What's up, everybody? This is Court1n from IndieHackers.com, and you're 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 did they
get to where they are today? How did they make decisions, both at their companies and
in their personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal
here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to
build our own profitable internet businesses.
I have interviewed hundreds of founders on this podcast, and many hundreds more on IndieHackers.com,
and I think it's clear that the idea you choose to work on matters. In fact, the big decisions
that you make in the early days might be the most important factor in whether or not you
can actually build a profitable side project and turn it into a business that supports
your vision for your life.
So today, I'm bringing on two previous podcast guests to have a discussion about how to make
some of these big decisions. Specifically, how do you choose what to work on? Justin
Jackson is the founder of Transistor, a podcast hosting service that's recently taken off
in a big way. He first came onto the show back in September to share Transistor's story.
Justin, welcome back to the show.
Hey, thanks. Good to be here. I had to have a good skiing day for today, so it's gotta
be worth it.
It's up to you. I guess up to me too. Tyler Tringis is the founder of Earnest Capital,
he provides early stage funding for bootstrappers and anti-hackers who are trying to build profitable,
sustainable tech businesses. Tyler, this is your third time on the podcast, so welcome
back.
Thanks for having me back. Does that make me the record holder?
I think you might be the record holder. I think we've had someone else who's been on
here twice, so you're officially in the lead for keeping track of this sort of thing.
That's the crown I'm after.
So the reason I wanted to bring both of you onto the show is primarily because of a blog
post that you wrote, Justin. It's called The Main Thing. What would you say is the point
you're trying to get across in that blog post, Justin, and also what motivated you to write
it?
Oh, that post there is me kind of following my curiosity. It was just me pulling on a
thread and going, oh, that's kind of interesting. I was talking to Nathan Bachez and I was just
kind of pulling on this thread of, it's interesting how sometimes in certain categories, the main
thing kind of swallows up most of the value in that value chain or in that category. Then
I thought of this metaphor of eating out. When I was in college and didn't have very
much money, if I ate out, I would order an entree and water. Just thinking about, oh,
yeah, that's interesting. Most folks often will just order the entree and maybe 10% of
the time they'll order dessert. I was wondering, well, maybe this is applicable to the way
we think about products. It's just kind of an exploration of this kind of intellectual
rabbit hole of, hmm, maybe this is a good way to frame some of the way we think about
building products. There are definitely some scenarios where it seems true. I have a few
examples in the post, but I use my friend Josh as an example. He has this kind of subscription
form business and he found it difficult to kind of be an appetizer in that market.
What does it mean to build a company where you're an appetizer? What's your example
of your friend's Josh's company?
In that specific case, he was doing subscription forms that you could embed in medium posts.
And his initial advantage was that he was an appetizer for a main thing that was taking
off medium. Medium was like crazy. There was tons of folks like me that were building big
audiences on medium. And the invariably, eventually you're like, man, I'm getting all this traffic
at medium, but it's not helping me any. And that's how I found him as I Googled subscription
forms for medium. But eventually what he found was that that wasn't enough. It's not enough
to be an appetizer, especially when, in his case, the main thing, medium, started to not
be as popular for bloggers like me. And then he was kind of trying to move over and say,
well, maybe I can be just like nice subscription forms for regular blogs. And it was just always
too much of an appetizer. It wasn't enough that maybe 10% of the time people would want
to order it. But most of the time, people just didn't want that. And in that category,
email newsletters, the main thing is I want to be able to create and send newsletters.
And a nice form that I can embed on my site is just a nice to have. It's just an appetizer.
It's something I might order once in a while, but I don't really need it all the time.
So one of the cool things about businesses is that it's complex enough for there to be
a lot of different viewpoints on topics like this. I've seen talks where founders basically
agreed with you and said, don't build on top of other platforms. Don't build a side dish.
You should build the main thing that provides value for customers that they're used to paying
for. I've seen talks where founders say the exact opposite. I was just watching Jason Cohen
give a talk at MicroConf where he was saying, one of the best things you can do is build
in an aftermarket where you're building on an app store, following in the footsteps of
a bigger business where their momentum is pulling you along with them. And Tyler, when
you read Justin's post, I think you had some points you raised on Twitter, where you basically
disagreed with some of the things Justin was saying as to how you can maximize your chances
of building a meaningful business as a bootstrapper. So what's your take on whether or not a new
founder should build a main thing or a side dish or an appetizer?
Yeah, well, first of all, I think it's a great post. And I think that Justin, I think you've
been on a roll lately with a bunch of insightful posts that have done a really good job of
giving a sort of nice, concise intellectual wrapper around important things to think about.
So I just want to say that the reason why I think, the reason why I'm having this conversation
I think is that Justin has basically been putting out this series of great posts. And
then essentially, I've been just like a lazy reply guy, just kind of jumping in there and
saying, well, you know, let me just nitpick on this, this, and this. But I think at a
high level, there's sort of like two points to most of these posts. One is like, hey,
this is an interesting and important thing to think about. And then there's a layer that
goes into like, but now what should you do with when you think about that? And I think
on all of these, I feel like I wholeheartedly agree with Justin that these are a really
good way to frame a thing that it's important for people to think about.
And then where we've kind of come into areas of disagreement has been, what are the implications
for doing business? And then usually, I think both of us and probably everyone here goes
to the narrower view of, you know, okay, bootstrappers, right? Kind of indie hackers, you know, these
folks, what, how should they be thinking about this particular category? And so, so that's
where I think like we started to create areas of disagreement is I think it's a great framing.
It's very useful to think about, okay, I want to build this product. Like, is it a main
thing? Is it dessert? Is it an appetizer? Is it foie gras? You know, a totally luxury
product that no one's, barely anyone's ever going to buy, but it's incredibly expensive.
You know, that that's a great kind of metaphor to use and a lens through which to look through
things and then to a first order approximation, you might take that metaphor and say, well,
obviously you should be building a main thing, right? Because, you know, everybody is going
to buy the main thing. Everybody that goes to a restaurant pretty much gets an entree,
right? Or, and water, you know, and then maybe they would add on some stuff to it. So, so
that's going to be much easier to find customers. But I think where I look at that and sort
of think about, okay, if I'm a bootstrapper now, or an indie hacker or something like
that, should I be thinking more towards building a main thing? Or should I be thinking about
building things that are, you know, kind of side dishes or appetizers or basically bolt-on
products that can sort of leverage somebody else's effort in a main thing, right? Should
I be building the complementary product to a very popular main thing? And I generally
think that at least at this point in time now for bootstrappers or indie hackers or
folks who are basically not coming with a ton of, you know, incumbent capital or unfair
advantages as I generally kind of use the aggregate term, should be actually shying
away from main things in the main because a lot of these general big verticals are incredibly
competitive right now. And when I look at indie hackers, and if I just kind of scroll
through all the products getting launched and things like that, where I see people basically
that I think, oh, yeah, I hate to break it to you, but that's definitely going to fail
our folks who have a new idea for a to-do app or a new twist on, you know, kind of WordPress
hosting or something like that, these like obvious big main things. And what they're
not kind of factoring in is how much competition is like a second order effect. We're just
going to make it so much harder to get traction, to get distribution, to get differentiation,
all those things get, you know, kind of they make it really hard. So where I just see this
like really talented founders running 100 miles an hour into a brick wall is building
another project management app, another, you know, really big obvious main thing. So that's
I think where I'm where I think we can have a discussion around sort of, should you build
a main thing? I think it's a great lens to analyze things, but you know, should you do
it or not? Separate question for me.
Mm hmm. And I think, I mean, if you read the post, I explore both sides because they're
both interesting. And one of the examples I use is one of my favorite places in Portland
is this ice cream place called the Salt and Straw. And, you know, they regularly serve
36 flavors and they make it themselves. And it works because it's Portland, right? Like
that place has a lineup out the door. And, you know, they're selling dessert, but it
wouldn't work. That concept wouldn't work in my hometown, for example, because it's
just too small of a market. We don't have, I think Portland has almost 30 million tourists
a year. And, you know, here we're not even close to that. So here the places that work
well are, you know, the meat and potatoes kind of places. If you sell meat and potatoes
and you do a good job, you'll probably have a lineup out your door. But a place that sells
just ice cream handmade the way they do it at Salt and Straw, it likely won't work. And
it's interesting looking at both sides. So in what situations and contexts does it make
sense to go after a main thing? And sometimes, for example, those existing categories, the
existing competitors there are old and crusty, right? There's opportunity because the incumbent
players are just so old that you can come in with a fresh new take on the category and
you can do well, even though these are big, you know, giants and gorillas in the space.
In other situations, there's a main platform like WordPress that's taking off. And it makes
sense to, you know, build really good WordPress hosting. And you can kind of ride on the coattails
of this bigger thing that's moving. And so for me, that's the that's kind of the interesting
part about this is looking at the variables on both sides here is Oh, yeah, in what cases
does this make sense? And in what cases does this not make sense? And what we don't want
to do is we don't want to discount things too early. Like we don't want to say don't
ever go into a competitive space. Because, you know, there's too much competition. Well,
but wait a second. I mean, like in podcasting, Libsyn has been around forever. But for a
lot of people, they were super old and crusty. And so to have a fresh new take in that market
made sense, right?
Tyler, I'm curious what in your opinion, is the biggest risk with trying to build a business?
That's the main thing. Is it the competition? Is it the fact that if you get started as
an indie hacker building something that targets such a huge audience, and that's really got
a lot of incumbents who are dominating the space that you just won't be able to beat
them?
I think it's the second order effects of competition, right? So to get any amount of traction, I
think you need differentiation and distribution, right? And you need some amount of either of
those two things. And so it's just so much easier to if you basically, you know, just
to sort of put like cards on the table here, right? I mean, the holistic view that I have
here is that, you know, both in terms of where I think most of the opportunities are for
entrepreneurs to succeed in this sort of, you know, software technology enabled indie
hacker kind of realm, leaving aside, maybe I'm not going to really pontificate too much
on restaurants and ice cream chains outside of metaphorically. But in these realms, you
know, I really think to be to maximize your chance of success, you need to niche down
basically by either product or audience. So that's basically differentiation or distribution,
right? Either you're going to target a niche audience somehow with a, let's say a main
thing for that audience, or you need to build a sort of differentiated product that is probably
not going to be the main thing, but in the big market. And I think if you are just kind
of going straight at the main thing, what you often again, like, we can just kind of
list them what I think of the idea of what are the main things for indie hackers, right?
It's a CRM. It's a project management tool. It's a to-do list. It's a basic e-commerce.
It's you know, static site hosting or just general CMSs, those sorts of huge verticals.
They're just chock full at this point in time. Like maybe like they weren't 10 years ago.
You know, it was a totally reasonable thing to be Squarespace and Bootstrap Squarespace
and go into that market. But now I really feel like we're in a time now where so many
of those things that we would say, Oh, go after a main thing to a, let's say a young
entrepreneur just kind of starting out looking for the best place to succeed as an indie
hacker. They're just so hard to differentiate or get distribution, you know, that used to
be, we all know these stories of folks who started their business back when, you know,
you could get five cents a click on AdWords, right? And that was how you got your thing
out there and you didn't need to be super differentiated. You didn't need this incredibly
niche audience, but that's just not the case anymore with these main things that sometimes
you can find these niche audiences where, you know, they just, they don't have a main
thing at all, you know, and so it's just wide open. This is maybe a little bit of a separate
conversation. But the other thing is you can find these niche use cases within the category
categories. And that's where I think, you know, if you look at, for example, the portfolio
of companies we're investing in, as well as where I see a ton of the successful indie
hackers, they're almost all in terms of lately, let's say, you know, things that have started
in the last five years, these sorts of basically appetizers that you would call them, right?
They are, you know, automated dunning and collections on top of Stripe. They are error
collections and notifications on top of, you know, rails and other hosting platforms. They
are, you know, these little bolt-on pieces. And the magic is that, you know, it's even
when you are a side dish that, you know, maybe you can't build an ice cream shop in Vernon,
D.C., but when you are selling to the internet, right, you do still have this magical sort
of ability to find these shockingly small niche products that you can't even believe.
I mean, I saw, I think you were interacting on Twitter the other day, I saw somebody who
does just snapshots for DigitalOcean. Looks like, I don't know the details there, but
looks like it's a full-time business for someone for several years. Just the most niche things
you could think of could turn into real businesses. And it's so much easier to get both differentiation
and distribution on the internet as an indie hacker.
Yeah, that ultimately, what I'm especially interested in right now is quantifying demand.
So what is the economic potential for a product if I built it in this context? And this is
why I often say the market you choose matters the most. So if you're in the PHP market then,
and of course you can get kind of pedantic or semantic about how we quantify, like how
we define these things, but if you're in the PHP market, that is a massive, massive market.
And Taylor Otwell has built, you know, a $10 million business in that market. And in a
sense, he's a side thing because he's on top of this massive market. Like I'm guessing
that $125 billion a year is spent on PHP developers. But in another sense, he's built things that
are very much the main thing in a development pipeline, like Forge. It's like something
that you need to get your work done.
Also, I'll just take a quick sidebar and say, I think we've got to be careful also about
the examples we use because the developer market especially, the technical market, is
one of the most unique markets in the world. And what works with the developer market,
especially these special niches we find within the developer market, likely won't work outside
of the developer market. It's just a very unique market. You can't take the lessons
that Adam Wavin learned with refactoring UI and apply it to knitters. They're just developers
right now are highly incentivized to get better at their job. They're making some of the most
money in the economy right now. There's a lot of factors that make it a very unique
market. And so we don't want to draw too many parallels outside of that category. I lost
my train of thought.
I'm actually interested to hear you say more about that. In what specific way do you think
developers are different from knitters? I think you're right.
I mean, first of all, the number of them, their average revenue, the fact that they
are highly incentivized to get better at what they do. So professional development in that
category is just unlike anything else. Like there's not really that many categories that
are like that. There might be some parallels with like doctors, but nobody has these all
of the check marks. Reachable Online, Congregates and Communities Online has tons and tons of
cheap channels to reach them with. What's Adam Wavin and Steve Shogar's marketing budget?
It's nothing. It's their time. They're using existing channels. And most businesses in
the world now are software businesses. And so it makes sense if you go to your boss and
say, well, can we buy a copy of Refactoring UI? You'll say, well, yeah, let's do it. We're
a software business that makes sense to invest in this. So when you have that many people
in motion, when you have that many companies that are also incentivized to invest in tools
and education and all these things, it's just a very unique market. And we might see a change
if in 20 years, artificial intelligence is writing most low-level PHP. Maybe that market
won't have those characteristics anymore. It's probably likely. Markets change all the
time. The dynamics within a market change all the time. I think that market especially,
I see a lot of examples on indie hackers and podcasts and things that are in the development
market. And then I see other people trying to apply those to real estate agents and lawyers
and other things. And I think the reason it doesn't work is because the developer market
and the technical market is just a very unique animal right now.
I think though that it probably shares a lot of characteristics with anything that is sort
of internet native right now, which is a much bigger pool, right? So anybody who is e-commerce
first, I think shares a lot of those characteristics. Anybody who is basically a content-based
business, whether it's ad-based news, blogs, membership sites, all that sort of stuff,
I think they all share those characteristics. Yeah, if you get into pure offline target
markets, yes. But I don't know that developers are so, so unique versus everybody who runs
a Shopify store.
I think there's a lot of differences there. Even if you look at ConvertKit, for example,
does these state-of-the-union surveys with creators, which is essentially bloggers and
podcasters and other people. The difference, and I used to be kind of in that category,
and it really actually was meeting folks like Taylor Ottwell and Adam Wavin that blew my
mind. So there's this kind of natural cognitive ceiling we have when we're in a bubble.
And I'm in this online course creating category, and I'm going to the conferences and all the
meetups. And I know who are the most successful people in this space? What do they earn? And
what does a typical launch look like? And what I've discovered over time is that launches,
that programming niche, the programming market, do way better, make way more money, have way
better channels, have way more upside. I'm also an advisor for Podia, so I have some
insight into what folks are doing on that platform. And this is held true. If we're
going to just say, let's just take online education. So one person does a course for
Shopify stores, and one person does a course for programmers. It's hard to generalize,
but in most cases, the programming course is going to do better just in terms of sales,
number of people buying, average sale price, and overall revenue.
There is a noticeable difference between categories.
I think that's true, but I don't know if you would see the same thing if you were talking
about products, right? So SaaS products. If you were to analyze the success of entrepreneurs
building on the, just to generalize, the Heroku add-on store selling primarily to developers,
the Shopify app store selling primarily to e-commerce entrepreneurs, and the WordPress
plug-in directory selling primarily to content folks. I think they would share a lot.
Well, certainly there's differences between WordPress. WordPress,
there's noticeable differences in that market. The customers tend to be more difficult. The
customers are more price-conscious. The customers, it's harder to get them to upgrade from free to
paid. I think that's the whole reason I'm so interested in markets, is that characteristics
of markets matter. These things that we observe at the beginning when we're pointing ourselves
in a specific direction and deciding which way to step forward, that 1% at the beginning of our
journey actually matters a lot. Pointing yourself, there's no guarantees, and it's still not easy.
People ask me all the time, like, okay, well, give me an example of a good market that's untapped.
Well, if it was easy, then I would just be playing the stock market. But it's very similar to
skiing. You can teach me how to position my skis one direction or another. You can teach me how to
stop. You can teach me to do all these things. But if I'm on a flat slope, none of that matters.
It feels like sometimes we're teaching people how to position their skis and how to go backwards
and all these things. But they're on a flat slope, so they're not moving. The first thing we need to
show them is, here's a good slope. This is too mellow. This is way too steep. But this right here,
this is a good slope. And now, your positioning matters a lot. Because now, as you're going down
that slope, the way you turn your skis matters, the way that your technique matters, the gear
you're wearing matters, the skills you bring to the table matters. To me, finding a good market
is very similar to just finding a good slope to ski. And there are noticeable differences. That
run over there, it's a little bit more mellow. Maybe don't go after that one. That one over
there, that's really steep. I sort of feel like with your main thing, though, you're basically
telling folks, go straight to the double black diamond. It's going to be fast. You're going to
get to the bottom. And you're going to either die or get there real fast. It's going to be wonderful.
I mean, I'm kind of saying like maybe... Tyler, the number one rule in the metaphor
club is that you can't cross metaphors. I think Tyler brings up an interesting point.
And it's funny that both of you are on the two sides of this issue that you're on, because I
would typically associate the position of go for the main thing, go hard or go home, pick the
biggest market with advice that I would hear from investors, especially high growth startup,
Silicon Valley investors, who don't necessarily care that much about the individual success of
any of the companies they invest in. But they really want one or two or three of the companies
they invest in to really hit a home run. And as a bootstrapper, I think more people are
concerned about, hey, can I get to enough money and revenue to quit my job to be able to sustain
my lifestyle? And it often ends up looking like a trade-off between something that has a higher
chance of success, but might not have as high of a ceiling in terms of how big of a business you
can build versus something that might be swinging for the fences going off during a massive market.
But there's just so much risk there. There's so much competition. You might have to be so much
more clever to figure out how you're going to make your mark. So Justin, my question for you is,
do you see that as a trade-off that you have to make? Or do you think that picking
one of these giant markets and building a main dish doesn't really come with any downsides?
I get mischaracterized here. I've never said pick the biggest market, or I've never even said
pick a massive market. I've just said the size of the market does matter. And I think there is a
danger to lean too far to like, oh no, just pick a tiny little group where you can compete.
And we don't even have to use the word tiny or massive. We can just say, well,
at some point, the size matters. We have to quantify the demand. What is the economic
potential for a product if I built it in this category? And so I'm not saying, you know,
that you want the biggest possible ceiling that is just infinite, but I'm saying the ceiling
matters. If your ultimate outcome that you'd like is to hit a certain threshold for income or
something, then yeah, the size of that market matters and the ceiling matters. And there's
no guarantees that you're going to be able to start in a smaller market or even with niche
positioning and that you'll automatically be able to kind of move yourself over to something else.
So yeah, I've never said like go after the biggest market, like go and look through all my posts.
And maybe I said it, but I can't think of that. That's never how it's been in my head. In my head,
I've just been like, no, this does matter though. Like the size of the market is one of the
characteristics that we want to look at. And we want to look at some other things too, right? We
want to look at, okay, so like number of potential customers, how much they spend, the frequency at
which they buy, the growth rate, right? How many new customers are coming into the market?
How much are they spending? What's the frequency of spending? And what percentage of the market
do you think you can reach?
I want to maybe try to pin you down a little bit on this and say,
because I agree that rather than sort of debating like what you have said in the past,
like what do you think? Because it seems that the post, the main thing basically says you should
build a main thing, right? I mean, to say there's caveats and exceptions, but the gist of it is
you should probably build an entree, right? And then at the same time, you're also doing that,
right? I think most people would look at you going directly head to head. I think when you
launch Transistor, when you Google like best podcast host, there's like a blog post that comes
up with like 42 options on there. So you're also clearly doing something that I think most people
would consider to be on the extreme end. You're not going head to head with WordPress or Shopify,
but you are going after what most people would consider to be a non-niche sort of product.
And you write this post saying, hey, you should think about main things,
appetizers and desserts, and you should build an entree.
I never said you should build an entree.
I think I did, but what do you think? What was it what you said now?
That's important. It's important because often the people who are nitpicking me on Twitter
are assuming that I'm saying something, but that's not actually what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is this is interesting. Man, this idea of entree, appetizer and dessert.
And we should consider this. And then here's a big section of the post like 30, 40 percent
that just talks about how bigger markets can support ancillary products.
And that's interesting too. And what are the circumstances in which all of these
kind of fit together? So like the responses I get from my readers of my newsletter seem to be more
understanding of all of the nuance I'm writing in the post. But the comments I get on Twitter are
often like saying, well, you must mean this. It's like, well, no.
Twitter is not the place for understanding.
Justin. I'm just exploring an idea.
And the idea has this kind of section over here. And the idea has this section over here.
And in many ways, like podcasting is interesting because it's not that big of a market.
So people are always saying like, well, Justin, you always always saying massive market.
Like, no, my biggest competitor, from what I can tell, has 70,000 customers.
That's a pretty small market comparatively. And from the beginning, I mean, if you go back to
John and I's early episodes of Build Your SaaS, we're talking about these things.
Like, wow, the ceiling of the podcasting market is probably much lower than what we saw with
WordPress hosting and what we see in video. And it's growing, but it grows like 5%, 10% a year.
It's not going to be this massive market. But we saw, we looked at it, okay, well,
what's the number of potential customers and how much they spend and the growth rate and
how much of the market we think we can reach. And then we kind of go after it.
And I'm just saying podcasting was big enough that it felt like it was worth going after
it as opposed to some other things I've tried. I've had all sorts of businesses in my life and
I've worked for different startups as well along the way. And I've got my newsletter list,
I've got friends, I've got MicroConf, I've got MegaMaker Club. I've seen all of these people
launching products. And often, one of the problems is they chose a market that for a number of
reasons probably wasn't the best market. And in some of those markets, whether you're building
the main thing or a side dish really matters. And so you should consider that. In other markets,
it might not matter as much. And there are other factors to consider. But this is one of the
filters I think people should be applying. And it's just an interesting exercise. Hmm,
am I building a main thing or side thing? If I am building a side thing, is the market I'm in
big enough to support it? If I am building a side thing, what are the potential threats?
If I am building a side thing, what is the ceiling for what I'm building? And is that going
to be enough? And Snap Shooter that you mentioned earlier, the Digital Ocean thing,
he's in MegaMaker Club. And one of the things he is, he's built a great business. It's a great
business, but he has hit a ceiling. And now he's wondering, okay, what do I do? Is there a way to
grow this beyond what I've got here? And so these are all just things to explore in the complex and
difficult world of starting a business. What are you going to explore?
I will just try to take a little bit more falsifiable position on this to maybe try to
engineer some debate here. So I think you framed it right a little while back, basically talking
about how you would traditionally expect the hats to be reversed, or at least for me to be
wearing a different hat as an investor. Most investors, they have a diversified portfolio,
so they want their individual companies to go for broke. So yeah, sure, take on the biggest
market you can with the most main thing on trade that you can. We have a totally different approach.
Our basic key metric is not the magnitude of, we talked about this already, but not the magnitude
of the individual outcomes, but actually just how many of the founders that we back actually succeed.
So we're trying to make as many of them succeed as possible. So I'm pretty aligned in the sense of
when I try to give advice to entrepreneurs to say, this is going to maximize your chance of success
with our fund strategy. And then you can look through our portfolio and you'll see that it
pretty much matches up with what I'm saying, which is essentially, I think if you are a bootstrapper
or bootstrapper-esque company, you don't have a huge array of unfair advantages. One of those
unfair advantages could be a big pile of VC money. Another advantage could be a lifetime of working
in the industry and a giant audience in that industry. But there's a lot of those. But if
you don't really feel like you have a huge number of unfair advantages and you're trying to maximize
your chance of success as an indie hacker, I think you should almost exclusively think about
side dishes in main markets. So any of those big verticals that probably any of the categories
along the left-hand side of the indie hackers slash products or whatever that page is that
says, e-commerce, CRMs, sales automation, all that sort of, if you're going to go right at any
of those categories, you should absolutely be building something that looks like a side dish
because you're going to be able to much more easily achieve differentiation. You're going
to be able to piggyback on the distribution that big players are already tackling in that space.
You can either jump into their ad stores, their add-on stores. You can hop into their forums and
find their customers and all that sort of stuff. And you should run like hell away from trying to
compete directly. I see people coming in and trying to build the main product in those
categories. I'm going to build a simple, easy to use e-commerce store. How many failed versions
of that have you seen in indie hackers? It's the build the to-do app way to learn to code,
but it's not the way to actually build a business. So we're pretty solidly in the camp of,
if you're going to go after any of those verticals, you should be building something
that looks like a side dish. And the big caveat being, if you're going to go after a very,
very niche audience to basically agree with Justin's point earlier, if the audience is very
small, you probably do need to build a sort of main thing product that is their primary use case.
So if you are going to build something specifically for dentists in Florida, you need to build a sort
of comprehensive full-stack SaaS platform is going to be the thing that they pay hundreds of hours
a month for at least not a little add-on. But I definitely think like go for side dishes basically.
Yeah. I mean, that philosophy is fine. There are definitely examples of where that can work.
Certainly, again, there's still a kind of the question of how much momentum in a market is
enough to make a side dish work. And the problem with trying to quantify like scientifically,
which approach is better, is that we just don't actually have quantitative data on success.
And even like what is your definition of success at earnest?
Well, we don't have a defined definition of success. But I mean, one of the things that
we measure is basically getting to default alive as quickly as possible. So we try to see most of
the companies we invest in, they're not default alive. They're just a side project,
just not paying them enough to cover their bills. And we try to say, in under 12 months,
the business should be default alive, covering your businesses. Because I basically think that's
a platform that you can build on. One of the things that I think is the thing that often kills
businesses is they go after too big a market, they go after too big of a product scope,
and they just don't get to default alive. Whereas once you get to a default alive,
and by default alive, just meaning that you're making enough money that you can kind of keep
doing what you're doing. You're covering your costs. And then you can think about,
do we expand into a adjacent market? Do we add on a second product? Do we build out a feature
set that moves us closer to the main thing from the amuse-bouche up to a hefty appetizer up towards
the entree? But you need to achieve those little economic platforms as you're building easier.
If we were going to quantify it, like is that $10,000 a month in revenue?
Is there any sort of kind of baseline we can use for there?
One magic number is usually like 10K MRR per founder. That usually feels like enough that
people feel like, okay, hey, I could probably do this for the foreseeable future rather than
having a lit fuse that's going to blow up any moment. But it hugely varies, right? It depends
on whether or not you have a mortgage and three kids and all that sort of stuff versus a solo
hacker in Thailand. This is what makes all of this so difficult. So first of all,
none of us here can really quantify which approach is the best approach to get most businesses
to $10,000 a month in monthly recurring revenue because we don't have that kind of data,
especially not that kind of data on bootstrap businesses. And so that's tricky already.
We also don't, you can't split test life. So if there's Jane in Ohio and she's like, okay,
well, which approach am I going to take? Am I going to go this route or this route?
We can't split test that and see which approach would work better. And so a lot of this does
kind of end up being what, in Tyler's case, what is he seeing on the earnest side? And in my case,
what am I seeing on my side? Not just with my own experience with Transistor, but with all these
other people I know. And I just don't want to, I think that the biggest thing, and Tyler probably
feels this on his side, is I don't want people to discount the big categories. Like my friend Paul
Jarvis and Jack Ellis, they're going after Google Analytics. That's one of the biggest,
most competitive categories. That's it. That's a crazy category to go after as a bootstrap company.
But they have such huge unfair advantages. This is where I think we do have a genuine
point of disagreement. I think a young indie hacker who is reasonably good at coding,
and that's it, right? They're transitioning from young in the sense of their total time
being an indie hacker, right? They could be older, but they're just kind of just getting into it.
And they don't have a massive audience and a best-selling book and just a huge amount of
built-up trust from folks who say, yeah, I'll give this a shot. Were they to come and launch
a direct competitor for Google Analytics, they would fail. And I'm sure that if we go through
the annals of indie hackers, we will see a whole bunch of launched milestones, nothing else,
in that exact category. I mean, this is why I don't want to extrapolate.
But including people that on the surface look like they have unfair advantages, right? There's
a lot of those folks that launch things that don't work, like that have the big audience,
that have these things that people often point to. And obviously, there are other characteristics
that matter. This is why I'm saying the market you choose is the most important decision you make.
Because so Paul and Jack launch this now when there's this whole other context happening.
If they launched it five years ago, even they, Paul's big audience and things,
would have probably failed. And Paul has a number of failed software project launches.
And so do I, by the way. I have things that I tried to launch that just did not work
for a number of reasons. So right now, there's this big backlash against Google.
There's this whole concern about privacy, that the idea of privacy-focused analytics
is increasing as a trend. The idea of simple analytics is increasing as a trend.
And really, and this is another thing I should point out, because I remember Rob Walling telling
me this. Because I said, you know, your audience must have helped you so much with drip. And he's
like, a little bit. But you know, on my side, I can see the... Everybody says that. And I don't
believe that. I know. Everybody says that they don't want to think they have an unfair advantage.
And they're just wrong. Everybody says that. But it is a humongous advantage.
I said the same thing. And I'm not discounting that. It is a bit of an advantage.
But do know that people with big audiences launch failed products all the time.
So certainly it helps, like who you know and who knows you, your financial margin,
how you execute on the product, how you execute on marketing channels, your history and skills,
positioning, timing, all of these things matter. But unless the market is right,
that's kind of the slope that you build everything else on. And so right now, the slope for privacy
focused analytics and simple analytics is a bit steeper than it would have been five years ago.
And so the timing does matter, right? I don't think Transistor would have done as well
if we launched five years ago or if we launched five years in the future.
Or if it was somebody else that wasn't you. I think that's something that is under extract.
Let me put rubber meets the road here. So somebody joins MegaMaker. They are a software
engineer. They know how to code. They've never really launched a product before.
They listen to this podcast and they say, huh, analytics market sounds like a good market.
Pretty big. Looks like Paul Jarvis is succeeding. I see some other stuff in there.
I think I'm going to build an analytics company as my first product. What do you say to them?
Do you say, go for it, great market, get after it? Or do you say, oh, no, I would say, yeah.
So that's a really good point. Definitely. If it's your first day skiing, a black diamond,
and I come along and I ski black diamonds every weekend, I'm going to kick your ass for sure.
Your experience matters. Everything you bring to bear as a founder does matter. Absolutely.
I started blogging in 2008 and made no money for a long time, but gradually built an audience.
And so audience is one thing, one advantage I have for sure. Ruben Games doesn't give a shit
about audience. He's never built it. He doesn't care. But he had an unnatural advantage with
search engine optimization. And he also had the right timing because when he was initially doing
it, he was there at the right time. So all of those things matter. I think one of the things
that we're hitting on here is that regardless of what your choice is, there's all these different
variables. Do you build an audience first or do you build an audience later? Do you build the main
thing or do you build a side dish? And there's examples of successful companies who've done all
of these things. But I think if you make a choice, you have to go into it with your eyes wide open
and make the resulting trade-offs that are consistent with the choice that you made.
And so I wonder, I'm going to get both of your takes on this. What trade-offs do you have to make
if you pick, if you decide to build the main thing? What can't you do? What has to be true
for you to succeed making that choice? Because obviously, Justin, you've succeeded doing that
with Transistor so far, but a lot of other people, Tyler, you pointed out have failed.
How do you make it work if you decide to build the main thing for a market?
I think one challenge with this especially is so much of this has to do with where you
are in your life. Because I'm almost 40. And I have four kids. And when people come to me now
and say, should I build a bootstrap startup with kids when I've got a two-year-old and a six-month
old, I'm like, ugh, it is so hard if that's the stage of life you're in. When a 20-year-old comes
to me and says, I just graduated college. I've never had a job. Should I start a business?
I go, well, you could, but it would be better for you to work in an industry and spend some time on
the slopes and start to realize, oh, this is where the good runs are and this is where the bad runs
are and this is the kind of equipment you need. It does help to have some experience.
And so these touchstones that we give people in blog posts and tweets and other things,
these are things for people to consider as they're moving along. But depending on where you are,
the trade-offs really depend on who you are and where you are and also the context you're in.
So I don't think those trade-offs are true all of the time. Sometimes a side dish is better
and it seems great and everyone's like, oh, bear metrics, that's the best business you could start
because they went on top of Stripe and it's incredible. But then you see, well, oh, wow,
there's a ceiling to that business. And after 10 years, after some time has elapsed,
there's reasons why you might not want to be in that business. So we have to be careful about,
I mean, definitely be careful about, don't follow me just because Transistor is doing well right
now because in six months it might not be doing well. There's all sorts of things that can happen.
I'm as much of a player in this game as anybody else. What I'm trying to do is share the things,
as I'm experiencing them, I try to share the way I think about them, how I'm positioning myself
on the slope and what kinds of slopes I'm looking for. So yeah, that's a difficult question to
answer from my side. I think your bear metrics example is a pretty good one though, where you
might be able to start a business that has a lot of momentum in the beginning, but also if you
haven't looked at the ceiling for that market size, like one trade-off you're making is that
it might not be able to get as big. Or if you're talking about audience, if you have a large
audience but then you enter a market where pretty much the only way to acquire customers is with
good SEO, maybe your audience isn't really going to help you that much because you have to do all
this content creation and you can't just get customers from Twitter. Tyler, I wonder what
your take is if you're building a side thing. As you say, most bootstrappers and any hackers
should start by building a side thing. What are they giving up by doing that? And what do they
need to make sure is also true? Do they need to target a big market? Does it need to be a growing
market? What should they take into account if they want to start by building a side thing?
Yeah, I think it's so true what you said Justin about how it's so context dependent on the personal
context of the entrepreneur. So that's why I've been trying to sort of continuously preface this
with like from the perspective of a young as in how many years since indie hacking,
indie hacker with no unfair advantages. Because as soon as you change any of those,
it starts to become a totally different question. But I think to your question, and this is something
we've talked about before, but to your point that you can't split test life, to some extent you can
get sort of some experimental data in the sense that you have a big megaphone here. And when we
were starting Earnest and we said we're doing funding for bootstrappers, what you were doing
comes up a lot. So a lot of people were thinking, what do you think about podcast hosting? So I
looked at a lot of podcast hosting businesses and had a lot of podcast hosting businesses apply,
reach out. Whole bunch of people who built relatively feature complete, very competitive,
modern slick UI, not necessarily objectively better or worse, but had a lot of the same features
as what you guys are offering and what the major incumbents are offering. It didn't ever crack
like 1K MRR. Literally, I could put, I don't want to throw anybody under the bus, but I could send
you a list of 12 companies that launched in a comparable timeline. And one of the things they
didn't have was they were just smart indie hackers, smart entrepreneurs that could build product,
but they never were able to get distribution or enough differentiation to really get off the
ground. So it really does matter who you are, where you are, and all of those factors I think
come into play. But I do think you can sort of start to strip those away one by one and say,
putting back your original hacker hat on, where would you sort of start to maximize your chance
of success? I don't know. I think that's an important takeaway is that what I do see people
without those unfair advantages coming in and getting success is when they basically find this
one niche where nobody else is building that product and they just solve a problem and they
can just go one by one. They can just email these customers and say, hey, I built this product.
You're using spreadsheets and sticky notes for this and you should be using my SaaS product
instead. It costs 20 bucks a month and enough people will be like, great, I'm in. And I think
that even though maybe that has an ultimate ceiling, even if it has a ceiling, I think what
you often see, even with some of these examples of people who end up building bootstrap businesses
that are in the main thing, they often start somewhere more niche as a point of entry.
And that's how you build those platforms to sort of say, okay, well, now I'm not a solo hacker.
Now I have two people on support and two engineers and a part-time designer that I
love working with. Maybe now I should go tackle this sort of adjacent big thing. So I mean,
the ideal, the magic path is to find a side dish that is sort of, this metaphor is going to break
down, but it's to find a sort of add-on entry point to a market and gradually start to use
that as an Archimedes lever to get further and further and further into that market. So I mean,
if I were to say something that I think is definitely true, it's to take the analysis
that Justin has laid out here and then take my advice, which is to find one of those great
markets and then find the right entry point for it, which has potentially less competition or
is more differentiated or has a better kind of a distribution aspect. And then build your team,
build your MMRR, build that ability to sort of build your audience, build your unfair
advantages essentially. And I think this is the thing that I've changed my mind on the most since
becoming an entrepreneur is I used to think everything should be super meritocratic and you
shouldn't care about whatever was the best product would win. And now I see businesses basically this
steady accumulation of unfair advantages and finding the right kind of entry point to apply
your pressure depending on what unfair advantages you have at the time.
I agree with that. I think there's, you're right. Like when you're starting out,
you need some sort of toehold and that can take all sorts of shapes, but it's probably going to
mean starting small. And that might mean you have to, yeah, you have to build a side dish
in an already big market. I think that's good advice.
How did you get a toehold with Transistor, Justin? Because you're in a relatively competitive market
and yet you've been able to grow pretty quickly.
I mean, there's so many things. It's layer on layer. It starts, you know, when I'm in high school
and I love talk radio and, you know, thought about how cool it would be to own a talk radio station.
And then it continues on from there. There's layers and layers of experiences and connections
and skills that we built up. And sometimes to untangle all of that is tricky.
John had built a podcast hosting platform before. That really helped.
Our first customer was Cards Against Humanity. That helped. That gave us a lot of
cred, right? We were able to take that. And while I was able to take that, I built up all these
sales and marketing skills and I was able to use that initial customer to as leverage to get us
other customers. I'm 40, almost 40. It's just like I had years and years of grinding and observing
and, you know, working on different things and trying different things and then meeting people
who showed me their numbers. And there's just so much there. And so, yeah, there's a culmination
of things that have helped us get to where we're at. And by the way, I mean, now there are like,
since we started, there are a couple really strong competitors that have come up after us
and figuring it out when you're in the stream and figuring out how to, okay, how are we going to go
from here is also tricky. So what started us out, yeah, there's just I think who I knew and who knew
me was the big one. You know, all of these skills that we'd been working on since we were kids
really helped as well. If John hadn't started programming in high school, maybe
transistor wouldn't exist. There's a lot of things there that helped.
I think there's a more complimentary way to put this and I'll see if you agree with this,
which is you said like, I'm 40. But like what you're really saying is you have a really huge
trust bank, right? That you have been giving to a community of entrepreneurs, of podcast creators,
of, you know, all of these folks that are in that the orbit of making a business like this work.
And you had been building trust with them, you know, through honest transactions and through just
giving away valuable content for a long freaking time that you had a huge, huge trust bank.
I mean, one of the things I think I've heard you say this publicly, so we can edit it out if it's,
if you don't want people saying, but I mean, I think you've said that like, you know, affiliates
really helped you get off the ground to get to like that break even part where you were really
cruising. One of the things we've learned from, you know, having a portfolio of founders,
and you probably see this in MegaMaker as well, is that, you know, a lot of people think affiliates
are just this thing where you put up a referral program and voila, it just works. It's not,
it's its own marketing campaign. You have to actually pitch affiliates to be affiliates and
to be, you know, to prioritize you and to promote you and all that sort of stuff.
You had this trust bank with them, right? Where I'm sure a bunch of affiliates that had known you
for a long time, you know, maybe you've done favors, maybe they just knew you were a good guy.
And they were like, great, Justin Zwing Transistor, he's got an affiliate program we're in, right?
And that's just, there's no like, oh, you know, that's cheating or something, right? It's just
like, you earned that, right? You earned that over a long period of time for them to say,
you know, we're going to do this for you. And maybe not the kind of like other random competitor
from someone they never heard of. And that's one of the ways you can get a toehold. That's like a
perfectly fair play. Yeah. Yeah. And I think hopefully that gives hope to people who are
older and people who are younger. I mean, I think one of the reasons Nathan Berry succeeded is he
started, he just started a practice and a pattern in his life earlier than I did.
He was blogging consistently in his early 20s. He was publishing things in his early 20s.
He was selling things. He started practicing selling early in his 20s. And that enabled him
to get started earlier than I did, right? It wasn't until I was in my 30s that I started
practicing those things. And it is the practice and the experience that matters. And if you're
young, and you've got a lot of time and a lot of energy, that's a great time to start practicing,
because you've got a lot of time and energy. If you're older, it's probably going to take longer.
If I hadn't started in my 30s, then I would have never gotten to where I'm at today.
And so I usually would like when I'm advising young people, I say who you know, and who knows
you matters a lot. And you got to start practicing, you've got to start putting things out into
public, you've got to start publishing, you've got to practice selling, all of these things take
practice. And the more repetitions you can put in, if you're moving in the right direction,
make sure that you're pointed the right way, the more repetitions you can put in,
that really helps. And if you're older, if you're in your 30s, 40s, or 50s, or 60s, or 70s, whatever,
you know, it took me a decade probably to get a reasonable toehold. But you can still do that
when you're older as well.
Tyler, let's say I'm listening and I don't have very much experience. I'm sort of a fledgling
indie hacker just considering this. And I'm trying to decide between building a main thing
and a side dish, building in a niche or not building in a niche. How do I make that decision
for myself? And I also wonder, do you think these things are mutually exclusive? If you build
sort of a main dish, something that people are used to paying lots of money for,
is it impossible to also build that inside of a niche?
Yeah, I think that's a great point. I mean, one of the things we didn't touch on too much here,
we spent a lot of it on this idea of main thing side dish. And I think that I guess we were kind
of going back and forth in this in Twitter. And I sort of feel like I parsed it a little bit better
in my own head, which is that there's a sort of two by two matrix of like, is it a niche audience
or the mainstream audience? And or is it a main thing? And is it a side dish? And I feel like
there's two really good quadrants on that, which is either the main thing for a niche audience,
or a side dish for a huge audience. And then there's one really bad one, which is a side
dish for a niche audience, which is like almost guaranteed to fail because there's just none of
customers. And then there's a questionable one, which I think is a function of how many unfair
advantages you have, which is going after a main thing in a huge market. And so if you don't think
that you have a huge number of unfair advantages, then you should pick one of those two quadrants.
So and you can see this actually, this is basically how we allocate capital essentially.
So if you look through our investments, pretty much all of them fit into either.
It is the main product for a relatively niche audience. And like we've talked about this to
death on Twitter and elsewhere that niche is this incredibly complicated word and all that sort of
stuff. But in broad strokes, it's not e-commerce owners. It is small businesses that do IT network
installation, right? Like one of those is clearly niche and one of those is probably not in a very
broad brush. So if you're going to go after something like that, you probably want to build
like a pretty core product for them. So another thing would be if you're going to go after just
CrossFit gyms, you probably want to build something that takes up a pretty good chunk of their business
that handles a lot. You can think of like MindBody, I think is a good example, right? They went after
yoga studios, but it's like everything you need to run a yoga studio. You pay them a couple hundred
dollars a month for a SaaS product does everything. So I think if you want to build like a main thing,
let's say you just have a particular product insight into how project management should work
or how payment transactions should work or something like that, I would go try to match
a niche market where they really overvalue that insight relative to just like launching it into
the main ether of like, here's how we're going to do e-commerce, right? Go and find like the,
you know, I don't know, just the particular you want to launch, you know, a Shopify competitor,
you have a couple of insights, go and look for like, I don't know, it's just like the particular
CBD industry because like they're not, they're quasi legal in certain places. I'm not advocating
you should necessarily do this, but like try to match that up. We're insanely good at, you know,
managing this aspect of it. And it happens to match up with this niche audience. That's a great idea,
even if it's a main thing, you know, or if you just kind of want to, you know, you just know
the industry really well, you've been in podcasting, you've been in e-commerce, you've written books
about it, etc. And now you want to turn that into a product. I don't think you should go build a
Shopify competitor, you should look at the Shopify app store, talk to your customers and clients there
and figure out what's missing, you know, and where the white space is.
I really like that idea of the grid. Like for me, that was the perfect evolution of the thread that
I was kind of on was I wasn't something I thought about, but I think that's a good way to think
about it. Justin, one thing we haven't talked about is that in your post, you mentioned that
there are kind of a limited number of things that customers are both already used to paying for and
value enough to pay a lot for. And I was wondering if you could elaborate on that and how that could
help people sort of identify these main things that are worth building. Because I talked to so many
indie hackers who are so afraid of the competition, that they end up building these really weird
products that like nobody really values, no one wants to pay for, just because they fill this pool
to build something completely unique. So what's your take on building things that people already
pay for and pay a lot for? Yeah, that's like another vector of this idea. Really, the only
example I can think of is my friend, Jack, who runs Stadimik. In the Stadimik kind of if they're
in a product stack, they actually get very little of this value in that stack. Most of the value,
most of what people pay for goes to Digital Ocean and Forge and the hosting side of it.
And he's in a market where people don't value the CMS as much. That's just the momentum in that
market right now is WordPress is free. And so if all you're selling is a CMS, it's difficult
because what people are used to paying for is the hosting and they get the CMS for free.
And you can see with Webflow and Ghost, one of the reasons that they ended up offering
hosting as a part of it is because I think Stadimik is super valuable,
but it's really difficult to change people's minds or change the way they do things.
And so you have to kind of look at that. In this kind of category or in this product stack
or in this value chain, who typically gets most of the money and who gets left out? And sometimes
that's more equitably split up, right? In certain value chains, all of the folks along the chain
get a reasonable portion of the income. And in some value chains, it's like people just
don't get very much. And so in podcast hosting, for example, if you're just going to do a commenting
platform or a review platform, and those products exist, but they're always kind of like a side dish.
Like, okay, well, maybe I'll get that, but really what I need is the hosting. And so
an interesting exercise to think about, okay, am I building something that there's not a lot
of competition for, but it's because there's just no momentum. There's no demonstrated demand that
folks are actually paying for this kind of thing right now.
I think I totally agree with that. And it's tricky to sort of square that circle of look for where
folks are already paying for stuff, but also there's not a lot of competition where I think
I see that circle gets squared most often is to look kind of orthogonally at where they are
spending money or valuable time, but not necessarily on an existing software product,
right? So if you see something where the CEO or the owner of a business is burning tons of time,
and you can say, hey, I built a software product, you can directly relate that to saving you a ton
of time. That's good. Even better is, hey, I built the software product that's going to prevent you
from having to spend money on an employee or to pay a contractor to do a one-off project for you.
I feel like that's often where you see these kinds of things happen where, hey,
we used to have to have a staff of three to manage our fulfillment centers inventory,
but now that we have this software product that actually intelligently sorts everything
and automatically syncs between stuff, we don't have to have three people doing data entry anymore.
So we were spending money on that. We knew you could assign a dollar value to it,
but it wasn't that we were already using a crappy software product. We were spending
money on people or other things. That seems to be the best version of that, although
another good version is they're already spending money on a very, very crappy outdated product.
So we're running low on time here, but to close out, I'd love to get both of your opinions on
how somebody who's just getting started can get over sort of this hump of paralysis when deciding
what to work on. Because I think it's hard enough to come up with a good idea, but then you listen
to a conversation like this, you hear there's so many different variables to keep in mind and to
consider. Are you going to enter a big market or a fast growing market, a side dish, a main dish?
Is it going to be podcasting or developers? Is it going to be something where you build an audience
first or not? And I think that can be even more paralyzing as to, wow, it's hard enough to come
up with a good idea without trying to check all these boxes. So Justin, perhaps I'll ask you first,
what's your advice for somebody trying to navigate all of this complexity? And Tyler,
I'd love your opinion as well.
I think the best advice is to get out of your bubble. So if you live in a small town and you
just hang out with people in your small town and the only tech people in your town that make money
are people who do build WordPress sites, you need to get out of that bubble. You need to talk to
other people. You need to meet other people. You need to have your understanding of what's
possible kind of blown up because you'll see this in small towns. People are like, okay, well,
the only way I can make money is to build WordPress sites. You've got to open your mind.
You've got to get out of that context. And one way I did this early on is I would find a cheap
flight or I would drive to another city a couple hours away and I would just go to a local meetup.
So you're automatically kind of exotic because you're coming in from the outside and it's all
local people. And it gives you this opportunity to figure out what's going on in their world.
What kinds of things are they doing? What kind of money are they making? What kinds of industries
are outside of your kind of understanding? And you can also do this in your town as well,
but it's just harder. So if you have a chance to get out of your town, especially if you live in
a smaller place, you would want to visit New York. You would want to visit Chicago. You'd want to
visit San Francisco at some point and just meet with some people. Look up meetup.com and just go
to a meetup and start to kind of expand your horizons. I think that's super good advice. I
guess one thing I would advise folks to do is to just try to keep the stakes really low at the
beginning. If you're still at the idea stage, you're still at the, is this a good market stage
kind of thing, try to don't quit your job and immediately start trying to figure out, okay,
I have to figure out something that's going to work. I feel like on the one hand, I have this
kind of slightly pessimistic view for entrepreneurs, which is that at least indie hackers,
software entrepreneurs, which is that a lot of the obvious low hanging fruit is taken in terms of a
lot of the big obvious use cases are now chock full of amazing competitors. And it's not the same
as when you were launching businesses 10, 15 years ago and you could be like, oh, what is this email
marketing? I don't know. There's like two crappy people doing that. Let's throw something up there
and if we're any good at it, we'll succeed. The flip side of that is this idea that I call the
peace dividend of the SaaS Wars, right? Which is that all of this battling also produced
Ruby on Rails and Laravel Spark and amazingly low hanging fruit for those people. They had to build
their own help desks from scratch. Now you just, you plug in intercom and help scout or whatever
and you're good to go. So it's an amazing time to be able to run fairly low risk experiments,
to be able to launch like a real product and see if it works. I mean, I would even,
even though I've sort of taken this position that you shouldn't go head long after these main
things. If you keep the risk to yourself low enough, I don't know, give it a shot. Go build
a CMS or a WordPress hosting business or a podcast hosting business. Sorry, Justin, but
just go build it and see what happens. I think it's unlikely to succeed, but if you keep the
risks low enough, I think you should go for it and just put in those reps to actually figure it
out. And then I guess one tactical thing along with Justin's go to meetups, I would say is,
often becoming a sort of freelance consultant in random industries can be a great way to just
figure out if there's a business. It's how my last SaaS business started because I was just
freelance Rails developer for e-commerce sites. And a couple of my clients were like,
I have this pain point. Will you build it for me for an enormous sum of freelance hours? And I
was like, oh, I think I can make this a SaaS business. And so just kind of if you're working
a full-time engineering job, maybe moonlight a little bit in some random industries and see
what people are struggling with and see if you can build something for them.
Love that advice. I think it's really difficult to pick up on a pattern and see some of the
commonalities between how successful businesses work and what ideas are out there. If you're
really not broadening your perspective, getting out of your hometown, perhaps working different
jobs in different industries than you're used to. So get out of the building and keep your
expectations and the risk low early on so you can experiment. Tyler and Justin, thank you both for
coming on the podcast. Hopefully this was a great discussion and people learned something from the
things you both agreed and disagreed on. Can you tell the audience where they can go to find out
more about Transistor, Justin, and also about Earnest Capital, Tyler?
Yeah, just transistor.fm. Say hello in the live chat.
Yeah, we're at earnestcapital.com. And you can find me on Twitter at Tyler Tringus.
All right. Thanks, guys.