What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making
a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to
discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of
so the rest of us can do the same.
We're here with Patrick Campbell, the founder of ProfitWell, a very popular set of tools
that helps other companies improve their revenue growth. So if you've got a subscription company,
ProfitWell will help you reduce the number of cancellations, it'll help you figure out
your pricing, it'll give you reports and stuff to just help you basically make money. And
Patrick came on the podcast years ago. It's been a while, Patrick, and you shared the
story behind ProfitWell. But then a few weeks ago, you emailed me with some secret at the
time but now not so secret information that you have gone from being an IndieHacker to
being an IndieHacker who sold his business for nine figures, not seven figures, not eight
figures, but for over $200 million, I think is the figure. Is that right?
Yeah.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
Does that sound crazy to you?
It's wild.
When you say that out loud, do you even believe it? That's ridiculous.
Oh, it's insane. And to give you guys context, we were aggressively trying to pay off our
house like very Dave Ramsey, if you ever heard of that guy, he's got some interesting views
on like that. I don't always agree with everything, but it was more like, oh, this is a really
cool thing to bring my partner and I together. And so in January, we had $15,000 in a paid
off house. That was it. Like no stocks, no mutual funds, anything and then sold the
company and it's very much not now. And it's kind of weird. A lot of shame, like a lot
of champagne problems there, like existential crises.
Like I was talking to a founder who will go unnamed, but he has a company that is worth
many millions of dollars. And I was talking to him on the podcast recently and he is kind
of broke. And it was just really interesting thing where you can have this company that's
super successful, but you haven't had an exit event, right? You haven't actually sold it
like you have and you're just stressed. And from the outside looking in, everyone's like
other companies making tens of millions of dollars. You must be rich. And it's like,
no, actually I'm broke. I'm paying my employees and paying my bills. It's kind of crazy.
Well, that's something that I'm really curious about. So how does a bootstrapped founder
grow a company that big?
Yeah, probably every indie hacker wants to be where you are. Like, oh, I sold my company
for eight figures.
I think I talked about it on the pod a couple of years ago, but like first principles thinking
was like very central and very core to how we thought about things. And I think that
the reason for it is because in a bootstrapped environment, like every company bootstrapped
or venture backed is resource constrained. I think at a bootstrap company, you are like,
you're so constrained by so many different things that you have to think about like,
what is the best way for me to step through this problem? Or like, what are these priorities
that we're going to go after? And what that means is, is like, okay, it's okay for us
to spend $200,000 on something, but we're not just going to like spend 200 grand on
a test. Like we need to like test it small, then grow it, or like really think through
our strategy before we go deploy that capital.
I think the other thing that we did really well in the past couple of years that helped
our growth even faster than it was, was we kind of started to approach our culture as
like philosophical monarchy, I guess is the best way to put it. I originally said dictatorship,
but that sounds so aggressive.
It sounds hostile.
Yeah, it sounds so much more aggressive than it is. And all it means is like, we were really
accommodating on things, I would argue like three or more years ago. And what that means
is like, we have, we have values, right? We have things that we think are going to give
us an advantage to winning, quote unquote, whatever winning is, like feedback is non
negotiable. We talk a lot about that the way you receive feedback, very negotiable, but
getting the feedback is non negotiable, right? We really believe in this thing called MCI,
most charitable interpretation principle, like, you know, Channing, if I all of a sudden,
like, you don't like when I say that the color blue, and I'm like, Oh, yeah, that book was
blue. And you're like, offended, like, well, the way you handle that situation, and the
way I handle that situation is really important. It's not like, Oh, I should have read Channing's
mind. And no, he didn't like their color blue. It was more like, no, like Channing should
be like, Hey, man, you didn't know this. I don't think he meant anything by it. But like,
I don't really like when you say the word blue. And I'll be like, Oh my God, I'm so
sorry. I'll like not use that color, right? We weren't really, I can't relate, Cortland
and I never argue. And we definitely don't have a policy of being most charitable. Yeah,
yeah. Well, your brothers and your twins, which just as a whole nother, I feel like,
you know, wrench in the whole situation. But those are those are two really big things
that I think like, we didn't do as much as we should have, like the first couple of years.
And then the last few years, we really internalized. And the latter one meant like, you know, firing
some people and like, some people quitting because they wanted us to handle certain situations
one way. And we were just like, No, like, this is how we do things here. We're not saying
it's better or worse than what you want to do. But we don't do it that way. And if that's
not okay, like, let's find you a new job, which it's an uncomfortable thing to do in
a bootstrap company, because you're like, Oh, my God, I need everyone recruiting so
hard. And you know, I think it's one of those things that we just had to put put a stake
in the ground, as they say, there's a I mean, every company, to some degree is a government,
right? You've got leadership, you've got people, there's like, some need to organize and figure
out like, how do we make decisions? How do we deal with disputes? How do we treat everybody?
Like, there's like a de facto government at every company. And any government can have
any form, right? There's usually some type of leader, there's it could be democracy could
be a republic, it could be dictatorship or monarchy, as you say, and I think like in
recent times has been, it's kind of issues come to the fore, because there have been
like controversies where the way the employees of the company want things to be run doesn't
align with the way leadership wants it to be run. Coinbase, you saw Brian Armstrong,
who wrote this giant manifesto almost about like how Coinbase is not a place for political
discussions, which goes against the beliefs of quite a large number of people, especially
in the tech industry. And like, people quit, people were fired, there's a huge controversy.
Basecamp had a similar thing, I don't know if they handled it as, as well. But same thing
going on there. They did not, they did not handle it well. That controversial opinion
out there. I, yeah, they did not handle it well. But it's a tough situation. There's
like not exactly a playbook for how to do this. It's kind of a new, I think thing.
I don't remember there being some huge controversy at profit. Well, if there was, I might have
dismissed it. Like, how did you, how did you make this transition? It was, thank God, there
was it, but, uh, yeah, how do you become a monarch? Probably more of an oligarch. Is
there an oligarch? I guess, like something like that, because it wasn't, it wasn't just
me. Like we had this like small group of folks that like, you know, frankly were like the
top performers. They weren't all like leadership, but they were just the people. Right. And
I think what we did is we were writing, we are writing culture. And so what we did is
we would debate, debate things, right? And it was always debating like, like basically
on a spectrum, right? Because it's never like black and white. Nothing's like black and
white. It's all like nuance. It's all like, well, how would we handle this? What are we
going to optimize for all these other stuff? Right. And I think the advantage we had is
we were like well-intentioned, arrogant leaders. And what I mean by that is let's say someone
like had a really hard trouble with most charitable interpretation. Um, we had a situation where,
um, you know, someone like, um, they just use the word girl in the presence of someone
like it just offhandedly. Like they were just like, Oh, who was the girl who was on the
call and someone was, got very bothered. They went to HR. It was like a huge thing. Right.
And in that situation, what we should have said is like, listen, like you guys, if you
need help talking together, we'll have a manager, intermediate HR can intermediate, but you
guys got to talk this out because it sounds like this person didn't mean anything by it.
It sounds like, you know, this is important to you and maybe they don't know, blah, blah,
blah. Right. And I think the way we handled it was like, let's hear it out. Let's like
do all these other things. And it was one of those things. And this is really controversial.
This is like, unfortunately, this is very controversial. And it was like, no, like we
believe in MCI. We believe it. It's your job to, if you, if like, you can give him in this
case, most charitable and certification, do it. If not, like go to a manager to get help.
If you can't go to that manager to get help, go to another manager. And then like through
all the layers, you go to HR last, right? Unless it's like an obvious thing where we
all have good judgment. Right. And so I think like what we used to do is we try to like
talk to that person and try to like change them. Right. And it would, it would work with
like skills, right? Like if we had a job that needed 50 out of a hundred in critical thinking,
but the person was at zero, we would go, we can get them to 50 in six months. Like we
can help them. Right. And it was just, again, it's well intentioned arrogance. And I think
what we ended up doing is we started codifying stuff. We started talking about it. We started
filtering for it and recruiting. I started doing like all the final interviews and doing
some like specific questions to kind of help with it. And then we like had them read the
memos before they started and all these other things. And then that kind of like, it kind
of filtered most people out. It kind of filtered people out. And then the people who were there
that didn't jive with it, like we only had to let go one person. Um, and then two other
people like quit. Um, it wasn't this big, controversial thing. Um, it just was like
us getting the backbone to like defend our values, which it sounds scary even saying
it because it sounds like, Oh, what are these crazy values? Like they're not that insane.
They're just like, you know, they're just basic stuff, but we just start defending it.
It's funny. You said that you're not a lot like the base camp situation, but there's
one sense in which you are and one sense in which you're not the sense in which you are
is what it sounds like is there was just sort of no system, uh, for, for hashing this out.
So it was just like, okay, we're just going to go ahead and hash it out. And one of the
things that, that DHH talked about with his situation is they just kind of worded this,
this open forum. We can all debate these, these random things. And that was what was
controversial. We put the kibosh on that. Hey, listen, if you're at work, we're talking
about work. If you have political opinions, talk about it outside the sense in which you're
not like, uh, base camp is that you didn't write a big public blog post kind of declaring
to the world outside of your company what your policies were. But now you've got this
system, you have, you have these ideas and you had to get rid of some people that, that
didn't jive with it, but are you now kind of more systematic? Like, you know, does it
seem like these frustrations are still bubbling under the surface and you're just kind of
like, Hey, listen, this is, these are the rules or.
Yeah, I think it's, so there's, there's, there's two things run like one, I think we actually,
we did have a system cause this, this wasn't like a moment perfectly in time. It was kind
of like building, like we had the memos, we just didn't defend them, right? Like, and
then we had like a couple of memos we needed to write and then we needed to add it to the
hiring. Right. And so yeah, we didn't, we didn't have like a pure system and then it
didn't get implemented overnight. Right. I think the last thing was just having the courage
to like actually hire based on culture, which is everyone tells you to do, but you just
never have the courage to do it. And I also don't think you've understand it. I think
it's one of those wisdom things. Like you can hear tons of podcasts of people telling
you like, no, no, no, you shouldn't hire that person because they don't fit your culture.
And then all of a sudden you're like, Oh crap, I learned that lesson. Right. I, and even
on the base camp memo, it's kind of funny. We wrote our own version internally. Basically
the, our memo was you can debate and talk about whatever you want. You are not entitled
to anyone having your opinion. You're not allowed to get overly offended if someone
has a differing opinion than you, but also keep in mind, this is our mission. Like to
help subscription businesses grow automatically. That's our mission. That's what we're doing
within these four walls and whatever we can do within these four walls to help with that,
including different initiatives and stuff. We absolutely will do that. And so like, I
think that was kind of a take is like, whenever something would bubble up, we would like,
Hey, here's what we think if you don't agree. And we also have a feedback culture, like,
let us know. Right now where this is getting a little, little hairy, right? Um, is we were
85 people at profitable. Now we're 350 people at a venture backed, like, you know, paddle,
a company, a venture backed company. Right. And so all of a sudden now it's like, we did
a lot of this, like, okay, do we kind of think about the same things, um, as each other and
like diligence and like pre-diligence, right? But now it's like the rubber hits the road,
right? And now we're 350 people. There's all types of different managers. Like we're a
minority of the group, right? Like, and so it's like, yeah, like Fox was running product.
I'm on the board and on the exact team, but like, how much of this can we push for? How
much of it can we, is it change when we're 350 people? Cause some of this stuff you just,
your sensitivities do have to go up, right? And you know, I mean, only apple I think has
the backbone to be like, yeah, we don't care. Like get back into the office or whatever
it is. And even then they faltered on it, right? And so, yeah, I think it's, I think
it's tough. So I think like when you are defending your values, you will lose people and you
will not be able to hire folks, but the giant overarching thing of this entire conversation,
we're talking about tech jobs. Like it's like the most privileged subset of all jobs in
the world, right? Like we're talking about like, Oh, you're getting, you know, $90,000
to answer support tickets, right? Like you're not digging ditches for $35,000 a year, right?
Like, and so I think at the end of the day, like I always hold that in context because
I think it's like, okay, yes, it's, it's not unimportant. Some of these things, but it's
also like, you know, it's okay. Like if someone can't find a job like here, they're going
to find a job somewhere else. Like even in this market, maybe this is arrogant to say,
but I think of tech jobs as like almost sort of being like an indicator of the future.
Like I remember like in the early 2000s, like Google is this crazy place to work. Like look
at their cafeteria. They've hired professional chefs and they've got all these like massage
rooms. It's just like mind blown. And then now today it's like, Oh, it's like you could
throw a rock in San Francisco and it's hard not to hit a company building that does all
of those same things. And as a result of that, like they sort of like push the world forward
in a way where like, oh, there's like millions of more jobs that are cushier and nicer because
somebody led the way in doing that and others follow their example. So on one hand, it's
like definitely true. Okay. These are cushy tech jobs. You know, people should be chill
out a little bit. You know, they have it pretty good, but on the other, it's like, if you
are putting on like a sort of like, I don't know, visionary hat and imagining this future
utopian world where work is the best thing it could possibly be. It's like you in a way
are helping to create that and shape what that's going to look like. And I guess a part
of your vision is that, you know, don't let me put words in your mouth, but like when
you come to work, it's for work. And when you come to work, you're expected to be a
grownup and resolve your own disputes and be an adult and not necessarily look for leadership
to solve all of your problems. What's funny about what you say and the guttural reaction
is Google also did, they were the ones to start the whole, bring your whole self to
work concept. Like that was a big thing, right? And this is a huge wave, right? So the problem
with the base camp situation, and I would argue like, we didn't go, you shouldn't talk
about politics work. You want to talk about politics work. Let's, let's do it. Let's do
it at lunch. Let's do it in Slack channels. I don't care, right? I think the issue is
we expect people to bring their whole selves to work. Then they bring their whole selves
to work. And then we're surprised when part of themselves is like their culture, their
stuff that's happening in the world, all these other things, right? And then you have all
these compounding things about mental health and all kinds of stuff that are on top of
it, right? And so I think the addendum that I would give is like, I think you, and this
is a little scary, you will have companies that will be more, I don't know if they're
open, but more obvious and how they think and they work. And I think that some companies
will be for people who like love their craft, they love their job, they like, they love
that. And that's kind of where the culture orientates them around. And there might be
like two groups inside a company, right? Where you have that group and then you have, like
we called them nine to fivers inside profitable. And we called them like careerists and the
nine to five, it wasn't none of this pejorative nine to fivers. It's like, they want a great
job, great pay, but don't talk to them on Friday night. Don't talk to them on Saturday,
whatever the career is, they were like, can we work this weekend? Can we work on this
thing? Can you like show me how you did that thing? Like on Saturday, like they were like
that style, they wanted 10 years of a career in two years, right? And I think it's like,
that should be okay. Like you should, you should be able to open with it. And I think
what happens is on an individual level, people feel insecure about being a nine to fiver
because they see what careerists get and then they're insecure about, oh, the careerists
are able to, you know, to, to get advanced, right? But I think it's, it's going to be
more of like, you'll either have jobs that are mostly automated or like, unfortunately,
like more menial, right? Like this is where the Amazon, you know, warehouse stuff is coming
into play. You'll have jobs that are pretty casual. And maybe it's the future vision of
like, Oh, I have multiple different freelance jobs, basically, where I used to maybe have
one full time job. And then you'll have careers where people are like, no, I want to like
go all in. And I don't know, I think it's, I think it's really interesting. And finding
a culture, like if you think about snow crash, right? Like snow crash has been the news past
couple of years again, it's like, Oh, you almost align with your company, like a religion,
or like a state. And I don't know if we'll go that far, but I don't know. It's interesting.
It's interesting to think about.
That was like, that was like the mafia was a company, right? So like, are you part of
the mafia?
There's the pizza mafia, the pizza mafia. Yeah, yeah. It was the pizza. They ran the
pizza shop.
Wasn't there like a fried chicken one too? It was a KFC slash mafia.
I can't, there's like, yeah, there's like a number of others. It's a great, the world
that I think it's he, the world he created is just fantastic. Yeah. The, the story was
like, Oh, that's interesting. The world was more interesting at least to me.
I think you're right. You mentioned that people sort of underestimate culture. It's like one
of those things that's like, it comes from wisdom and experience. Like you make the mistake
and you learn the hard way. And no matter how many people on a podcast sit around and
pontificate about how you should do this. It's like, yeah, I just kind of like washes over
you. If you're listening, you're like, I'll think about that later. Like I'm just trying
to get my business to work. But like what I think about, like, at least what I've been
thinking about a lot recently is that culture is everywhere. Like even in our friend groups,
it's like a prime example of culture. Like I've been like introducing a lot of my friends
to each other this year. And I have friends from all walks of life. I know a bunch of
starving artists. I know a bunch of entrepreneurs running billion dollar companies. I know a
bunch of sex workers. I know a bunch of like circus performers and like, I'll bring them
all into like a house together and like try to like have them fit and it's fun. It's super
fun. And everyone's like kind of shocked and like, whatever. I'm like, yeah, you meet this
person. You meet this person. They're so different. You know, some people want to go on like a
10 mile bike ride in the morning. Some people want to like, you know, chug beers until they're
drunk at 2 p.m. Some people want to go do shrooms. Some people want to watch movies
and dissect the culture behind it. And the thing is like, and point of fact, despite
like my wildest optimistic dreams, it doesn't always work. Like there are some people who
just like don't want to be in the same room as other people. And when I think about like
a company culture, it's like arguably the kind of kind of the same thing. Like if you
have a group of like 10 people who you really like, you can kind of make sure that people
you all drive with, they drive with each other and it works really well because you're there
to enjoy each other's company. If you have like a 300 person company or a thousand person
company, like is it even possible to bring that many people together in a way where everybody
brings their whole selves to work and it actually works and it's not just a bunch of conflicting
cultures and opinions. Like when I think about companies that are that big that are like
uniformly the same, I think of like the empire from Star Wars with like Darth Vader at the
top and everybody's a clone. You know, like, is that actually working real life?
I think the ones that have been successful, like we always talk about like tech companies,
right? But there's like tons of companies that are enormous. Like headcount wise that
are actually doing like, I, they're controversial for lots of reasons, but like Coke Industries,
like Coke Industries is extremely successful company. They have like, gosh, gotta be hundreds
of divisions, if not a thousand divisions, right? Like different products and these types
of things. And like, I think what they did is, and they're also like a very libertarian
because it's the Coke brothers, right? For all their baggage, you know, they run a company,
by the way, that's how they became billionaires, right? And I think that what's really interesting
about their structure, if you kind of read anything about them is like, they kind of
do it based on like almost a city structure. So they, they focus like at the top, more
on like the leaders of each group, like, and another one is Disney, like Disney, Eisner,
what he talked about is like, everyone on the exec team should be able to be the CEO.
Like that's how you create a great exec team, right? And then I think what that does is
if that culture can like cascade down and if you choose like almost like the core principles,
like almost the first principles of how you're going to grow, and then just like cascade
that down, there's always going to be like bugs, right? But you have systems in place
to handle those bugs. And I think that when you look at like Google, for instance, like
Google had like a lot of backlash the past two years that Microsoft didn't, right? We
made fun of Microsoft for a few things, but they didn't have like the worker revolts as
much as Google did. And I don't know if I know the answer as to why that is, but like,
that's interesting. Like we should explore that. I think Google, I worked at Google and
it's, it's a fantastic company. They pay you more than your worth for what you're doing.
And they treat you like it's Disneyland every day. And it's amazing. But it's one of those
things that I think that they, for lack of better phrase, like, I think they, they were
like, bring yourself to work to an extreme, then everyone started bringing themselves
to work in front of the entire company at all hands. And that just created a lot of
consternation where you had some people who really cared, arguing, and then other people
who just wanted to do their jobs, like, like just kind of distracted. And you just created
this cocktail where the balance was off, I think, whereas maybe Microsoft figured out
the balance. I don't know. I remember seeing this, uh, this old diagram of how different
tech companies are organized. And I can't remember the way that Google looked, but I
remember, is that the city and the network one? And I remember like Microsoft's on there
was a bunch of different like little fiefdoms with guns pointed at each other. And maybe
that is like the thing you're talking about where it's like, not saying it's fun to work
there, but they don't seem to have these issues. I think that's right. Cause it, maybe it's
like what that's saying. It's like, this is not one monolithic entity. Sure. It has a
name sure to the public. It's a monolithic entity, but when you're part of it, maybe
you can't organize a hundred thousand people to all be the same culture the same way. Like
maybe they have to have distinct teams that are just different from each other. Yeah,
you probably shouldn't. And if you have those distinct teams that are different from each
other, you probably create like quote unquote, a safe space for anyone at the company where
they can just work for the team that's right for them rather than everybody trying to appeal
to the leadership during all hands meeting saying we should, this is how I feel and therefore
you should feel this way, leadership. And therefore you should dictate that onto literally
all a hundred thousand people or a thousand people or a hundred people at the company.
I think it's also one of those things where not all, like I would argue, like you can
pick your principles, you can pick your values obviously, but not all principles or values
are created equal. Like for example, like yes, we have this philosophical monarchy that
I'm describing or this oligarchy, right? But like our values are like debate, feedback,
like no top-down decisions. Like all decisions are like with the person who's on the front
line, right? That's a very different culture than like a very top-down like gun pointing
type culture that I think some people end up having. And it's also very different than
like the five person indie company that like it's four contractors and the founder, right?
Like it's all very, very different. And I think it's like, as you scale into different
areas from what you want as a human individual as a founder, and then what you like, what
is expected to get towards that outcome. You have to align on those particular things.
Like I don't think you can create a truly top-down culture for 10,000 people, let alone
a hundred thousand people. It just won't work.
Let's get onto like a more advice driven topic. It's a lot of people listen to the show are
early stage founders. And I remember back in the day, like we used to do these office
hours things. Do you remember those? Like on YouTube we would get, I guess we get on
a zoom call and you did one and a bunch of like early founders came in and just asked
you questions. You've been through the entire gamut. You've gone from Andy Hacker to nine
figure exit. Now you're a cool, rich guy. You can sit on the mountaintop and talk about
how to do it. What do you think any hackers need?
I'm still writing BDRA emails, by the way. So don't worry. It doesn't get glamorous.
I'm still writing blog posts and emails. Yeah, exactly.
What do you think fledgling founders need to hear? And I'm not talking about the stuff
that like is necessarily the obvious advice that everybody knows and isn't doing, but
like what are some things that, you know, like maybe some of these things that we hear
on a podcast and we'll just never do, but we need to hear it anyway. Like what are people
not doing right that you think they could be doing better?
I think, um, we talked about this a little bit. The know thyself concept is so important.
And what I mean by that is like, you want to push $250,000 a year and work 20 hours
a week. Fantastic. You want to try to build a hundred million dollar company. Fantastic.
But like know what is required by looking at the people who have done that and stick
with that. Right. I think that the biggest issue I see with some founders and one of
the hardest conversations I have with like founder friends sometimes are like people
asking for advice is, is around this topic of like, okay, well like what's your calendar
look like? Right. And it's like personal thing, personal thing, personal thing, personal thing.
It's like, well, okay. So you only worked 15 hours a week. Okay. Yeah. Like that's,
okay, don't get me wrong. That's awesome. Right. You can make a living, right? That's
amazing. Like you could like Cortland, you were kind of saying this before, like you
could make a live a really good living off of, you know, finding that sweet spot of like
working the least for the lifestyle you want. That's great. But I have never met like someone
who got to an eight figure exit, let alone a nine figure exit. If you didn't like put
the time in and like work their ass off, right. And it wasn't just like work smarter. It was
also work harder, right? Like it was also time, right? And there's, there's a point where it's like,
yes, like vacation stuff, but like I haven't, and I'm not saying I like, there's the only
way to do it, but like I haven't been on a vacation three and a half years. And I'm not
saying that's good. I'm just saying like, that was like what I thought the business
needed and I'm a little bit of a workaholic. So I'm a little bit of an outlier, but I amongst
at least my friends, like until they realized they just want to do a profit business, the
ones who are trying to go for like big and growth, the ones who are venture backed, like
they all work extremely hard. And I think that's a really big thing is like, you got
to understand what it takes, or at least what it has taken for other people to see if you
want to be in that like general direction, if that makes sense.
I have a friend who was a Gates scholar and he got to meet Bill Gates in college. And
my friend is very ambitious. Uh, but he always talks, he always brags about being kind of
lazy about how smart he was. And he could do all these things, but he wasn't working
that hard. And then he met Bill Gates and Bill Gates told him that exact thing, which
is like, look, depending on like how successful you want to be, like you're going to be competing
against people who are not only equally as smart as you, but also work super deeper hard.
And if you don't have both of those things, it's like sort of hard to reach those upper
echelons.
Well, and I think that like we all have indie hacker friends who they have seven projects.
That's amazing. Go do seven projects. That's awesome. One of them is going to pop. Like
it's not luck. It's just iteration. That's great. Awesome. Right. But it's also like,
I don't know. At some point you got to go all in on something, right? If you want, if
you want that exit, if you want that like big thing, if you want like, you know, good
exits, again, like it's all relative, right? Like a million dollar exit is amazing. It's
life changing, right? You know, maybe you don't have to work as hard, but some people
they work their butt off just for a million dollar exit, right? And that's kind of what
it takes is like, when you have everyone somewhat equal, you know, on all these variables, like
that's the one factor that's differentiating. I think, I think the other thing is like before
I went in, so I worked for the government as my first job, I worked in US Intel, which
I know we talked about that on the last pot a little bit. And then, um, and then that's
how I got into tech. I never wanted to go into business, but when I was in college,
I was going to go get like my PhD in economics, which thank God I didn't do that. But that
was like the thing I wanted to do. It was that or political rhetoric, which again, I
was just going to be an academic because I was like, you know, let's go read books and
write too long papers, dude. It's a great, great Channing. I actually think you would
like that field, um, based on some of the things you've said in the pod the past few
episodes. Um, I'll send you some readings. Courtland, I know you're the frat boy, but,
uh, long story short, I think that like the reason I brought that up is because if you're
not approaching your field as like, I would argue almost like an academic or a professor
or like, whatever it is, I think you're doing it wrong because your job is to like, just
fill yourself with so much data, right? Read paper, read blog posts, read books, read like
academic papers. If your field has those things, like learn from people are better at you than
engineering. And I think that that's like, that's the thing that like, I think I did
a little bit differently. Like I didn't know anything about pricing. I didn't know a damn
thing about pricing when I started this company. Now, like I probably know, you know, I'm uncomfortable
with, you know, saying something like this, but I probably know more about like Sasser
subscription pricing than most people out there. Right. And it was not because like,
I'm just smart. It was because like I read grueling academic papers on pricing theory.
I read like all these other things and like studied them. I have flashcards, right? Like
I have all these different things, right? And I think a lot of founders, there's so
much going on. You don't like focus on like, Oh, I need to like know my craft, whether
that's a specific type of craft like marketing or like engineering or like my industry, if
that makes sense. You go too broad, you can't go deep.
The thing that I love, I think the most about, about your advice, first off, it's like, it's
advice, but it's like meta advice, right? It's like, you're going to have to work hard.
And one of the, one of my pet peeves is that everyone that I know who's an indie hacker
who's successful or who's successful at a lot of other things in a lot of other fields
that it's difficult to be successful at them is that they had to work their asses off while
they were working, while they were climbing, at least at some points in those periods over
the arc of them developing their skills or reaching their goals, they had to not really
have really good work-life balance.
And yet one of the things that I often see among indie hackers is like, when someone
will become really successful and then once they're at the top, it's almost kind of like
they pulled the ladder up and they're like, Oh, you know, we've got this work-life problem.
We, everyone, yeah, everyone, it's like, it's like, it's correct. Well, it's, it's correct,
but it's, it's like, it has like the wrong, it like misses part of the story. It's an
incomplete story. It's like, I get to sleep about, I get to sleep now and I get to work
on like work-life balance because I'm, you know, sort of, you know, resting on my laurels
and to connect that to the other insight that you had, which is, you know, a lot of the,
the people who, who achieve this, the way that they're able to achieve it in a way that's
at least sustainable, sustainable enough that they become successful at it is that they're
in a field where they can be obsessed. They're in a field where they can just do this crazy
research and all that stuff. I don't think it's difficult in theory to, to, you know,
sort of do research and like become a professor and stuff. If you are in a field where as
you, as you said it, like, you know, you're a craftsman at this thing, you naturally do
that.
Let me push back against this a little bit though, just from my own personal story. The
reason indie hackers was blew up in the earliest days of indie hackers wasn't because I was
working 80 hours a week, which I was doing. It was because I was in the right place at
the right time intentionally because it had a lot of market research to try to figure
out what the right idea was. And then I worked 80 hours because there's other things I wasn't
sure about. And I was going to, I was putting on a lot of effort, but a lot of that effort
was wasted. Like in hindsight, even at the time, like I wrote detailed blogs about hourly
tracking on the earliest days of the indie hackers blog, and you can see where every
hour went and a lot of the effort that I put in was wasted because I didn't make good decisions.
And if I'd been a little bit more disciplined and taken more time to make better decisions,
some of those decisions were obviously really bad. Like one of the things I didn't do very
often was I didn't talk to mentors. There are people I could have talked to who would
have given me several answers so quickly and so easily, but because I emotionally was in
a place where I just, I need to do it all myself. Like I worked harder, not smarter.
Yeah, but that's the thing. But that's the thing. Like that that's wisdom in order to
learn that wisdom, the pro in hindsight, I start profitable over just again. I have none
of the base. I just have the knowledge. I can shave three years off our trajectory guaranteed
three years because you didn't know the piece of advice or the piece of the thing that was
going to unlock the thing, right? You had to go through all the like, and that's the
other thing, right? It's persistence. It's resilience. And it's a tricky thing, right?
Because there's people who like, you know, they leverage their life savings and their
mortgage, their house, and they're going and there's no traction, right? Like, and that's
a situation where you should probably stop, right? But I think in terms of knowledge,
like I had the same thing. Oh, I don't want to ask for help because, you know, I don't
know. I have to do it myself. And then as soon as I asked for help, oh, everyone's been
through this. Okay. Like I can, I can ask it, right? But I think Channing, one of the
things you said, and maybe Courtland, I don't know, you might disagree with this, um, is
I think the reason people pull up the ladder is because no one wants to admit that work
life balance is probably the wrong way to think about, like it's just the wrong framework.
It's completely the wrong framework. It made so much sense when it was nine to five white
picket fence, you know, all that other stuff. It made so much sense. Now we're on a podcast
at what is it 2 p.m. Pacific shooting the shit. Courtland doesn't even have sleeves
on his shirt, right? I'm in shorts. I haven't showered in two days, like just to throw that
out there like, and we're just chilling, like talking about stuff, right? And what that
means is, is it's just a different world, right? Like this is balanced, right? Like
I was talking to another founder Friday and we were both talking about, Hey, like we don't
really have a lot of like close friends. We have like five close friends and it's because
like we love what we do when we found our friends with the people who we do, right?
And then there's people like Jenny, my better half, she has 30 friends. She's got so many
friends like she's invited to every wedding, right? It's just different strokes. And I
think that's the thing that like we get wrong, not only with our teams, but with ourselves
of like, what's the lifestyle we want? What is the best hedge against that lifestyle?
And we can change whenever we want. That's another, that's why the framework sucks too.
We can change, right? Like I haven't taken a vacation awhile. I will guarantee you the
rest of this year. I'm probably not going to work as hard as I did a year ago because
like I, I gotta like balance it a lot. I gotta like pace myself a little bit, right?
To me, this is the main value proposition of running your own company. I mean, it's
cool to make a lot of money. It really is. It's cool to do, you know, whatever have big
following or whatever it is that a lot of super superficial benefits of it are. But
to me, I completely agree with you. I was actually, I'm, I think I'm in the middle of
writing it. I haven't figured out the controversial title yet, but a post about how I don't believe
in the concept of work-life balance. Yeah, I don't, well, it's bullshit. No one's willing
to, I think that I think it's like what it is, as you said, I think it's that there are
contexts. Like if, if I worked a nine to five and I felt that I didn't have a lot of options
and I'm doing this thing sort of reluctantly dragging my feet, doing this thing to pay
the pay the bills, then I might say that, but you know, it's like, I can't wait for,
I can't wait for Saturday, right? Or on Sunday, I can't, you know, it's, I can't, I don't
want to go to sleep because tomorrow's Monday. But the cool thing about what we do is, especially
if we hit a certain level of sort of sustainability is we get to craft our own lives. And so the
way that I look at it is I don't look at it as work in life. Everything that I do is just
my projects. And so I want to find some balance, but that's because if I work all day, my girlfriend
just walked in the room and rolled her eyes. Like I'm working again, right? So it's like,
that's one of my projects, my, my relationship, the relationship that I manage with people
that's, you know, if left to my own devices, not thinking about it, I'm probably going
to neglect that a little bit more than I like to. So I have to be a little bit conscious
about it. There's a certain amount of work that I want to do, but I kind of got to do
the work that I need to do and not always just the, you know, the fun coding things
are like blogging things. There's a lot of like management. It's work life fit. And that's
the thing that like, I think that's a thing you have to learn as just a 20 something 30
something. Hopefully you learned in your twenties, you can choose your friends. I lost friends
because of starting this company. They weren't really friends, but I thought they were friends
at the time. They wanted me to go out every night. I just didn't want to do that. It wasn't
me. Like it wasn't me. Like maybe it was me at a time, right? I lost a partner because
it just wasn't the lifestyle she wanted. And I was like, Oh no, like I, I like this craft.
I like to go after my craft and it's, it's not going to change. So like she thought I
was going to change. I knew I wasn't going to change. And like, you know, and I think
it's communicating as well. It's what a lot of people they miss. And this is what caused
a lot of like problems in interpersonal relationships. When I started dating Jenny, third date,
Hey, this is the lifestyle. This is how I think about things. These are the bounds.
These are the things are probably not going to change. Like with kids, everything, but
here's the advantages, flexibility, all this other stuff. I'm so happy when I'm with you,
I am with you. Like all those other things, right? And I think that that's, if you communicate,
you've done the introspection to understand like what you want, whatever it is. And, and
you surround yourself with the people that are there. Like, I think that's, that's true.
Like indie happiness, I would argue. That's good founder happiness, whether you're an indie
hacker or not, I would argue.
I'm glad you said work-life fit because like, I do think that there's this vision that like,
you have to be miserable in order to start a company that successful. I could be working
so hard that you don't like it. But if there's a good fit, like the people around you, like
Channing is a good example. Working on any hackers or Channing, the very first person
I brought on has made, any hackers, like a joy to work on because he's my brother. And
we love just talking about philosophical stuff and debating, et cetera. We love being on
the podcast together. That doesn't hinder my work in any way. In fact, it makes it much
better. It just fits in with my life a lot better. And I think people underestimate the
degree to which like, if you're an indie hacker and you're a founder, you can do literally
anything that you want. As long as it doesn't like violate the laws of physics, like you
can structure your business that way. And hopefully you'll structure it in a way that
like the market, I'd argue the laws of laws as well. The laws of men as well.
Exactly. Right. Yeah. People need to actually want what you're, I mean, you can, it's going
to get you in trouble.
You might get, you might go to jail, but point is like you can structure a business that
fits with the life that you want. And you can ask yourself these questions at the beginning.
You can say, what kind of life do I want to live? Like when I started any hackers, like
I knew I didn't want to start a mission critical business where people's lives are dependent
on my website, staying up with 99.999% uptime, because I know that's going to translate into
me being stressed out all the fucking time when my website inevitably goes down. Those
can be good businesses. Those businesses tend to have really good retention. They tend to
serve like really important niches, but like, that's not what I wanted for myself. And I
think very few founders ask themselves these questions. They don't do what you said, Patrick,
which is to study the people who are successful, see what it's like to be that person, see
what it's like to get there and ask, is that the kind of life that I want to live?
Well, and I think it's because you, you start with like, oh, this is a cool idea. And you're
like, oh cool. And then you have the vision of like the beginning, the cool, the coolness
and the first code and the landing page. And then you have this vision of like the social
network or money ball or like all these other like, you know, movies that guys don't like
to admit how many times they watch them. Right? And so it's like one of those things where
like you have the ends and they're both really exciting. And then this messy middle, right?
And I think that, I don't know, I think like, that's why it's really interesting when you
look at like second time founders, no matter if the first thing was successful or a failure,
like they're less accommodating on like for themselves, less accommodating for their teams.
They like kind of structure things like, and I think a lot of first time founders, you're,
you're struggling to learn these things while you build, which they're hard lessons and
hopefully like you luck into learning them with the right mentors, advisors, et cetera.
But sometimes like you go up in a ball of flame and then you have like a year of like
existential crisis. Cause you're like, what happened? Like, I don't know what happened.
And it's hard. It's really hard.
Speaking of existential crisis, 10 years running profit. Well, you sold it for, you know, I
popping amounts of money. What now? Like what, what did the next 10 years look like?
Um, good question. Um, I met paddle. I want to stay till IPO at least if not longer, mainly
because I, I've always loved building. Like I liked the building part. I think I started
becoming an entrepreneur because I thought like, Oh, if I'm going to work my butt off,
like I want to get paid, but then like, I think you quickly realize like there's easier
ways to make money than like grinding. And I was always enamored with like, cool. We
solve this problem. Oh, we got faster at this. Oh, we compounded that. Like I love those
problems and I think I want to see that from this point to IPO just to see what that looks
like. And if I like it right, because if I want to swing again, I don't know if I want
to like, all right, we're going to create a hundred person company and that's what it's
going to be profit sharing. Or if it's like, no, no, no, let's go for an IPO again. But
beyond that, or maybe on the side hustle, I'm very fascinated with like two areas. One
is like broadly defense, which sounds scary, like defense companies, those types of things.
But I think with my experience in working in the Intel community, I think it's like,
there's a lot of things around like cybersecurity. There's a lot of things around like personal
security I would argue that are like really important, but not enough people are working
on them because it's like defense and it sounds scary. And then the other area is really around
like, I guess the broad category would be like democracy and like freedom of information.
I think that's like an area that like, so you're dealing with really, really minor trivial
topics. There's this speech that I always come back to and I suggest people read. I
should have brought it up in the previous conversation of Teddy Roosevelt gave this
talk. It was the doctrine of a strenuous life. And this kind of like houses the entirety
of all of my views I feel in the past like hour. And it's basically like, if you've been
given the ability and he was given the speech in front of like people at a press club, like
all these like hoity-toity folks. And he's basically like, listen, you're all in a good
position. You've been given a gift no matter if you're rich or like middle-class or whatever,
like therefore you must not live a life of ease. You must like do hard things, go after
hard things. And so now it's like, no, like if I can like help fix democracy or help,
and that's such a loaded term, but if I can help the way elections are run specifically
how campaign finances run, cause I think that's a really interesting problem because everyone's
trying to solve it through public means. And like you're asking the barber to stop giving
haircuts like it makes no sense, right? Like rather than like solving it from a private
perspective. Um, and then there's this other thing and whenever I get a chance, I like
to talk about it. Um, so forgive me for a small diatribe, but like Aaron Swartz, I don't
know if you remember Aaron Swartz, like Reddit or one of the co for early employees. I don't
know, technically if he was a co-founder, but he, um, he was involved with like Sopa
and Pippa, but he also was like, he got his exit from Reddit and he started buying public
information and just setting it free because this is a big thing that people don't realize.
Like there's a lot of court records that people need for like even public defenders that are
behind paywalls and it's free the information, but you have to pay like a processing fee
basically. So he started buying us stuff and it was all legal. Um, at least it was gray.
Um, and then, you know, he did a JSTOR thing and had a prosecutor, Carmen Ortiz, who was
trying to like scare him and then he took his own life. Yeah. And it was definitely
over prosecution. Like JSTOR didn't want to sue him. MIT didn't want to sue him, but
she chose to keep going. Um, at least in my opinion, I need to say for defamation purposes,
but yeah, long story short, I think there's like stuff there because we have all this
information now, like the cost of that information is like important to come down. And I think
the cost of information coming down also helps election costs as well.
I checked out the speech, the speech in the sort of main point in the opening remarks.
He says, I wish to preach not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous
life, the life of toil and effort of labor and strife to preach at the highest form of
success, which comes not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not
shrink from danger from hardship or from bitter toil and who out of these wins the splendid
ultimate triumph. That's amazing. Um, people that are listening
to the podcast can hear this, but, um, this is my favorite quote. It's from this guy named
Nicholas Hobbs. And it's like the mirror image of, of that same concept, which is he was
a psychologist in like the 1960s and it is one should choose trouble for oneself in the
direction of what one would like to become at a level of difficulty close to the edge
of one's competence. And like that's supposed to be like the way that you strike that perfect
balance in life. And so it's awesome that you've had this again, ridiculous exit and
that you're doing exactly what everyone who knows what happiness is made out of, which
is you're stepping your game up and you're looking for the next challenge. It's at the
level that you've leveled up to. There's something actually channeling you suddenly
in the actress form the other day that I responded to in this vein, which is that like, you know,
a lot of times you'll see soldiers who are in war and war is this terrible, scary thing.
It's awful, right? Like most of the people that I know were in the military, like who
have been to war spend a lot of time thinking about like that day. They finally come home,
how great that's going to be. And then often people come home, like normal life seems aimless.
It seems like what's the purpose I had this band of people that it was like literally
life or death every day with. And now that I'm home and safe, like that's great. There's
something bad about that, but it's like, where is that strife? Where is that like challenge
that I'm fighting against? You know, it's almost like a ridiculous comparison to make,
but there's some parts of the analogy are true that like as a founder, if you've been
going through the shit for years and it's been tough and you're struggling to survive
and then after you're done, you're like, okay, well now I'm like made a boatload of money.
Like what do I do? It could be a similar like aimless feeling, you know? And I think this
idea, some veteran from Afghanistan, I just pissed off a whole bunch of people throwing
his computer across the room. It's basically the exact thing. Here's yeah. Yeah. You know,
it's really funny. Like it's not funny, but in that vein, fun anecdote, not really that
fun. Talk to 30 folks in making this decision to sell. All of them had sold. All of them
had made something. 15 said they wouldn't have sold the company if they had to do it
over again. I think it's, they have the money. So it's kind of like a hard thing to like
understand that. Um, I think almost a hundred percent of that 15 were people who like gave
the keys and just walked away. The other 15 mostly like went on to the next company of
the 15 who walked away or so three of them became addicts, either like drugs, like hard
drugs, alcohol, and they're all fine now. But like it's, it's when it's exactly what
you're saying, Cortland. It's like when you, when you have that void, that purpose, like
it's hard and not everyone's going to become a drug addict, right? But it's like, it's
a tough thing. I think purpose is so important. It's like someone tweeted today, like they
know a couple of 30 to 40 year olds who have retired and all of them are back working because
like, you just got to get something going. Even if it's small, it doesn't matter what
it is. Like go work at a company, go volunteer. Like I think it's, it's important to have
purpose.
Important to have purpose. Well, listen, Patrick, congratulations on your success. Thanks for
coming on the show to share some of your thoughts and your advice and your opinions with us.
And hopefully people got as much out of this episode as I did. I had a blast. Where can
people go to learn more about what you're up to now, uh, at both profit well and outside
of that.
Yeah. I'm just Patekis P-A-T-T-I-C-U-S on Twitter, childhood nickname, long story. So
I'll just leave it at that.
All right. Thanks, Patekis.