What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from AndyHackers.com, and you're listening to the Andy Hackers podcast.
On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense
of what it's like to be in their shoes.
How do they get to where they are today?
How do they make decisions, both at their companies and in their personal lives?
And what exactly makes your businesses tick?
And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and
go on to build our own profitable internet businesses.
If you've been enjoying the show and you want an easy way to get back, you should leave
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Today I sat down to talk to Greg Eisenberg.
Greg is the head of product at WeWork, and he's also one of the most talented, experienced
founders I know when it comes to designing social apps, consumer-facing apps, and specifically
apps for communities.
And so in this conversation, Greg and I just sort of informally chatted about what he knows,
what he's learned, and some of the cool things that he's built today.
Enjoy.
Let's talk about YouProbablyNeedaHaircutt.com.
It's very much enabled by the pandemic that we're living through.
It's arguably the most popular, viral project that I've seen come out of COVID.
And it's just been everywhere.
It's been all over the news, and it's a really cool idea.
What is YouProbablyNeedaHaircutt?
It's pretty simple.
Basically, I needed a haircut, and my girlfriend wanted to give me a haircut because my hair
was really long.
And I was just like, you're a data scientist, you know nothing about cutting hair.
Absolutely not.
I was just like, hey, why don't you get on the phone with my stylist Jabari, who's in
Brooklyn, and he could teach you how to do it.
And hence the birth of YouProbablyNeedaHaircutt.
So basically, the way it works is you go to the website when you need a haircut, and you
book a time or type of haircut, men's, women's, and you get paired with a great stylist who
just coach you through the process of cutting your own hair or your partner or friend cutting
your hair.
And it really took off.
It was on The Today Show.
It was on ABC.
It was on Fox.
It was on NPR.
Millions of people visited the website.
And by the time this airs, probably thousands of haircuts, and I learned a lot from that
project.
I talked to people who start these sort of viral apps that just do amazing in the media
or they grow through word of mouth.
And very rarely is it the case that people do this on accident.
I think the average sort of layperson is like, oh, yeah, I wish I would get lucky one day
with a cool app that blows up.
But when I talk to people like you, it turns out that you have a long history in making
consumer-facing apps.
You put a lot of thought into what will spread, what people will use, what people will talk
about.
Did that play a role?
You probably need a haircut?
Or was it just 100% I need this website for myself so I'm going to make it?
Who knows if it's going to be successful?
When I had the idea and I had the name, which is a really under-appreciated part of the
whole process, a really good name to make things go viral is super key.
And once YouProbablyNeedAHaircutt.com was available, I was like, it's done.
I told my girlfriend, I was like, this will go viral.
And viral hits are really where art and science meet.
There's a way to manufacture it.
There's definitely a bunch of luck associated with it.
But I think that's the art in a lot of ways.
And science is really the framework for thinking about how to launch viral projects.
But if you know how to do it, it's quite cool.
Let's break that down.
You got the art, you got the science.
The art of this, I think, is in part the name and the design.
And just the fact it's this, obviously, real world thing, you know, getting a haircut.
You brought it into this digital world of startups and websites where, you know, I guess
we're all at home.
It's just weird to see those two things brought together in such a way that makes perfect
sense.
I mean, why wouldn't you want to be connected to somebody who can help you do this?
But what do you see as the art of YouProbablyNeedAHaircutt and what do you see as the science of what
helped it grow into this big viral hit?
The art was like the positioning, the design, we had a YouTube, well, no, an influencer,
more than an influencer, he has a TV show and he has hundreds of thousands of followers
on Instagram.
He did our video that like, you know, you come to the website and he talks about, you
know, how badly he needs a haircut.
Just like the art is like, what is the image that you could put in people's minds?
That is the art.
And then the science is how do you systematically get it in front of everyone's face so it imprints
in their minds?
And I think there is a formula to it.
And you're seeing it with not just things like YouProbablyNeedAHaircutt, but I think
a great example is the Mischief team.
They're a product studio that just creates hit after hit.
Like their first, one of their first ones was the Jesus Walks shoes.
I don't know if you saw that one where they basically, I don't know if they were Air Force
ones or whatever, but like some Nike shoe and they put like, quote unquote, Jesus water
in like, you know, I guess in the soul and they sold millions of dollars.
And you know, these are the things like the question is really like, how do you create
an app or a website that gets people talking?
And we're now learning in 2020 that you can do it with a certain degree of success.
Yeah.
How much of that do you think is the idea versus the execution?
Because you hear an idea like that and it's like, oh, that's so clever.
You know, you get some holy water, you put it in the bottom of a shoe, you get, you know,
you match up people who need a haircut with barbers.
That's such a great idea.
And I think it's easy to think that, well, that's 100% of it, you know, but if you have
that idea, it's still easily possible to make that and then it doesn't go anywhere.
How much do you think, you know, is the execution after that?
And how do you actually model what gets somebody to tell somebody else about your product and
share it?
Yeah, I think like the getting there is how do you get the right media to talk about you?
So there's two things.
It's like, how do you get media to talk about you?
And then how do you get customers to talk about you?
So like, I just got off a phone call with a vice president of Philips, like Philips Electronics
and they have like razors and he was like low key using, you probably need a haircut
as a customer, but like, you know, used his, you know, didn't have his Philips email.
We had no idea and just had the best of experience and he was like, yo, this is amazing.
Everyone was starting telling his friends and he started telling people at Philips and
lo and behold, like now we're working together with Philips and you know, I think what you
need to do ultimately is when you have a really great idea and like something like you probably
need a haircut, you know, the question you have to ask yourself is how am I going to
get this in the right like you saw you probably need a haircut in a few different like maybe
media outlets, like how do you systematically get that and there's ways like for example,
like I cold reached out via Twitter DM, like a pretty catchy way to a bunch of journalists
that I didn't know, you know, and you have to put in the work.
I'm not going to be like too good for that, you know, the creator you have to.
Yeah, I was looking at your Twitter actually just like scanning for things you had said
recently and I clicked over to your tweets and replies tab and I see like, you know,
one of the things that you've been doing is actually just pinging people on Twitter who
are talking about needing a haircut like it's a common topic of conversation now when everyone's
at home like hey, you know, my beard so long, my hair so long and saying hey, you should
check this out, you know, and you're putting in a ton of work on Twitter, you're putting
in a ton of work with journalists, you're creating partnerships.
So yeah, you're putting in a lot of manual labor that I think no one really sees, you
know, it's all kind of behind the scenes.
And that's the kind of stuff that I'm fascinated by because you know, even though there is
luck involved, like that stuff that you can control, you know, that's what makes it less
likely to depend on luck and more likely to depend on the efforts that you're putting
in.
Yeah, I think on the marketing side, you know, because we're in tech, right?
People often talk about like, how do you create the technology?
How do you create the design?
How do you create the product?
We don't talk enough about marketing, R&D, marketing, research and development.
For me, all I want to do is figure out what is one channel that I know is going to be
really, really good 123 channels, really.
Yeah, like I might put in an hour a day for seven days on Twitter and just like paying
or two hours a day or five hours a day, just paying a bunch of people, measuring that.
And if it works, and I'm like, okay, great, now I can go find someone on Upwork to go
automate this.
And all of a sudden, like I have a marketing channel, but you have to put in the work like
or else you're never going to know.
So what is your skill set?
Because most of the people I talk to who are product people or who are engineers, they
don't want to put in that marketing work.
It's not interesting to them.
It's not fun to them.
Like they want to do all the stuff you're talking about, design the product, etc.
So they don't create like that hour or two slot in their calendar, because they'd rather
do this other stuff that they're really good at, that they're comfortable with.
What's your sort of skill set?
And how do you, I guess, find the motivation to do this kind of trudge work in the beginning?
I think my skill set is I like to build beautiful communities.
And then I'd like to get people into those communities as quick as possible.
Design plus marketing, and I love that intersection.
That for me is the most interesting part.
And why am I motivated by it?
Because there's nothing more fun than waking up and seeing that your app is on the Today
Show or NPR and stuff like that.
For me, that's really exciting.
And it also allows me to get my message out in the world.
For example, our stylists are people of color, and that was important to us.
Because one of the things we thought would be really cool is our lead stylist and creative
director Jabari Anderson.
He's just amazing, flamboyantly, gay, outspoken, black guy.
He's amazing.
And he gets paired sometimes with someone who's in a town with 12 people on some farm,
this white person.
He was telling me a story about this, who's never even seen a black person in real life.
And he might have never met a gay person.
He's never met someone from Williamsburg.
So all these, what I think is really cool is creating the connections between people.
And right now, COVID time, there hasn't been a better time in my recent memory, since I've
been really alive, to build products that create that connective tissue.
I saw Mark Andreessen, someone sent me a quote that he said the other day, which is, every
bad idea in the dot-com bubble is a good idea now.
Something like that.
And I think that's absolutely true.
I think one of the cool shifts that we're seeing, and I hope you see more of, is moving
from a one-to-many model of all of our communication online to a one-on-one model.
And you probably need a haircut is a really good example of that, where you're not paired.
It's not like one stylist or barber puts out a video for everybody to learn from and personally.
You're getting this very personal one-on-one mentorship experience.
It's going to be better than any YouTube video or article you could watch or read.
And I think the power of the internet makes that really easy to do and really efficient.
And I think when you look at most of what we've seen online, it's always been the opposite.
How can I scale more?
How can I reach more people as just one person?
And so I like the idea of platforms bringing people together one-on-one.
I hope that's more the future of the gig economy, where people can, maybe educators are more
one-on-one.
Maybe mentors and teachers who are not teaching classes, but who are just teaching a student
one-on-one and stylists and other things like this.
Do you have any other ideas, I guess, in this vein?
And is that something that you think about or how do you think about community evolving
in the future?
Yeah.
I mean, I'm sure you've probably read that post by Andrew Parker, like 2011, 2012, about
the unbundling of Craigslist.
It's a really, really fascinating post where he talks about all the opportunities for like
StubHub would be tickets and just like the unbundling of Craigslist there and Airbnb,
same thing.
It's just a better version of listings, apartment listings on Craigslist.
And the value from all those unbundlings of those companies is actually way greater than
the value of Craigslist.
And it's super fascinating.
And I think what's been happening over the last few years quietly is this unbundling
of Reddit.
And I think it started with Discord, which is a multibillion-dollar company that built
itself off of the subreddit of League of Legends, popular esports game, and eventually made
its way to CSGO and Dota and all these other vertical networks within Reddit and built
this really bespoke communication tool for those subreddits and eventually went horizontal
and expanded beyond just gaming and reached multibillion-dollar status.
And I think what you're going to see right now and while you're kind of just seeing it
is that people are systematically looking at what are the needs of particular communities
and how can I build a utility for them or how can I build something that brings them
together via some social technology.
And I think what you're going to see over the next few years is multibillion-dollar
companies that are going to be created in those spaces.
And the best part about it is that a lot of times you actually don't even need venture
capital to start these businesses because your focus is so small that you're able to
show product market fit.
And as long as you continue going and there's some revenue model, you can expand from there.
Yeah, I think this bundling, unbundling idea is really interesting.
Jen Barksdale, who I believe was Marc Andreessen's business partner back at Netscape, has this
quote about how basically only two ways to make money are either bundling things together
or unbundling.
And if you're an indie hacker, you sort of prefer the unbundling where you do what you're
saying.
You go to one of these giant networks or websites or communities like Reddit or Twitter or Craigslist
and you figure out, okay, what community exists there that I can already tap into, which is
way easier than building your own audience from scratch.
I mean, these places have already sort of aggregated tons of people, divided them up
by interest groups, put them into one little channel, one subreddit that quite frankly
isn't that well suited to those people.
It's not that custom for those people.
It's kind of generic, which is why if you can unbundle it, like you said, the value
of that unbundling is more than the value of that subreddit.
It's more than the value of that one area on Craigslist because you can build all sorts
of custom features and cater to the needs of the people who are sort of part of that
community.
We're speaking kind of like vague and high level, but the specifics of what happens is
you end up just building something that's way better.
Like you said, Discord.
Discord is going to be way better than any sort of gaming subreddit because it's a tool
and it's built from the ground up to appeal to those people.
And the best part about it is those people end up really worshiping that product and
that service because they're used to a one size fits all product and all of a sudden
they feel like home.
This is home.
And I think that's a really powerful feeling that you can give to people.
And I think it's also a very worthwhile endeavor for people to create products that do that
to people.
So why do you think this is more, less resource intensive than like the traditional venture
funded business?
Why do you think this is like a model that people who don't raise money can follow?
I think the first reason is basically that a lot of time technology, it isn't really
a technology innovation more than a positioning and marketing innovation a lot of time.
Like Discord, yes, at scale, it's hard to keep millions of concurrent people, you know,
and this isn't a discredited Discord technology team.
I'm sure they're fantastic, but I think like the innovation was really understanding what
people wanted in that community and building.
And then at the very core, like basically Discord is like a chat room, IRC, you know,
we've been using that since the 90s or even before, you know, what the innovation was
was really a positioning and a market and execution innovation more than anything.
So there's a lot of opportunities for founders and creators to go out there, take products
that are off the shelf and kind of skin it for different communities and see what sticks.
So I think that's the biggest reason why you don't need venture for that.
There's almost like a whole playbook that you could pretty much follow if you want to
try this out.
I mean, Indie Hackers itself is a splinter off of a bigger community, Hacker News, where
I noticed like, hey, there's this activity that's going on inside Hacker News, where
once every month or two people get together to talk about these projects they're building.
And there's so much enthusiasm around this.
And like the people in this community really deserve their own dedicated community, their
own dedicated place that caters directly to them.
And then from there, just a matter of, okay, well, how do you do that, right?
You research and you look at all the evidence, you know, what are they talking about here?
What do they care about?
Make sure you know what makes them unique compared to other people, and you like sort
of work backwards from there to figure out what kinds of features you want to build that
are specific to them.
You make sure your branding is on point, the naming, like you said earlier, should be aligned
with that group, etc.
And what's cool about it is you're kind of doing this without having to validate a whole
ton because the fact that this community exists is already validated for you.
They're already doing what they want to do in a particular place.
You can just go research it.
You're not having to ask people questions and hope they tell you the truth.
You just look and the proof is in the pudding based on how people are already sort of behaving.
If there is a subreddit about a topic, if there is a Facebook group about a topic, if
there is a Slack community about a topic, there is a business.
How do you find out what business will actually make money though?
Because there's a lot of communities where people want to talk, and they want to chat,
and they'll hang out and be buddy buddy, but like, what do you sell to these people?
How do you make any money off them at all if you just build another place that's better
for them to talk?
I mean, it's simple, but focus on communities that are with people with money.
Focus on communities that have a need to either learn or earn, which people will pay for learning
or earning.
Or getting paid or getting laid is another way of people putting it.
So as a few examples that come top of mind, it's like subreddit slash r slash WallStreetBets
is one of the most active communities where people talk about day trading and the market.
So obviously, those people would potentially pay for a service that perhaps gave them insider
tips or insider trading, but like tips and tricks, that sort of thing.
That's one example that comes top of mind.
But another one that comes top of mind, I guess this is also finance related, but there's
this movement.
I heard about it through Sean Purry, Sean, but he has a great podcast to my first million
yes.
And I was listening to it and he talked about this subreddit called Fat Fire, which is,
I forget what fire stands for.
I think it's something like-
It's financially independent.
Retire early.
Yeah.
Fat Fire is kind of like you want independence, and you want to retire early, but you also
kind of want to like ball out a little bit.
And it talks about that and it's a very, very, I went to go check it out.
It's a super active community and they're using Reddit.
You just have to think that there's an opportunity there, so you have to think about what is
the product, et cetera.
So I think going back to your question, it's like, how do you think about how do you build
for a particular community?
I mean, I think you really got to prioritize the ones that have disposable income, ones
that have intention, the intention being learning or earning is ideal, and that when you're
building it, having not just the back of your mind, but in the front of your mind, how to
monetize it from day one, because you always want the option for venture capital.
You don't want to be dependent on it to basically launch your business.
I love thinking this way because if you've built enough businesses online, if you started
enough projects, you realize there's kind of a limited number of reasons why they fail.
They fail because you don't have product market fit, no one actually cares about what you're
building or because you can't find a good distribution channel or you can reliably get
people in the door or because people won't pay for it, so they'll use it and it's free,
but you're just kind of on the hook for a lot of money for your server costs, you're
not generating any revenue.
And so there's almost kind of two schools of thought for how you come up with an idea.
Maybe the first thing you do is you say, I've got this great idea for a project or wouldn't
it be cool if this thing happened, which is great.
A lot of creative ideas can come out of that, but then as early as possible, if you can
start thinking about those challenges first, like distribution first, okay, how am I actually
going to get this in people's hands?
Is there a community or channel that I understand that's going to work?
Business model, do these people make money?
Do they spend money?
Can I make any money from them?
All these things are things you can ask on literally day one and you don't have to spend
like eight months building something before you realize that you're serving people who
aren't going to pay you any money.
So I think it's a great way to think, but unfortunately, it's also a way of thinking
that most people don't really come across until they're pretty far into their career
building and trying things out.
I agree, but I do think there is this movement happening right now of like bootstrapped entrepreneurs.
Andrew Wilkinson of Tiny Capital has done a lot of that by building and sort of thinking
about how to create and buy businesses that are very bootstrapped and sort of thinking
about this from day one.
So I hope that when my last company, Islands, we raised over $2 million on an idea, venture.
So I think like it's a very, you know, it's a different approach to building a business.
Yeah.
So give me the story behind Islands because I know what the product does, but I don't
really know how you came up with the idea and the story behind how you ended up at WeWork
where you're currently the head of product.
So Islands started at the end of 2015 with a simple concept, group chat is the new social
network and our concept was that we created a deck around group chat is the new social
network and it's going to verticalize.
I've been on this vertical network train for a while and you'll have a place to talk with
your finance people and your gamer people and your workplace people.
And that really happened.
We decided and we said, give us money and we're going to figure out which vertical to
start in.
So we built the primitives of group chat and all this technology to get started.
We realized that we wanted to start with college campuses because at the time, and still to
this day, actually, group me is still which is owned by Skype, which is owned by Microsoft
is still like a thing.
People still use it.
It's crazy.
And we decided to go and after all, Facebook also started as a social network for college
campuses.
Right.
So it made sense and we went after it.
We iterated for 18, 24 months.
We started getting really good traction.
Every school we launched that we'd get between five and 25% penetration or attention was
really good.
Every user would invite at least two people.
So we had virality too.
And we got to this point where we wanted to go big and raise a lot of money.
And it was a lesson for me because I went to some of the world's best investors while
I was building this product.
And I said, what is it going to take for you to give me 10, 15, $20 million in a Series
A?
And they told me specifically, these are the metrics you need to hit.
When I came back to them and I said, okay, I'm here and not only did I hit these metrics
and we've exceeded these metrics, the market had changed.
So 2018, 2019, people were calling on the – it was basically like the cold winter
or cold years of social.
It was the worst venture funding environment for social apps almost 15 years.
The lowest amount was in that timeframe.
So it didn't make a difference what your metrics were.
The market was not positive and I was able – I potentially could have raised a bit
of money.
But I was just like, I'm a go big or go home type guy.
And I was just like, so we ended up picking up a bunch of folks, different partners, and
WeWork made the most sense because it was a vertical network for professionals.
And how do you use Islands to power that was the concept.
It's crazy because your market is a founder in that situation.
It's kind of two-sided.
You've got your users and the people who love Islands who are talking and sharing it.
And then you've got investors who are your source of money who aren't really your customers,
but you need them to survive and to do what you really want to do.
And ultimately, you don't really have any control over the investor landscape and whatever
seems to be fashionable or trendy among investors, which goes back to your point earlier that
you don't necessarily want to put yourself in a position where you have to raise money.
Ideally, if you can just be self-sufficient and when investors say no, but you still have
this amazing business going on, you can just keep it going.
You don't have to quit.
That's right.
Yeah.
I mean with Islands, because it was a social app, because we focus on college campuses,
we knew that we needed to build the audience first before monetizing, and the only way
to do that was to raise venture.
So yeah, our hands, as much as we felt we were working for ourselves and as much as
we felt really good about what we were doing and as much as we felt awesome because metrics
were really good, it didn't make a difference.
If we weren't on Vogue or it wasn't a cool thing for venture people, it was tough to
raise.
And we wanted to raise also from good people.
We didn't want to raise from, we had the opportunity to potentially raise from less good investors
and we're kind of like, why?
So the lesson for me there was just like, try to own your destiny as much as you possibly
can.
So tell me about this phase where you spent 18 to 24 months figuring out how to get Islands
working and how to get retention up and get virality up, because I'm sure that was a lot
of trial and error and you learned a lot of lessons coming out of that.
It's not easy to create a viral social app.
I mean, I did something that was really wild, that was written about a bit, which was I
went and actually pretty much lived on college campuses in 2017.
And how old were you in 2017?
Old.
Too old to be on a college campus.
Way too old.
Maybe like a postdoc, maybe good enough for a postdoc.
I probably was like 20, well I was 28, I guess, 28 ish, so I am Canadian and I went to McGill,
which is in Montreal University here.
I dropped out.
The university college experience is very different in the U.S. versus anywhere else
in the world.
My understanding of how college worked was by watching like U.S. movies, like Van Wilder
and stuff like that.
So rule number one, if you're building a startup, is know the customer and try to understand
it and speak to them and build with them.
And I believe that wholeheartedly.
So I went and our head of growth was ex-Yik Yak and that was based in the South.
So we started actually out in the South and I went to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, so like basically
my first time in the South and spent months in Tuscaloosa and Mississippi and going from
school to school, which was also a whole other experience.
And it was through that process where we went from having an app that was just another group
chatting app to having an app that really resonated with people.
You were like going to frat parties, going to class.
Oh yeah.
What does it look like to immerse yourself in a world of college students?
Where from bid day, checking out what bid day is, which is for fraternities and sororities
for those who don't know, to yeah, going to checking out like fraternity parties.
Because like the Greek system, especially in the South, is such a core part of the identity
and how the school works that like me and the team wanted to understand and get the
product in the hands of these folks.
So you know, all of that dropping out classes, getting people to like pitch the app, go to
the chapter meetings for fraternities and pitching it, like everything.
It sounds like it would be so easy just to eventually lose yourself and just start living
like a college student and not learn anything, you know, I mean, you learn about different
college kids, but you don't learn anything that helps you improve your app.
What are some like concrete things that came out of that, you know, what did you decide
to do for islands that you probably wouldn't have done if you hadn't been, you know, living
as a college student?
The biggest thing I think was, you know, there's this narrative that if you have a social app
and you want to launch it at college, you go to fraternities and sororities.
Because the playbook for that was actually Facebook was started, started like that initially
was in the Jewish fraternity, a pie, Tinder and Bumble in the dating space also started
in the fraternity and sorority system in the Greek life system.
You know, when we did our like research from Silicon Valley, that was what people told
us to do when we launched it from from SF and we weren't getting the results we needed.
That's when I decided to go to the South in Alabama.
And when I really understood started to like investigate and be a detective about what,
you know, why do people even do this Greek life thing and try to understand it, I quickly
realized that Greek life is actually the complete wrong market for us.
Because what Greek life gives to students is basically this built in social network
that you can access.
So it's like, where's the party, it is like, you know, guys and girls that you can like
flirt with and meet with and stuff like that.
So we realized we had built this app that actually what we said we connected the disconnected.
So we connected disconnected people, but who are the most connected people on campuses
are the fraternity and sorority people.
So we realized and we quickly pivoted to the other 80% of people who are not in the Greek
life system, who actually needed a built in social network to open up an app and be like,
where is the party or want to connect.
So that's when we started focusing on like the LG, like the more disconnected people,
the better like LGBT in the south, like that's still a thing.
Those people want a place, you know, to talk Muslims in Mississippi, like stuff like that.
And that's when we really started started working.
It's interesting because it's almost like, you know, fraternity or sorority at a school
is a miniature community within this greater school community.
And you niche down super hard, but it's almost like you can niche too far where everybody
in those communities has all their needs met, and they don't really need your app doesn't
really matter.
Anyway, that's all a long time ago, you're now working on communities design firm called
late checkout.
I'm sure a lot of the stuff we learned building these other community and social focused
apps has translated into what you're doing now.
What is late checkout?
What does it mean to have a communities design firm and why'd you start it?
Yeah, so I co founded late checkout because I like I was saying in the beginning, I just
realized all this white space in terms of opportunity with vertical networks.
And I believe that community unlocks potential.
And I believe that there's a certain playbook for unlocking that potential.
So the idea is we self funded, you know, this business, and what we've been systematically
doing is finding interesting communities that we think are cool, and building products or
networks for those communities and owning it.
And we do that and we also have a small agency business that sustains and helps grow the
core product studio in that business, we work with companies like tick tock and help them
think about some of these problems as well.
So and why am I excited about it is because it's like we're talking about like there's
no more for me, there's nothing more interesting than how do you provide a platform for people
to come together.
And there's nothing more interesting than like creating bespoke experiences versus like
what I would think of like the Walmart or the internet, you know, I don't want to build
I want to build like the cool indie coffee shop.
I don't want to build the Starbucks and I think that's okay.
Yeah, you tweeted recently, at the past is the mass market.
Today is mass niches with narrower audiences, yet there's even more love is even more loyalty.
And when I hear that it's it's funny because it's so like I feel like most of Silicon Valley
venture capitalists, especially are kind of betting against that they're betting on the
Walmart of the internet, they're betting that if some new trend or way of communicating,
you know, happens online, that there's going to be one big platform that they can invest
in, that's going to gobble all of it up.
And there's not going to be room for any, you know, individual bespoke communities because
everybody's going to glom onto the network effects of the next Facebook or the next YouTube
or whatever big new thing is, why don't you think that's going to happen?
You know, where's your point of disagreement with kind of the wider VC community that tells
you that it actually, the future actually looks like us building more bespoke and individualized
communities.
We could have this conversation in two years and we might realize that, you know what,
we can only build a bunch of businesses that do 10 to $100 million or, you know, one to
$100 million a year each and there's a cap, which to me, I'm okay with because we have
self-funded it.
We own 100% of these businesses.
But I think what we're going to realize is that sometimes the most biggest businesses
look like the smallest businesses.
I mean, think about Uber, like Uber was a black car on demand business on mobile and
mobile, you know, as early days in San Francisco, like that market wasn't that super expensive.
You know, that market wasn't that big.
I mean, even Travis and Garrett, the co-founders didn't, they weren't even running the company.
They got Ryan Graves to run it.
You know, he was an intern, you know, if it was such a big opportunity, then why didn't
they run it?
I don't know the details, but, you know, I think what we're going to learn is that over
the next few years, these quote unquote niche businesses are going to start looking like
actually pretty damn big businesses.
I think one of the best recent examples of that is Discord.
You know, Discord is becoming the center of gaming.
You know, what looked like a League of Legends tool not long ago, or, you know, has now become
extremely big, and who is going to be best positioned for the future, I think, are going
to be people with deep, deep, deep insights that are able to systematically expand horizontally
quick enough while maintaining the closeness to the customer, so to speak, by like, just
speaking to them a lot, and that's my bet.
There's this cool, almost like, oscillation between bundling and unbundling, where you're
a small indie hacker or founder, you look at some huge bundled resource like Reddit,
you unbundle one part of it, and you start to grow, you get your tiny foothold, everyone
thinks you're small and you don't matter, and you start growing, and you use that foothold
to basically get, you know, more and more market share, a bigger and bigger audience,
and eventually you're huge.
But then, like, you're a bunch of bundled products and communities together, and somebody
wants to unbundle you.
It seems like it's this never-ending, basically, wheel where there's bundling and unbundling,
bundling and unbundling.
Do you think there's any way to stop that?
You know, if you build a community into something that's huge, got all these different groups
you brought together, you know, can you protect that thing that you've built?
It's extremely difficult.
You know, I think, like, you know, how did the Facebooks of the world deal with that
as they acquire these companies?
You know, I think it's inevitable that every vertical network becomes a horizontal network
at scale, which is kind of depressing to me as the purist of vertical networks.
But you know, I think that's okay.
I think it just leaves a ton of opportunity for startups building technology, because
there's always going to be opportunity.
And I guess, you know, if I could, if you leave with anything from this talk, I guess,
is that we are in an era of unbundling right now, a massive era of unbundling, because
of how big the major platforms have gotten over the last few years.
It's just created a ton of opportunity in white space to chip away at it in a bunch
of different ways.
And these periods don't last super long.
Like, we're talking about a few years of opportunity.
And I know that might sound like a lot, because, you know, it's in the years, but, you know,
to think of an idea, to research an idea, to build it out, to get it to work, to build
the team, to do it, it just, it takes time.
So now's the time.
Yeah, I think, you know, one of the cool things about being in this era, I mean, if you think
about how startups work in general, you've got this idea of moats and defending your
business.
And I think less and less, it's the case that technology is really a moat, you know, at
the end of the day, no matter what you build, technologically, there's some other group
of smart programmers, developers and engineers who are going to be able to build that thing.
And even if you have a head start, like they'll probably catch up to you, or they'll get to
90% of what you've gotten, and that's enough.
But the real moats are usually kind of distribution-based, you know, building your own audience, building
your own community that you can distribute something on.
And then you can build all sorts of products and like push them to people through these
distribution channels that you own and that nobody else owns.
And what's really cool about that, if you're not someone who's raising money from investors,
is that it's pretty hard to assail that, you know.
If you build your community, underwater basket weavers who all love each other and talk to
each other, is there going to be a bigger company who can come along and take that from
you?
Probably not.
And so if you're an indie hacker, and you're trying to build something, and you really
don't feel like raising money, and you don't feel like doing something where you're going
to need all these resources, and you want to be able to defend your moat and build a
business where like you can capture the value from that and keep running it.
And I think there's really no better way than to target a small niche community.
And hopefully you can grow to a healthy size without being unbumbled by someone else coming
along behind you.
Or if you get to the point that you're being unbundled, like it's a badge of honor, like
good for you.
You've made it.
Yeah.
You've lived long enough to see yourself become the villain.
Exactly.
Well, listen, Greg, this has been an interesting talk.
I'm excited to see what comes out of late checkout.
Are any of the communities that you're building public, you know, have you spoken about them
in public?
Can you share anything that you're building with us?
We've got stuff out in test mode and until we basically... no.
The answer is no.
Not yet.
All right.
Well, when they are, you have to come back on and share with us some of the communities
that you're building.
You know, I always ask people on the show, what's your advice for listeners?
People listening in are trying to come up with ideas, they're trying to figure out what
they should build, not just to build some cool stuff, but also to basically support
their lives so they can make enough money to quit their jobs, maybe join the fat fire
community.
What's your advice to people out there listening who don't have an idea yet, who are trying
to figure out what to work on?
Yeah, I mean, before an idea, just think about yourself.
So think about who you are, think about all the things that make you who you are and what
you love to talk about.
Like, if you're at a party and someone brings up a topic, let's say it's, you know, League
of Legends and it's like, oh my God, I'm so happy he brought that up, I love talking about
it, it's my favorite thing, like, and you can't stop talking about it.
That's a sign that you are kind of a nerd in that space.
And in this world of, you know, not masks, but niches, you have a competitive advantage.
I know it's weird to say, but you have a competitive advantage over Facebook, you have a competitive
advantage over the big players.
So start with that, and then come up with the idea around that and think about what
you'd like to create that would make your life easier, more interesting, and that you
would pay for.
And I think if you do that, you'll be surprised to see that there's a lot of opportunity left
in this world.
Dig deep and think about in what way you are a nerd.
Greg Eisenberg, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Can you let listeners know where they can go to find out more about what you're up to
with late checkout?
Sure.
Well, the best places are my stuff, Substack, actually, which is latecheckout.substack.com.
And I just send out thoughts around vertical networks and stuff, and it's been pretty fun.
Or you can find me on Twitter, where I tweet thoughts.
It's just my name at Greg Eisenberg.
Or to check out more about late checkout, it's at the website with latecheckout.com.
All right, Greg.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
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