Hello everybody, this is Cortland Allen from ndhackers.com, where I talk to the founders
of profitable internet businesses and side projects to try to get a sense of how they
got to where they are now.
Today I'm talking to Dave DeSandro of Metafizzy.
Metafizzy is a one-man operation that Dave started really as a side project, but eventually
grew into a substantial enough business that he was able to quit his full-time job at Twitter.
What's interesting about Dave's story is its simplicity.
He didn't set out to change the world as we know it with a revolutionary new product,
but instead of using his skills as a developer and a designer to sell basically widgets to
other developers to use on their websites.
Metafizzy has been incredibly successful in the past seven years, and today Dave comes
on the show to talk about what that journey has been like, and also later on in the episode
how his life has changed as a result of being able to work for himself full-time on his
side project.
If you are yourself a developer, or a designer, an artist, or really any other type of creative
who's interested in making a living by doing what you love and taking advantage of the
scale provided by the internet, then I think Dave's story is a great example.
So without further ado, let's jump right in.
I'm here with Dave DeSandro.
Dave, thanks for coming on the podcast.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
I'm excited to have you on.
They're a little different than some of the people that I found out recently who are more
like traditional business founders.
So they're building these huge companies, they're hiring and managing people, they're
building out sales teams, and you on the other hand are a lot closer to the side project
end of the spectrum, but with an incredibly successful and popular and long-lasting side
project, where you've really just started using the skills you developed as a programmer
and a designer to build things that you love and to make money while doing it.
So I think it's really great to get a chance to talk to you and to bring someone onto the
podcast who's coming at things from sort of a different angle.
Before we jump in, let me ask, how would you describe what you do?
Yeah, sure.
So like my basic pitch for even people that don't even work in tech is that I make widgets
on websites.
So I don't even make the entire website.
I make something that another developer would put on their website, and I take care of all
that so they don't have to reinvent the wheel.
They can use one of my products.
So I make things like carousels, one of the processes, Flickity, I have another product
called Isotope, which does sorting and filtering of lists.
So kind of basic functionality that you see all across the web, that's the core business
model of what I do.
Those are the products.
So you're like the developer's developer, really?
I'm the man behind the man, yeah.
So you're also kind of this rare unicorn where not only are you a developer who's capable
of building tools that other developers hold in high esteem and widely make use of, but
you're also a damn good designer.
And I think by combining these two skills, you're really getting much more than the sum
of each part.
So you can build products that literally nobody else could build without having to have a
two-person team.
But you can build them entirely on your own without any sort of overhead or communication
or things that might get lost in translation.
So let's go back to the point where you developed both of these skills.
How did you do that?
I guess it's just like a shared interest in making stuff.
When I was first kind of looking at, I mean, it all just started out as a hobby.
And I was working on a blog, and I just had a photo blog, and I enjoyed working on the
web design of it.
And I didn't really think that I could even make a progression out of it at the time.
But I developed the interest, and at the time, this is 2006 and 2007 or so.
There was just kind of one title, and that was Web Designer.
And that was kind of like a wide funnel that brought in people with lots of different kind
of talent.
So I would say like John Hicks was somebody who's a web designer, but he also did icon
design.
And then you would have other kind of people that were just like back end.
So maybe it comes from that, like that kind of history of these kind of catch-all web
masters that have different kind of things.
And so I never thought going into it that, you know, like anybody, I just kind of pursued
my interests.
And so I was interested in some design stuff and some programming things.
And I would say that if anything, you know, it's like I'm a jack of two trades, like master
of very few, you know.
I've also had concerns about like, am I spreading myself too thin by – not spreading myself
too thin, but like could I advance myself in a certain niche further than other people?
Since I am working alone, so I'm concerned about like how to best use my time, does it
really make sense for me to try to be a designer?
Because I feel like I – there's way better designers out there, however, maybe I could
be a better, you know, front-end developer than other people in my group.
Yeah, design is – it can be intimidating.
And I think it's because – at least one of the reasons is because, you know, it's
like any other skill.
It's something that you have to learn.
But for some reason with design, it just seems like people are just born with it, you know.
Like when you see a really good designer, you're like there's just no way I could
have come up with that.
And yet, like I look at what you've done and it's awesome.
So how did you go from being someone who was, you know, maybe on the outside looking in,
thinking, okay, I want to become a designer, but I'm nowhere near as good as all these
other people to being someone who's actually good?
Yeah, that's a great question.
So I'll go back to like kind of my origin story is that in college, I didn't get a
degree in design or program or anything like that.
I kind of got a general bachelor of arts degree.
And I didn't really know what I wanted to do with that.
And out of college, I got a kind of office cubicle monkey job where I was like dealing
with spreadsheets and I hated it.
And at the time I had this hobby where I had this photoblog and I love working on the photoblog
and like working on the CMS and with the design.
And you know, just kind of pinging around that you there was this kind of tight knit
community of web designers.
And it just seemed very exciting and very appealing, you know, they kind of seem like
they all knew one another and they would all meet together at South by Southwest.
So I definitely felt like I was like outside looking in on this, you know, from my cubicle
and what I did was I just kept on working on the photoblog until the point where I realized
like this is who I am is I'm not just somebody in an office job.
I am a designer and kind of once I made that decision for myself, I kind of changed everything
because after that, then I was like, okay, I'm a designer.
What do I need?
I need to make a portfolio.
I need to actually build these skills.
I don't know Photoshop or Illustrator.
I don't know what a web designer does in an actual company.
So I was able to find a certificate program that taught me the Adobe suite and also did
web design stuff and got me in touch with a lot of people in the area who are actually
working as designers and some of those people are still my friends.
And this was, you know, back in 2010 or so.
And you know, those relationships have still kind of helped me throughout my path.
Yeah, that's a great answer.
A lot of people ask each other and I've asked me also about web design.
And I think a while back, five, 10 years ago, if you were a great designer, that was something
that really made you stand out compared to other apps.
Whereas today, it's almost like table stakes.
It's so common for people to launch with just these amazing designs that it's easy to feel
inadequate, especially as a developer, if you don't have any design skills.
And so people are really searching for a way to develop those skills from scratch, at least
to a passable level.
And I think your example of how you went about it kind of just diving in should serve as
a good example for people who are looking to do the same thing.
Yeah, I would say like the kind of the hardest part to know is like when to stop, because
you can like endlessly keep tweaking.
And I think like one, maybe it's a good thing or bad, but it's like for me, I kind of lose
steam eventually working on a design where I'm like, you know, this is this is good enough
here.
Like, because I'm concerned with other things, like once the thing I feel is meets a low
threshold, I'm more, I'm more concerned about the other thing.
And I look at kind of like what I've designed so far, and I never feel like, wow, I really
put like a lot of time and effort into the web design things, because that's just I see
that as like one of one of many things.
Yeah, it certainly is.
And, you know, even the other angle coming at it from okay, well, what is like enough
time to put into it is pretty hard, because I feel like a lot of people think that, you
know, if you're a designer, you're designing something that you just get it right, the
first try and you just move on.
And I think the iteration and the iterative nature of it is completely invisible to people
like you probably make something and it looks like crap, at least to you when you first
make it.
And then you keep refining and refining it until you hit like, you know, a certain point
like, okay, I'm done with this.
But all of that work that you did is completely invisible and people only see the final product
and think, well, you know, I can't first try make something that looks that good.
And so they get frustrated.
Absolutely.
I like to think of George RR Martin, who's, you know, probably the most popular writer
right now, you know, he's like the hottest writer that can possibly be we're all like
waiting on pins and needles for the next book to drop.
I was reading his he has this anthology of pretty much his entire short story career,
including the stuff where he's, he's in high school, he's basically writing like fanfiction.
And there's two fascinating parts of it.
One is like, just like you said, like he starts off awful, and it works his way better by
better and by like the time he's like about 25.
The stories aren't that interesting.
But you can see there's a hint of the writer he's going to become where he's talking about
the human condition in a very ridiculous, you know, horror fantasy setting.
And the other funny thing is that his ideas will propagate throughout his career.
So he mentions in the high school, he has, you know, just like an action finger called
like, called Drago, and it's like he brought that name with him all the way until he was
in his latter careers like, let me use this idea that I always thought was good.
And he keeps recycling these ideas.
And that's why like, when you read the Game of Thrones books, you're not just reading
a great writer, you're kind of seeing a writer who's built up all these things over decades.
And it's both impressive, but it also is humanizing and that this person just didn't just show
up one day and knock it out.
Yeah.
And I think what's interesting is that it's analogous to kind of you and metaphysically,
because you've been working on metaphysically now for seven years, which is an eternity
and the internet age, I mean, you've had a long time to build these libraries and to
learn from what you've done in the past and improve.
And even before you started metaphysically, you released masonry, right?
So it's really been longer than seven years.
And so maybe it makes sense to start at the beginning, what is masonry and why did you
build it?
Yeah, masonry was kind of like my first claim to fame.
In internet terms, masonry is a cascading grid layout library, and you've probably seen
it all over.
And Pinterest, I guess, most popularized this kind of style.
And even before Pinterest, what masonry was around, and there were other things that did
masonry stuff at the time, but they were kind of siloed.
So there was another product called grid delicious, and there was another thing that that worked
with WordPress.
There's also cargo collective.
What masonry did, it was a jQuery plugin, which meant that other developers could use
it and it was easier to spread.
It didn't have to fit in a certain CMS.
I think a lot of my products, or a lot of things I make, it's not an original idea,
but it's just maybe a little bit easier to use.
And it was the right tool at the right time.
This was 2010, and that's right around when Pinterest kind of took off.
And having lots of images on a web page was a whole new way to experience the web.
And masonry was kind of a big part of the trend of these image-heavy sites at the time.
Yeah, it's like the perfect time to launch.
Were you aware of that going into it, or was it just kind of a happy coincidence?
The original reason why I made it is that I had my little photo blog, and I had an idea
for the way I wanted to lay out comments, because some comments are longer than others
and it didn't really matter which order they were in.
So I personally just, like a lot of people, wanted to make things.
I needed it for my own reasons, and it was just something I wanted to use on my site.
And I saw it as a way to market myself, because at the time I may have just landed my first
job, but I was trying to make a name for myself.
And so that's all I kind of thought it might be useful, but it also shows my skills.
And I didn't anticipate that it would be such a huge phenomenon.
Yeah, and it's really huge.
It's been used on 40,000 websites.
Your GitHub repository has almost 12,000 stars.
You're like 11,991, I'm going to start and see if we can get you to 12,000.
Yeah, it's just incredibly successful.
And a year later, 2010, you start your actual company, Metafizzy, on the side.
And at this point, like you said, you've just gotten a new job, you're working full-time
as a web designer at an agency, but you wrote something really interesting in your blog
post about launching this side project, this company, Metafizzy.
You wrote, as masonry is open source and free for commercial applications, it has been leveraged
in a number of premium templates.
This is awesome, as my work can lead to some sort of money, and if the developers of the
premium templates are making money off of my resources, why not me?
Clearly, there's a market for developers who can use my work to turn a profit.
Were you kicking yourself at this point, like a year after launching masonry, this thing
that turned into a huge phenomenon, were you kicking yourself for not having decided to
charge from the get-go?
Oh, no, because masonry kind of did much better than I expected, or like my goal was for me
to make a name for myself.
And it absolutely did that, to the point where today, if I'm out of talk or introducing myself
to other developers, I can say, like, I'm the guy who made masonry.
And I feel like some people would know what that is.
But I mean, that's why I started my business, is that because there was a part of me that
was like, man, I should be making money, right?
Like, when I saw other people making this stuff, I was like, well, why not me?
I think it's just so hard in general to build something that people like, especially at
that scale, and so I totally can identify with, like, okay, if we're going to build
something that's that successful, you know, why not also take advantage of that and also,
you know, like charge money?
But your decision was to essentially start building other tools.
Why didn't you, you know, put a price tag on masonry itself, or add more to masonry
and start charging for a premium version?
I guess because I and I still feel this is that the general spirit of the web is that
things are free and open.
For the things that I work on, which is JavaScript, HTML, CSS, that's largely, largely the case.
And I didn't really want to buck that trend.
And I felt that masonry was so popular that it wasn't exactly mine, you know, like it
belonged to everybody.
And the other thing is that masonry already existed, whereas if I created a new project,
I would be able to introduce it with a new set of rules and make money off of that.
So I, it was kind of like trying to follow the spirit of, you know, front-end development
and the community that was already a part of.
Yeah, it's very true.
And I think the way that your business models have worked, I really want to go into that
in detail later on, because it's such an interesting topic.
And for people listening who aren't developers, you know, what Dave's talking about when he
says that front-end development has this culture of kind of being open and free.
When you write JavaScript, and people use it on their website, the code is visible to
everyone.
Like, you don't really have any choice other than to make it basically open source, which
kind of facilitates this culture that he alluded to of things being free and open, because
it's hard to make money off of something where all of the code and the functionality behind
it is totally open, and anyone could just take it and not pay you.
But we'll get into that.
So back to, you know, the beginning of Metaphysy back in 2010, you decided that you want to
work on extra projects and products and try to sell them for, you know, profit, but you
don't want to charge for masonry itself.
What were your long-term goals?
Were you thinking that, hey, this is something that I'm going to do on the side?
Or were you thinking that, hey, this is something that I want to do like full-time eventually?
Oh, at the time, it was just something I wanted to do at the side.
I could never think it'd be a full-time gig.
And I was, you know, happy with the work I was doing at the agency.
So I wasn't thinking about it overtaking things.
Before I even started, I kind of got the blessing of the two founders of the agency, Alex and
Martin, who were two awesome dudes and kind of like led me to this path because they're
very, had great entrepreneurial spirit and big advocates for being in the community and
sharing what you know and putting together events that brought people together.
And so I asked them for their blessing on this and they were absolutely for it because
they realized that, you know, my success would lead to the agency's success.
So let's talk about some of the things that you've built, you know, because following
the success of masonry probably seemed like a tough challenge at the time.
What was the very first thing that you built after starting Metaphysia?
Well, I started Metaphysia around one product.
It was called isotope.
And again, this was something that it wasn't my idea.
There was another thing that did it at the time called quicksand, but I thought I could
do it better.
And also I built this thing around masonry and so I was really just building on top of
masonry.
So in two regards, it wasn't a big step, you know, it was just kind of like a one plus
one plus two kind of thing.
What isotope did is that it had the masonry layout, but it also had the ability to filter
and sort items.
So it could dynamically change where things were and what things were visible and what
things were hidden.
And you know, I already saw that this other thing called quicksand was got some buzz.
So I knew I could I could kind of shimmy off of that.
And I also had masonry out there.
So you know, I had notoriety from that and I could also use it to point to isotope.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of people who are excited to work on a project but aren't
sure what to work on and have a lot of trouble coming up with an idea because they're under
the misconception that whatever it is that they're working on needs to solve some totally
unsolved problem right it needs to completely just change everything when in reality I end
up talking to entrepreneurs like yourself and a lot of what you're doing is looking
at what came before looking at what things are already succeeding and what problems are
already solved and saying hey I'm just gonna go after this stuff you know they don't have
to validate the market all I need to do is build a solution that's you know better than
what's out there or at least different than what's out there in some way and I think it's
really the safe bet.
Were there any other examples that you learned from or that you felt inspired by?
I do feel like if anything was new about isotope it was like the business model and there wasn't
some there wasn't a lot of things for me to look at at the time but I do remember the
one thing that that was kind of in the same realm where it was charging money for an open
source project was this suite of tools called Wijmo and I think it's it may be still be
around but I don't know if it's still in development that was an inspiration now I'm thinking about
there's other two there was Shawn Inman's Mint which was a service that did analytics
you know kind of like before Google Analytics was around or something you can put on your
site for tracking like that and so that was a commercial product that was kind of associated
with the web and there was generally things like premium WordPress themes premium tumblr
themes so I knew there was other kind of things that were kind of similar to it and so even
though there wasn't anything that was specifically like you know a job script plugin that you
can charge for I definitely looked at these other things and they looked at their licensing
their commercial pages you know how do they sell it on their home page and that gave me
something to at least build off of and work as a reference point okay so you're working
a full-time job you're doing isotope on the side how long did it take you to get isotope
to the point where it was ready to be released and how did you juggle that with your work
responsibilities well I didn't really have a timeline and this because it was a side
project I was able to you know let myself have enough breathing room but if I remember
correctly it probably took me about three to four months to launch it and this is my
first time kind of working on a project extended like this even as a side project I remember
the time breakdown was something like it took me close to twice as long to build the documentation
as it was to build the actual JavaScript so like the core code maybe took like a month
and a half but the rest of the stuff took two and a half months subsequently the products
I've built since then have the time breakdown has been like that because when I get to the
documentation stuff that's actually when it's being put into actual use and I start have
to to verify the things the features that I thought that I built and I start catching
a lot of edge cases or I realize that something was idealized I thought it'd be work this
like really smooth way but when I actually put it into use I see you know the rough corners
that need to be sanded off and I took my time with the documentation and that's kind of
still where I feel my products can can shine because I don't see a lot of developers or
when I look at other projects I feel like their documentation can be promote their product
much better yeah I was gonna say I think in the open source community like a lot of people
don't have time to put into documentation and they don't have that much time to put
into their products to begin with especially since they're not charging and one of the
things that's really cool about metaphysics how much time you put into all your documentation
it's like really a differentiating factor because for any developer I think this lesson
applies to other companies too but for any developer like your first point of contact
with the project is the documentation okay what what even is this are there demos what
does it look like is it right for me how do I use it you know I'm running into this bug
how do I fix it and if the documentation is this afterthought that you know has been kind
of tacked on at the end with very little effort then it's a significant impediment to people
actually adopting and using the products I think it sounds like you did it right by you
know focusing a ton on the documentation and really it seems like that comes about from
focusing on what things are like from your users point of view rather than just your
point of view as a developer which is a lot easier said than done at the time I didn't
really have these kind of thoughts formalized you know I just kind of want to make something
that was special but since then I've been thinking about this kind of point and what
I how I frame it is that I went how do I use other people's things and typically when I'm
using some other tool or something like that it's like I don't actually care about the
tool the tool is just one of many things that I'm using to build the site so let's say that
it's like a package manager like NPM and for whatever reason I'm working on a project with
this new package manager it's like I don't care about the package manager I'm only using
this to get to the next step and so with that thought in mind I try to make everything that
it's like as quick as possible being very kind of upfront don't have a lot of happy
text so people can get the information they need and move on to the next thing like they
don't need to know the philosophy or the methodology behind this sort of tool is just like get
me to the point where I'm using it and then if I need to see more stuff it's there but
those first kind of like initial onboarding steps are very important and I think that's
like something that's it's driven home if you're a actually working on a commercial
product project or some commercial product that you know people need to be onboarded
in but I think a developer you don't really frame things in that way you think about like
onboarding for using a tool it's just like not part of the vocabulary so fast forward
to today and metaphysy has a ton of products you've got isotope you have flickety and packery
you just released infinite scroll it's a lot of stuff and what's striking to me about this
approach is it's so different than what you see with most startups most startups just build
one thing because it seems a lot simpler and they just iterate on it forever and ever because
they want it to be I guess because it takes a while to get it to be good enough to compete
on the market and yet somehow you've built like six different things that are all good
enough to sell how did you decide on the strategy yeah so I'll just be a friend about the breakdown
like isotope is still the big tentpole for metaphysy and I'd say it's about you know
50 to 60% of the license sales that I make from then it's kind of like I already have
one product like maybe I should make another and kind of packery came out because that
would allow me to point to something else and hopefully one helps drive sales of the
other and that's kind of my basic marketing thinking behind building a product lineup
is that somebody might be looking for one thing and eventually they find you know in
the future like didn't that one company have the carousel widget or something like that
you know when they're already using a filtering sorting thing and so that's why I'm I build
multiple things and the other reason is that once something's built it doesn't require
as much time you know isotope take took three months three to four months to actually build
but after that you know it's still been been making revenue and so I don't actually have
to be actively developing it every day in and out that's one of the things that I really
love about your approach to metaphysy too because most companies build this behemoth
products that have a giant to-do list of features that never get any smaller whereas in metaphysy
you're just building individual features for other companies to use in their products which
means that your products that you release have a start date and an end date once you're
done with isotope you know you might have to fix a few bugs here and there but you're
done with isotope and you can move on to something else and I think that's really the key to
passive income is this approach something that you planned on taking from the beginning
I didn't know going into it but after isotope was successful I realized that was that was
the way to go you know and and since then you know I've had ups and downs with this
kind of approach so my second product packery it's another grid layout library but at the
time people kept on asking for this one feature and I was like I can't actually build it it's
it's tough to do with the things I have with isotope and masonry so I said you know what
let me build something that specifically does this problem which was dragging grids of items
which is like a very kind of like complicated math problem you have to do like bin packing
and stuff like that and I thought it was like people kept asking for it I was like all right
you know I'm gonna I'm gonna make it because I finally had the opportunity to do so and
as it turns out it was one of these things that got a lot of questions but it's very
hard to sell it because how many people are looking for a draggable grid layout libraries
you know it's it's kind of like a very niche product but at the time I wasn't thinking
about that I was just thinking about like quieting the the big request and so then the
next thing was like alright let's not do something that's so niche and also spread the availability
of what actually metaphysy does so the the two first products were like very similar
both and they were very similar to masonry and so the third product was flickety which
was a carousel library which is not like everybody uses carousels right so that was some completely
different and you know would be different from isotope and packery but I knew people
were actually using it and so flickety has been much more successful than packery and
so now I'm trying to like kind of broaden things and that's why the the latest thing
I did was infinite scroll which was points back to stuff you can do with isotope and
but it's different enough from that and flickety so hopefully making that tent bigger and just
for context I'd love to to talk about like how successful these things have been for
you because in terms of usage I mean masonry masonry like I mentioned earlier is like 12,000
stars on github you made a library called images loaded it's used on 70,000 websites
6,000 stars on github isotope is like 30,000 websites 8,000 stars on github how much money
are you making from all this stuff yeah so I'd say that metaphysy makes six figures it
has for the past four years the most successful years were 2015 and 2016 which had made $120,000
in revenue those years so this is like full-time programmer job like you don't even have to
have a job this is your full-time thing huh yeah and so at the time or like those years
it was making about what I was I made from my full-time job the last time I worked full-time
on not on metaphysy was 2014 and that year I made the same my salary over in metaphysy
revenue what made you decide to quit your job and go full-time on metaphysy yeah well
at the time this was 2014 and I was working for Twitter in New York City and metaphysy
had been going for four years at that time and you know year to year that it grew basically
200% it doubled over year over year like the first year was like 25,000 and then was 50,000
so when I when I looked at that I was like I can I can be it's legitimate money and I
wasn't transferring you know I wasn't taking too big of a leap so I didn't have to worry
about I felt that I could I could sustain this at least for the next year and see where
things go from there and it was just like the right time for for me to leave the job
I kind of you know why anybody leaves job you know you grow tired of something or you
don't feel like you're a full person working at that so you know it was the right time
and but I also it wasn't too big of a risk yeah I bet it makes it a lot easier to leave
your job when you when you're actually making hundreds of thousands of dollars from from
your side project how did you juggle during this period where you were working at Twitter
and also growing metaphysy how did you juggle the two things that sounds like a lot of time
yeah well I mean to put it into context you know I was married but I didn't have a kid
or I do I do have a son now but you know it was just a lot of things in my life had already
been taken care of so I kind of had enough availability to work on metaphysy on the side
during those years and it's funny those years like when metaphysy was growing double that's
when I was working on it least and so a large part of my success is really just luck you
know like isotope is the right product at the right time and it didn't have too big
of a competition you know so it's it's flattering to talk about this like I planned it all but
I look back on this you know like I just got really lucky with isotope and it took off
on its own you know I didn't I hardly did any actual marketing during those years where
it was doubling over yeah I think it's fascinating and something you mentioned earlier too about
packery how it's like okay it's like this draggable grid library for JavaScript you
know how do you like market that thing you know how do people find it but it seems like
you did a really good job leveraging your early success and like having that help the
success of your later projects for example mason reads this grid library well isotopes
basically like you said built on top of masonry and packery is basically a feature request
you know that's that came about from isotope a lot so you know I'm sure there's a lot of
luck but also like it seems like you had like a really good strategy for ensuring that the
things that you were building were things that people needed and the people who discovered
you for one thing would also you know become aware of similar products that you made yeah
you know everything I kind of make is is just another different version of something else
that's already out there and like I remember at that time I was like I'm such a big innovator
you know like masonry is this whole new thing but I've come to realize I've come to embrace
you know what it is I do now or I'm just I can clean up stuff and kind of present it
nice and write write okay documentation and that that that works so far yeah so the other
half the equation besides the you know the building of the actual products is the marketing
how have you thought about marketing because I know it's not an easy task in general and
it's especially not easy for a lot of developers you know I've been there in that phase a lot
of developers get stuck in where it's like way easier to code that is to figure out okay
how am I gonna get this into people's hands and yet you've been working on metaphysically
for seven years now so you've kind of seen like the entire marketing landscape change
I mean there was no product hunt a lot of the channels and a lot of the things that
have been written about how to get the word out about your products just didn't exist
seven years ago so how have you thought about you know finding customers and making sure
that people know about your products yeah I'll tell you the marketing is definitely
a sore spot for me because it's so hard to know when something is successful in that
realm and for something like the products that I make it's not like I'm selling shoes
where you see the shoes and you're like I want those shoes and you immediately buy it
I'm making a tool for developers so they might be other developers might be working on a
site and they might come across the product because it gets retweeted for for something
like that but they might not be working on the site that needs it at that time so it's
it's hard for me to track these things and my sweet spot is working with code and doing
design so you know I'm always like reluctant to do marketing things because I don't see
the immediate results but I've been trying to a bunch of different things and it's really
what what are the things that appeal to me and some of the basic stuff words like I never
did a email campaign before I started working on metaphysy full-time so I was like one of
the first things I did was like alright I'm coming out with a new major version and I'm
going to be putting together an email list of all my previous customers like I hadn't
thought of that at the time or I I just hadn't put the time into it how much how big is your
mailing list by the way it's over 10,000 previous customers right now do you find that it really
helps you and like getting the word out about new products or kind of emails do you send
to your mailing list well you know this is one of these things where it's like there's
part of me that wants to be a marketer and grow the business and the other part of me
wants to be like a human being and like not be when I get emails you know it's always
like oh it's you know but every now and then there's a there's a product or service I really
love that I get the email and I appreciate so hopefully I try to position metaphysy like
like something like that like people appreciate it so something like panic you know who makes
Mac apps they had really great emails so I've tried to copy off of their stuff and is this
successful yeah it definitely brings in previous customers there's it's so fulfilling to see
when I when I send out one of those emails there's a cohort that will immediately buy
it and it's just like I mean those those are my people right there you know before doing
the email I didn't really know that that existed yeah that's like your tribe like the people
who will follow you and buy anything that you make because they love what you do yeah
you know but it's like how do they get to that point you know is do they even need to
see this email or they already follow me another you know there's all these questions out there
well you know I I responded to your email to ask you to come on the podcast because I think you
launched the new version of infinite scroll and I was like holy shit I should get Dave on the
podcast metaphysy is so awesome and you know I don't think I would have I would have thought
about it without the email so there's a limited is one data point for you that's great to hear
and it's it's always like so murky what what works and what because like for all I know I'm my emails
now going to spam you know like am I doing too much spammy things and now I'm preventing from
actually seeing people but hey I got got this gig so I'll take it what other what other marketing
tactics have you tried over the years and what are some things that have worked or that have not
worked um last year I tried doing a series of kind of like video recording I just did it over
Twitter so at the time you can only post 30 seconds to Twitter so I was like it was really
short I was like I'm working on this feature I closed out these issues and I made this much
money this week see you next week really fast and the response to that was interesting because
there's a lot of people like hey you know I don't know why but I've listened to your video like once
a week you know it's like even people like like my my brother-in-law you know who doesn't you know
work in tech whatsoever he's like you know it's just nice to see and there was also something
compelling about putting a human face to things more wasn't just like a website when you think of
metaphysic was actually Dave de Sandro behind it but you know did that get me any new customers
maybe I also tried some kind of what I did is a campaign for code pens to which is a site that
you can make website demos on so I got a bunch of demo people in that scene to make things with
isotope and packery and my products and hopefully get that community excited or at least that
community know about it because then I'm leveraging those demo people they have their own you know
followers around them and hopefully they can spread out the word that they know I felt like
that was a kind of interesting way to to get different people to see it and then another thing
I did was try Twitter promoted tweets which is you know I'm like a big Twitter user but I also feel
it's a you know you're kind of like blinded when you're like working in your own home that's not a
phrase but like it's so close to me that's like all I can see sometimes so and I've had like some
some good tweets that get lots of retweets and things like that so that's kind of how I judge
if it's done well because again I don't know if people see that tweet and they eventually come
back to actually buy something but there was just like a more of a general awareness so those are
the things I've tried so far and then the other thing was was something completely new which was
last year I did this completely different project called logo pizza where I was so tired of working
on code that I made I was like let me work on logos because you know it's like that was way
more enticing was like the new shiny thing for me to chase at the time was like no more code and
so I made these logos and I was this kind of gimmicky site that had the price went up with
each logo purchased and that was like when I came out that got a lot of traction on Hacker News and
you know via tweets and stuff like that and that was helped promote the brand and also brought in
all these different logo clients so you explain the like the gimmick you talked about with the
pricing yeah so the way it worked it was like there's 50 logos the original price for any
logo was like $100 and then as soon as one person purchases a logo the price increases by $20 so
like then it's like $120 for the next logo then it's $140 so the idea behind that is that like
if you're gonna sit on your butt like the price is gonna go up in addition to like the logo you
want might not be available because once it's purchased that person owns it so with this it
was this kind of gimmick in addition to just logos what was the point of it was it was the
gimmick to do you think it would you know make it more interesting to people or more likely to
succeed in Hacker News or was there another reason behind it I had this inkling that went
like it was kind of like a non-conventional thing I've seen good results from these kind of and I
don't even know how I don't even know what I can put you but I could just think like the things
that like I share the things that I see what like on my Twitter feed it's not just like you know
company releases new product it's like a special kind of one-time kind of thing right and so I
guess that's what I was I was trying to go after and also I got this idea from another kind of
promotional website where it was like I wear your shirt comm or is the same thing was like this guy
who wore a t-shirt and he would take you know pictures with it and so it'd be a post on Instagram
and so you would pay this guy $20 for January 1st now on January 2nd it was $40 and by the end of
the year he made you know like six figures just on wearing shirts right and it was like it was one
of these things like I should have thought of that so I you know I just I just reused it that exact
concept and I felt like it produced the same results like people are like like this is you
know like people people bought these logos I had some people there's like they just wanted the
logo you know they didn't even have a project for it they're just like let me get it it triggered
some like short response in their head so it's like the price is gonna go up you know they gotta
buy now otherwise the logos are gonna be hundreds of dollars yeah and also like logos are kind of
like ever-present but they're kind of hard to find you know if you have to work with a logo designer
that costs more money and if you go to like something that's like you know logos for sale
I feel it's like you don't get as a good a product so I was kind of somewhere in between there where
I was like you know you pay more money but you might be feeling better about it because I don't
know it's like a nicely designed site or something like that you know like I had a particular skill
set there that I could exploit so not only did you have an interesting pricing model for logo pizza
with the price increases every time somebody buys a logo but you've also got you know all of your
other projects have I would say you know pretty abnormal pricing models at least compared to a lot
of the other people that I've interviewed where you're selling open source software anybody can
just come through and basically download what you've what you've made and never pay you a dime
but you've got a license that says hey if you're gonna use this for commercial reasons then you
know you need to pay me $20 or $30 or however much your different libraries cost how does that work
exactly and how do you ensure that people are paying who are supposed to be paying? Whoo boy
licensing has been it's another like sore spot for me because it's legal stuff and it's like who
understands it so when I first started out it was just like as you said it was kind of like a
stipulation where if you use this for commercial reasons you need to need to pay for it and then
eventually that was problematic because there was some people that you know actually knew
legalese and said like you're not using the right license here and so you know I tried different
things and eventually where I ended up now is that the actual terms of the license is that the
product is open source and it's also licensed under GPL and one of the stipulations of GPL is
that if you use this publicly you have to in turn open source your project so if you do not want to
use this project or open source your project you need to pay for this license which will allow you
to use the metaphysied product under closed source and the reason why I got there is because of
things like WordPress which needs you know GPL is like a big thing in WordPress and I was just
kind of like that's it's been working so far and so I actually worked the lawyer to develop that but
as you mentioned it's front-end software so all this stuff is readily available and the things
that I'm competing against are free you know like there's a part of me that's like should I be
making more money or is it miraculous that I'm making money at all because somebody can be like
I don't want to pay this but I think the way I went about it was like try to make it official
work with the lawyer so at least if somebody does check it it looks legit and metaphysies
whole business has been built around the appearance of being legit legit I mean that it actually is
legit but it's like it it feeds back on one another yeah I mean you definitely have the
appearance and I think isotope was one of the very first purchases that I made when starting
Andy hackers I was like I'm gonna have a grid I've seen this cool animation effect somewhere let me
just google and try to find out where that came from and took me to metaphysy and I checked your
licensing page and I was like I just bought it you know it was like it's super cheap too how do
you decide on pricing because I think that's a thing a lot of people struggle with where the
common advice you hear from every angle is charge more but psychologically it's so easy to come up
with reasons why you can't charge more while you shouldn't charge more especially when like you
said all of your competitors are basically free yeah and this is another thing too where it's like
I have a personal feeling about how to do pricing because I'm a front-end developer and it comes
from a community of free and open opportunity and the stuff I'm competing against is is also free
so the way the metaphysy pricing works is that it's per developer and it's a one-time purchase
and it is tied to the major version so if you need it if there's a big version upgrade you'll
need to make a new purchase however it's not tied it's not annual reoccurrence and the current
pricing scheme is that it's $25 for a single individual it's like a hundred and ten bucks
for up to eight people and it's $3.20 for everybody in your organization and I haven't played around
too much with that over the years you know I the way it's like worked out is that between those
three tiers I'm kind of making the same amount of money for the for an individual product amongst
those three so I think like that seems like a good thing that it's not like lopsided in any way like
that I'm sure I might be able to make more money if it was reoccurring but there's a there's a part
of me that just hates that model like I hate paying for Photoshop month after month and I
kind of see the updates you know it doesn't feel like I'm getting that much and it's also there
there's just something weird about paying for open source software in general so there's part
of me that's like feels icky about it even though it is like my my income I do it so I can feel good
about it too that's that's kind of the pricing model it's not it hasn't been a be tested your
entire situation is pretty cool because you're basically just doing whatever it is that you want
like you're working on on projects that are fun for you to work on and when they stop being fun
you just work on a different thing like like logo pizza and you're charging the amount of money
that feels right for you and it's all working out to the point where like you can still you
know sustain basically a developer salary on your own which is like pretty much living the dream
Dave how's your life changed since you since you quit Twitter and started working on metaphysics on
your own I mean have you found that you know it's it's lived up to your expectations of what it's
like to be kind of like the solo bootstrapper or you know do you have you found you have a lot more
free time what is what is the upside of this new lifestyle I mean at the time it was just so
liberating I was working you know at Twitter and being a part of the big company it's hard to see
the fruits of your labor manifested at with the company at large you know because it has to go
through multiple rounds of revisions and it has to work with the larger experience and I was really
feeling pressed down against that pressure at the time I left Twitter and so the first couple months
working for metaphysy full-time it felt just so enthralling to work on something that I knew was
gonna see the light of day that was all my work and even if this is successful or not like I could
feel that I did something with that and so that was just amazing that's one of like the highlights
of my career at that time you know just the fact I didn't have to deal with meetings like oh my gosh
it was like you know I'm gonna go see a movie or I'm gonna go play at the arcade for like a day
because you know what if I was at another company this time would be stuck in meetings or responding
to emails yeah it would just be wasted and I I feel the same way I think like the just the freedom
and like the self-determination that comes with being self-employed and being able to work whenever
you want take care of chores whenever you want just take a day off or a week off whenever you
want is awesome do you still feel kind of the same way that you did right after you quit I mean the
initial highest kind of smoothed out a little bit but recently the big thing was that you know my
son was born six months ago and so I was able to you know set my own hours and say I'm gonna be
taking paternity leave and focusing on my wife and my son for four months it ended up being you
know I didn't really have a hard deadline there but I was able to do that and you know that's a
whole big life experience that I'm very thankful to have and that was able to be that that occurred
because of metaphysic and working for myself and there's other things that you know like moving
out of New York and buying a house it's like how do people do this when they work full-time you
know it's like how do they even like like sign all the papers and stuff like that you know I was
working for myself I could scan in stuff it's just like so much paperwork people just don't read
stuff they just sign it well I'm even just like if you just need to scan something it's like oh my
gosh you gotta print it out scan it takes a lot of time so it's been I absolutely appreciate it and
I feel like so lucky to be able to do these things but at the same time you know it does come with
its own responsibilities right now metaphysy it's having a down year that might be because I took
paternity leave or might just because you know other market forces or something like that and
so now there's this question hanging over me like what do we do to get it back to where it was a
year or two ago or is this how does metaphysy change or is it still gonna be a full-time thing
come a year later so it does come at its own cost yeah I was actually a perfect segue because I
wanted to end by talking about kind of how things have changed and dealing with competition and
and really like your long-term outlook because you know obviously one of the upsides to having a job
I mean you can be fired at any time but like there is such a thing as you know job security and you
could be reasonably certain that if you have a job that you will probably be employed you know
and definitely into the future whereas when you branch out on your own nothing's guaranteed right
your business can decline your marketing efforts can fail your new products might not take off
etc so how do you think about the future and what are your plans to I guess keep up this lifestyle
and keep metaphysy successful plans for the future well each year it's been get to the end of the
year you know now that I've been doing it full time for two and a half years I'm able to see
like what was I what have I been able to do it with that time so things like logo pizza were a big
time investment but I felt like a paid-off so for me right now like the biggest thing was getting a
new product out the door which was infinite scroll which brought us to this conversation now it's
like can can I build the business and then also there's these a kind of bigger goals which would
be like can I hire somebody else can I grow the business to that much because I think what
metaphys is doing is that you know bringing money into a front-end developer just on my front-end
code is very special and I wish more developers would do it so you know it's kind of like a lofty
touchy feely kind of goal but it would be great to distribute this business model kind of like in
the open source spirit and have other people do this sort of thing and I have seen some other
people try it like that but you know to the point where metaphysics it's still just me which is you
know one of the things I've always kind of felt reluctant about where it's like I haven't been
able to grow it past me I'd love to be able to hire somebody else so it's one year at a time and
right now I'm just thinking about getting that sales back up to be honest yeah a friend of mine
was talking to me and he said that he really wanted to start something but he felt like he
was kind of late to the party like he wish he had started an online business or a side project five
years ago but he dragged his feet and now he feels like it's too late because seems like everybody's
doing it you know there's so much written about it and you know I personally think that it's not
true and it's still early days and that ten years from now there'll be a lot more people doing what
you're doing and what a lot of other people are doing than there are now but what would you say
to someone in that position who's who's considering starting a side project who's considering
starting an online business but it's kind of on the fence about it I said the first thing to do
is start you know just deal do it like any other thing make a demo and do it for you and see where
things goes you know it's like as you in my experience as you get better by doing something
over and over but you also see how you personally respond to it and so this is you know when I
ever tried some new stuff where it's like freelancing or working for like different clients or things
like that like that was kind of new for me a couple years ago but at least I at least tried it and I
also didn't feel that it had to be the next big thing so start and also keep it small it's okay
if things don't work out cuz everything I did worked out all right well thanks so much Dave
I think I've had a really good time talking to you yeah thank you for let me share my story where
can people go online to here to find out more about you and about metaphysy my sights are
dessandro.com d-e-s-a-n-d-r-o and metaphysy.co-m-e-t-a-f-i-z-z-y and what's your Twitter I'm gonna go
follow you right now my Twitter handle is dessandro and metaphysy's handle metaphysyco all right take
it easy Dave thank you if you enjoyed listening to this conversation and you're looking for a
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