How was your weekend, by the way?
It was...
Dang it.
It feels like it still is the weekend.
I have no real distinction between the weekends and weekdays.
It's Tuesday, dude.
I mean, it's all the same for me, so...
I mean, the weekend was great, though.
Is it really all the same?
Is your weekend, like, basically playing the exact same way your weekdays are?
Literally, the only difference between my weekends and my weekdays is weekdays we have
our co-founder meeting, and that's literally it.
So my weekend, I probably just do a little bit more personal work.
That's the only difference.
But you don't find, like, your friends, like, change that?
Because I have...
Most of my friends don't run startups, or, you know, they're not, like, financially independent.
So they're free on the weekends, and so if they want to go on hikes, or they want to
do fun shit, they basically plan it on the weekends, which means that I end up doing
most of my social stuff over the weekend.
No.
Well, with me, my friends and I hang out on weekdays.
We go out and get food.
Also, there's a little bit of a blurry line for me, because my girlfriend works from home
three days a week.
So we frequently, in the middle of weekdays, we'll just go to, like, you know, the botanical
gardens or do random things.
So to me, like, yeah, there really is no...
It's like there's no boundary here.
Yeah.
I had a wedding this past weekend.
You know, Phil and Crystal.
They got married on Saturday.
They've been together for, like, I think six years.
So basically, everybody that I know, like, half of my friends from college and San Francisco,
like, came out for the wedding and crashed at my place, basically.
It was a blast, man.
It's so awesome having people come over and stay.
It just makes me wish everybody lived in the same city.
Like I thought...
Why do you arrange that?
I can't make everybody move to the same city, because everybody has jobs that tie them to
a certain location.
Or they've got family.
They've got roots, man.
Have you ever lobbied for this, though?
I mean...
Yeah, constantly.
Even the wedding was, like, in part planned on, like, a really nice weekend in Seattle
where the weather would be great to subtly convince everybody who came to town to consider
moving here.
And so, like, there's plans on plans on plans to try to get people to, like, coalesce into
one place.
But I think the opposite has happened.
Like, since I've graduated college, like, in the very first year, a lot of people stayed
in Boston.
But after that, like, people all went out to different cities to get jobs.
And I just had, like, some pipe dream in my head that people would, like, make a lot of
money and then eventually, like, move closer together.
But it's even gotten worse, because a lot of people moved to cities for jobs and things
got remote, so then they moved out to, like, the wilderness.
So now I have friends in, like, you know, the middle of nowhere in the woods in New Hampshire
or in Wisconsin.
And it just keeps getting, like, more and more spread out.
So I've sort of given up on this dream of everybody that I know living close together.
It's just going to be, I think, less and less of that.
You have to abandon all of your college friends and then just try to get as many of these,
like, remote-working tech founders as you can, build a tech city, right?
Hard pass.
Ride that wave.
Hard pass.
I mean, people levels did it, right?
Yeah.
But I don't want to be surrounded by nothing but tech people.
That's what San Francisco was for 10 years.
I want to be surrounded by people who are, like, doing other things, living around people
who don't make me want to work constantly.
Hey, what's up, Lauren?
Hey, Coraline.
Hey, Chani.
Good to see you guys.
I was listening to some episodes from Backlog.
Good stuff.
Cool.
Cool.
We're sitting here debating the merits of living around a bunch of tech people or living
around a bunch of people who are not tech founders.
And I feel like I lived in SF for 10 years.
And I got the first experience.
Now I'm in Seattle doing, like, the second version.
I think I like the second version better.
I also kind of want to make an assumption, Liron, that you're going to be, that you're
an opponent to tech cities.
Well, you know, I'm pretty flexible.
I've always loved remote work, and I actually just came out of doing two years in upstate
New York, this town called Gansver.
That's like three hours away from New York City.
And, you know, day to day, it didn't really affect my life, but I just, like, had this
sense of isolation that went away when I moved back to San Jose.
So take it for what it's worth.
Were you just, like, out in the woods, like, not much around you?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'd go out.
You know, we had three acres.
It was, like, the first time I, you know, lived in a house like that that wasn't kind
of, like, packed into a suburb, and, like, I would just, like, walk my dog, like, around
the property, and it was just, like, gratuitously large with, like, a bunch of random trees
and, like, a swamp, and it's, like, you know, I learned about myself, like, I'm not really
a country guy, so I'm, like, very much like a valley nerd.
Yeah, me either.
I'm, like, much more of a city guy, and so my, like, ideal is not, like, living out in
the woods or living out where there's nobody, like, I want to be surrounded by people.
I want to, like, have convenience.
Like, I can walk two blocks, and I'm at Whole Foods, like, that's my preferred setup, but
I also want the people around me to have, like, I don't know, like, a diversity of careers
and interests, because when I lived in San Francisco, everybody I knew was working on
a startup, and so, like, it pushed me to feel, like, if I don't, if I'm not working 24-7,
like, something's wrong with me, and, like, case in point, like, everybody I know in San
Francisco was, like, single in, like, their mid to late 30s, because no one cared.
It was just, like, I had no one to do that, sort of trying to figure out, like, what's
the best balance of living around people who are super hardcore focused and ambitious and
living around people who are, like, maybe I'm more of, like, a big fish in a small pond
in that regard, and it calms me down a little bit.
Totally.
And you're single now?
I am, very recently.
Oh, nice.
All right.
Freshly single.
Yeah.
Nice, nice.
I mean, that's got to be a big factor where you live, you don't want to move to the middle
of the woods if you're single.
No, you absolutely do not.
Well, Leron, thanks so much for coming on the show.
You are the founder of Relationship Hero, one of the most popular relationship coaching
platforms out there.
I think, just for context, you guys make, I would guess, like, millions of dollars in
revenue, and you started it in, what, 2017?
Yeah, that's right.
High single digit millions, and it's been slowly growing.
You know, it's not exploding exponentially, because the market of relationship coaching,
even though we're kind of number one in the market, it is kind of a small niche market,
I'm sorry to say, but I'm optimistic that more people are going to discover the market.
It's kind of crazy that it's a small niche market, because you have these relationships
in life that I think are absurdly important, anything from who are you going to be roommates
with to who are you going to start your company with, and especially who's going to be a romantic
sexual partner, right?
And it's like this hugely valuable relationship that's going to determine potentially the
course of your life.
And, yeah, we almost, as a society, invest very little.
It comes down to like, oh, who did you swipe right on tender?
And the idea of like having relationship coaches or dating coaches is like surprisingly not
that popular compared to how important it is.
So true, man.
And you know, that was when we made a slide deck for investors, I just put up a pie chart
and it's like, look, just like think about your life, right?
Like what's important in your life, what's valuable to you?
Relationships, you got to give that like a pretty big slice of the pie, right?
So if you look at the market size, or you look at where people's budgets are going,
you know, a lot of them are going to like impressing their date, right?
Like looking good on a day, like going to fancy stuff on the date, but like, why not
just invest a little more in like making the right decisions on a date so you don't waste
like four years of your life, you know, dating the wrong person, right?
Or like, yeah, bad relationship.
Yeah.
So is relationship hearing more about helping you find the right person?
Is it more about like, okay, I'm single, let me come to relationship here and like find
out how to date?
Or is it more like, hey, I'm in a relationship and we were having issues, let's find a couple's
sort of counselor, a relationship coach to help us with our issues?
It's both.
So the range of stuff we do is super broad.
So we have dating coaches, which is actually the origin of relationship here was on the
dating side, because it's what I'm more familiar with.
When I started the company, I just was about to get engaged, I had a lot of dating experience
at that point.
But we also have coaches, you know, for people who have been in multi decade relationships,
and we do couples coaching.
And all the things we do are like very high stakes, like even just dating, right?
Like my wheelhouse, I personally have done some some dating coaching at the beginning
just because coming from a nerd background, I had so much to learn about dating.
And you know, if you recently learned, you can teach and it's like, look, it's high
stakes what you're texting and what you're doing.
Right.
So I feel like the coaching does pay off.
The coaching can pay off all share a really quick horror story, which is that my most
recent girlfriend before the current one, we were together for, I think, three years.
And when we pretty much were effectively broken up, we decided at that point to get a relationship
coach, basically at a point where our relationship was on its dying embers.
And then we went in and it was, if anything, the usefulness of the coach was that she
like didn't allow us to deny the reality that was our terrible relationship.
And we really quickly wrapped it up.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, you know, a lot of times the coach is even just like a venue, you know,
which is similar to therapy in the sense of like, just like having a space where you just
like have to get stuff out there and like face it.
That's already like a big chunk of the value.
Yeah.
So are you single, Lauren?
So I'm actually married with two kids.
So you know, I'm kind of out of the game on the dating coaching.
Yeah.
I'm more, okay.
I'm more in the market for the relationship pointers now.
But I guess most of my memories of needing relationship coaching are very much on the
dating side.
Is that why you ended up starting this or was it like a sort of scratch your own itch?
Hey, I would love to have a dating coach.
Let me make this dating coach platform.
Very much.
Yeah.
Because so for most of my twenties, you know, when I was thinking of startup ideas, I had
a previous startup called Quixie that was in a totally different space and ended up
being a huge failure.
But as I was thinking of other ideas to do, I'm like, what problems am I actually familiar
with?
There are so many problems.
You know, I've lived a fortunate life.
But like, I really suck at dating, right?
Like my date, you know, as a nerdy guy, it's like, I really don't know like what to say
on a date.
And like texting was the worst, right?
Because I like match somebody on like, okay, Cupid or, you know, hinge.
And it's like, man, it's like this white screen of text.
Like what the hell, you know, it's like, I don't have anything to say, like, let's go
on a date.
But then it turns out, it turns out, it's like, look, there's like communication skills
that you can do.
There's like, there's actually like ways to just like have a good conversation that's
like fruitful and getting to know each other, right?
So that there is like, a kind of a system to it, right?
And that's what I like finally learned.
And then I'm like, well, wait a minute, this is like a problem that I think I can help
others with.
And maybe they'll even pay for it.
And it could be a business.
I just feel like it's such a great business.
Like my ex was a relationship coach, she wasn't on any sort of platform like yours, because
I think relationship heroes sort of employees are like, it's maybe a marketplace to find
these coaches.
She just had her own business.
And her and her partner made like, millions and millions of dollars doing relationship
coaching.
Like it's so like, it's like people sleep on like how big of an industry it could be
even though there's not enough people finding coaches, like you can charge a super high
amount of money just because people like people's relationships are the most important things
in their life.
So it's like a smart industry to build a business in, I think.
It's very true.
And you know, when we originally started, you know, we were optimistic that we'd grow
into the billions just because we look at therapy, right, like better help is making
like hundreds of millions a year in revenue.
And we're like, look, if you look at the average person, you know, do they go to therapy?
Maybe.
Could they use some help with their relationship?
I would argue that's even higher probability than needing to go to therapy.
So we were kind of calibrating our market size to therapy.
It just hasn't worked out on the marketing side where you just don't see that many people,
you know, holding up their hand being like, I need a relationship coach now.
It's not as much of like a known thing that people are asking for right now.
Well, one thing I would add to it not being so much of a known thing is that both with
relationship coaching and even with online dating, I've noticed that I don't know, three
out of five of my friends who don't live in coastal cities turn their noses up at it.
They have this very romantic traditional notion that anything that is related to like romance
or relationships or your skill with like communicating with the, with whatever sex you're interested
in needs to be completely natural.
And like, there doesn't like, you mentioned system.
I know people who would instantly be like, what, what do you mean system sounds so unnatural
that sounds so weird?
Right.
And you know, the ultimate creepy system is like the pickup artist stuff, right?
Right.
Which I think, and you know, I'm not ashamed to admit I've like studied them pretty comprehensively
all the different pickup artists stuff because I'm a systematic guy, right?
And I really like that they're always offering a system.
Now, unfortunately, they're like bad systems.
They have like a million problems, but their pitch that they're going to systematize it
and like, you know, just explain it, that part has a lot of appeal.
Yeah.
Well, I think that there's so many different stories of like nerds approaching dating
in ways that are off putting to like maybe the average person that just like, they don't
seem romantic.
Like, um, our mutual friend, Sam Parr Channing, have you heard the story of how he basically
decided to start dating and like how his approach to it as a nerd?
I interviewed him on another podcast.
I talked to him a little bit about it in person, but I haven't heard.
Yeah.
He's basically like, Hey, I'm a nerdy guy.
You know, I'm not that, like, how do I use my intelligence that I apply to startup life
to like basically pick a life partner?
And he just did a bunch of research on like, what group is, uh, essentially the most like
likely to like, to like me.
And he like went on and he like did, I think, okay, keep it a bunch of reports.
And he's like, okay, like black women for whatever reason, like don't get, don't get
like as much attention on the dating app.
So like, if I'm going to invest my time, I should have asked my time there and more likely
to have like outsized gains.
And he did.
And he found like an awesome partner he's still married to.
She's super smart and cool, but like, you know, most people hearing that story, it's
like, that doesn't sound super romantic.
You know, like, that sounds like you fucking nerd.
How could you approach dating like that?
It should be, you know, romantic.
It should be serendipitous.
Like you shouldn't, you shouldn't have a star.
You shouldn't have a system.
So yeah, you know, that is not in our playbook of advice for how they recommend finding somebody.
But wow, I'm glad I work for him.
I want to, like, you've written a bunch online.
You have this awesome concept that you call the great filter of startups.
You know, there's like the Fermi paradox, why there's so many planets, there's so many
stars.
There's so many aliens, you know, all over the galaxy, right?
And there's got to be some sort of great filter, some sort of gap that makes it really hard
for any intelligent civilization to spread out and take over the galaxy.
Is it because it's really hard for intelligent life to evolve?
Or is it because it's really hard for people to get to the point of faster than light travel?
Or is it because, you know, species kill themselves?
Like, where is it that's stopping, you know, aliens from eventually taking over?
And you can ask the same question with startups, like at what point in the startup lifecycle
do most founders fail?
Or give up, or quit, or have their company collapse so they don't eventually get to this
like billion dollar exit in IPO, or they don't get to this anti-hacker dream of having a
profitable business that just provides for their lifestyle.
What do you think that great filter is?
Like, what's killing most startups?
I love that you ran with the Fermi paradox analogy, the Fermi paradox and the great filter,
because yeah, it's exactly right.
You look at the empty universe and you're like, what killed off the aliens?
Where was the biggest improbability barrier of, you know, of atoms becoming sentient life?
Like, where's the biggest barrier?
And then I make the analogy to startups.
If you do a post-mortem on like, why did the startup not become a huge company?
The most likely place that it failed was actually that initial point of creating value for one
user.
And that's what I think is underappreciated.
That's what I call the great filter of startups.
The idea that, in my estimation, 80% of startups will just shut down without having created
value for one user.
To me, that's insane, because we're not talking about like, okay, you didn't make your unit
economics work, right, or like, you didn't scale enough to run a profitable operation.
It's like, no, no, no, you didn't create value for one user.
And yet you like burned $5 million and you have like a big team.
It's like, what were you doing?
Right?
So that's the question I ask.
One thing I noticed anecdotally from just basically interacting with hundreds and thousands
of indie hackers.
So they're not necessarily startup founders who are raising money, is that with them,
at least the great filter doesn't necessarily seem to be where they're provably providing
value to one user.
It's just getting to the point where they're genuinely building and launching their companies.
I mean, like, entrepreneur seems to be the biggest term that's thrown around on indie
hackers.
Your starting line is even earlier.
It's like, basically not even getting started is the greatest.
It's basically the equivalent of like the great filter for aliens being like, intelligent
and life just doesn't evolve very often, let alone succeed.
Like I would imagine that the drop off point for both of these different milestones, right?
One is I'm going to be an entrepreneur and then okay, well, are you building and trying
to launch something?
The drop off point is massive for that.
And then I think likewise, once you're building and you're going through basically playing
startup the drop off point for then like, okay, let me find someone.
His name is going to be Lee Ron, you know, and you know, I'm going to like try to get
him to buy a thing.
The drop off point there is also, I think, massive.
That's very interesting.
Yeah, because you know, there is a selection effect, right?
Where if I'm talking to somebody, it's because I'm like helping them apply to YC or they're
trying to get investment and you guys are seeing this, this indie hackers community
where it's like much more casual.
Yeah.
It's like the very top of the entrepreneurship funnel at any hackers where it's like, we're
talking to people who are like, Hey, my mom saw this story and I read it and it's like
really interesting and maybe I should quit my job.
So we're talking to people who are like, haven't even heard of YC yet and they're like super
duper early in the sort of like inspiration phase of becoming certifiers.
Now, I think the advice might be the same.
I mean, I know your advice is like, Hey, try getting started, see what happens.
And the way I would phrase it is like, see if you can just go give value to the first
person, right?
And you probably want to do that in a manual way, right?
Like don't write some code is usually the advice I give, right?
But just like, go get some.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What do you think the real great filter is for aliens around?
Like what's your, what's your guess?
So I love the great filter idea.
It's, it's a, I think it was from around 2000, it's by Robin Hansen and he actually has an
update on the gray filter, which I think is that it's underappreciated.
So first there was a Fermi paradox and then there was Robin Hansen's great filter observation.
And now as of a couple of years ago, he's updated it with a new research paper that
he calls grabby aliens.
And he's like, yeah, grab the aliens like aliens that just like to like grab things
and like, cause the whole idea is like, if an alien is grabby, it's like really expanding
and you really should be able to see it.
Like it's really weird that the sky just looks like there's a bunch of like untouched galaxies
because like, they really should be like harvesting that power to be like replicating, doing whatever
they want to do.
So the idea of grabby aliens is like, look, it's still early in the evolution of the universe.
It's kind of like the starting gun has gone off.
And like throughout the really large universe, there are, there are a bunch of intelligent
civilizations evolving.
We're just one of the first within the visible universe, but like he predicts that like a
couple billion light years away, there's already like another one or two civilizations that
are popping off.
And now it's just like a race to like take over the universe like as fast as possible.
Like it's far enough away, like it's still early, like, and he does some calculations.
He's like, look, if you look at the fact that how we came in, in the earth, like he has
some analysis that, you know, I don't fully get it, but it's like, okay, well, we came
in after like a billion years, but it seems like if you roll the dice, it should have
like taken much longer.
So like, it seems like we really are like, we're just really early.
That's an interesting theory, it's like the universe is like many, many, many, many billions
of years old.
But I mean, it's presumably going to last for like, you know, many more billions of
years.
So like, yeah, we could be super early.
I love the sci-fi shit.
Even a trillion actually, right?
So he's like, look, this themes early, right now, it's like, it's early.
My favorite theory is that we have a false assumption that the best thing to do as an
alien is or any species is to take over the galaxy that we just need to keep expanding
because that's how we treat land on earth.
So why wouldn't we do the same thing to the planets?
My guess is this, and this is obviously just completely pulled out of my ass, that essentially
that there isn't, that it's not very like resource efficient to try to take over the
galaxy, that most species will have a pretty short lifespan anyway, and like traveling
throughout the galaxy is just like, not very efficient, and that actually, if we reach
a certain level of like, I don't know, techno utopia, technological advancement, that it's
better to just like make life on one planet awesome.
And so you could do that in a number of ways.
Like for example, like we as a species are just now really experimenting with virtual
reality.
But you can imagine a world like The Matrix, where we create like a digital world where
you can plug into and it's essentially just as good, if not better than the real world,
if we have sufficiently advanced technology and you can do whatever you want in the digital
world and why, you know, try to expand different planets if everybody can just plug in, you
know, utilize fewer resources, keep the planet basically like alive instead of, you know,
cash off at the harvest and resources and then just keep the population low and just
live out our days like that.
I can imagine there being a lot of alien civilizations that just do that, in which case we wouldn't
see them because like, they don't care about the galaxy.
It's not as valuable as digital worlds.
So Cortland, you haven't read Elon Musk's, one of his most recent tweets about how we're
going to have some existential crisis, you know, a comet is going to hit meteorite or
something's going to hit the earth and so you don't think that we need to be an interplant
planetary species for purely self-preservation reasons?
I get that.
I just don't think we're that long-sighted.
I think the average person doesn't give a shit that at some point in the next billion
years, life's going to be wiped out by some sort of effect like that.
And I think that it's just really hard to travel across space, but I don't know.
This is all very hand-heavy stuff.
One more caveat is, sure, maybe humanity won't become grabby and maybe a bunch of alien civilizations
aren't grabby.
I love that term grabby.
Yeah.
They're just chilling, right?
But Robin Hanson's observation is like, the thing is you only need one to become grabby
and then they start like essentially attacking everybody.
So you kind of have to be grabbing defensively.
Yeah.
You could be.
It's a really good sci-fi series.
I think they're going to make a Netflix show about it or maybe HBO is doing it with the
same guys who wrote Game of Thrones, but it's an adaptation from a book called The Remembrance
of Earth's Past.
I don't want to ruin it, but it's kind of a sort of about this exact concept of very
grabby aliens trying to sort of spread throughout the galaxy.
Anyway, let's talk about startups.
So you got over this grateful to yourself, the very first one that Channing's mentioning
where you got inspired to start startups and you decided being a software engineer isn't
just good enough.
I want to be at the top of the order chart.
Where do you go from there?
What's the first step after you decide you want to do this to eventually starting a relationship
here?
Yeah.
So we started pretty lean.
We started with just a Facebook group to give our friends advice and it was funny.
We just tested it with a handful of friends and one of the first use cases was our friends
would just post screenshots of dating conversations they're having and they're like, oh man, this
girl said this.
What should I tell her?
You should ask her out on a date, stuff like that.
And then we would just give advice in the Facebook group.
And so we watched it for a month and then I check it in a month and it's still active
and I'm like, well, if this group is still active for a month, that's more than my friends
have ever humored me on any project that I've asked him to check out.
So that was a good first sign.
And then from there, we're like, well, maybe we can get people on Reddit to come for free.
And so we have a free chat room and we spent a couple months just getting people to engage
for free.
And then probably the hardest step was like, okay, now let's try to charge her money.
And then it was like instantly everybody's gone, it's a ghost town.
Can you say we, who's we?
Oh, right.
Okay.
So I started relationship hero.
I had a co-founder.
He was with the company for four years and now he's on to the next gig, but he, he was
also a dating coach.
His name's Lior.
And he was like the head of coaching for a while.
And I was like business and software engineering.
So we would both give dating advice and he would also give relationship advice.
He wrote up a bunch of curriculum for the coaches and the whole idea was like, can we
translate like this fun experiment we're doing with our friends?
Can we turn it into a place where like coaches come and they like learn how to be better
coaches?
And then, and then we're like, yeah, paid, right?
So like a few things to click into place.
I think Facebook groups are so underrated as like a form of like validating ideas or
like as an early version of any sort of project because it's like, it takes you five seconds
to create a group.
You already have a ton of friends on the platform.
Like I never use Facebook, but I also never deleted my account.
So if a friend were like, Hey, join this group, blah, blah, blah, like once every couple years
someone says that and like, I'll join and talk to people.
And then like Facebook itself is so good at like surfacing kind of the conversations to
other people that it just kind of like, it's just the easiest way I think to like bootstrap
a very small group of people to discuss any sort of idea.
Totally.
Yeah.
I mean, it's to the point where when people as an angel investor, when people are telling
me about their idea, if they're telling me that they're like interacting with people
on Facebook and like they haven't written code for me, that's like a big point to score,
you know, creating value without writing code, great sign of a startup.
What's the, so you have this idea.
I think you call it like the value proposition story.
It's like the story you're saying that startups should walk themselves through before you
write any code, before you do any market research, like you can just like tell yourself this
story and try to like instantaneously see your startup idea makes any sense.
So how does that, how does that work?
And did it apply to you starting relationship here?
Yeah.
The value prop story, right.
And I feel like I got to pick another term because it's like, you know, three words,
value prop story.
I'm a little wordy, but you also see me on Twitter talking about hollow abstraction.
It's related to that.
There's actually something really deep here, which is it's this idea that when you pitch
something abstractly, sometimes it can sound good and it can have no flaws.
Like the abstract pitch, you can't really argue back against it.
And yet there's no specific example of what you mean.
And that's what I mean by a pitch.
That's like, it doesn't have a value prop story.
It is a hollow abstraction and yet it sounds super convincing.
And I've been tripped up on those kinds of pitches a lot in my career, arguably my company
that I had that I failed, a lot of the pitch was a hollow abstraction.
And so the point of the value prop story test is to open the trapdoor of an abstract pitch
and to be like, what specific example does this map to, if any?
And that's the key is some of them map to zero.
So what would be like an example of like a hollow abstraction business idea that just
doesn't map to anything specific?
Yeah.
Well, obviously, you know, crypto is such a rich space of all abstractions, but like,
let's say micropayments, right, not necessarily crypto, which is like, I'm going to make a
business to enable better micropayments.
And it's going to be great because suddenly you can pay any amount, you don't just have
to pay like minimum of a dollar, you can pay a penny, right?
And you can like stream somebody's wage at their work.
And also you can like pay a penny to read an article.
So if I pitch it to you like that, it's like, that's pretty cool.
Like, sure, that's awesome.
It should exist.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
But the Achilles heel of that idea is when you then force the person to add specific
context.
It's like, great.
I don't know that abstractly.
Like there's nothing wrong.
I'm not against micropayments.
It sounds great.
But now tell me one example.
And they're like, okay, here's my example, reading an article, like, okay, like reading
like a New York Times article and like, yeah, and like, okay, well, if, you know, but why
just pay for one article, why not just like have a tab of like two bucks where I can just
read a few articles?
Like, is it really that big deal?
Because I'm going to be back, you know, in the next year, is it like, what's really the
pain point there?
And like, well, okay, maybe not New York Times and like, okay, so you want to pick a different
example, right?
And it's like really hard to pick an example.
Okay.
So how do you, how do you fix this problem?
Like you're trying, you're sitting here with relationship hero.
You've got your Facebook group, you know, how do you basically make this a specific
pitch and go through this value prop story process?
So for example, like my friend is trying to figure out the best text to send on a dating
app.
And he likes this girl.
He's trying to get a date.
Now without relationship hero, he sends a text and then he's confused why he doesn't
get a reply.
Right?
Like he thought things are going fine.
Like he just doesn't know what he did wrong and he doesn't get a reply and he doesn't
get the date.
And suddenly the whole timeline of his life is now awry, right?
Because he could have been married to that girl.
So it's like a disaster.
But with relationship hero, right?
So we help him analyze the conversation.
We're like, well, this point you actually just said something that's just like, it's
really difficult to reply to.
Like you didn't really steer the conversation in a certain direction.
So you give him like this tip and suddenly he does get that reply and the conversation
is back on track.
So like, that would be the value prop, you know, the difference between the before and
after of using relationship hero.
And so now you have like real names with relationship hero because your actual friends are in the
Facebook group.
Like, what were they doing?
Like sharing their dating woes with you or like helping each other workshop date?
Like what were they actually posting about?
Yeah.
So it was a lot of screenshots both from dating apps and then from texting that would happen
after the date.
Yeah.
And then later on as we branched out, we started getting like texts from people within relationships
and then breakups became a really great segment for us.
Is there really a niche of people where they've already broken up and they are trying to negotiate
the question of whether to get back together?
Yeah, that's actually a really large niche.
Yeah.
And the funny thing is like, because you never even necessarily get closure, right?
So you could even have a different relationship, right?
And then like 10 years pass and you're like, I wonder if I should get back together with
that other one.
Yeah.
I think it's never good.
There's never closure.
This is so fascinating because I feel like there's such a huge long tail like SEO keywords,
like basically tens of millions of people trying to workshop their relationships by
googling this stuff.
Like anything from like, how do you break up with someone effectively?
Or should I break up with this person?
Or like, how do I know if this person is right for me?
There's like probably like a million different terms like that.
And every one of them can be kind of answered by like talk to this relationship coach.
I mean, Google search is actually our best marketing channel.
So our funnel is like somebody is googling for a question.
And even my wife was like, yeah, one time I had a bad breakup.
And I was like, so distraught.
And I just remember I was like, googling for answers.
I was like, oh, there you go.
You would have found a relationship here.
Like, yeah.
How do you recover from a breakup?
How do you feel better?
How long do you feel sad after a breakup?
Like all these are relevant questions.
Exactly.
Now, you know, the problem for us as a business though is like, they don't really expect the
answer to be like a coach, even though that's like the best answer.
Like we actually can pretty quickly like give you some really good guidance, like just because
we're like, you know, we specialize in this stuff.
And so so we have to get them over the hump of like, well, if you don't mind paying a little
bit for a coach, like it's gonna be worth it.
But they're kind of just like they're expecting to read an article.
They're just like, is it yes or no?
Exactly.
So what's the next step after you have like sort of validated like, okay, there are specific
people who want to use this.
My friends in this Facebook group, like, how do you go from a Facebook group to like a
real business where you're actually building out a product and you're beginning to start
like charging money and market it?
It was really mostly like the exercise of like, how do you just streamline a marketing
funnel?
And to some degree, we had to streamline the hiring funnel, but the supply side was
always easier than the demand side, because there's a lot of perfectly good coaches who
are all just like bottlenecked on getting clients the way we are as a business.
So it's kind of funny that we took our greatest weakness and like, made it our greatest strength
to the coaches like, hey, we're good at this, even though it's like our greatest weakness
right?
Yeah, but so the supply side was the relatively easy side, and the demand side has always
been the hard side.
And so just like, we have like, what's called consultant coaches that basically like advise
the clients on like, which coach they should get and like, you know, what they should purchase
and obviously, like what size package and like recommend the upside of like doing a
two month coaching package instead of just a single session, right?
So like, that's right.
That's part of like making the business work is like, you know, getting those higher LTVs.
Yeah, that's such an interesting problem.
Because again, I've mentioned that like my ex was like a relationship coach.
And she made the bulk of her money, just charging like three or $400 an hour to mostly couples
who are having like, relationship issues, sexual issues, and then eventually she hit
on teaching.
And she realized like, hey, a lot of other people want to do what I'm doing, they would
love to be relationship coaches, but they don't know a lot of stuff, right?
They don't know how to be good relationship coaches, they haven't put in the hours in
the work.
And also like, they don't know how to do marketing, they don't know how to get clients to find
them.
And that's like the hard part.
And so basically, your supply side is all these coaches who don't know how to like,
maybe they have the skills, but they like have trouble getting more clients in the door.
And then you guys, you're saying you have the same exact issue, it's really hard to
find clients.
But like,
we're a little better at it than them.
That's it.
Exactly.
You're just like a little bit better.
Like, they've got to work, like focus on two problems, how to be a good coach and how to
find clients.
And you can focus almost exclusively on like, we'll find clients for you.
And they have really nothing to lose by by signing up with you and saying, okay, like
hopefully these these guys come through if they don't, they don't, I guess how did you
go from like making your first dollar to making more money?
Sure.
Yeah.
So you know, in startups, VCs love when you've got like an unfair distribution advantage.
But we only have fair distribution advantages, like we only do it the hard way, like we just
do Google Facebook ads, we do affiliates, where we just bid on like impressions, you
know, like cut out the middleman Google AdSense.
So like, we've never figured out any creative way to market ourselves, you know, just it
just all we did is we just monetize it so that we can afford to spend money to market.
And you know, what sucks is we can't do demographic targeting because our users are like ages
18 to 80, both genders equally, like every walk of life, you know, you kind of have to
have some amount of disposable income, but like, we just can't target and so like the
Google search or like on affiliate pages are like the best way to target.
Do you remember around the very first dollar that you made, like the very first time you
guys actually connected somebody to a coach?
Yeah, and it's kind of funny, because I was telling my co founder, I was like, I don't
want to turn on monetization, because it's going to require some code.
It's like just like keep getting the free people to like use it more.
And there was this guy Edward, who was a professional meat packer from Texas, obviously didn't have
the highest disposable income, but he was like using relationship heroes so much that
it's like, all right, Edward, we got to charge you, it's going to be $5 for unlimited coaching
for the next week, which is like the cheapest thing ever.
And he's like, Okay, fine, that's worth it.
So week goes by and so and of course, he like uses it to the max, right gets like dozens
of hours of coaching, like for me and my co founder, it's like, all right, we're raising
it to 10.
And then he's like, Okay, I'm out.
I can't do 10.
And of course, we just did it through like a PayPal invoice.
So you've mentioned that one of your best marketing channels is SEO.
But what other marketing channels have you tried that didn't work out so well?
We kind of tried them all.
So like, you know, it's like, I'm a pro at like dumping a bunch of money into something
and getting like zero result and then being frustrated.
Like I've done that so many times, like, you know, we did like radio ads, like 10 grand.
And so we get like zero people using our like special tracking link.
Okay, and then I'm like, well, that was a complete waste.
But since then, a couple people have told me like, Oh, yeah, relationship here, I heard
that on the radio.
So like, at least I know that they like play the ads like they didn't screw us.
What about if you tried any influencer marketing, because I know there are these like, there
are these people out there who just have huge followings in terms of people trust their
relationship advice and their life advice.
So you've got like big names like Brene Brown, for example, she writes a lot about just relationships
and sort of like being a whole person.
And then you have like relationship coaches, have you tried like reaching out to any of
them and getting them to promote you to their audiences?
Yeah, we have a little bit.
And there are some coaches, especially the coaches that are more hands off, like, Oh,
do my email coaching, like there are ones where we're just better as an upsell.
But for the ones where they monetize by themselves coaching, it's a little competitive.
So it's not the best affiliate partnership.
But like, we do have a bunch of affiliates, like content sites are our best affiliates,
we're always hoping to get a dating app as a major affiliate, it hasn't come through
yet just because there's not that many daily dating apps at the right scale.
But like, that is our advantage is like, we're a good back end for getting higher value purchases
if you have clients who are like buying cheaper stuff from you.
So like, I do think that will probably hit for us at one point, for example, like, let's
say Oprah wanted to have like Oprah's coaching, you know, like a white label relationship
hero operation could make a lot of sense.
Do you have coaches who are getting rich off your platform?
Like they're making like, you know, hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars in coaching?
I'm not gonna go to rich, but you know, we're happy that a few are making six figures.
That's if you're like in the top 10% of relationship area, you're at least making six figures on
the platform, which is pretty nice when you get to work anywhere around the world.
Yeah, you're essentially your job is to talk to interesting people about like love and
sex and their partners.
Right?
He's a pretty sweet job.
Like most people I know who are released to coaches like enjoy doing it a lot.
You just you just gave a hypothetical about getting Oprah to be a coach, which makes
me curious about quality control.
I mean, you're not a coach.
How do you like make sure that your coaches are good?
How do you like it's, you know, it's the classic problem.
If you're not a developer and you want to hire a developer, then it's like, you're like,
you have no idea of how to assess them.
So what's your process?
Yeah, so we used to be more hands on and like really train them and be very picky about
like exactly how they coach.
Now we're more of a marketplace model where we just look at what they do in their current
coaching business.
So we're just picking like, look, you, you basically just already have to prove that
you're successful.
Like, so we don't really take the raw talent and make you successful.
We just like look at what you already have going on and then just like, you know, sharing
your success as your agent, basically.
So that's already a lot of evidence coming in.
Like we look at your resume, we look at your training.
And then once you get on the platform, we are really quantitative of like, you know,
what are your clients saying in the reviews?
What's your attention rate?
And we just go by the numbers.
Like, are you matching like what a successful coach looks like?
And we just weed out pretty quickly, like the few people who aren't meeting the standards.
It's like very quantitative.
Right.
And as a user, do you get like the same?
Like, if I come to you, I'm like, I want a relationship coach for, you know, my relationship
with me and my girlfriend.
It's not going so well.
When I come back, do I get the same coach over and over?
Or do I get paired with the different coaches every time?
That is the default, especially because like the coaches have like longer term programs.
So you're probably like in a program with a coach, but there are some clients who are
like, look, I just want to have three different coaches.
And like, we support that too.
I just want to call you guys up when I'm having a fight and then just get somebody to tell
me that I'm right and that I'm the one who's correct.
Do you offer, do you offer that service perhaps?
Yeah.
I mean, you know, that's, that's what boost our confidence.
They can try.
I remember I, my friend Len worked at Homejoy and they're like, do you know what Homejoy
was?
They're like a.
Yeah.
And actually Adora was my product manager at slides.
So we go back.
Oh, really?
Okay.
So you have the connection.
Yeah.
They were like a cleaning service.
And I remember one of their issues was that like, if somebody comes to clean your home,
like, like you don't really want that to be a total stranger, ideally, like maybe the
first time they're a stranger.
But the second time you're like, you want that same person back because you trust them.
It's this very intimate sort of interaction and it'll be better cleaning your home if
they cleaned it before and they know kind of what you like.
And I think one of the challenges with Homejoy in particular was that like every time you
might just get a total random person.
And so having a coaching is like the same thing to me or it's like, I personally would
want the same coach, assuming they're really good.
I had a therapist with my ex as well and he was so good at like telling you what you were
doing wrong.
Like he would come up with some sort of euphemistic phrase to explain.
Like for me, he had like a, like I could be argumentative, but he wouldn't say a court
linear argumentative.
You need to chill out.
He'd say, Hey, you've got kind of like a warrior lawyer inside of you, right?
Like a warrior lawyer.
And I would hear that.
I'm like, I do have a warrior lawyer.
Like, I'm all proud of it, but he's really just telling me like something that's like
wrong and need to change.
So I feel like you can find someone who's like you like, but who also can give it to
you real and like not just take your side.
And probably, you know, from our perspective, it's like, look, it's probably better than
talking to your friend.
That's kind of like the next level.
So I was reading your, uh, your Twitter bio, you describe yourself, uh, as Iran, Shapira
rationalist entrepreneur, angel investor, author of blood at MVP.com and aspiring to be the
Michael burry of crypto.
And the last part I think is super interesting.
So Michael burry for, uh, maybe some listeners you don't know, he's kind of famously predicted,
uh, the big real estate bubble in the early 2000s.
He predicted that it would collapse and then he made something like $700 million for his
investors and like a hundred mil for himself, basically shorting against the market.
And then when the real estate bubble did burst, he just, he just got huge.
And so there's like a movie about him, the big short, one of my favorite movies, uh,
where Christian Bale plays Michael burry.
You want to be Michael burry for crypto, which I assume means, uh, you want to bet against
crypto and make a lot of money doing that.
Like what is, what's the strategy there?
Like how do you, how do you achieve becoming the Michael burry of crypto?
There's a couple of differences between me and Michael burry.
Like I don't have a multi-hundred million fund or anything.
I didn't go raise money for investors who do the strategy.
Um, I just put like half a million of my own money on a, on a short portfolio against Bitcoin,
which has done well in the last few months.
Um, so, you know, I hope to make like a couple million out of this when, when all is said
and done, if, if Bitcoin and crypto crashes, I predict, um, but worst case, even if Bitcoin
stays bubbly forever, like that's fine, you know, it's, I'm not risking it all.
Um, but the interesting thing about crypto is for a while there was a lot of alpha embedding
that it's going to crash.
I mean, back in the day, a few months ago, right, when, when Bitcoin is trading at 67k
when Rivian was trading at like $140 a share, I was like, are you kidding me?
Like there's so much, uh, how much juice to squeeze out of these stocks.
Um, and there's a lot less now, like the odds when you're, when you're doing a long put
on like a deep out of the money put on, on like the Bitcoin ETF, uh, you know, the publicly
traded ETF it's now like the markets have gotten wise, like, okay, yeah, this thing
might crash again.
So a lot of the opportunity has already passed, but I still think there's some opportunity
to make a few bets like this, explain, explain your, like this financial terminology.
What is a deep out of the money put?
So like, let's say the price of, uh, of a Bitcoin ETF, Bitcoin, if you have just something
that goes up and down, when Bitcoin goes up and down essentially.
Um, so if it's currently valued at like 20 bucks, I might buy something where if the
price goes below, uh, $7, you know, it's not 20.
That's when I start making money.
And then like the lower it goes below seven, the more money I make, and it's called a deep
out of the money, but because seven is like way below 20, right?
As opposed to like a $9, but it's a $7, but right.
So essentially you're basically just betting on Bitcoin or Ethereum or any crypto, whatever
you're betting on, just to basically drop like a stone and go way further.
I really think that, I mean the trillion dollar valuation of the crypto space, I don't necessarily
think it's like a complete zero, but I think it's like, you know, 10 billion, right?
Like much smaller than a trillion in my estimation.
So that's why I feel like it's, it's like a pretty attractive bet to buy, put options.
I read on Twitter, one of your cases against crypto or one of your, one of your criticisms
against a lot of like crypto bros is this hollow abstraction idea that there's a lot
of people selling abstract visions of crypto that don't ever track with, you know, very
concrete real promises.
But besides that sell me on why crypto is something that I should not involve myself
in.
Sure.
Yeah.
By the way, I used to, back in the day, I used to be pro crypto because the rationalist
community back around 2010 was saying like, Hey, Bitcoin seems like a cool bet.
Like there's a chance that it might get really big.
And if so, like, you know, it could have like a really high upside.
So we should bet on it.
So I actually did.
I was buying Bitcoin.
Like in the really early days, I actually angel invested in Coinbase in 2012.
So my views have obviously changed a lot.
And what's crazy is I don't think Bitcoin makes that much sense anymore.
Now that I actually like looked into macroeconomics a little more, I'm like, the central bank
is actually like pretty critical the way that they regulate the money supply that has like
a very important function.
And like the fact that Bitcoin doesn't have that is like bad, like very bad, right?
It could lead to like a deflationary spiral and like directly lead to a great depression.
So like, if I could go back in time and tell myself that I would be right, but I would
also be poor.
It's like, you know, I'd make make less money on that.
But the thing about all these crypto pitches are they are to be frank, like hollow abstractions,
the ones that aren't scams, right?
I'm not even telling you about the scams, the ones that are like trying to think I'm
telling you about the ones that are founded, you know, funded by a 16 z funded by visionary
founders who are really smart, who have other successful businesses besides it's like totally
legit.
Nobody's trying to scam anybody.
And yet it's like what I said about micropayments, right?
So they're just like high on their own supply, which I've been there in my previous companies.
They're like, man, wait until we get payments as the infrastructure of the internet, things
are going to absolutely change.
And it's like, well, there's not really an example where they change.
That's like a problem.
Yep.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
I've like looked into what are the actual benefits of like blockchain technology, for
example, what are the actual benefits of a lot of these coins and like, for most of them,
I feel like the actual use cases when I get into the specifics, aren't really like better
than what you can already do today, like the vast majority of them.
But there are a few like I'm curious to get your opinion on like, for example, I'm a little
bit bullish on NFTs.
And I'm not bullish on like the speculative like sort of art market of NFTs, where you
really some sort of collection and lots of people speculate on the price.
But I am bullish on like the blockchain is a database, essentially, that almost anybody
can write to like almost like a universal API where I had any hackers could, you know,
reward users with some sort of badge or something, or some sort of proof that they accomplish
something and any hackers, put it into the blockchain, so they can have that NFT in their
wallet.
And then any other website on earth could basically look at their crypto wallet and
verify that they have this item that came from me.
And what I think is cool about that is not that the technology enables something that
couldn't already be done, like you could just use a regular database for this.
And honestly, it would be better than the blockchain, store more information, be faster
to query, but that it's really hard on an adoption standpoint, basically, the fact that
crypto so widely adopted, that people can kind of feel like they trust it, because it's
not really like the Ethereum blockchain is not really owned by anyone.
And so lots of bigger companies and smaller companies say, I'll just like connect to this
API, whereas if Google tried to make a universal database, everybody use like nobody would
really trust it makes me a little bit bullish for the future of NFTs is like some sort of
way where a bunch of disparate internet services can essentially write to the same database.
That's the only like the only thing that's ever gotten me really excited about crypto.
What are what are like, what are your thoughts on that?
Is there anything that excites you about crypto?
I'll tell you why I don't like blockchain is interoperability, but I'll give you one
consolation prize of something that I think makes light sense after that.
Yeah.
So blockchain is interoperable.
What you just described, I feel like people just pitched that and they work backwards
from a solution.
But we have this blockchain, isn't it good as the interoperability layer?
But if they reverse it, and they're like, okay, we need interoperability, how do we
get interoperability?
And they're like, oh, we just need a decentralized proof of work or proof of stake thing where
it prevents double spending.
It's like, wait, what I'm seeing like a mismatch here between like the problem as if you look
at the problem first thinking start from the problem.
You know, we have micro formats, right?
Like open graph, right is a way that Twitter reads the tags on a page to know what image
preview to display.
Like you don't need blockchain technology or you know, like, so there's a lot of ways
to like show those badges on another page.
Yeah, so you have that but like what we don't have is essentially because what I care about
is adoption.
Like, for example, I don't care that much about the decentralized nature of the blockchain.
I don't care very much about any of those other features you mentioned, like that a
lot of crypto nerds get obsessed with.
What I do care about is the fact that like if anyone releases some sort of particular
product like it's really hard for it to be mass adopted, just really hard.
Something like open graph is cool, but open graph is like based on like a website.
Like I could add an open graph tags like an Andy hackers user profile page, but like that
doesn't mean that like this user quote unquote like owns that information like I still sort
of own that information.
And I think it's kind of a cool like interesting problem that like, if I for example, work
my way up to become a moderator for a particular subreddit, like that's some amount of trust
that I've earned on the internet.
And there is no real standard way for me to take that trust and prove to some other website
that I have that trust.
I mean, Reddit publishes like a JSON feed of who's a moderator of a subreddit and anybody
can pull that in.
Exactly.
Right.
And so you have all these different proprietary formats of saying, oh, Reddit publishes this
feed or Andy hackers might put it on your open graph data, or so and so Twitter might
have their API.
And these are all cool.
And they're very useful.
And they require sort of like a one to one mapping of anytime anyone wants to connect
to a service, they need to read the sort of proprietary like documentation of that service,
which I think is very cool.
And it's like one of the gems of the internet that you can do this.
But I also could see a path toward okay, people are maybe excited about crypto for reasons
that aren't even that good, maybe from these hollow abstraction reasons.
And because crypto is decentralized, like who cares about the direct benefits of that
and direct benefit is that people just trust it and it gets adopted a lot more.
And then you have kind of one standard.
And I can see a path where just because that's so singular and easy, it sort of like becomes
more popular and Reddit might have their JSON file saying this, but they also might issue
a NFT that says this thing and that will be more interacted with.
And if that were to happen, I could see it becoming more adopted.
So that that's my only real bullish thing.
But I mean, you're right, like there's not like a specific problem it solves.
It's just more of like the other way sort of looking from the solution onward, potentially
just because it's convenient and well adopted, it might catch on.
When I play through your example of the Reddit idea, you know, like, well, what if the format
was more universal and it matched other sites, but it's like, imagine the consumer site,
right, that wants to know that you're a Reddit mod.
It's probably going to have some business logic to like interpret what it means to be
a Reddit mod.
So the same programmer who's writing that business logic might want to just like do
an HTTP request and get the JSON, right?
Like it seems like it's kind of the same kind of goes together.
Yeah, yeah, it could.
On any hackers, for example, I love it if I could like very easily determine like, okay,
this person is a YC founder.
Why?
Because when they sign up for any hackers, they connected their crypto wallet.
And I saw an NFT that was issued by Y Combinator that said this, or they graduated from this
college or they're, you know, I can trust that they're a real person because they have
this Reddit moderator badge and I know if Reddit trust them, then I trust them.
We're a long way away from any of this happening.
And there isn't any sort of standard like this.
So it's like, it would be quite a while and it would require like this back end plumbing.
Like I would have to write this code, but it's like, I don't, this doesn't exist on
the internet today.
No one's done it.
And I don't see a path of it ever existing unless there is some sort of like widely adopted
database.
And I don't see anything that's even close to being that besides potentially the blockchain.
You know, we'd be having the same conversation.
If podcast RSS didn't exist, you'd be like, man, what if everybody could just put their
podcasts on the blockchain and then any player could consume it?
Right.
But it's like, well, this one actually happens to be a web to solve, right?
You see what I'm saying?
It's like, exactly.
Yeah.
It's like, we agreed on the standard of, of podcasting.
Like we've agreed on the standard for lots of different things for like HTTP for websites
or for like, um, SMTP or pop three for email or for RSS for podcasting.
But it's just like, there isn't a standard for like what represents like this idea of
like a digital good.
Like I earned something or bought something on one website and I want to be able to show
it somewhere else.
And like for all of these things, there wasn't like necessarily a need.
Like before podcasting, there wasn't really like anyone saying like, God, I really need
like a decentralized way to host my audio files.
And yet because it got popular, it sort of created its own need.
Like people started to expect it and maybe it's not the ideal format.
So I don't know.
I mean, like on one hand, it's like, I completely agree with you.
Like there's no, there's no real need.
Like the world will be fine without this and it's not enabling something that couldn't
be built more simpler.
But on the other hand, I feel like there's so many technological breaks, like the internet
itself or the web itself, like it wasn't solving a specific problem that like people
out there are like yearning for, but once it got adopted using snail mail, I think it
solved my problem when I was like, yeah, exactly.
Like it made life better.
Now I've been primed to think about things in terms of, well, what's the, what's like
a concrete example of this, right?
I don't know.
I play video games.
It's so cool if I had just, I don't know, one avatar that I could take from like, I
don't know, Fortnite to like, so, you know, whatever call of duty.
And there's just some, you earn, you earn like an item in one game and you go another
game.
It can represent it because on the blockchain, which is like, again, completely possible
without the blockchain.
There's no reason you need the blockchain to make this happen, but I just don't see it
ever be.
Yeah.
I just don't see it ever being adopted.
I didn't see your point, Carlin.
Yeah.
And I can see that because the blockchain, I can see that because the blockchain exists,
people might try it and then if enough people try it, their games might just be popular
enough that it catches on.
So it's like, in a way it's like, it doesn't necessarily solve a non-existent problem,
but I can see how it creates a reaction that creates its own demand because it's kind of
a cool feature and why not?
So that's like, that's the only, the only way in which I'm in any way bullish on anything
crypto related and it's still a huge long shot.
No, totally.
And like, you know, I've, I've, I think it's kind of funny to be like, well, you know, Soviet
Russia was like a really bad system of government, but like there was like some daycares that
had like, you know, some good programs that they did.
You know, it's like, you're always going to find like stuff, good stuff.
Yeah.
Very cool.
Well, Lauren, we've kept you for quite a while.
Thanks for coming on.
Thanks for sharing your story.
Is there any piece of advice, any experience you've gone through as a founder that you
think fledgling indie hackers would benefit from hearing anything that you've learned
on your journey that someone who's just now getting started and considering ideas might,
might want to take away?
Yeah.
I would say give value to one user so that you have a specific example of what your value
prop is.
All right.
There you go.
Thanks so much for coming on.
Where can listeners go to find out more about you and your writings and what you're up to
with relationship hero as well?
Check me out at Lee Ron on Twitter or bloated MVP.com.
All right.
Thanks again.
All right.