Jeff Meyerson, welcome to the Indie Hackers Podcast.
Thank you, Cortland.
You are a lot of things, Jeff.
You're a musician.
You've released half a dozen albums.
You are a software engineer.
You're the primary reason why the Indie Hackers Podcast exists.
You convinced me to start this thing way back in 2016.
Most significantly, you're the host of the Software Engineering Daily Podcast,
which is one of my favorite shows.
It's also quite a remarkable business.
I think you're doing something like 60 grand in revenue per month
just from advertising in your podcast.
Is that right?
Something like that, yeah.
Very cool.
I would also describe you as a podcaster's podcaster.
Most of the podcasters that I know, somewhat surprisingly,
don't listen to a lot of podcasts.
I probably spend three hours a week on a good week listening to podcasts.
There's many weeks where I listen to zero hours of podcasts.
You, on the other hand, are a very different creature.
I've heard you complain more than once that you will literally run out of podcasts
to listen to.
You'll exhaust everything on your playlist, which is mind-blowing to me.
How do you find the time to listen to that many podcasts?
Also, how would you describe the benefits?
How have you changed as a result of being such an avid podcast listener?
Well, we have norms around how many in-person conversations we need to be having
on a regular basis.
If you throw out some of those norms and spend more of your time on the podcasts
that are available, then you can consume a lot more of them.
Now, there's obviously some downsides to that,
but that's pretty much been the trade-off that I've been making for the last four,
six, maybe eight years, is I just listen to a ton of podcasts
because the conversations tend to be more rewarding
than the average in-person conversation for me.
Yeah, a podcast is basically like being sort of a fly on the wall
of some other people talking, which is super cool
because you can listen to almost anyone.
You can listen to basically world leaders, experts in their fields,
discuss topics as if nobody else is listening.
But the downside is that you don't get to really interact.
There might be times where you want to jump in and ask questions.
Does that frustrate you at all, or do you feel like you're missing something
by trading a lot of these in-person conversations for podcasts?
That doesn't frustrate me.
I really like just listening.
What's not good is that the amount of time I spend listening
to podcasts relative to in-person conversations,
I think at times has had a hobbling effect
on how good I am at normal social interaction.
That's funny you say that as a podcast host,
because one of the things that I first noticed
after you convinced me to start a podcast
was that the way I host the podcast affects my in-person conversations.
So I would start asking people questions
in the same way I ask questions on a podcast,
and at first I was a little self-conscious about it.
I would say something and I would be like,
did that just come out of my mouth?
It sounds like such an interviewer question.
But people really appreciate it when you ask them
interesting, unusual, deep questions.
People don't necessarily want to talk about the weather all the time.
For me, I would say being a podcast has made me a little bit better socially,
just because I have more to talk about and also better at asking questions.
To a point though, right?
Because if you take it too far,
then people are like, can you stop psychoanalyzing me please?
Can we just order something on the menu now?
Can you stop asking me about my childhood fears?
Yeah, you're right.
There's definitely an extreme limit that you can go beyond.
One of the interesting things about podcasts
is both you and I probably know a lot of people who have started podcasts,
and the vast majority of the people that I know who have started podcasts
have ended up quitting in the first three or four episodes.
They just don't stick with it.
You probably know even more because you seem to be somewhat of a podcast evangelist.
You're the reason why I started this podcast, for example.
Why do you think it is that so many people who start podcasts end up quitting early,
and what are some things that they can do to have more longevity?
I think this is just more of a general question around persistence.
What are the things in your life that you're going to be persistent about?
You want to choose some number of things that you are going to be persistent about,
and it's totally fine to start things that you choose not to persist on,
and also to have certain things that your periodicity of persistence
is going to be once every month or once every six months.
Maybe you just release a podcast whenever you feel like it, whenever you have an excuse to.
I think it's like people try podcasts.
Maybe they're not natural at it.
It takes them getting used to, they have a bad experience with the first couple,
and then they drop it.
The same thing happens with blogging.
People start a blog or a Twitter account,
and then they just don't keep up with it.
It falls by the wayside like any kind of project.
You have how many episodes of Software Engineering Daily now?
About 1,100.
1,100. That's some pretty amazing persistence.
I'm only at 115 or so with the Antiochus podcast.
What would you say are some of the things that have allowed you to stick with it?
I really like it.
I genuinely enjoy these conversations.
They're a great way for me to learn personally.
It's a business that works for me,
and I'm very desperately holding on to this business.
It's kind of like I'm very paranoid about the business falling apart.
I'm quite rigorous in adhering to the necessary deliverables to keep the business alive.
Tell us a little bit about the show.
It's called Software Engineering Daily.
You release a new episode on Mondays through Fridays.
You're releasing these at a relentless pace.
What do you talk about on the show?
The topics of conversation are mostly deeply technical software subjects.
That's kind of the moat of the podcast.
It was started based on essentially a direct clone of Software Engineering Radio,
which is a podcast I was a volunteer for for three years.
I got the blessing of Software Engineering Radio.
I remain very good friends.
The editor of Software Engineering Radio, Robert Blumen, has been a mentor of mine.
The structure is just a two-person interview format.
It's the classic podcast interview format,
except the subjects are things like databases, JavaScript frameworks, distributed systems,
and then subjects that are more sociological or cultural in nature or management,
soft skills kinds of things, business-related things,
things that are less demanding of a technical background.
I would say I probably try to do one in four shows.
It is less technically demanding for the listener,
but the vast majority of shows kind of require a software engineering background.
Yeah, I came across a tweet the other day and it was pretty interesting.
It said something about how the people to follow used to be the educators who would teach in public,
but now in the age of podcasts, the people to follow are those who learn in public.
That will be you on your show talking to these software experts,
deep-diving into these topics that you didn't know very much about beforehand,
and you're learning from your guest in public,
but also people who are listening in are learning.
The justification for why this is sort of a better way to learn
is we live in an age where people are so specialized
that there's no one person who can sort of teach everything you need to know.
So you're either going to constantly be finding a bunch of teachers
or you can find somebody who sort of matches up to your learning style
and just follow along with them as they learn.
So I wonder how you think about this.
Where do you see your role in both learning on your podcast and in teaching others?
So the thing is I grew up not doing very well in school,
and I've always been a rabid learner,
and I've always liked learning about a wide variety of things.
And so when I found the podcast niche, what was originally a niche,
now it's a bigger, obviously, medium of communications,
but I really found that it suited my learning habit.
And over time, as I've started podcasts and talked to more people about podcasting,
I've learned that there's a lot of people who learn quite effectively from podcasts.
And it's kind of debatable.
How much are you actually retaining?
What are you learning?
Are you learning about the actual subject of the podcast?
Are you learning about government or geopolitics or software engineering?
Or are you really learning how to have a conversation with other people?
Whichever of those you're actually learning,
I do think that there is something material that people are taking away from these podcasts.
I certainly feel like I gather information,
whether I'm listening to a podcast or if I'm hosting the podcast,
and I feel it's really valuable to me.
So it's a learning process that certainly works much better for me
than the sitting in front of a lecturer who's the authority on something medium of learning.
You had an episode of your podcast recently with Tyler Cohen.
He is an internationally recognized economist, but he's also a generalist.
He's got his own podcast.
He brings on tons of guests from a diverse set of backgrounds and fields
and just talks to them about pretty much everything.
And the two of you had an interesting exchange
where you discussed sort of the ideal format for a podcast.
And Tyler comes down hard on the side of being very anti-narrative.
He thinks that a lot of people just listen to podcasts because they're soothing
and because it's just, I don't know, it just feels good to sort of hear one event
after the next in chronological order.
We like stories.
But for his podcast, he just throws all of that out the window
and he's just optimizing for the number of insights per minute.
So he will rapid-fire interesting questions at his guests
that also have interesting answers with no real regard for story or narrative
or conversational flow.
And it can be a little bit jarring, but he's just optimizing for being insightful.
I wonder how you think about this with your show, Jeff.
What are your goals with each episode?
And what do you want your listeners to come away with?
Well, first of all, I'm not sure how much I believe him.
Like some of the very strong opinions that he states,
I mean, that's something he's owned up to, that he takes a very strong opinion
and sometimes it's not actually the measure of subtlety
that he would believe if you pressed him,
which is in and of itself a very useful narrative device,
a very useful rhetorical device.
You know, it varies from show to show,
and actually a lot of it depends on who the guest is.
So when I'm preparing for a show, I'm listening to podcasts,
interviews with that person.
I'm reading their blog posts.
I'm getting a feeling for who they are
and what their conversational cadence is.
And I want to modulate my conversational cadence
to something that's going to fit well with theirs.
So like Tyler, I know that he is comfortable with that format
of the rapid fire, jump from topic to topic,
very few filler words, that kind of thing.
So in his case, that's going to be,
I'm going to try to adopt that style,
and I'm going to try to, you know, first of all,
because I know he will respect that kind of style.
Second of all, because I know it will be amenable
to a good conversation.
But yeah, I mean, you know, if I'm having a conversation
with somebody else, I may adopt a different style.
There may be more filler words.
And other times I may just like totally experiment with a style.
Like if I've been listening to conversations with Tyler a lot,
I may just adopt his style for a random guest
about distributed databases,
which might go really, really well.
So I actually don't have like super strong opinions about format,
and I like mixing up the different formats.
Yeah, I noticed that when you were interviewing Tyler,
you adopted his style.
So you were sort of rapid firing questions at him,
and he was indulging you, which was cool to hear.
It was like listening to an episode of his show,
but with him as the guest instead of the host.
I think about this a lot with regards to the Andy Hackers podcast as well.
How much do I need to change up my questions and my style
depending on who I'm talking to?
It's kind of like sparring.
Yeah, I think that's accurate.
You have to match up what you're doing to what your guest is doing.
And I think when I first started,
I didn't really think about it in those terms.
I just kind of asked the same questions to everybody,
and I would get wildly different results,
sometimes good, sometimes bad, and I would wonder why.
But nowadays I'll change it up.
For example, if I'm talking to somebody whose business has had a lot of longevity,
if I'm talking to a Peltier or Natalie Nagel or Jason Fried,
I'll try to stick to higher level philosophical questions
because that's where their mind is at.
I'm reflecting on the entire 20-year history of their business.
If I ask them how their business has gone,
I'm basically asking them how their life has gone.
If I ask them about a mistake they made,
they think about a dozen mistakes.
They don't really think about the tactical realities of one specific situation.
They just reflect on the entire theme of making mistakes
and what it's like to make mistakes
and how important those are in the greater scheme of things.
They answer very differently.
Versus if I'm talking to somebody like you,
you're a little bit newer to your business.
You're a lot more tactical.
The short term matters a lot more to you.
Also, I know that if you keep learning at the rate that you have been learning,
then you're going to be in a very different place
by the time you're 40 than you are now.
I'll ask you a totally different set of questions.
I'm right there with you.
There's a lot of different ways to interview different people.
I'm still figuring it all out as a podcast host.
It's totally greenfield.
Very greenfield opportunity.
It's a lot of fun experimenting with it.
Yeah, it's very unusual and I think a lot of fun
to be so deliberate about having a conversation with somebody.
It's not something you do in your everyday life.
Let's talk about how you started Software Engineering Daily.
You mentioned earlier that you were working for another podcast
or on another show.
You had an apprenticeship of sorts.
I don't know very many people who've had apprenticeships,
so tell us about how that worked out
and how that led to you starting your own show.
It was wonderful.
I've historically been a very bad apprentice.
I'm very bad at taking direction from people,
but this was a case where I started listening
to Software Engineering Radio in college
and there was a call for hosts on one of the shows
where they said, we are looking for new hosts.
We're a volunteer-only organization.
If you want to be a podcast host, send us an email.
I sent an email and Robert Blumen gave me a shot.
I started Software Podcasting with Software Engineering Radio
and I continued doing that through my early years
as a software engineer because I started that my last year of college
and then I continued to do it my first couple years
of being in the working world.
Eventually, I just realized that there was a huge hunger
for more content than we were producing.
I also saw emails from sponsors, potential sponsors,
that were coming in.
This was a volunteer-only organization.
It wasn't accepting sponsors at the time.
We were turning away sponsors.
It just seemed like an obvious opportunity.
At the same time, I wasn't really enjoying my work
as a software engineer.
I just saw the opportunity and it was obvious to me.
It was like, okay, I should start a Software Engineering Podcast.
There's advertisers that want to advertise on it.
Let's give this a shot.
I think a lot about the operations behind your show
because you're putting out five episodes a week,
which quite frankly sounds exhausting just to hear about.
I'm struggling with just two episodes a week.
On top of that, you're funneling a lot of the revenue you make
from advertising and to these other projects and startups
that you're working on that we'll talk about a little bit later.
Have you ever thought about doing what Software Engineering Radio did
and putting out a call for host,
trying to bring on a new host to help you out
or maybe even replace you so that you're more free to work on other things?
I tried it. Here's what makes it tough.
Software Engineering Radio is a volunteer-only system.
Also, Robert is an incredibly good manager.
He's one of the best managers I've ever had.
I've been managed by him for a volunteer-only capacity.
When I've tried to bring on other people in a volunteer fashion,
first of all, it breaks the format.
People, I think, get used to hearing a host's voice.
I imagine if you tried to bring on other hosts,
you would see a drop in the listenership for those episodes.
People want to hear you as much as...
People don't like change.
I don't know if people don't like change.
I think people...
It's sort of like...
Imagine if Seinfeld just was like,
hey, Jerry is no longer with the show.
It's like the end of Season 7 and Jerry's like,
I'm moving to Hawaii and everybody's like,
wow, what are we going to do without you?
And then Jerry moves out and then the last scene
is somebody moving into Jerry's old apartment
and that becomes the protagonist for the next season.
It's like Jerry's brother, like John Seinfeld.
It would just be a disaster.
I think that's what happens sometimes when you have guest hosts,
but for Software Engineering Radio, that's always been the norm.
It's always been a volunteer show with a rotating cast of hosts.
Robert's always done an incredible job of ensuring quality
and managing the different hosts.
It's a lot of work.
It continues to be a lot of work for him.
And delegation of tasks to different podcast hosts
is something that I have not built a core competency in.
So I think it just becomes a very different show if you delegate.
Yeah.
You know, when I first started the Indie Echoes podcast,
I told myself that I was going to experiment a lot
with the first 10 to 15 episodes
precisely so that I could avoid this problem
of being locked into one particular format
and that I totally didn't do that.
It was just so much work getting the episodes out
while also working on the website and selling ads
and coding and doing all this other stuff
that it was all I could do just to get 10 episodes out the door,
let alone experiment with different formats.
So here I am today, not that experimental.
But nevertheless, I'm still trying to change things.
The Quick Chat format works.
Exactly. I've got the new Quick Chat format.
It's not that much of a departure from the regular Indie Hackers episodes,
but people seem to like it,
and maybe there'll be more change to come.
I'm curious about how you're thinking about this nowadays.
Have there been any major changes to software engineering daily
since you started?
And do you think you'll make any changes in the future
despite the fact that there might be some resistance?
When I've tinkered with the format,
I've reverted pretty quickly.
Mostly because, first of all,
the one-on-one interview format I believe still has so much depth.
I never really get tired of it.
I experiment within that format.
And the one adjustment I've been making recently
is I got the equipment to have a home studio set up now,
and I've started to do some in-person recordings
at my apartment office thing.
And that has a totally different dynamic.
I think you've done a couple in-person shows?
Yeah. I've recorded four or five in-person episodes now.
So you know it's almost so different that it's a different format.
I would say that's the only significant departure
that I've made for a longer period of time.
And I don't know, maybe this is like innovator's dilemma.
Maybe I should be experimenting more rapidly or something
or doing panel formats.
I hope you experiment, in part because you're a smart person.
So if you have more time, you're going to come up with some really cool stuff,
and then I can watch it and maybe steal some of it.
But also because I think audiences are probably more forgiving
than we give them credit for.
And of course, they might revolt at first to any unwelcome changes.
But in the long run, if it's actually good,
I think people will warm up to it.
Let's talk about this interview format that you're so in love with,
that I'm also in love with.
Specifically, I want to talk about how you prepare for an interview
on the Software Engineering Daily Podcast.
When I first got started, you gave me a few pieces of advice,
and your number one piece of advice, the one you were most adamant about,
was to prepare.
You kept telling me over and over,
if you're going to invite somebody on your show,
put in the work to prepare questions specific to that guest.
Do you remember that?
But you agree that that was like pretty important.
It's like the most important thing.
It's extremely important advice.
It's painful when I'm listening to a podcast that somebody else is on,
especially if it's a guest that I'm going to prepare some questions for.
And I hear they're being interviewed by someone who basically has no idea
who they are and didn't really put any effort at all into this interview.
So yeah, I'm right there with you.
It is the simplest advice.
I guess it's not easy for people to follow,
because I prepare like one to two pages of questions.
The general rule I've started to develop
is a page of questions per 30 minutes of interview.
How much is the page?
It's like 15, 20 questions.
Let's see.
So it's like whatever the standard Google Docs format is,
you know, I do control shift eight and make bullets.
And, you know, I cover an entire page with bullets
and maybe some headings to break up the different areas of the podcast.
And I try to have a narrative progression in mind,
which is sometimes not great because then you stick too tightly
to the narrative progression that you imagine.
You know, you have the story arc that you imagine.
And if you try to adhere to it, sometimes it's problematic.
Like, sometimes the guest is so good that, like,
they don't want to follow a story arc
and you shouldn't be following the story arc.
But, you know, you're just sticking to the tracks
that you've laid out for yourself and then it's counterproductive.
And, you know, this is why it's kind of like sparring.
It's like, you know, everybody has a plan
until they get punched in the face.
And, you know, the difference with podcasting
is you can continue with that plan,
even if you do get punched in the face.
And then it's just 60 minutes of pain
and the guest trying to go in one direction
and you trying to go in the opposite direction
and it's, you know, not pretty sometimes.
Yeah, my favorite is when you ask a guest
sort of the first question of their story arc
and they just tell you the entire story in the next five minutes.
And you're like, well, there's the interview.
Now what are we talking about?
Yes, exactly.
So, yeah, preparation.
That's like the most important thing.
And that's pretty much it, you know.
And then the preparation form, the preparation part of it
has as much depth to it as the interview itself.
Like how are you going to prepare?
What, you know, you have a fixed amount of time.
Are you going to listen to all their podcast interviews?
How many podcast interviews have they done?
Are you going to dig up the old YouTube videos that they've done?
Are you going to find their old blog posts?
Are you going to read through those?
Are you going to quote them?
You know, like what do you want to do?
How much time do you want to spend talking?
How much time do you want to give them?
Do you want to ask short questions?
Do you want to ask long questions?
You know, do you want to do the, you know,
say a statement and wait for their response kind of thing?
Or do you think they're going to be the kind of person
that's just going to wait for you to ask something
of a question mark at the end of it?
Like there's so many different avenues to be explored.
So yeah, preparation is a kind of,
you can begin to look forward to it
if you get in the right frame of mind.
You said in the past that as a podcaster,
you don't need to have the right answer,
but you do need to have good questions.
What goes into crafting a good question?
Empathy.
What kind of question does this person want to answer?
And can you ask a question that is brief and concise,
but also not a question that they've been asked before?
As you're preparing for the interview,
can you keep the totality of every question
that they have been asked in prior interviews,
in prior YouTube videos?
Can you keep the totality of all the information
that they have explored in blog posts
in your head at the same time?
And can you constantly, like,
resift and reformat that information
that they've said in the past
and use that to synthesize your questions?
I think that's what's really important.
Man, I can identify so much
with that short-term working memory thing
where you're just trying to keep a lot of information
in your head as you have a conversation with somebody.
It's almost like coding.
When you're writing code, you're not only writing code,
but you're remembering what files you have open.
You're remembering what functions you're working on.
You're remembering what's in your terminal.
You're remembering what's on your clipboard
that you're about to paste.
When you're interviewing someone on a podcast,
you're remembering the other conversations they've had.
You're remembering the conversation
that you've had up to this point
and the questions you've asked
and the answers they've given.
You're trying to remember the next question
that you're going to ask
and what you can do to tie the different themes together.
Man, is it exhausting to do that at the same time
you're trying to have a conversation
and listen to somebody.
I am basically worthless for the rest of the day
after recording a podcast episode.
Yeah, I can definitely relate to that.
One thing you mentioned is that
when you're preparing for an episode,
you'll listen to other podcasts that the guest has been on
in an effort to make sure
that you can ask the guests unique questions
that they've never been asked before.
I found myself pulled in the same direction
almost to such a degree
where I don't want to listen to other podcasts
because then I end up defining my own shows,
my own set of questions based on those other shows
because I'm so obsessed with not being repetitive.
Do you feel the same thing?
Do you feel like if you listen to another episode
that one of your guests has been on
that you have to make yours completely distinct?
Yes.
I think it's really important to have content
that's extremely distinct from the other interviews
that are out there,
especially because if this is a person
that's been interviewed a number of times before,
this is probably one of these popular people
who has spoken a lot, has been interviewed a lot,
and the thing about these kinds of people is
there are going to be people in your audience
who are going to be going through a phase
of listening to all the DHH podcasts that are out there.
If you want to be on that playlist
and you want to be a good track on that playlist,
you're going to have to be something different.
You can't just ask DHH,
so why doesn't Rayl scale
or why don't people think Rayl scales?
He's been asked that 50 times.
He may give a different answer this time.
That may be good, but probably not.
One of the additional advantages that I think helps
with asking unique questions to guests
is that you kind of throw them off their game a little bit,
especially if they're somebody who's super popular
if they're doing the podcast circuit,
if they've been on 10 different episodes this year.
By this point, they probably have somewhat rehearsed answers
to some of the questions that they've been asked
over and over again,
where they just end up reciting the questions from memory,
which is very boring for them.
It's boring for you.
It's boring for audiences,
but if you ask somebody a question,
especially right out of the gate,
that they've never heard before,
then it kind of forces them to wake up,
to be on their toes,
to be a little bit more engaged and thoughtful,
which is what you want out of a guest.
I've also heard of a few tips and tricks.
I'm always looking for different ways
to make questions more interesting.
One of them I got from a friend who pointed out
that if you combine any two random concepts,
you're very likely to get something
that no one's ever heard before,
because that's just how the math behind combinations work.
So, for example, if I were to ask you,
hey, Jeff, I know you're a fan of Warren Buffett
and Charlie Munger.
Charlie Munger recently gave some advice
that the fundamental algorithm of business and in life
is to find what works and keep doing it,
to just repeat what works.
How do you think about that
in the context of you growing your podcast, Jeff?
Well, in one sense,
that's a question you've gotten a lot of times.
How do you grow your podcast?
But in another sense,
since I've combined it with this other thing,
it's unique,
and it's going to force you
to give a more thoughtful, original answer.
So I'm curious about how you think about this.
Do you have any tricks?
Do you have any techniques
for coming up with interesting questions,
whether you're talking to guests
who have already answered
all these questions a thousand times?
I think that's a great one.
I think if you do it too much,
it can be contrived if you take it too far.
But generally speaking, I think it's wonderful.
There are a number of patterns that you can follow.
For example, if you find yourself
interviewing somebody about distributed databases,
there are questions you can ask every guest
who you're interviewing about a distributed database.
For example, what happens during a read to this database?
What happens during a write to this database?
And if it's a distributed database,
a lot is going on.
If you're writing to a distributed database,
there's all these different things,
and what happens if there's lock contention,
or is this master list?
These details are pretty interesting.
So for your podcast,
there's probably,
what is your marketing strategy?
What does your sales funnel look like?
What were the bottlenecks that you developed
in your hiring process?
Something like that.
Those kinds of questions are almost boilerplate things.
They fill in a lot of time.
You can have these lists of templated questions
that fit into most of your podcasts.
I think you can take that to the extreme
and be like Harry Stebbings and have the lightning round
and reuse your questions from interview to interview
and be very blatant and totally like he owns that.
And you can do that.
It works with some people.
So yeah, I don't know.
But as far as being unique, I think it's really important.
And I think you should never stop being paranoid about it
because that is honestly your vector
of being able to outwork people.
If it's hard to be unique,
then that means you should keep trying to do it.
So you worked at Amazon prior to starting your podcasting business.
Amazon is sort of famous for their flywheel model of growth,
which I believe when I'm not 100% sure
sort of has infiltrated every level of Amazon,
every team sort of thinks about this flywheel.
Is that right?
I would say so.
So can you explain to us your perspective
on how the flywheel works, whether or not it's a good model,
and how, if at all, you've applied it to your business?
Yeah, the idea of the flywheel is that you have a process
of how your business works almost like a perpetual motion machine.
And there are inputs into the business that create outputs,
and those outputs have exhaust effects
that serve as inputs back into the business
in such a way that the overall engine grows over time.
So in the case of Software Engineering Daily,
I guess a simple way of describing it would be
the listenership grows over time,
the volume of content grows over time.
The number of people who are listening to the podcast
that might think about advertising on the podcast
is implicitly growing over time
because there's more people that are listening,
which leads to more ad dollars,
and ad dollars can feed back into the business
and serve as a resource to perhaps invest in things like marketing
or invest in better microphones.
And that's a very simple way of looking at it.
I just think the flywheel is useful
because if you can't imagine the flywheel of your business,
then it's almost like, does your business grow over time?
Does it? Does it work? Does it work?
I mean, it can work.
It can be just a business that makes the same amount of money
every single year and never really grows. That's fine.
But it's probably better to have a flywheel.
Let's talk about the advertising portion of your flywheel,
which is clearly what's powering your business,
at least in terms of revenue.
How have you grown your advertising revenue,
and what are some lessons you've learned while doing that?
It's not easy right now because people still don't buy podcast ads.
I mean, some people do. Most people don't.
And so we have a lot of ways of engaging with advertisers.
We will say on the podcast, hey, we're looking for advertisers
for this season. We'll get some inbound.
I certainly do a lot of outbound, reaching out to companies
and saying, like, hey, Microsoft, you should probably
sponsor Software Engineering Daily.
And 99% of the time, they're like, no,
why on earth would I want to sponsor a podcast?
We've got billboards to buy.
You know, like, we've got swag to buy.
We've got bouncy balls with colored lights inside that, you know,
we have a budget allocated to the bouncy balls.
But podcast ads, no, not a chance.
So it's not easy.
And it's a constant struggle right now.
And I mean, that's why it's a good time to start a podcast,
especially a podcast business, because it's just not easy right now.
So one, you can fight for it.
But two, the market's growing.
So I'm seriously not being coy here.
It's just it's not easy to find advertisers.
Nevertheless, you still manage to grow your advertising revenue
with something like 700 grand a year.
How do you get to that point?
How do you, as a fledgling podcaster, as a fledgling content creator,
convince advertisers to give you your first dollar?
Email people.
Just email advertisers.
Email companies that would make sense to sponsor your podcast.
And email them time and time again.
There's no easy way of doing this.
Go to conferences.
Go talk to people.
Don't take no for an answer.
If it makes sense not to take no for an answer,
be a hard negotiator.
You're selling something that you have a surplus of.
And so you need to sell that aggressively.
And you need to believe in it also.
Like, I wouldn't sell this thing as aggressively as I do
if I didn't believe in it.
I truly believe podcast ads are a much better investment
than so many of the ways that these companies spend money on marketing.
I don't know.
I go to these conferences.
I go to a lot of software conferences.
And I start to go crazy because I just look at how these companies
are spending money on marketing.
I'm like, I am so happy I'm in this business
because they're going to realize eventually
that what they're doing is madness.
Yeah, I remember selling ads for the Indie Hackers podcast.
And you actually helped me out a lot in the beginning
because you gave me a list of leads, really,
of people you thought would be amenable to purchasing ads.
And so I just started emailing them.
But before that, I was basically doing what you were just talking about
and hustling a lot.
I was telling everybody that I knew that I had a podcast,
that I had an email list,
and that they could sponsor it if they wanted to.
And it turns out that because I was running Indie Hackers,
most of the people that I knew were running these tiny,
fledgling Indie Hacker processes.
And so...
Not the best customer base.
Yeah, I love them.
I mean, they're great.
They're great people.
But they're also not the best customers
because they don't have the largest marketing budgets.
So they're going to spend $500 on an ad.
They really want that ad to perform.
And they're really going to check in with you at all times of day and night,
every day to figure out how well their ad is doing.
Whereas when I would sell to bigger companies,
they would just say,
Hey, Cortland, this sounds great.
Here's a check for two grand.
Come back next month.
We'll do another one probably.
And they wouldn't check in at all.
They almost wouldn't even care.
So that was particularly great.
I always figured the best ad deal that I could get would be like some sort of
year-long sponsorship commitment where I wouldn't have to sell ads at all.
How do you think about it with your podcast?
What's the best ad deal structure for you?
Definitely bigger company long-term.
Here's the difficulty.
Most of the biggest contracts that we get are brand advertising deals.
And brand advertising deals are not measurable.
They are the billboard equivalent of a podcast ad.
It's very hard to get those deals.
There's just no shortcut.
You have to have an internal advocate within the company.
We've certainly gotten like plenty of direct response deals also,
where they're actually measuring like go to,
you know, go to microsoft.com slash se daily and get a free Azure windbreaker
or something.
You know, if you sign, if you give us your email address,
you'll get a free windbreaker.
That kind of thing.
Those kinds of deals are great for actually getting retention if these
people actually want to advocate to their manager with a data-driven argument.
But most of the time, these are not data-driven arguments that are being
had within these companies.
It's literally like, do we like this guy?
Do we want to advertise on his podcast?
Does he make us feel good?
That's, man, advertising is a weird, weird business.
And I wish I could give you more quantifiable answers,
but it's really more of a touchy feely, like figuring it out kind of business.
I recently interviewed Sam Parr, who runs a media company called The Hustle.
And they make something like eight figures a year,
just from selling ads on their newsletter,
which they then take and use to expand into other areas.
So, for example, they just launched a podcast.
So I asked him, why start with a newsletter?
Why not start with a podcast?
And he said, because podcasting is, quote, a bad business.
I wonder if you don't agree with him, Jeff,
after listening to you describe how difficult it can be to sell to advertisers.
Is podcasting a bad business?
I mean, I like it.
It depends, like, what do you want out of your business?
Like, do you want to spend a ton of time every week preparing for podcast
interviews and having podcast interviews?
Do you want to figure out the strange contortions of running a podcast business at scale?
Do you want your podcast business to be at scale,
or do you want it to be lead gen for something else?
What's your vision for how this fits into your portfolio?
I liked your interview with him.
But, you know, I'm not sure I agree that, like, you can, you can uniformly,
it's sort of like saying, like, the book business is a bad business.
I mean, it's like pretty good business for like Dan Brown.
Yeah, you know?
Well, this goes back to the question of why so many people quit working on their podcast so early.
And I think what you just said pretty much summed it up,
which is that there's lots of different reasons to have a podcast,
and they're all very personal.
And it's very easy to quit something if you don't get what you want out of it,
but it's very hard to get what you want out of something if you don't know what you want.
So I think people kind of start podcasting because they're cool,
they're trendy to do, but those aren't really good reasons.
If you know you're trying to enter a way towards a measurable result,
if you know that you're doing it for the love of the craft,
or something like that, then it's easier to keep going.
Pretty much.
Let's talk about books for a second since you brought them up.
How do you think about the difference between audiobooks and podcasts?
Because I know myself, I probably spend five times longer listening to audiobooks
as I do listening to podcasts every week.
Right.
So this is where it gets into why are people actually listening to podcasts?
And when I psychoanalyze myself on this question,
it leads me to some uncomfortable territory,
which is that I think people listen to the two-person audio interview format of a podcast,
oftentimes because they want to feel less alone,
and they want to feel like they're surrounded by the kinds of people that they want to be having dinner conversations with,
or just like grabbing a cup of coffee with.
I think oftentimes people listen to these podcasts in a binge format,
because they're really in a state where they're not getting what they want out of their in-person social interactions,
but they feel desperately that they need social interactions that rise to their level of preferred quality.
If we're talking about pure, that insights per minute idea, probably audiobooks are better.
But then again, can you listen to an audiobook in the gym?
I mean, I can listen to a podcast in the gym.
I can listen to a podcast in the gym.
I can listen to a podcast when I'm going for a run.
Audiobooks are more, I have to be like cleaning the kitchen maybe,
I have to be folding laundry, something that is much less mentally demanding.
So yeah, this is an evolving question for me.
And also it depends on what kind of audiobook it is.
There are some audiobooks that are just so compelling that I can listen to it,
even when I'm in a somewhat distracted state.
So yeah, I don't know, hard to generalize.
Yeah, I definitely find myself reaching for that rewind 30 seconds button
a lot more often when I'm listening to an audiobook than when I'm listening to podcasts, to your point.
Exactly.
They're definitely just denser, they require more of your full attention.
But on the flip side, there's also this phenomenon where books are often way too long.
In order to justify publishing a physical copy of a book, you need to make it 200 or 300 pages long.
And so oftentimes books that could just be 50 pages or 100 pages end up being like double that length.
I wonder if in a world where people are conditioned to listening to audio,
where you listen to so many bite-sized hour-long podcasts,
if there's not room for people to write books that are actually just the right length,
just an hour-long book, it tells you everything you need to know and doesn't go into any fluff.
Did you listen to Can't Hurt Me?
No, I haven't.
That one's pretty good.
That's the David Goggins book.
He's a Navy SEAL that's been on a lot of podcasts recently.
But the audiobook there is an interesting format because it's actually audiobook in normal format
interspersed with little interviews with David.
So then they kind of blend it.
And so I do think that there's a lot of room for exploration.
Very cool.
I think things are going to be in a pretty interesting place five or ten years from now
with this whole intersection of audio and learning stuff,
especially in a world where everybody is sort of comfortable listening to things for hours on end.
Let's talk about what you mentioned earlier,
which is that a lot of people listen to podcasts to feel less lonely.
I think the flip side of that is also true somewhat that being a podcast host can be pretty lonely.
There's no way for people to comment on your podcast, really.
There's no way for you to really interact with your audience,
like so many other types of businesses.
It's almost surreal.
You can watch your download numbers go up every single week, week after week,
but never actually talk to or meet anybody who listens to your podcast
because it's so distributed and you're so disconnected from them as a podcast host.
I wonder how you think about this with your podcast, Jeff.
How do you know what your listeners want?
How do you know what they care about?
How do you connect with them when there aren't really any good channels for doing so?
I don't know.
We have a Slack channel.
I get emails sometimes from people.
I do the Twitter sometimes.
What I find is that the listener base of software engineering daily,
they're silent until something is wrong.
If I do a show that is not great, I will hear from people.
If there's something wrong, I will hear from people.
If I put out a call for suggestions, I will hear from people.
No people are listening.
At conferences, I talk to people occasionally.
You have to go out and do it yourself.
You have to go out and meet people.
You have to go to conferences.
You have to create the Slack group.
You have to write people up on Twitter.
Otherwise, you're just never going to hear from anyone.
It's bizarre, man.
I think it's so weird.
But you're also really good at getting your listeners to collaborate.
For example, you've had a couple people who've worked together
to build a mobile app for software engineering daily, which is so cool.
You've also spun out another project called Fine Colabs.
This is basically a website that allows people to collaborate on projects
together with strangers over the internet.
I think it's perfect for your audience because you're catering to software
engineers.
Who better to collaborate with strangers over the internet on different projects?
Tell us a little bit about Fine Colabs.
Why did you start it and how does it work?
Right.
Actually, I started Fine Colabs with the goal of making a music collaboration
tool.
I'm very passionate about music.
The thing that's tough for me about music is I really like to write music
with other people.
But there's very few people that I like working with on music because I like
people that take it seriously.
It's like if we were to say, hey, Corland, let's start a company and we're
going to bounce ideas off of each other for the next week.
We're going to meet twice a week and we're going to bounce ideas off of each
other, then we're going to start hacking on something.
We would take the whole process pretty seriously.
The musicians I've worked with in the past, there is no way to get them to take
it seriously.
It's literally like, let's get together, let's have a beer, let's chat, maybe
we're going to work on some music, maybe not.
Who's going to be doing what?
It doesn't matter.
We're not going to be organized about this thing.
So Fine Colabs started as a place where people would take it seriously to
collaborate on something.
I kept it general, but really the goal for me was to create a music
collaboration place, a place where a drummer could get together with a
producer and a vocalist and perhaps another producer and collaborate on
things and they could rate each other.
The rating system is really important.
That's a big component of Fine Colabs.
So really, the backbone of Fine Colabs is a place where you can create a
project, you can create a system of roles and people can slot into those roles
and work on the project together with a well-defined division of labor.
Now, obviously, this works well for software engineering to the same
degree that, in fact, it's turned out to be a better fit for software
engineering, largely probably because of my audience.
I've announced this on Software Engineering Daily and I'm like, hey, if
you've got a project and you're looking for collaborators, post your project
on Fine Colabs or if you're a person that's looking for a project, go on
Fine Colabs and look for a project.
Obviously, my audience is software engineers and software engineers are
producing a lot of software.
They're not producing a lot of music.
It hasn't really turned into the music collaboration site that I envisioned,
but there's a lot of people who are posting software engineering projects
and finding collaborators for software.
So, yeah, I mean, if you're a software engineer or you have a creative
project or a creative business or something in mind and you're looking
for people, you can go to Fine Colabs.
I think, more generally, the problem that I'm pursuing is we've got all
these tools for making very cool things on the internet.
You know, we can make music.
We can make businesses.
We can make art projects.
We can make open source software.
Why are we going at it alone so often?
Why is it so hard to find other people to work with and to collaborate
together?
And I think there's a variety of reasons for that, but it definitely does
not feel like we are at the end state of internet creativity because if we
were, we would see a lot more large collaborative projects.
Yeah, it's a tough problem to solve.
There's a lot of friction there that prevents people from working together.
And you're right.
The tools we have today with email, with Slack, with video chat, with pretty
much all the tools that make remote working so possible and so common, it
should be easier for people to collaborate.
This whole thing reminds me of my fake question from earlier where I was
talking about how the fundamental algorithm of life is to figure out what
works and keep doing it.
It seems to me that what's working with your business is the software
engineering angle because of your audience, with your podcast, because
software engineers are familiar with using computers to collaborate
already, whereas musicians maybe use other means that are used to meeting
up in person, in studios, et cetera.
How do you think about the future of FineCollabs given that it's veered off
the course that you initially intended?
I think it's fine.
You know, the vision for FineCollabs is very big.
The idea is that if you want to develop a reputation as a person that builds
collaborative projects online, this is the place where you build that
reputation.
So when you finish working on a project, your collaborators give you a review
from zero to five stars.
And I believe that much like Airbnb's moat over the long run has been the
reputation system, I think that FineCollabs, the moat will be the reputation
system.
And I think that if you develop a good reputation in producing open source
software, maybe people will correlate that reputation with being a good
musician.
I feel like if the site grows big enough, then people who develop a lot of open
source software, some of those people are going to be musicians.
Maybe eventually they'll start working on music projects with each other.
Or maybe somebody listening to this right now will come and work on music
projects with me, which would be fantastic.
I've got some projects posted.
You can post yours.
I'll work on them with you.
So yeah, I mean, I just, the thing is, I just haven't really seen other
people solving this problem.
I think it's an acute problem.
I think it's going to exist for a long time.
I don't know if I'm going to be the one to solve it, but I just think it is
strange that it is not easier to collaborate with other people on projects
on the internet.
It's not easy to find people.
And I think it's largely a trust question.
That's why the reviews are so important to the FineCollabs website is the idea
that you will be reviewed at the end of your project, put some accountability
on you.
And I just think that accountability is crucial.
It's lacking in our current environment.
Yeah.
You said a couple of different things there that I think are underrated.
The first is reviews.
If I look at a website like Amazon, a huge part of the reason why I shop
there is because of the reviews.
If I go to a random store on my street and I try to buy a blender, how do I
know which blender is good?
If I go to Amazon, every blender's got hundreds of reviews.
I can be pretty confident that I'm going to pick out one of the best blenders
in the world because of the reviews.
Airbnb is another example.
20 years ago, I probably would not have stayed at a random stranger's house
when traveling, but today I can go on the website.
I can see that this place has been reviewed by hundreds of people who've
stayed there.
They say what's good.
They say what's bad.
So I feel a little bit safer.
I feel like I'm not going to be axe murdered just because of this review
system.
And of course, there's hundreds of other websites that rely on reviews that
create new models of collaboration and interaction because of reviews.
So perhaps fine collabs will be one of them.
The other thing you said that I think is underrated is that as a founder, you
don't necessarily have to stay at the place where you start.
You can start something small, you can accumulate some advantages, build up
your revenue, build an audience, and use that to sort of parlay yourself into
a bigger win on the next step, a different market, a different type of
customer, building more features, a different product, whatever it is.
You don't necessarily have to start with whatever your end goal is.
I think this is very unintuitive to first-time founders.
I find myself saying this over and over again.
People buy it off way more than they can chew when they start because they
think that whatever they start with, that's what they're stuck with.
But it's not true at all.
And I think if you look at your business, you've generated a ton of revenue
from your podcast.
You've used that to create fine collabs.
Fine collabs target software engineers, which is great.
It's kind of a foothold.
And if you get enough traffic and attention from software engineers, you
can parlay that into perhaps getting musicians to start collaborating and
other types of collaboration.
So yeah, you're a good example of the fact that you don't really have to
start at the end.
You can start at the beginning with something simpler or something easier
and then work your way to where you ultimately want to be.
And that's the biggest lesson from Amazon, is the adjacencies.
Being able to move from one adjacency.
In the case of Amazon, the most humble business, selling books on the internet
has become just the beachhead for so many lateral points of expansion.
That, I think, is the most interesting aspect of how Amazon has grown to
become what it is today.
Let's talk about making time to make these sort of lateral moves.
You have a pretty operationally intensive business.
I mean, you are releasing a new podcast every day of the week.
You've got a lot of preparation that goes into it.
You've got to record it.
You've got to edit it.
You're also selling advertisements, enough advertisements to generate
60 grand a month in revenue.
I imagine that takes a lot of time as well.
How do you as a founder structure the sort of nuts and bolts of your
business to allow you the time to start something on the side?
Well, first of all, there's definitely been a cost to just like kind of
working pretty hard on things and doing a lot of different things.
You know, I have a vision for what I want to do.
And that vision, like I don't know of another way to get there other than to
just put in a lot of hours.
So I put in a lot of hours.
That's kind of like there's not like secret sauce to software engineering daily.
That's kind of why I'm pretty open about like sharing what I do.
There's just no secret sauce.
It's just like I just do put in a lot of hours.
And so like the reps, you know, it's like reps, reps help.
If you do more podcasts, you get better at them.
You know, if you do more podcasts, you have more ad slots to sell.
So that's kind of the thing is like and as I've gotten into the habit of doing
the reps, like the reps have gotten easier.
And so, you know, as the reps get easier, you start to find yourself with a
little more time.
You can start another business.
You know, you can write a little more music.
You can start another podcast.
So that's, I would say that's the way of scaling is just put in a lot of hours
if you can.
What about growing your download numbers?
There are a lot of people who start podcasts.
And the reason they quit is because it just doesn't grow.
The download numbers never really get beyond the low tens, the low hundreds.
Whereas with software engineering daily, you're getting something like
20,000 downloads a day.
How do you grow your podcast?
Well, there have definitely been periods where we've stagnated and, you know,
had just periods of not growing, of being flat.
And then, you know, the growth starts again.
I don't know what it is.
Like I just, you have long streaks of shows where like things are mediocre
and like the show doesn't stand out, but then you occasionally have shows
that really stand out.
You have really good ones.
I don't know.
I wish I had a causal understanding of the growth of the show.
You know, if I pull back, the thing is like if I pull back the Zoom
on the Libsyn analytics, I use Libsyn.
If I pull back the Zoom, it looks basically flat for the last year.
I have to like go to a different view and have the Zoom where it's like you can
zoom out to the entire four years for it to actually look like an incline.
Yeah.
So the growth is very slow.
And the India Actors podcast is the same.
I mean, it grows pretty slowly, pretty steadily though.
It's consistent.
And I found that the most important thing is just to not miss episodes.
As long as I'm consistently putting out decent episodes and I'm not missing
a week, it continues to grow.
It's kind of hard to see the growth if you're zoomed in too far.
But like you said, if you zoom out, you kind of see it.
There have been some other tricks too, like having a guest on the show
with a big audience could help grow the podcast, especially if that guest
hasn't been on a lot of other podcasts.
If they've done like 15 podcasts in the last month, their audience probably
doesn't care if they tweet another one.
But yeah, mostly it's just consistency.
Let's talk about the early days for you since it seems that most of your
growth seemed to happen back then.
How did you get started?
How did you get from no listeners to your first hundred or your first
thousand listeners?
It was easier.
Back in the day, you know, four years ago, people were hungrier for podcasts
than the number of podcasts that were available to sate their appetite.
You know, for people like me, that's still the case even today.
But there was such so little quantity of episodes, especially in the realm
of technical content that was fairly well prepared for.
So it was just easier back then.
I think it's still pretty easy today to get started.
You know, it's the market's just soft.
You know, it's just soft.
There's not enough podcasts out there.
You spent a lot of time talking to other podcasters, Jeff.
We went to sort of a meeting of the minds a few weeks back with Mike Solana,
who does Founders Fund's podcast, and Solanul Chakshi, who's the editor
in chief at A16Z and who runs their podcast operations as well.
What are some things you've learned from talking to other podcasters
and from observing how other media operations work?
So those are two different things.
Learning from individual podcasters, I will say I've learned more from
listening to the podcasts than talking to them.
And sometimes I will have conversations with the other podcasters where I will
just say an observation from their pod—like something that I've noticed
about listening to their podcasts that I think they do distinctly well.
And they will say, yes, like I have refined that technique.
You know, I've worked on it really, really hard.
You know, like Mike Solana from Founders Fund, who was at that meeting,
the cabal, the podcasters cabal.
And he does this thing where, you know, most of his shows are very well produced.
They're these sliced together, you know, from different interviews
and then monologues from him.
And then some of his shows are just interviews, just like an unedited interview.
This is the same thing that Reed Hoffman has done with Masters of Scale,
where he has the highly edited Masters of Scale episodes,
and then he's done a couple just unedited raw interviews,
like the interview he did with Reed Hastings.
And, you know, when I was talking to Mike about this, I was like,
I don't know why you do the over-edited—not over-edited.
You know, I think in Reed Hoffman's case, it is over-edited.
But in Mike Solana's case, I think it's adequately edited.
But to my mind, like, I guess this is just because I'm a power consumer
and because I hit an inbox zero, I would just rather people have higher output
with less editing and just, like, you just don't need the editing.
You just don't need—I just think people want to hear the one-on-one conversation.
This one-on-one podcast conversation format has so much depth
and so much dynamism within it that just talking to people about that specific format
is something I never get tired of, and there's a lot of finesse to discuss.
Having one of these highly produced, highly edited shows
just takes a ridiculous amount of time and planning.
I mean, if you're just staring at a waveform, trying to figure out
when somebody said something, where to cut, how to rearrange things
to make it more interesting, like, that's going to take you five-plus hours
per hour of audio to do something like that.
Whereas with a normal conversation, if you just sort of release it as it is,
you can sort of churn through episodes.
That's sort of the magic behind what makes your show work.
You're releasing five episodes a week.
You get a ton of downloads because you have so much content,
and I think that's only possible if you aren't really editing things too heavily.
Yeah, and I should add that I'm definitely not confident
that I'm in the majority on this opinion of the, you know, being –
and, like, I love Mike Solana's interviews.
That's part of the reason.
It's like, I would just rather hear his long-form interviews.
I would just prefer that because I like it so much.
But I know there are people who just love hardcore history, for example,
and that's, like, the most edited – it's, like, super edited.
So, you know, and some people love Radiolab,
which is just, like, also editing Carnival.
So, I don't know, different strokes.
Different strokes.
Well, listen, Jeff, we've talked for a solid hour about podcasting,
so I think it's a good place to wrap up.
Why don't we end by you telling listeners,
especially the early stage founders,
the early stage people who might be considering getting into podcasting
or any sort of business, what's your advice for them?
What do they know before going into this?
Have a vision.
Know what you want, pursue it, and don't give up.
Put in the wraps, develop a style that is your own,
and prepare those things.
I love it.
It's a succinctly stated, great advice.
Thank you so much for coming on the show, Jeff.
Thank you for having me, Corlan.
I'm a huge fan of the podcast.
I'm really glad that you started it,
and I'm seriously an adherent listener.
I'm glad you helped me start it.
I almost forgot.
Can you tell listeners where they can go to get to Find Collabs
and where they can go to listen to Software Engineering Daily?
Absolutely. So you can go to findcollabs.com
to find collaborators for your projects, to post your projects.
You can listen to Software Engineering Daily on Spotify
or on, you know, your podcast player to search Software Engineering Daily.
And, yeah, I hope you enjoy it.
If you enjoyed listening to this conversation
and you want a really easy way to support the podcast,
why don't you head over to iTunes and leave us a quick rating or even a review.
If you're looking for an easy way to get there,
just go to ndhackers.com slash review,
and that should open up iTunes on your computer.
I read pretty much all the reviews that you guys leave over there,
and it really helps other people to discover the show,
so your support is very much appreciated.
In addition, if you are running your own Internet business
or if that's something you hope to do someday,
you should join me and a whole bunch of other founders
on the ndhackers.com website.
It's a great place to get feedback on pretty much any problem
or question that you might have while running your business.
If you listen to the show, you know that I am a huge proponent
of getting help from other founders
rather than trying to build your business all by yourself,
so you'll see me on the forum for sure
as well as more than a handful of some of the guests that I found on the podcast.
If you're looking for inspiration, we've also got a huge directory
full of hundreds of products built by other indie hackers,
every one of which includes revenue numbers
and some of the behind-the-scenes strategies
for how they grew their products from nothing.
As always, thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next time.