What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland 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 of their companies and 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.
If you are enjoying the show, take a minute to leave a quick review on Apple Podcasts.
In today's episode, I sat down with Daniel Visallo.
Daniel was working a dream job as a software engineer at Amazon.
His salary had ballooned to over $500,000 a year when he made the unthinkable decision
to quit and become an Indie Hacker.
I think it's pretty easy to imagine that the story ends poorly, and Daniel himself was
very worried that it might end that way.
But it turns out that he's done a stellar job.
He's made hundreds of thousands of dollars in less than a year and a half since quitting,
and this is his story.
You know, when I think about you, I think what's particularly cool is that you are into
lifestyle design.
You've really thought about how doing what you do as an Indie Hacker can give you a better
life.
You're just in it for the money.
In fact, I mean, we'll get into this, but you obviously left a very high paying job
to do what you do.
In doing some research for this episode, I found your Indie Hackers account, and I went
back to the earliest comment that you've ever made, which was on February 27th of 2019.
So this is right after you left your job at Amazon.
And I posted something asking everybody what their top reasons were for becoming Indie
Hackers.
Why were they Indie Hackers?
And you had the number one comment.
I don't know if you remember this, but you got like 18 upvotes, and you said, I want
to work on my own terms, doing the things that intrinsically motivate me.
Yeah, I don't remember that, but it sounds like something I would have said back then.
Yeah, I think at one point, I realized that I had been at Amazon, I think.
So in total, I've spent eight years at Amazon, but I think about five years in.
At one point, I looked around me and I sort of realized that no matter how much more I'm
going to get promoted, no matter how many more laces I'm going to get, no matter how
much more money I'm going to be making, my lifestyle was unlikely to change significantly
or to move closer to one that better matches my preferences, which I started to realize
that my ideal lifestyle is one where I have lots of control on what I work on, choosing
from where to work on, choosing what not to work on, something that in a typical color,
you're typically less texted.
So I had started searching, and it took me probably a couple of years, two or three years
until I managed to take the plunge and sort of abandon a color that by every measure,
by all metrics, was succeeding.
I was getting promoted, I was very, very much in highly guarded Amazon, everyone was telling
me I had a very bright future, I was getting in college to stay, they were rewarding me
financially, extremely well, way beyond my wildest expectations.
Basically I managed to get to know many people quite closely that had been there either for
a long time at Amazon or sort of similar big tech companies.
And to be completely honest, I really didn't like their lifestyles, and I started wondering
for myself, is this it?
Is this what I'm going to be doing for the next 10 years, 20 years?
I had just had two kids, so I was sort of raising a young family, I didn't want to sort
of be a person who leaves home before everyone wakes up, you're a life home as soon as, almost
as everyone else is going to sleep, you're exhausted.
Even if you manage to work just a 40 hour week in that type of color, you're typically
just mentally drained, it sort of takes all the energy out of you.
So long story short, and we'll dive more into details, I think, I pretty much left at the
beginning of 2019 in February, without any concrete plans, actually, of what I was going
to be doing.
I was extremely lucky, I think I had a very healthy amount of savings, I had managed to
save about over five years worth of expenses, so that gave me some peace of mind to spend
some time exploring and experimenting and figuring things out.
And yeah, that's what I did.
And maybe we'll sort of go into some of the details of how that turned out to be about
a year and a half later.
I mean, I think it's the ending to your story, a lot of people are familiar with.
And it's not the end, obviously, you're still in progress.
But now you've made, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars from products that you've
created in the last year and a half.
You're working an extremely cool lifestyle, like, for example, like when we were scheduling
this podcast, I just DMD you on Twitter and was like, Hey, can we push this back an hour?
And you're like, Sure, no problem.
I've got nothing on my schedule today.
And that's very much by design, you keep your schedule open and empty, you don't like have
a busy calendar, because you want to be able to basically fill up your days doing whatever
you want.
Absolutely.
No, I'm extremely careful what commitments and obligations I get into.
You know, you can never really take nothing.
So it's not absolutely against any commitment or any obligation.
But I like to, I'm definitely designing and arranging my life in such a way where I have
lots of spare time, like lots of uncommitted time.
And this is something I'll admit, I sort of started I started discovering this, that I
enjoyed this.
After I left my my career, after I left my job, I sort of initially I thought I was just
going to focus 100% on one thing and just use all mental energy directed on just one
thing, but as the months progressed to sort of I started to realize that I did not have,
you know, wake up in the morning, you know, just do the very minimal things, you know,
check my emails, whatever, and then after 10am, like my whole day is free.
And I can use the inspiration opportunity, whatever happening during the day to sort
of figure out where to spend my time or to spend my energy, sometimes they're not even
work related.
Sometimes it's a sunny day outside, my kids are home, and we decide to, you know, spend
the day with with with the family that which is, which is definitely an intentional part
of weaving my personal life together with my work arrangements, which I'm extremely
enjoying, right?
And I think it's extremely healthy.
If you can do it.
I've got kind of a similar approach to life or like a desire to have these very unstructured
days where I can wake up and just do whatever I feel really excited to do, which on one
hand is great because then you're almost always basically having a great day if you don't
feel like working on your ebooks today and you want to work on your podcast or Twitter
or whatever it is, like you can just do that and it's going to be a great day.
But on the other hand, what I realized very quickly into working on any hackers was that
there's an entire class of things that I need to get done.
But if the question I'm asking myself at every moment is what do I most want to do?
Like those things just never come up.
They're never the answer.
Like I never wanted to write a newsletter.
I never want to like fill out like, you know, accounting forms.
How do you deal with all that kind of stuff when you're sort of living every day doing
what you want?
To be honest, I think I try to eliminate as much as possible the things that I don't want
to do.
It's not always possible.
Obviously, I have to find my tax returns over the April and so on and so forth.
I nobody's going to get no, it's not going to do itself.
But the things that I have an option to not do, even if it comes at the cost of leaving
money on the table, leaving opportunity on the table, I think really hard whether I should
take them.
Sometimes I do take them.
Sometimes we can talk about something that I chose to do.
I started working a little bit part time with Gumroad, which I've sort of committed to taking
a little bit of commitment, but for some some rewards of part of it financially and part
of it other things.
So it's not I'm completely against entering any obligations, but I'm extremely careful.
You know, you mentioned newsletters, like it's something that I've talked about a lot
whether free newsletters or paid newsletters.
Initially, I thought I will enjoy writing a newsletter, you know, every the week.
But when I find myself trying to do that, I realize that, you know, I have nothing to
say and I don't want to sort of sort of put content on a schedule and sort of force myself
to do that.
So I chose not to do it.
And I'm very likely missing out on many things in that case and many other cases that I'm
doing.
So basically, I think to summarize the approach is I try to optimize for enjoyment and things
that are sort of that I feel like I would do anyway, for the long sake, as soon as I
can afford it.
So I thought whenever I can afford it, there are definitely exceptions where I have to
do something because it has to be done.
But I try to, if I can eliminate them or I can reduce them, I try to.
If I had to put it in the sentence, it's that you've switched from a life where you're exchanging
your freedom and happiness to make more money to a life where you're exchanging your money
to get more freedom and happiness.
Yeah, I think there's a bit more to it because I think there's always this balance of how
much do you sacrifice in the present for a better future.
And I think probably the simplest way to describe it right now for me is that I'm trying to
do the minimum possible to have long-term peace of mind.
So I'm still keeping an outlook on the future.
I'm not just trying to live, to spend everything I have right now just to extract everything
in the present and then in the future, I'll have nothing.
But I'm trying to do the minimum possible there.
So basically, I'm trying to save the minimum possible, invest and so on and so forth.
The minimum possible, I'm not trying to maximize everything there.
Quite the opposite.
Just so that I know I have enough buffer, so if something happens, if the next COVID
happens again or some other thing that nobody can predict or the economy goes clashes or
whatever, I'll have enough buffer to be able to recover on it.
And then optimize for the pleasant.
I'm not a big fan of the deferred lifestyle, right, where you're just sacrificing almost
100% or a huge part of your life in the pleasant, just for the promise of living it sometime
in the future 10, 20, 30 years from now.
So that's sort of a little bit how I'm taking it.
Obviously, it's a bit easier said than done.
Sometimes it's a bit nebulous, how do you decide in terms of how to use your resources,
money, attention and so on and so forth, but it's sort of my framework of how to decide
to decide.
So let's go back to the beginning where this all started for you, which is, as you said,
you're pretty bored with your job at Amazon and you didn't like the lifestyle that it
gave you.
And it's pretty remarkable to see what you decided to give up when you quit because you
started Amazon making like 75K a year and you worked there for like eight or nine years
and got all the way to the point where you're making over $500,000 a year at Amazon.
With great co-workers, like a lot of recognition, like you're having a pretty, it's pretty much
as good as it gets working a job for somebody else.
How do you quit something like that and how do you feel giving that up?
No, no, it's I'll admit when I sent my notice, I had a little bit of clamps on my stomach.
Like what have I done?
Because it's hard to look at all the stock that I had sort of vesting in the next couple
of years and leave it there on the table.
But I think I had been preparing myself mentally, basically.
I think the way I managed to give up is I convinced myself that I've written off that
chapter in my life.
I've lived it, I was happy that it happened.
It definitely had been financially, but I was completely happy to just give it up and
not even because many people that I've seen, sometimes taking a sabbatical or sort of taking
a year off work and whatever, typically leave with the expectation that they're going to
go back.
And you can never say never, who knows what could happen.
But I left with the expectation that this is completely, I completely abandoned that
color for me.
So it's all just mentally realizing that that wasn't improving my lifestyle.
And I had already realized that if I'm working at my lifestyle, it's not improving.
I mean, what's the point?
So explain to me this philosophy of writing off an entire chapter of your life, because
it reminds me of kind of future authoring, which is this idea that you spend time deliberately
authoring your future life.
You write about what you want to happen to yourself.
And there are other similar practices where you just think about yourself from almost
a third person, like you're a character in a book or a movie, and you're just reading
chapters about your life.
And you want that character to have a very interesting life, and so you make riskier,
more interesting decisions than you would if you're just viewing yourself in the first
person.
Can you talk about closing a chapter of your life?
Are you literally thinking about yourself as a character in a book, or what are you
doing here?
I don't think I've ever seen myself as a character in the book, although what you just said sort
of resonates a bit with me in terms of sometimes when people ask me, like, what's your definition
of a good life or what sort of what are you saying to do?
And so I think that the best description that I like is, a life is just a good story that
you're proud of.
It's basically, I think the only thing where they can't know is how we react to things
and what decisions we make.
It's just something that I want to, I think that being satisfied with your life is just
looking back and saying, I reacted properly, I reacted in the best way that I could have.
And I'm proud about how the way I reacted, obviously, because you could react in very
different ways.
But in terms of writing guitar, I think it's more just, it's a philosophy that I heard
from the Stoics and the ancient Stoics, Greeks, and all men sort of talk about.
I think Sennacher talks about this a lot in terms of it's healthy, they believed to occasionally
give up almost all things that you have sort of accumulated in your life.
And I think something in between of actually giving it up is just sometimes just mentally
giving it up, like mentally writing it off, just assuming that it's gone and living your
life in a way that you're not trying to make sure that you're keeping that option open,
that you come to recover.
It's just a way I think of helping you sometimes take the plunge and sort of not keep regretting
what you're leaving by.
Because I'll admit that sometimes it's harder to leave a good situation, a decent situation
to trying to improve something.
Because if my situation was terrible, it would have probably prompted me to just leave early
and leave with absolutely no regrets.
So I definitely understand that.
Sennacher has this great quote that we suffer more from our imaginations than we do in reality.
I think that's something that can plague a lot of founders, especially people in your
situation where you quit this amazing job and you're like, oh my God, what have I done?
Did I make the wrong choice?
That's all just in your head.
These are like worries that haven't actually materialized.
And the actual reality of things, like your life's still fine, you're just working on
things you want to work on now, so in fact, your life is better.
No, no, and absolutely.
But basically, I think what happened to me, actually, to be honest, I think imagination
a little bit helped me as well.
The way things happened, my finances improved radically in a very short period of time.
And even my status within the five years, I joined as a junior, I was a senior, my compensation
more than at least five times.
And the period five years before, it was still flashing my memory.
But I started deflecting, like how different was my life back then?
Sure, I had a smaller house, a smaller car, had fewer material possessions.
I used to think a bit harder before upgrading my laptop and my phone and whatever.
But is that really it?
I mean, how much sacrifice?
How many things am I going to today for this small improvement?
Basically, I think, don't get me wrong, I think money improves lifestyle significantly,
but there's, I think, there's extreme diminishing returns after you see the certain point.
And basically, I think once you end up in the situation where you sort of trapped into
this lifestyle where everything around you is just focused and optimized for climbing
up the color ladder, keep getting promoted, it's literally directly, sort of how I described
it.
I never really thought about it that way when I was there, like I used to think it's something
else, but now the time out, it's sort of how I see it.
You're just there and the environment just forces you to just keep pushing, keep competing.
Like every day you're being asked, what can you do better?
What can you keep improving?
But then if you step back and look outside, basically, but this is it.
I think nowadays, even now that I'm working for myself, pretty much every time I ask myself,
if this is not improving my life, what's the point?
And go even back to the newsletter, like if or something like any other commitments.
And if I find myself that I'm doing something sort of I'm forcing myself to do it, I question
it like, what's the point is going to materialistic improve my life is are the odds very high
that's going to sort of make a significant difference?
If not, I tend to just give up on it.
So you're at this point where you've quit your job, your $500,000 a year salary is gone.
You've got five years of runway, but probably your family and your co workers all think
you're crazy.
What's the first thing you do when you're in that situation?
Yeah, it's true.
Many people thought I was crazy, family and friends.
I think sometimes when you're in these sorts of casual conversations, it's a bit uncomfortable
to describe what you're doing.
I remember, I think a couple of weeks later, I went to the dentist who asked me, you still
at Amazon, I said, no, what are you doing?
And I didn't know what to this point, like I'm just exploring.
So sometimes I think it helps to prepare yourself to have a good sort of Kansas spawns to give
in casual conversations.
I think with family and friends, when you have the opportunity to describe better, I think
people start to get it.
And this is what happened when I was explaining it to my colleagues at Amazon in the last
week when I told them I was leaving.
It was funny because I booked, I think a 15 minute meeting with everyone expecting that
I was just going to tell them I'm leaving.
And many of these conversations ended up taking like three hours like we were late at night,
because people were fascinated.
And then we started talking and many people had sort of similar thoughts and they started
to realize similar things.
People understand that once you start explaining, it's a bit harder when you just sort of in
a party.
And you have to describe what you're doing.
Because you have like a solid plan for how you're going to achieve the goals that you
want to achieve or what your first steps are going to be.
Yeah, so I had a plan which ended up being in hindsight, I think a mistake.
I had a nice spreadsheet where I pretty much started with my savings balance and my sort
of expense rate.
And I knew the downward slope.
And basically, I had a series of plans.
And that in my head were sort of the ideal things that I would be doing.
And for example, my first preference was to build a SaaS business and go that route.
And then basically, I thought if that didn't work out, I might try to do an info product,
try to write a book.
And if that didn't work out, I thought I might do some freelancing.
Then the next step was I might try to acquire maybe a small business, like there's this
market of online businesses that sell for maybe 100,000 to $100,000.
And I might try to run it.
And I probably I had a couple of other things that I'm forgetting.
But sort of I had like on my savings balance, I had like deadlines that if I drop below
this line, I'll figure plan B and plan C. And I started for the first six months with
sort of that assumption that that's how I was going to work.
But then I think about six months in, I had a bit of a small crisis, I remember, like
I was feeling that even though I was executing on plan A, basically all the uncertainty
that came with not knowing whether something is going to succeed or fail, or even what
the success or fail means, like what if something is working, but it's still going slowly?
What if something appears it's going to require a lot of time?
How will I decide to pull the trigger and sort of pivot to plan B?
And sort of all that uncertainty about, you know, it being very hard to even decide that
it's making me extremely uncomfortable, literally keeping me up at night, like it's literally
the subconscious nagging you, there's something in our head that sort of tries to prevent
us from taking include into risks and sort of risking things that are detrimental to
our survival.
And this I think was fully active at that time, like sort of pinging me to question
what I was doing.
I'm happy that I listened to it, that I didn't try to suppress it, because I think it opened
my eyes to a different approach that now I believe it's significantly more preferable.
I think it significantly helps tame the uncertainty when you're into this type of venture.
And believe it or not, I'm liking it more.
And basically, this is the idea that instead of doing things in series, like instead of
saying 100% focus on one thing, when it fails, you go to plan B, you just try to do all of
them together.
I try to do many different things together at the cost of some efficiency and some focus,
but trying to employ the 80-20 rule and sort of again, like trying to eliminate the details
and just focus on the most important things.
You've also worked on, you know, one of these other things you've worked on is a SaaS application
called user base.
And in my experience, it's very hard to build a successful SaaS, especially as a solo founder.
A lot of the fears that you had earlier on, which is like, you know, what if I work on
this for six months and it doesn't work out are totally justified because that happens
all the time.
It's just so much more work that needs to go into a SaaS compared to an info product
or an ebook or something.
And you just get less feedback along the way, unless you can find like super clever ways
to just like build these like tiny, minimum viable products.
Give me like an overview of the story behind user base and how it's going.
Yeah, it was.
So user base emerged when I was still in the mode of believing that I was going to focus
on one thing.
At the time, I thought that it was probably the most, my best bet to sort of work on something
that I understood was that if I came from a background of working in sort of databases
and tools for developers, and this was sort of a combination of that.
And I enjoyed the space.
In hindsight, I think I ended up investing a lot more time, a lot more money into it
than I would have liked.
Nevertheless, sort of the arrangement that I managed to do later, it allowed me to let
it take its time essentially.
Right.
I mean, I'm still happy that I managed to build it in a very lean way.
It's already profitable, even though it just has only about 100 paid customers.
Sort of just like even profitable, I'm not doing anything significant, I think we just
cost over $500 in MLR, so it's still very, very early days.
I think it's something that I can leave there just with minor and sort of basically with
the option of me spending more time on it, but not the obligation.
And basically, more time is beneficial to it.
I mean, it's baking even, but I like that I managed to position this in such a way that
it's only doing $500 a month, it's nothing significant right now.
But it's possible that in five years, six years, it could become a six-figure dollar
per year business, right?
And if that were to happen, I think it would have been worth it, even all the investment
that I've put into it.
So what is it exactly?
What's the idea behind user base?
So the idea started, I was exploring some ideas about building end-to-end encrypted
web apps, like imagine a productivity app where all the data that users put would end
up being end-to-end encrypted with keys generated from the user's password such that the server
would never see it.
It's sort of a way to both improve the privacy of the user data as well as sort of spurs
the developer and the sort of web owner from all the liability of dealing with user data
and clear, helps compliance aspects, and so on and so forth.
So at first, I was thinking of building a web app like that, and I thought maybe why
don't I build just the framework for it?
And this is pretty much what it is.
It's close to Firebase, like in terms of concept.
I think you use Firebase for the hackers.
So it's basically like Firebase, where you have an authentication API and like a database
API for installing stuff.
But the special feature is this end-to-end encrypted feature.
It's a super niche place where, like, really, really high when you search for end-to-end
encrypted web apps and things like that on Google and in other places, it did well on
Product Hunt.
We got a good boost on launch.
But I think one of the biggest challenge – I get about 10, 15 sign-ups every day.
The biggest challenge is that there's an extremely long lead time for when people sign
up and sign the demo and play a bit with it.
And then they arrive to a point where they need to build a production app, and they end
up sort of taking the wallet out of their pocket to pay like the 50 bucks per year.
It's extremely cheap as well, right?
It's just not expensive compared to hosting your own servers or whatever.
So that's one of the defects of this business model that I've sort of underestimated a
little bit, right?
That if I were to go back, basically, I'd find something smaller.
I think that would better fit my smaller bets, something with a shorter feedback loop that
didn't require lots of investment.
And basically, I ended up having to hire somebody to help me as well because it turned out to
be more complicated than I thought.
So I wouldn't say it's a mistake.
Now I like the situation where it is right now, and I'm going to keep investing my time
just trying to keep promoted and improve the product.
And again, it's all upside from here, but it sort of violates a little bit my criteria
that I've defined right now of smaller bets, especially in the beginning.
I think if my arrangement was much more sustainable, I think these kinds of bets become much more
okay in my strategy.
But in the beginning, I would rather go with smaller, long-hanging flutes that are more
likely to succeed faster, even at a lower upside potential.
I like the way you're describing these as bets and that you have multiple bets that
are out there and any of them could pay off.
You've got a couple different e-books.
You've got user base, which is still going strong and it's apparently profitable.
And I think in the same way, like with indie hackers, I have this giant directory of products
and it's like 12,000 products in there.
And there's a lot I could do with that, but it's kind of on the back burner at the moment.
We've got the forum and the podcast and our newsletter, and it just feels a lot less risky
when you have many things going on at the same time, even though that might detract
a little bit from your focus.
Some of these things can just sustain themselves.
It sounds like user base is basically running itself.
And the fact that you left behind the zero mindset where you have to do one thing at
a time and then shut it down when it's over really is to your advantage because now it's
like...
You shut it down.
Exactly.
And maybe five years from now, there'll be this huge success story about how user base
is crushing it and it's an overnight success, but the reality is it's not an overnight success.
You just left it and now you're doing a lot of other stuff that seems to be more immediately
profitable.
I think you could see time as your enemy and time as your friend.
I think if you're in a mode where you have a finite runway and you need to get something
to work, time is essentially your enemy.
Every second that ticks, it's getting you closer to running out of money or resources
or whatever.
Because I think if you managed to put these bets where time is your friend, basically
every second that comes, this could just bring a new customer and if somebody influential
mentions it or something happens.
And I think it's preferable.
I think you can't always do this, but I think it's preferable to place bets in such a way
where time is your friend, just time exposes you to upside only.
It's because either your costs are covered or they're very small that you can just bury
them forever or almost forever.
Okay.
You're smart.
Userbase is now in a situation where time's on your side, the project's running itself,
it doesn't cost any money, it doesn't cost any attention.
What do you do now that you've abandoned this serial one thing at a time approach?
Basically the very first thing I tried to do when I realized that I needed to do this
was I went to look out a little bit for some freelancing work.
And I happened to be lucky.
I had a friend who was living close by, had a startup and needed some help.
And we agreed that I'd be taking about 20 hours a month, just a tiny amount, I was just
going to spend two to three days a month, pick up a couple of tasks from buried backlog
and that just helped develop them for them.
This immediately helped me.
It was something very clear in my psychology, how much it had, even though it was just an
extra thousand, $2,000 a month in income, which was nowhere close to even paying all
my bills or being sort of sufficient.
But basically I realized that before I was just relying on the idea that if things don't
work out, I could always go find some freelancing.
But it's much, much different if you're actually doing a little bit right now.
I mean, the difference from thinking you can do it, from actually I'm doing it, and if
I want to, I can do more of it, there's a significant difference.
So I was so happy that I found so much peace of mind with just this small change that then
I realized that why don't I try something else, maybe a few more things.
And my plan B was to try to write an info product I had already, like an ebook or create,
share some knowledge that I have in terms of a product.
And I said, okay, let me see, I mean, what are some low hanging flows?
Like what is something that I know really well that maybe I could market myself?
We can talk about the topic of building an audience.
By the time I had a little bit of a Twitter following, I had about 10,000 followers.
I had been tweeting mostly technical stuff at the time, and people seemed to be interested
in what I had to say.
And I said, okay, I know a lot about AWS, I worked there for like eight years, I had
been using it two years before, I thought I had an interesting perspective on how to
simplify this daunting topic with lots of moving parts.
I decided to write a very short ebook, like I allocated a month, it ended up taking even
less than that.
So if I put it out there, we can talk more about this, but it turned out to be one of
my most sort of successful things in terms of financial outcomes that made over $100,000,
just that book.
And then I ended up doing another info product, which did another 150K.
But so I discovered not only that I enjoy creating info products, I enjoy marketing
them, talking about them, I enjoy the whole creator economy, it's helped me financially
as well.
It's something that I now realize it's something you could, I could at least make a living
out of it, very likely.
It's helped me in multiple ways that as we were talking about before, it helps in peace
of mind, taming uncertainty.
Basically when you're doing multiple things, sometimes you get a win from one thing, sometimes
the next day you get a win from some other thing that it sort of smooths out the sort
of spiky nature of this business.
The other thing that was really fascinating was that it felt like it worked even better
for me to find motivation.
I think no matter how much we like to do something, you always at some point, you want a break.
And sort of having multiple things going on at the same time just allows you to just shift
attention to something else.
Whenever I feel like I've done enough of this, I can shift attention to just do some promotion
for my products or maybe start working on a new one or do something else, like to explore
some new ideas.
It's really helping me for sort of finding almost free energy to keep doing things.
Well, this is one of the things I love about your story is that you're always working on
so many different things.
And I think most people when they quit their job, or even if they don't, when they're just
working on side projects, they might also work on a ton of different things, but they
don't quite learn the right lessons, they're not sure what the takeaways are if something
doesn't go well.
But first, you had all these different projects, you had user base, which you talked about,
you had another one called S3 Benchmark, you had another project called Bootstrapping Calculator,
you're writing a ton of blog posts, you're doing a ton of tweeting, you took on a freelance
job, you eventually wrote this ebook, all in the span of less than a year.
Tell me about some of the earlier projects you're working on and how you thought about
learning the right lessons from each one of these.
So I think something that I definitely believe, I think I did very, very well in the beginning,
again, wasn't necessarily planned, but I managed to figure it out pretty much in the very first
week as I was on my own.
I was sitting here on my desk like literally the first Monday as a self-employed person.
And initially, I think my very first thought that I was going to be prototyping some software
products like to sort of be building something and just putting it out there.
And very, very quickly, I imagine myself spending, you know, six months or whatever, like building
something and then I put it out there, share it on Hacker News, share it on Reddit and
nobody upvotes it and nobody sees it, right?
And then now what, right, I mean, what will I do?
That was quite daunting, right?
So not only it was daunting, but it was demotivating as well, right?
Because I could imagine myself being very demotivated if that happened, like it could
probably have prompted me to maybe to go back to full-time employment.
So it's very easily, very easy for that to happen.
So I think I changed my attitude in a little bit and I really started to try to figure
out the probability.
I really believe it's really important and I think people tend to undervalue and be sometimes
overly optimistic sometimes, right, and sort of factoring in the probability of something
working.
I mean, sure, failure, you can learn from it, but to be honest, I think sometimes we
try to sort of, I think, give too much value to failure.
I think failure is very expensive, full-blown failure, like spending a year or something
working on something is a very expensive way of learning a lesson.
Long story short, I think basically the first thing I realized that was against me in trying
to make a living on my own is that pretty much nobody knew about me outside of the companies
that I had worked on in the past.
And since pretty much for the last decade almost, I had just worked in a single company,
I was pretty much unknown to the world.
So I became extremely determined to try to make myself known a little bit.
And it was something that I had never really done, had no social media experience, even
the concept of building an audience was something that I didn't really understand.
So I started thinking, like, what can I do?
What can I do to sort of for people to start to recognize myself so that when I have something
to offer, people will have a reason to trust me, to see what I'm putting out there and
so on and so forth.
Initially, I started wondering whether I should maybe build an open source project and sort
of use that route to get myself known a little bit.
But then I don't really remember exactly how it happened.
But I thought maybe the best thing to do might be to start writing something.
And I started thinking about what can I write about.
And the very first thing that I, one of the first things I thought about was just what
we talked about just a few minutes ago, like the fact that when I was telling my colleagues
why I was leaving, my colleagues were extremely interested and they were sort of very fascinated.
And I thought if it was fascinating for like those 10 people, maybe people on the internet
might find it interesting as well.
So I said, let's give it a try.
And that was sort of my first sort of attempt at sort of putting something out there and
building an audience.
That is what sort of I ended up, it ended up being sort of I wrote this blog post, it
was called Onions Instinct Motivation Last, why I left a 500k job to work for myself.
I shared this on the usual places, even on the hackers, which which did really well and
led it and hacker news.
And this got me my first few, I think got me my first 1500 followers, which basically
were people that were interested.
Sometimes they were just curious about what I would be doing next, or they aspire to do
something different, right, and they wanted to learn more.
I invited people to ask me questions.
And I started answering.
I remember, I got like probably like 100 over 100 DMS and email that day, right after, sort
of, after that blog post, and this opened my eyes that I can probably continue to do
more of this, right.
And that's pretty much how I spent almost all of 2019, probably it was my main focus,
just pretty much rearranging my life, I'm changing some of my lifestyle, I'm sort of
setting up a new business, I'm brainstorming ideas, and I was just documenting these, even
some of the most mundane things, like opening up a business checking account and sort of
figuring these things out, I was tweeting about them.
And I was seeing people liking, liking them, right again, like asking questions and sort
of helping.
And slowly but surely, it affected I think by so I left started in February with like
100 followers on Twitter, and like no other social media experience.
And I think by October, I had over 10,000, it was probably I think it probably still
is that's probably one of my biggest assets, like now that just because it gives me tons
of optionalities, but it's probably my market research arm, like people tell me what they're
interested in, it definitely takes part of my time as probably one of my best as well
in my portfolio, like I spend hours a day just answering questions and putting out content
and doing things like that.
What's striking to me about this first story about you noticing that your co workers were
very intrigued by you quitting, and that maybe other people will read about it, is that you're
not the first person to do this.
A lot of people have written post about how I quit my job and decided to be an indie hacker.
And not all of them ended up with people getting 1000s of followers and, you know, hundreds
of direct messages.
So what do you think it was about your particular post that resonated so well?
I think I'll be completely honest, I think something resonated.
It's hard for me to know what it is, but it's sure something resonated because that post
was seen over 200,000 times in total since then.
I don't know.
I can go, I try to write other posts, which they do as well.
But what I think people can take away from this is that they got me my first 1500 followers,
which for me to get the other 46,000, I had to do other things, right?
And the other things, you know, again, like this is very hard to predict what exactly
will work.
And sometimes I post that tweet and it goes via and gets me 1000 followers.
I still think it's almost completely impossible, almost impossible to predict whether something
will do well or not.
I think what's in the head was the determination of I really wanted to look at what I had in
me and my head on my computer.
Like you mentioned that bootstrapping calculator, this was literally a spreadsheet, one of the
discussions that I was talking about that I had on my laptop.
And I was looking at it one day like just to make sure that I was still tracking the
line that I projected, and I thought, well, maybe this is this is this might be interesting
to other people.
Literally, I uploaded it to GitHub.
I shared it on Hacker News on a Sunday, I think at 2am.
My kid was sick and was sort of I couldn't sleep and like it went on the front page.
I think Elon Musk had just docked with the space station and I was linking up above him,
which was just quite crazy when you think about it.
But I'll admit like I shared probably dozens other things that that went nowhere, like
which I thought I had the same attitude to them.
But I think it's just this system of looking at yourselves, looking at what you have in
you, what experiences you've learned to what you're learning, and just sharing them something
that I'm doing well that I see sometimes people doing sub-optimally is that I try again, like
it's just trying to deploy, employ the 80-20 rule, I really don't obsess too much about
optimizing the piece, search engine optimization, picking up the best title, even timing.
Like I post, I never really try to time my tweets or whatever.
As soon as inspiration strikes, I try to literally do it, share it and get rid of it.
And I think it just helps me to, it's just easier for me.
Like I don't try to spend too much time on things, just to feel unpleasant, but also
to just keep the flow going without necessarily I think forcing myself.
It's just when something really happens and I notice it might be interesting to others,
I didn't just share it.
I got better at it, like I'll admit, like in the beginning, I used to have to sit down
and think what happened today that might be interesting to share.
Nowadays I literally just encounter things and then just tweet about them immediately,
which is I think is why Twitter became a platform of choice.
Like I really like long form anymore.
I do it occasionally, maybe once every two months when I have something that doesn't
really fit in a tweet, but I think Twitter is just perfect for my way of sharing and
documenting my journey because it just updates in real time that I think I can just condense
them to these sort of short snippets that are just very easy to consume.
But looking at a lot of the writing that you've done, it seems like you're super good at it.
And maybe it's like I'm only seeing the stuff that succeeds and I'm not seeing the stuff
that doesn't take off.
But for example, your posts on Indie Hackers, when you look at how much engagement they've
gotten, your latest post, how I made $210,000 selling a PDF and a video on the internet.
It has 193 upvotes, 9,000 views on Indie Hackers.
Your earlier post always got like 50 upvotes, 30 upvotes, 3,000 views, 2,000 views.
And there are a ton of people who are trying to post helpful, interesting things on Indie
Hackers who aren't getting even a fraction of the upvotes and the views that you're getting.
So it's got to be more than just you being prolific here.
I mean, what do you know that other people don't know?
So I think the general answer to this is that I try to share details that I wish I had when
I was starting out.
And I started to realize that some of the most inspiring details tend to be financial
details.
I think people are extremely curious, especially about a non-sadditional way of making a living,
especially in the Indie Hackers community, probably, but even other places, even on Hacker
News, even on various subreddits, even in real life, like if you were to talk with people
and share compensation and personal finances, you notice that people are extremely curious
because it's not something that tends to be shared a lot.
And I think it's, I don't know, something in me, and I've been doing this I think since
I was 17, 18 years old, like I mean, I was always talking about my income and my finances.
It was something with friends, something that I feel comfortable about it, like even when
I was at Amazon, I was to share how much I'm doing, I mean, with small groups, not publicly,
but one-on-ones with people to try to encourage them, you know, to ask for raises and things
like that.
And I had not always noticed that it's something that people really value while you're sharing
all this stuff with me.
So basically, I think if I were to generalize the idea a little bit, I think there is, if
you've managed to make yourself comfortable sharing things that tend to be really shared,
I think you get an extremely, you know, an extreme advantage.
You don't necessarily need to do this, like there's many, many other people who manage
to build an audience without sharing anything, you know, that others might find may be sensitive
to share.
But I think it's very likely, for example, that post that you mentioned, that's where
I sort of try to do this till sort of how I manage to promote my info products and sort
of pretty much I blog down after the dollar where it came from.
I think all the financial information, like all the details, all the promotion campaigns
at the outside and sort of, you know, pretty much sharing screenshots from my spreadsheet.
I think just people really value that.
But it's basically, I think I don't want people to take away that you have to sort of show
your financial information.
But I think it's a good sort of, sort of, flame work to think about it.
Do I have something in me that is fairly shared that people will appreciate it, right?
It will help them.
That's basically what you want to do, right?
I mean, do these in financial details help in this case?
It opens people's eyes of, okay, you know, here's one way to do it, right?
Or here's one approach that worked.
It doesn't necessarily, people, everyone knows that there might be survivorship bias and,
you know, you're just seeing maybe a success story.
But even with that, like, I mean, I think people realize, I mean, you could actually
self-publish an e-book today with 10,000 followers and make $100,000, right?
I mean, you know, a year, two years ago, I didn't know this was even possible.
I used to think that technical writers make $10,000 if they're lucky, $20,000, and they
go to like two years of gruelling work, working with a publisher and so on and so forth.
So yeah, I think that's probably something that's an example, at least one example that
still helps engagement.
I think numbers are always engaging because it's just such an intense competition for
attention and readers nowadays.
Like if you're just writing the same thing everyone else is writing, and you're not sharing
things that are rarely shared or that are super valuable that no one's gonna read it.
And the numbers don't have to necessarily be financial, they just have to be relevant
to like whatever success you've had.
So if you're talking about writing a book, like you could talk about, you know, how many
copies you've sold without revealing the numbers.
So if you're talking about like doing searches and optimization, you could talk about how
many page views you're getting from Google.
And I think in the absence of those numbers, it's hard for anyone who's reading to actually
take any value away from what you've written because it's like, well, you know, this person's
giving me tips, but like how successful are these tips gonna make me exactly?
You know, am I gonna get a million visitors, am I gonna get 100,000 visitors?
And you know, to this day, I get emails and DMs from people who say, you know, why should
I be transparent?
Everybody's sharing all these numbers, whatever, why should I do it?
And like, this is the exact answer.
Because if you care about actually giving value to your readers, like you need to share
something with them that's gonna inspire them and like give them some context.
And like, you're very consistently good at doing that.
It's almost in every single thing that you do, you figure out like, what is the number
that you need to share that actually resonates with people?
I've realized the same thing with indie hackers as well.
Like all of our interviews are transparent, we share revenue numbers.
And it just resonates with people who are actually trying to be practitioners and learn
how to do the thing.
Absolutely.
No, no, absolutely.
And I think there is so much lack of clarity about what it means, like what it means to
start something new.
I mean, what do the first 12 months look like that?
I think just looking at even just anecdotal examples is extremely useful.
That's what I try to do.
And I try to caveat because again, like whenever I share on Twitter, for example, like I can't
guarantee that this is predictable, that is typically one of the first thing I say, probably
even if I were to go myself back in time and do the exact same things, I might not get
the exact results.
Nevertheless, I think there's still lots of value in just sharing how things turned out.
I had to just open people's eyes and just have people color blade themselves about what
the odds are for them.
This is what happened to me, right?
I looked at other creators that were sharing sort of some knowledge they had, like Adam,
for example, you had him on the podcast from Tailwind, the factoring UI and all the other
great things he does.
I think when I bought one of his books, it was really, really interesting.
I liked the format.
It was not filled with fluff.
It wasn't much just a brain dump with light editing seemed like in a Word doc save SPDF.
And if you put it online for sale, you ask $25 for it.
I was a happy customer.
I was worth $25 where it's spent or how much it was.
And I think just that experience inspired me and basically learning that he did very
well with it as well.
He made six figures and now even much, much more inspired me to consider it as an option
for me.
When I was evaluating what options do I have, that became a very viable candidate.
There's this equation by BJ Fogg as to what gets people to engage in behavior.
And it's B equals MAT.
So behavior equals motivation plus ability plus trigger.
Motivation is, hey, look how much money I'm making for my ebook, which people are like,
oh, wow, I want to make that much money for an ebook.
Ability is like when you and your posts and your guides, you go into like describing how
to do this.
And then people feel the confidence, oh, I could do this too, not have the motivation
and the ability and then like the trigger, like some sort of call to action, like here's
the very first step you should take or here's some life change that you could quit your job
or you can go freelance or just some way to actually get the ball rolling because that's
often the hardest step.
Once you get all three of those together, I think people tend to take action.
People take action.
Then they share, hey, you know, I read Daniel Vassallo's thing and it made me like change
my life.
I read Adam Wadden's like tweets and it changed my life.
And that I think is super valuable and you seem to like cover all those spaces.
I love that.
Yeah.
I never thought about it that way, but it makes perfect sense.
At some point you hit on the fact that, you know, just writing these blog posts about
what you're doing and these tweets about what you're doing is working really well.
And you create an ebook, the good parts of AWS, and that works really well.
You make, you know, over a hundred thousand dollars and not very much time.
What's interesting here is that I think a lot of people, when they're trying to figure
out what to do, follow this kind of explore, exploit algorithm where it's like, well, let
me try a bunch of different things.
And then once I hit on something that works, I'm just going to like press the gas pedal
on that and just keep doing that.
Whereas you took a different approach, you know, you realize that like, hey, writing
an ebook is like a really great way to take advantage of my audience and like the goodwill
that I've built and the trust that I've generated and to like make a lot of money.
Like maybe this is the approach, but you didn't just like stop working on your other projects.
Like you didn't shut down your SaaS application and go 100% on that.
Why not?
Yeah, right now I'm treating everything as, I'm treating this arrangement as, I'm not
treating it as temporary.
Let me put it that way.
I'm not thinking that I'm doing these just waiting until something picks up and just
go full attention on it.
And these I think are various, one of them I think is I'm just enjoying it better right
now.
I think some value for my life would diminish if I just had one thing instead of four things.
Another part is basically diversification, like in investment terms, like you're basically
having not all your eggs in one basket.
I think it just helps tame the unpredictability and uncertainty of different things.
I think even if something is showing much more promise than others, it just helps.
Part of it is motivation as well.
It's just good to have something else to do.
And to be honest, this is something that I've noticed many other successful business people
do even outside of tech.
I mean, it's very common for people to have a main business and then they join a board
of directors at the other company, even if they're doing it almost for free and they
join other things.
I think it's something that people tend to do and it's not very often noticed.
I think I'd rather have things going on that I sort of have control over than myself, rather
than just join other things.
Even if you look at celebrities, like you can look at Mike Cuban, he's like a billionaire,
like why does he go on Shark Tank and do investments in small businesses?
I don't know him, who knows?
But I suspect part of it is just it's fun.
It enhances your life to have a few other things going on.
If you can look at this thing, it's just you enjoy it.
And I'm definitely not that extreme.
I think probably my life would suffer if I had hundreds of different things.
I think there's a smaller balance.
But yeah, right now, that's how I'm organizing my life, just building a portfolio of things
that I enjoy doing, that I think they have potential and high odds of continuing to succeed.
Maybe five years from now, maybe something is going so much well that I will change my
mind.
I'm not sort of committing that this is, but it's part of the discovery, right?
And no, this seems to be my ideal arrangement.
I mean, this aligns with what you left as a comment on Indie Hackers a couple years
ago, that you're doing this because you want to work on your own terms and do whatever
motivates you.
And I think it's hard to do when you're working for somebody else, especially in a huge company
like Amazon, you're more likely to be pigeonholed into a very particular cog in this whole machine.
If you're a software engineer, you're going to spend like 99% of your time coding.
Whereas when I talk to founders and people who've created their own sort of lifestyle
as a result of their business, it turns out they have like all these little hobbies where
they can do like four or five things.
Like if I look at my life with Indie Hackers, usually Monday, Tuesday, some of Wednesday
I'm doing podcast stuff.
And it turns out it's like really fun to have a podcast to get to meet people and talk to
them and like research what's going on in their lives.
But then like the rest of the week, I might have days where I'm writing or days where
I'm managing like my team or days where I'm like, I spend a lot of time coding and designing.
And you know, people have asked me like, Oh, what are you going to do when you get bored
of Indie Hackers?
And it's like, well, I don't know.
I don't see a future in which I get bored of doing like all these different things that
I like to do.
And I have like the ability to just shuffle them in and out whenever I feel like it.
You know, it's really hard to imagine getting tired of that lifestyle.
Absolutely.
No, no, completely.
I agree.
So we've talked a bit about you sharing numbers and that being a big part of the reason why
your writings resonate so well with people.
And one of the numbers that you've shared in addition to just revenue numbers is hours,
you'll reveal exactly how many hours you put into each of your products.
So your first info product, your book about AWS, you put something like 160 hours into
that you made $100,000.
And your next info product, which is about how everybody can build an audience on Twitter,
you put something crazy, like 16 hours into it, it was like 10 times less.
And it's made, I think, 150 grand, which is just nuts.
That's something close to $9,000 an hour.
How were you able to put this thing out so fast?
I did this intentionally.
In fact, I was going to do a book, an e-book, a traditional e-book at first, but I was wondering,
I really want to test the idea of going even more extreme in terms of other way.
And you know, when you write a book, I think it's actually a little hard to do it in three
days.
There's, I mean, I can barely write a blog post in three days, right?
So there's always some editing and you need to find the right words.
So I thought maybe the best way for me to do this presentation, it's like I'm just recording
a talk at a conference.
So I put it much on a fly day, I prepared a few slides.
On the next day, on the Saturday day, I put a much started screen flow, recorded myself
talking over the slides for an hour and a half.
And then I spent the next day just preparing the cover on Gumroad and setting the applies,
setting the description.
And that was it, right?
And I shared this on Twitter, sort of $50,000 in the first week.
And it's sort of, it's still doing $400, $500 a day, like with the leases in April, like
it's like six months.
But I think, and this was, again, like this was something, the inspiration came from seeing
another creator, somebody completely outside of tech.
I was once, I was browsing Twitter, I saw that there was this woman who was doing something
completely alien to me, like buying the turned goods from Amazon and Walmart and pallets
and just selling them over eBay.
And that was this tweet, here's how I did $70,000 in profit last year by just buying
these pallets of the turned stuff and selling them over eBay.
And it was $25 as a video course and I bought it out of curiosity.
And it was really inspiring how basically, I mean, she went literally with her iPhone,
just to a warehouse and she went with her car and explained what she did and how she
picked the pallets and how she would go over the internet and which sites she chooses and
so on and so forth.
She just explained what she knew.
And I was really fascinated.
I was really, it was really $25 worth well spent.
Basically I just spent an hour watching this video.
It was really genuine, like first sort of person view of her world.
And again, like it was an example of, I asked myself, what if I do it this way?
I was still thinking I was going to write a book and I thought, wow, I could probably
do this in probably a day or two.
It might even come off better, like if I just explain it and I could share my screen and
that's something that still helped.
Like I just shared my screen and went over a few examples of good tweets and good accounts
and so on and so forth.
And yeah, I think this is a good example of sort of realizing that there are different
formats.
This is a good example of the 80-20 rule.
And by the way, when I was thinking about video, many people told me, video takes forever.
You're going to spend, for every hour of recording, you're going to spend 100 hours editing.
And I just wanted to prove them wrong, like do completely opposite.
Like I did absolutely no editing apart from just literally just making my face and sort
of in the top bottom corner, which I spent probably an hour on that.
But I just left all the arms, all the sort of noises and whatever.
I think basically this is something interesting that you could basically people in this sort
of market value, information quality, a lot, lot more than production quality.
As long as you meet some very minimum bar that your sound is clear and whatever the
text is readable and so on and so forth, and what you're presenting makes sense.
What they value is what they're learning.
This doesn't need to be a masterpiece that's going to live forever.
To compare it with like you're listening to a talk at a conference, like just hear somebody
talk for an hour, share a few slides.
And the internet and having an audience just helps you place these things at a reasonable
place point that makes it almost an impulse buy, pack a lot of information at high density.
I can prove and many people can prove that you can find thousands of people willing to
pay $25, $50 to learn something from you that might have taken you a year or two years to
learn for yourself.
It's a very compelling value proposition.
So yeah, it worked really well.
So I think again, I encourage people to consider different formats.
I had never done video.
It's not something that I was comfortable with.
I had never recorded myself.
So again, like I want a far from well polished presentation, but it works.
I mean, there's a ton of experimentation right now.
Paid newsletters are obviously the thing.
Everybody has a sub stack.
Everybody's charging a monthly or yearly subscription to read their newsletter.
And this barely even registered as a trend this time last year.
And suddenly it's blown up.
I've talked to people who have other online video courses that they're doing, but they
tend to err on the side of very high production quality and you've kind of proven that that's
not necessary.
And in fact, there have been people who I bought courses from online where I trust them
so much that when I get their course, if it's really crappy and it just looks like like
it was just hacked together and it's this rough around the edges thing, I actually like
it more because it kind of feels like I'm not getting this mass producing that everybody's
getting.
It kind of feels like I'm getting like their secret knowledge.
And so I think you're totally right, like what matters is the insight and the trust
that you have with your audience more so than the quality of sort of like ancillary details
around the production quality and the packaging if you're doing an online course.
Do you think, you know, having tasted just how efficient you can be with video production
that you'll never go back to eBooks again, it's always going to be video?
No, no, no, I think so, yes.
And I probably might actually.
No, no, I mean, I'm not against sometimes spending time to polish things as long as
you recognize that the polish that you're doing is not necessarily going to translate
into more sales or it's not directly proportional.
I mean, it might improve a little bit, but it might not.
If you spend twice the time, it might not double your sales.
And basically, now I'm starting to arrive in a situation where I think I can take more
liberty and not be so extreme with my ROI targets, right?
And now if I need to write a book and I need to spend two months on it, I'm happy to do
it.
So I feel comfortable enough that I will almost certainly, it's not very certain, but extremely
likely that I'll make enough sales that it will at least cover my two months of time.
So I can do it much more comfortably.
Whereas when I was doing those initial things, I'm completely honest, that has absolutely
no idea what I would say, even a single copy.
To totally honest, I mean, with the second product, I had a bit more confidence.
But especially with the first one, just whether I sell zero or $100,000 or $100,000 completely
random.
So I think that's why I think, as we mentioned at the beginning, that I think factoring in
the probabilities, although they're very hard to calculate, is important, right?
And in the beginning, the probabilities of this becoming a success were low, right?
There was extreme uncertainty.
So I chose how much effort to put into them in relation to the likelihood of them working,
which I think is very, very important, especially in the beginning where you're testing the
waters and just trying to understand what's viable, what's possible, what you'll enjoy
doing, and so on and so forth.
I think one of the cool things about the way you approach things is that you leave so much
free time that you have time to actually go back and look at the things you've done in
the past and analyze what worked and didn't work about it, which I see people often just
kind of skipping.
But also you have this exploratory time where, since your days are unstructured, you're not
sure what you're going to do every single day down to the minute.
You can take time to just browse around Twitter or whatever and discover people from other
niches and other categories who are doing things in different ways.
That's what gave you the inspiration to do your video, whereas often I think people feel
like it's hard for them to come up with ideas.
They don't have that inspiration, and they're not sure how to iterate and improve on things
because they don't leave that time.
And I started doing this for myself recently.
I bought an iPad last month or a couple months back and just created a new email account
on it and just subscribed to a bunch of stuff just to read from all sorts of different niches.
And I'll wake up in the morning with nothing to do and just like read random stuff for
a couple hours.
And it gives me a ton more ideas than when I wasn't taking the time to do that.
Absolutely.
I think spare time, something that I definitely try to leave plenty of it.
And I think it helps in two ways, as you're saying.
Like it's just, it invites inspiration.
You're just bumping into random things and it makes you ask yourself whether it is something
you want to do.
And I think it allows you to sort of pounce on the opportunity.
That's when inspiration sucks.
I mean, at least for myself, many people, whenever I mentioned this to people, some
people believe that they work differently, but at least for me, I feel like both inspiration
and opportunity are perishable, like they go away, like you can't just put them on the
shelf.
I mean, I used to collect lots of, I used to have like many people do, like the ideas,
notes list in my app.
But I stopped doing it.
Like, please much know, as soon as something inspires me, I wonder if there's an opportunity
and if it's there, I tend to just do it almost immediately.
At least I'll start.
Like I'll just start writing, start doing something.
Right.
And it's how I'm liking and how I'm sort of liking to operate.
Like it's sort of, you get this free boost of energy.
Everything is still flesh in your head, like it allows you to benefit from luck when it
happens.
Like when you just sudden the pity, it gets you in the situations where you just see something
that you might be able to do and you see the opportunity that it might work.
And you need to have the free time.
If your calendar, if your days are so squeezed that you need to schedule something three
months from now, it's very likely that the inspiration will disappear, the opportunity
you might not see it again.
Just hard to get back again.
To be his friend, Snyder is a head designer at Spotify for a while and now he runs a very
successful SaaS company and a blog, but he had a blog post from a while back called waste
your ideas.
And it was this exact same concept that he used to think, oh, I'm going to put my ideas
on the shelf, save them for a rainy day and eventually they'll be great.
But like the consequence of that is that where are you left now?
You're left with all your ideas on the shelf, you're not working on your best stuff.
And those ideas probably are just going to get worse over time because as you said, they're
perishable.
So it's much better like when you have these ideas, do exactly what you're saying.
Just get them out, get them down, like start working on them and like you're going to have
more ideas later.
In fact, when you work on ideas, it's the best way to come up with new ideas in the
future.
So I think a lot of people are stuck in this state of holding on to their ideas like they're
clutching their pearls, you know, like these are the last ideas ever going to have, but
usually it's not the case.
Yeah, absolutely.
So we've been through your story from beginning to end and obviously you've learned quite
a lot on the way and I think you're super successful with your products like they're
making a crazy amount of money every day and it's just fun watching you.
What have you learned from your successes so far that you think, you know, a fledgling
indie hacker might benefit from knowing what should they take away from your story?
So something I learned, I think I probably mentioned two things.
Something I learned about, I just tweeted about it this morning actually, I was thinking
about what we might be talking about this interview and again, like the inspiration.
I thought it might be interesting to people.
I think I discovered another way of doing business because I used to think there's like
this approach where you just product first, where you have a big idea and you try to make
it work at all costs, like this is typically where people might end up going find looking
for investments and things like that.
There's the more traditional indie hacker approach where you sort of start with the
business strategy, right?
You just want to make a self-sufficient, bootstrapped business, right?
So you start with the business strategy and you try to take two risks in such a way that
you try to maximize profits with the constraint of what you have.
And I think what I learned just by trying to do the second one is that there's probably
another approach, which is more lifestyle first, like where it literally starts with
your preferred lifestyle and then pretty much try to find business opportunities that enhance
your lifestyle.
And this is just, I think knowing which one you're pursuing just helps you make decisions
easier because at one point I thought I was doing, I was uncertain whether I was doing
the second one or the third one until it's sort of clarified in my head that it's the
third one that I want to be doing.
I'm doing these things to improve my lifestyle.
So it really helps and we touched on many things when we were talking about when choosing
what to do and what to leave on the table, sort of recognizing this attitude is definitely
helping a lot right now and helping me make decisions very quickly.
The other point that I definitely learned and I significantly underappreciated was that
uncertainty is extremely uncomfortable, even though as we said before, I was lucky.
I had an abundant runway of over five years of saved expenses and I had sort of planned
my burn down and I was tracking it.
After a few months, it started to become a little painful almost psychologically to just
see these sort of losses accumulate in your savings account and not knowing when it's
going to stop, when you're going to know when things are working, like how long you have
to wait.
Super stressful.
Will I know?
Yeah, it's really, really stressful.
Again, I really believe I'm not an expert, but it's really just from looking at myself.
There's something in our heads that just makes us worry about these things, probably for
a very good reason and I'm happy because it helped me evaluate my strategy.
I think my advice is still very general advice, but I think it's really important to try to
find ways to tame the uncertainty because I thought I was prepared for it, but it becomes
really uncomfortable and I think once you find a way to sort of tame uncertainty in
such a way that you have sort of some very baseline that's like the downside is protected,
I think things become much more easier in terms of motivation, in terms of just even
identifying opportunities.
I think many things I wouldn't have even noticed them in terms of opportunities.
I was still worried about focusing 100% on the one thing, because it might have felt
like a distraction.
Like, why bother with the info-pladuct?
Probably I would have said, why bother with info-pladuct?
I would be wasting time from this big thing that I'm doing right now, whereas if you take
the attitude that I want to time many different things because just going to help diversify
and help me sort of split my motivation and my attention on different things, it just
also helps you expose yourself to new opportunities, new good fortune that you might not even recognize
if you're just focused 100%.
I hope people take this to heart because this is all stuff that you can think about before
you write your first line of code, like before you do anything, you could think about, okay,
why am I starting a company?
What do I want my life to be like?
What are the sources of stress and uncertainty and how do I minimize those?
And I think people will be much happier and more successful with their company to fill
some of your advice.
So Daniel, thanks a ton for coming on the show and sharing your story with us.
Thank you, Karatlan.
This was a little fun, one of my favorite podcasts, I think, so thank you.
Thanks a lot for having me.
Where can people go to learn more about all the different things that are up to you and
follow you on Twitter as well?
No, yeah, I think the best way to follow what I'm doing is on Twitter.
I tweet almost every day, pretty much.
I try to keep a high signal to a noise ratio and I tweet mostly about my lifestyle, how
am I designing my lifestyle and business related stuff.
I try to answer to all the questions, so feel free to DM me or email me if you want to bounce
an idea, do something similar that I did and you want to see my perspective.
I'm always happy to share that.
So yeah, Twitter is the best place, D. Vasallo, D-V-A-S-S-A-L-L-O.
All right, thanks again, Daniel.
Thank you, Karatlan.
Bye.
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