What's up, everyone?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
More people than ever are building cool stuff online and changing their lives in the process.
And on this show, I talked to these IndieHackers to learn about the ideas, the opportunities
and the trends that they're taking advantage of, so the rest of us can do the same.
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In today's episode, we're going to talk about how IndieHackers are making a living off the
back of paid content.
Obviously, the big winner in 2020 when it comes to content was paid newsletters.
Seems like everybody's got one and a lot of them are doing very well.
So check out episode number 161 with Sam Parr.
I talked to him about the Hustle Trends, a paid newsletter he started that's part of
his newsletter company that was recently acquired for something like $27 million.
Episode 164 Scott Keyes of Scott's Cheap Flights, who's somehow making it through the pandemic
and the lower travel with his paid newsletter.
And Drew Riley in episode 173, who started up a newsletter to help IndieHackers capitalize
on trends and is doing pretty well for himself as well.
And here with me to discuss this is Jarosla Bagri, he's part of the IndieHackers Podcast
Network.
Jar, you got your own podcast and paid community, it's called Newsletter Crew.
Welcome to the show.
Hey, Kirtland.
Thank you for having me.
Yeah, thanks for joining.
So we're going to talk about how people are making a living by writing online, but I think
this is more than just about writing.
I think other IndieHackers are also sort of profiting from this trend, where they're making
apps and tools that cater to the newsletter ecosystem.
So this is kind of why I think it's important to talk about, it's kind of why I keep bringing
people on the show over and over again, because whenever you see people finding some new way
to make money, to chart a new path, create a new career, it creates pretty much an entire
ecosystem where you don't have to be, you know, the person writing the newsletter, you
could be building a platform that they're going to write on, you could be building tools
to help them write better, you could be putting out books and products to help them learn
how to write better, or you could start your own newsletter.
I wonder what your thoughts are on this.
You talked to way more newsletter authors than I ever have.
Do you think that this is just an opportunity for writers, or do you think the real opportunity
is for people creating tools and platforms and building software for these writers?
Yeah, no, that's definitely a good question.
And, you know, I feel like every IndieHacker should be paying attention to this trend.
And I don't even want to call it a trend, because I think it's here to stay.
But I mean, there's tons of people that are writing on this trend as well, like, you know,
Janelle from NewsletterOS, we got, I forget his name, Jacob Greenfield from NewsletterSpy.
We got ConvertKit, which is also like an indie, you know, kind of homegrown IndieHacker
product.
And then we got the big kind of grill in the room, like Substack, you know, Ghost.
But you know, there's tons of other examples as well, like, you know, actual IndieHackers,
you know, breaking into the space and, you know, making a decent living off of it.
Tell me about some of these.
What's a NewsletterSpy?
NewsletterSpy, yeah.
So, NewsletterSpy is, you know, it's actually an info product.
All it is is a landing page, an Airtable, and then basically it's behind a paywall.
So what NewsletterSpy is, is essentially just a database full of 20,000 Substack newsletters.
And you know, you get the name, you get the URL, you get the tagline, you know, you get
the launch date, you get the subscriber options, you get the pricing options.
So it basically just provides, you know, it basically just data as a service behind a
paywall.
I found it on newsletterspy.io.
You're right.
I mean, it literally is just someone went into Airtable and made a gigantic table of
Substack newsletters.
It says they have 20,000 Substack newsletters and the use cases are, you can use this to
discover amazing newsletters, or you can analyze competitors, or you can identify abandoned
newsletters that you can possibly acquire cheaply if you're an indie hacker.
And whoever's behind this, they're just selling this access to this table for 15 bucks.
That's it.
It's like a one-time fee, get access, 15 bucks on Gumroad.
Super simple.
Yeah.
And I think the first, when he launched on Product Hunt, he made like, I think 2K in the
first day.
So I mean, it's really popular.
You know, wanting to pay for this type of information.
And it's great.
I love it.
I don't know how much he's making right now.
But it's, you know, it's definitely a great product.
And you know, there's tons of other options, you know, other, I guess, examples as well,
if you have, you know, if you want to make it into those.
Yeah, let's talk about some of the bigger players.
So Substack obviously needs no introduction.
It's like, probably the platform that made paid newsletters sort of take off in the last
couple years.
It just makes it super easy to basically start a newsletter, build an audience and charge
them for access to some of your issues.
But then we've got some of the lesser known players that I think people have been sleeping
on a little bit.
So there's ConvertKit.
There's Ghost.
Ghost has been around forever.
It's a blogging platform.
What are your thoughts on Ghost and how their paid newsletter subscriptions work?
Oh, man.
Yeah.
So and actually, I use Ghost for newsletter crew.
So it's not just a blogging platform.
It's not just an email platform.
It's actually also like a membership platform.
And that's kind of the core feature that I use it for.
And man, I love it, dude.
I think this is the thing that's going to kill, well, maybe not kill WordPress.
But like, I mean, why not use something that, you know, they don't charge, you know, like
a monthly percentage, like, you know, Memberful takes 5% or maybe 10% of your revenue per
month.
Same with Substack, right?
10% of your revenue.
It's insane.
Which is super unique, because almost every other tool basically charges you more and
more money, the more money you make from your subscribers.
Like if you have a Substack newsletter, and you're making $50,000 a month in your subs,
like you're paying Substack, what, 10%?
Yeah, 5k, man.
Plus right fees.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So you're paying like, you know, 13% of your revenue.
And like, what are you really paying for?
Like, what does Substack give you that Ghost doesn't give you?
I guess it's like a cooler brand, you know, maybe it's a little bit easier to set up.
Why doesn't everybody just use Ghost instead of Substack?
Honestly, I'm not exactly sure.
Maybe it's just the marketing that Substack is doing.
I mean, Ghost has been getting popularity this last year from what I've been, you know,
and I've been talking to some of the team members there, and it's gaining popularity.
But I honestly don't know.
I mean, you don't even, it's not even that much more complicated than, you know, Substack.
You can host with them if that makes sense for $29 a year.
So it's like, no, they do all the tech for you, if that makes sense.
So it's like, all you do is you have to go in, you write your newsletter, you send it
out, and that's it.
So honestly, I'm not exactly sure.
I'm kind of baffled why, you know, Ghost isn't more popular than Substack at this moment,
because, you know, economics makes sense.
Well, Ghost is doing pretty well as a platform, regardless.
So Ghost itself is an indie hacker company.
It started by John O'Nolan, who's been on the show twice.
I need to have him on again and catch up with him, but they're doing millions in revenue.
As you alluded to earlier, they kind of started off as a WordPress killer.
So John was actually like part of the team developing WordPress, and he got a little
flustered and said that, you know, this is kind of crappy.
It's super bloated.
I saw a good meme on Twitter the other day where like WordPress is one of the only ecosystems
where every developer in it agrees that it's crappy.
There are no developer arguments, they all agree like this is shit.
And Ghost is just a much cleaner, better, it's like WordPress for the modern age.
And of course, now it's much more than WordPress, they actually help you build paid subscriptions,
paid newsletters, paid blogs.
So Ghost is obviously a very mature indie hacker company, ConvertKit is another very
mature indie hacker company started by Nathan Barry.
And they've recently moved into the paid newsletter space.
But you're obviously talking to a lot of people on your podcast about newsletters, Jaro.
Who are some like fledgling indie hackers who are building software and are profiting
from this trend towards paid newsletters?
For sure.
And one really good example is Joshua Enderton, he has a product, it's making 5K MRR, a solo
indie hacker, it's called Obscribe.
It's also in the newsletter space.
And it actually started as a Medium form.
So basically, you have your blog on Medium, at the bottom you put in your Obscribe form
to actually help people sign up.
And yeah, and he was doing that, but as time went on, Medium just started to suck and suck
more and people just started leaving it.
So he kind of saw that trend of Medium sucking, and then he kind of saw the trend of newsletters,
and he kind of pivoted towards that.
And yeah, now Obscribe is a email marketing tool, it's really simple.
Yeah, so all you do is collect subscribers, send marketing emails, email sequences, there's
no bloat.
Like I said, it's just really simple, and he did it solo.
Yeah, I'm checking his website out right now, it's Obscribe.net.
So it says just email marketing, that's all they do, that's it, no bloat.
You can send marketing emails, you can send email sequences, so they're basically competing
with something like a HubSpot, or a MailChimp, or a ConvertKit.
And it's pretty crazy that one person does this, typically you would expect to have the
infrastructure to send marketing emails, like you would need a whole team of people working
on something like this around the clock.
But there's so many tools and platforms out there that you can build on that it's actually
like not that hard to build a service like this.
So at IndieHackers, I'm building my own kind of subset clone.
And I'm building it using Postmark, which is just kind of a series of APIs that send
emails for you.
Like Postmark is badass, their APIs are amazing, the documentation is amazing, it's like really
easy to use that.
And so maybe 10 years ago, I would need like a team of 100 people to build something like
this, but today, you can just do it by yourself, have your own sort of one person shop building
this and then compete with like the bigger email marketing players like without that
much hassle, really.
Yeah, I totally agree.
And also another example is button down by Justin Duke.
He's also an IndieHacker, solo IndieHacker, also making 5K MRR on his product, which is
just a really simple email marketing tool.
And you know, the way he started is, you know, like every IndieHacker had a newsletter and
realized that he could do it better.
And he also noticed that you couldn't actually write newsletters with markdown.
So that's kind of one of the differentiating and unique features of button down versus
like Substag.
And yeah, so he kind of found his niche in there and he works at Stripe and he does this
on the side.
So yeah, and that's really cool.
So really minimal as well, just sends newsletters.
I mean, that's all it does.
Yeah, he's also got another side project called Spoonbill, I think it's spoonbill.io.
And it basically will track changes to people's Twitter bios and notify you when they update
their bio.
So a few months back, my buddy Julian, he was growing his Twitter account to like a
massive size.
And he tweeted some advice.
He's like, hey, if you really want to get more Twitter followers, you need to restructure
your bio so that it tells people what you tweet about so they know whether or not they
should follow you.
And everybody started changing their bio.
And then everybody who signed up for Spoonbill started getting a ton of notifications like
why is everybody changing their Twitter bio?
Like what happened?
And Julian's tweet was kind of the cause of that.
But it's pretty cool.
This guy works at Stripe.
He's got, you know, he's making five grand a month, an extra side income basically on
top of his normal salary just with these side projects.
And let's check out his other one, Button Down.
Never been to his website.
So it's www.buttondown.email.
And the easiest way to run and write your newsletter.
So it's like a super simple sub-stack built around, like you said, markdown.
And what I love about this is people think that they can't start companies because competition
already exists.
They think, okay, I can't start, you know, a sub-stack competitor because sub-stack's
already big.
But like sub-stack itself doesn't seem to have that many defensive moats around it.
Like it's not that hard to build something that allows people to send emails.
And so if you have really strong opinions about like how email should be sent, if you
think markdown is the best, if you think every email should be under 500 words, if you only
want to focus on emails sent by, you know, churches to their congregations or emails
sent by tech companies to their employees or something, like you could probably build
a highly opinionated email marketing platform and carve out some niche.
And there's going to be some like percentage of people for whom like that's much better
than a very generic sub-stack or even ConvertKit or Ghost.
Yeah, for sure.
And, you know, we already have two examples of, you know, people hitting a five-camera
RR with a really niche email newslettering platform.
So I mean, it's possible and then, you know, the market's so big, I mean, there's even
more room for, you know, more of these products that solve one really specific, you know,
use case within the email newsletter space.
So yeah, 100% agree.
Let's talk about your story.
I alluded to it earlier, but you run the newsletter crew podcast and blog and paid community.
And you've interviewed many dozens of people who are running profitable newsletters.
So you've basically learned a ton, and you kind of share what you've learned on your
podcast.
How'd you get into this?
You know, what was your motivation?
What's your sort of path to success as an indie hacker?
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
And it's, you know, it's kind of a long story, but I'll try to, you know, summarize it pretty
well.
Yeah, I started an indie hacking about a year ago, I found any hackers and, you know, I'm
really big into multiple streams of income, right?
So I got some real estate, I got stock dividend portfolio, and I'm just trying to build other
streams of income, like SaaS, SaaS was one big income stream that I really want to build
and still am building.
So after, you know, looking at browsing indie hackers, kind of trolling and not really trolling,
but you know, just creeping indie hackers for months and months, I started noticing
this, you know, newsletter trend, right?
And people are actually making money off of newsletters.
I was like, okay, that's pretty cool.
Why not start my own newsletter?
When was this?
When was this last year?
This was at the beginning of 2020.
So like, I think from February, January, February, March timeframe, I was like, okay, I think
I really want to do, you know, like start a newsletter, a paid newsletter or, you know,
just free newsletter, but I definitely want to have a newsletter as part of like one project
that makes me some income, right?
You know, it's possible.
So I was like, all right, I'm going to, I'm going to do this, right?
I'm going to, this is going to be my first project that as an indie hacker, and I'm going
to make, you know, my goal is just to make 500 MRR per month on this newsletter.
You know, I started learning about it and there's tons of resources online right now.
I mean, you got blogs, you got podcasts, I mean, you got podcast episodes.
There was actually, there wasn't any courses back then now, now there is, but, um, I was
just thinking, all right, let's kind of hop in.
I started reading different, you know, different resources.
I listened to all the podcasts that were kind of one offs episodes, right?
So kind of like your, uh, any hackers podcast with Sampar, but I noticed there wasn't a
full podcast that's just dedicated to this one discipline, right?
Um, and that's kind of how I learned I, you know, when I go to the grocery store, when
I drive to work, I pop on a podcast.
I like to learn passively.
So I just searched newsletter in, uh, Apple podcasts and literally got nothing.
There's a podcast about a newsletter, but all they do is just read their newsletter,
right?
So that, that's like the top hit was, was that, so it's like read their own newsletter
on the podcast.
Exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
So that's what they do is basically, I think it's called like the Salvation Army newsletter,
which is like, I don't know, I think they have a newsletter and they just read it as
a podcast.
I'm not exactly sure.
It definitely wasn't what I was looking for.
So I was like, you know, why not just create this?
You know, what I wanted to do was actually interview, uh, newsletter creators myself
to learn and why not just bundle it up, record, edit, and then publish it for everyone else
to learn about.
So that's kind of what I did.
And that's kind of how a newsletter crew started is, is a podcast.
So this is like the Andy hackers playbook, right?
You're trying to, you're trying to learn something specifically something that's really, you
know, lucrative or valuable, like something that like could be a lifestyle for you.
In your case, you wanted to make 500 bucks a month from your own newsletter.
When you try to learn about it, you realize that, Hey, there's very few resources.
The way that you like to learn about it, isn't there.
And then you just go create that resource yourself.
Cause there's probably other people like you who want to listen to a podcast that helps
them get better at writing a paid newsletter.
So it's literally exactly what I did with any hackers.
And I think this playbook works for pretty much any like new industry, new trend.
I see people getting big on OnlyFans or on TikTok, et cetera, like there probably should
be newsletters and courses and blogs and communities around like getting better at these things
because people are motivated when they realize they can make a living doing these new different
things.
So in your case, that was actually starting the newsletter crew podcast.
Yep, yep, exactly.
Yep.
And that's how it started as a podcast.
And then slowly I started adding more and more onto it.
And just kind of by randomness, I stumbled upon after my first product launch, one guy
who ran indie mailer, indiemailer.com, that was a community for newsletter creators.
Apparently, you know, he saw how popular my product and launch was, which is also a paid
community, a completely different product.
And he was like, hey, man, I don't have time to actually run this anymore.
And I don't really have the motivation as well.
But it looks like you're running a pretty interesting paid community.
And obviously, it's popular because you got a product of the day.
Why not just buy this off me?
And I was like, yeah, dude, I'll totally buy this off you.
And I actually got it for 100 bucks, so.
100 bucks?
Yeah, dude.
It was...
How big was this community?
It wasn't that big.
I mean, there was about 130 people when I acquired it.
So all paid.
ARR was only like 1.5K or something like that.
But it was really inactive, man.
When I went into it after purchasing it, I was like, dude, this is pretty dead, actually.
My understanding or my looking into the future was like 80% of these people are going to
churn when the year comes around, right?
Because it was the yearly membership.
And actually, he wanted to give it to me for free, but I was like, I can't just take this
for free, man.
Let's just...
Okay.
Let's just do like 100 bucks to like...
Right.
I don't know.
Just to solidify the sale, right?
And he's like, all right, let's do it.
So I started to do like 10X and acquired it, integrated it into a newsletter crew, and
then started using the podcast.
The audience that I'm building up with this podcast actually funnel more members into,
well, Indie Mailer, which is now like just newsletter crew membership, right?
Community.
So I use the podcast to funnel members in, and the community is thriving.
It's like 10X.
Well, the growth has like 3X, but it's like 10X more active, if that makes sense.
People are actually using it compared to like a year ago.
So yeah, it was really, really interesting.
And then after that, I added a blog onto it because, you know, why not?
And then from there, I started getting sponsors for it, and then now I'm offering package
deals for like the full sponsorships you get, you know, you get ads in the newsletter, you
get ads on the podcast, you get ads on the website.
So that's a completely different revenue stream that I'm building with newsletter crew alongside
the actual membership portion of it, so...
How much does it cost somebody to join your paid community and be a member?
Yeah, so I actually, you know, when I first started, when I first acquired it for Indie
Mailer, it was $19 a year, then I started, you know, increasing the price, so it was
$29 a year, and then it was $39, and then I actually interviewed Sam Parr on the podcast
just a few weeks ago, and he's like, man, dude, you're undercharging like tremendously.
I'm like, really?
Like I'm already charging 39 bucks, why would anyone want to pay more?
You should be...
Right, and that's my thought, right?
And she was like, yeah, man, you should charge $2.99.
And I'm like, well, actually, I asked him like, okay, how much do you think I should
charge?
And he's like, $2.99.
And I'm like, dude, there's no way no one's going to pay $2.99.
Like I'm not Sam Parr, right?
Like I can't do trends, you know, because you know, trends.co is $2.99 for you.
Like I'm not Sam, I can't do what Sam is doing.
Sam is like, that's not really my audience, if that makes sense.
I tried $2.99 for a few days, got, you know, like no one, no sales at all.
And usually I get about one sale a day, right?
So I did end up doubling prices to $59 per year.
And that's kind of what it's at right now.
But I might increase it, I might not, I don't know, it's, memberships are really hard, if
that makes sense.
It's actually figure out the pricing.
But I hear you doing like the stereotypical Indie Hacker thing, like talking yourself
out of why you can't charge, why you can't charge enough, you know, this is why Sam could
charge and I can't, but like, if there's a case to be made, you could charge at least
100 bucks.
And then you just really have to demonstrate the value.
But the good thing about charging more is it's a good forcing function for you to build
things of value.
Like if you think, okay, people won't pay 100 bucks for my, a month for my community,
because it doesn't have X, Y and Z, well now you know exactly what you need to build to
get them to pay 100 bucks for your community, you know, X, Y and Z.
And I think if you charge less, you're a little bit less motivated to build those things that
are super valuable, or ask people like what would get them to pay more.
So I like that Sam sort of ribbed you and tried to get you to pay more.
Sounds exactly like what he would do.
And I agree with him.
I think you should.
It's not even per month, it's per year, right?
So it's, you know, it's per year.
It's like, oh, for sure then.
Yeah.
100%.
100% go higher than 60 bucks.
But like, that's the thing.
It's like, I don't know if, you know, a newsletter crew, yeah, it's a business in and of itself
that's growing.
But you know, the main reason why I started all of this kind of going back to my SaaS,
you know, like that I actually want to build a SaaS is I want to build a distribution channel
for that SaaS in the newsletter space, right?
So I'm not sure how much time, you know, it's a balance.
How much time do I actually want to put into building newsletter crew and actually increasing
the revenue and you know, awesome features and content versus building an actual audience
distribution channel for, you know, like SaaS and building, right?
So yeah, it's hard, right?
I like breaking it into steps.
Maybe one day your goal is you want to have a super profitable SaaS company that caters
towards newsletter authors.
But you know, day one, like you start your podcast and you build the audience or your
podcast.
And then like once that starts getting pretty big, you funnel them into your community and
you work on your community and like, you know, maybe you get your community and your podcast
at the point where you can quit your job.
And like, that's your only goal.
And then once you get that, well, you now have a bunch more free time to work on like
your SaaS or growing your audience, etc, etc.
And so like, one step leads to the next step leads to the next step, rather than sort of
the typical ending hack or trap of like trying to do everything all at once, all at the same
time where it's really hard.
And you know, by the way, you're still working your full time job, and you still got a bunch
of other responsibilities.
And there's no time in the day.
Yeah, dude, I totally agree.
And that's actually why I sold off a few other products I was building earlier in the year,
just because I like literally had no time.
I spent 25 hours a week, I got a baby, you know, he's eight months old, I got a full
time job, I got a wife, house that I got to tend to.
Yeah, you got all the stuff.
Dude, that's the exact I was like, I can't do this.
So I just started cutting down things and, you know, just trying to actually I'm outsourcing
a bunch of stuff now, because newsletter crews making around roughly like if you count sponsorships
plus memberships around 2k MRR right now, it's actually not not too bad, right?
Not enough to quit my job, but enough to actually start outsourcing people because like, I literally
just don't have any time to do any anything anymore.
What's your quit point?
How much money do you need to make every month before you quit?
I hop back and forth every day is like, if it's a bad day at work, I'm like, dude, 3k
and I'm done.
Like, but if it's a good day, I'm like, all right, 10k, I think 10k should be like fine.
If I had 10k, like 5k is like that break even point, like if I can do 5k, you know, I live
in Minneapolis, 5k is like you can get far at 5k.
So that's kind of the break even point.
But like, if I can do 10k, like I'm quitting the next day, man.
Well, cool, man.
I'm cheering for you.
And I think you'll get there.
You're already almost halfway.
Let's jump into some of these stories that you've heard about through running your podcast.
Who are some newsletter authors and newsletter, any hackers that we should all be looking
up to?
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
So I think everyone knows the browser.
It's probably the most popular and probably long lasting newsletter out there.
It's been here for 10 years, right?
And they got 60k readers, 10k, those are paid subscribers, you know, $5 a month, they're
making 50k a month.
And that's one of the amazing stories I've heard on my podcast is the browser.
Yeah, I hadn't heard about the browser until I heard them on your show.
And I love their longevity, because it kind of proves that newsletters aren't necessarily
a flash in the pan.
You know, like, so I got an email actually a few weeks ago saying like, hey, you know,
this whole newsletter fad, it's just a fad, you should stop interviewing newsletter creators
on the podcast, like nobody's going to be subscribed to this stuff come 2021 2022.
And it's not true.
People have been subscribing to it for years, people will pay for value, no matter how you
deliver it to them.
The fact that there's lots of competition doesn't really matter.
So I like the fact that the browser exemplifies that I don't know their story, I don't remember
it.
So what's the story behind the browser?
Yeah, so basically, Robert, who's the founder, yeah, 10 years ago, I think it was like 2008
or something like that.
He used to work at, you know, Financial Times, The Economist, he was kind of like the head
editorial person there.
And he started noticing that like, you know, they're moving all towards the digital content,
right?
Like newsletters, they got blogs, you know, and he's pretty much thinking like, all right,
well, if you know, some of these big institutions are actually, you know, going digital, maybe
this is the actual trend that's going to be around for, you know, forever.
And he took the gamble.
So he quit The Economist.
But furthermore, he also started noticing that there's too much content on the internet,
right?
So and this was 10 years ago, you know, imagine how much content there is now.
So he's thinking that there's, you know, the internet needs more of a curator versus a,
you know, creator, if that makes sense.
So that's all he does is, you know, that's kind of how the browser started is, you know,
he starts curating newsletters, or sorry, he creates blog posts and articles on the internet
daily.
So he picks out the five best articles, sends those as a newsletter and people pay for it.
So yeah, all he does is curate.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
And he doesn't create anything, quote unquote, right?
He's not writing anything new, but all he does is curate and they're making a lot of
money.
I think curation is underrated.
There's just so much information on the internet nowadays.
And it's this weird dichotomy where for some people that makes it easier to find stuff
and learn for some people, it makes it harder to find stuff and learn.
So let's say you're like a prototypical indie hacker, you have a high bias toward action,
you're really good at using the web, really get it sorting through information.
The fact that the internet has so much info on it is great for you, because whatever you
want to learn, like when you're trying to learn newsletters, like you're going to find
every podcast, every course, like you know, the Twitter accounts to follow, you're going
to find it.
And then you're like, literally anyone else.
The fact that there's so much information online, it's just like paralyzing is way too
much for you to sort through.
And so the bigger the internet gets, kind of the more stressful it gets and the harder
it is for you to make a decision and pick what you want to learn from what you want
to read.
So I like sort of the rise of curators, like the browser where they're just saying like,
you know, we're going to do all the hard work.
We're going to go out and like find all the best stuff for you to read.
You don't need to browse Twitter.
You don't need to scroll through a million different sources.
You can just subscribe to us.
And that's what we're going to do.
And this is literally exactly what we do with our newsletter, Indie Hackers.
We're basically trying to give you like kind of the best need to know information as an
Indie Hacker because I spent a lot of time myself like combing through Twitter and following
like the right podcast, etc.
And it's really like low signal.
Like you have to listen to like, you know, 100 hours of podcast audio to get like three
or four hours of good, you know, information as an Indie Hacker about what you should be
capitalizing on.
And the same with reading newsletters and following Twitter accounts.
And so curators are, I think, a little bit underrated.
It's counterintuitive.
The more information that exists online, the less you need middlemen because everything
so democratized, you could just go out and find everything yourself.
But like, actually, the more information there is, the more you actually want there to be
some person who finds it for you.
Yeah, so you know, to go along with your point, yeah, internet needs curators.
But if you're trying to build a newsletter, and you think this is going to be one of those
far a week businesses, it probably isn't.
So Robert spends all day like literally eight hours a day combing through all the content
on the internet to pick out like the 1% of the 1%.
If you want to start a newsletter thinking it's going to, you know, you can work for
you know, one hour a day or one hour a week and make you know, tons of money.
I don't think it's going to be the right path for you if that makes sense.
Well, you're like a super efficient person, right?
Like it actually kind of shocks me that he spends an eight hour workday putting together
this newsletter.
I mean, that probably is super good if he does.
But I look at you, you're super efficient.
I mean, you said you've got a full time job, you've got a family, you've got your community
and newsletter and podcast and other projects you're working on.
Let's say you were Robert, you're running the browser.
Like what would you do to run it more efficiently so you can, you know, ideally curate the best
stories on the web without spending eight hours a day on it?
You know, the big thing is, you know, if you pick a really specific niche, right?
So the browser just curates the best articles on the internet, like the full internet, if
that makes sense.
I mean, just imagine how much content there is coming out every day.
So if you niche down, right?
So if you're just like with indie hackers, right, it's just indie hacker blog posts.
Or if you're just in, you know, like the bootstrapping space or like gardening, you start curating
content for gardeners, it's going to be a lot less time going through the full internet's
content per day than just doing like a specific niche like gardening.
So that's one thing.
And obviously you start building up your RSS feed, right?
So you're not going through and combing through Reddit or indie hackers or hacker news or
wherever content is being pumped out.
That's part of your niche.
If you have it kind of coming to use, you can just kind of, you know, scroll through
RSS feed, pick up maybe the headlines that seem the coolest.
And actually, Robert, what his number one tip is, is that he knows when an article is
good or not based on the first like five seconds of reading the first two sentences, right?
So he'll easily like scrap an article based off the first sentence.
Like if it's not catchy enough or just not good enough, I mean, that's it.
He doesn't read anymore.
I think he reads like literally thousands of articles per day, if that makes sense.
Right.
That's ridiculous.
It's kind of a cool job to have, though.
Like, let's say your goal is you want to be extremely well-read, well-educated, and you're
having trouble doing it.
You could start a business like the browser, and now you're literally forced to read hundreds
of articles a day if you want to just run your business.
So assuming he actually likes doing it, maybe that explains why he spends his full work
day doing nothing but reading.
But I like your tip, you know, you constrain your focus to a specific niche.
You won't have to read nearly as much content, and you could probably get off by spending
much less time on it.
Like I was talking to Nivea Chanta, she's an indie hacker who has a newsletter called
The Soapbox Project.
And it's pretty cool.
It's very mission-driven.
And so her website, you know, it says, if you want to fight climate change but you don't
know where to start, we'll send you free, bite-sized action plans every week.
And literally it takes her, I asked her, like, how much time do you spend on this?
And it's like three to four hours per newsletter, one newsletter a week, super simple.
And the reason it's super simple is because she just has marketed it as being bite-sized.
It's not going to be something that's going to take you two hours to read, like the Hustle
Trends newsletter.
It's going to be real quick, three-minute action plan.
And she gets to spend the rest of her time working on growing her business, finding subscribers,
hosting events, etc.
So I think there's lots of ways to sort of cut down on this massive time investment that
it takes to start one of these.
Yeah, for sure.
And actually to kind of go off that, there's, I don't know if you know Andrew Camphe, he's
kind of a pretty popular guy on indie hackers.
Yeah, he also had an idea kind of like this, like a daily newsletter, just really brief.
We're talking like one paragraph long, you know, summarize one niche topic or like maybe
just send one article per day, you know, that's in your niche, his was influencer marketing,
like, let's say you pick, you know, gardening, like, in this case, I love gardening.
Yeah, you just want an article per day and it just, you know, a daily newsletter, probably
take like 10 minutes or 20 minutes to do.
So yeah, I mean, there's tons of ways you can kind of, you know, skin the cat, right
to write to do a newsletter.
There's no one way to do it, right?
You know, if that makes sense.
So how do you make a newsletter last as long as the browser has?
I mean, they've been around for 10 years, even interviewed quite a few newsletter authors.
Has anybody else lasted this long?
And like, what do you see as like the commonalities and the tricks to make this not something
that you flame out on?
Yeah, so when you start your newsletter, don't think that this is the newsletter you're going
to be writing forever, right?
I just kind of do it like, you know, like a SaaS product, right?
So you, you know, you kind of iterate quickly, start with one idea, maybe do it for a month.
Maybe it's content curation newsletter, you know, after the month, just look back at it.
Did you actually like doing it?
You know, was it a drag to actually do it?
Was it fun to do it?
Could you see yourself doing this for like another month?
Or were you like, man, I can't wait for this month to be finished, right?
Right.
And basically just keep doing that until you find one that's like, you know, that checks
all the boxes that you know, it's fun to do, didn't take too much time, you actually want
to do it.
And that's kind of the main component.
I love that, especially because with content, any sort of content series, whether it's a
blog, a newsletter, a podcast, tweeting, or you're posting on TikTok, or making YouTube
videos, every time you put out a new piece of content, every time you send a newsletter,
you're back to square one.
And it's kind of like a fresh start, you're not locked into anything.
Like if you're coding something, and you build a bunch of features, and then you decide you
want to change directions, like that's super hard, you got to throw away a bunch of code,
you get a fresh start every time you send a newsletter.
So why not, you know, go back to the drawing board if you're not really happy with how
things are going.
It's kind of a parallel actually with a lot of founders do this 12 startups in 12 months
thing, which I've mentioned on the podcast, where they set out for the next year to actually
work on 12 different things.
And they're not gonna work on all 12 at the same time to do one per month.
But usually after about three, four or five months of starting different things, you realize
like how different different projects are, how different they feel.
And you're much more, I think, equipped to, I think, make a good decision about what you
want to run.
What kind of strategy you could possibly do is start a business that you don't like running
run it for several years, even if it's successful, you've now like, created a job that you don't
like.
And the whole point of this is to create a job that you do like, right exactly, like
12 newsletters in 12 months.
I mean, that's, that's exactly another spin on it right there.
So let's move on to another story.
I've got one that I want to share.
This one comes from Sean Puri.
He's the host of the My First Million podcast, love a show.
He's also very transparent on Twitter.
And he started a personal newsletter that has one of the craziest stories I've ever
read.
So he tweeted about this.
Actually, it blew up on viral.
Yeah, I got like 3000 likes and 280 retweets.
So he kind of starts off by talking about how he is running this podcast called My First
Million.
And the podcast has gotten super big.
I think they do about 350,000 downloads a month, which is as big as any hackers has
ever been.
And like, it's the biggest month back when I was doing like two episodes a week.
And basically on the show, like him and Sam will just brainstorm ideas.
But when people hear them brainstorming ideas, I find it hard to sort of take action because,
you know, it's one thing to hear about an idea, I hear about a success story, but it's
another actually see, you know, people who talk about the times that they messed up and
not just the times they succeeded.
And so Sean, we get like all these messages on Twitter.
And people will be like, Hey, man, I love this idea that you showed on the podcast.
But like, you know, how would you actually go about building this, I don't really know
where to start, you know, I'm stuck on this particular step, like what should I do?
And so Sean figured, you know, if people are willing to pay for newsletters, for things
they want really bad, maybe they would pay even more for a newsletter where he showed
them how to execute, instead of just telling them, you know, sort of high level details.
And so his idea ultimately was a paid newsletter that shows you that the day to day of how
to take an idea from $0 to a million dollars in revenue, and instead of like the typical
get rich quick stuff, you know, cliche advice that you see people tweeting, he was going
to actually, you know, kind of envision like this virtual apprenticeship he called it where
you kind of see exactly what he does from day to day, he's going to send you a newsletter
literally every single day of the week, like here's what I did today, to get this idea
from zero a million.
So we had three different projects, the first was, he was going to raise a million dollars
from investors who he didn't know, the second project he was going to email tips for were
him growing an ecommerce store to $100,000 a month.
And the third project he was going to do was him launching an online course that makes
a million dollars.
And so he announces on his podcast, and like to prove your point, you know, earlier, you're
saying like, what's the you know, why are you doing all this stuff?
Why are you starting with a blog and a newsletter, etc.
It's because you wanted to build your own distribution channel, where Sean had a distribution
channel with his newsletter, and so he was able to get 350 people from his podcast to
sign up to his newsletter.
And he's not charging like five bucks or 10 bucks a month, like a typical newsletter, he's
charging $150 a month for this.
So 350 people paying 150 bucks for his newsletter, he had a newsletter that was doing 50 grand
a month, almost instantly right out of the gate, which is insane for a newsletter, the
way the story ended, though, is a little bit tragic, which is that he quit.
So the problem for him was that it was an insane amount of work.
He already had a full time job.
He already had a podcast he was running.
He's married, he has a one year old baby, he's kind of like you.
And now he had this newsletter that he had to send five times a week.
So he would like go to work, do all that stuff, come home, you know, kiss his wife, and then
like he'd work on his newsletter from like 7pm to like 1am every single night.
And then he was working full days on the weekends because, you know, he didn't just write the
newsletter, he actually had to do the stuff he was writing about and like try to build
these businesses.
So he ended up quitting.
He said his goal was to teach 70 million people over the next 10 years.
He doesn't want to teach, you know, 700 people over the next like year.
So it wasn't really the right fit for him.
He's already rich.
He's like 50 grand a month.
But I think his story kind of goes to show kind of what you can accomplish in the newsletter
space and like how much space there is that really hasn't been explored.
I don't know anybody else charging 150 bucks for a newsletter.
Yeah, that's the first time I've heard of that.
But like, I mean, I agree.
I mean, is it really worth it?
I mean, from 7pm to 1am?
That's how long is that?
Like five hours a day or something like that?
After his job.
After his job, right?
Like after his eight hour a day job or however much he spends on his job, I mean, like, yeah,
for him, if I was him, like, yeah, I totally dropped this.
I mean, just it's not worth it.
If you're already rich.
I mean, why spend that much time?
No, especially if his main goal is to, you know, teach 70 million plus people.
You can't really do that with paid newsletter because that's kind of what it's all about
is exclusivity.
I mean, you're not going to get 70 million people paying, probably not even five bucks
a month to learn what he's trying to teach, right?
And yeah, I mean, on top of that, he has to build a business alongside with it, right?
So like the $1 million or like 100k econ business, like that's hard in and of itself, aside from
actually building a paid newsletter, right?
So doing that both at the same time, I mean, you really got to be an expert, you know,
an expert at this to actually pull it off.
And he did it, right?
But it's, yeah, I don't know, man, it's not worth it.
Yeah, I think he quit like after the second project.
He's like, okay, I'm done.
I'm going to, I'm going to not do the third one.
Everybody.
Here's a refund.
I'm out.
Good luck.
People weren't too disappointed, but he actually has a free newsletter now and I'm subscribed
to it.
And one of them, he had this cool like life dashboard graphic where he's kind of rating
like how happy am I with my life?
And so, you know, for health, he put himself out of four out of five for work, he's like
a four and a half out of five for play, he's a four out of five self respect, he's a four
and a half out of five, and then love, like his love life, he's only like a three and
a half out of five.
So for him, the casualties, maybe his relationship, right, he's spending so much time doing other
stuff, maybe his marriage is suffering, that's a good reason to cut back.
But I think like, let's say you're an average indie hacker, let's say you're either not
working a full time job, or you know, you make a less ambitious project, like, is there
some way that you could envision to make this work, to be able to charge people upwards
of $100 a month to subscribe to a newsletter, you know, it kind of reminds me of people
building in public, like right now people build in public, basically for free, you know,
they tweet about what they're doing, or they make a product page on indie hackers, and
they talk about what they're doing, or they might even have like a podcast where they
kind of follow their story.
But Sean's the only person I know who was doing that and charging money.
What's your take?
Or have you seen anyone else do this and paid newsletter form, and do you think an average
person who hasn't already made millions of dollars can follow in Sean's footsteps and
try something like this?
Yeah, for sure, man.
And yeah, like you're saying, building in public is probably one of the most popular
ways to build an audience right now.
I mean, Janelle's done it, tons of people are doing it.
And yeah, I mean, I think that's definitely viable.
I think doing what Sean is doing, but with your product that you're building, like as
an indie hacker, I think it's definitely worth it.
You could probably be charging at least like, maybe not 150, because Sean has like that
premium brand on him, but I mean, maybe you could charge 150.
I don't know.
I mean, why not try it?
But you know, one thing that I've noticed with this building, like the building in public
crowd is that, you know, they build in public, but they don't really go that deep, like compared
to Sean's newsletter, who was like really like detailed, I mean, he's telling you every
single step that he's doing to actually get to that end goal, while, you know, the building
public crowd is just like, okay, I hit, you know, today, I did this feature and I onboard
of this customer, and now I'm at 5KMR, and then tomorrow it's like, okay, now I'm at
6KMR.
So it's really like general overview.
So I think taking that one step further and pretty much doing exactly what Sean's doing,
but with your own product, maybe it won't be as successful, but still detailing that
out for subscribers is probably a really good idea.
Do you know, Kevin Conti?
Yeah, from software ideas.
Software ideas, right, right.
So he likes, here's, here's a really cool idea for someone out there.
Subscribe to his newsletter, find one idea, it could be any idea, take that idea, and
then actually start building it as a newsletter, you know, do exactly what Sean was doing with
a very detailed daily newsletter where you, because, you know, show exactly what you did
to build that business.
I think that would be a really cool idea.
I mean, I would definitely subscribe to something like that.
Yeah, I love it.
I think that's spot on.
I think Sean's just going way deeper than everybody else, everybody else is building
in public.
They're kind of just skimming along the surface where Sean was like, no, here's every single
detail about what I did every single day this week.
And he wasn't just sharing that arbitrarily, he was sharing that because he had a value
proposition that these details sort of aligned with.
So if you look at the average person who's building in public, they're kind of like,
oh, you know, I'm just doing this because I heard you should build in public and it'll
help me.
So follow along my journey and, you know, click on my links, etc.
Like, that's not very compelling, where Sean was like, hey, I'm going to build three businesses
to a million dollars a year, follow along to get a detailed playbook of how you can
do the same thing.
And like, that's a very clear value proposition.
That's not like, hey, do this for me, it's like, hey, do this for yourself.
And you know, if you think you can make a million dollars a year by listening to what
Sean's saying, or even half of that, of course, it's worth it to pay 150 bucks a month.
It's probably worth it to pay thousands of dollars a month.
And you know, he had a lot of street cred, like he's been on podcasts talking about the
businesses he's bought and sold and built in the past, so like, people believe him,
you know, like he has the trust.
Yeah, for sure.
I mean, like, I mean, if you take those two trends together, like paid newsletters, plus
building in public, and dude, you got like, he got a really interesting business that
that's been proven by Sean.
Yeah.
Let's talk about this other newsletter you brought up, and I think we'll wrap up.
It's called software ideas by Kevin Conti.
What's the story behind that one?
I know Kevin a bit because he posts on 90 hackers, but you know, what do you know about
Kevin's story?
And what should listeners know?
Yeah, for sure.
So Kevin, he's doing 10K MRR in five months, which I mean, again, that's absolutely insane
for a paid newsletter.
I mean, wow, amazing.
And he pretty much started, you know, he created an MVP, right?
No, sorry, he created a product about probably last year or something like that, that, you
know, he spent six months actually building.
And he got nowhere, literally zero customers.
No one wanted it.
And he's just like, all right, well, you know, screw that.
I'm going to actually start something and actually make money from like the get-go,
right?
So I don't exactly remember why he started software ideas.
Other than that, I kind of saw the trend of people actually wanting to don't really know
what to build on.
So on indie hackers, there's tons of people asking, especially newcomers, like, what do
I build?
What do I build that's profitable?
What do I build that I don't have to waste my time on?
Like that I know if I'm going to build this, it will hit five, 10K MRR or whatever.
So we kind of saw that trend and basically, you know, wrapped it up in a paid newsletter
and he sends three ideas out, but he kind of did it in a really interesting way, right?
So he didn't just start it, he did kind of like a pre-sale.
So he created kind of like an MVP, like, you know, newsletter issue with one idea that
goes really in depth, posted on indie hackers, posted on Twitter, Hacker News.
And the really cool thing is at the bottom, he was like, you know, if you want more content,
of this end are, you know, potentially willing to pay for it, you know, just email me at
this email.
He plugs his email in and, and yeah, and he kind of set a goal to hit a certain amount
of pre-sale revenue before actually kind of diving deep into that newsletter.
And and yeah, he hit that in like six days or something like that.
Like it was really quick.
So that kind of validated the idea that, you know, software ideas was going to make money
because people are already paying for it before it's, you know, an actual product, right?
And yeah, it's pretty much history ever since.
I mean, it's been growing crazy, like, like I said, five, 10 camera in five months is
insane.
Yeah.
It's another example of this pattern of like, somebody went out into the world and looked
for something.
In his case, he was looking for ideas.
And then he realized like, not only is it hard to find ideas, but there are a bunch
of other people looking for this too.
So what I should do is like, get really good at finding them and then give them to everybody
else.
So they don't have to do the work of looking, which is the exact same as you and your podcast,
like you want to find details on how to start a newsletter, it's hard to find.
Other people are also looking, so you're going to do the hard work of interviewing people
and you're going to give it to them in a podcast.
And the other thing that stands out to me from this story is the fact that as you highlighted,
like, it wasn't like working on this for like years and years growing a free subscriber
base and then eventually, you know, converted like 2% of them to his paid newsletter.
He did like a few posts, took pre-sales, saw that it was an idea that people would pay
for immediately.
And he just came right out of the gate with the paid newsletter and he's going into $10,000
a month.
Have you seen others who do this where they don't have a large free audience, but they
flip on the switch to paid content and it works out because usually people do the opposite
and they build up a big free list first.
Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the general like go to playbook, right?
As you create a free letter, free newsletter, you build it up to like 1000, 2000 subscribers.
Theoretically, 5% will convert, you know, you can do the math.
And that's kind of the standard playbook.
But hey, I mean, if you got a really interesting like productized insights newsletter, just
like software ideas, or like Drew's Trends.VC, there's tons of them out there and you're
actually providing real value.
I don't see why you need an audience to actually monetize a paid newsletter right off the bat,
especially if you're doing pre-sales, right?
So sure, if you do a paid newsletter and no one wants it, you know, if you do pre-sales
and no one wants it, then obviously you don't want it.
But if you do pre-sales and you're hitting your actual numbers, then yeah, totally.
I mean, you don't need an audience to build a product, profitable product.
I'm trying to find out how much he's charging for this.
I think it was $59 every three months or every quarter.
Yeah, on his website now and he's got a quarterly subscription, which is another thing I've
never seen for a newsletter.
So it's the done for you SaaS opportunity experience, he calls it.
When you pay, you unlock every past issue of the newsletter.
And you also will get idea, it says you'll get access to a video series that teaches
you how to take the ideas and find traction.
But he says the video series is still in development, so you don't get it yet.
And it's 57 bucks over three months, which I think is a smart way to put it because,
you know, if he just said like this was going to be, you know, 240 bucks a year, maybe people
get sticker shock, but if he, you know, breaks it down into quarters, the price is a little
bit lower, it's a little bit less of a commitment.
Maybe you should try this with your community, you know, if you're afraid to raise prices
instead of being like, okay, it's going to be 59 bucks a year, just try 59 bucks every
quarter.
And maybe people are willing to pay 59 bucks, but they're not necessarily going to commit
for a whole year.
Yeah, that's actually a good idea.
I might actually try that out.
And you can do that with Ghost as well.
So they do quarterly and monthly and yearly and buy quarterly or however, however you
want to do it, they got it.
So, yeah, I mean, it's a smart way to do it.
I mean, $57 per three months, I mean, in three months, you probably find one idea that you
want to build, right?
So it's kind of like $57 for an idea, plus or minus, right?
I mean, you probably don't need a year's worth subscription because once you have your idea,
I mean, do you really want more ideas, right?
That's kind of the biggest bane of indie hackers is too many ideas, right?
Right.
Yeah.
Like the very format of the newsletter itself is probably somewhat high churn, where if
like you technically, if you subscribe to his newsletter, and it does what it's supposed
to do, it gives you an idea you want to work on, then you really should graduate from it
and start working on that idea and not need any more ideas, which suggests that he probably
should charge even more because like you might have higher churn than another newsletter
that provides like, ongoing value like the browser, or like, presumably, you're never
going to churn from wanting to read, you know, the best information on the web, like you'll
still be doing that years from now.
So software ideas is on bare metrics as a public, you know, like thing that you can
see.
Yeah, you can definitely see his churn numbers, you can see his revenue, you can see his active
customers.
And like you said, churn is kind of high, if you look at like the last like, a couple
of months.
9% churn, I think.
Is he at 10%?
Yeah, 9.3%.
Right.
I mean, it's down 20%.
So it used to be 11.7%, right, or up to 12% back in December, has been dropping, I don't
know what he's doing to drop that number.
But yeah, I mean, it's definitely a high turn business.
I mean, imagine 10% of your user base is churning every month.
As a SaaS business, like you're going to go out, you'll be out of business like in no
time.
Exactly.
But as a newsletter, you know, if you get this money upfront, and if it's a little bit easier
than, I mean, at the end of the day, still making what is up to $11,000 a month in revenue.
And again, this is like less than half a year after you started it, which I think is much
faster growth than the vast majority of all indie hackers who are starting a SaaS business.
I don't know, I think like this is one of those businesses that like are almost inevitable
to like, tons of people are just, you know, because that's the thing, you find an idea
and then you stop paying for the newsletter because you got your idea, right?
So yeah, it's kind of insane looking at these numbers, man.
I love these like built in public companies on bare metrics.
Yeah, it's super interesting to see, to just kind of go research.
Another point here about like the sort of nature of what you're writing about, we talked
earlier about like the frequency with which you send newsletters, Nivea Chante with her
newsletter, she's sending it once a week, because she's sending like actionable tips
for you know, dealing with climate change.
How many actionable things can you really do to deal with climate change every week?
Like probably one, you know, probably people will do less than that, maybe one a month.
And so she doesn't have to send at a high frequency.
And with software ideas, I think it's probably similar, you know, how many ideas can people
really take and run with?
Probably not that many.
He doesn't need to send his newsletter daily, you know, once a week or a few times a month
is enough for him.
Whereas with something like the browser, trying to keep people entertained or something like,
you know, morning brew or the hustle, you're trying to keep people informed.
People have an almost limitless appetite for entertainment and news, like they want
a little bit of that every single day.
And so with those newsletters, not only, you know, do you have to send probably more often,
but you can't actually get away with sending more often, and not having that much turn
because you're not going to overload people, you know, like if your accountant sent you
email about doing your taxes, you know, every week, you'd be like, I only need this email
once a year, you would unsubscribe because it's noise.
But if you get you know, an email about the news once a day from the information or something,
or from morning brew, you're not going to ever unsubscribe because once a day seems
to be about the right frequency.
Yeah, for sure.
It's like it's like B2C versus B2B newsletters, right?
I mean, browser, it's a B2C newsletter, right?
I mean, the customers are all just, you know, regular people, right?
While software ideas, it's more towards kind of businesses, I mean, indie hackers that
want to start businesses.
So I kind of consider that B2B, right?
Because people actually want some sort of actionable insight out of it versus, you know,
being entertained, like you said.
So yeah, you can skim the cat like a million ways with a newsletter.
Cool.
We've got more ideas on this list, but I think we're out of time.
So I think what people are going to have to do is go to your show and check out the newsletter
crew.
You can just search for newsletter crew in your podcast player.
Have your show.
You've interviewed, I think, close to 40 different people who are making a living from their
newsletter.
And it's going to be much more.
And if people are interested in that, they could potentially join your community as well.
And hopefully you charge them much more than 59 bucks a year by the time this episode
is out.
I want to ask you, you know, before we sign off here, from all the different stories you've
seen from your experience as an indie hacker yourself, what's one lesson you would want
to leave listeners with that they can learn from what you've done?
Oh, man, just one idea at a time.
I mean, just take it slow, take it easy.
Don't try to do 10 things at once.
Yeah.
You can go at it.
If it works, keep going at it.
If it doesn't work, drop it, start something else, but don't try to start five, six projects
at once.
It just doesn't work.
Don't start five or six projects at once.
Don't start two projects at once.
Just do one thing at a time.
Love it.
You're our battery.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Yeah.
Thank you, Cortland, for having me.
Yeah.
Do you want to tell people where they can go to find out more about newsletter crew and
also anything else you're working on online?
Yeah.
So you can go to newsletter crew.com.
That's, you know, you can find all the podcasts there.
Like Cortland said, you can go out to the actual podcast player type of newsletter crew.
You can go to YaraBaggery.com for an assignment for my newsletter.
I send it out once a week, just kind of a summary of, you know, kind of my journey.
And yeah, and I'm creating another smaller kind of SaaS microSaaS called referral kit,
which is the actual SaaS building to sell to my newsletter crew audience.
I mean, that's, you know, it's still under development, but, you know, maybe it'll be
out by the time this podcast is out.
I mean, that's at referralkit.co.
All right.
Thanks again, Yara.
Awesome.
Thank you.
Listeners, if you enjoyed this episode and you want an easy way to support the podcast,
you should leave a review for us on iTunes or Apple podcasts.
Probably the fastest way to get there if you're on a Mac is to visit ndhackers.com slash reviews.
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Thank you so much for listening.
And as always, I will see you next time.