I don't really blame large corporations necessarily for having the work environment they do and like in a lot of ways
I contributed to it. And when I was there, I was a really bad employee
Yeah, like I created exactly that which I hate just because I felt like there's no other option
But like there probably were other options. They're just too lazy to do them
So I don't think of myself as necessarily a great actor or that like I don't think of corporations necessarily like evil just I
I personally often don't fit that well into large groups
What's up everyone, this is Courtland from endyhackers.com
I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses and I try to get a sense of how they got to where they are today
The voice you just heard belongs to Vincent Wu
Vincent is the founder of a remarkable company called coder pad
He came on to endyhackers.com a few weeks ago to share a story and it absolutely blew up. I'm in part
That's because coder pad is a small company that's doing something like two million dollars in revenue per year
But it's also in part because Vincent has a very interesting personality
So I hope you guys have as much fun listening to this episode as we did recording it
Okay. Well, why don't we start off by?
I think that's an interesting story and I want to go into
Exactly what made you a bad employee and what that looked like
But why don't we start off with you introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about what coder pad is and where it is today
My name is Vincent Wu. I'm 28 years old from the Bay Area
I went to college at Berkeley for computer science. I
Worked at a string of companies like let's see in order Zynga
Amazon Google
Everlane and then I started coder pad
So I went around the tech block and kind of didn't really find my place in it
Coder pad is itself a tool for interviewing programmers in a more like what I think of as humane manner
so it allows you to synchronize on
Basically a text editor with a candidate over the internet wherever they are through a web browser and also like online evaluate the results
Of whatever code they've written live in real time
Which I think is super powerful and important for for doing it like a real interview and not just like a whiteboarding thing
And what would you say like the measure of coder pad success is like how much revenue you're generating?
How many employees do you have dollars probably? Yeah. Okay. What are you what are you at right now?
We make annually a bit over two million dollars recurring and there's four or four of you total
Yeah, or like four and a half. I mean depends on how you count them exactly
But like four people in the office on a given day max. Okay, that's pretty cool
It's a very high revenue to employee ratio. Is it I think so. I mean does it be Google? Uh,
I think Google's like over a million it might be yeah
That's but for most like small businesses started by one or two people
It's it's much much well Google was once a small business started by one or two people. Do you think Google could have grown to?
Anything like even a fraction of what it is now if they just decided that they wanted to stay andy
Do you think they just would have been they didn't I mean, I mean in what sense did they not stay andy?
I would say like it seemed like Google mostly controlled the destiny of its own fundraising
I don't think they were ever hard up for it
Like they turned down like billion-dollar acquisition offers or whatever
So, I mean like I don't think the I mean
This is a lot of what this podcast is about as far as I can tell about the differences between like bootstrapping and start-upping
Via venture capital, but I don't think the line is so cut and dry. I think blurry
There's very there's like private equity deals you could do
I mean like even even in venture funding like to say you raised like a 30 million dollar series B can have
Enormously different outcomes for the founders based on liquidity preference based on like overall valuation based on hidden clauses that basically only the board members
Know about so like there's a huge huge range of like how much independence companies are able to retain
Through fundraising and my suspicion is Google actually I mean if you look at it today, it seems to be acting with like
relative impunity to its board desires
So in a lot of senses, I would say that Google essentially remained indie like they were always in control
It didn't get always on whatever they wanted
I don't think there was like a dark night of the soul the way there was with like Steve Jobs's absence from Apple and subsequent
Return of Savior and Messiah etc. So while we're talking about big companies you talked about working at Google
You talked about working at Zynga at what point during this process?
Did you realize that he hated working for big companies before I even started working?
And why'd you start? Oh, I didn't really see another option at the time
Like it was just what you did like I needed to eat and I was at a college
So you had to do something a lot ideas about like projects
I wanted to do but none of them like seemed like they could ever make money
Because they couldn't I mean what I was doing for fun back then was doing stuff like writing cheats for video games
And I made a little bit of money off that but like not enough to eat off of
So I was like, well, I'm good at this programming thing. I might as well just work a job at it and to be honest
Okay, when I interned at Zynga for the first time I did kind of fall in love with the idea that like these idiots would hire me
Out of Berkeley pay me some absurd salary for an intern. I think at the time was like
$5,000 a month which to me was like an insane amount of money to pay to a child and
They put me
Essentially with another intern in charge of the development of like a new Pokemon like clone
That we just like worked on on our own for like a couple months and like it went nowhere
But like we hired artists we like had all these plans
But we ended up just playing a lot of Pokemon in the office
Like they had cereal on tap like all this weird shit that like I didn't so the ideal of Silicon Valley being like this
Sort of like bubble nerd paradise. It was foreign to me at the time. Like I didn't really know about that
I just wanted a job at a college and this was like 2008 or something, right?
So like people are were obsessed with the real estate thing, you know
So yeah, and why did you not like that job? Cuz that's like what you described would be a lot of people's dream job
I liked it. I liked it, but I also sort of knew it was a sham, you know
I need like I got up in the morning like
Walked 10 minutes to work ate a bunch of free cereal and then like, you know
maybe in the late afternoon like kind of sit down and like maybe try to get a little bit done like
That felt I was both pleased and kind of disgusted at it, right?
Well, it's weird that that what you just described as a productive day for most people like for you
That sounds like oh, that's nothing at all. But like for a lot of people that's a good day's work, you know, you started 12
You finish it like to I don't know. I mean I
Don't know that I'll go I think yeah for a lot of people they have tricked themselves into believing as if they are productive
But I have met like what I would call actually productive programmers and they are really in their own league
They don't really talk to a lot of other people as far as I can tell like the best programmer ever met
My life was like this 60 year old plus dude at Amazon and he had been there like who knows how long and he just like
He knew everything there was to know about everything computer-related as far as I could tell
It was amazing and I have no idea why he worked there
Didn't make any sense to me, but he was there like there's this notion that there's all this untapped gold of like extremely good programmers
Who are just more or less content at their job and just like really being good at it all around the country
And I believe that I think they're in the vast minority, but like I think they exist. What should they be doing otherwise?
starting businesses I
Okay, like
What you're asking me fundamentally is like more than just what should highly productive programmers?
So you're asking me like what should people do right? Like what is valuable in life is essentially what that question poils
Why don't you just apply it to yourself since like impossible to apply that yeah, I mean no
I don't think it's impossible like I'll venture a guess right like I
Don't think people should start businesses for the sake of starting businesses
I think they should do it if they think that it would be satisfying for them to do it
But like you don't live a long time you got like 90 to 100 years tops, right?
I like to think of it from the perspective of like when I am dying like I'll be on a hospital bed
I'll be like hooked up to an IV like one or more of my major organs will probably be failing and like
I know I have like a month or a week or a day and I like I won't know which like I wonder what I'll think
About so that's my approach it like I try to like look at
You know, whatever I can do in the short term medium term, whatever like what will be memorable like 60 years from now
That's a useful heuristic for me. I don't always follow it because I'm lazy
Also, but like if there's like a guiding light for me
It is like my eventual mortality the long term like thinking about what you're gonna care about 60 years from now
But not care. I can't hope possibly to predict what I'll care about 60 years from now
I just hope that that I'll remember like memorability is all I'm really shooting for here
That's funny because it reminds me of the first two years after I moved to San Francisco
I kind of I started a startup and I basically just coded for like 16 hours a day every day for two years
It's wild and the problem is that if you're just in flow for that long and you don't very
You're like activities. You don't make new memories. Yeah, just boys together
So I like a two-year block of time in my life where there were zero memories and I swear that I would never do that
Again, that's kind of what I suspected happened in that six-year-old plus guy at Amazon
I think he just sat down to code one day and then he woke up and he was 60
Like I don't know like yeah, I think the flow is both really seductive and also kind of boring
Yeah in its own way. I mean, it's it's a tool that you can use to a certain end
But I can't do it anymore. I can't I can't program for eight hours anymore. Like I tried
I just I can't do it and you probably shouldn't given your role at your company
So let's get into the the genesis of coder pad because it started
I guess you eventually found your way to ever lane
Yeah, and you were conducting interviews one of the people you interviewed by the way was my brother who I just talked to code
I don't know why he made this to you
Yeah
The oldest if I search for coder pad and my Gmail the oldest email that comes up is my brother
Forwarding an email from someone at ever lane to someone coder pad. That's amazing in 2013
What position was the interview for my front-end engineer? Wow, but he was interviewing for his very first programming job. We missed
Channing Alan so I'm only Channing Alan. My whole company is morally bankrupt. I mean, I think there's probably no way I could justify
continuing
Well, that was 2013 that he that he applied what what year did you start coder pad? I guess in 13
Yeah, that was that was probably one of the first. Yeah, that's amazing. Do you have any other memories of this?
I'd love to hear uh, I remember he didn't get the job. I told him that's that's fine
I mean, it was like I think a second programming interview ever and he just like learned
But I remember he liked you who thought you were very fair
Okay, you were his actual interviewer. So that's amazing. I wish I remembered this
I really have no recollection of that time period in my life
Like even the story I told you for indie hackers is a is a reconstruction
Based on emails and timelines that I that I know must have happened around that right?
I have no direct memory of like sitting down to start coder pad
What what was like the birth of coder pad? Like why did you start it?
What kind of headspace were you in were you trying to get out of emmer lane a man?
No, I wasn't at all. I was I imagine that I was merely frustrated with an existing set of tools to do interviews namely collab edit
Mm-hmm. It's really annoying. I remember having
vaguely this debate with my coworker about whether it'd be possible to run code in the browser or something and
I think he showed me repel it repel dot it by that guy. I'm John Mossad great guy
they're more focused on education, but I was like, well, you could totally take this probably and kind of like slap it on
Like a collaborative text thing and then boom presto you would have something usable. So I just did that
I mean, I didn't do it. It wasn't an original creative work
It was just slapping two totally disparate things together and just seeing if it would play and it did
Did you need permission from anybody at Everlane to sort of incorporate this into the interview process?
Or did you just did it? I mean there weren't a lot of us back then and I think we all kind of looked at it
It was like oh, it's a good idea
Like my boss at Everlane was great non you who is now an abstract great manager in a lot of respects and in one of those
Respects, he was very defensive of us. Like he he ran interference
Like he made us he let us do a lot of things that it would be difficult in other environments to
justify doing
Was that the best thing for the company's bottom line hard to say but it let me do things that I enjoy doing
They kept me happy and I think that was important
Yeah
And it eventually led to you leaving
Yeah
Everlane because the things that you were doing turned out to be pretty promising and you know, at least moderately profitable or that's true
But I mean honestly if if I hadn't done coder pad, I mean, I think there's significant odds that I've left
I really around the same time. I think just knowing myself for reasons. I won't get into here
But yeah, it just it seemed like I would do that sooner or later. Okay. So what were the early days and like challenges like of
turning this essentially side project and to
Business and when did you even realize that it should be a business and not just something that you're building for fun or for your
Own use. Oh, I think I knew pretty quickly that it should be a business
I'm gonna answer in reverse order. I think you asked me like how do I know that a side project should be a business or whatever?
I don't know. It seemed obvious like that's not a satisfying answer. But like a
lot of this stuff is like just so ex post facto rationalization of the past and like the truth is like
I don't really know like I probably took a guess and it seemed reasonable and I was like, okay
I'll spend an extra few months building on with the payment flow and all this other
Random quota crap so that other people can use this. Did you use stripe? I did in fact you stripe
Oh, I'd also like to throw a shout out to firebase
Which really let me get going in the beginning
I neglected to mention them in the written interview and they kind of chewed me off for that because did they fire?
Yeah, absolutely because rightfully so because the early prototypes of cutter pet could not have exceeded nearly as quickly without firebase
Yeah, we still use them today. I mean, it's like instant real-time. Yeah, it was sort of built for the application that we were doing
So it made perfect sense. Nice
So you essentially just decided on a whim that this had business potential probably because women's the wrong word
I think it just seemed obvious that it had business is obvious and then did you change besides like implementing stripe, etc
Did you go out and say I need to make my first sale?
Well, I knew I need to make sales
But if you ask me like exactly how that happened, I have like difficulty remember
I remember my first sale was to a group of Udacity tutors
I remember driving down there my then-girlfriend worked at Udacity and she was like sure I'll do this intro or whatever
we
Were in this room. We had Thai food. I
I
presented like on a
Projector we talked for but I don't remember any of the details at the end
They kind of nod and said okay
We'll buy but like buying for them was like nothing because it was like $20 a month and yes
I made my first sale like
This is like isn't is for no money. I mean, but it was it was fun
It's kind of when I got hooked
I think it's like I can just drive places and like convince people that do things and and they'll do it
They don't really seem to care. Yeah. Yeah, you don't need any sort of like rails or golden path
It's eliminated. Just kind of like the Wild West where yeah, you don't really need permission make things happen
and and that you can there's no magical process to it like convincing people to buy is just like convincing people of any other thing
about the world and I don't know I had been used to that I've been used to like fighting or debating or
Convincing other people that my viewpoints were correct for a long time
So I don't think that like sales seemed too foreign to me like I'm not conflict diverse. So
Getting used to sales to me was not like the it wasn't the hardest transition
I think it's hard for a lot of developers. I don't know an exception. Steli
Has a great course on this. I actually think while it might be hard for a lot of developers
I think it's much easier than they think it is
Like that sales is most of the time about being friendly and persistent not about being mean
So like 1% of the time it's about being mean and you don't even really have to do that 1% if you don't want to
So if you just like like making people happy, you can probably be good at sales
It's mostly just about remembering to send seven follow-up emails. Like that's the hard part
Yeah
so we kind of we kind of blew right past the whole process of you
Building coder pad because I think a lot of people listening in and a lot of people starting their first companies
Never really get to the point where they've actually built something that they're even ready to sell because they're too busy
You know work gets in the way life gets in the way. How did you find the time to build a coder pad?
Well, you had a full-time job. I don't know what to say. I mean I work nights and weekends
Like if you want to do it, you'll do it. I don't know. There's this web comic that like really lays out
I think it's a quote from
It might be Faulkner I can't remember but like it's about
how
People who always say they need more time and space to do their art are almost always
Making something up like the people who do art do it because they're like compelled to do it
like that like they'll they'll cram it in every crevice in the day and that there's really like they're 16 plus hours in a
Day and honestly, you can get through like a day job in like five hours if you like actually wanted to so like if you actually
Want to do something like you'll do it. You don't need like encouragement to do it
And I generally don't know like what to say to people who say like oh, I don't have enough motivation to do this thing
I know I should do it's like like that's a core personality issue that like can't be addressed by advice or
By like learning from other people's experiences like you have to want to do it
Yeah, I just always assume that means you don't actually want to do that thing so maybe you should well
I think there's a big difference between like wanting something and like wanting to want something
I think sometimes wanting to want something can be enough and it can be a path to like actually wanting something enough to do
It because like I didn't always want to do it enough like only at the right time in the right place that I finally feel
Like I wanted to do something enough to actually do it like I had a bunch of like projects. I've never finished
I still do all right like I work on all sorts of weird stuff that has nothing to do with programming or whatever like that
Just like often never sees the light of day because I lose the motivation at the end so like I don't claim to have
This problem solved. I think I just got lucky
I mean like I don't think there is a good answer to that like if you don't feel as if you have the time to do
Something you may or may not be correct right like and there's no way for us on the outside to know nor anything
Anything that we can recommend that'll make that easier for you, you know
Have you have you worked on any other projects that you intended to turn into businesses or some sort of you know?
Financially successful endeavors that didn't work out. Yeah, like one or two before coder pad or after one after probably like one or so before
I can't remember exactly the one after was like I'll tell you about if you're interested. Yeah, I'd love to hear about it
I had this idea that like so basically there's this company that has a monopoly on all city and municipal governments for hosting
archival footage of City Hall meetings, which cities I think are basically required by law to distribute so they did like
obligated by law to
Engage such a contractor to perform the service for them and the existing provider Granicus. It's not really good
I've been using their website a lot because I'd like been trawling a lot of City Hall footage
so like one of the guys that hackathon that I was at for like City politics stuff came up the idea to
Basically like mirror all of their stuff and then they provide a transcript
to make that transcript searchable by timestamp so that you can sort of search in a given City Hall meeting for like a
Key phrase or whatever and just like instantly jump to that point in the video
I thought that's a great start and I built that basically and then I had the thought that like why not just
Build the whole thing and like compete directly with Granicus
Like it seems like a fun business and you basically have a monopoly once you land the deal
Like it seems like a pretty defensible mo I gave up cuz I got bored. I don't know why I still think it's a good business
I just I
Was distracted again by something else and I think essentially it almost all business failure comes down to giving up in some way
You know either because you're not enthused about the idea and it sucks
To work on it or because it's a bad idea. You run into business challenges
Was every time on coder pad where you felt like you wanted to give up? No
Never no
No, but what about the early days because I know for a lot of founders those like first few months where you're not sure that
This is something that's going to work out or be worthwhile can be pretty nerve-wracking
And I know you started off just the coder pad is a side project, but you eventually decided to make it full-time
So were there any bumps in the road or challenges or insights that you had growing from zero dollars to what was it?
I think $4,000 a month. Yeah, I quit when I hit 4,000 MRR
What was that decision like I picked the decision? Okay
This is gonna sound really stupid and I had to explain this in the YC interview as well
They're like why 4,000 like you haven't quit yet
I was like I'm quitting at exactly 4,000 MRR and they're like why I was like, okay. Here's the reason it's stupid
It's because when I hit $40 MRR, I posted on Facebook as a joke is like ha ha my business makes 40 bucks a month guys
Isn't that funny? And then when I hit 400, I was like ha ha guess what?
I mean ten times when I made the last time I posted that's crazy growth and then I thought oh shit
Like if I do this again at 4,000, that's actually kind of real stakes money
So I might as well just quit then also 4,000 kind of pays for rent and stuff
So like that's why like there's no reason to it
I just did because I felt like it could have quit at any number
I mean if I quit in the beginning it would have been fine, too
Like it didn't really matter in San Francisco $4,000 pays for like literally just rent
I had a roommate. We were splitting like a one-bedroom kind of, you know
But I had the converted living room kind of situation, you know, yeah, like one of those
But uh one of the shitty old Victorians in a basement
Was it a hard transition going from you know, your developer salary to just $4,000 a month and no
Would you say that like you were motivated to what was pushing you the most just increase your revenue or that?
I don't I don't
These motivational questions are hard for me. I don't think I'm like most people
Why was I doing what I did? The truth is I don't know. I don't actually believe that most people know why they do what they do
I was doing a thing because it seemed like the right thing to do but okay
I'm gonna take a moment to explain like I'm what you might call like an optimistic nihilist
Like I don't think anything's really real up to and including money
It doesn't seem like it money is like a is like a dead person's face painted on a green piece of paper like it
that it signifies material wealth to me is like almost amazing like that that system actually works to me is like
Terrifying and awesome at the same time. So like yeah, I thought it'd be fun to make more money
But like I knew abstractly that if I failed at coder pad
Literally the worst possible thing that could happen to me is I would just get a job
Right, which I had proven that I've been able to do at least a couple times before that
So like I wasn't worried about it
Like there was no anxiety for me like because to me this is all big game. Yeah
it's like it's almost like a role-playing game where you're essentially leveling up and acquiring skills and
Okay, what end I don't know
I think even more like an open-world exploration game like GTA or whatever
You know like just see how much you can get away with before everyone figures out there
You have no idea what you're doing and you're just making everything up as you go along
So one of the reasons I asked you about your motivation was because one of the earlier things that I saw you in was actually
A video where you gave a talk at Dropbox. I saw that you did do opposition research on your interviewees
Yeah, that was a cool video
I mean I actually watched this video
Last year before I even started in the hackers and I was trying to find out who I should have on any hackers
And I don't remember the exact title of your talk. It was something about how to start a side business without quitting your day job
Yeah, I was trying to provoke the Dropbox audience. Well, that's what I wanted to ask
Like why why give a talk like that? Was it to provoke the audience?
Did you want to tell them that you know that essentially that they were doing their lives wrong? Yes, huh?
How do they take that they like to be supportive? I mean they were happy
I mean it was it was it was tongue-in-cheek like obviously it was in this building probably on this floor
I'm just a different room. It's striped now. Yeah, so
We could do the same thing if you want I could
Same room
Why did I do that?
I mean, I mean the impression that I got watching it was that you actually it seemed like it was a
Core principle of yours that people should do this or that it's better for the world if more people do that
There was more of the premise for the talk than necessarily like a core belief of my personality
I mean, I was invited to do a talk and they even paid me was crazy. Yeah, and they like I
Would this was like the best topic I could come up with so I like tried to make it compelling and like
Try to make but I also gave reasons to like not started business
I actually think there are tons of reasons to not do it
Like many people I think are unsuited for and also it's not terribly pleasant in a lot of ways
So I don't know necessarily that like I actually recommend everybody who's listening to start a business
I know that's sort of the premise of indie hackers and also its acquisition by stripe is sort of
How do you put it like grow the GDP of the internet exactly, right?
So like the readers at home, you know, if you can start a business day, I'd probably you know
Do that or whatever but also maybe like don't
I don't know. It's not easy. Like it's a it's a lot of work
And there are a lot of things that are valuable in life that have nothing to do with money
And that is what I would that's how I put that
I think one of the cooler things that you touched on and that's I've also found to be true is that a lot of people
Who actually would love to start a business don't just because they've never even considered it as an option
Yeah, especially being like, you know the smaller and the hacker type business where you're just
Making money and you're not trying to be a unicorn, especially if you're a developer like that doesn't get advertised as much
Yeah, do you think that's changing nowadays? I
Think it it must be changing like if there exist people like you whose sole job is to promote
This lifestyle. I think I would take that as some indication that yeah things are changing a bit
But on the other hand I touched on this in the talk
Like I think this is kind of cyclical like it used to be a cultural norm that everybody kind of wheeled and deal
At least that's my impression. If you go in other countries, that's way more true, too
So like that we are that we probably hit like peak corporatism and they're trying to like dial that back a little bit
I think is is
Natural like it was probably inevitable in some respect that like people would get upset with like we've had cultural
satire and lampooning of
Corporate life for like decades now. I remember like my entire life
I would watch stuff like office space or like cartoons or yeah
I just they no one paints a favorable light of corporate life anymore
There is no work that makes the work of an office seem noble and in some ways that's tragic because like I don't think that's
Necessarily true, but on the other hand like it reflects reality. I think the majority of like office work in the world now is in some way
Deserving of satire. Yeah, and nowadays if you don't like the corporate culture, you can just do your own thing
It's never been easier. I mean you can build something especially if you're an engineer that reaches across cultural lines
That reaches people who aren't in your immediate vicinity
And you could build something scalable like you've done with coder pad and I think people seeing that really inspires them. Thank you
It's a very nice compliment and for the listeners at home Cortland is a really nice guy
Everyone seems to like him that I've talked to I don't know how he got so popular. It's kind of amazing
Yeah, why don't why don't we talk about it? Can we talk about you for a little bit?
Yeah, you can ask me anything you want. I can ask you anything I want
You can ask me anything you want. You're gonna cut it out of the okay. So yeah, how much did Stripe buy you for?
I can't tell you okay
I mean, I'd love to share but it affects more people than just me
At what number would you have like said yes to a buyout without pausing?
Without pausing like if you got an email from I think it was like Patrick, right?
They said acquire indie hackers and the subject of the body was just a number no explanation
I can't think about it. I've let it immediately say yes that what number would be so high that you would not think about it
You would just say yes at the time. I don't know
I did three million dollars maybe like just to not okay even ask a single question though
It's I don't actually know that there's any number for which I would just say yes without asking at least some questions
I mean you would have to figure out there's a deal
Come on like are you kidding someone emailed you today and said I'll give you a billion dollars or coder pad
You wouldn't have any questions. I would say yes, I would not hesitate
I would say yeah, I would assume they were lying, but I would like I would I would hit yes as fast as possible
I got a lock that in it's a billion dollar. What about something I can actually share some non-hypothetical details about how do you like?
It here stripes awesome. I think I don't know if you know this about me. This is my first ever full-time job
I didn't have her have I didn't know that about a string of working at big companies to find out that I didn't like it
I just assumed since I
Wouldn't like it for the readers at home. How old are you Corlan? I'm 30 years old Wow
So you have somehow for the majority of your adult life managed to avoid working large companies. Yeah, how did you do that?
I heard you play poker. Are you just really good at poker? No, you know, I lose a lot of poker
It's actually contrary to my ability to survive without a real job
But I started to start up right out of MIT and we won this business plan competition
We tied for first so we got 25k and I lived off of that in Boston for about a year
Say and then after that startup died
I use the remainder of that money to move to San Francisco and my plan was really just to get into Y Combinator and
Get funding that way or to get a job if that failed so it's kind of like you
You know, I knew I could fall back to my programming skills and therefore it wasn't really that scary to take a leap
Yeah, getting into YC worked out and the money they funded our business with lasted me for more than a few. They incidentally
Funding a startup with that or is that just money for you to live your life for five years or money?
Okay, so now they actually funded a startup that I was working on called task force which didn't end up succeeding
But we did work very hard on it. How did you tell the YC people that task force would be worth a billion dollars?
What was the pitch? It was one of Paul Graham's requests for startups
So he had this idea that email was sort of this Trojan horse and to something bigger and that if you could actually get in
And change the way that people used email and you would get hundreds of millions of users and then from there you could do anything
So we were building this task management application that let you convert your tasks or your emails into tasks check them off
It would notify whoever sent to you. Oh, you know Vincent has completed the email that you sent
So just to clarify for the readers at home. You built a to-do list app. We built a to-do list
And I guess the plan was to turn that into a billion dollar company somehow
God
Did you how did you feel doing did you believe that it would be worth a billion dollars?
Or did you convince yourself that you had to believe you know what even back then?
I think my role models were the guys at 37 signals
So Jason Fried and David Hunter Marah Hansen and they were pretty much the only people talking about
Just making money with a simple small online business
And it was always kind of crazy to me
Especially when I moved to San Francisco the first for the first time that people would throw around numbers like a million dollars in annual
Revenue and say oh, that's cute. You know, that's not actually a solid business
And so for me like I didn't feel any obligation because I was NYC to try to shoot for a billion dollar company
I thought it would be cool. You had to spin the story before you get in right?
Yeah, for sure. You have to pitch them on building a big that just you just saw that as some lie
You had to tell it had no real don't get me wrong
I mean, I would have been happy with much much less than a billion dollars, but we still tried very hard
I mean for the first eight months of task forces life
We didn't charge a single dime for the product and this is a productivity tool aimed at business users
We were giving away for free, but it became apparent eventually like this is not gonna work
And so eventually we ended up putting a price tag on it. We were one of stripes
early beta customers in 2011
And I think in our first weekend
We made something like $2,000 after we emailed everybody and said that we're now charging for task force. Good. Yeah, it was great
What's funny is we didn't have a barometer for how good that was
I mean nobody else in our batch was really doing that there wasn't very much written online about just charging no one else was
Receiving money as payment for services rendered
I mean as far as we could tell back then nobody was building a big business off of the back of a Chrome extension
It felt kind of like a little rinky-dink application and we were surprised that people were paying us money to begin to do
Do you have any idea how much like boomerang makes? Yeah, unfortunately, I do. It's a lot of money
I mean we miss oh my god for sure. I wish I'd come up with that like holy
I'm not gonna swear
It would be a lot of money to come up with like this incredibly simple Chrome extension like in the right time
The right play exactly and the other thing is like in the present the past always seems like it was incredibly simple and easy
And now things are hard. I would also buy Bitcoin for those at home. Yeah, I've gone back in time
All right. Anyway, just throw a little asterisk in there. Yeah
Yeah, Bitcoin now we have like the the presence of hindsight to see kind of where things have gone gone
There's a lot more written today about how to start a successful business
For example, you're interviewing any hackers
We just kind of broke down exactly what the process was like as best as you can remember from beginning to end
It would have been a goldmine seven years ago to someone
Oh, yeah, and I want to make it clear that absolutely I have stood on the shoulders of giants as well
like patio 11's writing for me was um
There's a big inspiration. Yeah, like I don't know about the actual business as he started but like he's writing on
just like
eloquently
Describing what the core fundamental issues of small business are were like confirmations of like long-held suspicions for me that like
Pushed me over the edge for like, okay, like if this random guy in Japan can like make it doing this random bullshit in Japan
I can probably do it here in America. Like it's probably fine, you know, like that just normalizing these ideas
Has done a lot. I think you're definitely working on normalizing this idea and I think that work is highly valuable for society
I'm trying to and I think that 10 years from now
There'll be far more people starting independent businesses
And I think people will the path towards doing so it'll be a little bit more mapped out as much as it can be
And there's like some argument to be made that like the better off that are the more information there is out there the more
Competition there is and the more it's going to you know, the harder it will be to succeed
But at the same time good, I think
Lower the profit margin. I'm fine with half
It's crazy how much money the winners make in tech
I mean
It's it's kind of the court like if the tech industry is different than all previous industries in any way
It's probably the profit margin
Like there it's fundamentally unlike any other industry that's come before and until we get a handle on that
We kind of don't really know what's right
So like I would be totally comfortable with like more competition in the tech space like I don't think we have enough
I don't think we have nearly enough and I think consumers suffer for it
Yeah
What about in your own space like since you started coder pad and grown it to a two million dollar business?
Have you seen a lot of competitors take note and says yeah
I mean the legacy people started copying us new incumbents started copying us
I don't know. I've met my competitors in real life and they are like weak
Spineless soft people and I don't even think about them anymore. They're so
they have no vision and I don't know like one of them is a YC company and I was like
I don't know what they saw and these guys or whatever like it I
Used to worry about competition. I guess when I was starting out when it felt like it was possible that I could just be squashed
But now I know I sleep very soundly. I worry about other stuff. Yeah, what do you worry about?
Politics mostly you don't worry about anything with your business. No
One of the cool things that I think you talked about in your Dropbox talk
Was kind of the constraints that you have as a solo founder, right?
If you're going to start a business by yourself and you have you know
These YC on founded companies that are trying to crush you or copy you you need constraints so you can actually be effective
So I think every company needs some kind of constraint. Yeah, they're more severe when you're so they're extremely severe
It's funny even working at Stripe
I'll look at you know, people whose entire job is something that I have to do for indie hackers, but it operates
Lives in such a small fraction of like the attention that I have to give it and it's like here
There's an entire team devoted to you just that one thing
Mm-hmm, and it's interesting looking at the constraints that you impose on yourself for coder pad
For example, you never did any marketing. Yeah, you never did any I guess you did a lot of sales
I don't know that mark not doing marketing. I don't think of as a constraints. Just I never wanted to do it
So I didn't do it. No. Yeah, it's never a thing that we had to walk ourselves back from doing
It wasn't a temptation to do marketing. It was just like marketing is stupid. I didn't do it
What were your biggest constraints though? I mean I talked in the Dropbox talk
I do actually mentioned like decision theory constraints for like how to choose what tasks to do next
I think the ones I mentioned were like either it has to like two out of three like make me money
and
Make customers lives better and three be easy to do
So like you could do a task as long as it was two out of those three
So you couldn't do anything hard that would make you money but wouldn't make people happy
right like it had to be like easy and make people money or make me money or easy and make people happy or make people happy and
Make us money and then it could be hard. And another thing. I think you said was that it needed to be
Intuitively obvious that it was one of these things. So you weren't using mixed panel
For example, yeah, I mean, I think it should be it should be obvious. Right if it's not obvious like what are you doing?
I
think that's one of them the hardest things especially for
Developers or people who haven't had like a customer facing role to connect
The things that you're doing the features that you're building with like the value
That the customer gets and why they're actually buying what you're you're selling
It's kind of what makes sales hard as well already marketing copy. How do you look?
I don't like the idea of enshrining that this is a hard thing readers at home
It is not hard. It has never been hard. It will never be hard. All you have to do is do it like
Think about what the customer wants if you don't know yourself call them like this isn't that hard
It's how you find out any other piece of information in the world before the year like 1990 or whatever, right?
Like we're spoiled now we have Google
We have the notion that like people are just like ones and zeros or something like that's never been true never will be true
Like you need to understand the people that your company services in order to service them
So yeah, I don't like encouraging that actually it's not hard
I don't think it's hard either if you know those things, but I think it's it's a little bit unintuitive
Yeah, they haven't done it before. Yeah, but starting a small business is doing like a hundred things
You've never done before like you have to be okay with that idea
Like if you only do the things you're used to you will fail like guarantee it
I've seen that happen so many times
I talked about that in the other interview a little bit right like the founders often get sucked into these productivity holes where they
Like I don't like you said coding like 16 hours a day or whatever, right?
Like if a solo founders only programming 16 hours a day, I can promise you they will fail like
There's no if fans or butts about that. They have to do everything else, too
Yeah, I think one of the cool things about you not
Having to do marketing and not even being tempted to do marketing is that really you guys were kind of growing by word-of-mouth
from early on besides the sales that you actually did people will go in interviews use coder pad tell other people about it and
Patty 11 had a tweet last week where he said it kind of repeated this off-quitted start-up advice that your idea is not what matters
In fact, your idea is valueless. It's a hundred percent
Executions. That's just not true. Yeah, I've seen a lot of disagreement about it. I wonder where you is obviously
Like okay, I'll give you a terrible idea. Let's see you make a successful business out of it
You have to make I don't know fit bits for dogs. Oh, wait, they did that. I don't know
Like it seems obvious to me that you're both your idea and execution have to be good
Uh-huh, that seems like table stakes right like not only that even if both of those things are true
You still might fail
So it seems useless to talk about like this whole notion because like it's not even scratching the surface of like what you actually need
To do and to be fair to Patrick
I think you would probably agree with you and it was directing his advice more towards newcomers who tend to believe that starting a business
Is 100% about coming up with the idea but on the flip side
I think if you look at especially VC funded startups
They're just a lot of founders who take this concept to heart and who really believe that it doesn't matter how bad your idea
Is when you start the entire goal of execution or maybe even the definition of execution is to iterate and to pivot and to eventually?
Arrive at a good idea. Okay. I mean I've seen that happen like a couple times
I mean good products have come out of terrible companies like Docker, but like
You know for every one time that happens like you don't see the 99 dead people, you know, like good luck
I mean, I would
Suggest starting with a good idea if you can if you don't have a good idea in your solo founder
I would highly suggest not doing it like or thinking harder or like
Finding low-cost ways to iterate on the idea that don't involve you spinning up a whole company first, right?
There's a lot of like risk reward trade-offs to make here. Yeah
I think ultimately like almost every company has some sort of clock on it whether it's the founder running out of time or
Patience or money and like to the extent that you can start with a good idea. That's like somewhere close to the mark
You're just significantly raising your chances of success. How much has coder pad changed since you first built it?
I know one of the early emails I also have from 2013 is you sending out an email to everybody at coder pad?
Saying we just hit 1,000 users
Here's what I'm working on and then at the bottom you have like a whole paragraph basically asking people to tell you
You know, what should I build? Yeah, how you know, what came out of those efforts and how much has coder pad changed?
There's a lot of stuff to probably okay, so like in the literal sense like how much coder pad has changed
I mean, we've like redesigned the site a couple times I would say but like not in ways that are shocking more like
streamlining and
Refocusing attention of the user and like what we think the important parts of the interview experience are
But like fundamentally the the the philosophical value prop is exactly the same as it's always been it's been refined a little bit
but coder pad as
An idea has not changed at all almost right like the original form of the idea is more or less the one that exists today
Because it was the correct idea. I think like I got lucky with having I could imagine another world where it's not true very easily
Hey, I don't think I'm a genius or anything
I just
lucked into the right problem at the right time and had the right set of skills to execute on there and
Like I wasn't the only one with this idea trying to execute it on the same time
Right, like there are other people with similar backgrounds who try to do coder pad that I never even knew about
That I found out we're dead later, you know, we're still kind of limping along
Like I just happen to be the one that one like the reason I'm sitting here talking to you is because by definition
I am lucky and the people who are not so this is the problem with advice in general, right? Like I
Think all indie hackers
Interviews should come with a disclaimer just because I think it'd be funny
But like by definition when you ask successful people for advice what they do is they like in shrine. It's a hagiography
They just like blow up these little details of their life and give them such
Explanatory power like I could sit here and tell you why like optimistic nihilism is the correct philosophy to have for someone wants to start
A business, but I don't really believe that like I have no idea
Right, like by definition the people you talk to are the lucky ones
What they should really say is the way to be successful is to be lucky like that accounts for like just make sure you get lucky
Yeah, that's like 90% of variance right there the other 10% like you have some control over like but not a lot. So I
Said the real advice is to like not worry about it so hard like the odds are you will fail
That's like, okay
You know why you have to be okay with that before you can do it
Like if you're if you absolutely cannot let yourself fail, then you shouldn't be doing one of these. I don't think what do you think?
In your path from like starting the company to 2 million in annual revenue
What do you think is the the most lucky thing that happened to you and that accounted for your success?
We were lucky to win the confidence of certain large customers
It's not clear exactly why that happened
I just happen to know someone at the right place or and got an intro or something like that
It's maybe surprising me, but I actually don't have many friends in tech
So it was actually I didn't I didn't really have an easy time getting interest to tech companies
So like of the few that I did like they tended to pan out pretty okay
And that went well for me. I remember one time like
Bob Lee like he was like a VP at square something like that like gave a talk at like
The VC that put up most of the money for square when they like recruit all the founders to come
Have a conference or whatever any like had some panel on hiring and he just like told the whole crowd
It's like hey, you should buy coder pad
It's this weird product made by some guy named Vincent Wu and that like I remember
I the only reason I heard about it cuz my boss had ever laid at the time like texted me that like hey
I heard you doing pretty good buddy. I
Still employed there. I was like I had no idea this even happened
You know like so that was that was lucky like some of that stuff kind of serendipitously happened in the background and it was useful
For getting going but honestly, I'd probably think it worked even without that stuff. It's just been slower
What about the opposite? What do you think is the the most beneficial part?
Or the most advantageous thing that happened that was just like sheer effort or skill or that was very deliberate
I am a very good programmer. So that's a huge advantage
I don't know like if you're making a product that is mostly code being a really good programmer
Almost by default is a big advantage like another founder doing this job with like, you know
Or more average programming skills, I think would be they would take longer or they would make more mistakes
I think so I'm lucky in that respect, too
you know, I think
Last July I emailed you before I started indie hackers and I I'd watch your video on Dropbox and I said Vincent
I like coder pad. I think it's been pretty incredible what you've done. I think you also like shared some hacker news comments about
Just how you're how you'd grown and you didn't come on any hackers because you said that the cost
The downside to sharing the behind the scenes details was not worth the upside was not at that time
No, I don't think what's changed my perception of how vulnerable the company is. Yeah, right like at the time. I probably was worried more about
Attracting attention of the wrong sort, but now
Like I was just anticipating a bunch of like difficulties that I don't think actually not will manifest like for instance
Like if our customers know our revenue numbers will that change like discussions we have with them
Like at the time I might have been a little paranoid about that. But now I
Don't think that's nearly as likely as an outcome
And I don't know it just it seems like so much more of the business has gelled since then
That I feel like the company's in a pretty good place and that it can totally tolerate like
Sharing some of its internal workings with the outside world
Not I mean not because I think sharing is the right thing or anything. It's just I felt like bragging
After like totally honest. It's mostly vanity
like after like four years to be able to like brag about it a little bit feels nice because actually been really secretive about it and
Like I did I've definitely it's nice to talk to people about what you're doing brought people over who have expressed
Incredulity at the idea that I am a wealthy business owner given the way
My then apartment looked like with my roommate and the you know, the living room with the bed
I don't think I kind of look at me like a crazy person. So it's nice to get a little bit away from that
After minutes, it's for me. It's for me. Yeah, I think that's honestly what makes any hackers work
Like if people didn't feel if it didn't feel
Satisfying to kind of talk about what you've done and what you've accomplished
Then I would never be able to get people like you to come on this show, right?
I think you should get people who have fucked up in a huge way
Like if you can somehow entice us because you're only getting the success viewpoint
Which I think look I don't think
doing a business is as much about doing everything right as it is not about committing like a few like huge errors that like
Everybody commits or like do you think of the game of tennis as being about like making the best plays or not making mistakes?
Mm-hmm at the highest levels. It's about making the right play at every level below the highest level
It's about not committing unforced errors. Like
There's like this YC saying I crib a bunch of notes off YC
We owe them a lot that like more startups die by suicide than by murder, right? And that's absolutely true
I've seen so many people fail for completely avoidable stupid reasons that everybody but them saw coming, you know
Like happens over and over again
So like listening to successful people they say things like oh, yeah
I knew I was doing like we had this plan and we did it and then we were successful
Which I think lulls people into this sense of like, okay
If I just feel as if I have a plan and do things like I'll be successful or whatever
But the truth is they did the right thing the difference between the right thing and wrong thing is really hard to illustrate by only
Interviewing the people who did the right thing, right? Like I think interviewing people who fucked up in this like incredibly huge way
I think it's is
Totally valuable. I think a lot of the reason why people do the wrong things or you know
Avoid doing the right things is simply because it's not because they know that those things are
There to be messed up on or excelled at and they just do the wrong thing
But it's because sometimes I don't even know for example, like you said earlier
We kind of live in the society where customers have been reduced to bits and just numbers and words on a screen
Where in reality, it's like you should be talking to your customers and it's difficult for a lot of people to
Are a lot of people fail to talk to customers not because they've decided they don't want to or that it's not important
But because it doesn't even strike them is something they should be doing. I don't know man
It's more than that. We've been like shouting that idea for the last 10 years
I mean like what I see has been around a while
It's definitely changed the game
Like if you haven't heard the notion that like starting a startup
You should probably talk to your customers like every VC would probably tell you that anyone you would go to advice would probably tell you
Something like that. Like if that lesson hasn't sunk in there's something deeper there, right?
It's not not just that you don't know but the use kind of person that really doesn't want to do that for some reason or other
Like why I think that's a lot of people definitely but I think the emotional motivation is there
I think it's on the advice side to be honest because
You would be shocked at the number of people who hear the good advice over and over and over again and don't follow
I totally agree. I think advice is often useless that you can tell people exactly what they're doing wrong and make it a really stark
Obvious picture and they can still ignore you like that Paul Graham quote about how their business and why she's you know
Giving founders advice they know they'll ignore right like this is endemic to human nature like people don't like advice
Fundamentally you have to trick people into doing the right thing almost half the time. Yeah, and like I mean
That's a key learning for sales, but also like what's going on there?
Like what are we doing with this? Like is our goal to convince people to do the right thing like?
materially by like producing information like this how likely
Do we think it is that we will materially affect outcomes?
Like I think that's a really serious question that like people who make a living off of advice giving
Need to ask themselves and I think there's very little
serious
Examination of even the basic idea of like does advice work. We know so many famous people have predicated their whole
Persona on advice giver, you know, and they're respected by the community
But like have they actually ever changed an outcome who knows right? It's very hard to quantify. Yeah, it's difficult for sure
I mean, I think people act on advice to the extent that it's obvious that advice will be valuable for them
That's why insider trading is a thing because people will act on information
But it just needs to be clear how that information is going to help them and it's difficult to measure to you
I mean at nd hackers like this is something that I think about how
Many people are starting companies because of nd hackers interviews. How many people are making better business decisions?
Because there's something they'll hear in a podcast like this or something that they'll read and a text interview or somebody that they talked to
On the form I haven't figured out the best way to measure it yet, but there's how many people did anything
Based on something they read in the interview
It's a real problem like Steli FT like had that YC sales workshop that I snuck into and he's like at the end
It's like okay, so you should make a list of discovery questions
You should ask and if any of you does it you can send it to me and I will vet them
But I know none of you will do that
Like he knows it's not gonna happen people don't do things
It's really really true
People only do things that they wanted to do already like and it's very very hard to change what people want to do
That's the chat. I mean the goal I think as a founder
I think one of your primary virtues should be like flexibility
You should you should know abstractly that your job involves doing a hundred different things that you should be prepared to do a hundred different things
If you're not doing a hundred different things, maybe you're doing the wrong thing, right?
Like it's not just any one thing
It's like you have to do everything and like you know that well from having done indie hackers as a side business or lucky
full-time gig actually and
Just some management of this entire pipeline of stuff must be exhausting but like you have to do all of this all on your shoulders
Yeah, I think another thing about advice is that as humans
We're just we're a little bit obsessed with novelty
And so you'll see the same advice given over and over again talk to your customers make something that people want etc
And people will see that and say yeah, yeah. Yeah, I've already I already know that
I already know that even though they're not doing it at all
Yeah completely see it being just because they want to hear there's just something about hearing something new and exciting that makes you
You feel like you've been enlightened. We call that the TED talk effect
That's a good name for it
Everyone needs to listen to a TED talk. Everyone wants to give a TED talk
Meanwhile, the best advice is obvious and repeated ad nauseam TED talks are the worst TEDx talks are even worse
Like it's crazy that that's still a thing
Well, even though we were sort of railing against the effectiveness of advice. I think
Why don't we end the episode on some advice?
I want to go back to this idea of starting starting a business while you're working a full-time job
Because that's the situation that most people are in what kinds of advice would you give to someone who's trying to make that work?
Have a good boss
I don't know like well, for example
I think one thing that I have heard you talk about in the past is how you believe that
It's better to start a business that sells to other businesses rather than starting a business that sells to consumers
Which is very hard to get off the ground. Yeah, I think B2B is easier
That's a checklist of things that like if you started your next company, you would follow
So again, the problem with advice like this is I'm highly biased to predicate advice based on just what I have done
So I would say I think it's obvious that you should do a B2B sales thing and it's clearly easier this way
But like do I really know that I mean like I give it like 60% odds
Like this interview is it's a chapter in a book and people listening in and getting here. Yeah. Yeah
Yeah, I guess I'm I'm trying to disclaim myself against future embarrassment by saying like really really really
I don't know everything
but the advice I would give is like
It's not about
Even execution advice. I think it's about your personality as a founder more than anything
Like again, like founders commit suicide way more than they're murdered
So like don't commit suicide like don't do weird stuff do like the right thing
Think really really hard about what the next right thing to do is like it's gonna be different for every company
So most advice is too general to be useful here
But like I think the one piece of useful general advice is like if you're not really
Thinking hard about what the next thing to do is maybe doing something wrong
You know, like are you what what assumptions do you have remaining that have not been questioned sufficiently, right?
Like are you sure your business will work?
Like why are you sure like can you convince other people that this is like going to work, right?
Like if everyone around you is skeptical, like why are they skeptical right? Like seek to validate your own judgment
don't just assume everything will work out for you because
most of the time it doesn't I'd like try to set up some checks on your own reasoning and emotions because
people
Generally speaking don't make decisions log logically. We just do my feeling all the time, right?
So like if you know that's true about yourself because it's true of everybody
Like the only thing you can do is like try to set up some guard for yourself
Like I didn't do that. I just got lucky right, but I know that's the right thing to do
We try to do that more now
Like startups are emotional. Yeah, incredibly emotional. Yeah, it's rough. Like that's the problem with them
I guess that they are so emotional, right?
Yeah
Well, you heard it here from Vincent Wu think hard about what you're doing think critically about what you're doing and don't just trust
Your gut feeling all by it. Don't be like me exactly if you want to end up like Vincent then don't do what he did
Vincent can you tell listeners where they can go to find out more about you personally and about the things you're doing at
Coder pad you can go to my website Vincent Wu comm that's WOO and I have a bunch of links to other places from there
you can find my Twitter or just a bunch of random writing that I've done stuff like that and
Look forward to seeing you online friends
All right, Vincent. Thanks so much for coming on
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