code like all these little meaningless like
demo projects that don't do anything like have them code little apps and
stuff that they can like put on a store that can actually make money like if I'm
learning how to code and you know my first week or two like I make some HTML
template and then like part of it is like hooking up to Stripe and like
suddenly I see that there's like five or ten dollars my bank account because my
HTML template was bought by somebody I'm gonna be like oh shit like this is
pretty cool like I created something of value and be much more likely to keep
going and I would bet a lot of money that more people would rather learn to
code on that platform where at the end of it they've picked up some business
skills and they've like actually made some real money then sort of an abstract
you know just learn to code and then who knows which will deal with these skills
but like you know just learn to code in the abstract I don't think that works
very well and I think most people who go that route end up quitting that's really
reminds me of a piece of a book I haven't finished the whole book but
recently I've been going through a book called how to not be wrong the part of
mathematical thinking by Jordan Ellenberg and he's a math guy and he
talks about how you know he teaches people math and he tells them if they
can make mistakes and still get partial credits if they make math errors on
exams but if they don't realize that they made a math error then you know
they definitely don't get credit and his whole point is he thinks that we we
focus too much time on on sort of wrote learning how to do the basics of
something and we don't focus enough time on why we do it you know and how can you
utilize it so then you get people who know how to do a regression line but
they actually can't interpret the results probably of the regression line
because it's all the theory is too disconnected from like the real-world
use cases of doing these things exactly exactly I think that's a huge pattern in
our just in our global society at this point in history is that we have these
education systems that are like let's teach you step by step all these things
you need to know and then six months later all those things are irrelevant
because the world has changed you know so yeah okay well why do you need that
yeah or even when you're learning it you don't know why you're learning it or
where it fits in like the way that I learned to code wasn't because I sat
down opened a book read a bunch of stuff and then like brilliantly memorized
everything that I read and it was prepared to go into the world and code
stuff it's because I had a very specific idea in mind for an app I wanted to
build and I knew how to build like 10% of it and the other 90% I had no idea so
I would just like literally Google like oh how do I put this website online and
I would read a bunch of articles about putting the website online then I would
check that box and do that part and I'm like how do I make it so I can save user
data oh there's this thing called a database how does that work which
database did I use and it was kind of like a pool method rather than like I
think the traditional school thing is kind of like we're gonna teach you a
bunch of stuff hopefully you remember it and then you'll use it when you need it
which doesn't work when you say pool method is that like a the name of a
method or you know it's like a description or like the project or the
thing you're trying to accomplish in the world world is pooling the knowledge out
of you like you're pulled to learn very specific things so I break it down like
there's a million things you can learn when you're trying to learn how to code
how do you know which ones you actually should learn how do you know which ones
are most important well if you're trying to build an actual product you end up
doing certain things like a hundred times and guess what you have to look
that thing up a hundred times until you memorize it and there's certain things
you never do at all so you don't even learn those things and so you end up
only learning the things that are actually necessary and you learn the
things that are more useful more frequently and more often because you're
sort of pulled along by the thing you're actually trying to build so I like that
approach to learning if you're listening you're trying to learn how to code and
you don't have a specific project in mind that you're trying to code you're
struggling that's probably why you should probably only learn to code if
you're trying to code something very specific it's hard for me to picture
what that would be because I think for aspiring entrepreneurs is they have the
idea that they need to build the next uber or something massive in order for
it to be worthwhile but you're describing much humbler starts right
where it's selling this HTML set or something like that and that's a
mindset it's I guess I'm trying to put myself in the I don't think it has to be
so humble so I think what people are gonna learn in a course like this is
they're gonna learn to utilize like packages and sets of things that are
already in existence they may not learn need to code right so if they need a
for loop they'll learn how to code a for loop but right if they just need to
learn how to code some JavaScript you know to change the color on something
then they'll learn how to do that and that's gonna take care of what they need
to learn or they need to do payment processing right well what I was getting
out there is is it has to be both easy enough for someone to be able to
accomplish relatively as a novice but also valuable enough for other people
who want to pay for right and that to me seems like a hard intersection to hit
yeah so I think there's a huge disconnect between like what's hard to
build and what people find valuable and I think the thing that a lot of indie
hackers and early stage founders go into the minds a lot of people have is like
in order for something to be valuable like it has to be like really hefty and
big and complex but again we were just talking about Janelle like Janelle went
into a notion document and typed up a bunch of notes and research and people
are paying 50 bucks for it you know like that didn't require any coding skills or
any effort whatsoever you know I mean that's not true required effort but it
wasn't like she needed to be a brilliant software engineer and if you go to like
any hackers for example you go to the product directory something like 12,000
products that people have uploaded it might be up like 13,000 now and you can
actually filter down by tech skills founders can't code so you can only look
at projects where people can't code you can do solo founders and you can filter
down to like projects where the revenue is at least like you know a thousand
dollars a month and it's a bunch of different stuff on here people can't
code and build stuff and they're making like five thousand dollars a month
eight thousand dollars a month eighteen thousand dollars a month two thousand
dollars a month because they were able to get started doing something that
didn't involve code and so I think if you're teaching people how to code they
could probably build like a lot of this kind of stuff like you could build
newsletter OS but instead of doing it on notion like you could do it on your own
website right and it's still the same value proposition but it's a little bit
better it's a little bit more interactive because you like have learned
how to do a for loop and make buttons interactive etc so I don't think like
your level of skill really matters I think what matters more is I think the
bigger challenge would be helping to identify ideas and such that are actually
gonna help them get paid and lack you know also just kind of like lack of
intimidation around code right I think that's that's one thing that gets in
people's way if they think there's any coding involved and they may be deterred
and and there's also this aspect so I in research this this one I came across you
know like you see these initiatives you know from the government things like that
that people need to learn how to code you know look Brock Barack Obama coded a
native the only president to write a computer program and it can draw a
square on a on a screen well okay that's not gonna make him any money but you
know that's all about getting people just to understand the value of learning
to code so one value is it does it helps your thinking skills right it helps
your planning and helps your creativity and it helps your logic right so why not
learn those things while starting a business right so it's it's it's just
taking that abstract idea of just you should learn to code it'll be good for
you too you're gonna learn to code you're gonna have all these collateral
benefits but also you're gonna learn how to start a business I think that's a
great mix of things and in the end you can also when you propose the value it
will be easier for people to be okay if they don't make a ton of money with
their early projects but if they do make a little you know hey listen listen I
learned these things I learned these basic skills and I also made a little
bit of money hey look at that I like that you mentioned this sort of this
whole everybody should learn to code it's a kind of movement that's been so
popular for the last 10 years because that's a perfect example of not giving
people a motivating reason abstractly everybody should learn to show it what
does that mean like why the learning to code is extremely difficult it's
extremely arduous takes a long time it's confusing you can feel dumb if you're
not progressing for you like there's a lot of downsides but no one's
articulating like the upsides very well and a very compelling way so if I
started this I would literally start with only the niche of people who are
already trying to do this there are already at least half a million people
out there who really want to build an online business and who have tried to
learn to code multiple times specifically because they want to make
money online with some sort of business I would anyone who doesn't know why they
want to learn to code I would just not even focus on them I would like have my
messaging being like hey you know you're trying to build you know this online
business but don't know how to code like we're gonna walk you through stuff we're
gonna have like really really simple projects to start like you're actually
gonna learn it the goal here is not to make you like a Facebook level software
engineer the goal here is for you to be able to stand up your projects on your
own without having to like hire a developer as a co-founder and I think
you can do that I think that's very possible and I think people who are
already motivated and who've already been trying to learn how to code to
accomplish this goal will be very excited to do it one idea that complements that
is I'm picturing say business owners who might need a small aspect something
coded for them and the example that comes to mind is an Excel macro and you
can post it on there and say hey I'll pay you ten bucks to code a macro that
does this and that's a low enough price that that established developers
wouldn't even go for it but someone novice might want to do that it's also
not time sensitive so trying to think of another way to I guess how to fill out
that other side of the marketplace so Chris and I went through a course about
starting a business and about starting software business was one of the themes
it was the theme the year that I started I don't know if it was when Chris did
that's the foundation interesting thing about that one is they they sometimes
bring in developers are like you are not coding anything you have to learn
about how to be a business person you have to learn about how to sell things
like do not code anything even know how but that's not always the case that's
what's necessary for the people in that course but there's also people who are
successfully running a great project and they're making income because of it and
you know you're a great example Courtland right I mean you code and you
have a business out of it and you're fully enjoying both aspects of it right
yeah exactly or you could say no I mean coded for me is the fun part like when I
first started my business I was like I want to code but really coding isn't productive
for me what I need to do is do a bunch of interviews and market them and grow
my email list so for the whole first like two months of running my business I
didn't code almost anything and then after it started picking up steam and I
was generating revenue I was like okay now I've got some leeway some breathing
room to do things that are fun which for me is writing code yeah so I think I
think like courses and and and projects like this are really useful for those
people they really want the enjoyment and the fulfillment you know and the
exercise out of doing code as part of the business and like we said there's a
lot of collateral advantages if you hire a programmer now you can communicate
with them even better but then you know also getting those business skills so
like a half-and-half mix as opposed to a full one-on or the other yeah and I
mentioned like Tara read earlier who has a business apps without code like
she's already doing this teaching people to build businesses with no code tools
and you can do this and teach people to use no code tools you could certainly do
it and teach people how to use coding tools so in getting started is that
maybe we just have a course is that is that the first step we think yeah I mean
I think you could do this in different ways you could do it the way the tear
did it where you literally just take on a few students and you just teach them I
think that's a really good way for you to learn because like when you come out
of the gate like you're probably not gonna know how to teach very well you're
gonna not you're not gonna know where students are gonna get stuck like I've
taught my brother and two friends to learn how to code three friends and now
one of them works at slack as a software engineer just made a ton of money in the
IPO earlier this year and with the Salesforce acquisition another one is my
friend Len who started her own any hacker business that's doing like 400
grand a year in revenue and the my brother works with me on any hackers was
doing freelance software engineering before that and another buddy who didn't
who didn't finish because he wasn't that interested in coding but like I learned
a lot from teaching people how to code and like now I'd be in a much better
position so if I wanted to start this like I would actually take on like
actual students maybe with five or six like I'd go on Twitter and be like hey I
know how to code are you trying to learn how to code I'll offer you like very
cheap or free mentorship or something like pay me a hundred bucks for the next
two weeks like I'll mentor you guarantee you you're gonna find people who want to
learn from real software engineers are struggling to learn how to code use that
to put together your lesson plan and then create like some sort of course so
you could either do a really big course which I wouldn't do because I don't like
big splashy launches where it's all or nothing like you're risking a ton I
would probably do something really small like I'm gonna put together like an
extremely small course I'm building this one really specific type of app and you
can go through it in like a day or two and it will not only teach you some
coding concepts but at the end of it you'll have like a little app and then I
would sell that or maybe even give that away for free and maybe I do a bunch of
those and sell like a bigger course or maybe I do a bunch of those and sell
them all for like small amounts so just looking up you know similar projects
Code Academy maybe is maybe it's actually like a little bit of old news
but just that's something that comes to mind when I think about learning to code
their annual revenue is currently thirty point five million dollars a year so
there's certainly money in teaching people to code and I don't think they
were even that profitable to begin with they didn't know what they were going to
do with with that and it turns seems like they make money from extra content
beyond the basics you know quizzes support support from advisors and things
like that so if you just kind of get get started there's certainly a market for
this in this oh sure education is like one of the biggest markets in particular
learning how to code is one of the biggest markets I think a lot of people
have trouble coming up with ideas because they think they've got to solve
an unsolved problem but the vast majority of ideas like I was saying
earlier just solved like really boring straightforward like already solved
problems they just solve it in a different way than the existing
competitors solve it that appeals to different people so a lot of people are
gonna want to go to Code Academy because their friend told them about it it
brings the website looks pretty or for whatever reason right some people would
much prefer the sort of early stage founder Andy Hacker approach where they
learn to code by building a business because that's what motivates them and
that's certainly not Code Academy's angle so it's in some ways it's kind of
like a gap in the market I don't see people teaching people to code and this
way I see people teaching people to code to get a software engineering job or
because you want to learn how to think better because of a million other
reasons but not because of this sort of like I want to make money with my own
business on the internet reason I think that's a good place to wrap over time
here to the listener take some action follow through on on what we said here
go pursue some of these ideas let us know what you think at the very least
about some of these ideas that Courtland shared if you have your own takes on
them we'd love to hear it email us at update at run with it FM with that
information Courtland where can people go to find out more about you I am at CS
Allen a LL en on Twitter I also run indie hackers so in your podcast player
search for the indie hackers podcast great thanks for the time here good
chat with you and looking forward to connecting later