What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process.
And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and
the strategies they're taking advantage of, so the rest of us can do the same.
All right, I'm here with John Yongfook, the founder of BannerBear.
How's it going, John?
Happy to be here.
Every now and then, I get someone like you on the show.
You're kind of like a prototypical indie hacker.
You are a solo founder, you're a coder, you're also a designer.
I think you do all your design?
Yeah, I do my design, yeah.
And your app, BannerBear, is a software as a service app, and you're also transparent
about everything.
You're basically building in public, posting on IndieHackers all the time and posting on
Twitter and your blog.
How well would you say BannerBear is doing today in terms of revenue or whatever other
metrics you think are important to measure your success?
It's exactly where I wanted it to be.
My initial goal when I became an IndieHacker was to at least replace my old corporate salary.
I thought if I could do that, then that would be my main success metric.
And yeah, happy to say that just last month, actually, it sort of went over that point.
So it's currently on 16K MRR.
And yeah, I passed 15K last month, so that was like the cutoff point.
Super exciting.
So $16,000 a month in revenue, and it's going pretty rapidly.
Right now, it's May, I think you were at $10,000 a month in revenue in January.
And what are your expenses look like as a one-person startup?
How much of this $16,000 a month is profit?
It's funny, people always ask me that very cynically when they hear that you're making
X amount of MRR, then the next question will be, well, yeah, but how much of that is actual
profit?
It's a typical SaaS product.
So I have Heroku costs, and I have AWS costs, and all in all, it adds up to a few hundred
dollars a month, I think, in terms of the running costs.
Then in terms of my time, it's pretty much a full-time job at this point.
And that's the dream of SaaS, right?
It's super scalable.
You can add more and more customers, but you're not really adding much to your costs.
And so theoretically, you can grow to the moon without having to build a huge team,
or without necessarily having to pay a lot of expenses, right?
It's scales on physical businesses where you're actually having to pay more money for every
additional cookie that you sell or every additional widget that you create in your factory.
And so that's kind of why I think you're living the indie hacker dream.
You're a prototypical indie hacker because you are a coder and because you are leveraging
your skills.
It's become a little bit more in vogue recently, not to regress, but to almost take a step
back and do content-based businesses where, for example, you're writing a blog or a newsletter
and making money that way.
But not as many people in 2021 are building SaaS apps as I've seen in the past.
It's not as popular as it used to be, it seems.
I've noticed that.
I've noticed that.
There's nothing wrong with it.
I think it's great that there's new ways that different types of people can create scalable
businesses now.
I think that's really cool.
But as a developer, as a designer, I get a kick out of building SaaS apps and I like
to see other people also building SaaS apps.
So yeah, it's been strange for me to see the community diversify over the last year, mostly
in the last year or two years, but I think there's still a core of people who are looking
to build SaaS apps and looking to live that indie hacker dream of building something that
can scale hugely without too much cost scaling as well.
Yeah.
And before we jump into things, what is BannerBear exactly?
Who's using it and what do they get out of it?
BannerBear is an image and video generation API and it helps businesses automate creative
tasks such as, but not limited to, Banner ad generation.
So the way it works is you or your design team comes into BannerBear and designs a template
that can be then reused multiple times, thousands of times, millions of times, BannerBear then
takes that template and turns it into a rest API.
So then your developer team can push data to the rest API and they get images back.
So there's two types of customers.
There's like kind of low volume and high volume customers.
So the low volume customers are social media managers who are looking to kind of like automate
some of their daily repetitive tasks.
So they've got kind of like social media posts of a certain design that they have to do regularly.
And BannerBear will just help them produce those images on a daily basis.
And then on the high volume scale, I've got customers like digital agencies who are using
BannerBear to generate tens of thousands of ad variations for various products that they
manage for their clients.
So yeah, what's been interesting growing BannerBear is seeing those two use cases that are like
opposite ends of the scale.
And there's like nothing really in between those two things as well.
So figuring out how to market to both of those end users, it has been pretty challenging
actually.
And there's always been this thing in my mind of like, should I be focusing on one or should
I be kind of like trying to target both of them at the same time?
No right or wrong answer to that.
I think at the moment I'm trying to target both and that seems to be going okay.
But yeah, who knows how things will evolve.
Yeah, I mean, in a sense, you've like, quote unquote, figured it out or you figured out
enough to be able to get to close to $200,000 a year in revenue.
And like maybe you haven't hit on the perfectly optimized answer yet, but it's good enough
for you to have gone to this point.
And you actually wrote a blog post last year where you talked about basically growing BannerBear
to $10,000 a month in revenue, which you've sensed eclipsed by quite a bit.
And that's kind of like a flagship number for indie hackers, $10,000 a month in revenue
is the point where most people can start to see this eclipsing how much money they're
making from their normal job, you know, suddenly becomes worth it.
I want to talk about how you got there, because that's the point that almost every fledgling
indie hacker wants to get to.
And every year, it seems like the path that people take to get there is a little bit different.
You mentioned that you did have a corporate job, and that BannerBear is now making more
money than your corporate job was.
What were you doing before you even started on this path?
So previously, I was working for a company called Aviva, which is a British insurance
company.
I sell all sorts of insurance products for home, for motor, for life, that kind of thing.
I was part of the digital team, and this is a big company, I think 30,000 employees.
So yeah, I was kind of responsible for mobile apps and websites and things like that in
Asia for Aviva.
Pretty early on, I realized that, oh, you know, this is probably like the last corporate
job I'm ever going to be able to get, or this is like the best one that I'm ever going to
be able to get because it was very obvious to me that the people who were more senior
than me, I just did not understand their job.
There was no way that I was going to be able to do what they did because their job was
way more about relationship building and internal influence and all of these skills that I know
nothing about.
I know how to build things.
You give me a design and I'll build the app, or you give me an app and I'll do the design.
I know how to do those kind of things.
The role that I was in at Aviva was sort of like the peak point of that kind of role,
where you're a senior executor kind of thing.
Anything beyond that, and you're in much more of a kind of corporate political role, and
I was just not built for that.
There's really no easy, clear-cut path to get there, but that's also where a lot of
the money is in the corporate world, being in those sort of hard to define, there's no
real school to train you for that job.
It's just supply and demand market dynamics.
If your job has a very clear and obvious title that many other millions of people could slot
themselves into, then that means that there's basically a lot of supply for hiring people
for your job and maybe not as much demand, so it's harder to get paid as much.
If you're some sort of weird executive who's got all these relationships, then you're super
hard to replace.
The reason you're rare is because it's hard to do that job and it's hard for others to
learn and get to where you are, so I can see it would be frustrating to not be able to
get there.
Did you want to be able to do that, or was it just that you didn't even care about it?
I'm 41 years old, so I knew that – you can't teach an old dog new tricks, basically.
I knew that it was too late for me to learn all those skills and be good at them, enough
to sort of advance my career in that direction.
Pretty early on, I realized, wow, okay, this is probably like the last corporate job I'm
ever going to get or the best corporate job I'm ever going to get, so what do I do?
I mean, I can either just stay at this position forever and hope that they never sort of fire
me or something, or I can start thinking about doing something for myself.
How did you get inspired to do something for yourself, because I think a lot of other people
might take the first option.
They might say, well, there really isn't a way for me to do something for myself and
in a way, talking about not being able to teach an old dog new tricks.
That is kind of a new trick, going out and being an indie hacker is not an easy thing
to do.
Okay, so I cheated a little bit because I had actually done it before about – when
was it?
Maybe six or seven years ago now?
I built my first kind of SaaS app and made a bit of money from it.
It got up to like $3,000 USD MRR.
That experience taught me that, yeah, I can do that.
I've got it in me to – if I can get to $3,000, I can get to $6,000, I can get to
$9,000, etc.
Tell me about that app, because it's a lot of money, why quit that?
Yeah, so that was called Beatrix, and it was a social media management sort of scheduling
app of which there are now many, many.
Very similar to Buffer, but Beatrix's focus at the time was more about content suggestion.
So it had like a big library of content, and you could sort of pick and choose to schedule
content instead of having to sort of go out and find content yourself to schedule.
So yeah, I launched that sort of right around the same time that Buffer launched, and I
think also maybe Hootsuite launched.
Buffer started to do really well.
As I said, it got up to $3,000 USD MRR, but I just kind of like ran out of steam a little
bit.
I think it just – it wasn't going beyond $3,000, and I saw that Buffer was doing really
well and kind of like every feature they launched, I was like, oh man, I was going to do that.
Either I was going to do that or I should have done that.
So eventually, I think they kind of just – they just wore me down a little bit, and I thought,
okay, they've won this battle.
And I – not I shut down, but I put the app into kind of maintenance mode and just kind
of let it run.
It's the end of every startup, I think, is when you lose steam as a founder, because
you can run out of money and then say like, okay, I'm going to keep this going and find
other ways to make money.
I'll work a job and work half a week or something, or your competitor can crush you.
You can say, okay, I'm going to pivot and go in a different direction and try something
different, right?
No matter what happens, you can always keep going, but when you decide, you know what,
my heart's just not in it anymore, that's a true moment that your company's dead.
That's why I always say now to anyone asking me about validating ideas or, you know, is
this idea good or whatever, I always say the number one thing that I think is most important
is like, are you passionate about this idea?
Because it doesn't matter if it's a good business idea, because if someone else comes
along with the good – with the same good business idea and they're more passionate
about it, they will win because they will outlast you.
When you're tired, they're going to be still working.
So that's why I think – I think that's been quite fundamental to why I've stuck
with Banner Bear and why I think I'm still really enthusiastic about Banner Bear is because
it comes from a like a personal pain point that I've experienced in the past.
And I just love the idea of automated design.
That's always something I've been interested in, whereas if I compare that to my previous
SaaS app Beatrix, I wasn't like super passionate about social media scheduling.
It's not really something that I could go deep into and feel like I'm like changing
the world by helping people to schedule their social media calendars.
There are other people who will be super passionate about that, but I wasn't.
Back to the corporate job, the corporate world, until eventually you hit the ceiling and you
realize, you know what?
This is not the life for you.
What did that transition look like leaving your corporate job or did you stay at your
corporate job and work on Banner Bear on the side?
No.
So I really envy people who are able to do that.
And I think that's a great way to start your indie hackers journey is by doing it
alongside your corporate job, if number one, your contract allows it and number two, you
have the energy to do it.
So I didn't have either of those things.
Aviva had a very strict policy about, I mean, I think also because I was at kind of like
a senior management level.
So they don't want you working on anything else, basically other than Aviva stuff.
So that was in my contract, but also even if it wasn't in my contract, I just did not
have the energy like every day I was working until kind of 7pm, 8am to 7pm ish.
And there was no place for me to fit in like a side project.
So I would have liked to do that, but unfortunately I couldn't.
So I had to begin after I fully sort of left Aviva.
And then I just had this glorious blank slate in front of me with like, literally like a
blank slate.
I didn't plan anything beforehand because I thought, oh, even that would be a bit risky.
If I'm like planning a business before I leave my job, they might, you know, that might come
back to bite me in the butt like 10 years later.
So I deliberately started with a complete blank slate.
As you may or may not know, I tried to do the 12 startups challenge at that point.
So I started right away doing like a kind of like launching a product every single month.
Doesn't that blank slate period feel so good where you can basically do anything you want?
You quit your job.
You've got some savings.
How much time and savings did you have?
I managed to save up quite a bit of a, what you call it like a runway.
And I had about $200,000 in the bank.
I also say to people like you need to be realistic about what your burn rate is and how much
time you're going to give yourself.
You can't do this if you've only got like three months of runway.
I don't think you can do it if you have six months of runway.
I think even that's a bit tight.
So I had about, I think that would have given me like comfortably three years of runway,
of earning nothing to try and build a business from scratch, which I thought was doable.
It's super smart that you decided to do like the 12 startups in 12 months challenge.
So this is something that was kind of pioneered by Peter levels.
It's literally exactly like it sounds.
You do 12 different startups in 12 different months.
And I think one of the challenges that people run into when they quit their job and they
have all this runway, they've got, you know, two, three, four years to just like live and
do whatever they want is Parkinson's law, right?
Like the work you have expands to fill the time allotted.
So you're like, Oh, I've got multiple years to work on something.
And then you work on something and it takes you like eight months to get your prototype
out.
But if you have like the set goal, like I'm going to have my business launched, built and
launched and marketed and ready and under, you know, a couple of weeks because the next
month they have to start a completely new one, then that's kind of a time limit that
keeps you honest and prevents you from just taking years and years and years to figure
out what you want to do.
What some people expect from the 12 startups challenge, by the way, I didn't launch 12.
I only managed to launch seven and then I got kind of like a bit burned out, but seven
is still pretty good.
I think I don't think anyone's got to 12 so far, but everyone always expects that the
reason or the number one thing that you get out of the 12 startups challenge is, Oh, one
of the things is going to turn into a massive business, but I don't think that's realistic
to expect that.
I think the number one thing it can teach you is, yeah, as you said, to keep yourself
honest and to learn how to timebox yourself and to just, just to know how to draw a line
and ship something and get it into customers hands.
I think that's the true sort of number one learning you get from that exercise.
And I think that's, that really has built a foundation for how I, you know, work with
Banaben now.
I'm very strict about timeboxing.
I'm very, I ship very frequently.
I don't go into sort of, you know, weeks and weeks and weeks of, of development without
shipping something.
So yeah, that's kind of built a foundation for how I work.
I think the other lesson or learning that you can hope for from the 12 startups challenge
is kind of giving you a compass bearing of what you're passionate about.
If you do the 12 startups challenge and you try a bunch of different things, you're going
to see which of the areas that you're actually really interested in.
You're going to have some ideas that you think are just good ideas and you think, Oh, that's
going to be a million dollar business, but then it turns out to not be.
And it also turns out that you're not interested in it.
But then there'll be other things that you're like, Oh, I want to kind of pull on this thread
a little bit more.
And those are the things I think that you should be pursuing.
So one of those areas for me was automated image generation.
So I was doing kind of like an image generation related products in, in, in the 12 startups
challenge.
And that was a space that I was interested in.
I was like, Oh, okay.
Could I make this like 10 times faster?
Could I make this 10 times more useful?
Can I make this 10 times whatever?
So that was the thread that I was pulling on.
And then eventually I kind of had the idea for banner beer.
It's kind of fascinating to hear about you going through this process because so many
people don't get started because they find it difficult to come up with just one idea.
They're like, I would start something, but I have no idea what to build.
Right?
Whereas if you're doing a different startup every month, you're routinely coming up with
ideas.
That you had that you didn't even have time to build.
And you kind of face the opposite problem, which is like this choice paralysis thing
where, you know, in the modern world, especially if you're an indie hacker trying to decide
what business to build, you've got an overwhelming number of choices.
Even if you pick a particular business idea, there's an overwhelming number of ways that
you could, you know, take that you can make it mobile, you can make a desktop, you can
make it web, you can make it red, make it blue, you can do whatever you want.
What was your process?
Like, if you remember for like coming up with these ideas and figuring out which ones were
worth working on and which ones to sort of leave on the back burner.
I actually had a, I had an Excel sheet or a Google doc, just full of ideas.
And I had the ideas on the left hand side, I had various columns of criteria that I was
scoring these ideas on.
And they were things like, you know, how hard it is to build, how defensible is it, how
easy is it going to be to get my first customers kind of like based on, you know, do I have
access to those markets already?
In retrospect, I don't think that was the best way to do things.
It's one way to do things.
And if you have, you know, analysis paralysis, then just do that, just assign a score and
pick them and be done with it.
But if I had to go back into it all again, as I said, I think I would add a sort of a
passion score that I would weight that more strongly above everything else, which I wasn't
doing.
I think I was more focused on at that time, I was more focused on I'm going to build a
million dollar idea and it's going to be it's going to be so clever, and it's going to be,
you know, so defensible and all of those things are a bit unrealistic, I think when you're
first starting out the best compass bearing is just what are you passionate about.
It turned out that you were passionate about basically automated image generation, probably
not something many people would predict that they're going to be passionate about.
What was it that stood out to you about that?
Was it like the work style or the revenue or like the you know, the business prospects
and the market?
I'd worked at a company previously where we would have desperately needed this product.
And it didn't exist at the time.
So I used to work in an ecommerce company a long time ago, where we were a pretty typical
ecommerce company, we every day, we would have some new products to put on the store
and those products would get photographed.
And then those photographs would go onto the website.
But then after that, we would have to turn those photographs into banner ads for various
different platforms, different sizes, different aspect ratios, and different words in the
banners because you know, the marketing team would want to test this message versus that
that message.
And at the time, we did all of this manually.
So I was running the design team at that time.
And we had this kind of little conveyor belt style process every day, where we would get
the images in from this side and out that side, we would spit, you know, a dozen or
so banners for each product.
And it was so labor intensive.
And we were all just kind of drained at the end of every single day is really repetitive.
And there was no kind of automated solution for this at the time.
Now there is, there's like these kind of big enterprise products you can plug into.
But I thought, oh, it would be so cool if there was just a self serve SaaS product that
I could just sign up for, get an API key, and then boom, I can just automate this.
So at this point, you're probably what, like, eight to 12 months into your journey.
You haven't made a dime from any of your projects, I don't think.
Were any of these projects making money?
So I actually had not built a business model into any of these 12 startup products, which
was probably dumb.
I think going back to the topic of runway, I think I had a bit too much runway.
It's Parkinson's law again, because I felt, well, I've got three years to, you know, figure
this stuff out.
So I don't really need to make money in year one, which I think is a stupid thing to think.
But that's how my brain was sort of processing it.
Yeah, which is a pain because having that revenue incentive, like having to make money
from your products or trying to charge money for your products will be kind of a signal
in the right direction.
People might say, I'll pay you 10 bucks a month for this, but I won't pay you 30.
People will say, you know, I like the product, but I'm not willing to pay for it.
You find out, okay, well, what am I going to build that people actually will pay for?
And it's really hard to figure that out, or iterate your way there if you don't have a
price tag on it.
I think I was just also afraid because the moment you put a price tag on something and
people don't want to pay, then it's like, it's like a personal rejection and it hurts.
And I think I was just kind of subconsciously avoiding that.
And after the, after the seven products that I launched, I had a bit of a break.
I was a bit burned out.
And then I launched one more thing, which was like a video conferencing tool for remote
companies, which I thought was a good idea, but again, wasn't super passionate about it.
And that I put a price tag on and nobody paid for it.
And that was really painful.
That was my rude awakening into, okay, now I'm seeing how difficult it is actually to
get people to pay for something.
Well, at this point, you've got what a bunch of different projects.
Some of them are dead.
Some of them are shuttered.
Some of them are probably still running.
One of my favorite pieces of advice for indie hackers is generally speaking, you should
be trying lots of different things.
And if any given idea doesn't work, you should probably just drop it because it's a waste
of your time.
It's not working.
Like you don't want to, if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
But if your journey isn't working, you know, overall things aren't working.
Don't quit your journey.
Keep going, right?
You want to keep sorting new ideas.
You want to resurrect the ideas that seem to have promise.
What did you do when you look back and you figured out that, you know, all of your different
ideas hadn't really worked out the way that you wanted them to?
Yeah.
So this was probably around August, September, 2019, where my seven products from the 12
startup challenge, they were basically all gone.
And then I kind of went back to the roots and just thought, okay, what am I actually
really interested in?
I spent two months working on something that I'm not really interested in, and that was
just agonizing.
I ended up launching something not called banner bear, but it was a similar ish product.
It was a image generation tool for your website.
So it would help you generate Instagram posts from your website pages.
And basically it would, it would sort of scan your website and take your cover images or
your article titles, that kind of thing.
And then it would generate a whole bunch of Instagram posts.
So that I put a price on that I was really interested in, you know, personally interested
in the actual problem that it was solving and some people paid for it.
So that was a good, a little bit of reassurance, a little bit of, you know, things were heading
in the right direction, but I made the classic indie hacker mistake of charging $9 a month
for it.
And obviously revenue growth was super slow because it is excruciatingly slow to grow
business off $9 subscriptions.
And you need something like almost 2000 people basically to get to the revenue you're at
today, you need almost 2000 customers.
And like that is a ridiculous number.
It takes years if you're nailing it.
If you're not nailing it, it'll take you a decade to get to 2000 customers.
So people don't realize that conversion rates on the internet are usually around like 1%.
And so 2000 customers means like 200,000 users, assuming you have like a freemium product
or something.
So that means you have to be, like you said, you have to be nailing it to be like a ridiculously
good marketer, probably a team of marketers working for years and years and months and
months and months, which is why it makes way more sense to charge way more.
So you don't need to get 2000 customers to get to your revenue goals.
So you only need to get to like 200 customers or 20 customers or something that's way easier
to get to.
The only companies I know, the only sort of small indie hacker type companies I know who
are getting to 2000 customers with kind of $9-ish subscriptions, they're killing it on
their marketing.
And one of those is plausible.
I think they do an amazing job of their marketing.
They're everywhere.
I see them pop up on Hacker News.
I see them pop up on my Twitter feed.
If you're not them, then you're not going to get to 2000 customers at $9 a month.
So yeah, it's better to charge more and aim for a lower volume of customers, I think,
unless you're a marketing God.
So yeah, that's exactly what I did.
I started charging more, and the revenue went up a little bit.
But then I think I just realized at a point like the use case that I was targeting at
that time was way too, there was too many criteria basically to be my target customer.
So I thought, okay, what's a way of massively expanding the use cases and having a few more
types of target customer, and then the idea for an API, but basically just turning the
whole thing into an API so that you can do whatever you want to do with BanoBear.
I'm just the provider of the technology.
And then the actual kind of use case is up to you.
Very quickly, that idea made a lot of sense because I realized that a lot of the companies
that I look up to or are big fans of are also API products like Stripe, for example.
There's a good fit, I think, between indie hackers and being an API product provider
because it keeps the product simple, and it keeps your scope of work simple.
You're just the technology provider.
You do the hard work in the background, and then what the customer uses it for is kind
of up to them.
I think, I always say that indie hackers are a good fit for building API products.
Yeah.
I think there's several advantages to it.
In addition to what you're saying, one of the good things, also for people who don't
know what an API is, it's an application programming interface, it's just a way for one program
to talk to another.
So the fact that you have an API company means that instead of people coming to your website
and having to drag and drop and fill out forms to make an image, they can write code that
talks to your website and you'll give them an image back.
And what's cool about this is that usually when people write code to talk to an API,
they write the code and then they're done with it.
They go on and do other things and they might take years to turn that code off or decide
they don't need it anymore, which means you have a very low churn business.
Most of your customers keep generating images automatically in the background.
Isn't that a little bit scary to make that transition though?
Because if you're building an API company, it now means that your users have to be software
engineers.
So not only that, they have to read probably a bunch of guides and documentation to learn
how to use your product and then like code something.
Just like the process of somebody using your API product is so much harder and so much
longer than them learning how to use like a drag and drop interface or fill out a form
on your website.
I think what helped was I loved the sound of all of that.
So I thought, okay, so my new goal now as a company is I've got to have the best documentation.
I've got to have some cool like API console in the dashboard.
I've got to have all these things and all of that sounded like, that all sounded magical
to me.
I was like, I really want to build that.
This is the product that I want to build, totally different direction, different challenges.
But as I found out later on, the target was not just developers, it was also this whole
new no-code space, which at the time of building BannerBear, I had like zero inclination that
it was growing so fast, the no-code space.
I mean, I had never touched Zapier, I think, when I first launched BannerBear.
But after a few months, it became really obvious that that was a massively growing space that
I needed to kind of tap into.
So what was your strategy like for, you know, you're doing all this building, you're doing
all this coding.
How are you actually getting people in the door?
I mean, there are these big waves like no-code and sources of users where like people might
be interested in what you're doing.
But how do you like, let them know like, hey, I have this app, I have this API, and it'll
solve this problem that you have, like, please come sign up.
My whole strategy has just been to create momentum and create a sense of gravity.
So I do that through, you know, I post on Twitter pretty frequently, I have an open
startup page, I have a newsletter that like clockwork, I send every two weeks, even when
I don't want to even when I'm like super busy, I still send it every two weeks and it has
a full update.
And it's not like copy pasted from anywhere else.
It's like me sitting down writing this thing.
Usually with some kind of like helpful, you know, nugget of story at the end.
And I, you know, I get a lot of people saying that they like the newsletter.
And they're not even my target customers.
They're just people who like the content that I'm writing.
So all of these things and a bunch of other things, you add it all together.
And yeah, the right people will find you it maybe it sounds like a messy way to do it.
It's not very kind of like targeted.
It's maybe not very efficient either.
But it's the only way I know how to do things.
So that's, that's been my my strategy and creating things like a flagship content where
yes, I do my biweekly newsletter and I do regular blog posts, but every now and then
I'll also create some kind of piece of flagship content that I want people to share.
So that was the 10,000 MRR post, which was like this big timeline of telling the story
from the beginning to end.
I think that got put on Hacker News and that, you know, went a little bit sort of viral,
quote unquote.
So all of these things added together, you know, creates the audience around you.
And again, the important point is it's not like those people are your exact target customers,
but they can help to connect you with your target customers.
They have a friend who says, I need to generate images like, Oh, I've been following this
guy John on Twitter, you should check out exactly.
And then, and then also very often I'll see in my Twitter mentions, someone who I don't
know at all is saying, I'm trying to do this thing.
And then someone who follows me is replying, Oh, you should check out at young folk at
banner bear HQ.
Right.
Because I think it does what you want.
And I'm like, Oh, wow.
Okay, that's cool.
That's, that's exactly cool.
This whole thing is working.
So in a way, like all of these marketing efforts are almost like little startups in and of
themselves.
Like just because you write a blog post doesn't mean anybody's going to read it.
Just because you have a newsletter doesn't mean anybody's going to subscribe or just
because you're tweeting doesn't mean anybody's going to follow you.
What's your strategy been, uh, for making these channels succeed because so many other
indie hackers are trying all of these things and they're just sort of like tweeting or
writing or blogging into the wind.
You do have to do it well.
So you can't just write a newsletter.
You do have to think about, you know, am I trying to teach people something?
Am I trying to get people excited?
Am I trying to, you know, there should, there needs to be kind of a fundamental goal of,
uh, any of the content you create.
Like to give you an example, the, uh, the 10 K M R R timeline that I made, my, my fundamental
goal for that was not really to tell the story and not really to be informative.
The fundamental goal was I want it to look cool because I want people to look at this
and then say, Oh, I'm not going to read any of this, but this looks really cool and I
want to share it with my friends.
That was the, that was the main goal.
If you do read the content, it is actually informative and it does tell the story.
But the primary goal was, I just want it to look cool so that people within 10 seconds
are like, Oh, I got to share this with someone.
And to get shared, you have to literally write stuff that's remarkable as in people want
to remark on it to their friends.
People generally only tell their friends about things that are really interesting or surprising
or new.
And so if you'd made this blog post look like every other indie hacker who's gotten to some
revenue milestone and it was just like, you know, black texts on like a white medium page,
you know, blog post background or something, that'd be completely unremarkable.
You know, why would anybody share this?
It's already been shared a million times, but yours looks so different that even if
people don't read the content, you're right.
Like it's worth sharing because it's like, look at this cool thing.
Yeah.
I think understanding a little bit about basic human psychology is, is, is really helpful.
If you're going to learn one thing or if you're going to have one assumption, just assume
that everyone has incredibly low attention span.
So if you have, if you hold that assumption in your head as you're creating content or
as you're writing a blog post, I think that's a really helpful belief to have, even if it's
not true for everyone, but it's quite true for most people.
Yeah.
Your font size in this blog post is like 30 pixels tall and it's only like, you know,
either bullet points or just like one sentence at a time.
And the next paragraph is like one sentence.
So it's written for people who are like, just briefly scrolling.
And I'll admit the first time I saw this blog post, like I didn't read it.
I skimmed through it.
I was like, Oh, this is pretty cool.
You know, I just came through like a few of the points because people just like when you're
on Twitter, you're not really in a state where you want to sit down and read, you know, 10,000
words.
I'm the same.
So yeah, it was created with that intent.
Like all of the sentences are super short.
You know, I wrote them and then I took out a bunch of words.
All of the, you know, the bullet points have little emojis because if people don't read
the content, at least they can look at the picture and get a sense of what you're talking
about.
Yeah.
This kind of stuff.
Also, you know, there's a way to write on Twitter as well.
You know, you don't, um, if you write all in one sort of paragraph as a single block
of text, people will just skip over it.
But if you write in, I think it's called broatory, like every single sentence is a different
line.
Yeah.
It's a different line, but, uh, if you write like that, it makes people stop in their feed
because they think, Oh, this guy's saying something important or this guy's, or this
tweet is easier to read or, you know, so, and what's smart is like you are learning
these tricks and practicing them because you built it into your schedule to do marketing
every other week.
I think I read this in your journey to $10,000 a month, uh, blog posts that you did a week
of coding and building features and then a week of marketing and then a week of coding
and a week of marketing.
And you just never got off of that, that track.
You always made sure to force yourself to sort of batch the marketing work, which is
really smart because most people who are coders and designers never get to the marketing stuff.
They don't put it on the calendar.
It's at the very bottom of their to-do list.
They've always got one more feature they're going to build.
And then eventually they'll do all this other stuff going right back to the start.
Your initial question was like, you know, how did I get up to this?
The 10 K milestone.
If I have one kind of lesson to give or one big takeaway from the journey from like 1000
to 10,000 MRR, it was consistency of balancing 50 50 product and marketing.
I did that for basically like seven months straight.
And you can see on the timeline, the 10 K MRR timeline, the point where I start doing
that, it's just this almost this straight line going up.
There's no like up and down or not a lot of it.
It's just all going up because I'm building new things, but I'm also telling people about
them.
And they're telling other people about them.
And there's just this constant cycle of that.
So I think that was probably the most important thing I did from 1K to 10 K MRR was just keep
that really consistent.
What did it feel like to actually hit that $10,000 a month goal?
I mean, like that's the the cut.
It's a promise land.
So we really want to get it's funny.
With SAS because there's also churn as well, right?
So you can reach a revenue milestone, but then, you know, a few days later, you could
go back under it because people have churned or whatever.
I actually, I never really celebrate revenue milestones that much these days anymore because
I know that it's going to be super embarrassing if I say, Oh, I got to take a MRR.
And then like a few days later, it's like back to 980 or 9,800 or something.
So when I do celebrate a revenue milestone, it's because I've blown way past it.
Like I've got to, you know, 10.5 or 10.6.
But then by that time, the euphoria has already gone.
So it's like this weird, I don't know, now it's just numbers, basically.
How do you feel about it?
If you think about it, like from a logical perspective, not the emotions, but like, what
can you now do now that you have this stable company and then have your plans changed,
if at all?
Initially, I thought I would run this thing solo until the very end, but especially after
hitting 15K MRR, I'm like really, really busy.
As I said, it's a full-time job for me, more than a full-time job.
I pretty much start at like 8AM and then finish at kind of like 6PM, 7PM.
So it's pretty full on.
After 15K, I was like, I got to get someone to help me.
I can't do all of this by myself.
I've got like way too much on my backlog.
And also by that point, the business had reached a point where I knew, okay, that I can delegate,
that I can delegate, this I can keep for myself kind of thing, which wasn't so obvious in
the beginning.
So yeah, that's the next step really is just kind of bringing some help on board initially
just kind of like part-time, but if they can grow into full-time roles, that would be great.
Yeah.
I saw your post on Indie Hackers last week.
It says, I'm finally hiring.
Taking a year to get better at this point, but finally, as you just said, you're getting
overwhelmed with work, but you know what you can delegate and you got enough cash to help
you hire.
What's your strategy?
I mean, how did this Indie Hackers post go?
Where do you think you're going to find the people that you want to hire?
I had a chat with one of my Indie Hacker friends, Adrian from Simple Analytics, and he's gone
through this process.
So I asked him how he did it and I'm basically copying what he did.
So he did the exact same thing, application process, homework assignment.
I think maybe he had one more step and then an interview and you're basically just kind
of whittling down the number of candidates at each stage.
And then he said the purpose of the interview was really just like, who do I click with?
Because it's all about personality by that point.
And he said for this role that he was hiring, he had two or three applicants and then one
was like an instant connection.
So that's the one he hired.
Very cool.
Well, you've come to not the end of your journey, but definitely a turning point.
What do you think the future looks like for Banner Bear?
Do you foresee yourself staying interested in Banner Bear?
Do you think you'll switch to other projects in the future?
And what do you do as an Indie Hacker once you're making more money than you're making
at your normal job?
Well, this is like the Indie Hacker existential question, I don't know.
I think it would be awesome to try and grow Banner Bear to a million dollars in AR.
So I've got a long way to go.
But I think that's the next goal in terms of the financial goals.
And honestly, going back to what I said about my corporate life previously, I miss working
in a team.
There are some Indie Hackers who want to always work solo.
And that's fine.
I think I did too in the beginning.
But now I think the next goal would be in terms of the kind of company that I want to
build.
So I actually wouldn't mind growing Banner Bear into a small company of, say, maybe like
10 people, for example, fully remote.
That would be really cool, especially because now I can see, like, OK, there are very different
specializations.
I could have a whole little team of template designers, and then I can have a small development
team of the API guys who make sure the API is running correctly, that kind of thing.
Who knows if it will change?
But I think from the very beginning, I've always had that feeling that it would be cool
to have to work in a team again.
A million dollars in revenue and a 10-person squad.
It's like the perfect team size, just for the elite crew of the people that you really
want to hang out with who add a spark to your day and who are sort of pushing in the same
direction as you and they're good at their jobs.
And why not, if you're going to start a company, why not use your company to basically hack
your way in surrounding yourself with the people that you actually want to spend time
with every day?
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, listen, John, we've walked through the entire banner bear story.
I know earlier you said that if you gave one piece of advice to any hackers, trying to
get from zero to $10,000 a month in revenue would be to sort of do this 50-50 split between
coding and marketing.
I think that's sage advice, and hopefully people will take it to heart and learn more
than just a thing or two from your story.
John Janfug, thank you so much for coming on the show and telling us about the story
behind banner bear.
Thank you very much, Courtney.
It's been awesome.
Can you let people know where to go to learn more about what you're writing about, what
you're building, how to sign up for your newsletter, and maybe where to find you on Twitter?
Yep.
So, on Twitter, you can follow me at youngfug, y-o-n-g-f-o-o-k.
Banner bear is at bannerbear.com.
And if you want to sign up for the newsletter, it's at the bottom of my open page.
So you can go to bannerbear.com slash open.
All right.
Thanks again, John.