What's up, everyone? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you are listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talk 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 do they
get to where they are today? How do they make decisions at their companies and in their
personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here, as always,
so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own successful
businesses.
In today's episode, I'm excited to be talking to you the talented, the mysterious AJ. AJ
is the creator of a number of very successful projects. Almost a decade ago, we created
HTML5 up. And to this day, if you search for free HTML templates, AJ's site is right there
in the first page of Google. And his templates have been downloaded something like 12 million
times. He is the creator of Pixillarity, a similar website, but where instead of just
giving his templates away for free, he actually sold them for money. And most famously, AJ
is the creator of Card, which allows you to easily create a beautiful one page website
for pretty much anything your heart desires. So AJ, welcome to the show.
Hey, Corlan, thanks for having me on.
It's good to have you. I've been trying to get you on here for, man, it feels like years
at this point. So really warms my heart to finally have you on here.
Yeah, sorry, it took so long. I've just, I don't know something about trying to get the
right microphone and trying to, who knows, I'm not going to make excuses. I'm here now.
Let's get this going.
You're a busy guy, AJ, you always have a good excuse. I mean, you are working on card card
is amazing. In fact, before we jump into things, why don't we give people a sense of the level
of card success?
You're generating something close to $30,000 a month in revenue. Now, every month, almost
20,000 new users sign up and create over 40,000 websites using card. And what's amazing is
that you built this thing by yourself in just a few years as a solo founder and a solo developer.
I think that's crazy. Does that seem crazy to you? Are you ever amazed by what you've
done?
Well, I mean, when you put it that way, it does sound a little bit crazy. But I think
when it, when you build something like that incrementally, it's easy to look back and
say, Oh, wow, that was so much that happened there. It's like, well, six months into it,
I got this much done. 12 months into it, I got this much done. It's not as insurmountable
as it seems in retrospect.
Yeah, it's kind of like a frog boiling in water. You just don't really notice. You look
back to years, two years later and you've got this thing.
And you wonder how did you end up in this pot where you're going to slowly boil to death?
I don't know if that was right. Now you need to be using Cortland, but we'll go with it.
We're getting really morbid, really fast here, boiling frogs. What do you think is the most
exciting part of card for you? What gets you out of bed every day?
I think just the sheer number of use cases that I just never anticipated. They just came
out of nowhere every day. It almost seems like I'm finding a new one. To an extent,
it's a testament to how I built something that was general purpose enough that it actually
is able to be used in a more general way. But at the same time, I guess that thing that
gets me out of bed every day is just, where's this thing going to go next? Every day is just
a new adventure.
When I introduced you at the beginning of this episode, I just called you AJ. And it's
not because I forgot your last name. It's because I don't actually know your last name.
You're anonymous. There are no photos of you online. And as far as I can tell, nobody knows
who you really are. You could be an exceptionally skilled elephant named AJ. And none of us
would know.
That's pretty close. Two questions here. First off, why be anonymous? And second, is it even
possible to remain anonymous over the long term as the founder of a business that's incorporated
and has a bank account and has real paying customers?
To be honest, I'm not really anonymous. I think it's and it's not even a conscious thing
that I'm doing. I sort of grew up in that era where you would have like an online handle
or username or nickname or something. And that was kind of what you were known by. So
I kind of continued doing that even in recent years. And it just kind of stuck with it.
And it's not because I'm like, it witness protection hiding out or something. It's just,
I mean, who really cares? I mean, I guess some people care apparently, but I mean, I
certainly don't. And I just I'm just doing my thing.
Despite being not really anonymous, but kind of sort of anonymous, you share a lot of stuff
online, you do a lot of building in public, you tweet about your stats. And I know one
thing about you is that you used to tweet your revenue stats required sort of regularly.
It was something that you sort of made a tradition of, especially in the early days. But recently
you've done a little bit less of that. Why is that?
I think past a certain point, you know, in the early days when you're making like 200
bucks a month or 400 bucks a month, or you know, gets up into maybe like the low thousands,
it just seems like a good thing to share early on because it's the early stages of a project
that you know, may or may not be proven. And then when you get to that point where it's
actually making, you know, more than a few hundred dollars, that's good motivation for
other people. It's good motivation for you. But once you get past a certain point in that,
you know, the five figure range, I just feel it's at least in my case, I feel it's like
a bit douchey. So that's why I don't do it.
Yeah, it's weird. Because it's like, nobody shares their salaries with their friends.
No one's like, Hey, I make $200,000 a year. What do you think about that? Because I would
be...
Well, I certainly know some people who are that way. And yeah, it's just a weird thing
to do.
It's just a lack of self-awareness that comes with that.
Yeah. But then there's business where no one really bats an eye if a business shares its
revenue. It's not like that crazy for business to share their figures. And now I think we
have this weird time period where one person just like sitting in her living room can code
an app and be making thousands of dollars a month. And she's kind of one person, that's
her job, but she's also a business. And so it's this weird mix where it can feel douchey
to share your numbers, but also your business. So why not?
I think you actually nailed it right there. I think the issue is how close I am to the
project. Now, if it were a team effort, where I had, you know, two or three other people
working on this, sharing numbers for that would feel a little bit more... Well, a little
less douchey. Let's just say that. But by me actually being so close to the project,
it being a solo project, me sharing how much it's making is effectively like sharing how
much I'm making. And that is when it starts to feel a bit too douchey. And so yeah, I
think you nailed it right there. It's just that there's not enough separation between
the two. And so they kind of fuse together.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. It's you really just sharing your personal finances at that
point.
Yeah. And it's just strange. But I guess for some people, I think they can contextualize
it better than I can, which is why I don't think they feel the way I do. So who knows?
So let's come back to that later, because I know you have strong opinions as well about
sort of separating your work life from your personal life. And I think that's something
that everybody treats in a different way. I know I certainly treat it differently than
you. So we'll talk about contextualizing your business. But first, let's talk about some
of your earlier projects. In 2012, you started a website called HTML5 up. What's the story
behind how you got started with that and how you came up with the idea?
Well, I mean, quite honestly, for years, I had worked on other stuff, I started making
good money off it. And then what happens when you get to a certain point, at least the way
I was, you start getting complacent, you start not working on things as often as you should.
And you inevitably just start sucking at what you do. Because you're not keeping up, because
why should you? You're making good money, why bother? But then inevitably you hit a
peak and then things start to decline. And then you sort of wonder, how do I get back
into this? So 2012, I realized like, well, I'm really far behind. So I need to do something
to catch up. So that's when I decided, well, the thing I really need to learn is responsive
design, which I had zero experience with despite it being around for at least like a couple
of years at that point, I think. So I figured, why not just jump right into it, just see
what I can make and just put it out there. And if people think it sucks, it sucks. If
not, you know, whatever, it's a good way to kind of get public feedback on something entirely
new that I have no idea what I'm doing with. But I figured that would be the fastest way
for me to learn. So I pretty much started with actually, if you go to HTML5 up.net right
now, scroll to the very bottom, that template is the very first responsive design I've ever
done. So yes, it looks incredibly dated, but it got me going. And so over the coming months,
I started working on it more, started adding better templates, learning new things. And
it just kind of, it just kind of grew from there. And I've been more or less keeping
up with it ever since.
You mentioned that before HTML5 up, you felt that you'd grown complacent that you've done
the same thing for a long time, and you kind of started sucking at it. What was it that
you've been doing for such a long time?
Oh, it's still I was doing site template stuff for years. I mean, even before I started HTML5
up, I mean, going back as like as far as 2008 or so, it was a different time, different era,
there was like a kind of a rising tide of themes and templates that would, you know,
if you just put up a site that put out templates of something or themes, you would actually
make pretty good money off it. I know a few other people who were kind of doing the same
thing around the same time, could probably attest that the same experience I had, there
was just a lot of money in it. And I made the mistake of thinking that would pretty
much be the thing for a long time, when it turned out to just be kind of a very quick
blip.
Okay, so selling themes and templates is not working out, the industry is in decline, you
decide to make a transition and you create HTML5 up, where you are giving away themes
and templates for free, you never put a price tag on it. Why is that?
Well, to be honest, I thought the first few things I put up there would not be really
good enough to charge for. And you know, it felt like it was a good the creative commons
license, which is why I put all my stuff out under just felt like a very good way to also
kind of spread the word of what this thing is. Because part of that license requires
attribution. The attribution I chose is you need to just keep a little link or, you know,
credit to HTML5 up in the footer. And that actually had a very good effect of just kind
of getting more people to go to HTML5 up and see what was their download stuff and just
continue that effect.
Yeah, I wanted to talk to you about growth, because I'm looking at HTML5 up right now
and you've got on every one of these templates, you've created a free download button and
a number after that button that I think is just a representation of how many people have
downloaded it. And some of these templates have been downloaded 418,000 times, 547,000
times. How do you how did you make this website so popular? There's a sea of other HTML5 template
websites out there. Why are so many people downloading your templates instead?
I mean, if I go back and it's one of those things where I can say, well, clearly, I did
it this way to have this effect, but quite honestly, I didn't plan for it to get this
big. I mean, even pixelarity that only came about later because I saw there was a demand
for it. But it wasn't something I really had like kind of planned out in a premeditated
way like, well, I'm going to build this and I know how to get all my traffic and all that.
But there's one theme for my experience with a lot of this stuff is that I've kind of just
fallen into things. And I think there's a there's something we said about making yourself
available to have things like that happen to you. So in the case of HTML5 up, I didn't
overthink it. I was like, well, I'm going to put out some templates with a pretty permissive
license. I'm not going to put a bunch of marketing bullshit all over the site. I'm just gonna
keep it really simple, kind of keep it a little bit more personal this time. You know, maybe
people like that better. And then it just went from there. So I don't want to make it
sound like it was a calculated decision because it certainly wasn't. It was just, I'm not
going to think too much about it this time and see where things go.
Was there a point where you realized that some of these things that you were falling
into some of these things that you were deciding on a whim actually turned out to be great
ideas and that maybe you could capitalize on them?
Oh, yeah, I mean, that's what pixelarity ended up being because there was a point where people
were just emailing me saying, Hey, is there a way I can pay you so I don't have to credit
you or people would email me asking questions about how stuff would work? And then I just
kind of thought, well, clearly there's a demand here that I didn't know about. So maybe I
should build something around that demand, which is exactly what pixelarity ended up
being gave people attribution or credit for usage of all the HTML5 up stuff, gave them
support and then even gave them like extra templates that are exclusive to the service.
So that was an example of a thing that kind of just came out of nowhere, but I didn't
plan for, but I took advantage of it. I just built something around it and it worked out
pretty well.
I have so many questions here because you made a lot of very interesting decisions.
For example, I think many people when they have a successful website, that's getting
millions of hits like HTML5 up, if they wanted to launch something off the back of that,
they would probably just use the same domain name, the same name, and just add some pricing
to that existing website. You created an entirely different brand, an entirely different website.
What led you to that decision?
I think because HTML5 up seemed like it was just doing well as it was. I mean, you mentioned
in the intro, if you search for it, it's still pretty high up in the rankings. And part of
me was like, well, I don't really want to mess with this too much. If it's working,
the whole experience was working pretty well, I suppose. Again, it was one of those things
where I just kind of fell into it. I didn't put a whole bunch of marketing speak on there.
I didn't have a lot of commercial stuff. There are no ads on it, with the exception of the
pixelarity, a little banner at the bottom.
Yeah, so I just felt like I should leave it as is. Build this thing is something separate,
so I don't pollute the original thing that was doing so well.
That makes a lot of sense. It's as they say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I mean, that's pretty much it. I mean, it was doing great. So why screw with that?
The other decision you made that I think is fascinating is your pricing model for pixelarity.
And so you say you've got 92 templates, and someone can download all of them in one go
for just $19. How'd you decide on that?
Honestly, I can't really remember. I mean, it just felt like the right price at the right
time. So to speak back to what we were talking about before, about sharing numbers, part
of it is when you are pricing something, a product that you're basically running on your
own, you're looking at from, well, how much do I want to make out of this per day, per
month, per year, whatever?
So if you're the only person working on it, you don't have other concerns like other teammates
you have to pay for, whatnot. You can be pretty lenient on pricing. You can pretty much price
it wherever you want, whatever feels fair to you. You don't have to add a whole lot
more on top of it to pay for other employees or other liabilities you may have come with
running it.
That makes sense. So you can be a lot more aggressive pricing wise. You can be more competitive.
Aggressive is probably a good way to put it. Yeah. I mean, even though I wasn't really
thinking, well, I'm going to price it as low as possible to fight these other guys. No,
just $19, that felt fair.
So looking back on both HTML5 and pixelarity, I can only see them from the perspective of
today where there are these big successes. What was the process like of 2012 not having
any of this up through 2016? Were there any big milestones you hit? Were there any things
that you changed to spur growth? Or was it a success right from the beginning?
Pretty much it was a success right from the beginning. It grew on its own. I think I owe
a lot of that to just Google, apparently, maybe the way they changed their algorithms
or something made it to where it started ranking highly very quickly.
I literally don't do SEO. That's just not a thing I do. I don't even really watch traffic
anymore. It's just right place, right time, I guess, which I guess is completely useless
to your listeners because I'm sure they're trying to figure out, well, how do I replicate
something like that? I don't know what to tell you, man. All I can say is if you don't
overthink things sometimes, good things happen.
Well, the entire idea behind Google's search algorithm is that it's supposed to reward
the best website to give searchers what they want. To some degree, you've kind of proven
that it can work.
That summarizes it just better than I could. If the intent behind their algorithms is to
reward or should I say rank the best sites possible, so when you search for something,
you get the best possible results, then skip all the SEO ground game that you have to deal
with now. Just go right to the end. Just say, well, I'm just going to make as good of a
website as I possibly can. It doesn't matter how they change their algorithms. As long
as you've done that, you know that's the goal they're heading towards anyway.
Yeah, exactly. Except the frustrating thing is a lot of people make great stuff and no
one ever finds it.
I'll probably get into this later, but luck is just a huge part of all of this and that's
why I'm constantly trying to stay as humble as possible because I know... I mean, I've
already said it. A lot of this wasn't calculated. A lot of this wasn't planned. It just kind
of happened or fell in my lap. So I can't take a whole lot of credit for everything.
Let's talk about some of the practicalities that are going on behind how you built these
websites because when I think about why entrepreneurs don't do some of the things that you've done,
sometimes it just comes down to mundane stuff. They don't have time to build a website. They
don't have any ideas. They don't have the money. How did you fund yourself building
HTML5 up and pixelarity?
So prior to all of that, I still had some money left over from all the work I had been
doing, my old projects, which I don't even mention them anymore because it was sort of
like... You remember the era of exact match domain sites and things like that, making
money off ads and all that stuff, which some people still do. But back then, it was kind
of what you did.
I made a reasonable amount of money off that. So I ended up saving most of it, which turns
out a really good idea. And by having that kind of foundation behind me, I didn't have
to really fret too much about building something that made a shitload of money right away.
So I could kind of take my time a bit.
Did you do the same thing with Card? Because you released pixelarity. Pixelarity, unlike
HTML5 up, was something that actually generated revenue. Was it generating enough money for
you to sort of live off of it and save and fund the development of your next project?
Yeah, actually, that's exactly what happened. Pixelarity was doing well enough to where
I could support myself just fine while working on this new project. And I think having that,
it's a huge blessing because when you don't have to worry so much about money, I'm not
saying I was a millionaire or anything like that and everything was taken care of, but
when you don't have to worry so much about whatever you're building next, making a shitload
of money right away, you can kind of take it a bit slower and build it around, I guess,
things that are a bit more sustainable and they're just like a quick cash grab, if that
makes sense.
Yeah, that's part of the magic of being a self-funded founder is that you can sort of
pay your own way to work on whatever it is that you want. And you can move at your own
pace without some other stakeholder or investor telling you that you got to move faster or
telling you that you got to work on something else.
One of the things that I'm always interested in is how founders get feedback from their
peers and how we learn to do the things that we do. I know that you live in Knoxville,
Tennessee, which is not exactly a tech hub. Who are you talking to over all these years
that you were building these things? And who are you learning from?
Man, mostly Twitter, I think, especially in recent years, it's amazing how it doesn't
matter where you are now, if you can get on Twitter and I guess, connect with the group
of people who are doing the same thing you are, you can very easily learn what you need
to learn from them, get feedback. I mean, in the early days of card, I think my like
the very first alpha I did, it was just all people I knew on Twitter. And maybe like a
couple of people I knew in real life who were just friends. But yeah, that was a huge thing
for me. And I can't stress enough how much value I got on Twitter over the last 10 or
so years I've been on it.
Yeah, you're one of the better Twitter users that I know. And looking at all your sites,
it's not an accident that you have a Twitter following. If I go to HTML5 up, one of the
biggest calls to action right at the top of the website is follow at ajlkn. And I think
in pixelarity, you also drive people to sort of follow you on Twitter.
That actually comes from the way it handles support still to this day, where I think,
I guess one calculated decision I did make in all of this was, I think the easiest way
to provide support and probably the most value support I can give people is if I just do
it directly. So putting out my Twitter handle, opening up my DMs and just saying, hey, hit
me on Twitter over DM or just email me, I'll take care of it. And that turned out to be
a very good decision.
That doesn't get crazy for you opening up your DMs and having everybody who uses card,
everybody who uses pixelarity messaging you?
I mean, shockingly, no. I think people need to give users credit. They're not as helpless
as people would otherwise think like they are, especially it depends on your product.
But at least in my case, I think there's a certain level of sophistication that comes
with it. So people aren't emailing me, you know, mundane questions like, how do I change
a piece of text in this HTML file? It's like they already know how to do that. So it's
only the really advanced, more complex things I tend to get questions about these days.
Well, overall, this whole Twitter strategy is really working out for you. You've got
something close to I think 50,000 followers on Twitter approaching that, I think.
That's huge. That's a lot of people. And if you make use of them, you can really drive
traffic to other projects that you work on, like you were saying, your first users for
card were your Twitter followers. I think some of the most off repeated advice for founders
is to build an audience before you build your product, but you've managed to do both simultaneously.
I mean, pretty much. And I think a lot of them are following either to just, because
I think on that site, in particular, I mentioned, you know, follow for updates. So I imagine
a sizable chunk came along from just wanting to follow along and see what else is coming
down the pipeline. Other people probably following just for support. So yeah, it worked out really
well because I was able to grow as I went.
Give me a snapshot of this process of engaging with your audience on Twitter, opening up
your DMS so that people can send you support messages. What does this actually look like
in practice?
Getting a tweet or a DM where someone's like, oh shit, this isn't working. What can I do?
And me just replying, basically. I mean, it almost sounds kind of a cliche, but people
really do respond well to support that treats them like a human. And it sounds like it's
coming from a human as well. So that's pretty much how I handle it. Just if a person came
up to me in real life and it's like, hey, I'm having trouble with this thing, then I
would respond as a person would in real life. So I figured just translate that to the online
experience as well.
Yeah, I've built apps in the past where I would sometimes get these support emails that
would just be the angriest, meanest emails. And then I would respond and be an actual
person. They'd be like, I'm so sorry for that first email.
Oh, yeah, that's happened a bunch. Yeah. People just, I think they expect to hear, you know,
we are sorry you are having trouble with this product today. We will attempt to help you.
Let me get you to the right, you know, that kind of robotic speech, you know, a scripted
experience versus what you just described where it's like, oh crap, there's an actual
person here. And I sound like an asshole for yelling at them when, you know, clearly it's
not entirely their fault that this is happening.
So things de-escalate very quickly. And in the case of a solo founder or a small team
running a product, you can oftentimes get things fixed very quickly because, you know,
you have access to everything.
So besides just doing support and talking to your audience on Twitter, I think you also
do a lot of building in public. You'll tweet out pictures of unfinished designs you're
working on, you'll ask questions. You've got this giant changelog tweet for a card where
you make a new tweet announcing whenever you've made a change and others will give you feedback
on it.
What's driving you to share what's going on behind the scenes so publicly?
Well, yeah, I think it wasn't really premeditated. It was just, I had noticed the feedback I
got when I would do that was oftentimes very positive. You know, at the very least, you
know, it was good to know people like what I was doing. That's one part. But also getting
constructive criticism for a lot of things helps me move in the right direction. And
so it kind of created this feedback loop where I just kept doing it. And I just really haven't
stopped.
Yeah, it's so great too, because like you were mentioning earlier, you've built this
online support network, you don't really need people in your town to be startup founders,
you don't need to move to a startup hub, you can just use Twitter, and you're getting feedback
from users and other founders. That's actually pretty good.
And I should mention that I think you're a lot braver than I am. I don't like to tweet
behind the scenes stuff. And I sometimes wonder how your pseudo anonymity plays into this.
Since nobody knows who you are, nobody knows what you look like, does that make it easier
for you to share what you're up to online? And does that make it easier to handle criticism?
I mean, I never really thought of it. But now that you bring it up, that probably factors
in to an extent. I mean, it's almost as if this aspect of my life is more compartmentalized.
And I think it's a little bit easier for me to handle criticism through that. Because
I know it's only just that part of my life being criticized versus the whole thing, which
I think if you're putting out your entire personality, it's hard to tell it to a part.
That makes sense.
Yeah, this is making me regret launching indie hackers under my real name. Maybe I should
have had like an alias or just an invented personality that created it. And I could have
been a different person.
How edgy.
I just wish I could be you AJ. So let's talk about card. The first thing I want to know
is why you even created it. You had pixelarity that was doing well, presumably supporting
your lifestyle. Why even start a new project?
Well, I mean, why why start any new project, you want to challenge yourself. And that was
especially true in my case, because I had just come off a few years of doing fuck all
really. So I mean, HTML5 and pixelarity and then card to me, it's not there wasn't a break
between those because, like I said, the years prior to that, I just kind of wasted.
So I was on this kind of, I don't know, there was a lot of momentum pushing me to go to
the next thing as soon as possible. And so I actually, I think I touch on this in my
little making of thing that I wrote up a couple of years ago. But I needed something that
took all of the skills I had learned building what ended up being a pretty diverse array
of templates that you had a lot of pretty crazy features, in my view, I needed something
that would take all of that and challenge me in an entire product that took advantage
of all of these things front end, back end, weird, you know, user interface stuff I learned
along the way. And I had a few ideas that weren't card that just seemed, you know, not
really my thing and card that idea came from just thinking, well, what am I already kind
of familiar with? And that was clearly had a lot of experience doing website design,
site templates, that sort of thing. So it felt like the best first choice for any project.
Now I didn't anticipate it turning into effectively a full time gig like it is now. But then again,
you know, who does tell me about some of these other ideas you were considering? What were
they and why did you decide to choose card over those?
Well, I think I had a to do list idea because you know, everyone is going to have one of
those. Everyone's made it to do this app, of course, because yeah, it actually it wasn't
that bad of an idea just because it probably would have been a good development exercise,
which I think is why it uses one so often. So shit, man, I can't remember the other ideas.
I just remember thinking, No, I can't do that. Oh, no, that's stupid. Or like, I just didn't.
I think I had a few things that were just so far out beyond my like realm of experience
that I don't think I could have done him justice.
Well, I think what's interesting about card and really all of your websites are discussing
is that you decided to do those despite the fact that you're in a pretty crowded. Oh,
yeah. I think a lot of people would say, Oh, you know, a website builder, I can't do that.
There's already Squarespace and Wix and 1000 other huge companies. There's a ton of competition
and why didn't you get discouraged by that fact?
I think because I realized pretty quickly that that particular market and this isn't
true of all of them, but at least this particular one is so massive. You know, there is room
for pretty much any solution because everyone is going to need a website that's a little
bit different from the next person. The features they need are different, what they're willing
to pay will be different. So I mean, you can really carve out an like a niche within this
much larger market and not really step on anyone else's toes. I mean, you will to an
extent but you can coexist with a Squarespace, a Wix, all these other guys.
How do you think people and other markets can come to the same conclusion? Because it
was cool for you. You could kind of build on your skill set. I think there are other
people who have skills they'd like to build on and they're maybe not convinced that their
market is so friendly to competition. How can someone look at what they're doing and
come to the same conclusion that you did, that there's still room for them?
I think being willing to take risks and being willing to try to do things your own way,
which is a point I try to drive home quite a bit, is that you're going to fail if you
try to copy one of the big guys. Because the reason why that they're able to do what they
do is because they're a much larger operation than you are. You've got to think of some
way to get into that market that takes advantage of what you have, which is a much smaller
size so you don't have quite as much overhead as they do. But also, you're not as big as
they are, so you can focus on perhaps one small niche of what they can kind of do, but
you can do better. In my case, it was the one page site type, which all these other
guys do too, but those services are actually built more for full-on websites. So they're
not going to be as into it or as detailed about how they go about it than I would be.
Yeah. Tell me about this process of differentiating card from the other players in the space.
I think it's super fascinating, the set of decisions you make in the very early stage
of your company that kind of stick with you for years. How else did you want to differentiate
card from the competition? What was driving some of this differentiation that you're putting
into your app?
Well, I touched on it a little bit, but constraints just are something that comes with doing a
project like that yourself. It's just you. So you don't have 30 developers. You can say,
hey, we're going to cover all of this ground. You have to actually look at what ground is
out there to cover and then say, well, what can I do myself that's not going to kill me
because it's just me doing this? So I think by having your set of constraints from the
get-go, it kind of makes you get creative with what your product ends up looking like.
So in my case, it was, well, I'm going to be doing all of it. So what does all of it
look like for me? Well, clearly, I can only go after maybe one or two niches, probably
just one, quite honestly, because you can't spread yourself that thin. It has to be simple
enough to where it's not going to have a huge amount of support overhead and just lots of
little decisions like that. And then you end up landing on sort of a very small sliver
of this otherwise gigantic market. And I think just your constraints end up defining that
and then you can kind of go from there.
That's such great advice because I think no matter what you're building, there's always
some sort of ideal vision you have in mind of this amazing app that's going to take 100
programmers, 10 years to build. And it's just hard to cut down on that and have the discipline
to say, I can't realistically build that, I need to start smaller.
And the constraints will make you just get creative, like in any situation, not just
building a product. When you don't have everything at your disposal, you have to just kind of
make do with what you have. And humans are pretty smart at doing that. And that's like
what we're really built for. So you can really figure up something unique and special that
you probably otherwise may have overlooked it if you had access to a massive resources,
whether financial or in terms of human power.
People talk a lot about this concept of validating their ideas, making sure that their ideas
are actually good before they invest months or years of their lives into building it.
Did you do any validation for card? How did you know this would be a good idea?
The validation for card was sort of that came from HTML5 up, if I'm being honest. So I can't
really, I don't want to speak to other people's experiences with that. Because in mine, card
came from in part, or what I saw as one of the most popular things on HTML5 up was, you
know, the A to B one page templates. So clearly, there was something there. I mean, I was,
you know, like the numbers on the download button that you were just talking about earlier.
Yeah, they're really high for one page designs. And I up until that point, did not know that
was really a thing. I just did those on a whim. So the validation to an extent came
from just seeing that saying, Oh, shit, a lot of people downloading these, maybe there's
something there.
Yeah, in a lot of ways, the best way to come up with a business idea is to start another
business before and see what happens. Analyze your market, see what you learn, see what
works and what doesn't. How did you get started with card after you first decided that, you
know, this is a good idea, this is promising, and it's something I'm definitely going to
work on.
So I had to first figure out like, do I have the skill set to build something like this?
Because even though I'd worked on so many templates and some other projects along the
way, I didn't know if I had it in me to really pull together all of those things into one
single product that needed all of it. So the first thing I did was build a very rough kind
of prototype of what would later be called the generator part of card, which would take
kind of the raw data from a user to build a site and then actually generate the HTML,
the CSS and whatnot. And that was really like the first foray into building this thing was
to see if I could even do that. I did. And so then I ended up just iterating on that
building every other layer outside it until basically I had a full working product.
How long did it take to get the first early full working version of card?
Let's see, I did a closed alpha, I think in October or November of 2015. And I started
on it that summer. So probably about five, six months of kind of off and on work to get
this very rough alpha out that was arguably feature complete in that it would let you
log in, build a site and publish it. So yeah, about six months.
One idea that I've been obsessed with lately is the power of analogy and how important
it is to really think about the analogies that you're using to describe whatever task
is in front of you. So for example, a lot of people talk about launching your startup.
Well, if you start to think of your startup as something that's analogous to rocket launches,
you're probably going to spend all of your time building and tinkering up front. And
they're going to invest all of your marketing effort into this one single moment in time
and then expect it to sort of carry itself from there.
Oh, for some reason I heard rocket launcher and I was like, wait a second.
Is that a thing?
Have I just been out of the startup loop for so long? There's a new concept, the rocket
launcher.
Yeah, exactly. Another analogy that a lot of people tend to use is that of inventions.
So if you think of your startup as analogous to inventing something, you're probably going
to put a whole lot of weight behind the idea and building it. You're probably going to
keep your idea secret and not want to tell anybody. And you're going to undervalue sort
of the subsequent execution, finding users, et cetera.
I'm curious what analogies you use, AJ. How do you envision the whole journey of a startup
in your mind?
Huh, I actually kept a lid on it for at least the first, yeah, the first six months until
I did the alpha. I mean, it didn't even have a name. I only emailed, I mean, less than
a dozen people about it. I avoided talking about it on Twitter. I think I may have teased
one or two things along the way, but I don't know. I would hesitate to call it an invention
because it's not really anything that revolutionary or innovative in that regard.
But I think part of it was, and this goes a little bit back to when you're building
in public to an extent, you're kind of a little bit nervous to share too much about something
before it is really viable. You know, like you just, is this thing going to suck? If
it is, I don't really want to share, you know, like where I'm at 10%, you know, I'd rather
just keep a lid on it until it feels like it's time to start telling people about it.
Because you have a roadmap, sort of a predictive roadmap of what things are going to look like
in the future. Like an X state, I'm going to launch a card and then next year I'm going
to go to step two and then there's going to be a phase three. Or are we just sort of winging
it, you know, one week, one day at a time?
Early days, for sure I was winging it. I just wanted to get the product out the door and
see where it would end up. Recently though, especially in the last year, because things
have just grown to the point where, you know, you need more planning, I've done more planning,
I've done a bit more, I have a bit more formal of a roadmap now, but there is still, like
to some extent, there is still just winging it. You know, if something comes up out of
nowhere that I didn't anticipate, but it seems like it would be a good thing to add and it
makes sense, then I will actually oftentimes prioritize doing that over maybe what else
I had planned at the time.
I do the same thing. There's this, I think it's called recency bias where whatever things
you've heard recently seem to stick in your mind and like really just take up the most
mind share. And so it's really easy for me if a good idea pops in my head or somebody
suggests it to end up prioritizing that over some of my more long-term plans.
Right. Which could be dangerous for sure. Like otherwise you just end up tacking stuff
on in kind of a haphazard, unplanned way, you know, completely forgoing whatever proper
planning you did before. I mean, there's this, but there's also still value in being flexible
enough to incorporate new things out of nowhere. You know, like one of cards biggest features
is this, the custom form payment enabled form thing, which literally I had no plans for.
And it came out of a conversation with Peter levels just on a whim. And like right after
I was like, shit, I'm going to do this. And so like immediately I started working on it.
I don't even remember what I was supposed to be working on at the time. I just started
working on that. And it turned out to be a huge, huge thing.
So nowadays, you're getting something crazy, like 20,000 new users per month joining card.
Yeah, that's what you mentioned that in the early days, you were just reaching out to
people on Twitter, you were talking to your friends in real life. How many users exactly
were you finding through efforts like this? And what did that process look like?
Oh, well, prior to launch, I would say, I mean, just less than a dozen people because
that's who I emailed. I think around early 2016 is when I started announcing publicly
on Twitter that I have a new thing. I'm doing kind of an open beta. So if you're interested
in trying it out, DM me or email me, and I'll give you details. And so I probably got a
few dozen more that way, because I didn't really publicly share a lot of information
about what this thing was, until people reached out to me because I still at that time, you
know, still kind of wanted to keep a lid on it for whatever reason.
After launching, I mean, it's been a while since I looked at this, but probably I started
getting a decent number of new users from just that on Twitter. And then the product
launch kind of just blasted the crap out of all of that. That's what product on tends
to do. But yeah, it was no, it certainly nowhere near what I'm getting today. But it was it
was pretty good just on Twitter alone.
Let's say your launch didn't go very well, or your Twitter advertising sort of petered
out. Did you have any sort of growth roadmap or marketing strategy that you planned on
following after that?
Nope. I mean, that was definitely the time when I was winging it a lot. So I was just
like, well, whatever happens happens, you know, I, to an extent, I had already gotten
what I wanted out of the product. In terms of I learned a ton along the way, I felt like
it had leveled up a lot during the development process. And so if it didn't go well, or if
it just it petered out, it's like, well, it's not costing me a whole lot to keep it around.
So it's not going to hurt just to keep it there and move on to something else.
That's such a cool mindset to have, because it makes you more optimistic about what you're
building. If you know that you're going to be gaining all sorts of things from your product,
even if it doesn't succeed, if you know that you're going to be picking up new skills and
learning things or meeting people or whatever you consider valuable, then yeah, it doesn't
really matter if it succeeds or not. And so you can still move forward without sort of
this paralyzing anxiety about success.
Right. And for Card as well, I mean, at the very least, I was like, you know, I'm gonna,
when I was done with it, and it launched on Twitter, like way back in early 2016, I was
like, yeah, maybe you know, if it doesn't turn into like a commercially viable product,
at the very least, it's a very cool, like portfolio piece. If I need to get another
gig or something, I can just point to that and say, hey, I built this on my own. So,
you know, it would have helped at least on that level.
What was your business model like in the early days? And how has it changed since then?
The business model hasn't changed a whole lot, but I did make one very good decision
early on. And that was to first make it a free product because there's a lot of debate
as to whether you should go free meme or not. And I think for something like Card, I felt
that either I invest a whole lot in marketing and like demo videos and all kinds of shit
just to show people what the product can do. Or fuck it, I'll just let people use it for
free and then make it to where the really cool stuff is behind a sort of paywall. So,
it launched with the free plan that anyone can get just by going to the website. And
then a pro plan, which was, you know, $19 a year that gave you custom domains, forms.
And I think, I mean, honestly, not a ton more beyond that when it first launched. I mean,
I added a bunch more to it later, but not... Yeah, I think it only launched with those
two key features really.
That's a good combination to launch with free and paid plans. Most of the founders
I talk to who are doing things that are free, it's really because they're afraid to charge.
So they launch day one, they've got a free plan, but there is no paid plan. And they
say, oh yeah, one day I'll get to it as long as I can make my free users happy. How did
you decide to launch with your paid plan?
Well, I knew if I was going to launch on Product Hunt, I didn't want to waste that initial
surge which I had seen with so many other products where you just get this huge wave
of new users and attention really. For it to only have a free plan, I felt like I would
be missing out on some potential conversions. And also, that's a good way to get a sense
of is this a good product beyond it just being free? Would people actually want to pay for
it?
And so by launching with both at the same time, I was able to validate that very quickly.
And in my case, it was, oh yeah, people are willing to pay for this thing. So that is
really great and extremely motivating, quite honestly.
Yeah, that's smart. You're treating your launches not just a way to get a bunch of users in
the door but also is an experiment really to test your hypotheses, to test if people
will pay for what you're doing.
Right. I mean, if anything, people were complaining about it being too cheap. I was like, well,
okay, I'll take that over people complaining that it's too expensive.
It's a good problem to have. So on that note, I want to point out that Card violates a lot
of the advice that I find myself giving to founders. I tell people, for example, to charge
a lot of money for what they're building, but you sell a card for cheap. I think it's
lowest plan is like 10 bucks a year or something.
Yeah, there's an entry-level pro light plan for 9 bucks a year. But I can get into that
a bit later.
Super cheap. Yeah. I tell founders to charge everybody. I was just tweeting about this
the other day. I think you responded to it. But I don't like freemium. I don't like giving
away your product for free. But with Card, you have tens of thousands of people signing
up every month who never convert to paying users.
I tell people not to build products for consumers to target businesses instead. But the vast
majority of your customers are just regular people. And none of this seems to matter.
You're killing it anyway. In your opinion, what's going on here? Is my advice just bad?
Is Card a special case?
I would say your advice is good, generally speaking. And I have to stress that Card is
a special case, just as every product is. You can't look at Card and say, well, this
is the way to do it. I'm only sharing my personal experiences with this stuff. And that's all
I can really speak to. So what works for me is not necessarily going to work for anyone
listening.
That being said, I think being dogmatic about how to do things is a good way to box yourself
in and not take different approaches or even just risks that may end up panning out. So
in the case of Card, for instance, there's an aspect to it that I would say, yeah, I
winged it. I certainly winged it. I probably could have done things a little bit different,
but it ended up panning out because I was willing to just kind of take those risks going
in and not be held back by, well, all the startup advice I've seen tells me to do otherwise.
So let's dive into some of the specific ways that Card is unique. The first thing we already
touched on is pricing. You have pricing plans that go as low as $9 a year. What is it about
Card that makes this a good decision?
Well, Card initially launched with just that single $19 a year plan, because that felt
like a good starting point. But as time went on, it became clear that there are just so
many different types of people using it. And I figured it being a freemium product, I should
come up with a way to incentivize converting those free users over to paid. I mean, that's
obvious.
So in the case of like that $9 a year plan, I noticed about it's been maybe like a year
and a half, maybe two years even, a certain demographic of users began using Card, as
you well know, K-pop aficionados, among others. Okay, use case I didn't anticipate, but still
pretty cool. Those users would probably never pay for the features on a regular pro plan
because those features are more business oriented, custom domain forms, Google Analytics, that's
type of stuff. So I needed a plan that had features that they would actually want to
pay for and also price it in such a way that they would almost on a whim upgrade to that
plan because it's so cheap. Because I figured, look, it's either a decision between that
getting something out of them or getting nothing out of them. So by adding this plan, I actually
ended up converting quite a few of them, maybe not all, I mean, it's not a huge percentage.
But at least now I'm actually converting some of those users who would have otherwise just
been free users.
Let's say you could go back in time to the early days of Card and give yourself some
advice around some of these major decisions you made about pricing and product design
and the architecture of your code, etc. Is there anything that you would tell yourself
to change?
Well, first, I think it would be have a little bit more faith that this thing is going to
do well, which I guess it's hard to really, you know, that advice doesn't always apply
because you know, it could have worked very well not gone well. But I would have made
some better code decisions. It's not to say what I have right now is not I can't work
with. I mean, it's certainly it's fine. But there are aspects to it where had I seen where
things were going way back when I started, I probably would have structured things just
a little bit differently to make my life a bit easier now. But I mean, that it's not
not that big of a deal. Beyond that, I'd say maybe actually, I can't really think of anything
else.
I mean, I'm not saying that I got everything perfect. I mean, it's it's almost as if I
just kind of lucked into the right setup to handle the scale that I have now. No, that
could very well change in a few years, maybe even sooner. But as it stands right now, I
think between my own, like good decisions and just straight up luck. There's not a whole
lot that needs to have been changed.
Card is one of the few truly viral products that I've seen. It feels like you know, one
out of 100 products actually of real virality. If I search Google for website builder, card
doesn't come up. And yet you're getting tons of new signups, tons of traffic. And people
seem to be finding you primarily through just spreading the product through word of mouth.
Is that accurate?
Yeah, I'd say that's very accurate.
How much time do you spend doing marketing and growth stuff for card deliberately?
Zero, I'd say. I mean, unless you count my tweets on Twitter, and then these, you know,
the occasional podcasts they do, I mean, I really don't put any effort into marketing.
Again, it doesn't apply to every type of product or every product period. But I don't know,
something about card, I guess just makes it spread on its own, at least right now.
That's every programmer's dream to sit around building their product all day and not have
to talk to anyone to do any marketing whatsoever.
Oh, believe me, yeah, I can absolutely relate. But I can't, I can't sit here and say, well,
I designed it to be viral. You know, it's like, no way, man, it just kind of happened
in my case.
Well, what do you think is the secret here? How do you think, you know, with the benefit
of hindsight, that you build something that spreads via word of mouth?
I would say, first, it being free, because the barriers entry is pretty much eliminated
at that point. People aren't having to hand over a credit card to use it, that sort of
thing. Second thing would be, and actually, this was a conscious decision, the process
to get into building the site, like to try out card, like if you never use it before,
and you just want to give it a go, you literally just click a button. You don't have to give
an email, you don't have to do anything. You just click the, well, actually, I think you'll
do two clicks, you click the button, then you choose a template you want, and then you just
go right into it. No signup required.
And that turned out to be a hugely beneficial decision, especially going back to the product
on launch, that became extremely effective because of this one decision I made, where
people, there's no reason where you can't just accidentally build a website with card
because you were just clicking around, you'll end up building something, you don't have
to type anything. So that was probably a big part of it. And I think just, I mean, I really
deliberately tried to keep cards, copy, marketing, whatever you want to call it, as not marketing-ish
at all, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I'm in here right now messing around with card. You said it would take one or two
clicks to get started, and you're right, I'm already setting up a website. And I gotta
say, man, your design is slick. You've got a rare combination of design sensibilities,
front-end programming skills, and back-end programming skills. How does someone acquire
that entire well-rounded skill set?
Oh, man. It's actually not really a big secret. It's just, just try it. Just do it. I mean,
I think people are more capable of doing things than they give themselves credits for. And
I think part of that comes from just this desire to kind of pigeonhole yourself. You
want to give yourself a label like, well, I'm a developer. So if you see any problem
that requires even a modicum of design effort, you're just like, well, that's not my thing.
I'm a developer. And I think it's like, well, maybe, actually, you may be okay at design.
You may be good enough at design to actually solve that problem. So why not give it a go?
That doesn't mean, you know, become a designer in all this, but just try it. And the same
goes for designers. I mean, you're human, you're smart, you can solve problems. There's
no reason you can't apply that aspect of it to solving maybe a back-end development problem.
It's cool looking at your growth strategy being zero minutes a day invested into marketing.
But the reality is that you're sort of doing marketing by engineering. Like you said, having
it be so easy to sign up for the product or keeping it free, like your product choices
make your product more viral. How do you think the aesthetics come into it? The fact that
creating a card is such a pleasant experience and that the card that you create looks so
good. What do you find your users talking about when they're spreading this product
to each other?
If you're a word of mouth.
I mean, you pretty much summed it up right there. They're just pleased with what they
can make with very little effort. And I think that yeah, that is what spreads it. And again,
card is a unique case for many reasons. And I think that's one aspect is that you're creating
something visual. So it's very easy to spread something like that, because you can make
something and say, hey, I made this thing. And then someone can look at it and immediately
say, oh, wow, that looks cool. I want to make a thing like that too. For other products
that are a bit more technically oriented or just like, okay, Airtable. Airtable is freaking
amazing, but it's a little bit hard to spread it virally in the same way that card can go
because you're showing basically what's a spreadsheet that someone... Unless that person
already kind of has a need for something like that or familiarity, they're gonna be like,
I'm looking at a spreadsheet. You know what I mean?
You're right. There's just something about what it is that you're building. It's a website.
If you build a website, it's kind of like the point of it is to show other people. Probably
very few people build a website just for themselves. And so it's kind of like making a greeting
card company or something. If you're selling greeting cards, you can be pretty sure that
your customer is going to share the card with someone else because that's what you do with
greeting cards.
Right.
Do you do anything on top of that? Do you have any incentives? Like, hey, invite a friend
and we'll give you $5 off or something like that?
Well, as it stands, just the natural virality. I mean, that suggestion you just made there,
that's definitely been suggested by other people that I should do something that effect. Or
at the very least, like a referral or affiliate program or something. Definitely a good idea.
It's just I haven't really had a need to do that just yet. And I'm not dismissing it like,
oh, I'm growing so well. I don't need that. Right now, because it's growing pretty well
on its own, that's given me a lot of free time to work on the product itself. So to
go back to how I spend no time on marketing, well, by not spending any time on marketing,
guess what? I can spend that time on actual features for the product and enhance it that
way.
Let's talk about that, because a lot of us are building products. And especially in your
case where you've got so many users, so many people giving you suggestions, and so much
surface area, because what you're building is so general. I bet you've got a feature
list of like a million and one ideas for things you can build with a card. How do you decide
what to work on next? And you consider yourself more of a long-term planner or sort of a strategic
prioritizer? How do you figure this all out?
Also short-term stuff. I get a lot of people who have suggestions to make small enhancements
to things. And when those come in, I'll look at it and think, well, is this how much time
am I going to end up spending on implementing it? Well, first, it has to pass a filter.
Is this a good idea for a card or not? If it is, I look at it and think, well, is this
something that will take a few minutes to implement, a few hours, a few days, or a few
weeks. More often than not, the stuff that just takes a few minutes or a few hours will
be prioritized, because especially if more than one person has suggested this, clearly
there's... If two completely different people in a short amount of time suggest the same
thing, and it's a relatively small feature to add, well, then it makes sense to go ahead
and add it, because there are probably people who are looking for that but don't think to
ask for it. So I'll prioritize those things. Other things, though, beyond that, more major
stuff, I end up putting into sort of a kind of just a general... I basically have a text
file just full of major ideas. And those are things that I'm not quite sure at what point
I'm going to work on them, but they were good enough ideas where I know at some point those
need to make it into the product in some form or fashion.
Probably the most often repeated tip for startup founders is to talk to your customers regularly.
And it sounds like that's something that you've done a lot of with Card. What does this process
look like? How do you get in touch with your customers? And have they ever significantly
changed the direction that you're headed in?
Well, interestingly, I mean, this goes back to the way I handle support for even HTML5
and pixelarity. It was, I guess by keeping that communication channel open and making
sure people knew, yeah, you're talking to the person who made this thing. It makes it
easier for them, even as they're requesting support or something, to just get in touch
when they're like, hey, I have this idea for this thing. They're not having to go through
many levels of bureaucracy to get to me. They just shoot me an email and there it is.
So I don't really have to go out and really seek input. I get a lot of feedback just from
people getting in touch with me every day.
One of the things that I struggle with with IndieHackers is that I have this platform
that I'm creating. And there's this, I don't know how to describe it. Maybe it's like a
fine line you walk between being prescriptive about what features to build into your product,
and also keeping things open-ended so that users can surprise you.
That's something that you deal with with Card as well. You have all sorts of people building
cool websites that you never would have imagined. But at the same time, you're coding up a very
limited set of tools that they have at their disposal to create these websites with.
How do you think about enabling your users to be creative and do whatever it is that
they want, while also making sure that the sites that they create fit in with your goals
and your design aesthetic and what you think they need to be doing?
And that's an excellent question because there is always that possibility where if you're
too open and you just kind of go with what your users want, you'll end up with this crazy
mess of... It would be an incoherent mess of features that don't really fit together.
You'll have niche features for very specific people who don't really have general usage
beyond that specific niche. So yeah, it's a great question because the way I handle it
is anytime someone requests, they suggest a feature or something to that effect, I'll
always look at it in the context of, that's great. How does this fit into the overall
picture of what Card is? And will other people beyond just this particular person's use case
actually get use out of it?
And if it doesn't pass that test, then more often than not, I won't come back to it just
because I don't want to start adding on hyper specific features for hyper specific niches
because that's just going to clutter the product and make it, I think, less usable overall.
It's fascinating because I had Des Trainor, sort of the chief strategist for Entercom
on the podcast last year and I asked him how they prioritize features at Entercom. And
they have this whole framework called RICE. It stands for reach, impact, I think, confidence
and effort.
Wow.
And it sounds like you are pretty much doing that exact same thing without having a fancy
name for it. I mean, you think about the E, the effort part of it. You're prioritizing
things that are much quicker to do versus doing things that take a long time to do.
So you get a lot more features out the door. Or the reach, like you're consciously thinking
about how many of my users will actually use this feature. I don't want to build something
that only 5% or 10% of people are going to experience. And all of this sounds, I think,
obvious in hindsight, but your intuition often as a founder is not to do either one of these
things.
Right. That is really interesting that there's a formal term they have for it because that
does sound exactly what I'm doing. But yeah, a good part of it is intuition. I think overthinking
this stuff in advance, I think you'll end up missing the boat to an extent. If you just
dive into it and you start working on a product and you start interacting with your customers,
a lot of this stuff will just become apparent as you go. I mean, I realized that right off
the bat when I started getting people requesting features that are like, this would basically
require me to rewrite the entire product in a different way. I'm not doing that. I didn't
run it through that acronym. I just basically thought, well, no, there's no way I'm doing
that. I only have so many hours in the day where I can work on this thing. I'm not doing
that. But then I'll get someone email me a little bit later saying, Hey, do you think
you could add this tiny little thing? And I'm like, well, that makes a lot of sense.
I'm going to go ahead and do that right now. Purely intuition. And I think everyone has
this once they put themselves in that situation.
We've talked a lot about your wins here with card. We're talking about all the things that
have gone right. Let's talk a little bit about mistakes. What are some lessons that you've
learned from things that perhaps didn't go so well while you were running card?
I'd say the biggest thing when you're dealing with a, I would say a consumer oriented product,
and I didn't expect card to be this way, but is what it is. You have a lot of user content
and you've got to basically moderate that stuff because who knows what crazy shit may
end up on there. And luckily we really haven't had anything really untoward be put up on
the platform, but yeah, content moderation is definitely a thing you have to deal with
when you're dealing with a platform like this.
And I think if I had, I mean, to go back to the previous question you asked, if there's
anything I could have told myself back when I first started, I would have told myself,
be ready for this and maybe have a system in place right away that you can use as opposed
to something that you have to kind of very quickly implement and iterate on in a short
amount of time to get up to speed, which is pretty much what happened when cards launched
on Product Hunt. Up until then I was getting maybe a dozen new sites a day at most, and
then it got on Product Hunt and I was up in the hundreds. And that's like a shit ton more
content and nothing shady ended up on there, but I was like, well, I can see where this
could go though with this many people adding sites. Someone's going to have to look at
these and make sure people aren't posting porn or something, which we don't allow on
the platform. How are we going to do that? And for a while there, I didn't have a good
solution in place because I just didn't really think of that. And as part of, I guess just
growing pains with a platform like this, you just don't know what you're going to get with
user content.
What is the solution to that problem? Because with so many people creating tens of thousands
of sites per month, I mean, this is not something you can handle by hand.
Right. So part of it is automation. And that's actually been the thing that I implemented
maybe over the last nine months that's really made a huge positive impact on it. And also
having an interface in there for manual moderation as well for stuff that the automated systems
just can't figure out on its own.
So my business partner who I worked with on other stuff before used to not really be involved
in card, but then when moderation became something I couldn't handle on my own, he had to come
in and start handling it. So with his feedback, I actually built a good interface where he
can quickly go through what sites are remaining in the moderation queue that the automation
could take care of itself.
So I wouldn't say that's something that went bad. It was definitely something that could
have been better early on though.
That's cool that you have a business partner. I had no idea. And I've been meaning to ask
you actually what it's like to be building something this big with this many people using
it on your own and whether or not you ever feel tempted to bring in some outside help.
Is anyone else helping you besides your business partner? And what other things do you do to
sort of scale your own effectiveness so you can handle running such a huge operation?
Well, to answer the first part of that question, no one else. He actually came in to do the
moderation angle of things when I was doing that myself and then also working on the product.
I started spending a couple of hours a day doing moderation. I was like, no, fuck this.
I'm not doing that.
So I handed it off to him. He took care of it for a while, but then it started getting
even beyond the couple of hour range into like three, four hours. And at that point,
I was like, all right, we need a solution that scales.
Wanting to answer the second part of that question, how do I scale up with it? Well,
a huge part of it is automation because you'll find in even a product like Card, there are
lots of little things that early on you do manually just out of habit. You don't even
think about it. But then as things grow and you get more users and more content, you start
seeing the repetitive things that you end up doing every day that just take up time
that could otherwise be, in many cases, automated.
So yes, scaling automation is 100% key, especially if it's just you working on this thing. Or
even in my case where I have a business partner handling content moderation. I mean, I don't
want him spending 18 hours a day moderating content because that's just not cool. So automation
even helps if you have more than one person working on something. And that can take you
really far, I think.
You seem to have a bias in favor of automation. And I've talked to lots of people who have
a bias the other way around. They prefer to hire. They hire small armies of contractors
who are working overseas or working on Upwork. How do you feel about that path? And have
you hired any contractors in the past?
Not as of yet, which is part of why I'm going the automation route because my thinking is
if I can automate what I can, then the stuff that I can't automate, I can hire out. And
at that point, where I'm hiring in people to do stuff, I know I've done my absolute
best to automate whatever I could before I try to go the route of spending money on people,
if that makes sense.
We've talked about your early ambitions with Card. It started off as a side project. You
weren't sure where it was going to go. Today, you've got hundreds of thousands of users.
You're making close to $30,000 a month. How have your goals and your vision changed for
what you want this to be? And what keeps you motivated to keep working on this rather than
starting something new?
Well, the adventure every day of just seeing where the product goes, which I touched on
a little bit before, but yeah, every day, people are just using it in different ways.
And that's just something cool about when you make something and other people are using
it and getting value out of it. So there are people using Card now at an agency level where
they're building websites for clients. And I was like, I never expected people to use
it that way, but it's so awesome that they're using Card to power part of their business
so that they can move forward. And that's just really cool to me. So things like that
really keep me going on the project.
And as far as where I see it going, though, yeah, there's so many major features. I mentioned
that text file I have where I have major things written down that I'm not sure when I'll get
to it, but I'd like to get to it. One of the big things right now that I'm thinking about
is taking a whack at commerce and seeing how I can do that in a Card sort of way. Who knows
what they'll end up looking like. But it sounds like just a natural challenge to add even
more value to the platform, but also just more value that users can get out of it.
I think some people say that a business is something that should be done for the sake
of growth, that every business needs to grow. Some people say that every business needs
to generate revenue, you need to grow your revenue. Some people say that a business is
meant just to provide a nice lifestyle for the founders, the employees, or the customers.
What is the point of a Card for you? You're saying you want to add these new features,
e-commerce, what direction do you want to head it?
Part of that I think is dictated by how you start. If you're taking funding, I think that
dictates the terms of how you run the product. If you're taking funding, you have an incentive
to get your revenue going, grow as quickly as possible, that sort of thing. If you're
doing it yourself and you're self-funding it, you have a little bit more freedom in
that and so you can take it slowly. You can choose not to grow. You can grow at a manageable
pace like what I'm doing. You have just more options available to you.
For me though, right now, Card is more of just a thing that I do. It's gone to where
it is my full-time job, which I didn't anticipate even two years ago when it was still kind
of at that side project phase. I'm enjoying it and I'm going to keep doing it as long
as people want to use it and as long as I still have ideas I can put into it.
I've taken up more than enough of your time, AJ. There's so many more questions I could
ask you but it's been an hour and a half at this point. I will end by asking you to give
advice as people who are listening in who are maybe just starting their first project,
just starting their first company, or even just trying to decide what to work on. What
do you think these people should know? What do you think they can learn from the lessons
that you've learned?
If you're just starting out, first, if you haven't even figured out what you want to
do, then the advice I give everybody for that is just pick something that seems like it
would be fun for you. It doesn't have to be a world-changing product or something that's
going to sell for billions of dollars. Just find something in your life that interests
you and then build a small product around it that solves a problem or makes something
better or whatever as long as it's fun and keeps you interested.
I think that's always the best way to start because especially if you've never done it
before, that gives you the motivation to kind of move to the next level because then you
realize, wow, I can do this. This is something that I'm capable of doing.
Cool. I love that advice. I think you've embodied it yourself because you've always
stayed around this niche of products that you really enjoy doing yourself. Anyway, thanks
AJ so much for coming onto the podcast. Can you let listeners know where they can go online
to find out more about what you're up to and where they can find card?
Sure. Easiest place is just Twitter, at AJLKN. That's where I'm usually just yakking about
the stuff I'm doing. And then of course, card, cardwith2rs.co. And that's about it.
Courtland, thanks for having me on, man. This was a lot of fun.
Yeah. I'm going to have to get you and maybe Peter levels on at the same time sometime.
Yes. The thing we've been talking about for a while. Yeah, that'd be a lot of fun. We
should totally do that.
Yeah. Some day. All right, AJ. I'll let you go.
All right. Take it easy, Courtland. Thanks a lot.
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