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. Here with Chris Justin and Ethan Janney from
The Run With It podcast. They've been on the show before. I think we did... When was our
last episode? Like in January, we did kind of an idea riff episode where I came on and
shared some of my startup ideas. And today, what we're going to do is all three of us
are going to share just random stories and ideas that we've heard of that we might think
would be good for IndieHackers to run with in 2021. And this is kind of the whole theme
of your show. So Chris, why don't you explain like how your show works?
Yeah, sure. Run With It is a podcast where we bring on successful CEOs and other founders
to talk about business ideas that they love, but they don't have time to do themselves.
It's very action-oriented stories. It's riffing. We use the word half-baked a lot to talk about
the ideas on the show. Our goal is actually to... Tongue in cheek goal is to get them
to sabotage their own company by becoming so distracted with the new idea that they
just split their attention and go off and do that.
Yeah. No, actually, we claimed that we're hired by their competitors to distract them
from their primary business idea.
That's perfect. I'm going to have to hire you guys to get the new CEO of Product Hunt
on here so they don't crush any actors. There you go.
So we got a giant doc here with a bunch of different notes. Chris, you got a story here
that says flying cars are actually coming. What's the deal there?
Yeah. We talked about this recently in the Run With It podcast, and it struck me because
people have heard about flying cars forever. Henry Ford tried to popularize flying cars
back in the day. Obviously, it never worked. A lot of technological breakthroughs that
had to happen, but it's on the verge of being here. I will venture to say that everyone
listening to this podcast within 10 years will have an opportunity to ride in a flying
car. I think it's actually that close to coming out.
Part of the reason that it's happening is there's this flush of money going to flying
cars to startups via SPACs.
The super popular going public, the traditional route has been becoming less and less popular
because you basically have to do this whole road show and advertise yourself to these
banks and they take a huge cut, and founders don't like it. They want to keep as many of
their billions of dollars as they possibly can.
Yeah, it's interesting about that. It's a little bit of an aside, but it turns out that
they're likely to have less money overall going via SPAC. The fees are like three to
four times higher going via SPAC. It's just much less complex. The broker fee in itself
is five and a half percent usually. Anyway, three flying car companies, more accurately
known as EVTOL companies, electric vertical takeoff landing companies, have gone public
or are going public via SPACs in the last two and a half months alone. The latest one
is Lillium. Lillium was started in 2015 by Daniel Viegand. He worked out the engineering
specifications for the company for flying cars while many of his friends were out drinking,
which at least makes me feel bad about my own life decisions.
Anyway, he worked it out. He borrowed some money. He persuaded suppliers to provide some
free parts in order to begin building a prototype. Once he had that prototype, they raised money
from investors like co-founder of Skype, Nicholas Zenstrom, and Tencent invested $90 million
into them. The company is now worth $3.3 billion. They got $830 million, I believe, of proceeds
via a SPAC.
Funding aside, there's obviously a ton of momentum into this technology from a financial
perspective, but technologically, I want to talk about why this is going to happen. Two
main reasons, cost of batteries is coming down, and two, autonomous algorithms and infrastructure
is on the verge of figuring all of this out for flying cars.
I've always just assumed that the reason why flying cars don't work out is not because
the technology is super hard, but because we don't actually want every person to have
a car that can fly into the side of your house. The consequences are crashing. They're a lot
higher than crashing a normal car.
I think that's probably true for drones. It would be super annoying if everyone had a
small drone out there. Right now, these are way more expensive than the average consumer
can actually use. The lowest end that we saw is like $600K or so.
Do you have any idea why people are so excited about investing? You said the technology is
making it easier.
Well, one of the use cases, I think, is if you imagine flying into JFK and trying to
get into Manhattan, if you've ever tried to do that trip in a taxi or public transit,
it's a bitch to do. In a flying car, they promised to be able to get you from JFK to
Midtown Manhattan for $70 in 10 minutes.
Okay. So it's a cheap helicopter ride, basically.
Super cheap helicopter. It's super quiet too. That's another benefit of it as well. Less
polluting than helicopters. The runtime for eVTOLs, they're expecting to be able to run
for about 2,000 hours per year. Average helicopter is only able to operate for about 300 hours
per year. So it's a step change improvement in a number of ways. The batteries just need
to get there and I think that's going to happen with Tesla.
I don't anticipate any indie hackers going out and starting a flying car company. I'm
not advocating for that by any means. That's not the reason I'm bringing this idea out
here to you.
Why are you bringing this idea out here, Chris?
Why am I? One, it's super cool. How cool is it to be able to fly at a flying car? That's
going to be awesome. Of course, there's going to be a huge infrastructure need that's going
to come about as a result of these vehicles. I wouldn't want to bet on a specific company.
I mean, there are literally hundreds who are trying to do this, but you can bet that one
of them is going to win. There are certain things that are going to have to happen in
order for this technology to take off. No pun intended.
I wonder what you could do as an indie hacker before any of this stuff gets launched. It
might be 5, 10, 15 years before these even take off. What can you do now? Probably the
easiest thing you can do with anything as an indie hacker is just a content business.
For example, you could start a newsletter for flying cars or futuristic industry news
and just scoop up as much media, as much news, do interviews with the people behind the companies
and others who are interested and just sort of following the tech and knowing what's going
on. Probably investors primarily would subscribe and might pay for upgraded sort of behind
the scenes news and insights and updates that other people don't have access to.
That ties in nicely with the idea that you had brought in here about AlphaSights.
Yeah, so this is a whole different idea. It's actually kind of a story. My buddy Fred messaged
me last year and told me that he was getting paid $1,000 an hour to have phone calls about
the QA testing industry because he runs a company around testing. I was like, okay,
well, I'm interested. I'm an expert on quite a few topics. I want to get paid $1,000 an
hour for my expertise.
Apparently there are a number of these sort of expert Q&A services out there where big
companies will pay these companies money to connect them with an expert and just talk
to them on the phone for 30 minutes, 60 minutes, however long it takes. One of them is called
AlphaSights. I was like, alright, cool. I'm going to sign up for this. I did. That had
to be like six, seven months ago. I just completely forgot about it. Then two weeks ago, I got
an email from my AlphaSights sales representative. She was like, hey, Cortland, are you an expert
in technology XYZ because we've got a company on the line that might want to talk to you.
I'm like, I sure am. Let's talk. I got on the phone with her and proved to her that
I knew my stuff, which was interesting because she had no idea what it was. She was just
trying to, I guess, evaluate if I sounded like I knew my stuff. She was like, cool.
Alright, well, what time are you available to connect to the client? I'm like, anytime
Thursday or Friday, but what's the rate? She's like, well, it's going to be either we could
send you a nice bottle of wine or it'll be $75 for the call. I was like, this is not
what I was led to believe by my friend. It's a nice bottle of wine. It's not really worth
my time. I was like, well, I'm sorry, sales rep. I won't say her name here, but I actually
would only really do this for something closer to $1,000. She's like, oh, $1,000. That's
about 10 times what I initially offered. She immediately counters like, I'll pay you $300
to do it. I'm like, well, $300 is nice. I appreciate you coming up, but I'm also in
the back of my mind like, wow, she offered $75 knowing she would go to $300 instantly.
We went back and forth and eventually she was like, you know, I can't go above $500
an hour at the top to my manager. And I was like, well, that's cool. You know, like it
was cool talking, getting to know you. It's really not worth my time for less than $1,000
an hour. And so we hang up the phone and then like 15 minutes later, we get an email and
she's like, we can do $1,000, $1,000 an hour for the call. So how did this call end up?
Really this guy worked for an investment firm. And this investment firm is investing something
like $100 million into a particular space over the next couple of years. And so they
just have like a million of it allocated to research. So they don't care about like hiring
full-time analysts to spend thousands of dollars an hour talking to experts. And this guy knew
literally nothing about the subject area. He knew zero and he was just asking those
basic questions. And it was pretty fascinating to me because you wouldn't think that anybody
would pay $1,000 an hour to basically ask questions that they could probably Google
or email someone for. And yet there's thousands of people doing this when there's a lot of
these expert networks. And so the idea here is like, you know, how could any hackers take
advantage of this? And there's quite a few different ideas. I wonder what you guys think.
You probably could bring a service like this to people who are a little bit less rich than
these hedge funds and major investors who nevertheless need to do research. You know,
at the very low end, there might be podcasters need to do research on guests, and you could
connect them to, I don't know, expert researchers or something and get them all of their prep
sheets filled out for, I don't know, $50 an episode and make it a thousand times easier
to run your podcast.
Or in the middle of the end, you might have CEOs of startups who are trying to figure
out basically, you know, what industry to move into or which marketing channels to tackle.
And there aren't really that many service like nobody's ever emailed me and like tried
to run a sales process for any hackers and said, Hey, I see this is how your business
works. Let me sell you a package of information to help you grow or help you distribute your
services, etc. And so it seems like there's just a market for basically doing research
and connecting people to experts that is criminally under targeted just because of the value that
people are willing to exchange for this kind of information.
Yeah, I think that's it's definitely underused. I personally have had some experience with
this putting myself in that investors shoes that albeit at a much smaller scale. Earlier
this year, I won a contract marketing consulting contract five figures month with a company.
And part of the reason I was able to pull that is because I found someone on clarity.fm
who is an expert in healthcare sales and insurance and super complicated topic that I knew nothing
about similar to I'm sure that investor contacting you charge 200 bucks an hour. And I was happy
to pay him for as much time as he'd be willing to spend with me I was happy to pay that because
that got me the contract with this company. They were super happy to have that connection
super happy that I did that research and you know, it's certainly worth more than that
to me.
Yeah, I'm on their website right now clarity.fm says startup advice from world class experts.
And so you find an expert you request a call it's almost the exact same thing as alpha
sites but targeted at startups.
Yeah, I think it sounds it there's less friction to it too because you can just sign up there
you set your rate people message you directly you can you know, you don't have that negotiation
with the bottle of wine and gallon of milk or whatever. You just get right into messaging
people and yeah, send up your deals.
Yeah, they're all like sorted by basically price per minute. I'm looking through their
list of people you can see get top tier PR media exposure for your company. Some guy
charging $17 a minute, which is actually more than my $1,000 an hour rate. Someone giving
just business strategy and marketing advice for $5 a minute Stuart McDonald was a bunch
of people on here, you could actually do this as a as a founder, like let's say you're trying
to get your business off the ground, you don't have enough funding, and you're not making
revenue.
If you are an expert in a particular domain, like you could list yourself on one of these
expert exchanges, and hopefully get enough business and enough calls, maybe you just
spend your Monday on the phone all day, talking about your industry. And then that gives you
you know, enough money to pay for rent and servers and internet costs.
I wanted to get into BitCloud. This is the one idea that you've brought up Corlinds that
I was like pumped to talk about.
So I did a whole episode on BitCloud the other day with Maboshar Iqbal and BitCloud like
I didn't get it at all. At first, my friend sent me a link to it was like sign up for
this just do it. But the idea is that it's like a decentralized social network like built
on the blockchain. So that's a lot, right? Decentralized social network. The whole point
is it's a social network. That's not meant to be owned by anybody. So for years, social
networks have been owned by these huge corporations by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, Jack Dorsey
at Twitter. And people have been trying to build some sort of like network owned by the
people for a long time, because then essentially the people own it. And we can essentially
not have to look at ads, we can pay ourselves money instead of paying these corporations
money. And we can sort of, I guess vote or collaborate on what we want our policies to
be, rather than having you know, Twitter decide what is and isn't free speech on the internet.
And so the challenge with all of these networks in the past is that they've always failed
because it turns out it's really hard to grow a social network. And just because you want
it to be decentralized doesn't necessarily mean that you have any real chance of succeeding.
But BitCloud seems like it might succeed. So they just launched in March. They have,
I think something like $240 million now in a wallet basically worth of Bitcoin, where
people have put in a ton of money. And that's because the entire network is built on the
blockchain and runs on basically Bitcoin, or this actual this new coin they created
called BitCloud. And so if you create an account in BitCloud, it's almost exactly like Twitter.
But Chris, you would have your own coin like the Chris coin, and Ethan, you'd have your
own coin like the Ethan coin. And if I think that like, other people are going to start
buying your coins soon and that you know, your stature is going to rise, I can buy your
coin now, just like you're a stock basically, and invest in you. And what's cool about it
is it's kind of a blanket investment. I'm not investing in any particular project, I'm
not investing in your podcast, I'm just investing in you as a person. And so if I invest in
you, and then later on, a bunch of other people invest in you, your stock goes up, your coin
goes up, and now all the coins that I bought from you are worth more money, and I can sell
them and make a tight profit. So if I just trust in you guys as people, it doesn't really
matter what specific project that you build in the future, I can essentially just invest
in all of it, and sort of capitalize on that. And the last sort of segment of how it works
is that you can, because you see who all your investors are, all the people who own your
coins, you can essentially create rules for them. You can say, oh, the only people who
can respond to my tweets are people who own at least one Ethan coin, or the only people
who can DM me are people who bought at least 10 of my coins, which should, and I think
it kind of does contribute to like a lot of positivity, where instead of having a bunch
of haters who are following you and talking to you, you have people who authentically
believe in you and want to support you, who are going to be retweeting your projects and
asking you questions, etc. So that's the dream. The risk is that it's entirely a scam, or
that it's going to get hacked, and that everybody's going to lose all the money that they put
into the platform. And so I was pretty careful in my episode a couple weeks back to make
sure that people didn't, you know, take my enthusiasm for big cloud as any sort of investment
advice, like I put maybe $5,000 into this, I would not put any more money into it than
you can afford to actually lose. I think there's something to big cloud, I think that this
isn't its final form. And I don't think that big cloud is going to be the one to figure
this out long term. It's not really decentralized right now all the money's going to like you
said, one wallet, right? Like that's right, you can't claim to be decentralized like that.
So that's a major problem. It's still on on that platform. It's not really open source.
And two, they're taking a large part of the pie for creating the network. And let's say
for example, Elon Musk is the top one on there. He's got three and a half million big cloud
to his name, something like that. Yeah, I'm checking right now, he's got 365 coins, which
are worth each $70,000. And in total, his market cap on the platform as if he's a stock
is $25 million, of which he owns like eight. So theoretically, if Elon Musk joined the
platform, he would have $8 million with the big cloud. And he hasn't done anything, just
because other people have invested in his coin.
Yeah, so there are two ways of looking at it. And one is he hasn't done anything. And
he gets that money. The other is he's ceding 60% of the value of himself to this platform
for the fact that they created it. So if it does become this universal thing where big
cloud is the way that you measure your self worth in a financial way, then I wouldn't
give up that much of my financial stake to to a platform like that.
Yeah, I think it's interesting because it's like, it's weird to have a dollar amount next
to your name. And in a way, like you see that dollar amount and you think, Oh, this is my
worth as a person. But the reality is, it's not really your worth as a person. This is
just like on this one platform, how much money have people invested into what they think
you're worth on this platform. And in Elon's case, I really in anybody's case, you're not
really doing very much, you know, he's not really doing anything, you know, like it's,
he's done nothing for people to come and give a bunch of money to big cloud. And like, ideally,
they don't lose all their money. But assuming it all works as planned, I think it's very
entertaining to look to log in and see like how much my big cloud is worth and see what
other people are buying and selling. I don't take it very personally. And to be honest,
like I think, you know, some of the cooler things that people are doing is they're building
side projects on top of big cloud. So you don't really need to be like this cool celebrity.
And honestly, it's probably a little risky to even post on big cloud because it's built
on the blockchain, everything you post is on the blockchain, which means it's completely
public and it's impossible to delete forever for all time. So if you say anything even
a little bit risque, then you know, you might be canceled 10 years from now. And you know,
we're murdering all the people who once ate meat or whatever, whatever is going on in
the future. And you were a bit clouding about eating meat in 2021.
I actually don't think that that piece is that big of a deal. I think that if you post
on Twitter, if you become famous enough, people can find that people's deleted tweets from
10 years ago are still coming back to bite them. Internet Archive is going to essentially
doing what that blockchain is doing in that regard.
I know people who are anticipating getting famous, for example, working on new startups
and raising a lot of money who will go through and just delete all of their old tweets. I
know people who delete all their tweets now. And a bit cloud that's literally not possible.
But your mileage may vary up to you to figure out what you want to do. But I'm the most
interested in is like, what kind of side projects would you build on top of bit cloud.
So mubs has a cool one called bit cloud follow, where you basically just recommends who should
you follow on the cloud. That's literally all it is. He looks at the interesting people
who are on there. He groups them into categories. And then he created a profile on bit cloud
for bit cloud follow. And I think that profile itself is now popular enough that it's coin
is worth like $1,500. And so the total market cap for that profile is $80,000 or something.
And mubs is doing an AMA on any hackers today. He said he's put in $1,000 in bit cloud. And
now it's theoretically worth $40,000. He can't withdraw it because there's no withdrawals
on the platform yet. But one day if you can, he made a bunch of easy money by basically
building something that other people believe in. And he probably wouldn't withdraw that
money at once because people probably stopped believing in his accounts. And so it's kind
of an incentive to keep it and keep the coin price high and show people that you're not
just kind of a scammer building something that's going to disappear. You're not building
vaporware but you're actually building a cool side project.
This also reminds me of a different project but similar. Zedrun is a digital horse racing
game built on the blockchain. And it's one, it's a fully functioning game where it has
a number of factors. It has the NFT aspect of these horses, digital horses are unique.
But it also the really cool thing that is pulled into it is the genetics component of
it. So when you buy a horse, you can analyze their bloodlines and genotype and breed type.
And then you can breed horses and you can actually do a digital equivalent of the real
world of horse racing out there. I haven't gotten into it at all. It's like a steep learning
curve apparently but it's super immersive from what it looks like.
I want to hear your thoughts, both of you overall on the NFT world.
So the idea of an NFT, it's a non-fungible token. The basic idea is it's a way to create
digital scarcity. It's a way to say like for example, a CEO of Twitter created an NFT for
the first tweet that he ever sent. And it's like this is the only digital representation
of this tweet and someone bought it for I think several million dollars. And it's almost
like collectible trading cards or something where people will pay tons of money for the
rarest Pokemon card or the rarest baseball card or the rarest Magic card but a digital
version. And a bunch of artists have grafted onto this and I think there's a guy, what's
his name? Beeple who sold an NFT representation for some digital art he created for like $70
million or $60 million or something crazy. And I am a skeptic. I'm not certain that this
is going to be popular or even around another couple of years from now because I don't think
digital scarcity is all that new. I don't think there's any underlying technological
shifts that make... For example, Twitter handles are already scarce. If you have a Twitter
handle, nobody else can get that Twitter handle because it's a unique role in a database somewhere
and nobody else can get it. Our domain names are the same. Our email addresses are the
same. There's already a ton of digital scarcity. And the way that NFTs are implemented, for
example, like Jack made an NFT for his first tweet, there's nothing stopping him from doing
another NFT for that exact same tweet. He could do a thousand NFTs for the same tweet.
So is it really scarce? Are you really bidding on any scarce resource? The same for all the
artwork that gets sold. You could do an NFT for a famous painting that you've made, but
then you could just do another NFT for the exact same painting. Or anyone who doesn't
own that NFT could basically just copy and paste the image. And so is it really digitally
scarce? Or are we all sort of fascinated by the idea that it could theoretically, in some
weird way, be considered to be scarce, but it's not?
Well, it's scarce in the way that diamonds are scarce. It's like controlled scarcity.
The producer is metering out the production such that the value stays high. And if you
take advantage of that and you flood the market with products, then yeah, it collapses. That
happened in the trading card industry in the 80s and 90s. They just figured out that, hey,
people want these holographic cards of Mike Piazza or whatever, and let's just make a
bunch of them and just crash the market.
It's not just about creating digital scarcity per se. There's just also the digital representation
of ownership, a place where you can say, I own this and this is how we know. The argument
that there's other forms of doing that already, some people might think it's a valid argument.
The argument against Bitcoin as a store of value. But where people run into a problem,
I saw this one. I like this blog, this Mr. Money Mustache blog. This guy talks about
saving and retiring early and stuff. He had this argument against cryptocurrency. Well,
anything could be scarce. What if we started trading my toenails as currency? We could
do that, but that wouldn't be Bitcoin. And I was like, I usually appreciate your arguments,
Mr. Money Mustache. But it's like the thing that is that people are seeing potentially
value about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies is that it's not only scarce, something like
gold, but it also has other properties that make it a better gold, that you can transfer
it more quickly. You don't have to pay a lot of money to store it and move it and protect
it, all this kind of stuff. And I think that that's probably what's going on here with
the NFTs as well. Yes, there's other ways of making something owned by one person or
providing some sort of digital scarcity, but it may be the best way to do it. And that's
why you're seeing like, as a company called WAX, the worldwide asset exchange, who's invested
heavily in NFTs for several years. And the guy running it, William Quigley is super smart.
He's got a ton of patents already in the space. And not only is that platform already doing
a lot of business around digital collectibles, but they're looking to be expanding very soon
in the future. They're working with big brands and creating licensing deals and all sorts
of things. He foresees a future where you have people trading like tennis shoes on eBay.
So they literally just order the tennis shoes because they think it's a good price. They
get it shipped to their house and then they put it back up on some other platform and
some other way to resell it at a higher price. So he's envisioning a future where literally,
actually, you just ship those tennis shoes to a central warehouse and people trade the
NFT for the tennis shoes until maybe somebody actually wants to have it in their house.
And it kind of sounds ridiculous to people who aren't in collecting, but to people who
are in collecting, they're already doing it. I mean, you can't argue with... I think sometimes
it sounds silly to trade comic books or baseball cards, but people are doing it. So I don't
think it's going to go away.
I think that's what it comes down to is ultimately, is there a market there? And are there people
who are willing to do it? And if there are, it doesn't really matter what the utility
is. Nothing really matters. The fact is there's a buyer and there's buyers, there's going
to be sellers. And there are market dynamics. As you said, Chris, the baseball trading card
market collapsed at various points in the past. I worry if that might happen with NFTs.
There really isn't that much to stop you from opening a new marketplace for NFTs. There
might be a point where there's so many sellers and not enough buyers.
And to be fair, that doesn't mean it's the end of NFTs. The art world doesn't have that
many buyers. It's not that big of a market altogether. There aren't that many super rich
people collecting fine art. And yet it exists and it thrives and it's something that we've
known about. Maybe the NFT world will be something like the art world. But I am very bearish
that in two or three years, it's going to be as popular and as hot as it is today.
I want to throw out one example of an NFT that I think could work before moving on to
a slightly different blockchain topic. I think it'd be super cool if someone like Beeple
actually created the art on the blockchain live. Each stroke that he did with his virtual
paintbrush was recorded on the blockchain. You don't actually see the piece of art. The
only way that you can see it is if you have the private key. That would be truly scarce.
Maybe that's not how it ends, but I think that there is possibility for something like
that.
I like it because it's creative. And if you have a creative piece of art like that, there's
a story behind it. Whoever owns that now has a really cool story to tell anyone who's like,
why did you just spend $8 million in this art you can't even see? And they're like,
well, let me explain to you how the blockchain works. And they get this cool unique story
to tell anyone. And that's the kind of story that can ratchet up the price of your art.
Well, and they could see it if they have the private key. But you'd literally have to be
with them and they open up and it'll be a whole experience. It will be very different
than any other kind of art.
One other point of skepticism I'll mention on this point is that there's just so many
vested interests. We saw this with ICOs years ago where people would create a new coin offering,
and then they would just pump in millions and millions of dollars to it and make it
look like something's happening here. And there are a lot of people who own these NFT
platforms. And you see these sales of art going for millions of dollars, but no one
really knows who exactly is funding this and who's buying it. And it could easily be,
in fact, almost certainly is, to some large degree, people who own the platforms pumping
in a lot of money to drum up excitement, to get other people who are rich to say, oh,
this is worth a lot of money I'm going to buy in. And the art world does this too. Even
traditional art, you'll see people basically pumping up the initial bid. And so it'll be
interesting to see how it plays out over the next few years.
I think that the interesting thing about the blockchain application is the verifiable nature
of the tokens. It's not as much the scarcity, because as you said, you can duplicate anything,
but the verifiable nature does come in handy in other applications, one of which is climate
change. One of the big new applications that's coming out is the ability to offset your carbon
emissions via a platform like Nori. What Nori does is people and corporations can buy these
tokens. I think the average person, it's $275 to offset all of your carbon emissions
for the year. And when you do that, that money goes to farmers who are implementing sustainable
farming practices that absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. Nori takes a little bit of a cut,
and everyone's happy.
The reason that you need the blockchain here, because I know you guys are going to ask me
this question, maybe the listener has that in mind, is about 50% of the price of carbon offsets
goes to overhead. Legal, compliance, accounting, auditing. And if you can consolidate that,
simplify that into a blockchain, which is very easy to monitor and verify, then that is actually
adding real value to the world in a way that I think is much more lasting and sustainable,
even, than NFTs.
I love the idea, the basic idea behind Nori. So it's N-O-R-I. I'm on their website right
now. It's a carbon removal marketplace, as you said. And one of the things they do on
their homepage that I think is super cool is they just give you the numbers to put things
in perspective. So they kind of default you to saying, how many tons of carbon do you
want to remove from the atmosphere? And they default it to 16 because they say the average
American emits 16 tons of carbon over the course of a year. And they give you other
examples too. One round trip flight or a cruise can emit about a ton of carbon, literally
one ton of carbon. These are numbers I didn't know about. And when you put it all on perspective,
it will cost $15 to remove a ton of carbon from the atmosphere. So I could basically
cover my entire yearly carbon footprint for $240 plus their actual transaction fee for
this overhead that you're talking about. That seems like a no brainer. It seems like it's
such an easy way to feel better about, I guess, the impact that you're having.
What I like about this, in particular, is that there's always an appetite to do good
in the world. No matter how many years you go back, people have always paid money to
donate to charity, et cetera, et cetera. And those are often some of the best businesses
to start because you know there's a market for it. And then what you need to do is basically
figure out, OK, well, how do I use technology to do this a little bit better than the people
in the past? Or how do I market myself to be a little bit better? And there's a lot
of indie hackers who are doing this. I've talked to John O'Nolan from Ghost, who is
creating basically a WordPress competitor. And he's super good at marketing. Five, ten
years ago, he had this whole manifesto. And a lot of people hate WordPress, apparently.
And so he had a lot of people funding him from the beginning. I talked to Quincy Larson
on the podcast, who runs FreeCodeCamp.org. And that's I think the biggest resource online,
teaching people how to code. And he's super good at basically breaking down the math.
You can see, OK, for every dollar you donate, there's 200 hours or something crazy of students
actually learning how to code on our platform. So it's super efficient. And people get behind
that. And I think with something like Nori, the fact that they're breaking it down and
putting it on the blockchain, they're making sure it's all transparent. Is this really
that different from other nonprofit charity organizations? Not really, except for the
fact that they've got their marketing down and their processes down so that people like
me, who are maybe a little bit more modern minded, want to do something like this and
actually contribute. And so I think a lot more indie hackers can probably do this. If
you want to have a socially conscious business and you're good at marketing and you're good
at programming and you know how to use modern technologies, there are a ton of people out
there with a lot of money who are willing to donate to charities that actually can show
their work and be more transparent and be more modern than the old school.
There's a huge opportunity right now in general with infrastructure and just doing anything.
I think if you throw a dart, you can't miss right now. Biden's team is putting out $2
million into the economy. I think that the NFTs that we're seeing is the sign of people
have a ton of money and they don't know how to use it productively, honestly.
It's very true. Every startup right now, every deal, I get all these DMs, you're an angel
investor, we've got a deal for you. By the way, we're oversubscribed. And it's a company
set of like, in my opinion, who would invest in this business? And it's like, apparently
lots and lots of really rich people are investing millions of dollars. It's crazy how much money
people have saved up over COVID or how much money is looking for a place to go.
Yeah, I think that in terms of opportunity, it's a much better opportunity right now to
start something than to invest in something. That's an overall trend. Even if you have
the money, just use that to build something and pretty much anything you can do well right
now.
Another example of a non-profit that is very modern is GiveWell. I love GiveWell. Basically,
a charity... Well, effective altruism is basically a philosophy about having a very logical approach
to helping people. How do you be as efficient as possible when you're donating money to
a charity? And GiveWell was started by these two guys at a hedge fund who were thinking
about donating. They started doing all this research. They're like, how do I know how
efficient a particular charity is? How do I know how much of my money is going to the
people on the ground versus overhead and marketing costs and all that kind of stuff? And it turned
out there just wasn't very much data.
And so they started GiveWell, which is basically a program that evaluates charities and figures
out where should you actually donate your money to? And they have their own process
and standards. And it's super cool. The way these two guys grew GiveWell was they were
on Reddit and they were on internet forums. They would ask questions like, hey, what's
the best way to find a charity to donate to? And then they'd go on an anonymous account
and answer with GiveWell. They're doing the same thing that any hackers would do to grow
their websites and their businesses, but they're doing it with their own charity organization.
And today, I think they've raised something like 60, 70 millions of dollars that they've
redirected to the most efficient charities. I donate to it every year. Their most efficient
charity is called the Against Malaria Foundation. Basically, they're doing, I think, distributing
nets in certain places in Africa where malaria is really bad. And you can reliably save a
life donating $3,000 to $5,000 to GiveWell, which is crazy. It's like, oh, do I want to
upgrade my apartment this year? Or do I want to literally save somebody's life? And you
know that you're doing it because they are extremely rigorous about how they evaluate
these charities.
Even on their homepage, one of their main tabs says, our mistakes. And it's a list of
every mistake that GiveWell has made over the last few years broken into major issues
and smaller issues. And they talk about all... We had an error in a spreadsheet that led
to this charity getting too much money, et cetera, et cetera. And they don't care about
looking bad or looking good. They just care about being super effective. If you're asking
people to give you their money, especially investors, or especially people who are donating
charity, and you can create trusts, that's huge. And there's a whole realm of old school
charities and nonprofits that aren't doing any of this stuff, who are still sucking up
millions and millions of dollars from investors and donators who could probably be replaced
by indie hackers doing a better job at proving that they are trustworthy and proving that
they do care and they are going to show their work, et cetera.
That's also the idea behind this podcast is getting YouTube on, getting other people on,
having a bunch of people share their stories. It's just creative inspiration. There are
people out there working on businesses or trying to come up with business ideas. So,
I'm glad the two of you guys came on, shared a bunch of different stories. You got, I don't
know, how many episodes of your podcast do you have now?
About 80, I think. I don't know.
80 stories. And every episode is basically two stories, because you have a guest who
has a story of their own company, and then you have an idea that they're sharing for
a new company that could be started. So, it's basically 160 ideas, a giant repository of
inspiration for people who want to go check out the Run With It podcast. Chris and Ethan,
thanks a ton for coming on the show. Can you let listeners know where they can go to find
out more about where to listen to your show?
Yeah, the best way you can find us, search for Run With It on your podcast player of
choice. We should be popping up near the top. You'll see a digital representation of myself
and Ethan. And yeah, hopefully get inspired by some of the business ideas that you hear
on there.
Thanks a lot, guys. Thanks again.