What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making
a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to
discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of
so the rest of us can do the same. Okay, we're here with Arvid Kahl and Daniel Vasallo, two
IndieHackers who've been on the show before. They're both very successful. They've both
made a lot of money doing, I guess, following two very different paths. And I would say
they're both great audience builders and teachers who have big followings on Twitter. And right
now we're in the middle of talking about inflation, which I know literally nothing about. But
Daniel, you had a really funny tweet about inflation recently, where you talked about
how inflation can't hurt you if you just avoid the red things on this graph. And you shared
kind of that classic graph of how prices have changed over time. And the red things have
gotten more expensive over the last 20 years, like textbooks, college, tuition, healthcare,
housing and food. And the blue things have gotten cheaper over the last 20 years, like
electronics, TVs, cell phone service, cars, etc. So this is what you're doing, Daniel,
you're just avoiding inflation by avoiding the red things?
Oh, I mean, it was it was mostly a joke, obviously, like you, I know almost nothing about inflation.
But you know, like many people I worry about because I have some savings and I don't want
it to disappear. But I think, you know, it was 90% joke, but there's some truth to it.
Because I think, you know, when we see these inflation numbers, 8% inflation year on year,
I mean, that's an average of lots of things. And it doesn't apply to everyone the same,
right? Depending on what you're spending money on, depending on what stage in your life you're
in, depending on what you do, what you can avoid. For example, you know, housing, you
could have you if you manage to secure house by house, have a mortgage, you're pretty much
insulated from rising housing costs. So so and that's usually a big expense, right? So
I think it was something at least some food for thought. But it was mostly a joke as well,
because some things you can't really avoid, of course, you know, food.
I saw food was one of the red things. Like, how do I avoid food? Well, I read that and
I was like, so in other words, don't go to college, don't go to school, don't live in
a house, just buy a computer and go live in a library. Yeah, don't get sick. Don't go to
the hospital. Well, but I mean, on that topic, who here has Daniel, I think I saw on Twitter
that you do have kids. I do. Yes, to me. So what, what, what is your thought for them
in school? I mean, they're going to go to college. Yeah, they were born in 2014, 2017.
But they're sort of seven and five. To be honest, I'm playing it by ear. Like I read
I also come from Europe, I come from a smaller country Malta, which sort of has a different
approach to education than the United States. And I'm learning as I go. I think what I'm
saying to be careful with is to not set the expectation on my kids that they have to go
to college or they have to do this or that. Otherwise it's going to dent their opportunities
or their self-worth or whatever. But I do see it a lot in the United States. Many of
my friends here seem to put that expectation on themselves and on their kids. Like even,
to be honest, even with the choice of private schools and public schools, my kids are for
now going to a public school. And I'll admit, private schools look better, look nicer. There's
probably better education or whatever. I think some of my friends spend tens of thousands
or $50,000 a year and they're just first grade, second grade. Is it worth it? I think I'd
rather leave my kids maybe $100,000 or the equivalent with inflation for when they're
18 or 20. $10 billion, 10 years from now.
Probably. I'm not an educational maximalist. I know it sounds almost bad to say it, but
I'm not trying to maximize my kids' education at all costs because like everything in life,
you know, if you maximize something, you're paying the cost somewhere else, either financially
or some other sort of more subtle way, which is sometimes even more insidious.
By far the best thing that I got from college was my friendships. Like I have 20 or 30 great
friends from college who I've had since I graduated. And that's awesome on one hand,
but it's also like, I don't think it's something people should necessarily rely on. Like I've
been focusing a lot on my life recently on just making more friends and turning it into
a habit to make more friends continually as I get older because I know that's something
that when I'm 50, 60, 70 years old, I'll appreciate that I did when I was younger, you know, I'll
have meaningful lifelong friendships that I formed at age like 35 that I really appreciate
when I'm older. And so I don't think school should be this crutch that you lean on for
that kind of thing. I don't think it's good that people go to school, make a bunch of
friends and then just stop. I think that's a muscle you want to flex. That's a skill
you want to work on your entire life.
Yes. School has this kind of community, right, that it creates that is kind of also exclusive
because school as a physical place is limited in scope. Like how many kids can you reliably
put into a room? That's kind of where it starts. And that's what the system is like and has
been for a while. What I wonder, Kortland, like, do you think you would have found the
same friends if you hadn't been at that institution or similar friends?
I would have found definitely fewer friends and they would have been different friends.
And I think it's kind of funny because, well, so you have, Kortland has me to look at because
we're, we're, we're twins and we're the science experiment. We grew up together, similar genetics
and we went to different schools. And so he was in a fraternity. He had, you know, he
just pressed the button and he had a bunch of friends out of a box. Whereas I was not.
I had a core group of friends, but at what minute, you know, a order of magnitude smaller
than the number of friends. Yeah, like more friends. I had like four, like, yeah, four,
four close friends. And then even that friend group was gone because I left college and
then I moved to San Francisco and had to completely start over. And first thing I did when I went
to San Francisco, I got a job and then I made a lot of close friends at that day job.
I hate the company community stuff. I've only ever had like a couple jobs. Like I had an
internship in college and like you go work at a company and be like, we're a family and
we all hang out at the ball game. Like I, I'm not against it for other people, but like
I didn't want to like automatically have to be friends with people just because I work
with them. Like I never went to any of that kind of stuff. I would much rather pick the
people who align with me personally. I have an anecdote here maybe because like I, I also
thought at some point that I threw a job, I would find friends and I never did. But,
and it was almost surprising to me that when I quit that job, I'm not going to say which
one it is, but it happened in the past. All the people that I had really close connection
with just completely dropped off. Like I haven't talked to like 95% of them in five years at
this point, even though we were hanging out every day, we had our inside jokes, like we
were like sharing memes and like going to see movies together and stuff. But the moment
you go out of this community, like you leave the club, you're out and they make you feel
it. That was a pretty weird experience. And I find that's very different in these kind
of self-select opt-in communities like in the hackers or like the, in the hacker community
on Twitter or whatever, the solopreneur community where people go in not because they are paid
to be there, right? Because they want to be there and then that kind of community and
they're not paying to be there either. Like there's no transactional exchange. It is that
the transactions that happen are supportive, they're motivational or whatever it is, but
they're not monetary and all of a sudden it becomes much more about the community, about
the internal tribal aspect, then about access and elitism and exclusivity, all that stuff
just falls apart.
Okay. So you and Daniel had big Twitter followings. Twitter just got taken over. Well, it's about
to get taken over by Elon Musk. Who knows what's going to happen? Like how have you
thought about platform risk?
It's a risk, right? I think you should worry about it once you have something to lose.
I think usually I get into these discussions where people are about to start out on Twitter
or sort of building an audience or whatever, and they start worrying prematurely, I think,
about platform risk. And I think you shouldn't, right? You should leave village and take advantage
of all the opportunities from social media, whether it's Twitter, Instagram, YouTube,
Facebook, LinkedIn, other forums that are in the hackers everywhere, right? There's people
already hanging around in those places. And I think you should benefit from there, that
you should try to build a name for yourself in those places rather than inventing something
for yourself. But at some point, I think, yes, you start to feel that there's some platform
risk. It's easy to start to imagine what happens if I get kicked off Twitter or the algorithm
changes or I can't teach my audience. And then I think you take it from there. Then
you start to adapt. You start to build an email list or build other communities or,
you know, write somewhere else on your site. But I think I would wait until it feels like
there's something to lose. Well, I think with Elon taking over Twitter, you're much less
likely to get kicked off for doing anything. Yeah, like who knows? That's the thing, right?
I mean, I suspect so. I think sort of I'm more optimistic than pessimistic, but things
could change. That's super interesting because the platform is you. Like in this regard,
with you being like your media company, right? Both of us are, right? We have the newsletter
and the books and the courses and whatnot. Like there's all different kinds of media.
I would also argue ND hackers is a media company, but it's not branded personally. It's not
Courtland Allen, you know, but you guys are personally branded media companies. And that
personal touch is that is the risk. That's the kind of thing. Like the first sass that
I was ever successful with, the one that we sold a couple of years ago, I built that as
a sellable business. And in my red bill to sell by John Warlow, great book for people
who want to build a sellable sass business. Cause it really tells you if you want it to
be sellable, you need to be able to replace yourself in the business. The whole book is
a story about an agency owner that tries to sell the agency and they can't because they
are the agency. And I feel for creators, that is a gigantic risk that they are the platform.
And if they don't deliver and they don't have, let's call them passive income projects like
books and info products, that alone is almost as risky as employment when it comes to that,
right? The being able to be quickly fired than having to find another job. That's also
very risky. But one thing about platforms like social media platforms, I think people
have to understand that borrowed audiences like on Twitter or LinkedIn or wherever you
are, they have synergetic effects like crazy, right? You find people, you find other audiences
out there so much easier than you find one email subscriber. It's probably so much easier
to have like hundreds, if not thousands of followers.
The power of the retweets.
One retreat, like I had that a couple of weeks ago, like an account four times as big as
mine retweeted me and I grew like 10% in my follower count, which was like six or 7,000
people. That just happened. And I had no control over it, which is great, but I had no control
over it because that was frightening. You know, like you have both at the same time.
So borrowed audience is great. You have all these effects, but at some point, and Daniel
just said this, there is a tangible risk and you should diversify, maybe not from the start,
but you should always allow people to opt in to your own audience. Maybe that's the
more important part.
Allow people to become your email subscribers and allow them to get on your list.
That's right. Start a newsletter or just capture emails for some reason, but have them so you
can actually reach out to people if you need to.
Daniel, I feel like you're like one of the most risk averse people that I know who's
an ID hacker. I'm almost the opposite. Like I don't care that much about platform risk.
I just go hard on one channel.
So Daniel, with your, you have a lot of projects. I know that a big focus of yours is not doing
things that you hate. And so when you have like this portfolio of all these projects,
how much of it is purely self-protective risk as sort of diversifying your risk and how
much of it is like you have an idea and you just want to build it?
So I think my approach evolved over time. I think I did the mistake in the beginning
where I took the typical boot stepper approach where I came up with an idea that I thought
was the ideal SaaS business for me. I was imagining it's the perfect combination of
my skills, my interests, my expertise, and so on, so forth. And I was just going to focus
on it and try to make it work at all costs. And I realized after a few months that this
was a very idealistic approach that I was underestimating the role of chance and randomness
and luck and bad luck and all the things outside of my console that tend to have a significant
impact in the success of a business.
So then I changed quickly because I, again, sort of, I started to negatively visualize
going back to a full-time job, but I wanted to avoid that. So I shifted mentality to tell
away all the idealistic stuff. How can I make some money next month? And I started looking
at things that weren't particularly exciting or nice or whatever. The first dollar I made
was with some freelancing, you know, for a friend of mine, sort of, programming work
and whatever. Then I wrote a knee book and then I wrote a course and I sort of started
and then paid newsletter. And then I took some more freelancing with Gumroad and I sort
of kept experimenting with things over time that I had been sort of selecting more things
that were much more preferred, much more compatible with my preferred lifestyle, with my preferences.
But I'm expecting that in 2023, 2024, later, I might bump into the opportunities that will
make me stop doing those or do them less or maybe do them more. Because sometimes another
realization that I learned, which I think is quite obvious, but we tend to as well fool
ourselves into believing it's not the case, is that it's hard to enjoy something if it's
not working out, if it's not working out financially. No matter how much we say, oh, I'm doing it.
I love the process. The work is fun, whatever. It's hard. I think it's human nature. So if
something is working, suddenly it starts to become fun, even if it wasn't originally something
that I would have thought I would enjoy doing. Paradoxically, this gives me also peace of
mind. That's sort of the flexibility of not pigeonholing myself into I need this to work
or I need something in this specific category to work.
Dan, you have a good tweet. I think it's your most popular tweet of all time in terms of
likes. 10,000 likes. He said, you read 100 books, 99 are meh, one changes your life.
You try 100 things, 99 don't work, one changes your life. You meet 100 people, 99 you never
see again, one changes your life. Life is more random than it seems, so act accordingly.
And I think that that tweet is something that I live by and it has almost the opposite effect
of what you're saying and that I don't really diversify that much. I don't really have that
many backups. I'm kind of like, OK, I tried like 100 companies. One of them is doing really
well. I'm just going to press the gas on that one and completely forget every other company
that I'm working on.
If that company can make me a million dollars, $5 million, $10 million, then it doesn't matter
if I'm not sort of diversifying or I have backup options because that one was such a
success.
I think what I feel is important to me is to not feel the obligation that I need to
double down on something. Actually, there's always the option, but not the obligation
because I think once we start to feel obligated, we start to feel trapped. And I hear this
with many entrepreneurs, even some widely successful ones that are making way beyond
their wildest dreams, millions of dollars a year, that they feel squeezed, that they
can't let go of the gas now because they locked into this winning lottery ticket. And they
feel like it's like they won the lottery, but they're not cashing out the full price.
So I think it's an important psychological technique to feel like you can leave money
off the table, that you could press the gas 50%. And maybe that gives you some more free
time, more opportunity to explore other things. I like the terminology small bet. I like thinking
as every incremental thing as a small bet. So I got everything to the stage. If I wanted
to, I could choose to make another small bet on something existent, basically by pressing
the gas another maybe 5% on that thing. But with a bet, what I like about the terminology
is that, again, it's an option, not an obligation. I can place that stake, but nobody is forcing
me to do it tonight, which is something undesirable. I think I don't want to feel trapped, especially
psychologically, because I think those are the hardest and the most insidious steps.
Yeah. You mentioned the fact that people feel trapped, right? People who are already successful.
Let's talk about lifestyle design. This is something that's kind of at the top of my
mind. And I think all three of you guys are pretty successful. Like Arvid, I had you back
on Indie Hackers. I've had you on twice before. But the very first episode, you're talking
about selling your company that was making 60 grand a month in revenue. I can only imagine
you sold it for a life-changing sum. Daniel, you were crushing it at Amazon. You're making
$500,000 a year at Amazon. And now you're self-employed. And all these different revenue
streams are making over $300,000 a year for you in profit. Channing and I sold Indie Hackers
to Stripe for millions of dollars in Stripe stock. So we're all set. We're all in a place
where we're pretty financially comfortable, presumably, unless any of you put all your
money into crypto last year. What do you do from here? Do you focus on making more money?
Do you focus on keeping money? Daniel, you're a very safety-oriented guy. You're almost
like a self-described prepper. How do you guys think about lifestyle design? And what
do you do once you've made it as an Indie Hacker?
The way I like to think about it is that I don't want to think of myself as successful.
I might have been successful in the past, which you could measure maybe in such a way.
But I think the typical financial advice, the past is no guarantee of the future. And
I think it's important to, again, not set my expectations anywhere, because that leads
to lots of problems. You just mentioned last year I made $200,000. I started this year
thinking, what if I make nothing this year? Because I don't have the current revenue.
And I think I prefer thinking of it like that. And I visualized, what if I make Z in 2022?
And I realized I did some math. I said, it won't be. It would be not nice, but it won't
be a huge deal. I have to tap him into my savings. And that allowed me to, every dollar
that I made so far in 2022, it treated almost like a bonus. It was helpful. It was enjoyable.
There was no expectations, no disappointments. Everything was a pleasant surprise. And I
almost paid this every month. Now, these were already almost halfway into May, but it seems
like it was just yesterday. I did the same thing. I mean, April was my most successful
month ever. I made almost $100,000 in April, which was quite crazy. But again, I thought,
what if I don't make anything in May or anything for the rest of the year? And this, I think,
is really helpful. And something else I believe as well. I'm not a big fan of living off passive
income. And I don't think we're wired to live off passive income for a long time. I think
there's something in our DNA that's me speculating. I'm not a scientist. I didn't study this rigorously.
But it feels that way. It feels there's something in our DNA that wants us to be active on a
regular basis. And that's what I think, when our ancestors were hunter-gatherers 10,000
years ago, there was no concept of passive income. There was nobody in our ancestors
who just made a million dollars and they invested them in a sort of a mix of stock and bonds
and clipped on the US state. And they just sit idly and they just collected dividends.
It's sort of an unnatural thing. And I think there's not just some idealistic way to live
with nature, whatever. I think our subconscious, our lizard plane, the part that sort of deals
with anxiety and other things will start to kick in if we don't feel we're still useful
to society of today. Because I was useful to society of yesterday or five years ago,
but the world changes, the environment changes, I change, my circumstances change. And I think
active income by doing something today, by earning a dollar today, I'm testing my fitness
for the world of today. And that, I think, helps with anxiety, helps with peace of mind,
with resiliency and all these kinds of things.
I've never met anyone who wants to make, I've met people who want to make millions of dollars
and retire on a beach. I've never met anyone who's actually done that. I've met a lot of
people who've gotten rich and succeeded. And then after that, what do they, like Arvid,
Arvid's not like, ah, I'm going to rest on my laurels. You're now this huge ND hacker
educator. Even with ND hackers and us at Stripe, it's like, we're like, cool, we did the thing
with ND hackers. We're like, OK, how do we make it bigger and better? What's the next
challenge? You're almost always like Sisyphus sort of pushing a boulder up the hill because
for whatever reason, that's the fun part. It's the fun part is to sort of tackle these
challenges. And like you said, Daniel, be useful to the world of today. It's kind of
embarrassing just to be like, yeah, I did this thing 10 years ago.
Well, I think it's more than that. I think it's not just we don't really know that many
people who have just scored it rich and then gone and laid out on a beach. Actually, I
do know some people who've tried to do that and then they got really depressed and then
they went back into work. I think it's what you said, Daniel. It's like, it's depressing.
We have this need. And the funny thing about that is I'm an entrepreneur. I wanted to write
a book before I did this company and I'm really into projects. And I had this idea in my mind
that like, OK, well, once these things are successful and I make a lot of money with
them, then I will want to do those things. And I had this sort of burning anxiety, but
I feel that now that on the other side of knowing like, no, you just you get to the
top of that mountain and you want to go to another mountain. If I had known that that
was going to be the case earlier on, I think I could have appreciated it a lot more, if
that makes sense.
Yeah, that was a moment. One of the strongest, biggest struggles that I had was just after
selling the business. Like all my passion, all my enjoyment, all my source of where I
felt accomplished was just taken away from me. And then, of course, they handed me this
big check. That was great. But the fact that my passion was gone, that was a mental challenge
that I was not expecting, even though I knew it was going to come. Like every founder on
every podcast, when you ask me about the exit, will tell you there's this void, beware of
the void, right? Because everything that defines you as a maker, as an indie hacker, as an
entrepreneur, is your customers, is your interaction with the people that you serve, like your
call it audience or market or customer base, whatever it is, these people, they are the
reason you're making money. And you're the reason for them to live a slightly better
life. There's a connection there. And once this is gone, and you have nothing, you have
a lot of money, but money doesn't, it literally can't make you happy because it's not an active
agent. You need to find that active agent that gives you something back. And for me,
that was writing. And I was never a writer, right? I never wrote anything really before
I started blogging. And I only started blogging because I felt, hey, I know this much now.
I learned so much from people all over the place, including the indie hackers podcast.
And I just wanted to see maybe I am now in a position where I can share instead of just
consume. And then I started writing and then I was, oh, thank heavens, did I find something
that gave me my passion back? Because otherwise, I would have been depressed. I know I would
have been because I could see, I can still see lots of founders struggling with this
after they sell.
It's almost a cliche, I think, because I think like the number one thing people hear when
they feel like rich people talking about the success is the success didn't make me happy.
And then I think it's very easy to hear that and not take it to heart, right? Like I never
took that to heart. I was like, yeah, yeah, that's easy for you to say you have a lot
of money and you sold your company, etc, etc. Like, well, of course, you're gonna say it
didn't make you happy. But like, I'm not in that situation. So like, that's all I care
about. Right. And then I think once you get there, you realize like, okay, actually, it
is kind of the journey, like having that lofty goal, that's a challenge to reach, is itself
what is giving you purpose and meaning and like striving to get there. And then once
you get there, you probably need some sort of other journey to go on. Right. And I think
for a lot of people, we follow this, I think what's called like the deferred life plan,
where we have these things that we really want to do, but we defer them because I go
first, let me like make a lot of money, right? Let me do this business, etc. Channing, like
you want to write your books, Arvin, I'm not sure if you wanted to write beforehand, but
now you're writing. Daniel, I don't know, like, do you feel like you deferred anything
in your life until you got successful with your work at Amazon?
Well, I used to, I used to live the deferred lifestyle life plan or whatever you call it
site until sort of two years ago, I would say that and I sort of I think I came a bit
into my senses and I started to realize how foolish this idea is and how much hidden risk
there tends to be. I think what sort of to continue a bit on what Arvin was saying, this
is also why I'm a fan of building a portfolio of things, like it's sort of the, one way
I think to sort of make this thing of something going away less painful is by having other
things going on at the same time. You know, just personally, something that happened yesterday,
I haven't even talked about it publicly yet. Some of you might know that I had this quarter
time low, that gum road is a fractional PM. I had to wind it down sort of and I had to
sort of leave yesterday, like yesterday was my last day because I'm going to basically
outgrew my capability, my skill, my capacity and my ability to with my 10 hours a week
to sort of be able to keep on top of things and so on and so forth. And you know, it's
a bit disappointing because I really wanted to make it work, but you know, after two years
I had to, we had to stop. But you know, it feels disappointing for a second, but then
I have three other things going on. It doesn't put me into that void where I now need to
reinvent something. And this is sort of something that even when my sales business failed, or
I started to realize that it wasn't going to be as successful as I thought it was, I
had two other things. One that I already launched, another thing that I was about to launch,
and it sort of helped me give my attention to those things without sort of feeling that
big spike of disappointment.
There's something about this, like, thanks for sharing this. And I feel like you've been
sharing these things publicly as well. And I think that makes all the difference in dealing
with these things too. Because if you build in public, and I don't just mean like build
a business, but build, build a lifestyle in public, and you share why you do it, you share
what you do, you share your finances, you share what works out what doesn't, that journey
alone in sharing this is instructive to other people. And that gives a purpose that gives
purpose to failure, then even if you fail with something with a SaaS business, wonderful.
Now, thousands of people learn what not to do. And all of a sudden, it's an empowerment
message, right? You may have some financial loss, or one of your many, many projects that
or many small bets doesn't work out. Well, thankfully, you have a few more. And this
is now a lesson. One that I think building in public, that particular kind of building
in public is empowerment, not just for the people who follow you, but for yourself as
well. Like anything that happens is good, depending, of course, from which perspective
you look at it. But I think that helps me too. Because I also have a somewhat failing
SaaS business that is just like chugging along at like $48 monthly recurring revenue, really
not happening much in that regard. But I can talk about it, I can say, hey, I'm not spending
any time on this, I have other priorities, I don't need this, you know, I can I can take
this, what other people would call a horrible failure, and just turn it into a, well, here
it is in the context of my larger plan, right? It's something that is not a failure anymore.
It's just an anecdotal thing to share with people.
All right, let's talk about making money as an indie hacker. We've talked about Okay,
what do you do once you've made it? But how do you make it? I think everyone here we sort
of were, I guess we have a hodgepodge, right? Like any hackers as a community, or you had
a SaaS business. And then Daniel, I guess you worked at Amazon, but then became like
more of a creator. And so it's like three different approaches. Nathan Barry has this
excellent blog post called the ladders of wealth creation, where he talks about how
like, you can basically start off as a content creator, or you can start off basically getting
a job. And that's trading your time for money. And you can then like move into like, consulting.
So now you're sort of self employed trading your time for money. And you can move to product
ties consulting, where you're automating away what your service like your services, you
can scale to have more customers. Like I talked to Brett Williams, a couple months back, and
he's making like, one and a half $2 million as a designer, because he's like, basically
turned his consultancy into like an extremely automated thing, where he has very predictable
workflow and tools to help him do that. And then at the highest end, Nathan put like,
a SaaS business basically, or you can build some sort of software that is making money.
Basically on its own, these are all different approaches, right? And Arvin, like you're
interesting to me, because like, you've almost gone backwards, like I did SaaS, now I want
to go be like a creator and like trade my time.
Like Nathan kind of shared that from the position of a successful SaaS CEO, right? You have
to kind of look at it from the way that I've done it. I am right up here. And I think it
is it's perfectly fine for his position. But I think it's more a graph of things than an
actual ladder, like you have a web, right? You can be at any point, and you can be happy
there, can carve out your little niche, your little spot. And if it takes you from SaaS
through product ties to content or from content through SaaS to then product ties it like
for bread or whatever it is, doesn't really matter. I think the most important part is
that you have something where you can empower other people through either a service like
you help people reach their goals or you teach people teaching them like other people or
you teach people how to help themselves. It really doesn't matter. Like money happens
as a transactional exchange to when you help other people. And for that, I think any form
is fine. Like I started with a SaaS, now I'm essentially building a media business. Like
I never thought I would, but it turns out this is more enjoyable for me. This allows
me to be more motivated than an SaaS. In a SaaS, I had anxiety and mental health issues.
In this media company, I wake up every morning and I'm happy, right? That's where I wanted
to go. And that's also, and we talked about lifestyle design. I just want to kind of throw
that in here. That's what I optimize for. I optimize for two things, for an empty calendar.
This thing that we're doing right now is the only thing I'm doing this week. Like literally
the only thing. And for when I get up that I want to do the thing that I'm going to do
that day. Those are the two things I optimize for. And you probably noticed that money is
not in there, right? Because that was solved with the exit.
The best challenge is how do you make your first dollar, your first hundred dollars,
that your first small successful thing. And I think that's where I think there's still
a gap for people about how to reason, about that first small win, I like to call it. Because
I think that is what changes everything. Once you do have something small that's working,
I think your odds of being able to build on top of that increase exponentially compared
to somebody who still hasn't had something. And I think, unfortunately, we tend to glorify
failure a bit too much. Many people tend to try very ambitious things with low odds of
success and then they fail and they say, oh, but at least I learned a lot. The journey
was fun, whatever. But we tend to learn more, I think, from something small that worked.
I'd rather try something tiny that makes me a hundred dollars a month or makes me a thousand
dollars once because I managed to sell something to strangers. I have some funnel that's working.
I built some relationships, some customer contacts. I have some useful knowledge versus
I say something ambitious. I spent a year of my life focusing on it and then it flops
and I have nothing. It seems almost counterintuitive. I had to go for the low-hanging flute to start
with the small wins to curb your ambition. As I mentioned before, what I did to myself,
I like to ask myself, what can I do to make some money by the end of this month? I think
if I were a new entrepreneur, I just jumped into self-employment from scratch. This is
what I would do. I would ask myself, how can I make some money, like whatever it is, even
just five bucks by the end of May? I would maybe go to Fiverr and pick up a bit for some
freelancing gig. It might be nothing. This might be obviously less than minimum wage,
but at least it will be something. I will start building a system. I will start knowing
how to invoice people, how to deal with clients, how to figure out which clients to pursue,
which ones to avoid. Then you build from that. I successfully built with it more success.
I think one of the most important things to piggyback on, to take advantage on, to start
with small, low-hanging flute, easy wins, accessible things that have high odds of succeeding,
but they're small. That is what you would say they think of.
The easiest thing is a job. Obviously, this is a show about startups. Here's how to start
a startup and make money on your own, which is cool, but I was reading online. A job and
a side project. You can make a ton of money from a job. If you budget your time well,
you can make money from a project on nights and weekends, and it can be small. You can
grow it to the point where you want to quit. I was reading about three of the ways that
people get rich in the United States. I'm not sure how accurate the stat is. It's on
a random website, but it was number one, inherit the money. Number two, marry into the money.
Then number three was don't have kids, which is essentially just work a job, don't have
kids, invest your money well. Actually, you'll turn out to do pretty well. I saw a bumper
sticker on a car the other day that was kind of the same thing. You know that decal that's
got stick figures of a family on the back of a car? It's like on every car. It's like
two parents and two kids. I saw one that was like two parents, and then instead of kids,
it was just a bag of money. It was just like the simple things I think can work really
well. Even working at Stripe, I know people who become like decamillionaires because they
worked at a company that was helping a lot of people, and they did a good job in that
company.
Let's talk about simple things working well. I think that is something that many founders
or people who are just new to entrepreneurship seem to completely ignore. Everybody wants
to build the perfect thing. Everybody wants to use the newest technology and wants to
create the perfect product. Even with info products, I get people ask me, how do you
create a course? What kind of equipment do you buy? How do you write a book? What kind
of software tools do you use? Do you just write a book, turn it into a PDF, and sell
it on Gumroad? Don't ask me what tech stack you need to use. Google this most supported
tech stack or use Laravel or Ruby on Rails technology from like 20 years ago. You're
going to be fine. You're going to be perfectly fine. The thing that you're supposed to do
is to help people, not figure out what the best tech stack is. That is where people have
this initial starting jumpstart problem. Instead of just doing something simple, like what
Daniel said, doing something that has a high chance of succeeding using reliable technology
or just simple pieces of technology that you already know how to use and that other people
already know how to use, they want to build this highly complicated unicorn inspired thing.
I think that is one of the biggest issues that I see founders or just creators of any
level have in the beginning. I guess if you are an entrepreneur that wants to get started,
just use the thing you already know and then make something that people need. Then you'll
make money.
I think it's a form of procrastination, even if people aren't consciously aware of it.
It's hard to do the real thing. It's hard to go out and help people. It seems it's much
easier to sit around thinking about what tools am I going to use? What cover is going to
be on my book? All these ants, what's the name of my company going to be? That's not
the real challenge.
You need the sense of urgency. You need that fire. You need to remove the safety hinges
and know that if you don't make it, you're going to end up in an arrangement that you'd
rather not be in.
That's why I don't like the idea of quitting your job with a huge nest egg. I've got $200,000
in the bank. It's like, you're just going to fuck around for three years and do nothing.
In the last six months, you're going to do the real thing.
I don't speak about it much because as well, it sounds like privilege that I speak, but
I think I had too much sun way. I think that's what fooled the beginning to be too idealistic,
too dream big. Luckily, I didn't waste at all and I realized before it was too late.
When we ran Feedback Panda, the business that we sold two years ago, how long is that ago?
Three years ago, when we ran that for Danielle and I, my partner, co-founder, and life partner,
it was pretty much all we had in terms of wealth that was locked in that company. We
had no nest egg to speak of, really. That's also why we sold the business at the point
when we did, because I was close to burnout. There was a material risk of the business
evaporating if I couldn't function anymore. That was one of the reasons why we sold the
business at 55, 60ishK MRR. We probably could have grown into 100. We probably could have
exited four or five times the amount we did, but we didn't and we couldn't. Obviously,
the exit itself changed our life after that forever, but at that point, when we were running
that business right in the middle of it, at the end of the second year, there was a sense
of urgency, but not a fun one. Not one that allowed us to create something new on the
side or anything. We have to deal with this now, because if either of us doesn't work anymore,
the whole thing just doesn't fall apart. With that goes all the wealth we have.
That was a risky thing, because I've been living paycheck to paycheck before that.
I was a software engineer. I was in Germany. It was just a regular kind of job that I had,
and it paid well, but I didn't save. I was also not taught or ever educated on how to deal with
money. That is something that I had to learn from the great Tony Robbins. Let me just admit it right
here. I had to read financial literature at 35, 33 for the first time in my life,
understanding how to deal with money. If you are that old and you don't know how to deal with this,
then you make weird and stupid choices that lead you to living from paycheck to paycheck.
I'm fortunate that we had that business, and I'm fortunate that we sold it, and that now,
from this cushy kind of position, I can make much smarter choices, much more long-term choices.
I heard this being called the post-economic state of mind. If you don't have to make a choice
about tomorrow, the next mortgage payment or your next grocery bill, then you make choices that are
long-term. You make these bets, small or big, whatever it is, in decades, not in weeks of time,
timeframes that you have. That definitely makes a whole lot of difference, but we were under
pressure. I was personally me. Me being the only technical person in the company felt like if I'm
not waking up at 3 in the morning fixing some database issue, then our customers are going to
quit. Everybody is going to quit. The mental pressure of that for years was quite substantial,
which is why we sold. I love that story because I think we've all been in a similar situation
where we're under a lot of pressure. I think this goal of getting to a post-economic situation is
kind of the goal for every indie hacker. The other takeaway I have from that is never be too
humble to read a book, whether you're 35, 45, 55, if you need to learn about finance,
learn about finance. I think we need to wrap up, Daniel, when you need to go.
Yes, I need to go. Yeah, I unfortunately do have something on my calendar.
Okay. Yeah. I'll wrap up real quick.
Thanks so much, Arvid, Daniel, for coming on the show. You want to tell us
where they can go to learn more about what you're up to?
Yeah, Twitter. Twitter is the same. Diva Solo.
Twitter, Twitter, Twitter. All right. Thanks, guys.
Thank you. Adios.