What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a ton of money in the process.
And on this show, I talked to these IndieHackers to learn about the strategies, the opportunities,
and the ideas they're using to get ahead so the rest of us can do the same.
If you've been enjoying the show and you want an easy way to get back, do me a favor, leave
a quick rating for us on Apple Podcasts.
It helps other people find the show and it makes me a happy podcaster.
In today's episode, I sat down to talk to Evan Britton.
Evan runs an absolutely massive site focused on digital celebrities.
It's called Famous Birthdays.
He gets something like multiple billions of page views every year.
And I think his story is inspiring just because of how focused he is.
He says no to pretty much everything.
He stays in his lane, as he puts it, and he's single-mindedly focused on making a site and
to a significant institution on the web.
That's it.
That's all he cares about.
He's a really fun guy to talk to.
I really enjoyed the interview and I hope you do as well.
Evan, you are working on a website called Famous Birthdays.
I'm looking at it right now.
And it kind of looks like Myspace.
How old are you, by the way?
I'm 42.
So you're 42.
So when Myspace was out, I was in, it was big in like 2006.
I was in college.
I had friends who had Myspace accounts.
You were well out of college.
Were you on Myspace?
Were you using it back then?
I was not.
But you've somehow distinctly captured, it's like a more upscale, modern Myspace vibe with
balloons and stars and all these pictures of kids, except they're not like my high school
friends.
They are celebrities, YouTubers, TikTokers, TV stars.
I see Jake Paul on here and Zendaya.
Tell us about Famous Birthdays.
What is it exactly?
So Famous Birthdays is a simple way to quickly learn about celebrities, social stars, movies,
TV shows, bands, web series in a concise yet informative format.
And it takes advantage of a few trends that happened on the web the last five years all
into one.
One is mobile.
I saw eight years ago that Wikipedia and IMDb were built for desktop because that's when
they were launched during the desktop era.
And on mobile, they had too much information.
And then also, those platforms didn't focus on the digital stars, which our users showed
us were really important to them.
Yeah, I'm browsing around right now.
So Brooklyn McKnight, YouTube star, just clicked on her profile.
And I can see her age and her birthday, her sign, you've got photos on here.
And then it's almost like Wikipedia, but just way shorter.
So you've got like six paragraphs of biographical information like about her, what she did before
she was famous and trivia or family life.
And that's it.
You know, if you're writing a book report, Wikipedia is awesome, you're going to get
tons of info, but we distill the most important, concise info.
And it's basically Wikipedia for what matters right now.
So you know, you started off the asking me if I remember myspace, you know, myspace came
and went vine came and went, you know, right now, tiktok's huge.
But our users tell us what they're interested in learning more about right now, they want
to learn about Netflix and they're searching for Disney plus shows or tiktok stars or YouTubers.
So I think right now, Dixie Demelio, she ranks in our top five because she's really popular.
That could continue or there could be a new platform with new stars that become more popular.
So I think that it's really leverages what's happening now and what people care about.
You know, so we're platform agnostic and entertainment agnostic.
And you got a lot of users, I use this Chrome extension, it's called detailed SEO extension.
And you install it and you right click on any website, and then you can click view the
site and similar web.
So when I go to your site, and I do that, it takes me to similar web.
And it says your traffic every month is you know, this is a similar web estimated 30 million
page views a month, which is a ridiculous amount of traffic.
Yeah, we actually have over 100 million page views.
So we get about 30 million unique users among, you know, similar web definitely shows that
we're scaled, I think it shows we're top 1000 US property, the majority of the traffic comes
on mobile.
We also have an iPhone and Android app, which is where some of our power users go.
But most of our traffic's on the mobile web.
And yeah, we've built a big audience, because I've been very focused on this one vision.
You know, it's been almost nine years of hard work focus and listening to what the users
want.
I know you don't share revenue numbers, which is unusual for a bootstrap company nowadays,
everybody seems to be in the market to share exactly how much money they make, what the
revenue is, what's the best way to sort of estimate, you know, besides just your traffic,
where you are with your business?
We just passed for the year, we're over 2 billion page views on our platform.
It's all organic.
We don't do any advertising, any marketing, monetization per user changes based on so
many factors, time of year, mobile desktop, different networks we're working with, but
we're profitable.
We have about 25 people working on the platform.
We're focused on the user and how can we grow audience serve the user, we don't focus on
revenue to the extent that we don't have anybody on the team, selling advertisers or getting
too detailed about how we monetize.
We're not overly aggressive with what we do on our platform.
I think we could monetize a lot more if we were more aggressive in our ad formats.
But we really care about UX and about, you know, our brand.
Let's talk about that.
Because even if you just put a few employees on it and had them focus on that full time,
probably the returns would cover the cost of those employees and help you do some of
the other things that you're sort of focused on.
So what's your philosophy here?
And also just give us an overview of how you monetize a site in general.
We do programmatic monetization.
So right now we're serving around 10 billion ad impressions per year, you know, from the
two plus billion page views we have on our platform.
So we leverage the programmatic networks to monetize our platform.
Programmatic has been awesome in that since we have enough scale, we can connect to the
top programmatic networks and they can send in a bid for the ad units on our platform
without us having to collect money or pitch advertisers.
So it lets us focus.
It's all automatic is what you're saying.
There's really no manual intervention.
Yeah, it automatically lets us focus on our vision.
And programmatic has shown itself to be very resilient.
We know what to expect from it.
And the auction, since we have 10 different bidders, the auction lets us monetize, not
amazing, but very efficiently.
So in terms of not caring about monetization, it's just not part of the focus or what makes
the platform what we're passionate about and how we got to where we are.
So I do think that's another advantage to programmatic is that it's just not in the
day to day operation of what we're doing.
We're more thinking about the users, but programmatic does allow us to, you know, fund and has allowed
us to be profitable and grow the company.
So we do care about monetization.
It's just, this is more of a long term, you know, it's been nine years and the way I've
been able to be passionate about it for nine years is I love helping the users and growing
the audience.
That's what's fun for me.
That's what I'm passionate about.
And that's why I think we can create the most long term value.
So if I knew I was only working on the platform for one more year, I would probably care a
lot more about monetization and I would bake it more in and be more aggressive with it.
But I think by not caring about monetization, you're building more long term value.
Because those users and those experiences that those positive experience users are having,
they're going to come back again and again and again.
So there'll be monetization opportunities there.
And obviously, you're still making money regardless enough to support a team of dozens of people
and still be profitable while you're fully bootstrapped.
We've gotten to scale now and we have 30 million users.
So we have considerable scale.
But that gets back to the point where I said you have to really, you know, be passionate
about what you're doing.
Because if we did care about monetization for the first few years, I would have quit
because it wasn't making enough.
You know, I want to grow our audience and help our users and go to different languages
and make our platform a pillar of the web.
You know, none of that involves monetization.
It just involves focus on the user and, you know, making this an awesome platform.
I sent out a Twitter poll maybe a month or two ago.
And I asked if it can only be one of these four things, which would you be?
So if you pick one, that means you just magically can't have the others.
So the options were you could be famous, rich, powerful, or influential.
And the last one was free, nobody's going to tell you what to do.
I assume you probably wouldn't pick rich.
So the other three, you know, which one would you rather have to the exclusion of the others?
Definitely not fame.
I mean, I think fame, like people on our platform are famous, but, you know, my Instagram is
private and people have millions of followers on our platform.
But that's not, I want our platform to be famous, not myself.
You know, I get searched all the time on famous birthdays, but I'm not on there.
You know, it's not about me.
It's about the platform.
You know, power, I don't think is important.
So I definitely think freedom.
I think I love working on the platform.
I love that we have such a big audience.
It's humbling to me.
One of the reasons why I focus so much is that we have such a big audience to serve.
It's a big challenge.
So I think the freedom to not only work on what I enjoy, but work on the specific aspects
of what I enjoy within the platform.
I think that's also another level to it.
If I'm more passionate about a certain area of the platform, that might be a good thing
for me to focus on because I'm going to, you know, give it my all.
Yeah, that was also the answer that I would have voted for, if I could have voted for
my own poll.
But also, I think 50 something percent of people voted for free and only one percent
of people voted for fame, which is pretty fascinating for me.
It's not like that surprising, you know, it's definitely the least useful of all of those.
But then you look at a website like yours, where it's just full of celebrities.
It's just literally like, like how many celebrities do you have on your platform?
We have about 200,000 celebrities, and then as I mentioned, we have, you know, a ton of
movies, TV shows, bands, web series, other type of content, but probably about 200,000
celebrities.
200,000 celebrities, you got 30 million people a month coming to check out these celebrities,
like just basic stats about them and their birthday.
So there's something there's some sort of pool that fame has, like people are attracted
to it in some way.
And yet, they don't seem to want it, or they don't seem to want to admit they want it even
an anonymous poll.
I think your social activity can tell if you like, in some sense, if you want it.
Again, our platform has grown a lot from the digital stars.
So I do think that people care about growing their audience and, you know, growing their
fame.
And I think the beauty of the web is that you can grow in different ways, whether it
be a singer or an actor, but now you can be good at, you know, TikTok dances, or you can
be good on Twitter at short comedic lines, or an Instagram might be for modeling.
So I think the internet gives a lot of opportunity for someone to try to grow a following via
a lot of different formats.
Yeah, I have this theory after I tweeted that where the reason why almost no one chose fame
is in part because of my followers, they're indie hackers, they want to have freedom the
same way that I do in the same way that almost all the guests on the show do.
But also because I don't think anyone really just wants...
Like what does fame mean?
Fame just means a lot of people know who you are.
You can be famous for something terrible, right?
I think people more so want fame times some other positive thing.
They want like fame times admiration, they want a lot of people to admire them or to
respect them, or to like them or to desire them or something.
And maybe people would have voted for that.
But I'm curious what your thoughts are, like you run this platform, it's literally got
fame in the name.
Yeah.
What do you think you see about fame that probably the average person doesn't see?
I think freedom.
I think that one of the reasons why YouTubers are such a cool goal is that YouTube has done
a great job to have a monetization program built into their platform.
A lot of the other platforms don't have it that built in.
So if you can find fame on the platform, it can also lead to freedom because there could
be monetization there.
And there's a lot of...
In the last few months even, there's been a lot of companies and technologies that are
building tools and raising money around the creator economy.
So I think that fame can translate into income, which can translate into freedom.
It's like a thing you don't even want for its own sake.
You only want it to sort of get you something else.
And if you're in your position, you're not like a creator, right?
You're not on YouTube, on TikTok, your Instagram is anonymous, but you're building a platform
that supports these creators, which I think is kind of the best place to be.
Yeah, and again, I think getting back to my vision, my vision was Wikipedia for mobile.
The whole creator space was shown to me by the users.
I wasn't on MySpace, as you asked, and I didn't know about Musical.ly or Vine or Twitter
or YouTube five years ago, but the users searching it showed us that there was a big interest.
One interesting thing I noticed back in 2014, there were these Vine stars with millions
of followers, and their email address was listed in their bio, but they weren't on Wikipedia,
whereas somebody with the speaking line in the movie was on Wikipedia, and you couldn't
even contact them.
They had like two managers in front of them.
So the user showed us that there was this big gap between kind of what the public thought
was famous versus where users had the passion.
Let's get into that.
I want to hear this backstory of you deciding to replace Wikipedia.
I just listened to an interview with Jimmy Wales, actually, on Tyler Cohen's podcast.
And he was talking, I think it came up very briefly, about how he didn't like the fact
that Wikipedia was so poorly designed for mobile and that it could be better.
And this is something he was saying like, you know, a week or two ago, not five, six
years ago, when you started Famous Birthdays.
What did you see that caused you to start Famous Birthdays and what were the sort of
first steps you took?
It was all about mobile.
I mean, I saw that the mobile phone was going to be where people concerned content and media.
So I think that as an entrepreneur, even as a bootstrapped entrepreneur, if you've ride
a wave, you're gonna not have people in front of you and be able to grow.
That's why people are growing on TikTok so much, they're riding a wave.
So I thought that since mobile was going to be the next thing, nobody could be ahead of
us in mobile because it was just getting going.
And Wikipedia, I felt when you pulled up a phone was just too much.
And I think that when you're on the go, you wanted to be informative, but to be concise.
And you know, if you look at our content, it's split up in five sections about before
fame, trivia, family and associate it with kind of five general topics that we could
draw into with a quick two sentences on each and just a nice organized format.
So to me, I thought it was exciting that our experience could be better than these huge
staples of the web.
And you know, when I say staple of the web, that's been a real motivation factor for me
is to create something that's a pillar of the internet.
And that's one of the reasons I focus so much.
Because you know, when like, when like, cloudflare AWS goes down, there's always like a TechCrunch
article that says, Reddit and ESPN.com and Wikipedia are down.
And I always wanted to be famous birthdays to kind of be organically mentioned as it
goes down.
Like it's a pillar of the web.
And I think that with each passing year, famous birthdays becomes that when it goes down,
it's going to matter.
So this whole story is fascinating to me because I think there are a lot of these pillars.
I mean, there's like Google, there's Wikipedia, and most entrepreneurs aren't trying to take
them on.
Most entrepreneurs are like, you know what, Wikipedia is huge.
It's been here for a couple decades.
I don't care if they don't have mobile, like they're going to get engineers on mobile.
Any second now, like there's no way I'm going to catch up and become a better mobile Wikipedia
before Wikipedia becomes a better mobile Wikipedia.
So what was going through your head when you decided to start this?
I wasn't going to take it on.
And I love Wikipedia.
And I'm you know, it's amazing what they've done.
And I think that, you know, it's almost like it's a different lane that we're going in.
So my initial vision was just cliff notes for that.
So we were just a resource when we had Tom Hanks and Kobe Bryant on the platform and
LeBron James and, you know, Tara Swift and, you know, Beyonce, that was just a resource
because those celebrities were on IMDb and Wikipedia.
The internal searches have always been our North Star.
And early on, we built technology to analyze those searches.
And that's when I saw Nash Greer and Cameron Dallas, who were two early big Vine stars.
I saw them being searched on our platform.
At first, I thought we were being spammed or something because I didn't know who these
people I know who they were.
So I think when I initially launched it, I didn't realize the lane that was going to
be there.
And then I went to VidCon in 2014 and I saw a mob of screaming teens around Ricky Dillon,
who was a Vine star.
And I went home and I saw he was on Wikipedia and I saw just in Anaheim, California, there
was probably 500 screaming fans for him.
So passionate to get a picture, but he wasn't on Wikipedia.
So Anaheim is a very small population compared to the whole country or globe.
So I didn't try to take it on.
I just saw that that was a huge gap.
In the internal searches, the more times that we added to our platform what was being searched
by the internal search in, the more we grew and the users kept showing us that loop, here's
more people to add and more and more and more.
So again, it wasn't the vision and I didn't think it would get as big as it did, but the
internal searches allowed us to be the source versus a resource because we directly reached
out to those Vine stars and said, send us your bio, send us your headshot because they
weren't on Wikipedia.
So we needed them to help us get the profile going.
So I want to know about these real early days, like the very nitty gritty on the ground details
of getting you started.
Because it took you a while.
I think you started this site in 2012.
It took you a while to latch on to like, oh, wow, look at all these creators who are on
Wikipedia.
We don't need to be the mobile Wikipedia.
We can be kind of the mobile, like what's happening now platform.
How did you start?
What's the first thing you did?
Who's we?
Who you're working with in the early days?
I initially was working with a programmer and one or two content writers.
I think that, you know, initially, it was a it was a domain, the famous birthdays I
purchased it from someone else who had a 10 page hobby site or just listed the birthdays
for each month.
And one thing I did is I actually contacted the maybe two years into it.
Once I saw how much famous birthdays was growing, I contacted the old domain owner because we
were getting profiled and I said by some article and I said, hey, I'm calling myself the founder
of famous birthdays.
Do you feel that's okay?
And he said, I own famous birthdays.com.
It was a 12 page site.
I never could have built what you built.
So you are the founder of famous birthdays.
So that was a cool exchange.
It was a teacher in Ohio that I've kept the fun, you know, relate that I had a fun relationship
with based on it.
So it was basically a 12 page shell, you know, shell website that just listed birthdays by
the month.
But what we what we started to do me and the programmer and the two content writers is
started to build out profiles for all the celebrities prof, you know, birthdays for
each month of the year.
And it was a very, you know, you can go back on the Wayback machine, which is a great tool.
And you can see how famous birthdays looked in 2012, 2014, 2015.
You know, I thought in 2015, it was the greatest site ever.
And now if I look at it, I'm like, whoa, that was, you know, so I think one thing I did
is I never planned, I just kept making it better each month.
And I oh, let's add this, let's make the search better.
Let's have a sticky header.
So when you scroll the search box, and the logo is always there, let's make it faster.
You know, let's profile bands and TV shows, you know, let's add a boost button.
So when you get to celebrities profile, and you can click boost to help their ranking.
So it was every month, they got a little better, I never held anything back for a big launch.
You know, it's funny, with iOS, you have to release an update, the web doesn't work like
that, so it was really like a project that we improvise as we go went.
And we just slowly made it better and better, without a plan about what it's going to look
like six months from now.
And then, and then it said, and the traffic growth was very, very, you know, you always
see these social platforms that grow overnight from a million users to 100 million.
And that's amazing, but for us, it was like 3% a month for nine years.
So to me, it's a very healthy growth, because we just never had the hockey stiff growth,
we just slowly grew as our platform group.
What was your vision?
If you weren't making plans, you weren't like, you know, we're gonna be this huge social
network going to take over the world, but you're still investing money in this.
I mean, I imagine, like, I spent, I think $2,000 to buy the domain name for Andy hackers,
because I had a big vision where I was like, this is gonna be worth me spending this money.
And unlike you, I'm like, not still in touch with the guy who sold me that domain name,
I have no idea where he lives.
But like every dollar I invested, I was like, here's how I'm gonna get that dollar back
out.
You spent seemingly way more money than I did, you bought the domain.
Unlike any hackers, a person was already doing something with it.
So like, they're actually selling you something, they weren't just like a squatter.
You had a content creator, you had a software engineer, were you full time on this yourself?
I was, you know, and one thing I wanted to do is have one project, I'm all about focus.
And it's been nine years on this before I had like eight or nine websites I was working
on and everything was kind of flat.
So I wanted to have one site that was my entire focus.
But we only had one programmer and you know, we had like an intern from UCLA, so very efficient.
And you know, we had some ad revenue from the traffic that started to grow.
I thought we got to like two, 3 million users.
I was happy about that and you know, we were making a solid amount of revenue to pay for
the team that a small team, but as it kept growing, one thing I did was reinvest.
And every time it grew a little bit, we got a few more people on it.
And that entire focus was on the user and on the audience.
And when entrepreneurs asked me, should I focus on monetization or audience?
It's not even a question, audience, audience, audience, you know, there's a lot of tools
on the web for a lot of stuff, especially now.
You can use Shopify for e-commerce, you can use all these cloud hosting providers.
There's RSS, there's, you know, there's so many ways to do things efficiently.
There's libraries you can use for APIs.
What you can't library into is audience.
So you know, I always just did everything I could to make the platform awesome for the
user.
And that was a discipline that I still have today.
My model for doing that was the internal search.
So even though the revenue wasn't that high in 2014, when I saw people searching for stuff
that they wanted to learn more about, that you couldn't find more about on the web, I
knew that my users could be served.
And that got me going every day.
So this is another, I think, trend that's happening right now that a lot of people aren't
quite aware of.
But it's, it's, it's kind of crazy how it works where like pretty much anyone can be
famous nowadays, or at least a lot more people than could be famous like, I don't know, 80
years ago, like 80 years ago, you had to be a famous Hollywood actor or an actress, there's
like, you know, like 100, like really famous people on earth.
And that was it.
Right.
And everybody else kind of had to just like watch them on TV at the movie theaters.
And that's basically it.
Whereas today, you can have like 20,000 followers on Instagram, or like create a cool meme account
on Twitter.
And you can have a bunch of people who like, love you and who are obsessed with you.
And who are, you know, worship the ground you walk on.
And you walk around outside and like no one even knows who you are.
And there's millions of people who presumably are like this.
And I don't think that trend is going to end any time soon.
And it seems like Famous Birthday has came around like right at the cusp of this and
sort of ridden this wave of all these people who are famous online, but who aren't prestigious
enough or accomplished enough to warrant a page on a site like Wikipedia.
Definitely.
And I think if you look at someone like Taylor Swift or Beyonce, they might have 100 million
followers, but they'll get 1% engagement, they go very wide, but the social star goes
very deep, they might only have 100,000 followers, but they're far 50,000, but their followers
are really passionate about them because social media is a platform where it's more of a one
to one communication.
And there's no barrier to entry to get on a social platform.
And there are so many social platforms.
I think one misconception was I remember when someone asked me about Snapchat two years
ago, are they going to beat Twitter or is Instagram going to eat them?
No, there's gonna have to be one winner.
You know, people have Instagram and TikTok and Snapchat and YouTube and Twitch.
And that's what they do.
It's not like they pick one social network over the other.
They can have four or five that they engage on.
So there's just so much opportunity for creators.
And if you look at TikTok, another interesting phenomenon is that it's only 15 second videos.
So if you think about YouTube, it might be a four minute video.
So you can watch 16 TikToks in a time you can watch one YouTube.
So you can become fans of many, many, many different creators on TikTok.
There's a lot of appetite because the app makes content so digestible.
So yeah, to your point, fame is definitely becoming very, very accessible.
And it's not easy.
You know, for every one person with 100,000 followers, there's many who never got to 5,000.
But there are a lot of people growing on these different platforms and really connecting
deeply with their fans.
So tell me about this phase where you go from, you know, okay, I'm looking at the internal
searches.
People are searching for all of these online celebrities who don't have Wikipedia pages
to the point where you are at now, where famous birthdays is almost like an institution among
a lot of these people.
We were definitely part of culture now.
And I think, you know, I noticed that a lot of creators, Lincoln Bio is their famous birthdays
profile, which just happens organically.
A lot of creators when they get on famous birthdays, it's a badge of honor.
So they're a moat about it.
It didn't happen overnight.
And I don't remember, there wasn't one super ball moment where it was like, it's there.
It just slowly happened, you know, enough creators, a mode about it, enough users came
to our platform.
You know, we get tons of emails every day of people trying to get on famous birthdays.
We've been very, even though we have 200,000 celebrities, it's still hard to make it on
the platform.
It's not Wikipedia, and that anybody can add themselves.
So for every one person we add, there's 10 other people we could that we don't based
on factors.
So I think and then I think the focus my focus on the user, our platform is super fast.
It's easy to use.
And you know, those are internal search engine is now search 900,000 times a day, which gives
us a ton of insights, and it's all anonymized users don't log into use our site.
So but we can see what searched and what's what searches are missed.
So I think, you know, and then to your point, the social platforms have really grown.
So that was another wave that we wrote on, you know, via the internal searches.
So if I don't have a day where like maybe a year and a half ago, we 20 million users
at that time, I was like, this is awesome, maybe a year before that it was 10 million,
it was a very healthy, you know, 3% per month growth for the last nine years.
So I don't have like a one moment where it was like, wow, we got a Justin Bieber shout
out.
And now we made it.
It was just like a slow and steady build until we became part of culture.
I will say that VidCon has always been interesting experience because VidCon was an hour away
from where I live.
It worked.
We're based in Santa Monica.
Every year we would go to VidCon, which is basically the conference for video and social
media.
You know, we would wear famous birthdays t-shirts and I think in 2014, 1% of the attendees
knew about us in 2015, 3%.
By the last VidCon, 95% of the attendees knew us, literally 95%.
And that's something that you can't pay for.
And you can't kind of like orchestrate it, it just happened via hard work and via focus.
Because the reason users knew us is because we kept being good at the same thing over
and over again.
So I guess that's my last answer to it is we spent so much time being consistent where
users eventually knew, okay, this is what this site does.
And it's awesome.
So I want to dive into like how that works exactly.
Because one of the things that I've noticed, you know, interviewing so many founders is
that websites are a little bit like icebergs where from the outside looking in, you're
like, there's not a whole lot going on here.
And from the inside, there's a ridiculous amount going on.
So when I'm browsing around on famous birthdays, it's like, okay, you've got like, as you said,
kind of like an abridged Wikipedia like page for everybody.
You've got the search engine, which is searched an outrageous almost a million times a day.
And you kind of use that data, who are people searching for?
And you go and build pages for people on the site.
How else does the site change?
Is that basically like the entire formula behind how this works?
Or what are you spending your time doing?
What are your engineers spending their time doing?
We also do search is also help with our ranking.
So we have a proprietary ranking system based on different factors.
One being searches.
We also have the boost button on the site.
So our users rank everybody.
We're not involved work Gnostic.
So you know, so if you on famous birthday search TikTok, you'll see the most popular
TikTok stars ranked by our users.
If you search Gemini, you'll see the most popular Gemini is ranked by our users.
If you search, if you search May 12, you'll see the most popular May 12 birthdays ranked
by our users.
So that's one thing going on as a ranking.
You know, we have an image gallery, I mean, we've probably we've secured rights and cut
over a half a million images for our platform.
Again, a lot of it is repetitive, hard work to build the platform.
But if you go to a celebrity, you'll see 10 photos, we've secured the rights and then
manually cut those into our format.
You know, we also have things like the randomizer so you can randomly find a celebrity.
We had a trivia last year, so we take all of our data and we have different formats
for trivia, which is fun.
As I mentioned, we now we see the searches.
So people started searching three years ago for bands.
And I was very against that.
No, no, no, we have to be about the core.
But that was an area where I evolved, you know, we even have pets on the site, because
people search pets, which I was against also.
But if they're searching for it, they're on there.
People now search colleges.
If you search a college, University of Michigan, you'll learn about the college and see past
and present attendees that are on our platform.
So we just make sure that we analyze what users want and then build a good experience
about around it.
But we know we've built technology about related.
So if you're on a celebrity, we'll show you for related celebrities based on, you know,
our technology, you know, so I guess we kind of slowly add different elements to create
an awesome experience and speed, I think speed is something that's my number one priority.
I'm okay saying this that my CTO gets very frustrated with me because I keep wanting
to do more.
And I think the thing about speed with the website is every little thing on its own doesn't
make a difference.
But when you add up 400 little things, it does.
So we've spent a lot of time and effort making sure that our platform is as fast as it can
be.
And that's something that, to your point on the outside doesn't seem like a lot.
But we've really prioritized that.
Yeah, it's one of those behind the scenes thing you don't really appreciate, but it
takes a lot of time to make a website fast.
And the benefits are pretty numerous, especially if you are getting a lot of your traffic from
Google, like it's one of the central primary ranking factors that Google cares about is
how fast does your site load because they don't want to send people especially on mobile
to a really slow website.
And I have to imagine for what you're doing, your users don't have accounts, they're not
leaving comments on here.
It's kind of like you come here, you get what you want, you search, you find, you read,
and then you leave experience, which is very different than most other sort of modern social
platforms and B2C companies are trying to do.
You're not trying to remember everybody's information and lock them in.
You're trying to just be a useful resource, which probably means that the vast majority
of them are coming back not because they're addicted to some sort of feed or some sort
of like frequent updates.
They're coming back because they do a search on Google or there's something where they
just want to find out the information that they need.
Our direct traffic has grown month over month for the last five years.
And our app has grown the amount, I think more than half of our page views come from
users who visit more than nine times in a month.
So I think that just like Wikipedia, it's just you just know to go there when you want
to learn something about something.
So I think that's what we've solved for.
And to your point, we're not trying to be a social network.
And you know, that's not our vision.
And not a lot of other amazing companies are going to do that.
And we're going to be kind of the layer beneath that, where people want to learn like, for
instance, there's a new social network called Dubsmash that was just acquired by Reddit
two weeks ago.
But if you search Dubsmash on our platform, you'll learn more about Dubsmash stars.
We're not trying to use our scale and brand to change our course.
We're just trying to do it better.
That focus is how in users mind, they know what they're going to get when they come here.
And that's why they come back.
During all of this, you're basically saying no to a lot of stuff, because you can obviously
be allowing your users to create accounts and putting social features on there and trying
to increase engagement and trying to, you know, sell ads to, you know, personalized
based on people's accounts, etc, etc.
What kind of things are, you know, what's your goal, basically, what do you want this
to be in five or 10 years?
The goal in five or 10 years is for any internet.
I've always said internet years are like dog years.
So five or 10 years is like, you know, very far out.
But you know, we I want to focus on the vision and, you know, those 900,000 daily miss searches.
I mean, those daily searches about 10% are missed.
So every day, there's 90,000 searches on our platform that aren't a match.
Now some of that isn't relevant, it might just be I love you, or they might search themselves
or so forth.
But a lot of those searches are opportunities for us to help the user.
So I just want to keep focusing on that and stay on that path and see where it takes us.
One big thing we're doing to grow and to help users more is launching different languages.
We launched in Spanish two years ago, and that was the first time we ever internationalized
from another language.
About two years after, once we passed 5 million users on Spanish, we decided to do Portuguese,
which launched two months ago.
And the Portuguese platform already has low six figure monthly users.
So in 2021, we're going to do German in Q1, and see where that goes.
And I like the languages because it's very native to what famous birthdays is.
Same experience, same vision, just in that local language.
And the cool thing is we can see the searches in those languages.
So the rankings and who gets profiled is based on what the users want in those specific languages.
So I can look at miss search data in Spanish or in Portuguese to see where those platforms
need to go.
So I do think that as the creator economy grows, as everything goes digital, as mobile
grows, there's going to be more and more opportunity for us to help users get what they want.
There's a good quote about being wise that says, I don't want what I don't have.
I want more of what I do have.
And it seems like the approach that you're taking, right?
You don't want a whole bunch of different things.
You want more people doing the same thing on your website, but in different languages
and with better search results and just carry on and do that for basically forever.
I didn't think this was going to get to 30 million users.
I think it was going to get to 5 million.
So I remind myself that it's bigger than I thought it would get.
So I want to double down on it and make sure that I don't take my off the ball.
So there are many other great ideas that the team or people and entrepreneurs or other
people I respect have suggested.
And internationalization was one that we went with.
But there's many that we don't because I think it would take us too far off path.
And I'll let somebody else do that and do it well.
All right, so you're pretty set on what you're going to do.
You're constantly encountering these ideas that you're saying no to, which is really
the harder focus, right?
Focus is not some vague word or focus means you have to literally say no to things that
sound like good ideas.
What are some ideas that you've come across while you're working on famous birthdays,
you think other like indie hackers might be able to run with or or work on someday?
You know, some of the ideas and there's ideas that are good for our business, or just other
cool ideas that you know, like ways of thinking about things.
I think there's a lot of opportunity for entrepreneurs to build an audience and community on the
web.
I think that, you know, part of the key is to find a niche that hasn't been explored
versus trying to do something better that's already done.
So if you look at what Yelp's doing for restaurant listings and professional listings, they're
doing a great job.
But you know, I've noticed all these food trucks that are all growing very much.
There could be a Yelp for food trucks, or you know, a lot of a lot of blogs right about
what's happening on social media, but maybe attack publication that really talks about
what's happening in the comments on social media.
And you know, what's what's breaking there.
Or another good example could be with cameo.
That's a platform that's growing a lot.
And they're doing a great job focusing on the vision.
I think entrepreneurs could create a new site about cameo just about the community, talking
about different stats of you know, what's going on the platform, or news what's happening,
maybe funny stories or funny cameos that happen.
There's a lot happening on the platform that people are talking about.
So being that central platform where people talk about it, and you could grow community
from there.
And it's funny, last week, I saw a new website launch called pod page, which basically is
a it's like a WordPress for podcasters.
So you know, you can build a podcast website in five minutes.
So instead of that entrepreneur trying to redo WordPress, he just focused on a kind
of like a WordPress for podcasters.
And by doing that, he can offer specific tools that will help a podcaster build out a web
presence for what business that they're in.
And he can go really deep by helping podcasters show guests have links to episodes, build
an email list, you know, show stats and rankings potentially.
So I think that if you find something that's growing and really go deep within that niche,
you can slowly build an audience and a community and the platform, you know, so so look, I'm
not doing it.
So I encourage I would love to see a food truck platform, or, you know, more, more information
about social media comments, or just really getting cameo stats, and figures and fun stories.
And I think if you just focus on the platform, as the web grows, and as the digital generation
glows, not only will your traffic grow, but your traffic will grow in a passionate way,
which is I think always key, and that's probably why indie hackers has done so well, is that
people care about it and know it.
And if indie hackers went down, there would be real pain for people.
And I think that only happens when you go really, really deep into a niche.
And in a way you are doing this with Famous Birthdays, because I mean, the pattern here
is you figure out kind of one big thing that people really care about, and that's actually
very popular.
And you like, it's kind of de-risked, because there's proof that people care about it.
You know, a lot of people are already searching for food on Yelp.
They're searching for, you know, information and research on Wikipedia.
They're searching for how to make websites on these big website builders.
And then you figure out like some real small subset of that, that you can niche down into.
And so in your case, that's like, okay, people need to do research on Wikipedia, but like,
what if they need to do research on kind of like the celebrities, and the more like up-to-date
digital famous people, rather than kind of the old stodgy celebrities online.
And the food truck idea is kind of like, okay, yeah, you want to search for food, but like,
what's one small niche within searching for food?
Or the websites for podcasters, it's like, you want to make a website, what's one small
niche within making websites?
And all of this works because the broader circle, like that really big thing you're
finding a niche within is big enough that you can carve out a niche and still build
something really big.
And then you can also take advantage of growth, which is also key, I think, for an entrepreneur,
can you ride a wave?
You know, and I think that Cameo is really growing, food trucks have really grown, podcasts
are really growing.
So I think it is important that you and social media is growing.
So my comment thought.
So I also think that entrepreneur, the great thing about riding a wave is no one will be
ahead of you.
You know, no, TikTok just launched, you know, a year and a half ago.
So whatever it was, so no one can be ahead of somebody that far if they got into that
niche.
Cameo just really took off, you know, it's really grown in the past year has really grown.
So I think if you can get into a niche that grows, you know, maybe you do a website about
zoom, like funny zoom stories, whatever it is, or maybe a platform that talks about technology
on zoom, because I know zoom is launching an app store.
So maybe you just analyze what apps are being built for virtual video, and you just really
build a platform that helps people learn about that.
So if you can get in, where into the wave early as the wave grows, your niche will grow.
And then you'll be the expert of something that's more relevant, which is kind of what
happened with us, the mobile wave and then the social wave really grew.
And you know, like I mentioned, our mobile website was a huge focus back in 2013 2014.
So we had an awesome mobile website right as the mobile web took off.
And then you know, and then when we started focusing on now the beauty is our search data
let us know about what wave is happening.
So that I didn't have to know about social media, the search data, it can also clue you
into that, you know, in terms of where's the wave headed.
So you just have to take that by the storm and ride it.
Yeah, you can have this perfect combo where the fact that mobile was growing, and the
kinds of people who care more about using their phones, also happened to be the kinds
of people who are really big on Instagram, and tik tok, and all these new digital celebrities
you weren't showing up on Wikipedia.
So it's like you're smack dab in the middle of like both of those trends.
Definitely.
And I also think since we were mobile first, you know, I always felt it's important to
be informative or be concise.
And I think on desktop, you don't think about concise.
I always tell my team like a designer or an elder, when they send me something, they send
me a desktop version, because that's what they work on.
And that's always important to remember, everyone accesses our platform on mobile.
That's what I don't want to see how something looks on desktop, because that's not what
a majority is, and not where it's growing the most.
So I think that, you know, by focusing on mobile, and being concise and informative,
not only did we focus on the information they want, but it was in a format and on a platform
that they want it in.
And I think that's where my UX focus really paid off, because, you know, just being on
the right wave isn't all that matters.
You also need to focus on the user as well.
So you need to marry it with that.
You know, if you build a food truck platform, you can be the first one.
But if it's a poor mobile experience with a ton of ads and a ton of bugs, then you're
not going to scale.
So you have to combine it with that.
You mentioned Cameo.
So I want to put you on the spot here and ask what you think about it, because they're
another big player in the celebrity space.
So the way it works is they've got, I don't know how many thousands of celebrities on
their site.
And anybody can just go find your favorite celebrity if they're on there, and then just
like pay them 50 bucks or 100 bucks or whatever they charge to record like a video message,
you know, like wishing your mom a happy birthday or wishing your friends like a happy anniversary
or something.
So what do you think about Cameo?
What are your thoughts?
I know the founder, and I'm impressed.
I heard a podcast with him earlier on, and he was very focused about this is our lane.
And I love that they're so focused on helping celebrities monetize their time via having
fans engage.
I love the model.
And I think that it suits well for the digital generation where everyone is kind of spread
out and, you know, digital and walking from home, that's been a perfect, you know, gift
to give out or way to engage.
You know, I saw Facebook two weeks ago said they're going to launch super, which is kind
of their version of it.
But I think that the cameo team is so focused on their niche, that they're going to do great.
And I think it's also great for creators and celebrities, because there's a number one
guy was the guy from the office, it wasn't the main actor, Brian, you know, whoever
it was.
So he made over a million dollars, he wasn't the lead character, but a lot of celebrities
do have communities and passion behind them.
And you know, like I mentioned earlier, going wide is one thing, but going deep is what
social stars can do.
So I think when you go deep, people are going to be willing to pay 50 100 200 hours for
a video to send to their friend from you.
So I think it's a great model, and I think their focus is great.
And they built a brand.
I think that's why brand matters so much, you know, famous birthdays.
If you're not on our users or in the industry, you might not know.
But if you're a user, you know, like when celebrities say boost me on famous birthdays
or I'm on famous birthdays, I used to be like, Oh, I wish they posted a link on that tweet.
Now I don't care.
I think it's actually better that they don't sometimes, because everyone comments, everyone
just knows it's more organic.
And people know the brand.
So that's what Cameo has done for what they do, is they've built a brand that when you
hear it, you know what it is.
And they've also focused and they have a good UX.
And you know, they are trying to extend, they've raised a lot of money.
So they're extending in different areas, but it's all endemic to their main model.
So I think it's a great company.
And I just think it's a really, really fun business.
I mean, it's in your space.
And I want to talk about some of these other ideas that you could be doing that you're
not doing.
You could arguably be doing Cameo, you have all these celebs on your platform.
I think it's fascinating to me because a lot of the ideas you could be doing would be very
hard for me to say no to.
They just seem like too much fun or too promising.
So you mentioned news, merchandise, influencer marketing, selling ads, you could have done
any of that kind of stuff.
Yep.
Let's talk about news.
News is a huge one.
People in my opinion really sleep on news.
It has kind of like a bad rap in the tech industry, because everyone's always talked
about how blogosphere has really killed news.
It hasn't.
The biggest media companies in the world are all reporting news.
They have way more traffic than pretty much any blog or any individual creator.
They're crushing it.
And they've sort of proven that you can scale news by basically hiring a team of journalists.
You're going to put out a ridiculous amount of content that's always fresh.
And it's probably more viral than any other kind of content.
Your whole platform is all about basically these little celebrities.
Some cases, in some cases, really huge celebrities who have tons of stuff going on.
And you even have like these rankings, you get like your trending section, you're saying
like, okay, here are the people who are like recently blown up, which isn't in a way, is
in a way kind of like news.
Why not just go for news?
Why not augment that with actual content, hire some journalists, allow you just to update
you know, events, etc.
Because it's just something super fascinating about about news that keeps people coming
back.
We've thought about it.
Never say never, but it's definitely not something we're considering.
And I think it's good to look at it from a lens of that decision versus something there's
always an opportunity cost.
So if we were doing news, we might not be doing famous birthdays in German, which I'm
excited about.
But in terms of news, there's multiple reasons.
One being, you know, news isn't evergreen, the beauty of famous birthdays is that on
Christmas, if no one's working, the platforms gonna be just as grow as it was a week before.
Whereas with news, you need to have that every day.
Also, I think for Gen Z, which is where we're growing a lot, they get their news on social
platforms.
That's already solved.
But I also think maybe one of the main points, just our brand, you know, like, we're agnostic,
we're Wikipedia, we're fact based, we're not opinion based.
And celebrities emote and share their famous birthdays profile and love getting on there.
Sometimes in news, you have to kind of write stories that aren't as favorable to somebody.
So you know, so that can have that's another example.
If you don't if you don't focus, then you could end up hurting the main business.
So I think with news, we may end up writing articles that an influencer who used to brag
about their famous birthdays profile might not.
So just a variety of I think also if we did news, like I mentioned, we wouldn't be focused
on the ball.
Like I mentioned, our internal search engine is missed 90,000 times a day.
And they're not searching for news, they're searching for new tick tockers, a new Netflix
show, a Twitch streamer, and they want to learn more about them.
And that streamer might have 500,000 followers, or that Disney Plus show might be really popular.
So that's serving the 30 million users we already have to make what we're doing better.
And if we started to do something else, I don't think we'd be able to do that as well.
What happens when you get to the end of like all of your goals, let's say you, your search
engine is legit, it's to the point where, you know, fewer than 1% of searches are missed,
you've got an amazing system in place for, you know, when you are missing searches, you
get a bio page created like almost instantaneously, you're in every language known to man.
And you're at the point where you're like, you know, your site's growing, and it's growing
organically, there's like some, you know, magic bullet, you can shoot to make you grow
much faster.
What do you do?
You know, do you rest on your laurels?
Do you innovate and try to do some move into some sort of different pond?
You know, I think 15% of all Google searches have never been searched before.
So I just don't see that happening, frankly.
The ball is always going to be moving.
And we're our job is to make sure that we're on top of it, to, you know, give users what
they want.
So I don't think Wikipedia needs to continue to produce more content and help their users
for what they want.
And so we're famous birthdays, you know, I'm still passionate about it.
And like I said, I, I did not think the site would get this big.
And it did.
So I feel, you know, very motivated to make sure I'm doubling down to make it, you know,
as best as it can be.
So I can't talk about in five years, you know, who knows, but in March will be our ninth
year birthday, and I'm not slowing down.
You know, I think that we're about to launch our fourth language in February, there's a
lot of more languages.
And you know, the last thing I'll say is the beauty of the internal searches, there's always
new stuff.
Right now, people are doing these TikTok collab houses, people are searching that.
So people want to learn more about that.
So we can serve that user, you know, Disney Plus wasn't around, but now people want to
know about Disney Plus exclusive movies.
So there's always going to be more searches that we can answer.
And to me, that's exciting.
Yeah, I love that.
It's so cool the comparison to Wikipedia, because you're 100% right, like they are kind
of like an institution, and nobody's asking, how is Wikipedia going to change, you know,
when is Wikipedia going to add stories, like Twitter, where's Wikipedia stories, like it's
not even a question.
It's like, no, this is what Wikipedia does.
It's this very useful tool and resource that does one particular thing really well.
And like, they don't ever have to change what they do, they could just keep doing that.
It's funny, I actually spoke, I graduated University of Pittsburgh, and I, I spoke on
zoom to 30 entrepreneur students a month ago, which was great.
I told the story answered questions, I really enjoyed it.
And one question was, what mistakes have you made?
And I'm sure I've made many mistakes.
But obviously, the platforms had a lot of success.
And what my answer was, was interesting.
You know, these other ideas that we've talked about news, merch, influencer marketing, selling
ads, I've probably spent 10% of my time just learning about it or considering it or starting
to do it.
And we never did.
So even though I've been so focused, the mistake I gave was that 10% of time.
Because that, that was me looking into other stuff where I could have been focused on the
main platform.
So you know, focus has helped us so much today, and I'm very focused, but I wish I would have
even been more.
You know, because that's that that's helped us get to where we are.
Well, the good thing about being so insanely focused on one thing is that it's really hard
for somebody to catch up to you.
Like let's say you do 12 different things.
You know, you add stories, you add user accounts, you add merch, etc.
Pretty soon, and I'm sure you probably already have copycat platforms out there, but pretty
soon like one of your copycat platforms is going to catch up to you on the main thing
that provides your value.
But if you focus sort of maniacally on that one thing, yeah, maybe you're not doing 15
other things.
But your traffic is so huge.
And just run so far in your one lane, that I have to imagine it's super discouraging
for anyone who's trying to catch up to you.
Like you're not getting distracted and doing stuff to let them catch up.
Exactly.
And I feel like software around like very, very unique things related to exactly what
we do.
You know, Miss Search is one of them, we've built so much technology around, you know,
how to analyze that, or in terms of different things we notice about celebrities on our
platform, you know, we have a pencil on every page, we get 1000 submissions a day of users
submitting updates, or potential errors or corrections.
And we manually review all of those.
So yeah, to your point, by being so focused, you know, and doing it for so long, also,
it's not just that focus that we've done it for so long, you know, we've had this focus
for nine years now.
So it does make me feel more comfortable to I'm not not sharing our story because I'm
concerned someone else is going to go do it.
Yeah, there's a I think a lot about platforms, and the people who are creating the platforms
and also the people who are sort of competing to be the best, you know, like if you are
a creator on YouTube, if you're trying to grow your Twitter account, if you're trying
to grow your Twitch account, you're trying to grow your Etsy account, it's really tough
because these platforms sort of force you into competition with everybody else, you
know, it's very difficult to differentiate yourself, because like, ultimately, like your
Patreon page is going to look very similar to everybody else's Patreon page, you know,
like if you're going to be the best gamer, you know, your game and Twitch, like, you're
kind of locked into zero sum competition where only a few people can be on the top page of
this game and Twitch.
But if you don't know what you're doing, you're kind of owning the platform, you know, I hesitate
to call famous birthdays a platform because it's not really in the user accounts, you're
sort of like creating something where you can differentiate and be completely different
than everybody else.
I think that's the power that every indie hacker has who's able to create their own
website and not sort of compete for status or attention or eyeballs on any of these platforms,
like you're not locked into enter like eternal competition.
And then you've gone like almost a step further, where because you refuse to play the same
games that all these other big platform esque websites are playing, you're not even in competition
with them.
None of them are trying to do what you're trying to do, you're not trying to do what
they're trying to do.
You're just your own sort of unique thing.
And I think there's a certain piece and calm and being so focused and obviously, it's led
to pretty outsized results.
I think you're pretty good case study of what you can achieve when you consistently say
no to almost everything, and you just maniacally focus on one single thing.
I think another good example, you know, I see websites or brands or even individuals
have seven social networks, follow me on LinkedIn, on Pinterest, on Instagram, on Twitter or
Twitch.
It's like we only had Twitter for several years.
And once we got to a few hundred thousand followers, then we switch somewhere else.
So I think even having focused on one social platform is a good idea.
It doesn't make sense to have six social channels in your footer that just get random updates
every now and then, versus just having one which you really put great content on.
So that way, those users will get a good experience there.
I mean, you didn't even just like only focus on one social network or one sort of niche,
but you focus on one particular fact of all the facts, which is birthdays.
It's called...
It's literally in your name, famous birthdays.
Your homepage is today's birthdays.
And yeah, you do have a page for almost everybody, but you're primarily focusing on the birthday.
What's the deal with that?
Name and only on birthdays, is it literally because that's the name of the domain you
bought?
Birthdays, it's a fun theme.
We're famous.
Now, look, if you look at Wikipedia on the homepage, since we're not in the news business,
it's hard to have fresh content on the homepage, but birthdays is a light, fun way to have
new content on the homepage.
Birthdays is good for social.
So it's been a good theme for us to help try to get some real time engagement.
But it's definitely just one fact.
It happens to be one of the most relevant facts people care about, but it's one of a
hundred facts that we might have on a profile.
So it's just our theme and it's fun, but we're not a birthday site.
And I think that outside of our niche, people might think that we're just a birthday site,
which is okay.
But the users that love us, they think of us like they might think of a Wikipedia.
And a celebrity says, boost me on famous birthdays, they don't need to respond with a link.
Everybody knows what they mean.
So it's just part of our brand and our culture.
And it's a fun theme, but it's not our focus.
Yeah, I'm thinking about some of the different ways that you are part of the culture.
And this boost button is super fascinating because in a way, one could argue that the
most accurate thing you could do is go scrape Twitch or TikTok or something and try to programmatically
find out who the best people are and have that be the core of your rankings.
But if you do that, then there's no real reason for anyone to come boost someone on your site.
Of course.
It removes you from relevancy.
So instead, you create your own ranking system, which is based on people coming to your website,
clicking this little pink button, which you can do without an account.
Anybody can do this.
And now social media stars have a massive incentive.
If they want to be at the top of famous birthdays, where they're going to get a lot of traffic
to tell their fans basically to go check you out.
Yeah.
And there's other facts.
Yeah.
We have searches and like, you know, in terms of looking at relevance, that's important
too because we don't look as a bootstrap founder, you have to fight, you have to, you know,
we've had to fight for a lot of stuff, whether it be getting press or getting verified on
a social platform or getting into an ad network.
And another way is we don't have any third party APIs.
So we don't have access to Instagram or Twitter or TikTok, third party API, which actually
helps us because our rankings are based on agnostic user behavior on our platform.
So somebody might be good on TikTok and getting engagement, but they might not have the fandom.
Or there might be somebody who's not even on social media, but is in some new Netflix
show that people really care about.
So our rankings are amazing in that it's totally dependent on the 30 million users.
And we've seen people rank high on our site that maybe you're on a new social network
that no one's heard of that's growing now, or maybe is in some band that happens to now
be opening up for some other, other, you know, bigger band.
So we're very agnostic.
And we don't have that concern of, oh, I hope TikTok doesn't shut us off, you know, because
our rankings are based on our own activity, which is very liberating and allows us to
move fast.
So if there's a new social network that pops up, our users are going to tell us about it.
We don't have to go do biz dev with that network.
Think about the speed of your growth, you've been talking about growing 3% a month for
nine years.
You're at the point now where you're probably making a substantial amount of money, you've
got 20, 30 employees, you're profitable, you're not worrying about what your next meal is
going to come from.
Do you think about growing faster?
Have you ever thought about raising money, doing something to sort of accelerate how
fast you grow?
Or do you want to stay bootstrapper forever?
I want to grow healthy, you know, I want to make sure that we're profitable.
And that we don't lose track of what users know us for.
And we've been able to launch in different languages, you know, within our model.
So yeah, I don't think that, you know, and I think that we could go more of a Wikipedia
route where anybody can profile themselves, which might make it grow faster, because then
we'll have pages for me and you even.
But yeah, I don't, I don't have the motivation to try to put any more lighter fluid or to
inflate it because we do have significant scale.
I mean, like, we're like probably top 900 site in the US, that's all organic.
You know, I wish some of these similar webs or comm scores were ranked sites by organic.
Because if they were, I think we might be top 100, probably definitely top 250.
So we do have tremendous scale.
And I think, you know, we're continuing to grow.
So there's not a burning desire for me to do something that money having more money
would solve.
You know, and on the other side, having more money might end up making me not have the
business be profitable, or maybe focusing more on the enterprise value of having like
a pro version or doing something that's not within our core.
This is almost like a very philosophical sort of question I'm trying to get at the heart
of here, which is, you know, what do you want out of life, right?
Like, you don't want fame, you already have freedom, I mean, it seems like you're an incredibly
free guy.
I assume that like your average day, no one's really telling you what to do.
And maybe every now and you got to put out fires, but like, probably not because you've
got, you know, a big enough team where people probably experts at everything, probably have
enough money.
You've got, you know, maybe not like traditional power, but you've got influence in a space
where people actually see you as part of the culture for a lot of these Gen Z influencers
and video stars.
What do you want besides that?
You know, why do you want your platform to be big?
Why do you want to do any of this?
I'd say two things.
One is it's fun.
I love user experience.
I love the web.
It's been awesome to grow an audience this big.
Like I mentioned, you know, I would love to be in that TechCrunch article that Reddit,
Wikipedia and famous birthdays are down, which is a big goal.
But that's being a pillar of the web.
So I'm still enjoying it.
And I'm passionate about user.
I don't care necessarily about the celebrity aspect, as much as I do about the UX.
And it's still a good fun challenge to not other languages have been a great challenge.
I'd never done that before.
I'm excited to go into German and see what the rankings are in that language and so forth.
I think the other thing is I do have a chip on my shoulder.
Like I think when you bootstrap, you get, you know, laugh that I remember I first went
to VidCon.
People laughed at famous birthdays.
And I never take it personal and I never hold a grudge, but it's motivating like I've we've
been denied.
Like I'm very humbled and thankful that you got me on the podcast because it's you know,
it's hard, you know, it's hard to get recognition and notoriety.
And that motivates me.
One funny story is I remember I went to a conference and I met an executive I linked
in him and then I went to a South by Southwest and I saw that person was going there.
So I said we should meet up and we scheduled like a two o'clock time to meet.
And I at that time I'd have any money.
I was staying like an hour outside of Austin at a motel.
And I drove in through the rain to go meet this individual.
And they never showed up for the meeting.
And then at 205, I got a text message that said, Hey, I had to do something.
If you see me on the street, feel free to say hi.
And I actually taped that person's business card to my wall in my office just to motivate
me.
And the funny thing is about a year ago, that person lost their job guy intro to me and
interviewed to help work at our company.
Wow.
And I of course didn't mention it.
And he was totally respectful and very smart and I didn't, you know, it wasn't a fit because
I don't, I don't really hired like executives like that.
So I didn't hire the person because of what happened or not.
But my point is that I think that as an entrepreneur, I still want more recognition for our platform.
And some people still do think it's a joke.
And I still get denied for certain things that I want to.
So that pushes me to keep going.
And so that's kind of when I combine that with the fun, I'm still very motivated to
go and to see if we can get the 50 million users or maybe 100 million users.
That's a good challenge.
So we'll see.
Also, I think you're...
I would bet on you getting there.
And I think most people listening to this would bet on you getting there too.
Based on your experiences, these nine years in the trenches running famous birthdays,
what would be your advice to a fledgling anti-hacker who's just getting started?
Maybe they've got an idea.
Maybe they don't.
What do you think they can take away from your learnings and experiences?
Say a few things.
One is only do one thing.
If an entrepreneur says, oh, we're going to do this, I'm going to do that, I'm going to
do that, I'm going to do that.
Be very, very narrow minded.
I'm going to have a blog that talks about the life of a door to ask driver.
Like I'm going to stick about that.
So just be very narrow and don't take the temptation to extend into other areas.
A, B is, it's very hard because you have to be very committed and passionate because now
things are easier for us in famous birthdays, but I had to work on it for two, three, four
years before things started happening that are much easier now.
So it takes time to break down walls and to have things open up.
So I would say you really have to be committed and passionate about it to stick with it.
Even some YouTubers have said, I did a video every day since 2014 and it took me till 2019
so I got a million views.
Now I have a billion views.
I think that's similar with a lot of different entrepreneurs.
It really takes time and blood, sweat and tears to really build that.
And then I think the third thing is focus on one niche within what you do.
So as I mentioned earlier in the podcast, there are so many tools that are available
for an entrepreneur.
So don't reinvent the wheel.
Take advantage of all of the third party tools and support that are out there.
So that way you can continue to get leverage on what your unique thing is.
Just focus on your core within your niche and leverage all these amazing tools that
are there for entrepreneurs to help them.
And one last tip I think is good to mention is about investing in technology.
I did mention to use third party tools and so forth and that's good.
But anytime you can also build your own technology for the long term, we'll pay dividends.
I think a lot of times technology seems too difficult to do but it can be for little things.
It's all about technology helps for the long term, whether it be internal processes you
have or things you're doing repetitively, it's short term pain for long term gain.
And I remember when Amazon is one of the vendors we use and I remember they had us sign a 1099
and we probably have 15 vendors and every time they emailed us a 1099 we have to scan
it, print it out, sign it, send it to our partner manager.
But Amazon had a little tool where it was very automated.
I didn't have to interact with anybody.
We just basically did like an e-cig and uploaded our EIN number and submitted it.
And that's just such a minor thing that maybe saved me two minutes and it probably saved
me our Amazon partner manager two minutes.
So that's the type of technology that isn't exciting per se.
But if over and over in the long term, that's going to pay dividends.
So I think that's a good way to think about technology.
It's not so much we need to send someone to the moon or do something so exciting.
It's how can we leverage technology to make our operation better for the future, even
if it's doing a lot of work for something that only has a minimal benefit over time,
those minimal benefits will add up.
I love that point.
And it's something that's helped me with NdHackers too.
And it's something you can only take advantage of if you're in it for the long haul.
If you're just like kind of running your project for like a month or something and then you
give up and quit, like you're not going to really reap the rewards of investing.
But with NdHackers, for example, like I spent I think nine days to build kind of a custom
forum from scratch.
And at the time I was like, well, it's just the right thing to do.
And I'm like, well, if I work on this for a long time, like this forum is going to grow
and kind of snowball into something big, and it was completely worth doing.
So in your case as well, like you've been running famous birthdays for like, what, nine,
10 years.
The fact that you've invested in all these internal tools, the fact that you have especially
your search engine, where you can see exactly what people are searching for and what they're
missing.
Like, I'm sure you've built a ton of tooling around that.
And maybe it was a huge upfront investment, but now it's like paying dividends and it's
what kind of enabled you to pivot and kind of stay relevant to what people actually want
to search for today.
Yeah.
And I think to that point, too, I think it's also the reason why focus is so important.
Because if you're always changing what you do, and if you're, you know, you're trying
to go in different directions, those internal tools and processes won't be leveraged.
But if you have the discipline to scale one vision, then you know, in three or four years,
this is still going to be the vision, and then you'll get the dividends from that technology.
So I do think that to build technology and processes that have ROI, you have to be willing
to stick to something for the long term.
Love it.
Well, listen, Evan, we are out of time, but thanks a lot for coming on.
Thank you, Courtney.
I think it's amazing how passionate you are to help entrepreneurs and, you know, like
just finding out insights that can help them.
So I almost wish I would have had your you went out in 2014.
So you know, I think it's really amazing what you do for entrepreneurs.
I mean, you're doing all the work here.
I'm just asking the questions.
Do you want to let listeners know where they can go to learn more about, you know, what
you're up to, what you're tweeting about, what you're saying, and what you're sharing
online?
Evan underscore Britain on Twitter.
Not very active, but sometimes I'll share podcasts I'm interested in or some random
things I notice.
Obviously, you can go on famous birthdays, you know, it's an easy to use platform.
I do.
I know while we are popular in Gen Z, the platform is starting to grow in other demos.
So hopefully, if you utilize it, it'll be useful for you.
All right.
Thanks again, Evan.
I enjoyed it.
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.
I really appreciate your support.
And I read pretty much all the reviews you leave over there.
Thank you so much for listening.
And as always, I will see you next time.