What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet
businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they
get to where they are today? How did they make decisions both at their companies and
their personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here,
as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our
own profitable internet businesses.
Today, I'm talking to Danielle Johnson. Danielle, welcome to the show.
Hey, thanks so much for having me.
You are the founder of a company called Leave Me Alone, which has to be my favorite name
for a product ever. I just want to say it over and over again. Leave Me Alone. What
does Leave Me Alone do exactly?
So Leave Me Alone is a service that makes it easy to unsubscribe from unwanted emails.
So it's super easy. You just sign up, connect all of your email accounts. We show you a
list of all the subscription emails, so like mail-in lists and newsletters that you've
received. And then you can just click a button and unsubscribe from them all.
Very cool. Sounds super useful. Your IndieHackers product page says that you're making $1,700
a month in revenue. Is that accurate?
I think the Stripe verified revenue on IndieHackers is the last 30 days rolling. So it is accurate.
But before about last week, we had a huge spike because we were featured in Lifehacker
and also recommended in a newsletter with 28,000 subscribers. So that gives us a huge
boost. So before that, it was about $500 a month and we were slowly growing that. But
yeah, last month and then a product hunt launch yesterday inflated that. But let's hope it
stays.
Yeah, let's hope it stays. That's a lot. That's a lot of things that happened in basically
just the last few weeks. Let's go in reverse order. Let's talk about your product hunt
launch yesterday. You were number two at the top of product hunts. You had 100 comments.
A lot of love for you in the comments. How do you get to number two on product hunt?
So this is our version two launch. We actually launched version one back in January. That
was a really, really big launch. We actually ended up number one of the day and of the
week, which was completely insane. And yesterday we were number two, but that's totally fine
because we did a whole thing around the launch where we actually live streamed the whole
day and had the latest sessions and interviews with other indie hackers and founders, other
nomads from around the world and made it more of a kind of event than, I guess, a focus
on our launch. But to get the amount of engagement and the amount of comments and people sharing
it, I think has come almost solely from communities that we're a part of, ones like indie hackers
or this make a log, which is a task tracking community, helps to keep you accountable.
Women Make, which is a super safe space, like a telegram group and a forum for women in
tech. I support each other when there's launches and milestones and feedback and things like
that. So that really helps. And some people have a lot of followers on Twitter. So if
they're kind enough to retweet or to share something, then it can really, really help.
Yeah, it's a crazy amount of work that you put in. I can tell just from your icon on
Product Hunt, you've got like this cool animation that shows a mailbox being filled up with
spam and exploding and it says 2.0. And it's like, just that alone, you put a lot of work
into then you're in the comments responding to almost everybody. And also, like you mentioned,
you had this huge live stream today for your on Twitch interviewing all these founders
and just talking about different things. How did the launch go in terms of what you expected
and what you hoped?
I tried really hard not to have high expectations because of the success of the first one and
how well we've been doing with the Lifehacker feature and people recommending it in basically
the last couple of weeks. I tried not to set it too high and be like, okay, we're going
to have to get number one or it doesn't mean anything. And that's a really important kind
of side note that the Product Hunt launch, although it's obviously incredible to get
number one or number two or to rank for the day, it's also not the be all and end all.
The launch is great for a little boost, maybe some press or some sort of getting people
interested in your product. But if you don't do well on Product Hunt, it doesn't mean that
your product is not a success. Product Hunt is a really niche market. There are a lot
of makers, a lot of founders and a lot of other people who will help you and support
you and give you comments or feedback and upvotes. But they're not necessarily your
target market. I mean, I would say not even necessarily. I would say they're definitely
mostly not your target market. So that's important to remember, regardless of how successful
the launch day was.
Yeah. And I can tell you, you've sort of internalized that by the fact that you've launched twice.
Launch is not like this one giant event that you put on a pedestal and you do it once,
you can never do it again. It's just like you said, it's one sort of step in the road.
It's one way you're growing your product and you can actually launch over and over again.
So you launched, as you said, Leave Me Alone 2.0 yesterday, but back in I think January,
you guys launched Leave Me Alone 1.0.
We did, yeah. I know some people might feel like version two, three, four launches might
be a bit cheeky. Maybe it's not a new product or it's not an official launch. And version
two was actually, we kind of quietly released that in July. So it wasn't kind of like a
big push to version two. And then we committed and shipped it and then launched like two
hours later. But I think that it's important that people don't think, okay, we have to
build something and then immediately launch it on product time. We needed to get like
validation and feedback and everything before the official launch. So in the blog post titles
where I've been sharing it, it's our official launch. So it's ready for actual to be shared.
It's actually version two and it's okay now. It's done.
Yeah, exactly. So let's talk about these early pre-launch days. Not before your latest launch,
but before your earliest launch. You started Leave Me Alone in November of last year. I'm
looking at any of the product page. You came up with the idea, I think November 18th. Do
you remember how you came up with the idea for Leave Me Alone?
Yes, I can. So my co-founder and I, well, co-founder James and I, we spent a lot of
time in our emails. We do a lot of freelance work and we needed to figure out what was
important and what was not important in our inboxes. We have like mailing lists and things
that were subscribed to or maybe something I signed up to a year ago and they started
sending an email every day. And it's annoying and frustrating to have to go and open that
email, go to the bottom and see the unsubscribe link and click it. And then some of them have
extra steps. So like, do you want to definitely unsubscribe or click here to confirm? It takes
time and it's frustrating. So we started searching for a service that would do this for us or
show us everything that we were subscribed to and be able to unsubscribe from stuff.
And we found a couple, one of them being Unroll Me, which you might have heard of. But unfortunately,
after a little bit of digging, we found that they actually make their money by selling
all of your data. So the service is free, but you have to agree that they're going to
use your data and sell it for marketing. One of the biggest things is actually that they
curated all of their users' information about Uber and so all of the Uber customers and
they sold that to Lyft. And there's some really big news articles about that a couple of years
ago. And that's obviously, that's not great. So we wanted to build something that would
let you unsubscribe from emails, but without having to compromise your privacy, your data,
your security or any of those things. So we'd be able to leave me alone. And that's how
it was born.
I love that method of coming up with an idea, which is that number one, you have an actual
need yourself. And so you're like kind of your own potential customer. But number two,
you see a competitor, you see somebody already doing it. And that doesn't dissuade you from
doing the idea, but it actually encourages you because you're like, hey, this is an actual
need. Enough people will care about this that another company exists. And hey, there's this
huge glaring red flag with this company. They're stealing your private data and selling it
to Lyft and other startups. So there's room for us to come in and basically build a competitor
that doesn't do that. How did you go about validating that this would be a good idea
for you to work on? Or was it just good enough for you to see that Unroll.me existed and
that there was demand for this in the market?
So we've actually built a few products before this kind of product. So we had some lessons
that we learned before that. We had a couple of previous product failures, where we built
products for months and months and months without any users, any feedback, any validation.
We basically just built like in a little in our own zone in the quiet and the dark and
launched and got no feedback, no users and no customers. So this time around, we decided
to validate like super early and validate before even building anything. So we built
a landing page and that was it and shared it on social media. And in some of the communities
like WomenMake or Make-a-Log, a couple of Slack groups and on Twitter as well. I think
at the time I didn't even have that many followers, maybe like a few hundred on Twitter, but some
of the community aspects, people helping, again, sharing their, sharing our idea. Within
a couple of hours, we had like 50 PC users, people that were like, yeah, this sounds awesome.
We want to use your product. And there was nothing, there wasn't a product. So that was,
it's like really showed us that we were doing something right this time. We wanted people
to say they needed it. And that's like super important when you're building anything. Like
you need to like, you need to make sure people actually want what you're building. Otherwise
you're just going to, you're going to waste your own time. So then we had 50 PC users.
We needed to actually do some code, I guess. Like it's a bit, this is the bit that we're
the most familiar with. It's our bread and butter. We're both developers, JavaScript
developers by trade. So we put together a prototype in about seven days. We actually
built the first, or did the first bit of code while we were on a bus. I think we were crossing
the border from Argentina to Bolivia on like an 18 hour bus. And James was there like on
his laptop, they've got power and toilets and they bring you food. So it's kind of like
a really good use of 18 hours of time. So then, then we had about a week later, we had
a product or like really, really cut down core functionality product, just scanned a
week's worth of your emails, showed you the subscriptions and had like a little toggle
to say, I want to unsubscribe. We shared that on Twitter again and in the communities and
with the people that were visa testing, they were the people that were allowed to use it.
And they used it and it worked and they loved it. They were like, wow, this is so easy.
I can't believe you unsubscribed me from like 10 emails in 15 seconds. And that's like validation
step two. So this is like the timeframe here is 10, 15 days between, we've got this idea.
And now we've got 50 people who have already used it and said that it's awesome.
Yeah, I really like the timeframe, the fact that you're doing this so quickly. It seems
like you've learned a lot of lessons from previous businesses that you've started or
things that people have written because you did a minimum viable product. You got out
super quickly. You didn't spend like nine months working on something and you were telling
everybody about it at every step of the way. How many projects have you worked on in the
past to sort of learn the quote unquote, right way to do these things?
One of the biggest ones is a product called ReleasePage that we were actually working
on before we left. So about three years ago, we left to go nomads, but I guess we left
to travel for a year. And while we were traveling, we were like, okay, we like this lifestyle.
Maybe we can carry on with freelancing and trying to build our own products to earn some
money while we're on the road. And that was like nearly three years ago now. And one of
those products was, like I said, was ReleasePage. And we built that with absolutely no feedback.
And we built it in the dark. And no one really said they wanted to use it. And we kept trying
to explain it to people when we met them, other nomads. We were like, this is awesome.
This is our idea. And one of the biggest red flags was that we couldn't explain it in not
even an elevator pitch. We couldn't even explain it in like a good 10, 15 minute chat. They're
like, okay, so what does it do? So that's like, we should have really listened to the
people saying, yeah, I mean, that sounds cool, but I don't really see why I'd use it. And
just like, oh, you just don't get it. Or, you know, we'll be able to tell you where
you need it, but only after spending a month on the landing page. So that was like so totally
backwards. You should be able to be like, hey, I built this thing that lets you unsubscribe
from emails. And everyone's like, wow, that's awesome. I love unsubscribing from emails.
Well, that sounds useful. And that's one of the big things about Leave Me Alone is that
everyone has this thing. Like it doesn't necessarily have to be tech focused, or there's no real,
I guess like real, there's not a niche for it. It's just like everyone has emails. Everyone
has too many emails and mailing lists and they want to unsubscribe from stuff. So you
can tell your mom, your grandma, maybe, I mean, it depends how tech savvy your grandma
is. You can tell everyone about it. And they're like, yeah, definitely. I know what unsubscribing
from emails is.
Yeah, that exact experience you had with your previous product is like one of the most common
stories ever. It's so hard. When you're a founder, and you believe in the thing you're
building, and it just seems to make so much sense to you. And you've invested so much
time into coding it and creating it. When people don't give you good feedback, and they
kind of like, scrunch their eyes at you, and they don't really know what you're talking
about. Just sort of dismiss that. You're like, oh, you know, you'll get it. It's gonna work
anyway. It's because you're in this sort of like reality distortion field of being optimistic
as a founder.
Yeah, it's really hard to look at yourself and look at your products and be objective
about what you're building and whether people need it or want it. And it's not just if people
aren't using it. It's just, it can be like you have a thousand customers, a thousand
signups, but no one's converting to pay. Or, you know, you've got free trials and everyone's
like, this is awesome. Can I extend my free trial? Again, they're not really validating
that they want it enough to pay for it. And being able to recognize that it's time to
say, I don't know, sunset a project, that's really tough. But if you can do that, it's
going to make you better and more objective in the future, looking at what you're doing.
And make it faster if you need to move on and work on something else that actually might
be successful.
At what point did you start attempting to charge people who were beta testing, leave
me alone?
Immediately. As soon as it was off of our, we had a staging environment, so like a specific
server just for the very first 50 people. And then after that, we put it on a live environment
and it was payments. So yeah, like the people who were beta testing, they were like makers
and indie hackers. So they weren't probably weren't going to pay anyway. They were just
helping us get some of the iron out some of the technical issues. But yeah, we were like
this time, we're not going to say, oh, here, have a coupon, please tell us how it goes.
It's like, and the price wasn't high. We didn't really think too hard about the price. We
were just like, right, here's a price. Let's just do it. It was from like $3 to $8 depending
on a timeframe that you wanted to search your inbox. And yeah, I mean, $3 is a coffee, right?
Yeah, so a little.
Yeah. And people paid for it. We got like our first payment and that was amazing. And
then actually some people in the community decided to really, really help us out. So
at the time we had a gifts kind of thing, a gift set up. So you could buy scans or leave
me alone scans in bulk for your whole company or for your friends or family. And we did
like a kind of Christmas theme around this. We were like, oh, secret Santa, gift for gift
of a clean inbox, which was really cool. And we had a couple of friends who actually bought
scans for their whole company, a secret Santa, someone, Steph Smith, who I follow on Twitter
and have now met in person here in Bali. She bought like 25 of them for her team in Top
Tell. And that was, that was insane. And people would use them. And that was like ultimate
validation, right? You know, someone's willing to share your product with this, with their
whole team and say, this is awesome. Like go and use it.
It's such a cool marketing idea to like offer your product as a gift because people don't
really typically think of something like an email unsubscribed gift, the gift of a clean
inbox. It just stands out. It's a really unique, fun gift to give. I wish I had known about
it. The other thing that's, that's, that's cool is you charge right out of the gate.
And even though it was only something like three to $8, your competition was big and
established. Unroll.me has been around for a long time and they're free. Like they're
not charging anything. What gave you the confidence to be a new intern into a space and charge
more money than the incumbents? I'm not sure if it was confidence or just that we were
like, if we don't charge for this, then we can't do it because we needed to be able to
at least have a little bit of money to be able to run the product. So there's two aspects
to it. The first thing is obviously we need, we need a little bit of revenue to be able
to run the servers and infrastructure, cloud flare, all those kinds of things. And they're
not a lot of money. Our expenses are all public on our open page. It's like 150 bucks a month
now. But at the beginning, that's a lot of money to be putting into something. And in
our previous products, we were putting money into stuff that we weren't using. We had development,
staging, and production environments. There's three different servers for something that
we weren't, people weren't paying for, all these sorts of things. So that's like aspect one,
which is kind of the, I guess it's like the boring answer, but we needed some money to
run the product. The second thing is that that was, again, it was a validation for the user,
for why, or like security for the user to know that they were paying. So what we said we were
going to do, not sell their data, was probably what we were actually going to do. If it was like,
hey, we're this tiny little indie made product that also does what Unroll.me does,
here you go. They're like, are we really going to give you access to our Gmail inboxes and let you
scan all of our emails if you're, you know, you say you're not going to sell it, but like,
how do we know? So if they're paying for it, then it's like, that's how they're making their money.
So I think that really helped.
Yeah, it's such a good way to stand out. Because if you had the same business models, Unroll.me,
basically charging users nothing, and then just selling their data, then number one,
it would take you forever to monetize. But also, it wouldn't differentiate you from Unroll.me at
all. There'd be no reason for anybody to use your very new, very bare-bones product over using the
existing incumbent that's basically the same. Yes, I agree.
Let's talk about some of this early feedback that you were getting. Because you had these
successive waves of people coming in to use your app. You had people just looking at your landing
page, and you had the early beta testers, and you had your first paid customers. What are some of
the lessons that you learned by talking to all these customers early on and sort of bringing
them on in different stages? So the biggest thing that we wanted by doing this iterative process
was to get feedback really early, and to mitigate any huge technical issues that could cause us
really big problems down the line. And that's basically what the beta users did for us.
Beta testers, they're really forgiving. They don't mind if things break, because they know
they're using an unfinished, unpolished version of the product. And they're happy to help you,
and happy to sit there and refresh, or keep trying to go through the same steps again,
because they know they're helping you. So opening up your product to a beta test,
regardless of knowing that, is still scary. Things are going to break, and people are going to judge
us, and it's going to be really hard. But they do break, and they break really hard. And some of the
lessons that we really took away from this is, beta testing is absolutely 100% something you need
to do before you launch a product. Or letting people use it that aren't you, because you're not
the user. You aren't going to go through weird flows. You're not going to try and do things that
you hadn't thought of. And you can't even try and anticipate what the user is going to try and do.
It's like, oh, wow, why did you click that button to try and unsubscribe? Or why didn't you try and
click there? That's really, really interesting and super important.
So this is about three months of work from November of last year through January 2019,
when at the very end of January, you launched version one product hunt.
Do you remember what you did to get ready for that particular launch?
Yes. We launched from a beach town in Peru. I just have to say, if you're trying to know mad,
do not go to South America. The internet there is not good. So we've had some problems in Bali,
so streaming was difficult and whatever. But in South America, it's super flaky.
So somehow, we found one cafe that had Wi-Fi, and we just camped out there all day. We had three
meals and sat there for like 10 hours. That was kind of crazy. But the buildup to that, again,
we went straight back to what was working well for us. We did open, being open about everything.
We were like, we're going to launch, come and show your support in like a week or two.
We prepared all of our assets, did all the usual product hunt stuff.
And then thanks to the community and people that we were connected with, we had people from product
we could ask to hunt us, which is really, really helpful. I know a lot of the rumors around product
hunt and how it works and how getting featured works. I mean, obviously, the chance of being
featured and being more successful is increased if you have someone who works there or someone who
has a big reputation in the community if they hunt your product.
So let's talk about this whole process of you sharing and being open because this has come up
several times. And if it's something you're doing back in January, it's something you're still doing
today, what's the point of being open? What's the point of sharing what you're up to transparently?
It seems like a lot of extra work, but I'm a big advocate of it. I wonder, you know,
what do you think the advantages are and how has it worked out for Leave Me Alone?
So I think there's two or three like really cool points for this. The first point is that it's
helping us build our product and shaping it for what the users actually want. So from a Leave Me
Alone perspective, it's sharing everything about our decisions, asking people, hey, we're charging
this much. Do you think that's right? Or this is our color scheme or this is our logo. Really
simple things down to asking what other email accounts they might want to connect. Like, do
you have a IOL? IOL? AOL accounts. Do you have Yahoo? Do you want to connect those? And when
people say yes and they have feedback about it, that means that once again, everything's driven
by validation and people saying, yes, we want this. Rather than as a developer, you can get
really carried away with all these amazing features and nice little UI things and focus
too much on stuff that people don't want and people aren't going to use. So that's like number one,
putting things in that people actually want. And then the second thing is hugely around community.
We've built a whole community around Leave Me Alone and around ourselves as nomads. We're a
couple that travel together permanently and build this together and work on it the same. We both do
the technical stuff. We're both developers. So our story and our whole thing, I guess our personal
brand, but the whole everything we're doing, people are really invested in and they want us to succeed.
And they love seeing people behind a product. They want the journey. So it's something that I
really wanted when I was building a couple of years ago with some of the failed products,
was following people like Josh Pigford from Bear Metrics, founder of Gum Road to Hill.
Those two people, and I'm sure plenty of others, sharing the everything, the ups and the downs,
which is the thing I will continue talking about failure, but the ups and the downs and the journey
to get to this success that people only see, that's so important to know that you're not just,
you're alone in this whole little failure bubble and you're not doing very well.
Other people had to go through all this too.
Yeah, it's so easy as a developer to look at this whole world of building companies and apps.
It's like a mechanical thing with inputs and outputs and you just code it and it works.
But at the end of the day, you're dealing with people and people really like connecting to each
other. They like knowing each other's stories. And people are a lot more likely to buy what you're
selling. They're a lot more likely to support you when you launch if they actually know your story
and they've been following it. So the fact that I can scroll through your product page or the fact
that I can see you in the comments on Product Hunt or follow you on Twitter and see that you're
posting about what's going on behind the scenes in your digital nomad is what makes me way more
likely to support you.
I think that's also, it is definitely a really big positive and it has worked for us so far.
But some people have other views on that and think that it could be a negative.
Because if you're sharing your revenue, if your revenue is zero or 500 a month,
there's a lot of people, a lot of companies maybe that won't want to use it because it doesn't seem
like a big product or it's not made by a big company. So maybe we'll go away soon or maybe
we're too small for them to really invest or roll out in their whole company.
You have to be careful.
Yeah, it's a concern. But I also think that for the most part, if you're making $500 a month,
your customers probably shouldn't be Microsoft. It probably shouldn't be some huge
business organization. You probably are better served by dealing with people who are
interested in reading your stories. So I really like the way that you've done it.
Thank you. Yes, I agree with that 100% because you shouldn't be selling to Enterprise as an
indie founder. Enterprise being, yeah, Microsoft or whatever.
You can sell to SMBs, small media businesses and other teams and people that are doing the same
sort of thing, same sort of scale. But try to go straight up there, 500 bucks a month,
hey, Microsoft, do you want to use my thing? That's not going to work.
So you've had some other events that have helped you grow besides just sharing publicly and
besides launching on Product Hunt. One of the posts in your timeline, you mentioned this
earlier, was that you were featured on Lifehacker. I think this was what, last week this happened?
Yes, it did. That was crazy. So we launched on Product Hunt yesterday and we were actually
supposed to launch a week ago. But because of some terrible internet connection stuff in
Barley, we had to postpone it. And thankfully, we did because we would have launched on Tuesday
last week, which is when the Lifehacker article came out. The server would definitely have set
on fire. So that was kind of a good thing, I guess. But yeah, Lifehacker, that just kind
of happened out of nowhere. We had a newsletter that recommended us and they have 28,000
subscribers, which is huge. And it was like personal recommendations, like a weekly newsletter.
And the irony of a newsletter recommending a newsletter unsubscribing tool, it's not lost on
us. We get that. The newsletters are helping us out. But yeah, their traffic was really high.
So on Sunday evening here, about 1 a.m. 12 a.m. 1 a.m. 2 a.m., their newsletter went out and our
traffic just went up. And then two days later, James had an email from someone from Lifehacker
just checking our privacy policy, making sure that everything was what we said, that we definitely
didn't sell any data, and they were going to feature us. And we were like, whoa, yeah.
So that happened on Tuesday. And then a week later, we launched on Product Hunt. So it's been like a
totally crazy couple of weeks.
Yeah. You posted your stats about it. You said you got almost 15,000 article views.
421 people visited your website. You did almost $1,000 in revenue that month and hit $8,000
in total revenue. And you made 29 sales from the article. So it was such a huge boost for you.
How did you get this to happen? How did you get in the newsletter that recommended you?
And what kind of things do you think you were doing that led to that?
I honestly, I don't know where it came from. We only kind of promote our products on Twitter.
I say promote. We only share, leave me alone on Twitter, a little bit of Facebook,
maybe one or two articles on LinkedIn. So I think someone used it. It was someone who
bought a package of credits the day before. He kind of put it on Lifehacker. And maybe
he saw it in the newsletter, or maybe there's like some journalist newsletter or like a tip
or something. But yeah, we didn't do anything. We've been trying to reach out to publications
for a little while without much success. And then this happens. So total luck.
Well, it's good luck. At least it's the good kind of luck. You're building a platform that
sort of relies on other people's platforms. So you're reliant on Gmail's API and various
other APIs. And you've got what's known as platform risk, where at any point in time,
Gmail can make you obsolete with a new feature, or they can suddenly decide to subject you to
a $15,000 audit to make sure you're not doing anything sketchy. How do you deal with that as
a founder? Because I've also built apps on email, and it was very anxiety inducing.
Yeah. So obviously, a lot of products are built on other products. You can't always get around
that. And you get a lot of benefits from this. You would assume that building on the Gmail API
would be a pretty good bet, because it's a really big product. It's Google. And I know they're
well known for shutting down products, but I really hope they're not going to shut down.
Yeah, Gmail's not going anywhere.
Well, Google is doing some crazy things. But yeah, let's just assume that Gmail's not going
anywhere. But yeah, they hit us with the audit, the $15,000 to $75,000 to do the independent audit
based on it. And it's every year. So we had to look really hard at whether or not we could afford
to do it, whether or not we could basically put in a lot of revenue or all of our revenue into
this one platform. But it's not all doom and gloom, because there's ways around. Well, ways around.
We've got some ideas on how we can continue to support Gmail without using their API.
And we've got other providers. So it's not just Gmail that's our thing. I mean,
Gmail's our main inbox. Most of the accounts that are connected are Google.
But you don't need the Gmail API verification if you're doing G Suite. So you can continue to
support teams and businesses who might want to use it. And then we've got Outlook and any Microsoft
accounts and anything else you can think of using IMAP. So Yahoo, and AOL, and iCloud,
and all of those things. So we've got some ideas and some plans. Their deadline's December,
the end of this year. And I know a lot of people have been really stung by this.
So I understand why they're doing it. But it kind of sucks that the price doesn't scale with your
revenue or the size of your business. It's kind of like, hey, independent person trying to build
something, call on my platform, pay 30 grand or whatever it is, 15 to 75.
Yeah, it's pretty tough building on another platform. And sometimes it's just tough being
an indie hacker running a smaller business because you encounter these rules, or even sometimes
regulations and laws passed by governments that target all businesses. But it's kind of like,
hold on, not every business is the same size. This thing that Google can afford to pay for,
maybe I can't as an indie hacker. So that can be frustrating.
On the flip side, what are you most excited about with Leave Me Alone? What do you like
about running a business like this?
The fact that I'm building something that people love, and they tell us every day,
we get messages from people like, oh my god, this is amazing. How have I not found this before?
This has changed my life. And we started having tweets right from the beginning that people are
saying, this is awesome. This is so cool. James and Danielle have built something.
They're super cool founders. They always reply to their feedback. I love everything that they're
doing. We put them on a wall of love, like took inspiration from Bearmetrics, having a wall of
love of tweets. And now it's a wall of love of actual testimonials, people who are willing to
spend time to tell us how awesome it is. And that just feels really good to be able to help people,
have someone say that we've changed something, given them some more time in their life or
more time spent with family. They spend an hour less on their phone in the morning because
they've unsubscribed from all this crap they didn't need. That's all we really wanted.
The money helps pay the bills, but the fact that you're working on something that actually
makes a difference and actually helps people, that's it for us.
Honestly, I'm super bad at email. I deliberately checked my email only once or twice a week
because otherwise I'll spend so much time on it. And I spent two hours today
cleaning out my email inbox and at least 20-30 minutes of that was just unsubscribing from stuff.
So I need your service.
I know at all.
Yeah, I know exactly what I need to be signing up for.
Danielle, what would your advice be for early stage founders who are sort of in the same
position as you or maybe even earlier where they haven't quite started yet and they're trying to
think about whether or not they should start something? What would you say to them?
I have two really big bits of advice around anyone from who hasn't started or who's early stage
or even people who are still building and seeing some success. It's okay to fail and it's okay to
admit that you failed or to pivot from something unexpected happening and changing what your app
does or how you're approaching a situation based on like feedback or other situations.
Don't let that put you off getting started or building something in the first place.
And don't let that put you off carrying on building or being trying to be a founder.
Don't let the failure get on top of you. It will help you be a better entrepreneur
if you learn from the mistakes. Failure is really good, but only if you learn.
So a lot of people have a lot of failures and they don't talk about them.
The talking about failure and where things went wrong is so, so important.
Like I said from other founders like Bearmetrics and Gumroad sharing where things went wrong,
as well as where things went right, it's really important to see.
And I think as a community, we don't talk about failure enough. We get so many success stories
and positive milestones, positive articles, things that people can just see like this product
growing and growing and growing. It means that you get this sort of bias and this Instagram
kind of view of the world where every single day there's success and happiness.
But it's not always like that. And it's so important to share both the good things and
the bad things. So I think that's like number one. And then number two is that imposter syndrome
is so incredibly real. I have suffered from it for my whole professional life,
probably even before that. Two years ago, I would have been listening to this podcast.
I never would have imagined how I would even get on it or do something that other indie hackers
would be interested in or that you would reach out and say, I want to learn stuff from you.
And then one year ago, I turned down podcast requests because I was too terrified to do them.
And now somehow I'm sitting here giving other people advice and it feels so surreal. But I
finally feel like I have some advice and some experience to share. And something that's really
helped me in that kind of imposter syndrome journey, it comes and goes, but is documenting
my journey. It's so easy to see where you are now and not see where you were two years ago.
And to say, I'm really scared of doing this podcast. I was nervous. I don't know everything
now, but I was nervous. But it's easy to say, oh, I'm struggling with all this stuff now.
And I'm failing at all this stuff. And my product's doing X amount a month a year,
but that's not a month or a year and it's not good enough. But if you look at where you were
two years ago, that's really a good comparison and a good way of measuring what you've achieved
and how you got there. If you can't do that publicly, do it privately. Write it down,
blog for yourself, or just do some bullet points somewhere and say, yeah, like I just said,
two years ago, I would never have wanted to go on a podcast. And now I was like,
yeah, definitely. That sounds awesome. So to recognize that and recognize the achievement
and where I've come, that's really, really important.
I love that advice. It's so true that you really only pay attention to how you felt a couple weeks
ago or a couple days ago. And so much change can happen over the period of a couple of years.
You just don't appreciate unless you do exactly what you're saying and write it down and make it
a point to revisit it. I love your first piece of advice too, which is that admit to your failures
and recognize them and share them because it's an honest thing to do. And also you learn a lot from
your failures if you're really deliberate about learning from them. I think a lot of your story
and why you were able to do so many things right early on with Leave Me Alone is because you had
done them wrong in the past and you didn't just sort of brush it off and ignore it,
but you actually focused on it and asked yourself why it went wrong and of course corrected.
So Danielle, thank you so much for coming on the show and giving us your advice.
Can you let listeners know where they can go to find out more about Leave Me Alone
and follow your story?
I can. Thank you so much for having me. So you can find me on Twitter. It's at dinkydanny21.
You've got Leave Me Alone. It's leavemealone.app, nice and easy. And then you can also see some of
our other stuff and some of our remote journey nomad stuff at squarecap.io and the blogs and
links to some more stuff around there.
All right. Thanks so much, Danielle.
Thank you so much for having me.
Quick note for listeners. If you're interested in coming onto the podcast like Danielle to have
a quick chat with me, go to ndhackers.com slash milestones and post a milestone about what you're
working on. It can be pretty much anything. People posted about launching or finding the
first customers. They posted about growing their mailing lists or hitting a thousand
followers on Twitter. They posted about getting to a hundred dollars or a thousand dollars or even
a hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue. So this guy is the limit. Whatever it is you're
proud of, come celebrate it on ndhackers.com slash milestones and other indie hackers will
help you celebrate. We love supporting each other and encouraging each other when we hit
these milestones. And what I do at the end of every week is I look at the top milestones posted
and I reach out to the people who posted them to invite them to come onto the show for a quick chat.
So once again, that's ndhackers.com slash milestones. I'm looking forward to seeing what you post.