What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process.
And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and
the strategies they're taking advantage of, so the rest of us can do the same.
I'm here with AJ from Card AJ, how's it going?
It's going.
It's going good.
How are you?
Excellent.
Okay, dude.
I got to say, you're on the podcast in like March, like two years ago, so it's been two
and a half years.
At that time, I thought Card was already huge, like you were making 30 grand a month, you
had I think 20,000 new users signing up every month, and you were running it as like this
one man startup.
So I was just thinking like, how can Card get any bigger than this?
And now I'm looking at this graph put together by this website, Exploding Topics, that you
tweeted about.
And they have like a graph of Card's progress over the last like three or four years.
And it's insane.
It's like apparently Kim Kardashian tweeted about you some point last year, and she shared
like a card that she made, and it blew up.
And now you're like five times bigger than you used to be.
You're making over a million dollars a year, and you've got three million people on Card,
which is ridiculous.
It's like you're taking over the world.
Well, so she actually tweeted out a site that was built on Card, and I don't think she gave
any thought to Card itself.
It was just the URL of the site that she wanted to share, she shared it, but that had this
really crazy effect on our growth and everything else that's kind of persisted to this day,
which I guess is sort of evidence that what was sort of like a throwaway moment for her
in some ways ended up being like a defining moment for us, which is really weird to think
about.
But yeah, you never know when things like that will happen.
We were growing it like a fairly consistent clip for years.
And then last year, between COVID and between that, it just shot off, and it's been a while,
right?
And the funny thing is, I have to stress that Card is growing quite a bit, but it's not.
It's not at that breakneck growth that makes it unmanageable as a project, it makes completely
overwhelming or anything like that.
It's like we're just growing it like a steeper incline than I expected.
So that has sped up.
It sped things up quite a bit, but not to the point where I'm like, oh shit, we have
to sell or something because there's no way we can manage it.
It's like, no, no, we just got a really good healthy boost that meant some things had to
move up like improving our infrastructure and taking care of some like legal side and
all that other stuff.
Things that I knew would eventually show up down the road, but just kind of showed up
on my doorstep the next day.
So I was like, well, shit, okay.
Which is sort of what led to doing that small seed round earlier this year.
And you're like the prototypical bootstrapper, right?
You're like a model poster child for somebody who has not raised money, who's doing this
as a very small scrappy team of one person for most of cars history.
And who did like, I don't know if you're ever like philosophically opposed to raising money,
but you just clearly hadn't and you were crushing it.
And so to raise money, it was like a surprising thing.
Yeah, there was a low key kind of like philosophical opposition to the idea of raising in large
part because I mean, it didn't really make sense.
And we were profitable.
And I stressed a lot of people like this was a, this started out as a vanity project.
Like let me just get that out of the way.
Like card was not, I didn't start out, you know, with a business plan or anything.
Like literally it was like, Hey, I wonder if I can do this.
And I did it.
And then great.
It started growing on its own and took on a life of its own.
Just so people know, in case they missed the last episode, card is basically a way for
people to create like simple single page websites.
It's a very easy way for people to create a website for themselves.
And this is like a platform that you built by yourself and you're hosting millions and
millions of websites.
And like for a lot of these people, like their websites are probably very crucial for their
business.
Like if I push a code change to Andy hackers and I break the website and then I go to sleep
and wake up the next morning, like people will be like upset or frustrated, but like
no one's like livelihood is ruined because no one like depends on any hackers.
If card goes down, a lot of people are screwed.
Like they're running their businesses on card.
They're running like all sorts of stuff on cards.
They're making extra websites.
And so it's kind of a big deal for you to be growing in like this rocket ship pace and
have all these people joining your site and look around and be like, uh, I don't have
like investors or an infrastructure or a big team to sort of help me with this.
Yeah.
And that was actually sort of what came from that.
It was like, you know, there's a, yes, I may have started this as a vanity project, but
it was clearly not that anymore.
And there was sort of a leveling up that had to take place like in terms of my own maturity
around what this thing is.
As you've said, a lot of people now run businesses with their website built on card or even building
card sites is a business for some people.
It required me yet to mature a little bit and sort of realize that this has to be treated
with a bit more care, but more seriousness than I had previously raising gave me access
to people who could help me with that.
And it wasn't so much hands-on help because I mean, investors like they invest in a lot
of things, right?
And they, it's a lot to ask someone who is like a, you know, a small percentage investor
in your business to come along, roll up their sleeves and actually start working on it.
Cause that's not, that's not what they signed up for.
What they did sign up for was to share to, you know, be kind of an advocate for you on
the outside, but internally also share their knowledge and experience and ways that they
can help us through problems that we're running into.
So that's exactly what we got from doing this small raise.
Someone asked me like, well, couldn't you just, you know, talk to some other founders
online?
Like, you know, cause I know a lot of people on Twitter, why not just talk to them about
what they did?
And like, yeah, I understand that, but when people are kind of financially invested in
your success, that sort of changes the dynamic quite a bit.
And as the, every investor I spoke to loves the phrase, uh, aligning incentives and this
is exactly what it is.
I mean, it like they, they literally have a financial stake in a succeeding and that
influences the amount of time they're willing to spend helping us through problems.
I think the incentive alignment thing is such a big, a big point because if you ask them
for advice, there's so many different reasons why people will give you the advice they give
you.
You know, on Twitter, like people will say things just because they like to sound smart.
And if they're not in any way like attached to your success, like they might prioritize,
like I want to sound clever and smart and cool.
Well above, like I want to give AJ, you know, the best recommendation for how to like, you
know, migrate all these sites to a new hosting platform because they don't care.
They're not going to actually see any financial upside or as the investors will.
And so I do think there's something to this sort of, um, mantra of aligning incentives,
aligning incentives that investors will constantly say.
And like, that's clearly worked out in your favor, but I think in your position, you have
to make this philosophical decision because like you started card is just like a project
for yourself and yeah, it turned into this thing that like grew beyond your wildest dreams,
but it's still like you behind the steering wheel.
You can do whatever you want and you could have decided screw the quote unquote responsible
path.
Like I don't want to turn into this like super buttoned up company.
Like I want to keep it, you know, small and scrappy and I don't care if that means our
growth is going to slow or things are going to go down.
That's how I want to run it.
You know, you could have just been the guy in charge of product.
There's like this dichotomy between doing what brings you joy and doing what works for
everybody else.
And I think that in the early days, you kind of just do the first thing, you know, like
if you really like making website templates, you can make website templates and spend all
of your time on that.
And then as your business grows, you get more and more pressure to deal with the market
demands of you.
And I, you know, it's kind of this like cliche of selling out, right?
You've sold out, right?
You're not doing following your passion or your dream anymore.
And I think that like, that's a false fiction, right?
You can do things that other people like and do something that brings you joy.
And I wonder how you're navigating that, like how much of what you do for the card day to
day is something that you like to do and is that changed having raised money and gotten
so big?
So short answer is no, it hasn't changed.
I think what brings me joy from card now is seeing how people use it and wanting to enable
that even more.
Like one of the most impressive sites I've seen on card today was Daniel Baskin's co-founder
quest, which you may have seen it.
Yeah, I did.
She was on the show a long time ago and she's, she's dating one of my good friends.
Another person has been on the show, Vincent Wu.
So I met with them in SF a while ago and she always has the craziest projects, but this
one that she built on card is like one of the most impressive I've seen.
Right.
And she's used card for other projects over the years like that.
And that sort of surprise and pleasant shock from seeing something like that and then finding
out, oh, it was made on card and then just wondering like, how, like, how did, how did
you do this?
Like, like I, I built this thing, but how did you build this?
That's what brings me the joy out of this now.
And I feel like everything else sort of takes care of itself.
I mean, to this day, card has not done any paid marketing, paid advertising, none of
that stuff.
It's all grown by word of mouth.
But so far that strategy has really paid off.
Yeah, I think there's, um, whenever anybody's successful, there's kind of like two modes
to that.
There's number one, like they figured something out one time and it did really well and just
sort of took off after that and it was kind of hard, hard for them to fuck up.
And there's this other method of operation where I think if you figure some deeper strategy
out and you just keep applying it over and over and it consistently works and you can
try new things and those are going to work too, because you have the same underlying
strategy like this.
Right.
It's like you figured out how to play the game.
And I wonder what that is for you with card because you keep launching new stuff for card.
Like it's much more futureful than it was in the early days and everything seems to
work.
What is the repeated thing that you do with card that continues to work?
Well, when users nag me for something enough, I implement it.
That's pretty much what it is.
I mean, the reality is it's like even something like the template seller program thing.
Like that came about in large part because I saw users were doing that anyway.
Like they were figuring out ways to create templates on card, which at that time you
couldn't create user templates.
Like you have to basically just make a whole site.
They figured out a way to do like even with those constraints, make templates and sell
them and make a living off that.
And I was like, there has to be a better way to do this.
And so that's what this ultimately like waltzing came out of it.
And other things are just people straight up saying, hey, why can't we do this?
And I'm like, why can't we do this?
And then so I'll figure out a way to do it in a way that sort of fits what card is without
just bolting on a new feature.
And so I don't know if I would call it a strategy.
It feels more like a reflex, but just this way of doing things has been very beneficial.
Why do you think that doesn't work for so many other people?
I mean, essentially what you're saying is like your users are doing something.
You just amplify what they're already doing.
Are they requesting something?
You just give them what they want.
I know a lot of people who have products and services and people are asking for stuff and
they just end up building a bunch of random stuff really nearly and like, it doesn't work.
The thing people say they wanted, they didn't actually want to never catch us on.
Why with card does that actually work to listen to what you just want?
I think we have the benefit of having a very large and diverse user base and it is very
diverse.
We'll have someone building like a serious, very serious business landing page right after
someone building like a fan page for BTS or something.
It's just having that very broad range of people, it makes it easier to sort of think
in terms of like the broader picture of who's using our products.
So I'll take a request from someone who, it might be a relatively niche thing to them,
but I'll be able to sit there and think, well, how would our K-pop fan users get value out
of this?
Or how will our no code users get value out of this?
What's a way I can implement this in a way that everyone can benefit from?
By approaching it that way, that keeps it in line with cards overall vibe, which is
not going to be this hyper deep, hyper complex, very sophisticated site builder platform.
That's not what it started as and it doesn't really make sense to go that way anyway, given
that there were better choices for that.
What we can do is sort of serve the basic essence of what people want to do.
So one thing we're going to be doing in the near future is commerce stuff, but we're not
going to be Shopify, right?
We're going to have stuff in there that will let you do, but most people do that for 70,
80% of the problem, right?
That's it.
But then we're not going to go to the 100% because I think that going from 80, 90% to
100%, that last 10, 20%, it almost specializes you for that thing.
We just don't do that thing.
We just provide you with the basics and then you kind of go from there.
I think for other people, they may not have the discipline to constrain themselves.
They may want to just run with something all the way.
And then they get the end of it and it's like no one's using it.
And so you just spend all this time and resources building something that three people on your
platform of thousands or millions are going to use.
And then you think of all the stuff that you just wasted as opposed to kind of looking
at before even going down that rabbit hole, thinking, well, how can we do this in a way
that everyone benefits from in some way?
And I wonder how much of it comes down to you having built the right thing in the first
place.
Like the very core product of card is like, for lack of a better term, a website builder.
And it turns out that lots of people really, really want to build websites.
People like building websites and people don't necessarily want it to be too hard.
There's lots of different ways to build websites.
And like you found a niche where people want simple one page websites.
And having gotten that right, sort of getting all these people on your platform who then
are giving you feedback of like these incremental improvements and fixes and things they want
to do.
And I think that often when I see people just listening to what users are requesting but
not having any luck, they haven't figured that first thing out.
They have absolutely no idea what people want.
And they're just sort of lashing out in every direction trying to figure out what people
want in the first place, rather than like having figured that out and sort of incrementally
building on top of that.
Right.
I feel like this isn't my thing.
I think one of our investors was talking to me about this.
It's like you have to be really confident in what your North Star is.
And Card's North Star was largely derived from convenience for me.
Because going way back to when I first started working on it, way back in 2015, the whole
idea was, yeah, I want to do a site builder, but I don't want to do something huge and
gigantic that's going to take me 30 years to write on my own.
I need to reduce the scope of the problem I'm solving to something very manageable for
me to work on, hence the whole Vanity Project thing.
So how did you reduce the scope?
Because I think everybody has this problem.
Like, oh, I want to build this big, ambitious thing, but I don't know what's possible for
me to do that as one person in anything less than five or 10 years.
And I don't think it's as easy for every product category.
For website builders, for me, what ended up being the easy way to do that was, well, I'll
just limit it to a single page.
The one page constraint.
Right.
And then I'll also constrain how you built the site.
So it's still simple, but you can't put things all over the place.
There is a sort of pattern to the way you build stuff.
But the upside is, for me, it makes implementation like supremely easier.
And the upside for the user is that actually those constraints make it easier for them
to build their site anyway, because they're not having to worry about complex layout stuff.
It's just like, just throw your crap up there and guess what?
It'll also work on mobile.
You know, like that, that was sort of the thing from the beginning.
And I can take some credit for identifying that that formula worked.
And that's why I'm sticking to it.
Now, again, it remains to be seen if that is wise going into the future.
I mean, because KAR could turn into something else in a few years, who knows, like with
just growth and bringing other people on board and things like that.
But I feel like for where it is right now, kind of sticking to this methodology is going
to keep giving a success.
And so I'd say like, yeah, have your North Star, but also kind of be flexible if you
have to change over time.
I was talking to our mutual friend, John from Ghost the other day.
And he has this tweet where he says that one thing people don't understand is that software
is always sort of dying by default, like the technology industry moves so quickly that
the second you code something and release it, you can't just let it sit there unchanged
forever.
Like it's already becoming outdated.
There's already new languages and frameworks.
There's already new trends that people are following, things people want to do.
And so yeah, maybe your decisions will last and be good for a few years, but like there's
no guarantee they'll last into the future.
And so part of what you need to do as a founder is kind of always be looking ahead and predicting
and I guess changing your mind about things.
In your case, maybe that means going from bootstrapping to fundraising.
Maybe that means going from being a simple website builder to having like these e-commerce
features, et cetera, et cetera.
I'm curious, like what do you think is in the future right now?
Well, first, obviously, John as usual is right, as he always is.
So John, if you're listening, yes, you're right, as usual.
So five years ago is actually when Card started, right, 2015 is when I started working on it.
Again, what got Card a lot of popularity was the fundamental assumption that everyone needs
a website pretty much.
Like yeah, you have your presence on social media, but at some point you're going to want
something of your own that's sort of separate from those platforms that you own that maybe
has your own domain name or something that's associated with you.
So that's not some like amazing revelation on my part.
That's always been the case.
It's just that I think it became more pronounced in recent years because more and more people
have gotten online.
And so that wave has sort of carried us for pretty far.
Five years from now, I think that's still largely going to remain the same.
I think it just means more people are going to be expecting more of, well, I have a website,
but I also want to do this with it, right?
So not just linked to all my shit.
I want to be able to like sell this product I made or advertise a service I do or something
because, you know, more people are moving online.
More people are doing their side hustles as like main hustles now, because a lot of reasons
of things going on in the world, there'll be demand for more from a website.
So like if Card were exactly as it was five years ago today, so like if I didn't change
anything, I think it would actually begin to decline in usage because there are things
that people want now that you have to kind of, it's no longer just here's all my shit.
It's like, here's all my shit, here's something that I want you to do here too, sign up with
my mailing list or buy this product or something like that.
And I think that's only going to grow.
And so it's sort of on us to figure out what those things are and implement them, but do
so in a way that's unique to Card rather than trying to, again, like bolt on this whole
other thing that, you know, very few people end up using and just sort of adding those
things as features in a way that kind of has broad appeal to everybody who's this thing.
I think one of the tough things is like, I don't know if you remember this trend, maybe
it still happens.
I don't see as much anymore, but like five years or so ago, like it was super common
for indie hackers to launch products that were just like, we're X but simpler.
And like, that was the most common business model like, oh, X has gotten so bloated and
hard to use.
Like, we're just going to build this website, you know, this app, but make it super simple.
And the trick with that was that like, okay, you can do that.
But now you're going to have a ton of users who are like, we want this feature, we want
that feature, and eventually you end up becoming like just as bloated as the thing that you
replaced.
And with card, like, I guess you have like that same sort of risk factor, right?
Like you can add all these features, but does that not mean that you're getting away from
like the simple early days of like, from I guess that user who just doesn't want all
those extra features, you just wants the basic website and does that not open up room for
someone else to come along and build like an even simpler card and grab those people
from you?
Oh, no, that's that's 100%. Like, that's always something that you run the risk of.
But I think you can avoid it. All you have to do is just like, remember, like, what,
what brought people to your product to begin with.
And you know, that can change over time. But I think fundamentally, like in our case, it's
the simplicity.
So whether you're building a site on card in 2021, or if you were in 2016, when it first
launched, the interface is largely the same, some things have been tidied up.
There are a number of new features, but the way in which they've been implemented is by
design, kind of one of those things where it doesn't hit you at once, right? Like it
doesn't overwhelm you. Like I've really, I've really tried to go out of my way to add functionality,
but sort of, I don't wanna say hide it, but conceal it from those who are not looking
for that. So if you are a power user, if you are somebody who's looking to do more with
card, I think by your nature, we'll find those things. Right. Sometimes you don't. And that's
usually on me for not making it clear enough. But for everyone else who just wants like,
you know, I just want to build a site to where I can link to all my stuff and maybe, you
know, have a sign up form or something, that flow has not changed since we launched.
I think that's super hard too. Like, let's say you are a genius product designer, but
then you've got your homepage and your marketing, your tweets or whatever. And I know, like,
I'm not super big on marketing with card, but like the temptation is there to say like,
we have all these features, right? Like to say like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and like to change your tagline from like the easiest
way to create a simple one page website to say like the easiest way to do e-commerce slash
be a blogger slash start a newsletter slash sell templates. And I think that like, that's
very hard to resist when you spent months, if not years working on all of these new features
to not like put that front and center on your website and have the discipline to stick with
like the simple statement is something that almost nobody can do. Let's go back to talking
about fundraising because this is not something that a lot of indie hackers do. Maybe the
first question I want to ask is like, how do you fundraise as an ID hacker? Once you've
made this decision, okay, this is what you want to do. What does that process actually
look like from beginning to end? In our case, like we got a lot of people just cold emailing
cold calling from, you know, smaller investors, but also like your usual venture capital outfits.
And that's been going on for years way before I even considered going this route. And I
think that's just a lot of VCs will have people who just go out and keep an eye on potential
products that they can get involved with. And then they'll just cold email them and
see if there's any interest. And so for years, I resisted even going that route until you
know, again, last year when I'd said, okay, this might be the best thing for us. So that
process really was saying yes, and saying, Oh, sure, let's, let's talk and to see and
see where this goes. And it's not shocking to me that you would get all that interest
because it's like, how many major website builders even exist? It's like web, Webflow,
Squarespace, Weebly, Wix, etc. And then you have like this outlier card, which is run
by this like really small scrappy team that hasn't raised money, but that's like having
like close to as much of an impact as all these big players. So like, it's not shocking
to me that VCs are like salivating over like this, like this unpicked fruit.
And that is pretty much that is pretty much what they look for. And it's not unique to
us. I mean, this happens all the time. Anytime there's a product that gains traction, it's
doesn't and if it hasn't raised yet, you will inevitably have investors curious to see if
they can get involved in help in some way. So that process is really just doing a bunch
of calls and talking and like kind of kind of like speed dating in a way like trying
to figure out like, are they a good fit for you? Are you a good fit for them?
And how do you make these like smaller, I guess, like technical fundraising decisions?
Like how do you decide how much money you want to raise? How do you decide what type
of structure to raise it on? How do you decide how much you know what percentage of a company
to give away, especially when you're a bootstrapper, you don't necessarily know a lot of people
in your network who've done this before.
So it's actually, from what I can tell, it's actually kind of standard. You know, raising
for a small startup is not a new thing by any stretch. It's not a unique thing. So there's
more or less kind of metrics you can follow. You don't want to dilute yourself past X percentage
or whatever. Big thing for us, though, is that one of our advisors who's officially
on board with Card is Ryan Hoover from Product Hunt. So Card, and I'm sure a lot of people
who listen to this already know, got its start really on Product Hunt. Without that boost
at the beginning, we wouldn't be here today.
So Ryan being willing to come aboard as an advisor was a huge thing for us. And he managed
to fill us in on how much of this works, what a good amount to raise might be for our size
and our plans, and just a lot of these things that I just didn't know. So I guess the TLDR,
that would be find yourself a good advisor who already knows a lot of the shit and bring
them aboard.
And then there's this whole question of, OK, you don't want investors to come aboard and
change the direction that you're going because you're going the direction that's worked for
you. You don't want to have to suddenly hit this hockey stick growth curve. But kind of
the standard goal for most tech investors is to hope that you do. They want you to become
like a unicorn or often for their portfolios. It doesn't make sense to invest in companies
that don't have this path to become worth billions of dollars. And so why do you think
there are investors out there who are willing to invest in you if you don't necessarily
want to go that route or aren't on that trajectory?
I think because they might see potential for it to get there anyway, without them having
to really mess with anything. So like Carter is sort of on this trajectory to just keep
growing and doing well, right? And they see that. And if my requirement for letting them
be part of this journey is like, let's not fuck with this, they're willing to do that.
Because I think they've seen enough now with different companies that there are so many
different paths to success. There isn't one template, if you will, for a startup to follow
to get to be a unicorn or whatever. And it's not like I don't really have any aspirations
to be a unicorn or anything. I don't think we'll get there. I'm content with just continuing
to do things as we have. But I think they know that sometimes the best way they can
be involved is to just be helpful, but not directly up in your shit all the time.
Yeah. And it feels like we're in a world today when I look at the valuations of companies
or whatever, where it's really a founder's world. If you have a product or service that's
working really well, there are a lot more people out there who are investing than there
are people who are able to create a product like you've done. And that gives you your
pick of the litter. And you can have that optionality to find the investors that work
for you, which is super cool because I don't think that was necessarily true 10, 15 years
ago or even five years ago. It was much harder. It was much more like trying to be led into
this exclusive elite club. And you need to listen to exactly what investors are going
to do. But nowadays, you can just find the investors who match your thesis. And it's
so hard to find a company like hard to invest in that there's going to be a lot of people
out there like that.
Right. The number of investors out there, yeah, it's huge. And it's like you have people
who are willing to invest in small checks. You can raise 10 grand, 50 grand, 100 grand.
You don't have to raise millions. And there are plenty of people willing to put up even
like $1,000 here or $5,000 or just smaller amounts.
I was talking to Michael Siebel about this, the CEO of Y Combinator. And he had an interesting
point of view because I do think a lot of founders, once someone has put millions of
dollars into your company, you feel like some way beholden to them. It's like, I need to
do right by this person. They just give me millions of dollars. It's crazy. And it's
easy to, I think his point was like you as a founder need to not fall into that trap.
And realize that's the risk that they took. That's their job. The reality is they might
have many more millions of dollars in other companies. So you might not even be that big
of a deal to them. And so it's your fault as a founder if you get sucked into this feeling
like you need to listen to what they say if they're giving you bad advice. You need to
do things their way.
Right.
I guess you sort of had it against that by picking investors who don't want to push
you to do something you don't want to do anyway.
But it still happened anyway. I think you end up having that natural sense of obligation
that someone gives you a check of money based on what you told them you're going to do unless
you're an asshole, you're going to try to live up to that. But in this situation, he's
absolutely right because early on, it was shortly after we closed our round, I was really
feeling like, all right, now we have to really do this. We have to focus on a lot of different
things that maybe weren't focusing on before.
And actually, two things. So first, our lead investor, Rainfall Ventures, Ron is an amazing
guy. It sounded like I was talking in those terms. He basically was like, we're going
to stop right here. No, don't worry about any of this shit. Just keep doing what you're
doing. We invested in you for you. If you want to hire, hire. If you don't want to hire,
don't hire. Whatever you feel like is best for your product, you just focus on that.
Don't worry about us. We're just here to back you up. I'm paraphrasing that. It's essentially
what he told me. It's like, just stop. And then Ryan also mentioned, look, when you go
this route, you're going to feel like because just like you said, Courtland, Card is my
baby. It's my only company.
For investors, I'm just one of maybe 10 or 100, maybe even 1,000 different companies
that they're invested in. They fundamentally, like just the math tells you, they don't give
a shit that much, like as much as you do. And they never will. And that's how it's supposed
to be. It allows them to kind of give you the capital you need to do what you really
care about. But then they're not so deeply invested in you that they feel like they have
to get involved to change what you're doing. So you just have to kind of learn to kind
of think the way they do about this. And I think that makes the relationship a lot better
as opposed to, yeah, they gave you money. Now you have to listen to every single word
they say.
Not obligated.
There's this kind of phenomenon where, like let's say you're selling to customers, and
you charge a very small amount of money. You're charging like $5 a month. And your customers
happen to be people who feel like this is very expensive. They tend to be like noisier
and complain a lot more. Like, this is like, I don't have a big budget. You know, I'm spending
five bucks a month on your product. You need to have this feature and fix this thing. Whereas
often counterintuitively, when you sell to people who have much more money, and they're
paying hundreds or thousands of dollars a month for your product, they're a lot more
chill. And they're like, ah, do whatever you want. It doesn't really matter because they're
super rich.
And I think it might be true with investors too. Investors who have enough money to put
hundreds of thousands, if not millions, into dozens of companies are probably the most
likely to be like, hey, whatever floats your boat, AJ, do you, don't let me interfere.
Whereas the investor who writes her only $10,000, writes a cheque to you for that, she's like,
all right, this is all I got. You need to make sure it counts, et cetera, et cetera.
And so it's perhaps freeing to have professional investors who can be that chill.
Well, AJ, thanks for indulging all my questions about fundraising. It's not something that
comes up on this podcast too often, but I wrote a piece on the connectors last year.
Yeah, for obvious reasons, but I think it's changing. The landscape is changing. I think
we're living in a world now where just so many people are starting companies and so
many people are investing that it's no longer this dichotomous, you have to raise some institutional
traditional VCs or that's it, right? There's so many different options. It's so much more
possible to find investors who are the right fit, which means that ND hackers I think should
be open-minded to considering some of these options. So I appreciate you coming on and
talking about what that actually looks like. Can you let people know where they can go
to learn more about what you're up to with Card and see all these cool updates you're
releasing? Because I feel like your pace of development to be a one-man developer shop
is insane. And obviously, you're supporting millions and millions of sites. So where can
people go to learn from you and be inspired by what you're doing?
Twitter is probably the best place. I'm not super active on Twitter. I used to be mostly
because I'm just working all the time now, but at ajlkn is where you can find me on Twitter
and then obviously card, C-A-R-R-D dot C-O. Yeah, that's about it.
I love that you follow exactly one person on Twitter. I think that's the way to do it.
You tweet and you don't read.
I know it actually comes off as kind of douchey I think, but it's really because I used to
get really distracted by Twitter. You start scrolling and then you never stop. And then
before you know it, most of the day is gone. So I was just like, shit, I need to – I
realized I did not have the discipline to avoid that. So I ended up just – I'll just
follow a card and then that'll be it.
Yeah. I do the same thing. I'll go on Twitter to DMU, for example. And then before I even
click messages, I'm reading the feed. I'm distracted. I'm scrolling down for half an
hour and I'm like, why was I here again? It's like I temporarily blacked out and woke up
and I'm like, oh yeah, I'm here to message you. So I don't think it's douchey at all.
I like the strategy of you tweet, you say what you need to say, you don't necessarily
read.
It's helped a lot. And I think if you're easily distracted like me, it's almost a
necessity if you want to actually get anything done.
Very cool. All right. AJ, thanks a ton for coming on.
All right, man. Thanks.