What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet
businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they
get to where they are today? How did they make decisions, both of their companies and
their personal lives, and what exactly makes your businesses tick? And the goal here, as
always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our
own profitable internet businesses.
Today, I am talking to Zach Resnick. Zach, welcome to the show.
Thank you. Happy to be here.
You are the founder and CEO of EasyPoint Concierge. I have a ton of friends who are involved in
travel hacking, and you run a travel hacking business. So I figured before we get started
talking about your business and how it all works, why don't you give us an overview from
Zach Resnick's perspective on what exactly travel hacking is?
Yeah, I look at travel hacking as any ways to improve the experience when traveling or
in any ways to save money. So often in my world, they overlap, but not necessarily.
Cool. So any way to save money, any way to improve the experience. I'm terrible at this.
I basically am just like the dope who gets on a plane and flies somewhere and pays full
ticket price. I don't collect points. I don't sign up for frequent flyer programs. What
sort of area of travel hacking do you specialize in with EasyPoint?
A thousand points. And I've kind of specialized in that my entire travel hacking career and
personal life.
Cool. So we're going to get into the story of how you started your business. And I think
it's a pretty interesting story because the story of EasyPoint is basically that it's
a side project. It's something that you've always done on the side. It wasn't something
that you ever intended to become a fully fledged business with employees at the beginning.
And yet today you've got a fully fledged business. How many people work at EasyPoint today?
We have about 10 people of which five are full time right now.
And how much revenue are you doing with EasyPoint?
We've done over $600k a year to date with a 15% month over month growth all organic
right now.
Cool. So we're going to go through the winding path of how you got to this point because
as I said, it was a side project and you're always doing different things. What do you
think the beginning of your story is? What did you first get into travel hacking and
start to acquire the knowledge that you would need to build something like EasyPoint?
Yeah, my story has a pretty clear beginning. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity
to work and live abroad in Jerusalem before starting school. And after I came back, I
was infected with a disease that I imagine many people listening to are as well. It's
called wanderlust. And I really wanted to keep traveling. But when I started school,
I didn't really have any money, didn't really have a job, wasn't necessarily looking to
get a job. So I wanted to see if there are ways to basically for free travel around the
world. And turns out, especially for those that live in the US, there are. So I discovered
the world of credit card churning and manufactured spending. So credit card churning is this
concept of churning the banks for new credit card signup bonuses, like you would a cow's
udder. And then manufactured spending is the process of spending money on a credit card,
getting all sometimes more, sometimes a little bit less of that money you spent somehow back
to you, and then using that money to pay off the the card itself. So you earn the points
and spend enough to get a signup bonus. So I'm sure you're asking, how do I do this?
So the the method that I used back when I was at school in Ohio, was the the music building
where I spent a lot of my time was very close to the post office and the CVS. So I would
go on a little, you know, break, put some music on, go to CVS and buy the daily limit
$1,000 worth of Visa gift cards, which unlike all the other kind of cash equivalent gifts,
gift cards used to code as debit cards all the time. And you can add a pin and came with
a pin, I'd meander on over from the CVS to the post office, buy money orders with those
debit cards, because you can buy money orders with a debit card, but not a credit card at
the post office. And then I would take a screenshot of the money order into my mobile banking
app, pay off the credit card bill that initially bought the gift card, my cost of kind of,
you know, spending $1,000 with roughly $5, so like 0.5%. But I was, you know, then for
each $1,000 block I spent, I was hitting a signup bonus of maybe like two, three or four
grand that was worth at least $800. So take a little bit of time, take a little bit of
money. But after each new credit card, I'd have like at least one round trip, at least
economy ticket to Europe. Wow. And that kind of got me hooked. Okay, so I have a ton of
questions about this. First off, where do we even learn how to do something like this?
Because if I was a poor college student, I would just give up on on traveling. Well,
the internet's a wonderful place. And especially within the churning and manufactured spending
community, while there's certainly a lot of, you know, secret, not shared on public form
information, there's so much information on public forum, there's all these great websites
that make it easily accessible. If you want to do this, and you're listening to this,
you have no excuse not to just Google turning community. And that exists somewhere on Reddit
or yeah, there's a huge Reddit community. There's a great community on flyer talk for
more advanced stuff, then there's many individual bloggers that also have their own communities
and all their own libraries of posts. Okay, second question, how are credit card companies
okay with this? If they're basically giving away these signup bonuses, and you're paying
off your cards, aren't they just losing money? Well, it's really hard to be an unprofitable
customer to a bank as a credit card user, even someone like me, who not so much now,
but I like in my heyday at school for a few years, I would get between four and six credit
cards per quarter, and basically just spend the minimum spend to get the signup bonus.
And then I would like never use the card again, or like cancel it. So it's difficult to imagine
that that card alone would be profitable for the banks, but just the chance that I could
then use their another card in the future, like on average, like, you know, banks are
willing to give out these really generous signup bonuses, because on average, you know,
a new customer to them is worth at least 1000s of dollars. So even giving away like, one
of the most generous signup bonuses ever, which I'd say conservatively valued at $1,500
J sapphire reserve a couple years ago, 100,000 signup bonus, they're going to make that money
back real quick without that much spending, you know, they make money, a little bit of
money off people going to debt and paying that back. But contrary to one people, most
people think that's actually not how they make most of their money. They make most of
their money by kind of opening up to other lines of business chase has been especially
successful at that in terms of getting you know, high spending millennials from the chase
sapphire reserve into using them for mortgages and for wealth management and all their types
of services, as well as just the interchange fees. So every time you you know, let's say
you spend $100,000 on an art gallery, you know, Chase is going to take at least a grant
of that. So if there's just some percent of chance that you'll use that card over the
next 10 years for that, you know, all the LTV data is siloed, but it doesn't take much
to make it really profitable for them to spend a lot in customer acquisition. And this is
one way to do it. And even if they have like, a few unprofitable customers here and there
that offered by and large still really works for them. And then even if I'm getting $1,000
in value from it, it's not 1000 on their balance sheet. You know, these are things that they
can transfer to other like airline miles or other hotel points. So the net effect for
them is pretty minimal, even for unprofitable customers, probably maximally just like a
few hundred dollars per card.
So what you're saying is the credit card business is a good business to be in?
Yeah, it's a great business to be in.
Last question on all this churning, how does this affect your credit as an individual?
Because part of your credit report is you get a little bit of a ding when you open up
a new line of credit, you get a new credit card is opening up four to six credit accounts
per quarter, not a thing that hurts your credit.
It is not. And that's one of the biggest misconceptions about kind of credit card churning and in
the miles and points world that getting lots of cards is bad for your credit. If you don't
pay your bills, it's bad for your credit if you do that on more cards than less. But fundamentally,
the thing that affects your credit score more than anything else is your credit utilization.
This is the percentage of credit that you have across all of your banks that you're
utilizing at one time. So the more cards you have, the greater credit you have. And as
a result of having greater credit, as long as you're spending doesn't increase proportionally
to the credit you get, your utilization goes down, which is the most important thing.
You're actually making your credit better by doing this.
Exactly. And then you're, you're increasing your number of accounts, which is positive
for your credit. So these are more long term things. And as you said, each credit card
you get, anytime you cancel, it's a small ding. But the more important stuff is your
age, the amount of accounts you have, and most importantly, a utilization, all three
of which are helped by this.
Cool. So here you are a member of the churning community and getting all these flights for
significant amounts off. How old were you when you were doing all this?
19 to start.
One of the most off repeated refrains in the startup community is that you should start
by solving your own problem, because you know more about your problems than anybody else.
It sort of prevents you from falling into this trap where you build something that nobody
wants. At this point in time, when you're saving money on flights, had it occurred to
you that maybe this is a service that other people would want?
Yeah, I mean, for years while I was doing this, you know, I had was giving lots of sometimes
solicited sometimes unsolicited advice to friends and family on what to do with their
credit cards or lack thereof, how to use the models and points that they had.
It's hard not to talk about it.
Yeah, exactly. And you know, people would say like, Oh, wow, like you went on this trip
how'd you do that? Well, let me tell you, I spent $40 to go to London this break. $40
and whatever hour and a half of my time over the course of going to CVS and the post office
and then yeah, I'd say probably within the year I had my first paying customers just
as an hourly rate and I didn't even think of it as a business. It was just kind of more
of like whatever hustle a consulting thing. I didn't even probably use the word consulting
until like two years after discovering churning. But you know, people just enjoyed kind of
the help that I gave. I really like teaching and helping others and you know, that kind
of spread and you know, within probably like two years when I was like 21, I was probably
doing at least like a grand a month in terms of just people paying me for my time and first
I charged way too little and then soon I, you know, read enough Tim Ferriss and hourly
rate stuff that I bumped it up to a hundred and then 150 and then kind of settled around
there for a while while I was in college.
So give me an idea of what it would be like to be one of your consulting clients at that
time. I would come up to you and say, Hey, Zach, I don't know anything about flights.
Can you help me out?
No, it probably wouldn't be that because then it wouldn't really make sense. It would be
more like, Hey, I have a trip coming up. I have all these points. How do I use them?
Okay, so people who already had points and people who already knew they had specific
travel plans.
Yeah, it was generally helping just optimize for like a vacation or for a business trip.
And generally speaking, the pitch was like, you'll learn something, you'll enjoy the conversation
and even after my fee, you know, you'll, you'll come out ahead.
So at some point you're making thousands of dollars a month from consulting and you ended
up starting another business cause you didn't view easy point consulting at that point in
time as an actual business. Tell me about how you got into your more tech product business
at that time.
Yeah. So, so land was an idea that I had because I, you know, love traveling internationally.
I spent a lot of time in the middle east after my kind of year in Israel, I lived again
in Israel and Jordan and you know, I, I always felt the pain of international travelers,
especially to new places. Like, wouldn't it be great if there was one place I can go that
can give me all the essential information that I ever wanted to have, you know, kind
of like cultural norms, transportation. Uh, and I, I had, you know, eight, eight of these
things that like, I wanted to standardize information wise and like a fun, compelling,
you know, app product. And I really wanted it was solving my own problem. I still think
it's a great product idea. I do have, you know, the MVP on the app store. If you look for land
happier, you could find it, but fundamentally I made the, I think the mistake that a lot
of people make, which is isn't necessarily solving a problem that no one has, but it's
solving a problem which no one's willing to pay for. Uh, and then also finding like founder
product fit in which, you know, I'm not going to be really happy leading, like leading a
tech project and essentially being like a product manager. Like I, I'm very passionate
about the products that I use and have a lot of opinions, but it doesn't, I'm not excited.
I don't think the way that product managers do. And it took me kind of, you know, a little
over a year of some pain to realize that, but yeah, I tried to solve my own problem.
I tried to build a great product for other people. And then this was like near at the
end of when I was in college and then I was working on this while doing a bunch of other
things, you know, post-college. And then I decided, you know, listen, I've spent too
much time and energy and my own money on trying to make this work and, you know, see no end
in sight of, you know, burn and what I'm going to get customers. So I decided to pack my
things and move to Jordan, focus on other stuff, founding, finding a product founder
fit is one of the most underrated things I think. And starting a company, because if
you don't like what you're working on, you're probably not going to be good at it. You're
definitely not going to be happy. Why do you think it took so long for you to figure out
that this wasn't the type of business that was right for you? And what do you think is
the kind of business that matches up with your personality?
So I think it took me a while because when I put my mind to doing something, I do it.
You're committed.
Yeah. So it would take something structural like, it doesn't make sense for me to do this
to even consider having that reflection, which is something I think, you know, a lot of founders
would do good to have more as part of their kind of regular reflection of like, am I happy
doing this? Should I be doing this? So I think the types of things that make me most happy
are things where I'm, you know, working with people and having, you know, interesting,
stimulating conversation on a, on a regular basis in person. I think running businesses
where I'm doing some type of sales, I enjoy sales, I enjoy explaining things to others
and I enjoy negotiating and I enjoy doing like strategic thinking. So I do think in
many ways, like the role of like an executive or investor is very well suited to kind of
what I like. It's just about, I think doing something that's less, you know, like product
focused and you know, more, more customer focused, but there is an intersection of those.
And I do have ambitions for easy point to have more tech products in the future going
back. Yeah. But just knowing that I'm not going to be the one that, you know, oversees
those, those products, uh, in terms of all the little, little stuff. So tell me about
the decision to shut down, uh, what's it called land happier? Uh, yeah, it was called land.
Uh, and then like the name on the afterwards land land happier. I was like, URL we got.
It's a good note. It's a good URL. I want to land happier. Tell me about the, the, the
decision to shut something like that down because I think a lot of people work on things
and they're not going well or they're not enjoying it. But like you said, they're committed
and it's really hard to know when should I shut this down and move on to something else?
And you know, am I going to be okay? Psychologically, if I do that, are we going to be depressed
and you know, not be able to start another company? What was that experience like for
you? Well, if you're thinking about shutting something down and you've had that nagging
feeling, you probably should just as a general rule. And I promise you'll feel a lot better
or at least I did. Uh, it wasn't, it definitely didn't feel worse. I felt like a huge weight
off my shoulders. So I, I actually made the decision pretty quickly while I was here in
the Bay area visiting my cousin and mentor, Dan Rosen, uh, who's been a successful entrepreneur
that also moved from the East coast to the Bay area. And we were just having a conversation
about what I'm working on. And I think he's always been really good about pushing me to
kind of think and dream bigger and to do more of something that I think has more material
impact on the world. And we're just like, what, basically like, what are you doing Zach?
Come on. Uh, and then I would also coincide with having this incredible opportunity to
work with this amazing composer, uh, in Jordan that I, that I've always enjoyed working with
and listening to as well as, uh, playing with the Jordanian national orchestra. So, you
know, having those two opportunities, kind of having a yearning for more freedom for
more music and, you know, being at the time of my life, I think I moved there when I was
24. Just, it all just seemed to make very clear sense when we talked about it on, on
some hike in Marin. And, uh, basically the next day I told everyone I was shutting it
down and I bought my plane ticket to Jordan a few days later. So at this point you've
still been running your sort of consulting business, helping people save money on flights
on the side. Has it evolved at all? And of course, if you're running this product business
or is it kind of stagnant while you're running their product business? Um, yeah, I'd say
like near the end of, of working on land, uh, I started to productize my consulting
and really get a better sense of my customers and like who I can help out more as I was
generally helping, I'd say like, you know, family, friends, people that were like my
parents' age, just like planned vacations, but you know, people that want to plan vacations
that aren't frequent travelers, like, you know, they ask a lot of follow up questions.
They're not the kind of amount of effort I put in reward that they get is good, but it's
not as good as helping out a small business owner or even a medium sized, you know, enterprise
business owner where I could help them, you know, get the right credit cards, put their
spending on the right cards and now, you know, save them literally six figures in terms of
increased return on spend or six figures worth of increased like travel value to them just
by doing this. So then I started focusing more on, you know, really just people I knew
and referrals. It was never kind of did any marketing for like points optimization plans
for small business owners where we focused on both the acquisition of points, uh, as
well as the spending as both are kind of big areas of arbitrage and ways to get more value.
And one of the, I think most important things, especially for an early stage business owner
is to be able to tell certain customers, Hey, this isn't for you. Because if you try to
build a business that works for everybody, you're going to go crazy. You're going to
have a product that doesn't really have product market fit. It doesn't work well for everybody.
And you're going to feel pretty bad all the time delivering kind of a mediocre product
to everybody. How was it for you, uh, deciding to sort of focus on a different kind of customer
than you'd focused on traditionally?
Well, it was great. I, you know, I love being able to think more like a business owner than
just maybe like a leisure traveler and kind of put myself in their shoes. And it helped
me learn a lot more about, I think just like good business owning fundamentals and you
know, looking at a balance sheet, looking at travel expenses. And yeah, I, I really
liked it.
How much did you say at that time you were like a student of business? Were you reading
business books and then following like business luminaries or are you just sort of winging
it?
Yeah, I think I've been like a, as you put it, a student of business for a while. Uh,
since I was young, my, uh, my dad was a business owner and I always learned a lot from him.
So I always was lucky to have a really good example to look up to and to kind of ask questions
about business. And I kind of helped out in the office from like, I think a very young
age. So, and then in high school I started doing more like reading. And then when I read
the four hour work week while I was living abroad, uh, before school, that kind of really
just changed my life in the way that I thought about, you know, like work and lifestyle and,
uh, creating value and capturing it. And you know, since, since then I've been a pretty
voracious reader of the way people think about business.
Are there any principles and learnings from the four hour work week that you still subscribe
to today and that were sort of infused in this whole process of how you were living
your life?
Yeah, I'd say, uh, some, you know, it's not an original idea of Tim's, but I think he's,
you know, really popularized it well, which is this idea of like fear setting. So instead
of goal setting, doing, thinking like, okay, if I want to do this thing that I'm like afraid
of, what's like the worst thing that could possibly happen? And just realizing, you know,
especially for those of us that are lucky enough to, you know, uh, grow up in the United
States at this period of time, you know, uh, not growing up, uh, with financial insecurity,
with food insecurity, like there, there's really so much that we can do in this world.
And if we try something and we fail, the worst that can happen is really not that bad. And
just getting over that initially is something that I think most people in life, even those
that come from, you know, having so much security don't end up doing once in their life. So
I think Tim really just helped me apply a lot of like the risk management principles
that I think I was intuitively good at for things like poker, uh, into like my, my life
and my, my business broadly speaking.
Yeah. That's, uh, it's interesting you mentioned that cause I have a lot of software engineers
on the podcast and like one of the most consistent themes when I asked people what made you confident
enough to start a business is this fact that at least as a software engineer, it's pretty
easy to fall back on your software engineering skills and just get a job, probably a very
high paying job. If your startup doesn't work out for you, what was the worst case scenario
if none of this worked out?
I guess, you know, for me, the worst case scenario was I would, you know, continue to
play music, continue to consult miles and points stuff, you know, maybe play a little,
little poker cash games. You know, I've always been someone that, uh, it's hard for me to
do just like one thing at once. And I've always tried to monetize my, my passions to some
degree. Uh, so I was never really worried about like what would, especially after that,
like reading the four hour work week and having the experience of living abroad, like what
would happen in terms of the worst case scenario? Like financially, I was more worried about,
you know, just making sure that I was happy doing what I was doing.
So let's talk about poker for a second. Cause it's, it's come up so naturally in our conversation.
You're one of the few people who I've had on the podcast who also play poker with in
real life. Um, I've been to like, what, like five or six of your poker games and San Francisco
haven't been any of yours yet. Yeah. Well, mine are, mine are low stakes, man. You don't
want to come to my games. Uh, but yours are riveting. Why do you play poker? Zach? I really,
really love poker. It's a beautiful game. And I think one that teaches you, you know,
really important principles like risk management, you know, practical kind of like statistics
and math, you know, the, this is the one that people just focus on and I think overflow,
but still true psychology and getting to like understand others and good kind of like negotiating
skills come from that. And I think most importantly, above all, which is like emotional discipline
and temperament because you know, the, the game that we play in, and I think this is
true for basically every game, it's, it's really not that much about like how skilled
you are and like how much you've studied the game theory and how much you know, it's like,
how will you execute that night and allow yourself to like be your best thinking self
and not let kind of the emotions of winning against this one person or, you know, trying
to lock in a win or trying to make up for the fact that you're down. I think that's
kind of the, the most important thing that sets apart the people that walk away with
a ton of money and those that lose consistently. And I think that skill of being able to make
quality like logically driven decisions under like financial pressure is, you know, an amazing
thing from poker. And it's something that's, I think, given me the confidence as a business
owner and investor, you have far more sophisticated reasons for playing poker than I do. I just
find it's really fun. Yeah, it's really fun. And I find it a good excuse to be a social
while also sort of exercising my brains. I'll get so bored if I just go to a bar and talk
to people. But if I'm like playing cards at the same time, it's super fun for me. But
all the points you made are, I think really good, especially the idea of being under the
pressure, especially financial pressure and yet having to make rational decisions in a
situation where you're probably going to get tilted if you lose or feel overconfident if
you win. How do you think that translates into being a startup founder, which is also
super risky, where you also have, you know, the potential for financial disaster, at least
you know, the opportunity costs that you could have made way more money if you weren't starting
a company. Do you think there's any parallels there?
I think there's a lot of parallels. First off, being almost any type of startup founder
is like so much riskier than let's say being a professional poker player or gambler, you
know, being a startup founder, it's you know, especially if you're trying to do the VC funded
like, not that most indie hackers are this way, but you know, if you're trying to do
the VC funded like, you know, growth or go broke, like you just statistically, you're
just gonna like, lose a lot of money and time and opportunity costs the fast, vast majority
of the time, hopefully, you'll learn so much and have enough network that it's not just
looking at the isolation, it's long term. But yeah, compared to like, when you break
it down from just like, how much money can I earn standpoint, it's like a very risky
thing to do. But I, this is where I think, you know, the it's not just about maximizing
the amount of money that you can make. It's about thinking of like, other types of risks
of like, what are the risks of my happiness? If I do a job that I don't enjoy? What are
the risks of like, if I want to build this business, knowing that I didn't do that and
having regret, like there's a lot of other types of risks. And I think what startup founders
I think many are just kind of impulsive and frankly, don't think about this, especially
first time startup founders, I know, I was definitely in that category when I tried to
build land. But I think especially like serial founders, you know, the they're evaluating
risk on many different types of axes, not just money. And, you know, I think by being
so around risk and having to make, you know, both complex and financial and emotional decisions
on a regular basis, you have a much greater comfort as well as I think understanding of
risk than those that don't have to make those decisions frequently. And yeah, so I honestly
very similar to poker, but just like a lot riskier and the problems are a lot more complex.
And there's the concept of unknown unknowns, where in poker, like as long as no one's cheating,
like there's only 52 cards, you know, you're going to know the odds, they can't, you know,
there can't be some like macroeconomic thing that then just like pushes the chips off the
table. Like poker is in that respect and is like, a lot less risky than like going into
business or, you know, going in financial markets.
What do you think are some of the things that you learned from your previous sort of business
failure with land, and from your years of consulting that sort of helped you on later?
Because if I look at my startup journey, my 20s, a lot of it was very risky, there was
a lot of opportunity costs that I gave up, I could have just gone and gotten a job at
Google or something. Instead, I was making pennies as a startup founder. And none of
the businesses that I worked on really worked out in an economic way. But I also became
a significantly better developer. I learned a lot about business and marketing, I learned
a lot about talking to people in sales, I learned a lot about a ton of stuff that basically
helped me build a successful business later on.
Do you think your early experiences despite the risks that you took and some of the setbacks
were worthwhile?
Definitely. And I think the main reasons they were worthwhile are not financial, you know,
they're just the experiences that I was able to have as a result. So like, knowing or learning
some lessons firsthand, and you know, everyone when they're like given advice talking about
their experiences, they always said, Oh, I wish someone told me this. But the reality
is the best lessons you learn in life, you kind of have to learn the hard way. So with
land, I learned the importance of like, building a great team and having a good culture and
having good communication with the people you're working with.
I think I would have honestly kept building land for even longer if it wasn't for a pretty
negative experience with like my lead developer. And that made it just much more of a drag
than if it was someone that I, you know, felt really good about working with. So learning
that and just having a lot more care and kind of who who I hired and who I brought into
future ventures. And I think that's that's worked out well now with the way easy point
is and kind of culture we have there. But other lessons are I think, also, just really
looking at, you know, the thing we discussed before founder product fit, just like, am
I happy doing this? Like, is this something that I could see myself doing? And, you know,
the way easy point kind of transitioned from the product as consulting to the concierge
service it is today, it kind of started a little bit as the side also, I'm just doing
myself, and I'm already doing it for like, I'm already doing it for my own travels, you
know, so all of this like consulting I'm doing, like, I love doing it for myself. So having
the opportunity to serve customers is just more ability to get to think about miles and
points in a fun way. And the discovering kind of the opportunities for doing miles and points
arbitrage allowed me to, you know, just do more of the stuff that I that I do myself
anyways.
So tell me about this transition to productize consulting, because I think one of the cool
things about starting a startup is it doesn't have to end up the same way that it started,
you can start by doing something like normal consulting, you can take time to productize
consulting, you can eventually scale and grow and turn your business into something that's
much better than what it started as, by sort of building on the earlier advantages and
learnings that you have. And I think that's not obvious to a lot of first time founders,
they think, Oh, whatever I start today, that has to be what it's going to be like two years
from now. And so they have, you know, sort of grand ambitions, and it's really hard to
start at the end, you need to start at the beginning. So I'm curious about the sort of
midway point, when you turned easy point from just a consulting business to a productize
consulting business, what did that actually look like?
So this came from I was, you know, helping like a family friend with a vacation, and
they're a business owner. And just the conversation came up for the business of like some quick
suggestions of how I could help. And then we kind of ran the math and it's like, Oh,
like, if you implement this, this is like easily like 50k that you're going to get in
a creature, increase return on spend, and what it costs you or take you that much time
to implement. And after that, I kind of the light bulb went off was like, Oh, if I can
like do just a really quick analysis and provide one thing that then does that imagine if I
you know, then get to understand their business a little bit more, get a you know, put a few
more hours of my time into it and give them you know, a customized points optimization
plan. So they're able to you know, earn as many points as possible, and then spend them
in a way that makes them go longer than they would kind of with their own, you know, knowledge
of miles and points. Cool. And so you're basically taking something that work for for one client
and sort of expanding it and scaling it something that could work for lots of different clients.
Yeah. I mean, really, every small business owner is leaving a lot of money on the table.
Like what's your points optimization strategy for indie hackers? Well, any hackers is owned
by Stripe. So I got my Stripe credit card, and I just have a stripe pay for my flights.
Okay, well, I cheat a little bit. That's that's not bad. But I mean, you know, call some brothers
listening to this, what's your credit card optimization strategy for Stripe? You know,
it's different for very large enterprises. But you know, this is the way I would usually
start kind of most sales conversations or just, you know, learning conversations of,
you know, what's your what's your points optimization strategy? And everyone's like, Oh, I don't
I don't have one. Oh, what's what's going on? And, you know, almost every business owner,
if there was like an easy way to like, increase their bottom line by 1%, like they're gonna
they're gonna pull a little time into it. But because it's like points and credit cards,
they just don't do it. I've never worked with a business owner in which I haven't been able
to increase their bottom line by one and a half percent, not a single one, on average
is closer to, you know, two and a half percent. And this is simply just by getting them the
right credit cards for the type of spending they're they're doing, and then helping them
use their points better for the things they already want to spend on.
Very cool. So this is iteration two of you helping business owners, would you say that
you would found product market fit at this point?
So I did not for the very clear reason of you have to solve someone's problem. So with
land, I was like solving, I think people's problems, but without a market opportunity.
Here I was, you know, providing a lot of value, but not solving a problem. No one knows that
they don't have a points optimization strategy. No one is suffering from this. So inevitably,
I'd have a conversation, people be very interested, ask a lot of questions, I'd show them the
math of how I'm going to save them at least five figures, you know, after our first meeting
within a year. And I, you know, I have the, we still have the guarantee where, you know,
if you sign up for our, you know, productized points optimization plans, and I don't get
you double what my fee is within the first year, we give you all your money back in $10,000.
That's how confident I am in our ability to add value, you know, so I think, Oh, with
an offer like that, it's risk free.
But for most entrepreneurs, they're, you know, they're too busy, not necessarily organized,
they have a lot of things and solving them, isn't their problem always goes down to the
bottom of the list. So the problem with product market fit there was just, yeah, it wasn't
solving a problem. I was just giving people free money. And I know that sounds like, well,
of course that should work, but it does not. And I had to learn that the hard way.
So was it more the case that you're telling people, Hey, I'm going to save you this much
money, you're basically going to make, I don't know, 10, 15 grand if you're spending a million
a year on your credit card or something like that. And they're like, Oh, that sounds great.
And then they don't get in touch. They don't actually sign up. Or is it more the case that
the people you talk to were intrigued and signed up, but nobody was, nobody was searching
for this. And so it was hard for you to get more customers.
Yeah, it's somewhere in between. Whereas like it would just take the trust of like a referral
or like an in-person communication to close basically every deal I've done. So I've done
like 30 of those over the last like two and a half years or so. I, to be fair, I never
really tried to build like an outbound marketing campaign for this. And I'm sure that like
this business could get a lot more customers. And you know, for any of you listening, part
of the offer that I'm extending to indie hacker listeners is $500 off any points optimization
plans that are signed up for within the first week of this podcast coming out and $250 off
all plans after that. So if you're a business owner and you don't mind spending a few hours
that net you at least $800 an hour in value for your time, then you know, shoot me an
email at the, in the show notes and you know, you'll check out our, the link for kind of
examples of what it looks like. So I think it's still a great business, but the, the
problem of just making people aware of the problem would take a lot of work. And it was,
was work that I, you know, wasn't particularly excited about doing and didn't have the money
or the vision to hire someone to do it yet. So, uh, it never really got off the ground.
I also had other things going on. You know, again, I never, with this business, I, I was
never trying to like grow it really fast. It was just like a way to, to make money that
I enjoyed, but it was, I was just more tending to my customer's needs as opposed to thinking,
how can I drive this to be this big company?
So it's so interesting that you've with both businesses, as you mentioned, found a way
to build something that like is somewhat valuable to people, but like, they're not willing to
pay for, they're not willing to divert a lot of attention to. In the case of sort of easy
point version two, it's that, you know, as a business owner, perhaps I'm super focused
on like, how do I make my company successful? Or how do I stop my company from dying? And
even saving $10,000 a month might not be that number one thing that's going to help me do
that. And if that's the case, even though it's free money, I'm not going to use easy
point because why would I? It's not my number one concern. How did you decide to sort of
take your learnings and build the current version of easy point version three, let's
call it.
Yeah. So, you know, to be clear, I and my CEO, we're still doing these, these points
optimization plans, and we're happy to help. And we love working with, you know, entrepreneurs.
So V2 is still around.
V2 is still around. We're not advertising it, you know, besides, I guess, this podcast.
But yeah, what we've been working on for almost two years now is the concierge service where
it's, you know, very simple flights that people want. We take care of it for them with good
service and charge less than any other possible way that they could pay for it.
So for example, I am flying to Cape Town in December. Let's say I wanted to be an easy
point concierge customer. How would that, what would that journey look like?
So we're a flight concierge service that focuses on business and first-class international
long haul travel. So flying at Cape Town would definitely apply for that. And you don't want
to be an economy for the flights that are that long, at least if you want to enjoy the
first few days of your trip. And we average about 40% off retail flights. So there's a
lot of variance with that. Sometimes it's just 10%. Sometimes it's as high as 80%, especially
for last minute. So the way it would work is you contact us either via our mobile app
or the way most of our customers interact with us is over WhatsApp and Telegram groups
where my team of concierge that are available 24, 7, 365 days a year. It's a group with
all of us in there. And then anytime you want a flight request, you just kind of give us
the information via the app, WhatsApp, Telegram, and then some over email.
And then we get back to you with a quote that will always be cheaper than the retail price
by at least 5% guaranteed, no matter what. And then when you're ready to book, we give
you a secure form and take your personal and payment information. We actually use Stripe
for the credit card information and we never see the numbers as a result of switching to
Stripe recently, great product. And then yeah, after that, we just book the flight for use
and your confirmation numbers and take care of any changes, cancellations, meal requests,
receipt requests, like any other concierge service.
But the two things that mainly set us apart are that we're available 24, 7 and mainly
interact kind of over text, although we'll get on the phone if anyone wants to, but usually
people prefer kind of text. And we have the best prices on luxury flights.
So how do you make money in all of this? Because you're basically saving me money on a flight.
Where does your revenue come from?
So what we do for our biggest savings are buying miles and points from businesses that
otherwise wouldn't use them effectively. And then we use those miles and points to book
our clients' flights. So where we make money is in the difference between what we pay for
the miles and points and then what we charge the customer.
So when we save our clients 40% off, that's with our margin included.
Very cool. So you're basically doing this arbitrage type thing where you're finding
these miles and points for cheap and you're using them on your customers and then you're
taking sort of a cut from that.
How do you find miles and points for cheap? That seems to be the difficult part of any
arbitrage opportunity. How do you find what you're selling for less than you're able to
sell it for?
Yeah. So the community that is actively doing miles and points trading or arbitrage is fairly
small and fairly concentrated within the Hasidic Jewish community, within the New York tri-state
area.
And I didn't even know this existed actually until going to kind of like a Shabbat lunch
in college and was telling a visiting rabbi about kind of this trip to Israel that I just
did all on points. And he was like, oh, do you know any of the brokers? I was like, what
do you mean? What brokers are you talking about? And he's like, oh, like, yeah, the
brokers that are brokering all the miles and points. I was like, tell me more. And then
I'm from New York. So I went home and I went to Brooklyn and met a couple of his friends
and learned all about it. And kind of my eyes were like, oh, wow, there's a big opportunity
here. So most people that are kind of doing miles and points arbitrage, they give kind
of, I think, a bad name to that word in that their approach, broadly speaking, is buying
any type of mile or point with not that much due diligence and then booking their clients
flights.
And like five to 10% of the time, there'll be like some type of issue because often what
we're doing is against the terms of service of the airlines. But there are ways to do
so that actually eliminate all risk for the customers. It involves paying a bit more for
your miles and points on average and not using just any supply and doing a little more diligence.
But that's what we do. And that's how we've been able to book a couple thousand flights
without a single issue. So what we're generally doing is buying transferable point currencies
like a chase or an Amex and then transferring those directly from kind of the business owners
or the business owners via brokers like Amex or Chase account directly to frequent flyer
accounts we make for our clients.
How we do that is a bit of a secret sauce, but that's essentially how it works. And being
able to do it and having access to the liquidity is not something that just any upstart person
could do. So I feel good about kind of the moat we've created and the kind of other ways
we're currently looking into acquiring miles and points.
Yeah, I like how this works because like you said, as a customer, number one, I'm communicating
with you over like a WhatsApp group or telegram group. It's very informal, but very fast. I'm
basically texting you, which is exactly what I want to be able to do if I'm booking something
as important as a flight and I want to make sure I save money. And if there's any issues,
I want you to be able to sort of get in touch with me very quickly. So it makes sense that
you're doing it that way.
And also, I like the fact that you're, as you put it, creating frequent flyer accounts
for your customers. That means I could be an easy point concierge customer without having
any miles or points of my own. I just kind of sign up.
Yeah, yeah. There's no requirement to use your own miles or points. We also do that
as a service as well. But our customers are the type of people that they need to get somewhere.
They're looking online for the price. And instead of going that and having to deal with
all that search themselves, whether it's them or their executive assistants, now they just
kind of text us. We give them a quote and we kind of take care of all the booking process,
all the service related things and do it at a cheaper price without having to deal with
any of the miles or points themselves.
Earlier with V2, when you had your productized consulting, you kind of had a product market
fit issue where you were basically saving people money, but it wasn't their number one
concern to save money in that way as business owners. With easy point concierge, it seems
like you're more focused on consumers again, rather than businesses. Is that true?
Yeah, I'd say our business is very much like B2C2B in that the vast... So our clients are
very specific type people. We really shine for the last minute business traveler in that
last minute, airlines actually open up a ton of award availability via their miles, but
they jack up the prices for cash tickets. So our inventory and our cost to book someone
a ticket goes down a lot in the last kind of 24 hours to 72 hours and then to a lesser
degree in like the week before, but the prices for almost everyone else goes up. So the value
we add to our customers on the price is probably like 2X difference in the last minute and
the service matters more because it's usually a little more stressful to book a ticket in
the last 48 hours than kind of a leisure trip months in advance.
So our clients are basically exclusively investors, like well-capitalized founders and executives
and high-end international consultants, people that don't consider flying economy for long
haul flights. And to date they've either worked with travel agencies that have been overcharging
them or not performing on the service or just kind of booking flights online themselves.
And then switching to us, we're saving them literally like thousands of dollars in every
flight that they're doing. And if you like the sound of thousands of dollars off your
flight, let's add another $200 to that. So if you are listening to this and have an upcoming
business or first class flight that you would like to book by using the code indiehacker,
if you book the next week with us, you'll get $200 off your first flight and you could
use that code whenever to get $100 off your first flight.
Very cool. So maybe a little too late for my flight to Cape Town, but I'll keep you
in mind for future flights.
Oh, I didn't say so. Yeah. So how's your flight to Cape Town work? Yeah. You get integrated
to WhatsApp Telegram. You give the, you let us know. And have you booked the flight yet?
I already booked the flight. This is a couple of weeks ago.
Corlin.
I know. I'm an idiot.
What happened?
I know. Well, next time I fly all the time. We have so many indiehackers meetups all over
the place. So I've got a lot of excuses to fly.
Okay. Let's, let's, let's convene after the podcast and see if they're a fan of the fare.
Because you probably overpaid.
I've definitely overpaid. It was an expensive flight. I think I'm on one of the very first,
there's like a whole new direct flight from I think JFK to Cape Town. And it's, it's brand
new. So I think they're not starting until December and I'm on like like the eighth flight
out or something.
Oh, cool.
It's exciting, but yeah, not cheap.
Yeah.
So I have a ton of questions I want to ask about how your business works and about sort
of how you came up with it. First, the fact that you sort of discovered this arbitrage
opportunity, how involved was that in basically a genesis of this idea? Was it like you wouldn't
have started this in the first place, this concierge idea if you hadn't found that?
Oh yeah. It wouldn't have been possible. I mean, but I just, so I kind of like my previous
lines of business, like I discovered the idea, I met the brokers and I already had a lot
of my own points. And then I, you know, knew a couple high net worth individuals that were
traveling a lot. And I just started booking them flights just myself. I didn't even think
of it as like, this is now easy point, you know, uh, it was more because easy point,
the brand and you know, domain and everything that didn't come to be until I was doing that
points optimization plans, like the product has consulting, but I didn't even think of
this as easy point.
This was just like, I'm booking someone a flight. And for me, it's fun because like
I literally at night, like we'll relax by like looking up like the way to get a good
deal via miles and points to like, you know, Bangkok or something someplace that I want
to go. So now I'm just doing that for other people and getting paid for it. Like really,
I'm very lucky to found something that I, you know, really love what I do.
Cool. And you come up with the idea, it works. You decided you're going to be, as you said,
B to C to B really, because these are business class flights that consumers are taking. What
was kind of the first step in building out a team to build this concierge business? Because
this is a little bit different than what you've been doing earlier. Yeah. It's a little bit
more official in a way, a little more serious. How did you turn that into a real company?
So I got pretty lucky in that. So I, the one other real time I've worked for someone else
in life was, uh, doing an internship for the points guy. And through that I got, you know,
to know the community there and that they have a really big kind of travel hacking points
optimizing community. And when I was doing this, uh, you know, I, when I decided I needed
to hire someone else, I just posted on their Facebook group and then someone messaged me
or, you know, a few people messaged me. And I just got really lucky that my first hire
a Cameron, uh, was just an absolute rock star. Uh, and you know, is, is with us today as
COO and just, you know, has the same kind of, I think passion for travel that I do,
uh, both on the getting the best deals as well as just personally traveling. Like, you
know, he's, he's always on the move on the plane and you know, that's how I live my life
for a few years as well. You mentioned earlier that with land, you really learned the value
of working with people that you like working with and that really can end up not liking
a business, not because it doesn't work, but because the people you're working with just
don't lie with you. I think a lot of ND hackers have yet to ever be managers or yet to find
co-founders or hire anybody. Uh, and your experience going from, you know, land to easy
point, uh, how can somebody more effectively find people to work with that they actually
like?
I think it's just really about having integrity with yourself and just drawing lines. And
for me, you know, this was kind of the culmination of advice from a lot of different people,
but it boils down to like what I want to have them over at my house for a dinner party.
And if the answer is no, they're, they're not going to be part of the company. It's
just that are they invited to the poker game? Yeah. So, so funny enough, uh, the second
hire, uh, Peter was like a good friend that I knew through, through poker and, uh, you
know, didn't really have the background and travel, but you know, it's, it's like a similar
type of, I think like analytical skills that are good for like finding the best deals on
travel as well as that, like are good for poker. Uh, so then, you know, he started just
diving into travel and you know, he like Cameron has, you know, been here, uh, still here.
And yeah, so I've also generally hired and I don't recommend, I'd say from what I've
learned like doing this, it just happened to work out well for me of like really hiring
friends and like hiring friends of friends, uh, as a way to make sure that just, I always
really enjoyed working with the people. So at this point you're at a team of 10, I think
you said, yeah. What does everybody do? Like, how's the team set up? So there's actually
been some, some changes lately and just in terms of, you know, how we're organizing things.
So, and it's always in flux as at a, at a startup responding to the, the business needs,
but, uh, we have Cameron who is like our CEO and he manages kind of all the concierge as
well as, uh, starting our, you know, uh, first, uh, dabbles into growth marketing. So we've
never done any marketing today. It's all been like our organic, uh, referrals and people
that I meet in person in terms of, uh, how people discover the business. So we're starting
to change that soon, but we've really taken the approach to date of just like improving
our service offering and product and just trying to keep up with our customers versus
like trying to grow new customers. And I know that's not exactly answering your question,
but it comes to just like how I thought about hiring, which is generally been like, how
can we just keep up with the growth as opposed to like, I need to go find more growth. And
then the more you do the business, the more you find things that you wish can be improved.
So, you know, I've always taken this approach of like, let's try to get the business to
a place where I can feel really confident, really in high integrity and say that like
we're the best flight concierge service. And for basically anyone that flies business class,
like we're the best solution for you. Just, you know, bar none. If you're part of a large
enterprise and you have, you know, a large team and need things to be accounted for in
a very specific way. We don't, we don't have a product that's great for like larger enterprises
now, but for any individuals or small teams, I could say that with confidence and the more
I do it, the more I realize things need to change. I realize, Hey, you know, it's not
good enough to just be available 20 hours a day and maybe not on Saturday. Like we really
need to be able 24 seven. If we're going to be booking people 24 seven, because even if
it's small, like we need to be able to be there for people. So the concierge team now
is five people. So, you know, and, and that's actually growing. We're looking to make another
hire right now, finding someone that's based in Asia. And that allows us to basically always
have like two people that can help out with both communicating with a client, fixing problems
and finding tickets for them at any hour of the day. So we have, you know, five concierge
Cameron's kind of managing them. And then we have a bunch of like part time, like business
development slash like, uh, yeah, business development consultants of which like each
of them are kind of doing a little bit of a different thing. We have a, you know, full
time person working on business development. And yeah, that's, those have been going on
for a few months. We've just, we've been growing very fast this year. So it's almost like almost
a new hire every month on average.
And have you raised any money from a crazy point? Or is it all self-funded based on your
revenues?
Yeah, I have not raised any money. I've taken out a couple loans just for kind of growth
and one kind of her growth, one for cashflow, got a term sheet for venture debt about a
month ago and, uh, fundraising, doing an equity raise right now. But yeah, today, I haven't
done any fundraising.
So let me dig into your mindset behind this a little bit because this business seems like
it has product market fit. You're talking about not having to do a ton of marketing,
but you're still growing the team just to keep up with demand. Yeah. Uh, you've been
through a bunch of different iterations where you've learned a lot and you've kind of incorporated
those lessons into the latest version of the business. What are your overall goals for
easy point concierge and how big do you think this can get?
So I think our core like concierge business can easily be a business with an enterprise
value of like hundreds of millions of dollars, but I don't think, I don't think billions,
but I do think that the concierge service positions as well for other like, you know,
tech products of which I've built prototypes before. So there's a few different areas,
areas of business that I think we could potentially grow to. And for me, the optionality is really
important where we have this business with product market fit. So that's going to be
my focus. Most entrepreneurs make the mistake of not being focused enough on finding product
market fit and you know, lucky enough to find a business with that. I don't want to start
investing a lot of emotional energy and capital into other things. We are at the point now
where I feel very confident in our service and there don't need to be that many more
tweaks to improve it such that I'm doing a, a fundraise to start to build out. Uh, you
know, uh, there are no longer need to be, uh, that many more tweaks to our core concierge
service, which is why I'm doing a fundraise to start expanding to, uh, specifically one
tech product, which will be helping consumers, uh, decide whether to use their own miles
or points or cash when booking. Uh, so imagine, you know, you have, you know, let's say you
sign up for some frequent flyer programs and if I don't get you to cancel your Kapton ticket
and book with us, you better sign up for a frequent flyer program and earn the miles
on your full fare ticket. So, you know, let's say after this trip, you know, you'll have
like whatever 30,000 miles on this airline. Maybe you'll have like 200,000 chase Sapphire
chase Sapphire points. And then next time you're booking, as opposed to trying to be
the expert like me or, you know, have me that you can call. Imagine if there was something
that, uh, had kind of default preferences, but you can adjust those preferences. And
then when you go online, let's say Google flights or Expedia, it's connected to all
of your points, all of your miles and recommends to you whether you should book with just a
normal credit card or with miles or points. So the way this will start is we'll use this
engine to automate a lot of what our concierge are currently doing manually and help that
on our backend. And then once our backend is, you know, up to the place where our concierge
basically don't have to do any searching themselves, then we'll start, you know, or in tandem,
uh, but to start just working on the backend, but at some point in tandem, uh, working on
the consumer facing aspect for this, which will probably start as a Chrome extension.
And then I think eventually become kind of its own like booking engine insight. And I
think that's a multibillion dollar opportunity because there's a lot of miles and points
out there. It's only growing, uh, and there's no good way to, to know whether you should
use them or not.
How much of this ambition plays into your desire? As you said, you're fundraising and
doing an equity round now. The other alternative is to basically stay independent, uh, be bootstrapped,
grow off your own revenue. How much of your ambition is fueling your desire to raise and
how much of it is just the unit economically of your business and running it as it currently
is?
Really just the ambition, you know, I mean, we don't need money to continue growing our
business at a pretty fast rate for the core business. It's more that I would love to work
with a world-class CTO and, you know, give this, this other product a shot. And the plan
is not to continue doing like many raises down the line. It's like, let's give myself,
you know, nine months of runway to, you know, hire a tech team that doesn't put the core
business at risk, maybe continue to invest some of the, or start to invest some of the
core businesses profits into that area of business, but, you know, get an MVP for the
backend within a few months, get an MVP for the front end and like max six months, see
if there's product market fit. And if not, you know, scrap it. Uh, so that's kind of
the plan there. Uh, and still, even if I, you know, do end up going down this line of
business, my focus will always be our core business with product market fit, at least
until we, you know, 20 X that business, because our customers love us. We have product market
fit. So I really want a 10 or 20 X the business, uh, of our, of our core business before really
considering putting a lot more, uh, percentage of mine, my team's time into an, into another
product. Uh, but I think what's nice about the product I described is that it really
works in tandem with our concierge service. It's like if we can automate a lot of our
searching that saves us a lot of time and we'll produce better results for our clients
and that will never, you know, uh, manually miss things. So it's kind of an internal tool
you would use as well as something that would be consumer facing. Yeah. So there's the internal
tool would power the consumer facing tool is just like, what is the best deal with miles
or points? Uh, that's the internal tool. The consumer facing tool combines that with then
some type of business, business logic of, okay, here's how I value or here's how this
consumer values their miles or points. And then is that greater or less than the cash
value that you're reading on the page and then making it look nice and have good UX
for that experience. So I mentioned at the beginning of this episode that easy point
has always been kind of a side project for you. Yeah. It's grown. It's got a lot of people
working for it now, but you've also throughout this entire story, all always been working
on other things on the side. And one of those has been a fund that you've been working on.
So tell me about how that plays into the story when you started it while you started it and
how it affected your decisions with easy point. Yeah. So I mentioned before that it was like
my, my cousin Dan who got me to kind of dream bigger, think bigger, and then moved to Jordan.
He was the same person that I actually ended up starting this fund with. Uh, so I ended
up, uh, consulting for his, uh, company, uh, mosaic in the fall of 2017 and spent a little
bit of time here in the Bay area. And while I was here, I was already, uh, investing and
spending a lot of time researching, uh, Bitcoin and other crypto assets and went to a lot of
meetups here and met people involved in the industry and was just really inspired by what
was going on and the types of things people are, were, were building. And just, you know,
then I started, uh, co-investing with Dan and he was like, doc, I think you're, you
know, good at this and the way your mind works would be good for investing. And I never thought
of that as something as like, you know, I would be doing like with my main energy or
focus more to something that like I enjoy doing and that maybe much later in life I'd
consider doing it. But yeah, so Dan and I were co-investing together and you know, after
doing that for a bit, we really enjoyed that working relationship. I saw the types of investments
that you know, other funds and investors were making in the general sentiment. And I felt
that there were, I think a lot of clear mistakes being, being made. I did some, you know, analysis
and consulting for two funds, uh, both of which have now blown up since and was pretty
shocked at just like the way or they did due diligence or lack thereof. And you know, after
that it gave me kind of the confidence to be like, listen, like I want to make good
investments in this space. And I was open to kind of working for other people, but I
just couldn't find a fund in which the thesis was enough. I can get behind that. I feel
comfortable working for them. So decided to start my own phone with Dan and you know,
now we've been up and running officially for a year and three months now. And we're investing
in the top entrepreneurs that are building on top of Bitcoin.
And so when you start a fund, cause some listeners might not be aware of exactly how it works.
You're not really investing your own money. You're investing money from other people who
basically contribute to your fund.
Well, yeah, I think normally, especially in the VC world, that's the case with us. Uh,
we knew that we needed to kind of build a track record before being able to do that.
Uh, so we started a fund at the beginning, which was exclusively kind of like the partners
and advisors money with just a pretty small amount of outside capital. And you know, we've
raised more now and kind of continuing to do that fundraise, but, uh, yeah, to start
it was, you know, primarily those that are making or involved in the decision making
for, for our fund.
This kind of seems like the perfect business for you because we've talked to all this episode
about you evaluating risk, you evaluating people, how you like really dealing with people
and doing sales and how you can keep a cool head under a lot of financial pressure. And
I think the stereotypical sort of line in Silicon Valley about how investors behave
is not exactly being cool under financial pressure. People making a lot of decisions
based on, you know, emotion and psychology and following the herd. What do you think
are the unique things that you bring to running a fund and how do you sort of view yourself
as being able to out compete other investors?
Yeah, I think the thing that, that we've gotten down that is our biggest differentiator is
just our thesis. Uh, the vast majority of funds, uh, don't even try to really have a
focused thesis and the ones that do don't really execute on it. Uh, we're very specifically
investing in the companies that are building on, uh, the BSB version of Bitcoin and the
only kind of like liquid asset that we're, um, holding is the either direct or derivative
exposure to, you know, the BSB version of Bitcoin.
So we're, you know, a fair, fairly narrowly focused and we think that we found, you know,
the blockchain that basically everyone is going to be building on over the next many
decades. And as a result, you know, I think that's by far our biggest edge more than anything
else. So there's our thesis. I think there's the fact that everyone in the fund that's
a partner has actually built businesses themselves and has entrepreneurial experience. Uh, while
I think a lot of the, the funds that have like notoriety or popularity in Silicon Valley,
they have some, you know, a good deal of entrepreneur experience themselves, by and large, still
most VCs don't really have much experience in actually like building businesses from
zero to one, which I think is really important for like the support of entrepreneurs. And
we like to be the first money in when we can. So, you know, being able to help at that kind
of pre seed and seed stage, if you don't, if you haven't been there, I think it's going
to be really difficult.
So I obviously don't interview very many investors on the indie hackers podcast, but I think
it's pretty fascinating that you were both an investor and a founder, because as an investor,
you're trying to look at other founders and tell, you know, is this a person who's going
to succeed? Is this a business who's going to succeed? But at the same time, you're doing
the same thing yourself. You're a founder. So I wonder how much overlap there is on your
thesis for what might make a business work and how you behave as a founder. I've heard
investors who, for example, are all about the team and they'll invest in any team. If
they think they're smart enough and talented enough and hardworking enough, regardless
of the business idea. And there are some investors who care all about the market. And they think,
you know, it doesn't really matter how good your team is if you're in a fast, promising
and growing market that, you know, they'll put their money in because they believe in
that. How would you say your sort of behavior as an investor matches up with your beliefs
and behavior as a founder?
Yeah, I mean, all of the, you know, markets important, teams important. So I know some
people are pretty rad. Some investors are radical in that they really just focus on
one thing. But I think there's, it's largely overlap, but it's a little bit different.
And one that, like as an entrepreneur, you're not optimizing for like the maximal market
opportunity in Eevee. You're hopefully maximizing for what you love and happiness and just where
that coincides. So like our miles and points, like the biggest market opportunity in the
world right now. No, is like investing in the blockchain. That's going to be what transforms
our economy over the next few decades is. My answer is yes. So in that way, it doesn't
overlap in that, you know, I think my fund has much higher kind of risk adjusted expected
value than my company does. But, you know, that also demonstrates in terms of where my,
you know, time and focus is, which is in the fund and, you know, not, not full time with
easy point in terms of like team, like so, so market obviously is very important that
our thesis is very narrow team is important too, but like market has to be checked off.
We're like, if let's say we meet founders that we don't think are, you know, maybe of
like the same very high caliber of the rest of our portfolio companies, but they're building
a business that we think is a great opportunity within a sub like market that we think is
a great opportunity, then we're going to invest. So there's some overlap there, but it is very
different kind of each side of the table where as an investor, you know, you're thinking over
a long time horizon, you're trying to maximize like your EV and minimize downside risk. Whereas
an entrepreneur like you just want to like build your thing. I want to build my fund,
but it's a, it's a different type of like build energy. I do think what is true for
both is that the culture of, you know, everyone that I want to, you know, that I work with
is someone I really want to hang out with. And one of my business partners at the fund,
one of the main partners, he and I started a business together in the past, did a podcast
together and have been kind of the best of friends since college. And you know, to me
that that is an edge. It's not a, it's not a downside. A lot of people don't like doing
like, and you know, I started the phone with my cousin. So it's like, in terms of doing
business with friends and family, it's like, I've done it. And there's certainly downsides
to it, but I think the net is very positive. And when you do business with people that
you really care about, you conduct yourself, I think in a, in, in a better way. And it
really strengthens the relationships, even if it could be hard at times. And some people
might do it with people and then they have a falling out. And I think fundamentally,
like, you know, you're, you're not a different person when you do business, there's just
more pressure. And if under pressure, you find that you, you know, you and that other
person aren't a great fit. Well, it might not have come out as friends, but you're both
still people and you conducted yourself and made your choices and you know, yeah, that's
who you are.
Yeah. I started, I didn't start any hackers with my brother, but we worked together and
you're right. It's great when it works well, because for example, last night we, you know,
we needed to have a meeting and we're going to meet about a particular document we need
to put together and we just talked for like four hours about our personal lives. And it's
great. You know, I can't imagine a more fun way to work on something than to do with my
brother.
Yeah. And as someone that my brother actually is doing some, uh, a little bit of business
development, social media work for us for, for easy point. And you know, it's, it's an
opportunity to get to talk to him more.
So you are running both this fund and easy point at the same time. I think for most people,
it's very difficult to start a business on the side of their job or even to run one full-time
business all by itself. It's, it's, uh, unimaginable, I think, to try to run two different businesses
that are very different kinds of businesses that require very different kinds of expertise
and skills and knowledge. How do you do that effectively?
Well, I'm very lucky in that for easy point. Uh, you know, I've talked a little bit about
Cameron, but you know, the fact that Cameron is, you know, running the operations and the
day-to-day allows, you know, my effort to easy point to really be kind of like strategic
grand vision and then just sales that aren't like additional effort for me. It's more I,
I meet a lot of people in my world of investing now that are ideal clients for the fund. I
mean that, uh, sorry, ideal clients for easy point. And that's how, you know, easy point
I think has grown as virally as it has been, where it's, you know, I'm meeting with a lot
of potential companies and potential investors for the fund. And I'm not just another investor.
I'm another investor who has like the best damn travel business and save them $3,000
in their last trip to Asia, you know? So it's, it's very synergistic. And I think, you know,
that's also intentionally why I've, you know, didn't like shut down easy point when I wanted
to start the fund and have this ambition of being, you know, a world-class investor. A
easy point I think is like really helped, you know, getting my name out there and getting
the fund's name out there. And then, you know, vice versa meeting people just in trying to,
you know, grow my fund and make good investments have, I've met people that have been good
clients for easy point. So my, you know, the majority of my, like my time and my focus
is on the fund. But when I, it's on easy point, it's like, you know, kind of higher level
strategic thinking. And because I'm not as involved in the day to day, I think it actually
kind of gives me a little bit of an edge in terms of making those decisions where so many
entrepreneurs because they're so involved in the day-to-day minutia, it's really easy
to like not kind of think bigger, where, you know, the way that I've set these up, I think
like easy point has actually been as successful as it has been because it's been a side hustle.
And I think a lot of people are like, Oh, wait, you're saying if you were full-time
would be less successful? Well, maybe at this point now, like I could grow the business
faster if I was full-time, but I wouldn't have gotten to this point of finding product
market fit. If I didn't just, you know, follow what my customers really wanted on the side.
If I was trying to like build this specific type of business, I probably would have toiled
with my product as consulting for two years or something versus finding it organically.
So I think they work very synergistically. You know, it's almost like, you know, I play
music, I play poker. Like those are things that are like skills that I've like developed
that I continue to enjoy developing. And I find, and I'm not doing either those like
a ton, but the more I do those, the better clarity of thinking I have when I'm working
at the fund. And I think easy points like that as well, where it's like, it's nice
to have a way to do strategic thinking. That's something that's your baby. That's maybe not
your main venture to just keep those wheels turning and also to really empathize with
entrepreneurs as well. So, you know, a lot of people, VCs, like they, they think back
to when they were being an entrepreneur, but maybe they haven't been one for 20 years now.
But for me, like I'm, I still run a business, you know, so I, I find a lot of times that,
you know, maybe like my first reaction of thinking how to say something isn't the best.
And I think, okay, how would I, how would I feel if I was, you know, the easy point
founder getting this? And then I, you know, reflect and, and write that. And I think,
you know, it's, yeah, it's been a very center synergistic thing.
Yeah. It's so cool to hear how they both work together. Because I think it'd be very difficult
to do it if they didn't. And it makes perfect sense that you're able to recognize that they
did and then decide to keep doing both of them at the same time.
Yeah. And I would, you know, encourage more people to like, you don't want to have like
multiple big things that just like eat away at your time. But I think having passions
that take up like, you know, some set amount of hours that you're, you're disciplined about,
you know, it's like, I really have like, you know, just like one day a week where it's
like a few hours on easy point. And then the rest is just like, you know, helping and supporting
here and there. But like, so it's important to have that discipline. But if you're able
to have that discipline, like having multiple passions, I think it's very synergistic. And
a lot of my like heroes are not people that like worked in one industry and one career
and didn't have other things. It's people that were able to develop skills and, you
know, develop ventures or even, you know, become artists and, and did those all overlapping.
Yeah. Yeah.
I've been playing a lot of chess recently and taking chess lessons and I've yet to figure
out a way to make it work with indie hackers in any way, but I will keep my eye out. Yeah.
Zach, this podcast is listened to by a great many early stage founders who would love to
start a business or we've already started one, but are struggling to figure things out. What's
your advice given all your experiences for someone in that position? What can they learn
from what you've learned?
Product founder fit really like just make sure you're loving what you're doing or you're
going to love what you're doing real soon. And I think have really regular reflection.
It's hard. You know, the last week, frankly, I haven't been like that great about it, but
every day when I like, you know, kind of end the work day or at least end any of like my
larger tasks that I have to do, I think, okay, like how'd today go? Well, how did it go poorly?
How can I do better tomorrow? How do I make my schedule tomorrow? Allow myself to have
the success that I want to have and the happiness that I want to have. And then, you know, even,
you know, a more like weekly or every couple of weeks, deeper reflection of like, am I
really happy doing this? Like what, what do I love and what do I not like? And how can
I cut the stuff I don't like out? And, you know, this is almost therapeutic to say it
out loud. It's like what I know I need to do. I've, you know, been pretty good about
doing it, but I could always do better. And, you know, I'll do a better reflection today
as a result of you asking the question glad to help founder product fit Zach Resnick.
Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. Can you
tell listeners where they can go to learn more about easy point and your fun?
Yeah. So we'll put this all in the show notes. But our website for easy point is easypoint.me
easypoint.me. If you want to learn more about our points optimization plans, it's easypoint.me
slash consulting. And if you want to learn more about our fund, it's unbound in capital
and it's unbound in capital.com. And for anyone interested in the points optimization plans,
$500 off in the first week, 250 after that. And for flights, $200 off in the first week,
100 after that. Yeah. Thank you for having me on Coitland.
Thanks so much, Zach. Listeners, if you enjoyed hearing from Zach, I would love it if you
reached out to him on Twitter and let him know. He is at Trumpet is awesome with no
E at the end. So if you learned anything or you appreciated hearing a story, take a second
and say thanks. I also love it when you reach out. You can find me at ndhackers.com, which
is a community of many thousands of founders and developers who are helping each other
get started building profitable online businesses. So if you're working on something new or just
thinking about getting started, I encourage you to make a post there and tag me so I can
respond. I'm at CS Allen. And again, that's ndhackers.com. Thanks so much for listening
and I will see you next episode.