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.
I'm here with Shahid Khan, the co-founder of Loom and Prolog.
Shahid, how's it going?
Going good.
Thanks for having me, Cortland.
Thanks for coming.
So, you are working on Prolog right now, which is sort of like a, how would you describe
it?
Like a parent company, a holding company?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Prolog is a holding company of both media and tech brands, and our starting brands are
hyper in early stage accelerator as well as Product Hunt, the home of a lot of the early
beginnings for some of the most promising companies of our time.
Yeah.
I think everybody listening will know what Product Hunt is.
It's kind of like the best place to launch a startup.
Probably half the people listening have launched their startup on Product Hunt, whether it
went well or not.
I've done, I think, three different launches on Product Hunt, but not many will know what
Hyper is.
How would you describe Hyper?
Hyper is a early stage accelerator.
We call it a founder program.
It's a $60 million fund, and our typical offering is $300K for 5% of any startup that goes through
our program.
It's a very hands-on four-week process with our companies, and it's completely remote.
We invest primarily early, but occasionally we'll do an investment into an existing round
of a company.
Cool.
Is it safe to say that Hyper is almost like a competitor to Y Combinator in a way?
The fact that you have these cohorts, the fact that you're investing $300,000 or 5%
of the company, it's similar-ish terms, and then everybody goes through this process together,
and then you're providing these benefits, helping with distribution, presumably through
Product Hunt and other means, helping with product, helping with recruiting.
Is that a fair comparison?
You're sort of like a new Y Combinator?
The way I'll say this, YC has definitely paved the way for Silicon Valley to get in early
in a company, provide support, provide mentorship from people who have built stuff in the past,
and create really this new model that never really existed before.
YC has also been around for, I think, 12 or 15 years now.
That model has proven to work, and I think that the big differentiation here is Hyper
has this network of mentors and investors and our general founder community that a lot
of companies tend to work very hands-on and very closely with.
That's one specific angle, and then the separate angle is the distribution element.
As companies start to either become launch-ready or have already launched a product and want
to build brand awareness, that's where Hyper comes in and kind of helps them get access
to that distribution.
Cool.
So we're going to talk a lot about this.
We're going to talk about the backstory.
How do you raise a $60 million fund?
How do you determine which startups to invest in?
But I think first I want to know more about you because it's the first time that we've
met, and I have no idea how somebody even ends up in the position that you're in.
And so I understand you have kind of a long history in the startup community, and it begins
presumably with the startup you created.
I think when you were a teenager, I read an article that said, Meet 16-year-old Shahid
Khan, who's the CEO and founder of Viatask.
I don't have very many people on the podcast who started to start up at 16.
So what was Viatask and what was going on in your life that you decided to start a startup
as a teenager?
Yeah, it's one of those things when you look back on your past and you're like, man, that
was a very embarrassing time of my life.
Again, I was 16, I'm 26 now, so this is almost over a decade ago.
Yeah, Viatask was the concept stemmed from me being a true 16-year-old.
I hadn't gotten my driver's permit yet, so I couldn't really drive anywhere.
And I asked myself the question, as most 16-year-olds probably do, which is, I just got back home
from school and I was craving McDonald's, but McDonald's was probably two and a half
miles away from my house.
And there's no way I was going to walk to McDonald's.
There's no way I was going to bike to McDonald's just to have McDonald's.
I was like, what if there was an app at the time, this is when social on mobile was really
starting to explode, this was like 2011, 2012, and I was like, what if there was a mobile
app that would allow people to post their errands and people within their community,
sometimes in their neighborhood, would bid on these projects, these microtasks, and complete
these tasks.
So whether it's mowing someone's lawn, shoveling someone's driveway, picking up dry cleaning
from the dry cleaners, et cetera.
And the whole concept was called the neighbors helping neighbors was like the tagline of
the business.
Right.
But let's step back a second, because I mean, you're 16, most 16-year-olds are like, I want
McDonald's and it's too far away and I can't drive, they just don't eat McDonald's.
They don't say like, let me start something in the vein of TaskRabbit or Airbnb and create
a local network effects driven startup.
What was going on in your head that that was even an option for you?
Who were your influences?
Were you reading startup books?
How does a 16-year-old come to that conclusion that that's how you're going to spend your
time?
I remember a bit vaguely.
I was in my library at school, I was in high school at the time, probably towards the end
of my freshman year, beginning of my sophomore year.
I was in the library during study hall and I opened up TechCrunch and I saw the first
thing that popped up, which was Peter Thiel had announced this new program called 20 Under
20, which had since been rebranded to the Thiel Fellowship.
And as an early sophomore, teachers are starting to tell you about college and how you have
to start thinking about college and admissions and start thinking through what you want to
do for the rest of your life over the next six months.
And if you haven't made the decision, then you're kind of falling behind.
And I always knew that I'm just a really bad student, so the way I've learned and have
learned a lot in my life to this day is just by doing and failing and trying to be more
deliberate about how I fail.
And I just knew that I was always fascinated by business and technology and that's why
I was like reading TechCrunch.
But yeah, I mean, it all stemmed from that moment where it was kind of like this, aha,
the founder of PayPal, first investor in Facebook was giving students $100,000 to drop out of
what he quoted, stop out of college, which was a softer version of dropping out of college.
And it just spoke to my soul and I was like, I have to like apply to this.
I applied, didn't even make it past the interviews there, like, sorry, this isn't a fit for you.
But then I applied again the second year, made it to interviews, but didn't get it.
But I think that was all the conviction I really needed to tell myself this is the path
I want to go down in life.
And this is like something that I'm interested about and I want to kind of pull the thread
a bit.
That ultimately led to like, you know, me really thinking about and surrounding myself
around a lot of technology and really learning about how startups worked.
And that's what led to via task.
So when you apply to the Theo Fellowship, do you apply like with a startup in mind,
you say I've got this app via task.
It's going to be huge.
Like, let me into the Theo Fellowship.
I don't want to go to college.
I want to come be a startup founder, or do you just kind of apply as an individual?
A little bit about so you apply as an individual.
And as part of your application, you they ask you what is the thing that you want to
be working on?
Like, how are you going to be spending the money as an early on is very much, you know,
research based and is very inviting for people who were trying to build like water wells
and, you know, parts of Africa to finding aging cures and like all of these like really
hard science, really difficult project that actually required a lot more money than just
$100,000 than an 18 year old kid.
But it wasn't really about that.
It was about how far can this 18, 19 year old kid take $100,000 into the research.
And then eventually, you know, as the these cohorts became more popular and as the program
became more popular, I believe the program shifted a bit more to let's start funding
founders who already have a startup and the startup is already doing relatively well.
I think there was like a Twitter thread out there somewhere where people dissected the
teal fellowship program and looked at all of the people who have gone through the program
that kind of went off to do really big things, Dylan Field from Figma, Vitalik Buren, who
started Ethereum, and it was like a number, maybe a dozen plus who have started, you know,
like multi unicorns.
So going back to your initial question, they, you know, you can apply as an individual at
the time back in 2011, with no idea.
Now it's very much geared towards people who already have an existing business.
And I applied with via task at the time, you know, did like the full business model rundown
of how I felt like I was gonna start in Naperville, Illinois, which is where I lived at the time,
and then expand into metropolitan area of Chicago, and then expand into surrounding
cities, and then kind of expand across the US, and then eventually the world.
It didn't work out.
Obviously, there's no via task anymore.
What were the some of the lessons that you learned, like this is like your first like
startup failure as a teenager, what did you come away?
Come away thinking?
Yeah, I mean, it was it's funny, right?
It was a very expensive way to learn that I should probably just walk the two and a
half miles to get my McDonald's.
Honestly, I think working on via task and like building the network of people that I
started meeting online, I met Josh Buckley, who's now my co founder at prologue, and at
hyper, I knew about him at the time when he was starting minor monsters.
So they're like this kind of there's like this class of, you know, from 1516 to like
2021 year olds, who all kind of knew of each other and like this like Facebook group that
I was a part of.
And for me, you know, having traditional Indian Pakistani parents, immigrant parents, who
just saw, you know, one path of life, which is, you know, you get good grades, you get
to a good college and you get into a good career, this whatever I was doing was very
foreign to them.
So a couple of lessons that I learned coming out of via task was, you know, if I could
sell my parents on me not going to college, I can sell anyone and that I knew technology
was the sector that I wanted to go down because I've just always been surrounded around technology,
specifically computers throughout, you know, like most of my adolescence till now.
And here you are ready for, I guess, round two, and you eventually started another company
that probably a lot of us will be familiar with called Loom, L-O-O-M.com.
So Loom is a way to record sort of quick videos of your screen and also like your camera.
So there's a sort of video of you while you're screen recording, you could share with other
people and Loom is humongous.
I don't know, do you guys share revenue numbers or any sort of other measure of like Loom
success?
We don't share revenue numbers.
We just publicly, there's an article that went out on Business Insider today, which
is an interview with my co-founder Vinay that talks about the journey from zero to 14 million
users worldwide, and then also during the pandemic, like how Loom had massive tailwinds.
But yeah, I mean, the company has definitely scaled from nothing to now, a lot of people
rely on it to get some of their best work done.
Yeah, that's huge, 14 million users and look at your website, 200,000 companies.
Why is Loom so popular?
How did you make it happen?
Is this successful?
So kind of the backstory, everything that led up to Loom, I worked at a company called
Backplane as an intern doing design work where I met Vinay, my now co-founder.
And I'm giving this context because a lot of founders asked me like, hey, how did you
meet your co-founders?
How do I find a co-founder for my company?
And the way I found both my co-founders, one, I worked with and then he became like a friend
of mine.
We ended up roommates in San Mateo.
And then I went to Weebly, I was a product designer for about a year.
And then my ADHD and excitement got really crazy and I was like, I want to go into venture.
I want to break into venture.
And I went and worked at Upfront Ventures down in LA.
So I grabbed, packed as much stuff as I could in a suitcase, moved down to LA and crashed
on the couch of my now co-founder CEO at Loom.
What ended up being like crashing on his couch for two weeks ultimately led to me moving
into his second bedroom in his apartment.
And the three of us just became really good friends and decided we wanted to build something
that didn't really know what it was going to be.
But we just knew that we all had the skill set.
I was designed, Joe was product and Vinay was engineering and we're like perfect combination.
So let's go off and let's build stuff for fun.
And I remember we got on a Skype call.
We decided to just list a bunch of ideas that we have on a whiteboard.
And I think we came up with six, seven different ideas.
The first one was my idea that I wrote down, which was a user testing platform, but with
product experts.
And this was something that I was saying when I was a product designer was sometimes I just
want design feedback or product feedback from people who have built and skilled products
before and I'm willing to pay for it.
And at the time I'd assumed that was a large enough market for us to build within.
The second idea was Joe's idea, which was, you know, there's a lot of excess food that
goes to waste.
How do we build, you know, at the time, the way we're thinking about it was like the imperfect
produce for restaurants.
So we just went down the list and we're like, let's just go with the first idea.
And we started building what was initially called open test later becomes loom.
Open test goes through two large pivots over the course of nine months before we eventually
landed on loom.
And I think that part gets, you know, kind of overshadowed by all of the success loom
has had in the last couple of years.
But that was like some of the most difficult, painful period of probably Joe Vinay and my
life of the 26 years I've been on this planet.
And that was mainly because, you know, we started a company with our, you know, our
savings and we're like, I was coming out of the world of venture.
I was promised that a lot of people that, you know, I was co-investing with at the time
would want to back loom blindfolded.
Tell me what you want to do.
We'll back you guys was kind of like the promise I was coming out of it with.
And then as we started to find product market fit, as we started to ask people to use their
product and we're building a product and really, really, you know, making sure we're aware
of how much burn we're spending all of this to be said, we didn't really have the success
that a lot of people saw.
We did later on in the years to come.
Our first investment was a $10,000 loan that one of Joe's friends gave us.
And that was just so we could make rent the following month.
This was like into month nine, month 10, we had initially pivoted into like an intercom
for user testing from the marketplace idea.
And then from intercom, the user test of the intercom user testing that ultimately after
maybe 100 or 200 emails we had sent to various people begging them to use our product, Harvard's
research lab picked it up.
They ran a test on a specific prompt with their researchers.
And someone from the research lab used the same extension that we had built for the testers
to record a summary of the six different videos that they had just watched.
Okay, so now this person is using it as like a generalized communication tool.
And that's not what you guys expected, not what you were planning on.
Like, okay, that's cool.
Not at all.
And it was kind of like, you know, last, it was maybe like two in the morning and we're
like, holy crap, like this seems this is like, you know, this, this might be a clear direction
into what we should be doing, or probably like a false positive and we should just continue
staying course.
That's a tough decision to make, because it's like, okay, you stay in the course, you have
all these plans, you have all this money and time and energy invested going in one direction.
Everyone does something unexpected, but it's kind of like, okay, who cares?
People do unexpected things all the time.
Like how does that convince you to just completely turn the business around and do something
totally different?
Totally.
And we're hit with this fork where, you know, we could take a Hail Mary and just pivot into
this new direction and hope that, you know, more than one person decide that this is something
they want to use.
Or you know, we feel like we're hitting the right direction, people are starting to finally
use our product and we should just build out what we're currently building.
So we decided to do the Hail Mary and basically ripped the extension out of the product and
rebranded it from OpenTest to OpenVid and through a landing page together.
You could go back on archive.org and look at OpenTest.co and it looks really ugly.
That's all, that's entirely on me, I was designing the time.
And OpenVid launched on product hunt, June 16th of 2016 and within 24 hours we got 3000
people to download our extension and start using it.
And by the end of the week, I think we had maybe five or 6,000 people who had installed
the app, installed the Chrome extension to use it for a variety of things.
I think that's when we finally like, you know, took a deep breath and like, okay, people
are finally using this new thing.
And now we need to go like raise capital because the $10,000 loan we took from Joe's friend
is now coming to an end.
So I remember this very vividly.
We had two different decks.
One deck was promoting the original idea, OpenTest.
The second deck was promoting OpenVid, this new concept that we now finally have users
for and we're AB testing our pitch and I remember our first investment was from a patent lawyer
who rented my room on Airbnb and I told him this is what we're building.
So he, the first investment was actually five grand and then he doubled down, put in another
five grand.
And then the second investor came in at 25,000, third investor came in at 50,000 and then
finally our fourth investor led our pre-seed round and gave us $200,000 and that was $15,17.
Huge.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I want to, I want to move on because we can talk about Loom for probably two hours.
Yeah, before we do, is there like a single biggest reason or decision or process that
you guys had at Loom that you would say accounts for the fact that it's been able to grow so
large?
Because on IndieHackers, I rarely talk to people who've built products that reach 14
million users.
Like that's a, that's just a tremendous amount of reach.
What is it about Loom?
Was the market just the right size?
Was it the right product?
Was it the right time?
Like what do you attribute most of Loom's success to?
Yeah, the market really wasn't ripe for what we were building.
I would say up until maybe 2018.
So from 2016 to 2018, we're just getting these like early adopters, ICs from different companies,
different org sizes who are like, oh, you know, I can record a video walking through
my presentation or I can record, you know, if I work on the support team, I can record
a quick like how to, on how to like, you know, downgrade your billing plan.
So and then on the remote side, the only company that was truly remote that really publicized
it was Envision at the time, but there wasn't, it wasn't really mass appeal.
Like remote work was still a benefit that you'd provide as, you know, part of like,
you know, so you're like way earlier than all the stuff you're earlier than the remote
work trend really catching on.
You were earlier than obviously the pandemic and I guess by the time those things did start
to get bigger, you were already there, huh?
Yeah, I would say those, those trends ended up becoming tailwinds for Loom.
It wasn't necessarily the reason why we built Loom.
So that brings us to today where you're running Prolog, which has like sort of two products
right now, Product Hunt and Hyper.
And Hyper is, to remind listeners, kind of the YC competitor for lack of a better word.
And I have so many questions about this because I think fundraising and investing, it's not
something I explore a ton on this show, but it's super interesting and it's becoming
a thing that more and more indie hackers and early stage founders are considering, even
if they don't live in Silicon Valley.
And so one of the things that comes to mind is like this business of investing in startups,
essentially the number one value add is like money, right?
Any investor is going to put money into your startup.
That's the number one thing if a founder could get anything that they will probably take.
And money is very, it's a commodity, right?
Like somebody, dollar bills from one investor are kind of the same as dollar bills from
another investor.
So how do you stand out?
You know, how do you differentiate yourself when essentially the number one thing that
you offer as an investor, and this is true for every VC firm and every fund, is kind
of similar to the thing that everybody else offers?
Yeah, it's a great question.
And to give you context, when I was leaving Loom, I was like, a lot of my investor friends
were like, you should go and raise your own fund or you should think about joining a boutique
fund.
And I told myself I wouldn't really start a venture firm if there wasn't something that
was very novel about what I was providing to founders, because that was what ultimately
led, you know, Joe, Vinay and I to picking our current investor.
If it was, you know, like, what is this person providing that the other people on our cap
table cannot?
So and it's really, it's actually incredibly hard to differentiate as an investor, just
given how abundant capital has become in the last couple of years.
And to give you an idea, in 2021, over $621 billion were invested in startups globally.
And that was like an all time record.
But the one thing that has kind of always been limited has been like attention.
It's like, attention has always been scarce, and it's been harder than ever for startups
to break through and reach people that actually matter for their growth.
What once was probably breaking news or a pivotal moment for a company is now a drop
in the bucket with all the financings and, you know, PR that's going out there and all
the, you know, the Twitter threads that are that have kind of been published ever since.
Again, like another till when that prologue in specifically hyper is going through is
the major decentralization of Silicon Valley.
So this shift basically means companies can be formed anywhere.
And increasingly, you know, they're actually based outside of the US.
And in fact, like another staggering fact that I learned a few months ago was out of
the 900 unicorns that exist today, nearly 50 percent of them came out of the US or outside
of the US.
Sorry.
And when you look at that from a purely statistical perspective, you have to realize that what
companies need the most, regardless of if they're a pre-seed company all the way to
Series A, Series B and beyond are three things, product distribution and recruiting.
So we're basically aligning hyper to provide value across those three buckets for the companies
that come in.
So hyper is incredibly like a high quality.
The founders that come in are generally, you know, very driven first time founders or proven
second time founders.
So it's really helping companies stage up from where they were when they joined.
That makes sense.
So that's, I think, answers a lot of the questions about why would a founder choose hyper, etc.
Like what what attracts them to you.
But then you've got the whole other side of the equation, which is like, how do you do
a good job as an investor?
Like if you think about the business of investing, especially in startups, like it's hard.
It's hard to pick when it's hard to determine like who's and to some degree, even if you're
doing it for six months or a year, you might not even know if you're doing a good job.
And so how do you look at because it takes a while for the companies to grow and scale
and turn into what they're going to turn into, like Loom itself and the first few months,
like somebody looked at it and been like, this is going nowhere.
So how do you like, how do you see that side of things or somebody wants to invest in startups?
How do you pick the winners and how do you pass on those who aren't necessarily going
to be winners, even if it might look like it in the early days?
It's a great question.
And I would say, as someone who's relatively new to investing, I'm still learning a lot
of this.
However, I would say I've learned, I picked up on a couple of key things that matter a
lot.
You want to generally find founders who will succeed, regardless of your help, like they're
determined enough, they're selfish enough in their own right to build something that
will ideally help, you know, depending on the company, hundreds of thousands to millions
of people globally.
And you know, venture is an accelerant of these startups.
So if you provide the right people with the right capital and the right access, if you
can provide them with the right tools that they need at the right time, that's basically
going to help propel them to kind of like help all the learnings that they would have
like a year or two years from now, you kind of want to condense that in the first couple
of months.
And if you could do that really well, those companies are going to succeed much faster
and better than than if they were, you know, not raising venture capital.
So I think, you know, there are certain businesses that are, you know, kind of aligned perfectly
for the way venture works as a business model.
And there are a lot of businesses that, you know, don't really require venture.
But for those that do, you kind of generally just want to find founders who can do well
regardless if they work with you or if they don't.
Yeah.
Okay.
That makes a lot of sense.
I think one of the things I'm most curious about is just like finding these founders
because it's super competitive.
Like you're out there trying to find them because these people are out there, people
who are very determined, who are going to succeed without you.
But like by the time you find them, they might have already been snapped up, right?
Somebody might have already invested in them, etc, etc.
So like what do you guys do to try to like to find them?
You use Product Hunt, you know, sort of like a an early sort of signal to who you might
want to contact and invest in.
Are there other means that you use to find founders?
Product Hunt is great for inbound deal flow from Loom launching in June of 2016 to Notion
and Airtable and Brex and, you know, a number of other companies all having their inception
on product time.
Startups just like come to Product Hunt without you having to do very much at all.
Yeah.
And I think, you know, while Product Hunt will, you know, become a great channel deal
flow for Hyper, I think the other thing to also remember is Hyper will only be as good
as the program and its offering for founders.
So if we really wanted to, you know, see the company before they got any type of funding
from anyone, we have to make sure that people under founders specifically understand what
we're offering and how it's valuable to them.
For example, you know, there's a great community on indie hackers and a lot of people who are
probably starting companies in that community.
And our brand at Hyper is completely encompassed around like running very intimate cohorts
with select companies about four times a year.
And we want to be pretty hands on with companies that we work with and make sure that each
company gets the attention that it deserves as opposed to funding, you know, 100, 200
days a cohort.
Yeah.
I like the idea of running four batches a year because it's just more, it's more iterations
through the loop, which means more, I guess, opportunities for you all to like learn from
your mistakes, to do a better next time.
So you know, this time a year or two from now, you will have had four or eight batches
to learn from.
And you also get sort of more shots on goal in terms of word of mouth, because I think
being a founder, if you want to consider going through a program like this often, it comes
from like friends who've been through and said, Oh, here's why this was awesome.
Here's why I liked YC.
Here's why I like hyper.
And like, and so it's a process that I just, I assume just takes a while to get something
like this spinning and like up off the ground.
Like with Y Combinator in particular, you know, if I look at like a lot of the reasons
why what they've done has worked so well, part of it has been like these stories that
have come out of it.
Right.
So like, everybody knows that Airbnb came out of Y Combinator or Dropbox came out of
Y Combinator or that Stripe was like funded by the YC founders.
And so I think once those stories succeed, it's not much different than like a school
like Harvard or something where you see people who are successful who've been through that
process.
And then you think, Oh, I want to go through that process too, so I can be like that.
And so in a sense, like you guys are working on the phase where you're trying to create
these stories, these awesome stories of people who've gone through hyper and then created
something successful and inspiring.
I think oftentimes founders underestimate how difficult it is to build a really good
brand.
It took Loom three and a half years for people to start like picking up on what Loom actually
was.
Now, you know, it's kind of broadly known, but that was, you know, three and a half years
of like getting to the point where people have heard of Loom or have seen a Loom video.
And then the following two and a half years was just like accelerating that through different
channels.
Not only at month, I think month eight or month nine at hyper, but it's still very early
and I think as long as we do our job right and do right by our founders, it'll naturally
have this like network effect where the more founders that come into hyper and the hyper
community, the more referrals we'll get through the hyper community for other founders that
should participate.
And those actually tend to be the best referrals.
I believe there's like a stat around, you know, a large majority of the Sequoia scout
investments came from referrals of existing founders.
So that was, you know, that was always a fascinating concept to me.
And if there's anyone in the community or anyone listening to this pod who's interested
in breaking into investing or, you know, is a scout of a different venture fund, it's
really, you know, some of the best deal flow comes from being a founder because you get
to like shit, like share notes and share learnings and also be vulnerable.
You know, it's like, hey, I have to like fire my co-founder and the other person's like,
actually, you should talk to this person.
They actually had to go through something similarly to just create this like inherent
trust.
Yeah, it's super helpful to go through like a sort of a batch of founders and talk to
lots of people.
I know a ton of YC founders who had invested in each other's companies five, six years
ago.
I mean, Josh Buckley did the same thing, right, invested in YC founders and it turned out
really well.
Maybe to close out here, what's your advice for founders who are getting started?
Most of the people who are listening to this show are like, you know, they're considering
bootstrapping or self-funding in the very early stages.
Some might be considering raising money, but it's always traditionally been kind of a thing
that you have to live in Silicon Valley to do.
And that's been changing, especially over the last couple of years.
How should founders think about going about starting a startup?
You know, there's so many different pieces of advice out there, so many different ways
to start, what's your, what Shaheed Khan's take on what it's like to be a successful
founder and how to get started?
There isn't one size fits all answer.
I think it's more about if building your startup while you're working a full-time job works
for you.
Great.
You know, there have been a number of people who have been successful that way to get to,
you know, either some conviction level for them to leave their job.
Some people leave, you know, off the gate before they even have an idea just so they
could start exploring.
So it works, you know, in many different ways.
But I think some of the things that have been proven truer than before is you're exactly
right.
You know, Silicon Valley is decentralizing, so you can start a business from anywhere
as long as, you know, you're on indie hackers, you're on products and you're kind of engaging
with the community, you're putting yourself out there.
You generally have a low to no ego when it comes to getting feedback and getting advice
from people, you know, when they start playing with the product.
I remember listening to this on a Gary Vee podcast and I think it's truer more than ever.
I don't know if you've heard the quote, you know, there's two ways to build the tallest
building in the city.
You can either build the tallest building in the city or you could spend your time breaking
everyone else's down.
So I think that's a really important piece, right, and it's similar to the feedback of
so many people try to like overengineer their idea or their market or their solution.
And it's like, just go and start building.
And it can, like, it's proof that if you go on archive.org and look at the very early
visuals of what Lube looked like, it looked like someone, it looked hideous.
And that's probably the safest word I can use to describe it.
And I was the one who designed it, right?
So it's like, just go out there, put something out there, put something in the hands of people
who could use your product and just learn and just keep your iteration cycles fast.
Really lean into first principles thinking, constantly ask yourself, what are the things
that, you know, matter most right now?
Why am I building what I'm building?
And if you continue doing that, I think you'll slowly just inch at your way.
It's the common, you know, thought process of like, things just happen gradually and
then it happens suddenly.
And that's, you know, very true about how Lube was able to scale into where it is today.
Yeah, I love that point.
And I think to give things sort of a chance to eventually start building up suddenly,
you gotta get started.
And it's so easy.
At least half the founders I talked to, their biggest problem is that they're stuck in this
analysis mode.
They're thinking about all the different possibilities and they overanalyze it to some degree where
they have a much higher chance of success if they do what you're doing or do what you're
suggesting.
Just get started, iterate quickly, don't worry too much about the first version is perfect
or if it's exactly what you want to build or if it's going to be this huge thing because
you learned so much, I think just from trying and doing.
Like with Lube, you never would have, you never would have known about this sort of
video sharing application if you hadn't actually tried to sell this other app that wasn't that
good to customers.
And so I love this advice, if you're listening and you're stuck, just pick something and
get started working on it and you'll learn as you go.
Exactly.
And that's honestly the best way.
All right, Shahid Khan, thanks so much for coming on to the NDS podcast.
Do you want to let listeners know where they can go to learn more about what's up to you
at hyper and product hunt and prologue in general?
Yeah, I'm most active on Twitter.
You can follow me at underscore Shahid K. I often talk about the learnings and anything
that we're announcing on the hyper side, on the prologue side.
And I also share a number of founder lessons along the way.
All right.
Thanks again, Shahid.
Thank you.