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 Drew Riley and Greg Eisenberg, two people who've both been on the IndieHackers
podcast.
Drew is the founder of Trends.VC, one of my favorite newsletters.
Drew you cover basically every thinkable market and trend and idea, and you do this super
deep dive breakdown of it, and it's super useful.
Greg is the founder of Late Checkout, and also the co-host of a new podcast called The
Room Where It Happens, which is also kind of like a community as well.
It's not just a podcast.
And Drew's got the same thing going on with his newsletter, so I guess in a way like all
three of us are like media and community, and I don't know, I think it'd be interesting
just to riff with you guys on some of these topics.
I think, actually, I shouldn't say I think, I know that Late Checkout pays for Trends.VC,
so we're a customer.
Me too.
I've been paying customers as well.
Awesome.
Thank you guys.
So I'm curious about you guys' concept of like an information diet, where you got your
food diet, you get food from whatever source, some people are vegetarians, some people eat
a lot of meat like me.
It's also the information diet, right?
Where do you get your information from, where do you guys learn?
And I follow you both on Twitter, I listen to your podcast, Greg, I read your newsletter,
Drew.
I'm curious where you guys learn about all the stuff that you put out, because I have
my sources, and sometimes I feel like it's lacking, and I want to know other people who
are smart, learn about what's going on and keep your ear to the ground.
What do you guys, what's your guys' information diet like?
I'll go first.
My go-to medium are podcasts, I use a player called Castro, and they just allow you to
build queues, so I just go through those queues, and I don't stick to one podcast, as it falls
in the queue, it gets prioritized, and I just flow through there, 3x speed.
What do you do while you listen to podcasts?
Walk.
Yeah, mainly walk.
I think that's my secret weapon for research.
My favorite medium for trends we see reports?
My information hack is YouTube Premium, which not many people talk about it, but it's like,
I think it's like 10, 12, 13 bucks, something like that.
You can watch YouTube without ads.
It's amazing, and you can also like basically on your phone, you can pull up video and just
minimize it and listen.
And there's just so much amazing content on YouTube.
And I know that some people might be listening, and they'll say like, well, like, you know,
when I go on YouTube, you know, I don't know what to find, and it's very difficult, and
I hear you, but that all changed for me when I just set up my subscriptions.
And just like Twitter, right, like if you, Twitter is invaluable if you're not following
the right people, and the same is true with YouTube.
So my information diet is really just YouTube Premium, which I watch probably, or watch
or listen to an hour to two hours every single day, and Twitter.
Just follow the right people, and you'll get some good stuff.
What are you learning on YouTube?
Like, because I, I'm someone who like, okay, I have YouTube Premium, but I literally never
watch YouTube.
I'm more like Drew, like I'll listen to a podcast.
And then I'm like, I'm obsessed with multitasking.
So it's like, I want to feel like I'm like doing two things, like I'll play video games
while listening to an audiobook or a podcast, or like go for a walk or like a drive or something.
And I can never find the time to listen to, to watch YouTube, because they sit there and
like, I feel like it's taking over too many of my senses.
I'm like, I got to sit down in one spot.
And if I try to walk somewhere, I'm going to get hit by a car.
So like, I can't multitask.
And so I don't like, I'm never on YouTube, and I don't even know like what's good on
YouTube.
But I have a few friends like you who swear by it.
So like, what are you, what are you learning on YouTube?
So I thought it'd be fun just to open up my YouTube and just share what I'm looking at.
So on the home screen, the eight videos that I see, one is a YouTuber by the name of Gian
Carlo buys tokens, where he talks, you know, the title of the video is huge NFT update.
And here's what he's buying.
Great person to basically sift through all the noise in the NFT space.
The next is I live in an island called Williams Island.
And in this island, they do these segments about what's going on on the island.
So there's that the all in podcast.
I know that's, you know, a lot of the listeners here know about the all in, but there's just
something about seeing, I'm looking at your mouth with like a massive turtleneck.
Like you don't get that just amazing Rex Orange County, who's a band.
It's a in the studio interview, a YouTube creator called Passport Heavy, who is an amazing,
amazing follow.
He goes from country to country as a digital nomad.
He's awesome, talks about great places to stay, internet, that sort of thing.
Coffeezilla, who's a finance YouTuber.
And last but not least, where it happens, and it's weird, it's a picture of me in Sahil
Bloom, which is our podcast for our YouTube channel.
Greg also made me think of something when you talked about the importance of seeing
someone as you're learning, where we have a lot of masterminds on Mondays, and that's
become one of my favorite ways to learn, where sometimes you can like solve your own problems
by just describing something out loud, it's sort of like therapy, like AA for entrepreneurs
or something.
Yeah, I like that you both have like, you both have these media businesses, but they're
both communities.
So Greg, like your, I don't know very much about the community behind like the room where
it happens.
But like, I'm thinking, okay, this is a podcast, you're on YouTube, you're on podcast players,
but I go to your website, and it's like literally enter your email, join the community that's
changing the future of business.
And Drew, it's like the same with like trends, you know, I go to your website, and it's like,
okay, we'll enter your email address and subscribe to the newsletter, but you actually have like,
this like these community events and rituals like behind it.
So maybe like, it's been a while since you guys are both on the podcast, maybe let's
do like a quick update with where you guys are at with your businesses, what's working,
what's not.
Greg, let's start with you what's going on with late checkout and with your podcast and
community.
So yeah, for those of you who don't know, late checkout is a thesis driven holding company,
our thesis is that community based products outperform non community based products.
We own an agency, which helps transform companies via community based products and web three,
we have a studio where we incubate our own stuff, and we have a fund where we invest.
So we play in this web three and community world.
And so we create a lot of NFTs, DAOs, that sort of thing, company, you know, when I came
on Cortland, I might have must have been like a year and a half, two years ago, and it just
started.
It was kind of the beginning of the pandemic, I think you were just like, about to quit
WeWork or something.
It was a while back.
Today we're 50 people, which is wild and working with some of the biggest brands in the world
incubating cool stuff.
The community piece of the pod is I think we have almost 5000 members, which is wild
because we just launched the pod and it's just a place where people can talk about what's
happening on the pod.
And I think you're going to start to see more and more of that, where there's this like
connection between media, which feels like one way.
And then you're going to have places where hopefully the community could participate
in some way in the media.
Like, how do you get to 50, 50 people in your business?
Is that just like you guys doing deals, working on projects, getting paid a ton and then like
bootstrapping your way up?
Are you like raising money because 50 people is a lot of people.
When we first started the business, we had one, one offer, you know, it was a $5 million
offer to incubate or seed fund, I should say, late checkout.
And we were so close to taking it, but we didn't.
I mean, I saw what happened with WeWork and what venture capital can do to WeWork and
businesses that I was just so turned off of venture capital that I decided not to do it.
That doesn't mean that venture capital is evil.
I'm not saying that at all.
In fact, like we have a venture fund, we invest in companies, we love it.
But what it does mean is, you know, it's not right for every business.
And I think people need to know why they're taking the money.
And we really didn't know why we were taking it initially.
So how did we get to 50 people was there's a ton of demand for, you know, community-based
product, product design, work, obviously Web3 is really big and, you know, self-funded
it.
And yeah, I don't know.
It just sort of compounded doing deals, making money.
I like the scars from WeWork because you could have gone the other way.
You could have been like, wow, this like Adam Newman guy is like killing his visionary founder,
raising billions of dollars.
Like maybe I should go that route.
But you want the more humble, I guess, level-headed route, which I respect a lot.
Drew, how's trends going?
I know the last time you came on, you were like sharing revenue numbers.
You're like the indie hackers, indie hacker.
What's new with you?
Yeah, we've evolved to focus on different rituals.
I talked about this in my pen tweet thread, but our main rituals are daily standups, which
unlock other things like Trends Tribe.
Those are random one-on-ones where you get matched with other people on Mondays and then
ultimately masterminds after a 100-day streak.
And you talked about like what's working well, what's not working so well.
So those elements are working well.
What we could probably improve is figure out a way to, I guess, scale standup participation.
There seems to be like a natural asymptote where the number of participants, a fairly
high number, but it will stay the same until someone drops out and then new people will
come in and fill that quota.
So there's something weird going on there that we could stand to improve.
How does a standup work?
So like a typical standup from like a tech company is like, you get all your engineers
together in the morning, you go through, everybody says like what they're working on, what they
did yesterday, what their main blocker is.
It's real quick.
It's just a way for everybody to check in.
How does that work online with like a community?
Yeah.
So ours, they're asynchronous where we just have a format.
People have modified the format.
You can do this.
Some people add their 2022 goals, but the basic format is what did you do yesterday?
What do you plan to do today?
And what do you need help with?
I add what am I reading right now?
Some people add again their 2022 goals and other things.
So you can remix it as long as it has those three core elements.
What's the point in doing this?
Like I know you've talked about like rituals.
Part of it is like, okay, you come every day, right?
And what media companies as community doesn't want your members to have like an actual productive
valuable reason to come back every single day.
Like a daily standup does that.
Like what are there any other purposes to having this?
Yeah, what I've noticed is that if I talk about the persona of most people and standups,
they're solo entrepreneurs where they don't necessarily have people to bounce ideas off
of.
We also have people with large teams, but they may not have people that they consider
peers or they would like openly share as much as they would share in standups.
I think something else that makes it a more vulnerable place, it's not open to the web.
It's still behind this wall.
So we have very vulnerable moments that I think would change if you were sort of put
on the stage.
Yeah, it's an issue I have with indie hackers.
It's like everything on any hackers is completely public.
The whole community is a hundred percent public.
I've even thought about doing like direct messages, but doing them publicly where you
can see what people are messaging each other just because it's been, transparency has been
the ethos of the site.
And the downside to that is like, all right, like, do you really want to be vulnerable
when every single person can see you sort of a permanent record, people can take a screenshot,
you know, maybe not.
And maybe when it comes to business, people are fine, not being vulnerable, or maybe they
want to be more vulnerable, but that's like something that like, I don't even have that
option because my whole, like in the same way that like Greg's thesis is community,
like my thesis is like transparency and openness and the fact that like people benefit from
everything being out in the open.
So it's a big way.
I think any hackers differs from trends maybe.
Yeah, I think a big upside or everything's a double edged sword there is that the user
generated content and the SEO where I often send a lot of people to my post on indie hackers
around product time where like I dropped those tips there.
So you get the SEO discoverability, but you just have to ask is, you know, is it a net
positive or net negative based on the mission?
Yeah.
Yeah, I have a tactical question.
I don't know if this is where you want to take Cortland, but yeah, I'm just like, this
is a great opportunity for me just to chat with Drew a little bit.
I'm on the website and I'm just curious, like, how do you think about pricing your different
products?
Yeah, we've played with pricing a good amount.
And one thing I noticed, I think the most recent change, I guess two most recent changes,
we lowered the prices and then we raised them again just because there is like a support
element.
I noticed that we got a lot of, if I say like low quality support requests, there weren't
necessarily things that we needed to change, but when we re-raised prices, those issues
went out the window.
So we're trying to optimize for accessibility, but yeah, it just seems like lower prices
led to more support issues there.
Try having a free community where no one pays anything.
I don't even, don't envy you.
I don't even check my email, I literally don't.
You have any suggestions, Greg?
Looking at the page?
Yeah, let me, let me pull it up here.
So you know, you basically have three options, you have reports only for $20 billed annually.
You have reports and community for $25 billed annually, and then you have reports community
and masterminds for $100 billed annually.
The first is like, I had a cocktail last night that was $24.
I mean, granted it was in Miami Beach or whatever, and, but like with tip and tax and everything,
it was $24.
So I think that, you know, there's this, there's so much talk around inflation and you know,
I think we're seeing, we're seeing the prices of obviously goods go up.
I think a lot of, you know, entrepreneurs aren't thinking about raising their prices
enough.
So I feel like the 20, I don't know, this is like completely like, I don't know much
about your business, although I am a subscriber.
So hopefully you don't raise it too much, but I think if that was $30 or $40, I wouldn't
buy it in an eyelash, I think C expression.
The other thing is on the high, high end, the $100 annually, I just feel like, so what
is that?
It's like eight a month.
Is that what that is?
Oh, I think it's a hundred dollars a month, but billed annually.
Yeah.
So, so it's like 1200.
I was just thinking like, where does the role of physical events, you know, play into that?
Like I would pay more than a hundred if you told me like, you know, there were certain
physical events that I had access to.
This is a very interesting point because it takes us in this direction of North Star metrics
where a question I have for you guys, well, I'll give a little bit of backstory.
The first, we just hit our two year anniversary and it was very confusing building trends
VC where we had the media element, we had the community element, and we didn't have
a North Star metrics.
So we were a bit all over the place and our North Star metric right now is around engaged
email subscribers.
So that's why that came up when you talked about physical events, because I'm bouncing
everything off of this question of how does that impact that North Star metric?
But I'm curious being on the media side and the community side, what's the North Star
like the leading domino for you guys?
Like the one thing if handled makes everything else easier.
For, for me with ND hackers, it's just straight up like how many thoughtful discussions are
people starting.
There's a bunch of posts in the actors.
There's hundreds of posts a day.
There's hundreds of people joining a day, but like a post on any actors does not matter
if it doesn't spawn a thoughtful discussion.
If somebody says something into the void, I can't put it on the homepage.
It doesn't help other people.
Nobody wants to read it.
No one's talking.
It doesn't matter.
So it's not just the number of posts.
It's a number of like thoughtful discussions that result.
And what's kind of cool about having a sort of community forum is that the number of posts
that are going to be on the homepage is the same, no matter how big the community gets.
Right?
If we had 10,000 people, a million people, guess what?
The homepage is still the same size, kind of like Reddit.
And so you just get an ever increasing quality because you're taking a smaller and smaller
percentage of the top tier.
And so what we really just need is like things to sort of increase that number and everything
else flows from there.
If there's more thoughtful discussions, there's more comments, there's more founders meeting
each other.
There's more traffic to the homepage.
There's more email subscribers.
Like everything kind of flows from that one metric.
And so that's kind of how we decided on that with Andy hackers.
I like that your, your focus drew on, on that one North star metric.
I feel like it's so easy to say that, but actually like focus on two or three or four
metrics.
I wish more, more people would do it.
And so it's also inspirational to myself as well for, for us, like just focusing more
on one metric.
The other thing is every product is, you know, is kind of a snowflake in a lot of ways where
every company is a snowflake.
So I think that, you know, what works for Drew might not work for a Cortland might not
work for some of our stuff.
So I think it's important that builders basically, you know, are honest with themselves and,
and say like, is this the one metric?
Is this the one metric basically?
I think you're in an interesting spot, Greg, cause it's like, you know, like some ways
like a venture capitalist or an investor, like they just see company after company after
company after company.
And like, in some ways they get like better insight than like a founder who's just like
heads down doing one thing for like five years and you like, okay, like you're not like
you have your community with your podcast and, but you also have like late checkout,
which is like kind of like an agency and like a holding company.
So you're like seeing community after community, like how do the, are there patterns that you
see in the metrics?
Are they like super crucial to have a North star metric?
And when you think about like the most successful communities are like, are they organized like
that?
Are they that metrics driven?
The truth is the most successful communities often are not metrics driven, at least in
the early stage.
They're just trying to host a cool party at the end of the day or cool event is the best
way to think about it.
You know, later when they're maturing, like, and they're trying to optimize the levers,
that's when identifying these metrics are really, really important.
But when you're trying to find community market fit, I think it's okay to just be thinking
about the intangibles.
So I think, so that's just one point.
The other common metric that we see in community based products or communities that work a
lot is, is the stickiness index, which is DAU over or over MAU, daily active user over
monthly active user.
And when you see a high percentage of that ratio, what it tells you is that you've basically
created daily ritual, which is really what you're trying to orient yourself around.
How do you create something that gives so much value that people want to come back every
day?
So if I had to pick one metric for community based products, I think it would be DAU over
MAU with the caveat that there are tons of products that just juice that number with
like hacks, push notifications, emails.
So I encourage builders and creators to, don't cheat, you know when you're cheating.
Cheating is what you do when you're trying to raise, like you're in Y Combinator and
you're trying to like raise a lot of money on demo day and you know it's going to come
down to this graph.
But if you're like an Andy Hackers, if you're like trying to generate revenue, it doesn't
make any sense to like juice the metric.
What's the point?
There's no one to lie to you.
There's no one to present to you.
You're not going to make money because everybody's turning.
It might feel good in the moment.
It's very like fast food, you know, like I'm eating fast food in the moment, but you know,
ask me how I'm feeling about chicken nuggets two hours after I eat the chicken nuggets.
Not great, right?
It's not great.
I like that DAU over MAU, the answer may be don't cheat, but have you found any way to
account for scale there to make sure like that the scale, the number of users are going
up?
Is it important to track when you're looking at this metric?
I mean, it is important because I think all of us in this room are, we love seeing growth.
Like that's fun to see growth.
The thing with DAU over MAU is it doesn't tell you the volume.
It just tells you the engagement.
I mean, I know we said focus on one metric, but it is important to, you know, make sure
that in your top of the funnel, you're still like increasing that as well.
I mean, if you have a sticky community, you're like, that's, that's the hard part, right?
Yeah.
Sticky.
Sticky anything.
That's the hard thing.
You have got like a bowl that holds water and it's not leaking water.
Like then you can find anything to increase the top of the funnel and you can do anything
to bring people in and it's going to work.
I think the hard part is having a sticky community, especially around something like entrepreneurship
or like something that's like really specific because it's easy to just stop coming back.
Right?
It's easy to, for people to be like, you know, I got all the value trends is awesome.
Me hackers is great, you know, but peace I'm out because I got all the value and I'm like,
I don't need this anymore.
And people graduate.
So I think that's like one of the hardest things is like building a sticky community.
And often like when you do have a super sticky community that grows, you just end up turning
into like a social network and there's not that many successful social networks.
So it's pretty rare that that happens.
Let's talk about crypto for a bit while we're talking about chasing shiny new things and
eating chicken nuggets.
Last time I talked to both of you, like none of us were talking about crypto really.
Like late checkout was just communities, right?
Trends did not have an NFT for every episode.
And then like suddenly over the last year and a half, it's just like crypto is the hot
shit.
Everyone's into crypto.
I'm buying crypto.
I don't even know what I'm doing.
How's this factoring into like, you guys, how do you guys think about community?
You know, I mean, obviously like Dows are huge.
This whole idea that like the businesses and communities of the future are going to be
these like autonomous decentralized organizations that they're not even going to have a checking
account.
They're not even going to be incorporated is crazy.
So I haven't really dabbled in it.
Both of you guys are dabbling in NFTs and Dow's like, how's it going?
Yeah, it's going good.
A few months ago, we lost metatrends, which is an NFT that grants you access to the community.
So we're sort of in this like web 2.5 space where you can still sign up with the eye or
you can grab this NFT and get access.
And we're also doing a report on token based communities right now are token gated communities
where I think the biggest sort of takeaway so far is what it does to incentives where
I think I heard you mentioned a like spamming issue with indie hackers in the past.
And I'm just thinking about a situation or scenario where if we had tokens instead, we're
incentivized to be less extractive to actually bring value to the community because what
that token represents is access to this community.
We want the value of that access to go up over time.
So I think that's one big change that token gated communities could bring.
Yeah, I'm looking at your metatrends NFT collection.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
So the way it works is basically it's like this like generative art series, like all
the art for each NFT is like computer generated.
And every time you release a new issue of trends, there's an NFT associated with it.
And I can basically buy that NFT and if I do, I get access to your community rather
than having to pay like the monthly subscription fee.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So you get lifetime access and that's to the reports plus community tier.
And the generative nature of it is pretty interesting because it's like this force
directed graph is not moving because that's a static image.
But it's actually based on the topics that are related to it.
So they're like these white dots that are nodes that connect to other related topics.
And that's how each image is generated.
And why would I buy NFTs?
Because I think like I'm going to hold on to this and it's going to be worth like a
lot more later and I can sell it or is it because it's like this is cheaper than actually
paying like the monthly subscription?
Like what's the rationale behind like a buyer?
It will be different for different communities for us.
This is the only lifetime option that we have.
So if you just want like a simple payment and to be done with it.
And of course, there's also that resale option if you think that this is sort of a phase
or this is a good fit right now.
You do have that resale value if you want to give up and sell access later.
I don't think you know one of the realizations I have is well first of all Drew you mentioned
you know Web 2.5 like I feel like you know what you said was you know we're doing this
sort of Web 2.5 thing people could like use their credit card basically to buy NFTs stuff
like that.
And like that's the that's the real Web 3 is Web 2.5 basically.
I'm interested in what you just said and I think that's what's going to hit mainstream
adoption you know going in like buying Ethereum and like setting up a wallet and like seed
phrase and all these things like it's really difficult right now.
So until we figure out ways to onboard people in a really and just like an accessible and
convenient way like we're not going to we're not going to be there.
But you know to answer the question like how do I think about communities and crypto.
I just think about incentives I think about tokens.
I think about upside sharing upside in bootstrapping networks.
I think about how this is just unprecedented like crypto is going to have I think it's
like 4 billion users by 2030 like 4 billion like getting 4 billion people in like what
are we 2022 now 8 year you know like that's insane.
How do you like as a practitioner that like take part of it because it reminds me like
I remember when I moved to San Francisco and I was thinking like should I start a start
up should I work for somebody and like every startup that tried to hire you they would
just talk about how big and awesome they are.
It's like we just raised so much money from these VCs were changing the world blah blah
blah.
And I was just thinking like yeah but like what's my salary going to be.
I don't care about all your stuff like how does this affect me and I feel the same way
about crypto sometimes or it's like okay cryptos undeniably huge it's undeniably popular but
like as an individual builder how do I take advantage of like that growth.
Is it better to like should I be building crypto and indie hackers.
Should I be just investing in coins.
And I think like the two of you are like the two people I know who like are actively working
on these like communities that existed well before you were super interested in Web 3
and are incorporating it.
So I'm just curious like how much does it help.
Well the first thing that people should do is and you don't need to be a crypto believer.
You just need to be crypto curious is participate just just to learn.
You need to participate to learn.
So like join a DAO that speaks to you and like there's bounties in DAOs which will say
like hey earn you know earn 50 of the Cortland tokens if you do this thing.
So go and like accomplish that and like see how you feel.
Buy an NFT in a community that you think is interesting and go join the discord and you
might hate the DAO experience and you might hate the NFT community experience but it doesn't
matter.
I think like the point here is that you've learned how to onboard.
You've learned what's the fuss and now you have a point of view that then you could you
know let's say Cortland you're on board and now you could be like hey what do I do with
indie hackers if I wanted to make a Web 3.
No I would never want to do it because it would ruin it for these these these these
reasons or you know what now I'm really jazzed about it and here's some ways that I can go
introduce it.
Yeah you use yourself as an example where you said like how do I incorporate this in
the indie hackers.
I think a lot of us and doing this report on token gated communities is bringing this
to my attention like we're still putting solutions in front of problems where we're thinking
okay we have this new technology this new primitive how can I use this instead of thinking
like okay I have this problem how does this technology this primitive help me out.
So I would be hesitant if you have an existing company perhaps the way to get involved in
is just dollar cost average in but if you're looking for something new to build I would
go back to what I talked about a lot where just what can you do for a long time right
like our is your medium media is it code a lot of people need smart contract developers
a lot of us don't understand what an NFT or a DAL is even though we think we do.
So you could you know get in on the education side but I would put a lot of emphasis on
that longevity piece because we talk about a lot but most of the benefits of compounding
come come later.
I think that's such a good point if there's like one mental model that I would like always
want to have as a founder it's basically like put the problem first because it's so easy
to get obsessed with the solution especially like in the digital world like in real life
okay the problem is kind of obvious like there's a you know a river or something we can't cross
it it's like that's the problem and all the solutions come after that but in digital space
like you don't necessarily see what the problem is and it's easy to be like ooh look at this
new technology let me jam this in and I think one of the my favorite things about your newsletter
Drew is like the way that you frame every issue is kind of like okay like I just opened
up your newsletter on DALs on trends I've EC and it's like why it matters and then you
have like the problem and you have the solution and the solution is like the topic so it's
DALs and this issue and the problem that you say the DALs solve is that groups face geographical
political and operational coordination challenges it's just hard to organize a group basically
and so DALs are a way that I guess align everybody's interests and organize everybody to reach these
shared goals in a way that's like easier and better than ever right and so you know when
I'm thinking about like what you're doing with trends like maybe that doesn't apply
like maybe there's a reason why trends is not a DAL because is there like a shared community
goal with trends like is there like one thing where everybody needs to organize and like
accomplish some mission like maybe maybe not right and if not then is there any reason
for it to be a DAL yeah that's a great point I also think that when we talk about DALs
just like tooling in the ecosystem is very undeveloped right now where it's even interesting
seeing people try to solve problems in like the physical space with DALs like people should
do it they should definitely try it and we'll just like learn on their their dime but we
have a lot of like I guess governance issues with digitally native DALs before we even
bring in this other physical aspect and fight this like multi-front war so I'm definitely
like kicking a can on it it's not out of the question but it's like a year four or five
thing for us and whether trends becomes a DAL just because I see the tooling and the
governance issues that others are facing right now what do you guys think is like the most
likely thing to be impactful five ten years from now like the metaverse so you got like
Mark Zuckerberg betting on the metaverse lots of companies like building VC software VR
software and hardware and you got like web 3 and like maybe through the main components
of web 3 besides just defies like DALs and NFTs so out of those three things like DALs
NFTs and the metaverse what do you guys think is gonna have like true staying power it's
kind of like picking your favorite kids situation I would say NFTs like the idea that you have
property rights digital property rights just unlocked so much one vote cast for NFTs Drew
what's what's your vote I'm gonna preface this so I sort of have this framework that
I use for predictions versus hot takes which we recently added prediction is like evidence
based and sort of like this thesis where I could tell you like here are early examples
this is why I believe it hot takes is like don't ask me for examples this is just how
I feel this is definitely a hot take I feel like I guess this is like the decade of cryptos
of NFTs DALs we'll see that metaverse will continue to evolve and then I feel like the
metaverse will really gain traction like after the 2030s where we may not even have a life
like in real life like we may mostly live we're just getting our food like pumped into
our veins and we're living in this matrix style just plugged into the machine yeah it's
like 2030 to 2040 but hot take like I said okay I'm on the side of like maybe NFTs most
immediately useful thing digital property you could buy it you could sell it once more
websites and organizations are implementing NFTs it just it becomes like this virtuous
cycle we're like the more NFTs that you can buy that are actually useful the more like
you want to buy NFTs the more you want to sell NFTs and so I think it's very hard to
imagine that cycle kind of unwinding but then also like my hot take version is also the
metaverse which I think is cool like I've loved VR since I was a kid I love this idea
that we're living like these increasingly digital lives we already spend so much time
like on our phones on computer screens why not spend it in like a better you know more
I guess high fidelity digital world so the metaverse makes a lot of sense to me but it
just it feels like the metaverse won't really come into being until the digital is more
useful and things like DALs and NFTs and cryptocurrencies like I think make the digital world
more useful I also feel like we should just take a second to like acknowledge what a cool
time it is to be a builder because there was a moment where it was kind of getting a little
boring 2017 2019 like I feel like that was the area era where like Facebook and Google
were owning like everything hard to like bootstrap social networks mobile a lot of the use cases
on mobile had already been like played out it just there was obviously a lot of opportunity
but it did feel like a lot of stuff had already been built and it was really difficult to
break in versus now which feels like there's so much digital transformation crypto NFTs
like it's the Wild West and I think builders and hackers thrive in the Wild West let's
talk about a talk about something totally different I'll talk about personal rituals
it's inspired by something that you do drew that's awesome and my brother has a lot of
this stuff to my brother like wakes up every day he's got like a mantra he reads he's just
like very effective robot person sometimes and it works it's really good I don't have
any daily rituals like that but drew you've got a cool one I don't know if you still do
it but it's called like 100 rules and I'm on your website right now it's like drew Riley
dot com slash 100 rules 2020 and it's cool it's literally just a list of 100 insights
rules and you say that these rules emerge from like years of refining and transferring
notes and the goal is not for you to remember these notes and remember all of these rules
but you just read through the list every morning with like some problem in mind like whatever
you're trying to focus on that morning you have that in mind you read through the rules
and sometimes you come you come across a rule that's like super good you know an insight
that really applies that you might not have thought of otherwise so I think that's like
that's brilliant yeah I still do that every night right before I plan my day for the next
day I read through those and it's a good filtering process when I transfer journals that friction
of like if you still believe this you have to copy it over and if you don't you won't
go through that effort of copying it over so it's like this endless filtering process
there and just recently because for years I meditated every morning I still do that
but I'm trying to experiment with like making other habits more automatic so I just added
like a daily walk to that where if I just stay in the house all day the day feels really
short not in as good of a mood so just trying to make that automatic like meditation has
been automatic for years yeah I like that get out of the house you can tell I've been
out of the house because I'm not wearing my robe right now and if you see me on the podcast
with my robe that means I've not left the house today huge huge insight with with the
staying at home days getting shorter never been able to make that observation myself
but it's completely like that like when you said that I was like wow he's he's 100% correct
the cool thing about like this list is that like we spend so much time reading and learning
like all of us like the three of us have consumed like more information probably in the last
like month or two than like the average person did in a lifetime like a hundred years ago
and it's like impossible to retain all that right it just like it comes in you're a brilliant
insight just goes away and it's like how do I use that right if you listen to a podcast
like how do you use this stuff you listen to on podcast and so I'm a huge fan of checklists
and like your 100 rules list is basically a checklist drew where like you can catalog
all the best information you've ever seen put it in one place and you can make sure
that doesn't go to waste because every day you're running through it and seeing how like
seeing how it applies and like that's such an easy trick an easy tactic to just get smarter
without having to have like a super good memory or without having to like have like you know
really internalize all this all this stuff to the point where it's just automatic for
you yeah it's interesting how often like if we don't do that we forget something that
could have helped us out for years just because we forgot it so you have to relearn that lesson
I know like nobody who does this though right like all of us are just like forgetting awesome
lessons that we learned a long time ago and then we're not reusing them and we're making
the same mistakes yeah I mean even me where I have that habit where I've done that every
day probably since 2013 or however long and I still often forget in the middle of the
day to focus on what I control where like Twitter is a professional at getting us off
track or involved in things or you know that we don't necessarily exert control over but
it's like what do you control maybe even have some influence over that situation but scoping
that out makes it more actionable instead of just filling this vague sense of dread you know about
something yeah Greg do you have any rituals habits are any sort of like planning new years
resolution the type stuff that you use to sort of organize how you be a productive human so I have
a note file called words and a notes file called ideas and it's it's on my phone but it's basically
words are words that I come across I could be like walking and I see like a particular word
that I think just connects with me I'll just write it down and I've got this like massive list of
words that I use for projects that I just like think are really cool so like field trip motor
lodge June some of it is silly and dumb whatever but some of it turns out to be really helpful
when you're coming up with ideas for project and especially someone like me who's like you know
we're an agency and an incubator so we're constantly coming up with that names for things so and I
think that names picking a great name for a product is underrated super underrated and I think
constraints are underrated too because it's like if you like if you if you go into a product and
you're like okay you know I don't know what was one like field trip and like you just like
arbitrarily make that a constraint like that's like I've got to work this concept of field trip
into this project you're instantly going to have a bunch of creative ideas that almost no one has
right what is the essence of a field trip like what is it like was it feel like to go on a field
trip like what are the colors associated with the field like what is the energy like you're just
gonna bring a bunch of creative energy to that that others wouldn't and it's it's like it's so
simple that it seems dumb but it's actually super smart it I don't know where I'd be without it
certainly have worse names for things and the thing is ideas and this idea you know we all have
ideas and you know they come to us in the in the darndest places in the weirdest times but just
writing them down as one-liners and then making a habit to maybe put one idea in a one pager every
single month as a task for yourself even if you don't end up doing it I think it's a great process
for for getting really good at coming up with clear products also have some ideas I like to
share because I have the same habit Greg okay why don't we just jump straight to that then drew hit
me with an idea like what's an idea you got all right I hope someone makes this here I have a
crypto sci-fi I feel like a lot of people that are against crypto right now it's because they
we talked about this earlier but like NFTs are primitives just a piece of technology we think
of it as like these status symbols but it could be an insurance contract a passport driver's
license and it's hard for us to imagine this because we don't have like stories of imagined
use cases it's like we don't have a lot of crypto sci-fi right now so I would love more books more
novels around crypto I just jump around there's a habit list I've used forever and it's getting
progressively worse I just don't think they're maintaining it so I want to pay someone to
basically make a no-code version of it that I could customize and control they're like a couple of
obsidian plugins that I would pay for anything else a couple of YouTube channel ideas I'm looking
for one that's uh that's that's PC let's come back to that because I actually don't have any PC
channel ideas here's the one so we recently started sponsorships and I wish there was a way
for us to like a tool for us to just easily like auction off sponsorship spots so this would be
like a arbitrary auction tool very simple you could take a percentage of it I don't care but
yeah we just the slot is booked no one else can book that slot and we get this like capital
efficiency out of it where we know exactly what an ad slot is worth instead of like throwing the
dart hit the number and like losing any potential upside there love it it's a lot of ideas what's
your favorite on that list crypto sci-fi that's number one and that's because of this uh
transcription process I talk about I could tell it's the one I've had for the longest because
it's at the top everything else above it has fallen off between journals Greg had us with I
wanted to do your ideas so my last idea on this or my latest idea on this note on this notes file
is rainbow the crypto wallet but for kids so just a whole experience around onboarding children
into the concept of crypto currencies and I know what some of you are thinking you're like that's
a bad idea to like you know crypto is bad enough for I don't know why would you go to kids I think
financial literacy needs to be taught early early early age and I think we you know as long as it's
a safe environment and it's fun I think it would be great to have more ways for children to learn
about crypto concepts I learned so much about like I don't know the world and life by playing games
as a kid like whether I play like roller coaster tycoon I'm like raising prices I'm seeing like
fewer people come to my rides and stuff like charging for popcorn or playing like World of
Warcraft I'm like you know 2004 I got 50 people on 40 people on like a audio call over the internet
trying to organize like a decentralized group to accomplish a goal like I think that kids can do
so much stuff that it's harder to do as an adult because you don't take the time to do it so I like
that idea of like a kind of a safe crypto place for kids I also like ideas that sound kind of bad
because no one else is gonna try them right like you'll be in the space where no one's trying
because it just seems risky and kind of scary and like worst-case scenario you learn a lot right
but like no one else is there like you kind of avoid the competition because everyone's like
everyone wants to do like the safe stuff you know like half the ideas on my ideas list are like
really safe and obvious you know just like a better XYZ you know like shorter one of the ideas on my
list is like shorter books not that crazy of an idea for whatever reason people keep writing these
long-ass books and we have all this technology to have shorter books I just want shorter books I
want an app or something where I can discover shorter books I want to be able to read them in
audio form I want to pay less money for them and I want maybe a platform to incentivize authors to
write shorter books because I think the publishing industry just incentivize people to write really
long books so that might be the idea that like I'm the most excited about them I'm never gonna do
I hope somebody does it so I can benefit as a reader yeah along the vein of bad ideas I had
this idea of the COVID cookbook where the grocery stores were often out of ingredients can't find a
lot of stuff at the grocery store very simple recipes the COVID cookbook terrible idea I couldn't
let it go it's it's it would be trending yeah it would be the alliterations on point all right
well cool I feel like that's a good stopping point I always see this at the end of any hackers
episodes they ask you guys for one piece of advice maybe drew this is a good time for you
to pull a rule or two off of your hundred rules list but what's your guys advice for any hackers
out there who just getting started who are trying to figure out an idea to work on and you know
something personal from your life doesn't have to be the world's best advice that everybody should
follow but it's something specific that you like that others should know about yeah on the advice
front I would say like joining indie hackers was a turning point for me so it's not about a particular
idea it's just about community and specifically going to physical meetups in Atlanta where I
just met people and I got like this ambient inspiration where you can have great ideas you
can have bad ideas but it's just something about physically being around people and being inspired
that way it's like I didn't start seriously building and getting traction at feedback until
I joined a community I love it lovely and the extra shout out and I agree I can't wait for a
COVID to be more over so we can get like the meetups going back because we had hundreds of
meetups going on a month at some point and it dropped to like zero I'd be COVID I think for me
I would say the ideas are already out there on places like subreddits YouTube comments
discords like in these communities you can often find really really interesting pain points and
from that distill that into interesting startup ideas so the ideas are out there you just might
not be looking for them love it get your hands dirty get in the real world meet people face-to-face
it's super inspirational and the ideas are already out there I love that point a lot because I think
it's so easy to get stuck in our own heads like what should we work on what problems people have
but the internet's kind of like an open book quiz like there's so much out there you can see people
complaining and see people like bending over backwards to post stories and help on forums
and different things and so you can kind of just go steal their ideas and just do it better
graduate thanks a bunch for coming on do you want to tell listeners really can go to find out more
about what you're working on with late checkout and with trends yeah to check out trends vc just go
to trends dot vc and late checkout is late checkout dot studio or follow me on twitter at Greg
eisenberg all right thanks guys you