What's up, dude? I got a question for you. If I asked you what are the things that motivate
you, what would you say? Do you have like a ready answer? Do you know?
I have a ready-ish answer. We played RPGs all the time. So in an RPG, you're constantly
trying to level up. And I would say that with me in real life, I see my life as basically
an RPG, right? So I'm really excited about, you know, leveling up my fiction writing skills
and like publishing a novel. I'm really excited about leveling up how many people we reach
with indie hackers and like being a better founder, et cetera, et cetera. Being a better
boyfriend, the list goes on and on.
So like getting better at stuff is your number one motivator. What else? It's just that?
Motivator? I don't know. You could say the inverse. I've like fucked up in the past at
various things. And I'm pretty motivated at like not making the same kinds of mistakes
I've made in the past.
It's a carrot and a stick. So I was talking to a mutual friend of ours, Brandon, and he
was talking about how he met this doctor who was like, uh, just like a leading surgeon
who had retired. And now he's an expert at pottery. And this guy, apparently when he
was 24, saw somebody spinning clay to make like a pot or something or a cup or something
and was so transfixed that immediately he had like an aha moment and was like, this is what
I have to do. And for the rest of his life, he basically was a surgeon and then he retired
and immediately went into pottery. And Brandon was saying that he does, he's never had one
of these aha moments. And I think I had one of those when I was a kid, when I was like,
you know, using computers and I was like, shit, this is what I have to do. But I was
thinking last week, okay, what if you break it down even further and ask what within that
particular career, like you like writing, but what is it inside of writing that you
like? And I guess for you, it's the leveling up experience. But for me, I picked four different
things that always motivate me. And I've been like trying to mix and match them to find
other things in life that I would like. So for me, they are spending time with people
that I like working on something that's like mentally challenging and engaging like puzzles
of some sort of things I don't know how to do, building some sort of cumulative project
that like gets incrementally better and better over time, like building a website or building
an Airbnb, like every day I go to it, it's bigger and better. That just like makes me
feel good for some reason. And then number four getting recognition from others feels
good. And so if I can do anything that has all four of those, whether it's a startup,
or it's like an arts and craft project with my friends, like it makes me feel kind of
the same level of good. And I feel like knowing this is almost like a superpower because I
suddenly know like anything on earth that will motivate me just because I know the constituent
parts of it.
Hey, what's up, Dash? Hey, um, can I just go tell people in my kitchen to be quiet?
You can do whatever you want. Loud family. Okay. I like her shirt. You see that? She's
got it. She's got a shirt that says dashing across the top of it. And her name is Dashal.
That's cool. I need a shirt that represents my name in some way like that. Well, we got
indie hackers and you don't really need to have anything besides that. You've got like
three different court. Her shirt literally has her name in it. Well, anyway, welcome
to the show, Dashal. It's good to have you here. I'm a huge fan. You've like messaged
me, I think like three or four times on Twitter over the last year. Every time you have a
gone to your profile, I'm like, what's, what's she up to? Like, what is she doing? And it's
gone from like, I don't know what I'm doing. I just launched my thing. You know, I'm just
happy to have it out there to like, I am the queen of the world with my project and I'm
crushing it. And it's been really fucking cool to see. So I think the last thing I saw
from you, I don't know where I saw this, but I think I saw you made $26,000 in profit from
your project Wishtender just last month.
It's growing really fast. So like, since that, I did like another calculation and now it's
already at 36, like 3635 K in profit. We have a weird model where it's like, revenue can
either be considered like $700,000 or $50 different. So I kind of just focus on my profit.
Still not sure how to say revenue in my model, but stripe balance change over the last 30
days. That is 36.46 something like that. Yeah.
Doesn't get more pure than profit. John O'Nolan actually messaged me because he, he checks
the indie hackers, uh, product directory to see who's rising up the ranks. Does he, who's
going to catch ghost? And he's like, you should talk to Dashul cause she's crushing it right
now. So it's cool to have you is $36,000 a month in profit. The most money you've ever
made.
Oh yeah. I've never had like a super real job before this.
And correct me if I'm wrong, this is like your first business as an indie hacker. It's
not like you started 20 failed businesses and then finally hit on the right one. Like this
is it.
Yeah, this is my, I've had like other non-tech businesses. I did like a fitness business,
but that wasn't technical. It was, it was a dance improv fitness. And, uh, was, I was
transitioning from being sort of an artist to trying to go into the business world and
be an entrepreneur. And it's a very different way of thinking because when you're an artist,
it's like, what do you want to show to the world? And when you're in business, it's what
do other people want? So you have to totally change your perspective.
Oh my God, you nailed it. That's exactly it. I wonder how you figure this out. Cause I
feel like the vast majority of first time business owners are in that artist mindset.
And it seems like whatever craft a given person is really used to, that's the form of art
that they care a lot about. So if developers are like, what framework am I going to use?
I really care about this framework. And it's like, none of that stuff matters.
Yeah. Yeah. How did you not get sucked into that?
Uh, it was a lot of failure where I would create something. So I'm not a tech business,
but it could be putting on like a play with my friends or creating a film. I'd done like
a lot of different art stuff growing up and thinking everybody would come see it if I
did nothing or everybody would come to some event, if I didn't do anything. So I had enough
experience knowing that doesn't really work. I can't just like make something I like.
Right.
And expect people to show up. So it was like, okay, this I want to do differently and I
want to take it more seriously.
Yeah. So now you're working on Wishtender and I want to try to describe this. You tell
me if I'm describing it correctly. So it's basically a gift list tool. So imagine I'm
an influencer or specifically I'm an adult content creator and I've got all these fans
and sometimes they want to pay me by sending me gifts. And so I go to Wishtender and I
create a list of all the gifts that I want and the cost of those gifts. And I send it
out to my fans and then my fans can go to my gift list on Wishtender and they can buy
those gifts for me, which really just means they give me the money to buy those gifts
for myself.
And I never have to give them my address. I can stay totally sort of hidden and protected
and you guys as Wishtender, you take a cut and that's basically how it works.
Pretty much. Yeah. Like a wedding registry. That's what's mostly out there. Like wedding
registries are more built for a family and friends. So your address goes on there, your
phone number. So this is built for influencers where two-way anonymity is important.
So I don't want people to find out where I live.
Exactly.
I want them to buy me gifts, but I want them to know anything else about me.
Yeah.
And then your main sort of market is like the adult content industry. Like these are
typically I would guess women who are doing some type of porn and they've like mostly
probably male fans who are buying them gifts.
Yeah. It's a lot of male fans, but it's actually a good split between male and female adult
creators on the site.
Okay.
Yeah.
I'm just like so curious like how you got to this because like you didn't like, if we
go all the way back to the beginning, like in school you studied fashion or fashion design.
Nothing to do with the adult industry. Like nothing to do with any of the stuff that you
talked about. And then like somehow you made like a hard pivot from that to a totally different
life.
So in college, yes, I was doing fashion, but I, two years into it, I realized that fashion
was not what I wanted to do. At least if you watch like Project Runway, they're, they're
working so much. It's so much labor. They're often pulling all nighters. So I was hallucinating
from sleep deprivation and had all this stress causing issues in my body. And I was like,
okay, I don't want to do this anymore.
I don't know anything about the fashion industry. I've never seen, Chani, have you ever seen
Project Runway?
I've like heard of it and nothing comes to mind. So yeah, I literally know nothing about
it. It's like, what, what are the actual skills involved? And like, like, I'm just like, what
are you, like what part of it is hard on your body?
Yeah, it's, it's all the construction stuff. It takes 10 minutes to like design something
on paper, but then all the sewing, tailoring is like a next level sewing. So it's really
intricate construction. And that was like a requirement in school. You had to take a
tailoring class. That was the one that made me super sleep deprived and end up in the
hospital. Just lots of like, you don't know what's going on in these, like suits you're
wearing. It's, it's, it's all this sort of stuff you can't see. And it took, it takes
really long. Also, if you don't have the perfect tables, you're on the floor in weird positions
for, for like eight hours at a time. So my back was in pain. I was super, super sleep
deprived hallucinating. You can injure yourself when you're hallucinating and dealing with
sharp objects. So I ended up, I ended up in the hospital. I think it was like a combination
of just, I had like two hours of sleep for a week and then just like one morning, like
had crazy pain in my stomach. So I think it was, yeah, from that sleep deprivation.
It's crazy like how many careers have this physical toll and outside of looking in like
wooden guests, like a lot of computer programmers or video game players have repetitive strain
entry. Like Channing, remember I used to play Starcraft all the time. And like I looked
up to all these professional Starcraft players and they're all like on their like third wrist
surgery because their hands like are falling apart from banging on their keyboard, you
know, a hundred times a minute, 12 hours a day. And my wrist started to hurt. And I was
like, ah, fuck this. This is not worth it. It's like a hidden cost of that career. And
so fashion is not so different.
Yeah. And like in every indie hacker probably I'm guessing has like shoulder problems. I
have wall mounted massage equipment for my posture.
I forced myself to like stand up every 30 minutes. Like I have a timer and I literally
forced myself, like the timer goes off and I'm like, all right, well now I have to stand
for 30 minutes. It doesn't matter how I feel because otherwise I walk around looking like
the letter C like hunched over looking at my toes with with with tailoring the way that
you described it in my head. I'm like, is there room for disruption there? Like do we
really need to have humans who are on the floor because they don't have the right table
setups and they're getting like these terrible injuries.
Oh yeah. Well, I think that's kind of how fashion has changed so much to be more. It's
so much simpler than it used to be. We used to wear crazy corsets and huge dresses that
took so much work. And I over time, it seems fashion is going just towards simplification,
just utilitarianism. A lot of people are like, oh, that's so sad. We used to have such beautiful
clothes, but I don't know. I don't like being in the hospital.
All right. So you decide fashion is not for you. It's too hard on your body. There's not
enough sleep. And then you get married and live in a van and kind of become like, I guess
were you learning to code while you were in the van? Like you kind of became an Eddie
Hacker on the road. Yeah, I took on the 100 days of code challenge
while on the road. I decided that lucid dreaming was my passion and that I had to learn something
to bring some sort of value to the lucid dreaming community. There's all sorts of lucid dreaming
teachers and writers, but like there wasn't a lot of people involved in tech. And I thought
this is a great skill to bring to lucid dream world. So I thought, okay, I'm going to learn
to code high level. I wanted to be a lucid dream tech entrepreneur, which is what I am
aiming for still. But, um, yeah, so I took on 100 days of code to interned into 365 days
of code and then even went a little further until I started building Wishtender.
And that's how they get you. Yeah. Now I'm addicted to first. It was hard like coding
every single day. I can't do it, but now I can't stop you. How do you do anything for
a hundred days? Like, did you miss a day? Was it like 365 consecutive days? I didn't
miss a single day. And how do you do something for that long and not miss a day? It was,
I was so nervous about doing it at first because in the van you have limited power. You have
limited internet. You're in a small enclosure with someone else who might be making noise
or doing their own thing. So it's hard to build an everyday skill within that situation.
And so it was especially hard, but I thought like, I'm just really going to try. I'm going
to prepare for every situation. I think that's going to come up. Like my spouse is driving
and he's listening to a podcast and it's really interesting. Okay. So I put headphones on
with brown noise so I can't hear what's going on and I'm focused. And it was super hard
at first, but eventually coding becomes really enjoyable. And then also you have to, a lot
of the keeping up a habit like that is training yourself to say what you need. So we would
go visit friends and they'd be like, Hey, we're going to climb a waterfall tomorrow
morning. I'd be like, okay, but whatever's going to happen, I'm going to take a break
sometime to code. And there's no negotiation around that.
I'm going to code on the waterfall. So the funny deal here is that I'm all about this.
Like I'm listening to and I'm like, Oh yeah, me too. I love that. Like what are your other
commitments? What are your other? And with Cortland, he's like the exact opposite. So
recently Cortland and I went and hung out and every morning I'm like, all right, I've
got this like two and a half hour block where I got to like do my morning routine. And he's
like, Hey, let's go out. Let's go out and have like breakfast or bread somewhere. And
we actually kind of got into like a tussle over it, right? He's like, why do you need
to do this?
We were in Italy, a place we've never been before surrounded by amazing food, beautiful
architecture, just like the most beautiful cities you've ever seen. And this guy wants
to sit in the Airbnb until like 2 p.m. until he finishes his morning routine. So yeah,
I was really strict with myself this first year that I, I did other challenges too. I
did 200 and something days of math, 200 something days of meditation, a hundred days of discomfort.
I did all these different ones. I was really obsessed with really getting myself to be
disciplined. But once I got past that, then I could do the, okay, I'm taking a morning
off because it's so ingrained in me.
All right. So you were learning how to code in a van. You're doing all sorts of cool stuff.
We'll talk about later. But at some point during learning to code, you came up with
the idea for wish tender or like a sort of fell into your lap. And that's what you're
working on now. That's like absolutely crushing it. How did that happen? Because most people
I think stumble on the step of like, they don't know what a good business idea looks
like. And I think if you get that, like the idea right at first, it saves you so much
work later on.
Yeah, I was really looking for something that would be profitable. I loved it. So I said
I wanted to be a tech, at least a dream tech entrepreneur, but I, I didn't want to start
with that because that's super new. Like you look at Elon Musk and he has PayPal. That
was his first, you know, and then now he does space X and neural link and all this cool
stuff. And I kind of wanted my version of his PayPal. I wanted something that was just
more guaranteed to work and more validated that was just pure entrepreneurship and making
me money and learning about business and then go into the stuff I'm really passionate about.
So I was just looking really hard for something that I thought would work. I got all these
different ideas and I was really trying to validate them honestly. So I went through
like several different ideas and Wishtender was brought to me by a friend who wanted something
like this. They wanted a wishlist on their website. They wanted me to build it for them
and then they were going to give me 50% of the profit.
Was it like they heard like you knew how to code?
Yeah, we knew I was looking for something and they also knew I was coding. And if this
one person is willing to give me 50%, there's probably more people willing to give me less
percent.
What does your validation process look like? Like when you came up on an idea or your friend
gave you this idea, did you run it through some sort of checklist? And if so, what was
on that checklist?
I went through some random articles that said what you should ask people basically. And
then I put together a survey and I had some friends log into my Twitter account and DM
hundreds of people with the survey. And at the end of the survey, it said, if you're
interested in this project, would you be open to a phone call? So we did a few phone calls
and a few surveys. That was for Wishtender. Before Wishtender, I also had some friends
actually go to the beach and do surveys. Super analog.
Wait, who are these friends that are just doing their marketing research?
What is your pitch to your friends?
So I'm not actually, I'm usually not really comfortable with having people do things for
me, but I found out that if you make a visual demo and you make it like you put into somebody's
head what this thing is going to look like, they are really excited to help. So for every
idea I would explain it to somebody and they would be like, I don't care. And then I would
show them a visual demo like the next week. And they'd be like, this is a trillion dollar
idea. I want to be exactly the opposite process of being a web designer. Or if you have a
client and you show them like your first mockup, they assume immediately that you've built
out the entire back end, the entire thing exists and that like, it's going to take you
like no time and they should pay you nothing. And so when I would like make websites and
apps or people, I would do the exact opposite. I would do the UI last, I would make it look
like shit. I would build all the backend stuff first and talk about how long it was taking
because there's something about that visual thing where people just immediately think
it's awesome and done.
So that makes sense. That's the same effect, but it's working against you as a web developer.
Exactly.
Right. And I would put examples in the mockup of like somebody using it who's famous and
like, or, you know, like, so it was like, wow, like this is this is great, you know? And so those friends
would, uh, yeah, they just got really excited. Like I want to help. They did fizzle out later,
but it was helpful for marketing, for marketing.
Do you tell your friends like, oh yeah, get involved. Like I'll give you equity or I'll
pay you. Or are you just like, you get to be part of the story? Like what's the pitch
to get someone to go on Twitter and DM a bunch of people?
Yeah, they just want to help. And also these were friends who, I mean, they're really my
family. It's like my cousin, my sister, my spouse, like people who were really close
to me. So it's not, um, somebody who thinks I would do anything. Like if they stayed involved,
I would give them equity, but they didn't.
They just love you and I like your story and they see you doing some cool stuff and they
just get excited.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I've been building an Airbnb with my ex-girlfriend and it's like very out there and uniquely
designed and anytime any of our friends walk in, they instantly do the same thing. Cause
like in this space and they see it's covered with all these plants and vine and they just
immediately grab a hammer and just like want to start helping. I think it's maybe the same
phenomenon of just like people want to be part of something that looks cool.
Yeah. Oh, that's cool that you're working with your ex-girlfriend.
Yeah. Well, she wasn't my ex when we started, but now she is and it's still good and we're
still working on it. That's good. That's good. All right. So you, you, you get this idea
for Wishtender. You magically convince all your friends to basically sign into your Twitter
account and DM people to validate the idea. What kind of responses did you get? I, I assume
they're pretty good ones cause you decided to do the idea.
Well, yeah, we DMed a lot of people, but we didn't get, it was like, what was it? Like
8% response rate, but people reacted really excited. They, they said they want something
like this and what was out there was really bad. And then I did stuff that you're not
supposed to do. I told them the idea and I said, do you like it? Which you're really
not supposed to do. I didn't know that at the time cause people will be polite and they'll
say, Oh yeah, that's a good idea. But their response was like, whoa, that's amazing. And
people were saying they would give a bigger percent than I thought. And that was the other,
that was the other reason.
And who are these people that you were messaging? Like, how did you find out like, like you
get this idea, your friend wants this gift list thing for their website. Like who else
did you message to try to figure out if they would want it?
Uh, different adult content creators. I didn't really know there were like these sub niches
of adult content creators. So I just searched anyone who had only fans in their bio or I
think you might've tried like Twitch streamers and stuff too, but it didn't seem like they
wanted it.
Wasn't this was all on Twitter. This was all Twitter DMS or did you ever go off platform
to reach out to people?
I found it hard to go off platform. Like I did a little bit on some forums. I did a little
bit on Reddit, but because I had a good reputation on Twitter, I thought Twitter was the best
place to do it.
Cool. All right. So you decided to do this because people are like, like they're telling
you, they'll give you a huge cut. Like what kind of cut were they saying they would give
you? Like how enthusiastic were they?
I asked, you know, what would be fair? And I kept thinking, Oh, it's going to be like
3%, 5%. They were like, Oh, like 10%. Of course. And then I looked at that. It makes sense
now when I look at different companies, like Substack does 10%, I think, but I didn't at
the time that that seemed sounded like a lot to me. It ends up being, I've talked to like
some other adult creators. Like I did an episode with Savannah solo and Ayla.
Yeah. I listened to that one that was like really, uh, when I was building this and I
really remember that. Yeah.
It was a really fun one, but like they were both on, I think Ayla sense quit, but they
were both on only fans and only fan six, like 20 or something, like a huge cut of the revenue.
Yeah. And you are paying for more when you use something like Wishtender because you're
paying for privacy. You're paying for a bit of chargeback protection. Um, if you just
opened a wedding registry, you wouldn't get privacy. You wouldn't get all this protection,
but you would get, it would charge like 2%. So no other product is filling that space
for them. And at what point like did you in this process, like say, this is it. I'm confident.
Like this is the business I'm going to start. Like what flip that switch for you after getting
enough responses, I think I still wasn't totally sure, but it wasn't so difficult to code. And
I thought even if I, even if it's not a good idea and I watch it and nobody wants to use
it, it's a great first training project for learning software. Cause it's not too difficult.
It's just a two-sided Florida's two-sided market with profile page and gifts. And so
I didn't really think I could lose, even if it didn't take off. I was like, there's no
failing here because I'm learning stuff. I'm, it just didn't feel like I could fail.
This is like basically part of your 365 days of code is like started business and worst
case scenario, just learning how to code.
Yeah. Yeah. And I had spent a year and a half doing the 365 days of code at this point.
It was like 365 days plus some, I didn't know it was going to take me a year to build Wishtender.
I didn't know it was going to take that long. So that was the other thing. I, I, I thought
it was going to take me like six weeks and it took me a year. Definitely people were
saying, were worried for me, like fellow founders. They thought, Oh, you didn't really validate
this enough. And you spent a year and like, you probably wasted your time. Yeah. I didn't
really feel like it was failing cause I had multiple goals in mind, which was making a
successful business was one of those goals, but also just learning how to code and learning
how to make a business.
All right, Coreline, let's be honest. How long did it take you to get to anywhere near
a comparable amount of success with your business? I mean, you bought well before I was making
$36,000 a month. Like this is blinding success. Yeah. I think I did. I think it was like what
was really helpful to me was happening to pick the right idea that just had the potential
to grow. But either way, I was okay with however it went. Yeah, of course. All right. So you're,
you're like, whatever happens, I'm cool. What, like, what are the next steps? Like, how did
you actually get it off the ground?
Launching was a whole thing cause probably you relate to not really knowing when you're
ready to launch. So I was doing too much. Uh, I had a friend, I asked a friend, how do
you like put a delete, how do you delete accounts? And he's like, and he had launched already
and he was like, I don't have a delete button. And I was surprised because that's illegal
in Europe. And, and I was like, what if you go to jail? He's like, don't worry about this
stuff yet. Like just manually deleted worry about this stuff later. Just want. So I figured,
okay, it's working. I don't have to worry about every detail. I'm going to launch it.
And um, you know, I thought everybody, I thought all my pre signups would crash my server and
sign up and, but it was very slow to start. And I got nervous. It was like two or three
months in and it wasn't gaining the traction I was expecting. And I thought, oh my God,
everybody was right. I spent a year and I wasted my time. And I asked all these, I asked
so many people, so many other either pre-launch founders or new founders, what am I doing
wrong? And they had all this advice about you got to change, you got to change your
design. You got a, you didn't really validate. You made all these mistakes. You have to redo
this. I like, I thought I wanted to just quit because I thought, okay, I didn't really validate
this. I messed up my market research. And somebody had said to me, you have to give
it at least two years. And I thought that's way too long to work on a project that's not
going anywhere. So I thought I'm going to give it six months. And if it doesn't go anywhere,
I'm quitting. And I was very reluctant to give it six more months because I was at this
stage where I thought it was the responsible thing to quit because I thought I just don't
accept my mistake. So I reluctantly did six more months. And we got, we got traction way
before then. And it became clear way before then that I was doing everything right or
mostly right. It just needed more time. So all the advice I got about I was doing this
wrong, I was doing that wrong. It was just I needed to be persistent and give it more
time. It's three months is not a lot of time. You had an awesome tweet about this. So you're
like there's five indie hacker myths that you didn't listen to when you were building.
And it's like you were saying, there's literally people who are messaging you telling you that
you're doing it the wrong way. And like some somehow, some way you had the confidence just
ignore them because it would have been so easy just like to pivot or to follow the advice
of people who are like maybe more experienced than you. But like, you know, a couple of
them on your list are like, build for yourself, right? But you didn't really build for yourself
you build for other people who needed the product would pay for it. And like that worked.
And another one is launch fast. But like instead of doing that, like you took a year to code
it and then you validate the idea up front, like you weren't just like spitting out a
different idea every week you stuck with it. You know, the biggest thing I think was learning
how to talk to customers, becoming better at it and making it a habit. So I think a
lot of people are scared to talk to customers. It's different, you know, you're you're you're
a coder, maybe you're a little shy. I actually was really, I remember learning how to do
these interviews. And I was just nervous of what the customers would think of me, which
is not what you should be thinking. When you're trying to interview a customer, it should
be making them feel comfortable. And they're trying to impress you. It's just natural,
even if it's a small company ahead of a company to reach out like they it feels intimidating
to so you're supposed to be making them feel comfortable. My head was in the wrong place.
So I had to learn this, just this new way of talking to people, how to get them to say
what they really mean. And a book that really helped with that, I actually learned about
it on here was Michelle Hanson's book, Deploy Empathy. That was super helpful.
Great book.
Yeah, great book. So many really good examples in there. And she actually has recordings
of how she talks to people. So that that's like the truth, what people think is the truth
of what you have to do, not what some indie hacker who got lucky thinks. It's like what
do you think? Right. And then just small changes, not overhauling
everything like asking people, why did you join? And then putting their answers into
your marketing, simple things like, and we got really good at Twitter, too. We copied
how Gymshark does their Twitter marketing. They create tweets that are from the user's
perspective, and then the users want to share. And I don't see a lot of people doing that.
But so we didn't tweet as a wishlist. We tweeted as a wishlist user. So it was like
shareable from their perspective. That was that was really useful, too. So that that
was like that.
That's so smart. So I'm like on Gymshark's Twitter. And it's like a tweet from Gymshark
will be like, we are in the gym this summer and all caps. And then it's like a bunch of
people who love their products and work out a lot. Retweet that for exactly the reason
that you're saying because it's like it's something that they would say. And it like
it promotes the vibe that they want to promote to their own followers. So that's what they
retweet.
Yeah, exactly.
Like for so for like a product like yours, like what does the marketing look like? Is
it mostly tweeting? Is it mostly like word of mouth growth? Like, how did you spin that
engine up and get it to the point where you're getting more and more traction? Because like,
you've been doing like interviews and like tweets over the last year about like a revenue.
It's crazy how it's grown. I mean, like last December, it was significantly smaller. Like
it was, you know, single digit thousands, I think, and then doubled in January, like
a few months ago, it was like $14,000 a month in profit. And then now it's like 36 last
month was 26 months. How's how's it growing so fast?
Yeah, one thing is that word of mouth is really built into this business because people share
their wishlist. But we focused in the beginning, we did a lot of DMing. So it's a free way to
reach people on Twitter, we sent you know, 60 to 100 DMS every day to people we thought
would want to use it. Then we got a tool that helped us do that it would would send like
mass DMS, not personalized people will tell you personalized that it depends on your what's
that word like LTV like how much each customer makes you but our our customers don't make
us a lot. So it's not worth doing a really personalized message to each person. So we
just changed the name, sent it out. And most people didn't think it was spammy because
we targeted the right people and they were really glad that we brought it to them. And
then like in the beginning, if people came to me with a problem, I took it really seriously,
I might even get on a video call with them, I would treat them like they were this high
priced customer, but they're really like not making me a lot of money. It's just like,
I do things that don't scale. And they and then they would be like, I had the best experience
with this company. And they became huge fans. And really, we built evangelists, we post
kind of funny things from their perspective. And there's there's just like a ton of word
of mouth. We haven't spent really anything on marketing.
That's crazy. That's like the ideal and the hacker business. And like, who's who's we
by the way, like how much of it is just you who's helping you out?
So it's it started out just me. And then my spouse got involved when I was like, I'm having
trouble writing DMS. It was taking me like all day to write seven personalized DMS. And
then he started helping me. Then we realized we shouldn't be writing personalized DMS.
But first he was my assistant, then he was community manager, then he promoted himself
to director of operations. We don't even know what that means. But we just worked together.
He does pretty much a lot of customer service stuff that he can do. And then he forwards
it to me if it's stuff I can do. So yeah, two, two people.
Would you consider yourselves like co-founders in some way? Or is that like more he's your
employee? Like, how do you even having a relationship like that makes it trickier to run a business
too?
I feel kind of possessive that I'm the founder. But he became sort of the co-founder post
post launch.
Yeah, that's how Channing is. He's my co-founder, but like a late co-founder, which I think
is obviously one of the best the best setups. Because you have someone who's like bought
in and they help and they're just as important as you are. But it's also like, I think easier
in the early days to just make decisions really fast when it's just you by yourself.
Yeah. And so you guys are brothers.
Yeah, we're twins.
We are indeed.
You're twins. Oh my God.
Well, I'm the two minute older one.
It's useful when you're with somebody who like knows you really well. And a random co-founder,
like I have, I have a, it's like a lot of emotional support, you know, something when you hit those
really low points and you have somebody who knows you really well, it's like, it's not
just somebody who can help, but it's like somebody you can help your lift your spirits.
It's true. I feel like a startup. So kind of like an emotional roller coaster and the
stereotypical co-founder repair is like two nerdy dudes with no emotional intelligence.
We don't know each other very well, like trying to start a company together. So I think like,
I mean, Stripe was founded by two brothers. They know each other super well and have their
entire lives and the hackers, you and your spouse are doing it together. And I feel like
that's like the secret hack is to not do it by yourself, to have someone who's in there
with you, but somebody who like have already proven you can sort of emotionally support
each other. You can communicate well, you respect each other's methods of like thinking
and making decisions because like you need that to make it work otherwise.
And then on top of that, if you, if you end up running into trouble, you can work it out
without it being like existential. Yeah. For example, Cortland, what was it? Jesse Patel,
the founder of a workflow. I think he wrote a blog post about how he and his co-founder
went and had to have like psychotherapy. Like they had like, yeah, I got a couples therapist.
Right. And like they are not related. There's just two dudes. Well, yeah, let's just, you
gotta do otherwise. I mean, like, I think a huge percentage, why Comnado really some
stats about it? Like a huge percentage of startups fail because of co-founder issues
where the business is going fine, but like the co-founders don't get along. And it's
like, you're making these like, you know, life or death decisions, like not for your
life, but like for the life of your business. And if like, you're not making those as somebody
who like you respect the way that they think, like that chick can spiral pretty fast.
I don't even know how I would go about working with someone so closely that I wasn't married
to because a lot of disagreements I fix by like, like kissing him or like hugging him.
It's a different, we don't do that. Not happening with any actors. Well, it's a different kind
of a management style. Yeah. It's a different kind of love. So now, so now what you got
this business that's spinning out way more cash than you ever thought it could. Like
you've got your marketing strategy dialed in. I love that it's, that's like a naturally
viral products. Cause like you said, like people share their gift lists with their fans
and then their fans get used to using that gift list. And if they become fans of other
people, they probably say like, you should get this gift list so I can buy you stuff.
It's just seems like it's going to keep working. Like what now? Do you have competitors? Do
you have like lofty goals? You have other things you want to work on?
Yeah, I would like to get wish under to a point where it's sort of automated where
I can step back a little bit from it, whether that's selling it or outsourcing a lot of
it. I want to go into tech entrepreneurship with lucid dreaming. That's my goal.
Okay. So I want to talk about this a lot cause I don't know anything about lucid dreaming.
And if like, I wouldn't have been able to tell you if this is the thing that people
really do consistently or if it's just kind of a myth that you can control it. So like,
is this something like, do you lucid dream all the time?
I used to. So I'm not a, I'm not really a natural lucid dreamer. There are some people
who just have them like something about their brain. They're wired to have them every night,
but you can also train yourself. So I had had a handful when I was up to the age 18.
My mom told me about them. And after she told me about them, just knowing about them, I
had a few of them. But then in college I went on a diet and at night I would have regular
dreams, non lucid dreams about foods I couldn't eat. So brownies pizza in the dream, I would
take a tiny bite of pizza and it would taste really real and really good. And then I'd
say, okay, no, you can't have any more. You're on a diet, like put it down. Then I'd wake
up and I'd be like, oh my God, like I could have had this experience of finishing that
whole pizza. And if I knew I was dreaming, so I thought, okay, I'm going to learn to
lucid dream. And so I went from having basically no lucid dreams to having three every night
in five months, just through this rigorous training of your brain. And I was eating the
whole whole foods, hot bar, everything I wanted every night while having this super strict
diet during the day. What a sales pitch for lucid dreaming. This is the way that you can
cheat on your diet. Like you can be disappointed when you're awake. Don't worry. Just go to
just take a nap in the middle of the day. I can't even imagine the terrible things that
I would get into in my dreams if I could just at well control what I dreamed about every
single night. Oh yeah. There's, there's some terrible things that I, yeah, all of the above
check, check, check. So like, what's the, what's the process to take? Like, how do you, like,
how does you train yourself to become a lucid dreamer? Like what do you do to control them?
The basic idea is you train yourself to recognize when something is off and when something is
off, you say, Hmm, this is dreamy. Okay. Am I in a dream or am I awake? And then you do
something, for example, like dropping a pen and if it falls funny, oh, you recognize,
okay, that's not, this is not reality. So that's called a reality check. And that's,
if you've seen Inception, they do them in Inception. Right. Yeah. They've got their
little totems and they're constantly spinning the tops and stuff to check if it's a dream.
So you really do that. That's real. Yeah. That is a real thing. You don't have to have
a totem though. The, my favorite one is just you hold your nose, keep your mouth closed
and then try to breathe. So like this. And you do this like all the time in real life.
I do a habit that you just like, you're just at the grocery store and you hold your nose
and try to breathe. The more I do it, the more lucid dreams I have. But if I was being
really disciplined, I would have done it right when I got on this podcast. That's what I
usually do. Like when I see new people or no, and this is an unusual situation. Like
I love this podcast and I'm on it. So I should have done it right when I got on, but I didn't.
But normally when I'm.
Wait, why don't you do it right now? Maybe you're dreaming.
Well, I just did it like, I just did it.
Who's to say?
Yeah. I've explained this to people and did the reality check to show them to only to
find out I actually was in a dream.
That's so cool. Are there already businesses in lucid dreaming or like, is anybody like
making a lot of money or is it just like limited to communities or books and stuff?
In tech, there's there's some stuff. There's definitely a lot of coaching. There's retreats.
But in tech, there's lucid dream induction masks. But I don't think any of them work
super well. Some of them work okay. But what you do is you the hot, the high end ones,
you put this basically like a sleeping mask that has a lot of embedded systems in it.
So little, you know, microchips and stuff. And then you wear it, you sleep with it, it
detects when you're dreaming and then it flashes lights in your eyes or it plays a sound in
your ear and you're supposed to hopefully incorporate that stimuli into the dream. And
when you see it, it helps you recognize, oh, that's that mask that signaling to me that
I'm in a dream. Okay, when the reality check, yes, I'm in a dream. Right. So it's like
a tech induced reality check. Yeah, if it actually works, and you can consistently induce
lucid dreams with people and like in some sort of, with some sort of technology or product,
like who wouldn't want to do that? I know people who have nightmares every night, like
terrible uncontrollable nightmares, and they hate it. And like, they don't know what to
do about it. And it's like, they don't like sleeping that much, because they just have
nightmares all the time. And if they had something where it's like, instead of sleeping, being
this terrible, scary thing, it's actually this wonderful, like magic land of whatever
you want, eat all the pizza you want, never get fat, you know, eat what you're allergic
to, hang out with your favorite celebrities. Like, I don't know if that's an accurate description
of lucid dreaming, but like that sounds way better than anything else.
Yeah, that's pretty accurate. Especially for like, first timers, like later you get into
it and you're doing this, like work on your subconscious and you get bored. But I, I am
still eating junk food in my lucid dream. So I, I like it for that reason. But yeah,
it's, you know, and it's, and it's two hours every night, you know, that you could be using
more efficiently, whether it's to have fun or whether it's to be productive in some way.
Yeah. Tell me more about like this expert, because I'm the, that would be an amateur
lucid dreamer. What do the experts do that? Like the first timers don't?
Yeah. So one thing that a lot of artists will do is, you know, your brain it's, it is on
another level. So you might, if you're a musician, like turn on the radio and listen to a new song.
Okay. And that's a song that obviously you just created in your head, but you didn't have a lot
of, it didn't take a lot of effort because you're in this weird state where you can create things
instantly. And so you wake up and then you record that song that was just played to you
in your dream radio, which you wrote.
I've, I've had something similar happen where in my dream I was like wrapping a song and I was like
this amazing freestyler. And I just like every verse, I was just like hitting it. And then I woke
up and I was like, holy shit, how did I do that? And I tried to write down the lyrics total
gibberish. So I'm really curious about this in the sense that like, I know a lot of people who
will get like high, like they'll, they'll smoke weed, they'll have to them brilliant ideas and
they'll write them down. And then when they're sober again, they'll look at their own ideas and
they'll be like, this is a terrible idea. It just felt smart when I was, when I was really high.
That happens too. So, but, but at the same time, there are people who take acid and do create
really amazing things. Yeah. So I had a professor at MIT who'd smoke a lot of weed and a lot of
shrooms. And then he was like a mathematician and he would use that to help his research.
When you put your brain in another state, whether it's
weed is good for certain things. Acid is good for certain things. Acid is good for,
I think it's good for like learning languages, retention. There is just like,
it's another brain state to explore. There is some research about what can be done
in the dream state, but definitely people use it to solve problems, like hard problems,
like coding problems, stuff like that. People use it to write music, creative inspiration.
And then there's a lot of using it to do therapy on yourself in a way,
can get into your subconscious and heal yourself. Well, listen, this is super fascinating to talk
about this stuff all day. One thing I always want to ask before I let you get out of here
is what's one thing that you would like other indie hackers to know, something that you've
experienced that you think maybe others aren't thinking about, others aren't considering that
you think that maybe would have helped you on your journey?
Yeah, the biggest thing for me was when I started, I put everybody on a pedestal because it seemed
like everybody knew more than me. And I think I would have benefited from knowing to take advice
with a grain of salt, like who's giving you the advice? Are they a successful founder? Are they
a one time successful founder? Could they have gotten lucky? Most successful founders,
they're figuring everything out. So there's no real hard advice, I think. And listen to
what people have to say, but don't think it's a hard rule.
Yeah, makes perfect sense. Totally.
Super true. Anyway, Dash, well, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
Can you let listeners know where they can go to find out more about
Wishtender and you personally, and maybe eventually like your sort of lucid dreaming
stuff, because that stuff's fascinating. I'm most active on Twitter, Dash Barkhus,
so that's the best place to follow me. But I'm also on LinkedIn and Instagram,
LinkedIn, search my name, Instagram, same Dash Barkhus. But yeah, Twitter is probably the best.
Cool. Thanks so much.