Tommy Griffith, welcome to the Indie Hackers podcast.
Kortland, thanks so much for having me on the show.
I really appreciate it.
You previously managed SEO at both PayPal and Airbnb.
And today you are the founder of a business called ClickMinded, which is
on track to average about $40,000 a month in revenue in 2019.
Tell us a little bit about what ClickMinded is and who's using it.
Yeah.
So ClickMinded is a digital marketing training platform for
entrepreneurs and marketers.
We teach people how to do, how to do digital marketing.
A lot of our customer guitars are entrepreneurs, in-house marketers,
or consultants and agencies.
And, and we focus a lot on team training.
It started as a side project of mine.
I was managing search engine optimization at PayPal and started physically
teaching in-person SEO classes.
So I would, I would rent out a co-working space in San Francisco
and in North Beach in, in 2012, rent out a, rent out a co-working space
and kind of teach people SEO.
It was like a dorky kind of Saturday morning sort of thing.
All you can, all you can SEO.
We would kind of nerd out on people's websites from like nine in the
morning to five at night and try and figure out how to get them more traffic.
It was a really bad business.
I really liked doing it, but it doesn't work.
And, but it just ended up being right place, right time with this kind
of online course Renaissance that we're in.
Now I ended up taking that offline course, turning it into an online course.
It became a side project that I used at work.
So once I moved over to Airbnb, we would use the online SEO training to train
up all the data scientists and designers and engineers that joined the, the SEO
team, part of the growth team at Airbnb.
It eventually eclipsed my salary.
And then, uh, two years ago, I left Airbnb to go full time on it.
Now we have a small team of five and, uh, and we're growing a lot.
So it's been a lot of fun.
You wrote a blog post recently and you included a tweet from Naval Ravikant
that says a taste of freedom can make you unemployable at what point in this
journey of you working on a side project to eventually quitting Airbnb
to work in it full time, the, that statement become true for you.
What point did you become unemployable, Tommy?
Oh man.
Um, way to dig in there and pull that one out.
I, and, and yeah, I'm, I'm so obsessed with Naval at this point.
Um, he's just an absolute monster, but, um, he's so right.
He's so right.
And, you know, it's really interesting, Courtland, because I was in this
situation where like, when I, the way I got into internet marketing was by
starting my own business right out of university.
Um, I started a very obscure, I guess you could call it startup with a friend of mine.
We were focusing on medical tourism.
We started a medical tourism facilitation company in Taiwan.
We were focusing on knee and hip replacement surgery for Americans age
45 to 65 that were looking for like cheaper, kind of out-of-pocket medical care.
We did everything wrong, everyone, really badly.
Yeah.
Dangerous.
Are you, you mean an idiot, 22 year old, no medical experience running a medical
tourism facilitation company is a bad idea.
Is that, is that what you're inferring?
How did that turn out?
Yeah.
So not well, but you know, that was a big problem.
I borrowed a bunch of money from family and friends and, um, lit it all on
fire, basically did everything wrong and came home, tail between my legs, didn't
know what to do and ended up just being right place, right time.
I'd learned SEO and PayPal was hiring an SEO manager and that sort of moved me back
into the like, you know, turning internet marketing into an actual job.
I managed SEO, PayPal and Airbnb for six years, started the side project and then
took off and so I was, I kind of had always wanted to do something sort of
entrepreneurial, but my first attempt was like guns, but I was like, I'm
just blazing, came out the door so hard and fell like immediately on my face.
You know, nobody died.
I presume nobody went to jail.
Nobody went to jail.
So I guess I'm like, it wasn't Enron.
It could have been worse.
I guess, but yeah, so it was interesting for me because I had this weird, you know,
a lot of people in there, like decision calculus of like, do I take like, I'm
an indie hacker, I'm listening to this podcast.
Like when do I take my side project full time?
The decision calculus is like really easy when you hate your job, right?
Like, it's like Google sheet out.
What's my cost of living?
What's my revenue?
The minute like the line, right?
Sort of crosses you're gone, right?
For me, it was interesting for a couple of things.
The first was like, I really liked Airbnb.
I joined it like this prolific time.
I, the first week I joined Airbnb, we were subpoenaed by the state of
New York for our data and the last week I was there, I worked on a Super Bowl ad.
And Beyonce had stayed in an Airbnb, right?
It was like, uh, like no, like it was a hundred something employees.
When I joined 2000 something, when I left, none of my friends had heard of it.
When I joined everyone had heard of it when I left.
So I loved my job and the company was so awesome.
I felt like I was there at an unprecedented time.
And not only that I had been burned by the, the wounds were fresh from the
initial idea of like how bad it can get, right?
And, and so I was in this weird situation where I really wanted to jump, but I was
at such an awesome company and I knew exactly how bad it could go that like, I
think I, I really understand when people are nervous about leaving because
it can go really bad, it can.
And so now, you know, I'm out and I really don't think I could ever
work somewhere else again, maybe, but probably not.
But, um, yeah, I get what Naval saying around being.
Unemployable when you are somewhere awesome.
And you believe in the mission and you really enjoy your colleagues, it's
easier to be employable for a little while longer, but, uh, but I do get what
he's saying, like when you get that taste of freedom, it makes it hard to go back.
You know what I mean?
You heard it here first folks.
If you want to be an indie hacker, get a job you hate, so you'll be
motivated to quit.
All right.
So you're at Airbnb before that, you're at PayPal.
And before that you'd started a company that didn't go too well.
How do you decide what to work on when you first decide that you want to dabble
inside projects again, because there's so many different things you can do.
You have probably so many different skills under your belt working at these
companies, how do you narrow it down?
Yeah, this is such a good question.
And this is probably like the indie hacker, indie hacker boards are like
just riddled with this stuff, right?
Like this hilarious mix of passion and ADD and total industrial market sizing.
Right.
I was just at a meetup yesterday in Seattle and there's a guy, he had 40
different ideas and he's like, yeah, I'm going to quit my company at some point
and go work on my own thing, but I just got to figure out which of these 40 it's
going to be.
So actually there's a test we invented around this, around entrepreneurial ADD.
And I absolutely had it, but there's a really good test after talking to a bunch
of friends about this, the test to figure out how much like neurotic entrepreneurial
ADD you have is how many unused domains you have in your hosting account right now.
And if it's, if it doesn't fit on all 10 fingers, you have entrepreneurial ADD.
Right.
And so yeah, I, I had this problem as well.
Click-minded, you know, was idea number 15 for me, like I tried a lot of different
things and part of the motivation for me was this debt I had caused for myself.
Like I was, I was very blessed.
My parents paid for university.
I was one of the few people to graduate with no college debt and I put myself
into debt trying this business idea.
So I was like really embarrassed.
By this, I was pretty miserable and I was way too confident and did everything wrong.
And I was really kind of had beat myself up over the fact that I'd like done this
to myself, you know?
And so being like miserable and in debt is actually like the greatest force in
human nature.
I mean, it will, it will make you move, right?
Like you will skip happy hour and wake up on Saturday morning to, to get it done.
You know what I mean?
At least for me, you know what I mean?
Like, you know what I mean?
Happy hour and wake up on Saturday morning to, to get it done, you know what I mean?
At least for me.
And so it's really interesting and actually I hate to be such a fanboy about
Naval, but Naval, Naval covers this as well.
He says as an example, right?
One of the many ideas I had, I had this idea for an iPhone app development lead
generation site.
So it was like 2011, it's in San Francisco.
That's probably right around when you got there, right?
Or maybe you were there.
Yeah, I got there in 2010.
Okay, cool.
Yeah, I got there beginning of 2011.
And so I had this idea for an iPhone app development lead generation site.
So like everyone at the time was like trying to learn Xcode.
If they hadn't, if you were a company that didn't have an iOS app, you were like
lame and you wanted to outsource one really fast, right?
And so the idea was like, okay.
And you could see in Google trends and Google keyword planner data, like all the
search query volume for iPhone app development companies and iOS developer
costs and iPhone app development agency were like all going up.
And so the idea was like, okay, create this site that ranks really well for these
keywords and then maybe sell the leads, like create a lead generation site, right?
And I was, I worked on it and I got it up and live and ranking, generating traffic,
generating leads.
Every morning, like when I went to go work on it on Saturday morning, I just hated it.
Like I, I just had no interest in it, right?
It was just so like transactional and mechanical to me and I wasn't really in iOS
and I'm a droid guy anyways, right?
And so like all this kind of stuff.
And so I just, I didn't like it.
And, um, I don't know, there's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of like kind of
tropes in the Valley right now around, around markets.
Was it Andreessen or someone they say like, I'd rather have a mediocre product
and a mediocre team in a great market than a great product and a great
team in a mediocre market.
But if you're an indie hacker or you're working on a side project, I really disagree
with this because I think there's an underrated amount of effort, like there's
an undervalued amount of, of, of focus you should put on your own personal
interest in the thing, right?
And for me, you know, I was a dork when I was a kid, I love playing computer games
and I love, I've ended up that turned into like search engine optimization.
I loved watching rankings go up on the dashboard and traffic going up on the
dashboard, so it just became my like computer game.
I also love teaching and then surprise, surprise, teaching SEO was like my
dream come true, like I loved doing it, right?
And so it's like a really long winded answer to your question.
But Naval says this, he says, what you work on should like, should feel like
play to you and work to your competitors and over a long enough time horizon,
right?
Like if you're working eight, 12, 16 hours a day and it's, it's work for your
competitors and it's play for you, you can't really lose, right?
And so, right.
And so I guess that's sort of the way I think about it was like, I had a bunch
of entrepreneurial ADD at the beginning and I do think you need some of that.
But once you find that thing that feels like play, drop everything else.
If you're that guy in Seattle listening right now, drop 39 of those 40 domains
and pick the one thing to hammer because you like kind of have to focus on that
one thing to get it going.
I love that you mentioned that quote from Marc Andreessen because it just kind of
highlights the importance of taking advice from the right people, understanding
the context of the people who are giving advice and the context that you find
yourself in and making sure those two things align.
If you're trying to build a massive unicorn business that has to be, you know,
worth a billion or $10 billion to pay back your investors.
And of course you need to be in some sort of monster market and that matters a ton.
But if you're an indie hacker and it's like, this is something you're doing
really to make your own life better, it makes no sense to start a business that
you don't love working on every single day.
Exactly.
And the problem, and you're so right about that, you phrase it really well.
One of my friends said this in a really funny way.
He said, if you, especially if you're an indie hacker, if you take that like only
do the best markets idea to its inevitable conclusion, you, the only things
you can work on are like oil, like gas exploration, like going to Mars, right?
Tobacco, because like, those are the biggest markets.
And like, if you just, it's kind of crazy to take that to the end line of thinking.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Okay.
So you figured out that you wanted to work on something that you loved and here you
were working as a full-time SEO expert.
Is that exactly how you found out that Click mind?
It would be the business for you.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I mean, I think I loved search engine optimization.
I was shocked.
Someone would be willing to pay me to do it because it still feels like, like
an MMORPG or something like that to me.
You know what I mean?
Like it just feels like an online game to me.
So I like it.
And then teaching is a lot of fun for me as well.
The big dirty secret about teaching is you learn so much faster when you teach.
Right?
So like when I first started, I was teaching, but like the big dirty secret
was I was, I was really learning, um, learning a lot more, like walking out there
like a clown, pretending like I was knowing what I was knowing what I was
talking about, but, but, but learning a lot.
Right.
Like, um, so that, that was a lot of fun.
But yeah, I mean, there's been a bunch of things.
It is really fun to teach this stuff.
And I ended up, I think, yeah, the easy test for me was just like, I would, I
was doing it when the business wasn't making any money, the business was a
dumb idea and I still love doing it.
The, it only changed when it became an online course.
The unit economics became a lot more like a SAS and, uh, and it really
started to scale and blow up and it all went really well, but it was kind of
like, Oh, that's convenient.
I was kind of enjoying doing this either way, but fine.
We can put it online.
I mean, so it ended up working.
Tell me about this dumb idea phase.
Cause that's the phase that most NDA hackers are at where they're just like,
I've got an idea.
I don't know if it's good yet.
You know, there's, there comes a point where you start accumulating wins.
You start figuring out what works and you build momentum, but that's almost
like an entirely different phase from the first phase where you have no momentum.
And you don't know if it's a good idea.
Uh, and that's the phase that most people find hardest.
How did you get through that phase and what did that look like for a click-minded?
Is that is dumb idea phase a thing?
Cause I don't know.
It should be.
That's a good like moniker or tag for it for sure.
I like the trough of sorrow and then dumb idea phase maybe.
Yeah.
Every day.
It's just a dumb idea.
Am I wasting my time working on this?
And you don't know it could be, you never know.
I feel like half of my life is dumb idea phase.
Yes.
Okay.
This, this is, I love getting into the weeds on this.
So one very simple tactic that I accidentally did correctly.
I did a lot of things wrong, but I accidentally did this one correctly was
going offline first, and I can guarantee you, indie hackers are going to be like
disproportionately bad at this because I was one, right?
I'm a indie, as we talked about earlier before the show started, I'm an indie lurker.
I'm a, I'm like on the boards all the time, but I started my business with meetup.com.
And, um, you know, I was doing an SEO training course.
Of course, my first tactic was for user acquisition was SEO SEO takes time, as a
lot of people know, and so one of the first things I did to try and get going
was, was with meetup, and I still think if you have a new idea or you're in the dumb
idea phase for your indie project, meetup.com is one of the single best user
acquisition tactics for new ideas, because it's the fastest, cheapest way, in my
opinion, to bootstrap and email lists.
So if you go to meetup.com right now, it costs like $15 to set up a meetup group
as an organizer meetup will immediately email everyone in your city based on the
categories you select during the account creation process.
Invite people to your meetup, to your, join your group.
I created the San Francisco SEO meetup in 2011, paid $15, set up all the categories.
And then within three days, I had an email list of a hundred people interested
in SEO and digital marketing in San Francisco.
I held one happy hour.
It didn't cost money.
Like I called a bar and said, uh, Thursday night, 6pm, like, can I bring a bunch of
nerds by to like drink cheap beers?
And, um, and then it grew even a little bit more than that.
And it grew even a little bit more to like 150.
And so my first idea for the course, I emailed all the users, 150 people in San
Francisco interested in SEO and physically got them in a room.
Right.
And this was one of the things that was really interesting.
There was competing SEO courses on Udemy at the time, Udemy online course
marketplace, I'm sure many are familiar with, but, um, a lot of the other online
courses, they were like guys like sitting in their basement, talking into their
laptops, like talking voiceover slides and like with these online courses.
But when I was teaching in person, like you see on your user's face immediately
when you suck or when some, when something works, right.
Or, or you, that thing you thought would be valuable isn't or something
you thought wasn't valuable is you just like the cycle time is so much faster.
Right.
And on top of that, I think a lot of indie hackers are really prone to like
sending cold email, trying Facebook ads, doing stuff that's sort of like behind
the screen, but I was able to sort of like do things that don't scale sort of stuff.
It didn't scale at all.
It was kind of a dumb idea, but I was in person like drinking the beers and having
these conversations with the users and figured out what they actually wanted.
So it was my own dumbness that had me there initially, but it ended up being
like accidentally correct, you know what I mean?
Yeah, it's a correct in numerous ways.
You kept saying this, this phrase early on where you said that you were in the
right place at the right time, but you're also doing a lot of the right things.
And like you said, okay, you were doing things that don't scale.
You're actually talking to people, engaging their reactions and seeing
their facial expressions.
Uh, you were having conversations with people and getting feedback
on what you were doing.
And I think the thing I love the most was the fact that you talk
about how quick that feedback loop is.
It's almost like a video game.
I also played a lot of video games as a kid and I prided myself on being pretty
good and the reason that I would get good is because I would play so much.
And you go through that feedback loop of losing and you figure out why you lost.
You do better the next round over and over again, hundreds of times a day.
And you just get better.
Whereas in a startup, the feedback loops can be super slow.
If it takes you like six months to release a product and then you send some
emails, you don't get responses, you will come to your site, but you don't
hear what they say and so you don't get any feedback, it might be like months
and months and months before you even realize that like your phrasing or your
tagline or your offering doesn't resonate with people.
So I really love your approach of doing it in person.
Yeah, that's an interesting way to think about it, hammering certain levels of
certain video games multiple times was my move as well, so I know that angle.
But yeah, you're right.
I mean, especially with an online course, which is a little bit more like kind of
media focused than it is software application, some of the cycle times of
creating high quality content can be long as well, but you're right.
Like the guys I was competing with against, and again, this is not saying
I knew this at the time, I mean, in hindsight it was correct.
They get their feedback when they get the one star review, right?
Yeah, that's too late and for me, it was like I had taught this course 15 times
in person, back to back to back to back, weekend to weekend, a weekend, a weekend.
And so like the V1, in quotation marks of the online course was probably like two
years ahead of what other people could get by pushing something out online,
getting the feedback, taking it down, pushing it back online, et cetera, et
cetera, you know?
Yeah.
So let's talk a little bit about these events.
One of the stressful thing about having events is that people might not show up,
but you've got all the upfront costs, right?
You might not know how many people are going to turn out until the day of the
event, but you've got to pay for a venue.
You've got to pay for drinks or refreshments or whatever it is.
How does you deal with that early on?
Like what are the logistics of, of doing this?
If somebody wants to sort of follow in your approach and teach
things to people in person, no one has ever asked me this, but I love this
because I'm like, no one was ever interested in this in the details, like
the unit economics of the events.
But if it's critical, it's absolutely critical.
I'm so glad you just asked this because usually no one's interested in it.
But yeah, it's critical.
Okay.
So I have very specific feedback on this.
If you're going to use meetup.com.
The first is when you host a meetup, the more meta feedback, the minute your
meetup ends, schedule a new meetup.
Even if it's two months from there, from that point, because there's two ways
to search on meetup, one is for upcoming events and one is for meetup groups.
If you always have an upcoming event going, you're going to add five to
25 emails a day, right?
So even if this might be more gray hat, but even if you don't plan on having
that event two months from now, create the event, create it, right?
Because you're just constantly adding new users to your group.
When I held the course and you're a hundred percent right, especially
something like meetup.com where most things are free, the flake rate is
really high, the ghost rate, like people will ghost you probably more than
they ghost you on Tinder, right?
So like, uh, you need to be very, um, like kind of neurotic about this.
So like the average meetup group I was seeing, um, when you host a free
event, it's like a 25 to 30% show up rate.
So one tactic you can do that I use is very successful.
You host the event, you put a price tag on it.
My first events were always free.
I just might, I wanted to get feedback really fast and I wanted to
sort of build the users.
But I knew the flake rate was really high on these things.
So I put a price tag on the event and I said, Hey, this is my SEO.
First I tried to do one for free and yeah, it was like, no one was showing
up, so I had to cancel it.
So a couple of weeks later, I did it again with the price tag on it.
And I said, Hey, I'm doing this search engine optimization course.
It's normally, uh, it's $500 per user for all day, all you can SEO, uh, but
it's going to be free for the first 20 people that ask for a promo code.
Let me know.
And surprise, surprise attendance rate, 70%.
So, yeah, that one, that one works out really well.
The other thing too, with the offline events and again, the unit economics on
my in-person training class were really bad, but part of the reason why they
were really bad was because I took less risk.
So I ended up doing a lot of partnerships in the first year of the business where
I basically took a lot of quote unquote, bad deals, every coworking space.
I didn't, I couldn't afford them and I was too risky to book one in advance.
Give them a bunch of money and have no one show up.
Right.
So I ended up asking for just doing a 50 50 rev share revenue share with these
coworkers, that's high, it's high, it was really high.
And so it ended up being, yeah, I wouldn't book, I would like have an event.
I would have a date up for it.
They would reserve space for me, but if no one showed up, it was okay.
Right.
And so the thing is like, again, it looked like I was taking bad deals at the
beginning, but I find it fascinating how little value people put on like the
initial traction of your first users, right?
Like the revenue looking back now meant was so little in comparison of like getting
product market fit, right?
And like getting the first kind of momentum.
Right.
You know what I mean?
And so I, again, this is another thing I accidentally did correctly, which was like
give away a little bit more money upfront in order to gain access to like lower
risk platforms, like access to people's email lists, um, things like that.
Cool.
Yeah.
I love the, uh, the psychology behind business because business can kind of
seem like a dry, a dry subject, but you get into the nitty gritty of like how
people get their first users and customers.
And it's always this cool stuff.
We do meetups and Andy hackers.
And for the longest time we had a meetups page on the website and I was like, yeah,
come to the meetups page, post a meetup.
And like few, if any people did, and then we said, Hey, fill out this
form to apply toast, any hackers, meetups, and suddenly 200 people applied to host
any hackers meetups.
So it's like these little psychological tricks are just really fun to uncover.
It's, it's, it's everything.
I mean, that's Ivy league schools, nightclubs, right?
Like fraternities, sororities, I mean, this is companies, and this is, this is how
you build a following, how you build a cult, right?
We're, we are bizarre creatures.
Yeah, we really are.
So let's talk about you turning click-minded into an online business.
What are that idea for a student?
Yeah, so it ended up, I know you called me out for this already, but yeah, right
place, right time with, with, with this online course, like kind of revolution
we're in now, it was started with Udemy, Udemy online course marketplace and sort
of pivoted like the offline version onto Udemy was on Udemy for a little while.
Unfortunately, I don't recommend going there anymore.
It's not, it's really not a viable place for an indie hacker or a serious hacker.
It's really not a viable place for an indie hacker or a serious entrepreneur
to build a long-term business.
I'm very honest, grumpy blog posts a while ago around how I was, I didn't like
what Udemy was doing.
I think they created a bunch of new policies that were like teacher unfriendly.
You don't get access to your email users.
They put a price cap on how much you can charge.
They take a huge rev share.
Um, it's, there's some third-party platforms you can build a real business on.
You could build a real business, a real life on the app store, on Airbnb, on
you, on Uber, but you can't really build a life on, on Udemy anymore.
So I, I don't recommend it anymore, unfortunately.
But yeah, yeah, Udemy was kind of the start, the impetus for that.
And then, um, eventually took it on my own site.
So I started hosting myself in the early days were miserable.
Learning management systems were so bad in like 2012, 2013.
Uh, but now there's so many, there's a lot of great third-party ones.
We use teachable as, as part of our stack now, uh, but there's a lot out there.
And yeah, from there, it was like, oh, wait, this, you know, Tommy's
28th idea is finally starting to work.
So it ended up taking off.
So you're not a developer yourself, are you?
I'm a wannabe faux developer.
Um, a very little bit, it was actually interesting.
I, I took some CS online courses before I got at Airbnb and I've pushed maybe a few
dozen commits into the Airbnb code base.
Cool.
But actually going off, off topic, I, I highly recommend this for any, any product
managers listening or, um, anyone that's like a specialist, like if you're an
email marketing specialist or an SEO or SEM specialists, and I'm curious what,
what, what you think about this Portland.
But when I first got to Airbnb and you're trying to get a change introduced on the
site, you have to be very delicate and not annoying with, with good engineers.
And, um, what I found after a couple of meetings where I was being annoying and,
uh, and like, and like not engineer friendly, you're way better off writing
the V one of the change yourself.
So instead of booking an engineer's time and calling them into a meeting and being
a jerk, I would write the change, right?
Like push the commit out, tag the person I was with.
And instead of saying like, Hey, let's have a meeting about this.
I'd be like, here's what I'm trying to do.
What do you think?
And even though my code was often garbage, it's actually way better than sending a
calendar invite, right?
It's like, right.
And so like, usually whoever's working with it, be like, you're an idiot, but I'm
going to fix this for you.
And so that, that ended up being pretty helpful.
That's great advice.
I can confirm from the other side of that equation as an engineer, when people
come to me asking for help or be a co-founder on something, uh, it's way
better if they've done like some steps and it's actually kind of fun as an
engineer to fix somebody's bad code.
It's kind of like, Oh, look at this.
Like someone wrote some code.
Like, let me, let me make it better.
Uh, and so I totally agree with that advice.
It makes, makes perfect sense.
I wonder, I wonder how as a, as an SEO specialist who wasn't really writing any
code, do you feel any, I don't know, like stress or worry about moving
to start an online business?
Yeah.
I mean, it was interesting.
I think a lot of, I mean, a lot of like online courses now are kind of a big
chunk of lists, like codeless sort of trend that's happening now.
You can, if you can do the media, if you can do the video and the audio and
whatever, there's just, there's so many platforms that you can use and like,
you could go very simple with it.
You can go complex with it.
We're not really, our, our stack is like very complex now, but we're not
really doing any engineering.
It's a lot of like drip and teachable and Zapier and thrive card and like a
lot of duct taping it all together with third party applications, but it's not.
You have to be kind of bright to like the thread the needle a little bit and do it,
but you don't have to be like really deep in, in rails or like react or anything
like that, right?
So it, it makes it a little bit more manageable.
And that's kind of been me, like I've been able to, even though I'm not, I'm
not proficient in any particular engineering language, I have always been
able to kind of duct tape everything together.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
So at some point you reached six figures in revenue.
I think it was 2014, two or three years after you started ClickMinded.
How did you start to think about your relationship between working a full-time
job and having a side project?
His revenue was surpassing your full-time job.
Yeah, this is, um, this is such a good question.
I think the first thing to think about in any, like anyone who's any indie hacker
that's listening now that has something on the side, there's like a trope going
around entrepreneurial circles right now that I really agree with, which is called
the thousand day principle and the basic idea is it takes about a thousand days to
get a side project to replace your salary.
And when I first heard this, I went back in time and looked and it was crazy how
accurate this was for me.
My, I counted down to the day and for me it was like 10,000 or 1,040 days.
Like, and I've asked, yeah, super close.
And I've asked other people as well.
It always seems to be somewhere between like 800 and 1200 or something like that.
For you and indie hackers, it's probably way quicker than that, right?
But, but there's always exceptions.
I just won't count the, uh, the seven years before indie hackers.
Okay, cool.
Yeah.
Right.
But, uh, that's right.
Yeah.
Overnight success, right?
But I guess the point here is like, um, there's so much survivorship bias in
entrepreneurial stuff you read and there's so much garbage on Instagram around the
like, you know, multi-level marketing scheme today, Lambo tomorrow, right?
Like, and so I think a lot of people, this is really brutal feedback, but if
you're working on something and you're not seeing any results yet, like, I think
a good general rule of some is like three years to get there.
And so for some people that haven't started, they're like, are you serious?
Three years, right?
But for other people that maybe if they're in like the brutal Travis R right
in the middle, maybe that can be more reassuring.
So I'm not really sure.
Yeah.
I mean, those three years are going to pass anyway, three years from now.
It will have been three years and you will look back and wish that you would
kept working on whatever it is that you were doing because you'll be there.
So totally in the same boat.
It's going to take a long time, but it's worth putting in the effort.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think one other thing that back to your question around like, what's the
relationship between having your job and having a side project and, and all that
for me, there's this other sort of concept that's going around called exit velocity.
This guy really like who talks about kind of lifestyle businesses and
indie hacker businesses, Dan Andrews, he, he coined this term, but the idea is
that like you're right now you're working for someone and you're being paid to do
something and you're probably gaining, you're delivering value every day, but
you're also gaining like a bunch of skills every day and you're working on
stuff every day.
And his point is like, it's kind of a dumb idea to not use that in your side
project or in your indie project.
So as an example, my initial idea to do medical tourism in Taiwan as a 22 year
old had no exit velocity and just pulling up the definition here, this, he, he
coins the term exit velocity, he says, exit velocity is the amount of
professional and entrepreneurial momentum you have when quitting your job and
starting a new venture.
Momentum can come from a variety of sources, investment, capital experience,
anchor clients, industry knowledge, and connections, AKA unfair advantage.
So like when I started my first idea, I had no experience, no clients, no
connections, no interest, no capital, and surprise, surprise, it didn't work.
Right.
But with the next one, I was doing SEO at one of the biggest sites and two of the
biggest sites in the world.
Then I was teaching SEO on the side.
Then I was using my own products, dog food, my own team, right?
Dog food and my own product and using it on my own team.
I was improving it every day.
I had a bunch of the brand credibility of working for these other companies
like in the product.
So by the time I inevitably left, I had like stacked the deck so much in my own
favor and I had so many unfair advantages that it was kind of inevitable that it
was going to work, right?
And so I think that's one thing to think about if you're an indie hacker.
Like this is the problem some people make, like, okay, they're a trial attorney.
They go to law school, they're a trial attorney for 20 years, and then they go
to like sell CrossFit jump ropes or something like that, right?
Or like, don't get me wrong.
Like if you love CrossFit jump ropes, that's fine, right?
But, you know, or they're like a, they're a pediatrician and then they go create
a paleo carrot cake website or something like that, right?
Like if you hate your job and you want to do something totally different, that's fine.
But if you like what you're doing and you've been building experience in
it for five, 10, 20, 50 years, why not take all that and use that exit
velocity for your next thing?
So I do think that's one, again, one thing I accidentally did correct.
I was not planning on doing this, but like I had a bunch of unfair advantages
at work, those compounded on my side project and it made it easier to make the jump.
Let's talk about some of the things that you did right with ClickMinded that
weren't the result of unfair advantages because you have these connections.
You had the experience teaching from your in-person teaching business, but you also
probably uncovered lots of different wins and successes with your online business
that you hadn't predicted that you weren't really prepared for.
What did some of those look like that helped ClickMinded get to where it is today?
Interesting.
Yeah.
So the first one is putting yourself in a situation where you have to pay rent and
have to like pay for food based on your inputs and outputs, right?
Like I wrote this post kind of summarizing the last two years of leaving
Airbnb to go full-time and it was titled burning the boats and I really did.
I really did burn the boats.
I mean, I gave everything away I had.
I took bought a one-way ticket to a foreign country and I was really like,
there's nothing to go back to now, right?
You know, so that was like the one, one kind of meta thing that is really helpful.
Well, tell me about that a little bit.
Like what country did you go to?
Why?
And what did it look like when you got there?
Yeah.
So I was, you know, I love to travel.
I traveled a lot kind of after university and then moved to San Francisco for six
years and didn't travel a lot and really wanted to do this kind of digital nomad
thing that's very popular now.
And I really drank the Kool-Aid that's all over Instagram on this one, right?
Like, you know, the most attractive people you've ever seen in Bali, like on
the beach and coconuts and laptops.
And I like bought this dream hard and I should not have.
And, um, I was really dumb about this.
I mean, I set my expectations really high for like what I was going to expect.
And when I got there, it was miserable.
I bought a one-way ticket.
I went, you know, I, I left Airbnb and decided to pivot Clickbinder from an SEO
course to like comprehensive digital marketing training.
So seven courses, I went and spent $15,000 sort of filming the next version of the
course and getting everything ready.
And I got to Bali and I was so excited.
And I was like, you know, I'm going to be a digital nomad and I'm going to build
this business and like the minute I got there, I was robbed by the police on the
first day, I started throwing up from food poisoning, trying to figure out
shortly after that that's $15,000 I spent on refilling the course.
It was raining really hard on this warehouse I had rented.
And so all the audio was like shot and I thought all the footage was lost.
Right.
And so I'm sitting in Bali one weekend, sitting in this, in this Airbnb in Bali,
I'm looking up at the sky.
It's pouring rain.
I had just been robbed by the police.
I'm throwing up everywhere.
I'm holding this external hard drive with $15,000 worth of garbage footage and
sitting there like thinking about like breakfast, lunch, and dinner and Airbnb
and like, you know, the bean bags and the Mac books and like the coolest people
I've ever worked with.
And I'm just like, what am I doing?
Like, why am I here?
You know, yeah, it was brutal.
But I think the big, you know, I'm being a drama queen.
Like I got over it when he ended up fixing a lot of these problems.
But one of the big mistakes I made, and if you're an indie hacker listening,
you're working for someone else and you're thinking about how great your
life's going to be like once you make the jump.
I did myself a huge disservice by setting my expectations way too high.
Like uninstall Instagram immediately.
Stop reading all these survivorship bias, entrepreneurship stories.
Realize that most startups are hard and most startups fail, right?
And like try and ground yourself a little bit more about how it's going to be.
It's hard and all that.
It's, it's, if you really want to do it, it can be a lot of fun.
But like, if you set your expectations too high, you're going to be very
grumpy on the other side.
I can attest to that.
Okay, let's talk about some good stuff.
What were some of the first wins you had after going full time on Clickminded?
Yeah, so I mean, you know, once we were really in the mess of it,
one of the things that that was incredible was this idea of we made a hard switch to
heavier on media and heavier on webinars.
And I'd, I'd never attended webinars.
I hated webinars.
I thought they were all a scam and super stupid and like use car salesman style stuff.
But we ended up putting our own spin on, on webinars and end up working really well.
And we did a Kickstarter style presale to this pivot we made.
It was also really interesting too, to bring on other instructors.
I was the only instructor for the first four or five years of the business,
but bringing on a bunch of other instructors was really cool.
So now, yeah, we teach seven different courses on digital marketing.
And our model is we try and find world-class experts that teach this stuff every day, right?
So our social media course is taught by the former head of social media at Airbnb.
The content marketing course is taught by the content strategist from Lyft.
And like a bunch of these sort of like when I was all in, when I had to work on all this stuff,
I realized a bunch of things like, I'm not good enough to teach these courses.
We got to come up with enough like cash to find people that are great, right?
Or like we need a lot of revenue now.
We have to pre-sell these things, right?
And we ended up doing like just kind of going out into the world and figuring out
what was working for other people from an internet marketing perspective
and trying a lot of different things.
It was interesting too.
I came to this kind of fascinating conclusion around the fact that
I had really over, my ego was way overinflated having worked at Airbnb.
And there's an interesting sort of thing that happens.
I started my own business, failed miserably.
Then I went to PayPal and Airbnb.
And when you're behind the guise of these walled gardens,
I'm curious to hear about you and your experience with like indie hackers to Stripe,
to whatever you end up inevitably doing next.
But I got too much credit for being Airbnb, right?
And I'm curious if you have this thing at Stripe, but like,
you go to that internet marketing conference once or twice a year
and you have that name badge that says like Tommy Airbnb,
and suddenly everybody's your friend.
And like, you're the coolest guy at the dance, you know?
But then when I left, you know, like didn't have the safety and the guy
under of this walled garden and this cool brand that was like a household name.
I went into the weeds of my own business.
And like, once I started creating the next version of the product,
the first conclusion was like, there are so many unknown people.
I've never heard of that are way better at this than me, way better.
I feel the same way.
And it's with everything.
It's not even necessarily joining a company.
Like I went to MIT for undergrad and like you graduate from MIT
and everyone just thinks you're hot shit.
And you're like, I don't I'd be tons of developers are way better than me all the time.
Working at Stripe, like any act is being acquired by Stripe instantly
a much bigger deal to people.
But behind the scenes, like nothing really changed.
It's the same as it's always been.
And the cool thing about that is obviously people treat you better
than like you have a better life for a little while.
And I think sometimes you in many of the same ways
that becoming a teacher forces you to learn.
People having high expectations forces you to try hard to live up to them
because you feel like you're sort of playing catch up.
But man, it's you're right.
It's like you're way overhyped.
And sometimes it takes you a while to realize that really catch up to reality.
For sure.
And yeah, the single fastest way to come crashing back down in reality
is to quit an awesome job by one way ticket somewhere and have it all go horribly.
And that's what ended up happening with me.
It's very humbling.
So I remember it had to be about two years ago.
I was thinking about SEO a lot and I kept hearing about Clickminded.
And you guys were like the gold standard.
And like startup founders go here to learn about these different topics.
I want to dig into how you got there.
It sounds like you were hiring the best instructors from the best companies.
What are some of the things you guys did to make sure your reputation was so good
and to help people like me find out that you existed?
Thanks, man.
I really appreciate that.
It's funny, you always...
What's that like there's a human psychology thing around like we care more about the losses
or something like that?
Loss aversion.
Loss aversion.
Yeah.
That's basically how casinos work, right?
Like something around loss aversion.
But it's the same thing with reviews.
Like you kind of gloss over the positive reviews and you always focus on the negative one.
I really appreciate that.
Yeah.
So like I said before, I think a lot of the start was just using the own product
to train up everyone in marketing at PayPal and Airbnb.
And then we just kept getting feedback.
Another thing too that might be valuable to think about any indie hackers that are listening,
like we have gotten really good at dialing in our customer avatar.
And we're pretty relentless now about telling people not to sign up.
Not all people, but a lot of people come in and they're like,
I'm an advanced SEO.
I have seven years experience.
I've done these kinds of things.
I'm looking for this.
Tell me why I should sign up.
And we're like, you absolutely should not sign up, right?
So we focus very specifically on beginner to intermediate,
people that they want to like have a comprehensive understanding of the bare minimum
that they need to understand in the fastest time possible.
And then people say things like, well, can I just use free YouTube videos and blog posts?
Why do I need any of this?
And our answer is you absolutely do not need this, right?
You absolutely can use YouTube and blog posts and most SEOs are self-taught.
I'm self-taught.
You absolutely can teach yourself this.
But kind of our value proposition is time.
A lot of people use us to train up teams.
They want like an authoritative source to do it.
And so we're just like really brutally, critically honest
about when you should or shouldn't sign up.
And I guess internet marketers are so sleazy about a lot of the stuff that they do
that people can't believe it when you're honest.
They can't believe you would leave sales on the table,
but it's ended up just making our lives way easier.
Like it was more, to be honest, it wasn't like a moral thing.
It was like, we want less customer support tickets.
You know what I mean?
It's like very selfish actually.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's been that like, we're not, we don't try and we're not for advanced SEOs.
If you've done SEO for a decade, you shouldn't be signing up for Click-minded.
There's no secrets.
There's no tricks.
Everything you could find, you could technically find out on your own.
But we're just very clear about who we target and people seem to appreciate that.
Yeah.
That makes so much sense.
Because if you want good word of mouth growth,
I mean, people have to recommend you,
which means they have to have a good time taking your course,
which means they can't be wildly unqualified customers
or the wrong customers because they're just going to leave you a bad review
and tell people not to go there.
So that's super smart.
But it also strikes me that to have the confidence to do that,
to turn customers away, you have to also have the confidence
that you're getting customers in the door.
How did you get customers in the door when you switched from offline to online?
Like where are these people coming from?
Yeah.
Interesting.
I mean, so yeah, the majority of our businesses SEO should be.
Right.
But yeah, outside of SEO, we've also done,
and I think this is worth thinking about in the early days,
we were really relentless with partnerships
and really, really big on different types of partnerships.
So the big one, like, I'm not sure if you're familiar with AppSumo.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
AppSumo.
So like Groupon for engineers and nerds.
But yeah, the basic idea is like I would latch on in the early days
to other people with big email lists.
And basically find reasonable ways to get in there, even offline.
Like there were co-working spaces in San Francisco where I would say,
hey, I want to host an event, 50-50 revenue share.
What do you think?
And they looked like a series of bad deals.
And whenever I talk to friends about this,
they would always immediately ask about the revenue share numbers.
They would always say, how much are you paying?
What are you getting out of it?
This and that.
And every single one of my friends unsolicited advice
was you're overpaying every single time.
And it would just look like a secession of bad deals.
But again, I accidentally did it right.
But I think what a lot of people sort of undervalue
is initial traction, figuring out product market fit,
and the unit economics on kind of lifetime values, right?
So like I did it back to back to back to back, quote unquote,
bad deals again and again and again.
And then all of a sudden, I had 1,000 paid users.
And word of mouth started to go.
And even though the initial revenue on these
wasn't that great, it ended up being like the first set
of users that was really helpful.
When I eventually left Airbnb and we decided to pivot
to the kind of full seven courses, we did a pre-sale.
We had this massive list that I had been growing
at that point for five years, both free and unpaid users.
So when we did this webinar launch,
it was like this massive launch, one week long,
pre-sell the product, get in at like a rate
that you'll never get at any point.
I had so many failures and so many bad deals.
But the user base kept growing, growing, growing.
And by the time we finally launched, we ended up doing,
and I wrote a blog post that has all these numbers.
We ended up doing a pre-sale launch of $113,000 in seven days.
That's huge.
And so it was just like that moment was like,
I might not die.
Like it might work.
So it was like kind of snowballing for a while.
And then it ended up being this moment in time
where it's like, okay, let's go.
So interesting.
Because you ask people for advice
or maybe they give you unsolicited advice,
and it's not bad on its face.
Like if you were to zoom in specifically
on one of those deals, yeah, it's a bad deal.
But a startup isn't really one moment in time.
It's not just one deal.
It's an entire lifetime of your business.
And yeah, that might be a bad deal today.
But if it helps you kickstart your business
and get out of this trough of sorrow
and build an email list that can sort of sustain itself later on,
then it's totally worth it.
And most people giving you advice
aren't going to have the same founder hat on that you have
where you're looking at the bigger picture.
They're going to be looking at like the one specific decision
you're making in isolation.
Exactly.
And it's actually really interesting you bring that up
because I had one of my old bosses
at this agency I worked at,
I did paid advertising for a little while
for four and five star hotels
when I was kind of figuring this all out.
And he had this saying once, and I didn't believe him.
He said, if you want to make a million dollars in life,
first you have to make a million dollars for someone else.
And at first I was like, this guy's just trying to get me
to work for him for free.
But there's hidden wisdom in that.
I think he said it in kind of a rough way.
He could probably be more eloquent about how he said that.
But the wisdom is that there's always kind of an ecosystem
like above and below you.
And especially when the unit economics make sense,
like you have a digital media product that scales to infinity,
or you have a SaaS that scales to infinity.
It's really, really valuable to not look at individual deals
in isolation and look at them more like slingshots
or catapults that can take you into the next level.
Put a lifetime value on your per user email list.
Put a lifetime value on a number of eyeballs
that see things, especially when you don't have
hard fixed costs on a per unit basis.
So yeah, I ended up doing a series of bad deals
for a couple of years and then it just like,
oh wait, all of a sudden we have a 30,000 person email list
and a hundred something thousand dollars in a week.
I'm looking at the blog post burning the boats
that you wrote about ClickMinded.
And you've got a really cool graph in here
where it's basically two graphs.
And in blue, you've got your revenue going up every year.
So 2017 was $312,000.
2018 was $380,000.
2019 is estimated to be about 500,000.
But you've also got a second chart mixed in.
And this is in red.
It's the number of hours you're working every week.
And the maximum was 2017.
It was 60.
But in 2019, it's down to something
like eight or nine hours per week.
How is that possible?
Yeah, so those are kind of hours required
of the business per week.
So what it takes to keep the lights on.
And yeah, one full time is about 60 hours a week.
The year after is about 40 hours a week.
And now it's about 10.
And it's not, everyone immediately says,
okay, so what, you're drinking coconuts?
And what else is going on?
We definitely have other ideas.
We're definitely working on other stuff.
But the core business is kind of operating
at 10 hours a week.
All of this is possible because of automation.
And it's actually my now co-founder.
This might be another tangent we could talk about.
I talk about later in the blog post.
But I very controversially brought on a co-founder
in year five of my business.
And yeah, this was a lot on him.
He made a lot of kind of critical decisions.
And at this moment in time where we automated
a lot of our stuff we created,
we got really dialed into our customer avatars.
We got really dialed into what they'd want.
We automated a lot of the things that they would want.
And we invested in, yeah, like kind of templates
and canned response to answer people's questions.
And everything sort of became this very predictable thing
where once we got really clear about who we wanted
and who we didn't want, it was pretty easy to deliver
them value with a number of these third-party applications.
And it took a long time to get there.
We were working on it like a year and a half before.
So it took about a year and a half to see the effects.
But it's all started to compound.
And now it's working.
Tell me about the controversial decision
to bring on a co-founder five years into your business.
I love that decision, by the way.
I'm a huge fan of the late co-founder.
I think it's sometimes less controversial
or less contentious than starting with a co-founder.
But tell me about your story.
Really?
I would love to geek out with you on this
because I've never heard anyone say they like that decision.
I'm a huge fan of it.
I am too.
So let's get beers.
But yeah, so I left Airbnb, went full-time on this.
And the idea was like, OK, I got this.
And you know, ended up in Bali, like getting robbed,
throwing up, didn't know what to do.
And I had worked with, I was teaching at a university
in San Francisco.
And every summer I took as kind of a side thing.
And every summer I took on an apprentice
and like kind of would work on things.
And my last apprentice was just the best guy I'd ever worked with.
And he had left San Francisco.
He went to go to New York.
And I was at this like Hail Mary moment.
Like I'm on the ropes.
I'm about to die kind of moment.
And I emailed him, Eduardo, my now co-founder,
and just said, hey, man, here's the situation.
Here's where I'm at.
What do you think?
And what basically ended up happening
was I realized I wasn't fit for the job.
I was kind of one of these guys who I'm very good at starting things.
And I was able to get the project to the first 20,000 email user list
and the first 100,000 revenue.
But I'm like good at the getting people excited and started stuff.
And I'm really bad at optimizing and making things more efficient
and kind of being a little bit more practical, right?
And Eduardo was a beast at this.
He was really, really good at this.
And kind of his brain was sort of more wired this way.
And yeah, it was just one of these things
where we had worked together before.
We really liked it.
He really enjoyed the product.
And I did something also very controversial.
When you're the founder, you're supposed to have the vision.
You're supposed to be the one leading the way
and the one doing the company all hands on Fridays and things like that.
Even if it's a one of two person shop,
I guess you're supposed to be doing that.
But when we talked and we sat down and talked about it a little bit more,
his vision for where we should take this was way stronger than mine.
Way stronger than mine.
He was actually a much better avatar for our user than I was,
or than I could think of.
And we basically, we got really annoyed
with the digital marketing media world that's out there today.
I'm not gonna name any names,
but there's too many blogs and sites out there
that's just like the third article this week
on how to massively grow your Twitter followers.
And it's like, we really hate this stuff, right?
Very clickbait. We don't like it.
And so our avatar are people that want technical understanding
of digital marketing with really comprehensive tutorials, checklists, cheat sheets.
It's kind of evergreen stuff.
It's less search volume.
It's not gonna get as many clicks, but it's like very practical takeaways.
As one example, like an unnamed internet marketing blog
that I won't mention today might be talking about,
you know, the 17 things you should watch out for in 2020
with Google algorithm updates, right?
But we're gonna create stuff that's how to implement Google Tag Manager
on a WordPress website, right?
And like way less sexy, but more technical.
And so very straightforward.
And so what happened with Adorno was like, we sat down, we talked about it.
And I was like, all right, let's go with your idea.
And it was basically like, I'm gonna get out of your way.
And this was one thing I did, right?
Was, you know, our team now is awesome.
We have five people, but like, I've brought on awesome people
and just kind of gotten out of their way.
And basically said, like, you find when you find the people
that are just genuinely passionate about sort of what they're working on,
and you ask them, like, what's their plan, what would they want to do?
And then mostly get out of their way.
I'm curious, like, if kind of that's what stripes doing with you and indie hackers, right?
It's like, like, the person's batteries included and just like, let them go, you know?
Yeah, stripes, very hands off with any hackers.
But I like the late co founder for a lot of the reasons that you mentioned,
like once you've worked on something for a while,
you just understand that a lot more.
You understand what the business needs, who would be a good person to work with,
you understand your own weaknesses, you can make a much better decision.
But you've also had enough control, you've been able to at least steer the ship in your direction.
And it's so hard to, it's really hard to overestimate how many companies fail
because of co founder disputes, because co founders don't get along early on,
you sort of split the equity down the middle 5050 on day one,
but then it turns out one person works way harder than somebody else.
So one person really, you know, isn't in this for the long haul.
So I think sometimes you eliminate that risk when you are sort of the captain of your ship,
and you can later on sort of unilaterally make the decision to bring someone on as a late co
founder under terms that make sense to you. So I think it's actually a way to de risk what you're
working on, as long as you have the kind of personality where you can get something started
by yourself, which is not everybody, a lot of people need someone else to work with to get to
that point. And for them, they should probably start with the co founder. But you sound like you
know yourself well, and you're definitely that sort of self starter who can get things from zero
to some point beyond that. And so it really makes sense in your situation.
That's such an interesting way to think about it. Yeah, like getting the ship like pointed
in the right direction, and then being more cognizant of what you need, because you're right
now that I think about it, I mean, it's actually so unlikely that both co founders will do exactly
50% and need exactly those things, right? It's like, it actually makes less sense than I thought
when you laid it out. That way, I just know a lot of people whose companies have failed because of
co founder disputes. And it's, it just doesn't get talked about that much. Like, there's, there's no
graph where you can see how much it happens. But from anecdotal evidence, it happens a lot.
Right. And because it's so personal, right? And it's usually such a brutal fallout that no one,
you know, people don't want to write about it publicly. And it's, it's, it's like a divorce,
it's not good, you know, exactly, exactly. One other quick tip, Corlan, if you don't mind,
I would give the people that are thinking about this, that I did that I really want to like
propagate this and get people's feedback on it. When Eduardo and I were talking about this,
there's so, and again, this is another thing where my friends called me an idiot,
but I'm pretty happy with the decision. There's so much like, there's so many blog posts out there
on like how to do equity and what should people, it's compensation, how to deal with a lot of this
stuff. When Eduardo and I were talking about this, and we like figured out the customer avatar,
and we figured out like, what we wanted to work on, and it was all way more personal, like,
he wanted to work on this, he didn't want to have a job, he wanted to go like move to Europe,
and be with his girlfriend, I want it like, I was more fun to work with him. So we had like a lot
of like emotional decisions that weren't about money that were like, those were kind of first
place and I'm glad we did that. The next thing was instead of like, if you're in this situation
where maybe you bring on a co-founder late, instead of like coming up with a number out of your head,
I did something that a friend recommended, which was I t-shirt sized the offer. And I just said,
okay, before we even like figure out the money, I want to ask you like, I'll give you three options,
kind of like, high salary with little to no equity, medium salary with medium equity,
or no salary and all equity. And like, what like, which sort of direction do you want? And he came
back almost immediately and was like, there's no chance in my mind that this doesn't work,
give me all the equity, let's go. And it was just like, yes, you know, it was, yeah, it was,
because he was all in, right? He was going to quit his job and go all in. And you know,
the minute he joined, like things went really bad. And we had like, we were both in it together for
a really long time. And now things are going really well. And he's seeing all that come back.
And so I can't stress that enough. Like, instead of like coming up with like these really detailed
offers around like one year cliff and all this stuff, like go way more kind of meta around it,
a little bit more emotional, just like, how in are you? How serious are you? And where do you stand?
You know? Yeah, I'm sure it makes it easier to have the specific conversations when you,
when you get like the high level bucket right first, when you start off on that leg.
Exactly. Yeah, that's that worked for us.
So you said that you guys have gotten the core functionality of ClickMinded down to just nine
or 10 hours of work every week for you guys, and you're spending the rest of your time,
sort of pushing the business forward. What does that look like exactly? And what is the
future for ClickMinded? So the one we're thinking about a couple of different directions, the one
thing we're really happy with, we created this new product called SOP library. And it's just
your classic, like everything Paul Graham says, like dog food it make for yourself,
be your own customer. And we just wanted a bunch of digital marketing SOPs for ourself,
the boring stuff I talked about how to implement Google Tag Manager on a WordPress site, right,
how to do cross subdomain tracking for conversion events in Google Analytics, like incredibly
unsexy stuff, but like really helpful and really useful. And we ended up turning into a product
that that would give to the users now that they really like. So we're like in the weeds with a
lot of this digital marketing stuff. And we're really happy with where the product is. But now
we're looking at like, how other people are teaching it, and starting to get really annoyed
at how a lot of other people are teaching it. And my biggest problem is with universities.
There are now more than 50 universities in the US offering a master's degree in digital marketing.
They are garbage. They are between $40,000 to $100,000. They're one to two years. Sometimes
they're a master's degree in social media. They are pointless. And young kids are getting defrauded,
like getting scammed into taking these degrees and thinking that they're worth something,
right? And these kids would be much better off. It is a business opportunity for us,
but it doesn't even need to be. These kids would be much better off taking three months off,
setting up a WordPress site, and watching YouTube videos, right? I mean, way better off than paying
the university of whoever $100,000 a year for a master's degree in social media.
I think the university have been slightly, of course, their CS degrees, but like the coding
boot camps are going much deeper into like kind of technical vocational stuff. And I really love,
I love Lambda school. I love what a bunch of others are doing. But people aren't coming in
on the digital marketing side. And I'm getting just genuinely very frustrated with a lot of
these guys. They're just bankrupting a whole generation. Young kids are thinking that these
degrees are worth it, and they're not. And we're thinking about going after them next.
We were talking about this earlier about how a lot of businesses, psychology, and you mentioned
education in schools, and they have this whole, I don't know, like this degree, this prestige
thing going on that just like plays such a trick where it's like, I need the degree, I need the
prestige, I need like the certificate that says I'm real. And you're right, it's like a lot of
cases basically fraud. It really is. And to be frank, I had this situation where I got an email
from a university, I won't say and they were saying, Hey, we're creating a curriculum committee,
it's basically this group of people that decide what the kids are going to learn. And they got,
I got on the phone with them and they said, we have this degree, it's a master's degree in social
media. It's $60,000. We have 50 something kids signed up. And they basically said like,
what should we teach them? And it's like, how is this not fraud? Like, what else is this, right?
It's just gross. And so, you know, it's probably happening at even a wider scale than this. I'm
just very dialed in the digital marketing, you know, it's only 50 programs in the US. It's like,
that's very small, but this is probably happening everywhere, like communication, psychology,
all this, all this stuff. And there's so many industries benefiting from it. The textbooks,
textbook companies, the apartment complexes, the financing companies, like there's a whole gross
industry of people bankrupting 22 year olds. And so I don't know what the answer is, but like,
it does, it does get me angry. I like, I wake up in the middle of the night sometimes angry about
this. So I would love to address it somehow. Okay. So if you're considering going to college
for a social media degree, think again, please do not please give me an email. I will, I'll talk
you off the cliff. Tommy, what other advice that you have for an early stage indie hacker who hasn't
started their business yet and may not even have an idea yet? What should they know going into all
this? Yeah, I mean, the thousand day rule and exit velocity, I think are big ones for me that
we kind of previously mentioned. The other thing too, I think about like what we said earlier on
with Naval Ravikant, I think he's dead on. What feels like work to other people should feel like
play to you. Like the world is so extreme now, you know, everything is so extreme. It's so like
polarized that there's so little room to be mediocre that you kind of have to, to be really
good or love what you're working on to develop as many unfair advantages as possible. So it sounds
cliche and it sounds annoying. But for me, it was like SEO became my video game. And I also love
teaching. It's a weird, very specific thing, but it ended up working for me. So it's kind of like
continue to work on what you're working on until it evolves into this bizarre sort of thing that
that only you can do. I wholeheartedly agree. I don't think it's a coincidence that the best
business that I've ever started, which is Andy hackers also happens to be a passion project in
an area that I really just genuinely care about. So thank you for leaving us with that advice,
Tommy. And thanks for coming on and sharing your story. You tell listeners where they can go to
learn more about what you're up to with ClickMinded. Yeah, on Twitter, I'm at Tommy Griffith. Our site
is ClickMinded.com. And we just launched these 8-bit digital marketing and SEO strategy guides
that are free on there. So if you ever played Super Nintendo or Nintendo in the 90s, we kind
of designed these SEO strategy guides as like 8-bit characters. So that's free at ClickMinded.com.
Very cool. Thanks again, Tommy.
Portland, thanks a lot. Appreciate it.
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