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 do they get to where they are today?
How do they make decisions, both in their companies and in their personal lives?
And what exactly makes their businesses tick?
And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and
go on to build our own profitable internet businesses.
Today, I'm sitting down to talk to Steli Efti, the CEO of CLOSE.
CLOSE is a CRM tool that helps sell people CLOSE more deals.
And Steli and I go way back.
We met in Y Combinator in 2011 in Silicon Valley back when I first moved here.
And since then, we've kept in touch.
This is Steli's third time on the podcast, and I really just wanted to catch up with
him and see what's going on in his world.
Steli is an experienced indie hacker.
He hit product market fit years ago, his business has already been making millions of dollars.
He's already grown his team to dozens of people.
And I wanted to get a snapshot of what kind of decisions and concerns you make when you
reach that point in your business and also how a business of that maturity level deals
with the crisis we're going through right now with COVID-19 and all these lockdowns
and shelter in place orders.
So I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Steli.
Steli, how are you doing?
How's it going with you?
No, I honestly cannot complain, but I still do it every day, but I'm working on it.
But I'm healthy and I'm reasonably sane.
So I have lots of blessings to count, I guess.
I feel the same way.
I complain.
I've had a lot of travel plans ruined this year and a lot of other plans, but in the
grand scheme of things, it's pretty minor compared to what else is going on.
I'm healthy.
My family's healthy.
I'm safe.
I'm also staying sane.
I'm a huge introvert.
So I think being at home for a long time hasn't been as much of a challenge as it's been for
some of my friends.
But it's starting to wear on me after a couple months.
So a couple of friends and I are going to look into getting a cabin, just moving away
and just riding out the storm together, see how that goes.
But one thing I've noticed that I've really enjoyed, a silver lining, is it feels like
everything's moving a little bit slower.
The whole world is moving slower.
People just aren't getting as much done.
They've got their kids at home.
Everyone's cutting everybody a little bit of slack.
And for some strange reason, that just makes me feel better.
It feels like it's taking a load off my shoulders.
I don't have to run as fast.
Do you feel the same way?
Do you feel like you've slowed down or the world has slowed down and that affects how
you think about your job and how you work?
My world definitely has slowed down.
My circle has focused a lot more.
And at first, it's funny.
At first, I was just complaining because I had to move at these travel plans with a big
retreat coming up.
We had to reschedule and cancel and do a ton of these changing my life plans, which I wasn't
cool with.
Reality was sending us all some carts, and I was just complaining about the carts that
was dealt.
And then at some point, I was like, wait a second.
I've been complaining about too much travel for the past three years every single week.
And now that there's no travel, I complain about not traveling.
I'm like, I'm just an asshole.
This is just the reality.
It's just like, no matter what happens, I just complain.
And so I started to work on my attitude and then being able to, I think, slowly adjust
to the pace, create a routine, and appreciate what this phase and time of my life, what
it presents to me and what I can learn from it.
And it's been, it made a big change, but in the beginning, I have to say, in the beginning,
I was fighting reality, and you always lose when you do that.
And so I was just struggling with it hard.
The pace has slowed.
I think it's more like I just spend a lot more time, like my mom, for instance, right?
I have a very close relationship with my mother, but typically, I would see my mom maybe once
every two months, and I would maybe talk to her once every other week for like a longer
conversation.
And I've been talking to my mom every single day.
I visit her twice a week.
I'll drive to her place, and she'll come out of the balcony, and I'll be down, and we'll
just chat for an hour.
And that's kind of awesome.
Like, it's sad that now I can't, like, I wasn't hugging her, and like, it said that it's under
these circumstances.
But I'm still glad for it because I just spending a lot more time with my family, a lot more
time with a small circle of friends than I used to when life was so busy, and I was always
on the go.
Yeah.
So that's definitely been a blessing.
I have the same story with my mom.
We don't have any balcony chats because she lives across the country.
But she's got a Zoom account now, and she'll just hop on Zoom with me and my brother and
just chat with us and talk to us about any hackers and what we're up to.
And it's cool how it's brought us closer together.
It's kind of helped us recognize, like, just the importance of life and the things that
really matter.
And I almost wish that, you know, six weeks a year, we would just kind of do this like
social distancing thing.
Slow everything down, bring everyone together, cut everybody some slack, and just relax for
a little bit.
And it's unfortunate that had happened under these circumstances.
Yeah.
So true.
Yeah.
The last time you were on the podcast, we talked all about sales.
And it's a great episode.
I was telling you earlier, I constantly recommend that any hackers go listen to it because sales
is one of these things that almost every fledgling founder struggles with, people are afraid
of.
And you gave like a masterclass on how to think about sales, how to find your first
100 customers, no matter what you're doing, how to send great emails, but we didn't talk
about your company, Close.
The last time we talked about Close was two years ago when you were on the podcast.
And two years is a very long time to run a company.
So tell us about how things are going with Close and remind us also what Close is again
and how it works.
Yeah.
So Close is a sales tool, basically a CRM that helps small and medium sized businesses
to sell better, to communicate more and better, and to close deals.
And we're a fully remote team.
So we're, I think by now we're like 45 people or so, 14 different countries.
And we're profitable, we're growing, and we're kind of like trying to build a house we want
to live in, which is simple, but yet challenging.
And yeah, I don't even know when you, even when you just said the last time we talked
about Close was two years ago, I was like, wow, what happened those two years?
And this was like, I draw a blank because like, it's all a blur in my life.
It's just all a big, if it's last week, I can tell you.
And then everything else is like two weeks ago or three years ago feels the same.
I don't really know.
But we, I think for us really over the last two years, maybe one thing that we have been
going through is like this kind of awkward, some people call it like the messy middle.
I call it like the awkward teenage years of a company's life cycle.
We're not really children anymore.
Like we're not really a startup startup anymore, but we kind of want to have all the privileges
of no responsibility and no process and just being cool and just like winging it.
But we're also not real adults yet, right?
So we can have like, we don't have all the privilege of a real massively skilled organization.
So we're in this middle phase where we have to find our balance of being more adult, like
in stepping up a game and leveling up a game appropriately to where we are as a business.
And it's just awkward.
It's always like one day off.
The awkward teenage years.
It's super awkward.
Anytime you try to like change something about the, like saying, okay, now we're at a size
we need to like move differently or change some of the things, the way we do them, the
way we work, it always feels like awkward and like so corporate and it's like, why do
we need this?
Like there's an inner rebellion of the child that's like, I don't want this responsibility
and all these things.
Yeah.
I don't want to grow up.
I don't want to have a job and earn money, right?
I want to just be like a child, a play, but I want to, you know, have the power of an
adult of deciding where I want to live and make all my own decisions and all that.
So that's kind of like the last two years and still ongoing, I would say, when there's
like super awkward, try to figure out adulthood and that's been a fun and awkward ride for
sure.
So how do you look at that when you're deciding, okay, well, I've got this one list over here
of all the advantages of being like a small, scrappy startup.
And another list of all the advantages of being like kind of a grown up company and
having all this responsibility and all this success.
What is appealing in that second list that's causing you to basically drive to be a grown
up company?
Why not just stay tiny, stay free and keep all those advantages?
You know, being a 40 year old that acts like a 12 year old just isn't cool.
Like it's not really, it sounds like a cool idea.
Like, hey, what if you just, I don't know, you know, played video games all day long,
collected an unemployment check and ate Mars bars.
Like I get this part, there are days where I'm like, that would be awesome.
Like just not doing anything would be fun.
But in reality, it's just not fun to live a life like that.
At least not for us.
I think part of what drives us at close is this feeling or this dedication to growth,
like internal growth, personal growth, and growth as an organization, as a team, as a
company.
And anytime we're growing, I feel like there's a sense of fulfillment within the business.
People are happy.
People feel like things are changing in a positive direction, they're learning and
growing through that process with the business.
And anytime we're stale, there's like the sense of restlessness and unfulfillment.
And it's like everything is the way it used to be.
But it doesn't feel right.
It doesn't feel like we're learning fast enough, doesn't feel like we're growing.
So I do think that as the business is growing, as the amount of team members we have, as
the amount of customers we serve, as the amount of revenue we generate, it's just naive and
childish to be like, but I want this to keep going on indefinitely up and to the right
while I still act like it's four people in a basement.
I get the appeal and I used to be in still probably am one of the chief offenders of
holding on to the old days for longer than I should be.
And now I've kind of, I've recognized that in me.
And anytime I impulsively shut something down, like when somebody is like, Hey, maybe we
could change the way we do meetings.
So we need a little bit more documentation here.
Like it will be better if we help my instinct, it's always to be like, no, we don't need
more process.
We want to be all this bullshit.
And now what I've learned is to just take a breather, just breathe in, breathe out,
just be like, let's put the emotions to the side.
If I have that strong of an impulsive reaction, it's probably not the smart side of me, the
rational side of me or the adult side of me that is the mature side of me that is responding
to this.
It's probably the child, right?
The childish side of me.
So maybe I just like marinate on this idea a little bit.
Maybe I just look at it.
Maybe I'll just ask a few smart people and then I'll add my two cents if this is good
or not good.
And, and it's challenging.
It sucks at times to have to do this, but I've recognized that I was slowing down the
growing up process more than I'd like to admit.
And I'm trying to get better at it.
It's a never ending process, but I do think it's important.
Like it's important for us to be the best company we can be and for people here to be
happy and fulfilled.
And for me, for my own sanity, I don't like to look back three years ago and be like,
everything is exactly the same and we're the same people doing the same thing.
That sucks.
Like that feels like we wasted life.
We wasted an opportunity to grow and learn.
So that's why I think it's important to like, again, not overdo it, right?
Which is the mistake that we all also do at times.
Like we were like this with three people with an idea and we want to have like higher CFO,
you know, and have a corporate responsibility council and like do all these things that
don't match the baby size of our life cycle that we're in.
But it's important to progress and evolve, I think, as you grow as a business.
It's interesting to think about the sort of focus on growth and evolving when you have
a team.
And the fact that everyone feels a little bit restless if you're not growing, if you're
not going somewhere, it's kind of like, what is the point of this team?
What are we doing here?
We feel the same way internally at ND Hackers.
But also ND Hackers as sort of a community is very different.
The community is almost the exact opposite.
So I was just on the forum yesterday having a conversation with some people who were complaining
about the change.
Like, well, it's getting too big, there's all these different things, you know, what
about the halcyon days of yesteryear, where everything was so small, and everyone knew
each other.
And it's almost like the community is full of people who don't want change.
And so it's fun for me trying to grapple with that difference.
But in your situation, it's like you don't have a community, you're 100% team, you're
100% people on the same page working to achieve this goal.
So you're all kind of in it together towards growth.
You mentioned that you're building the house you want to live in, what do you imagine that
house looks like at the end of the day?
Like what companies do you look up to?
Who do you model yourself after?
And how do you sort of navigate this process of growing up?
Yeah, I think that for us, building a house we want to live in is like applying really
long term thinking in what we do and trying to build and create things that have longevity.
Because that is appealing to us, a value metric, like looking at something that had real longevity
feels more fulfilling feels like it was something worth doing because it was not just worthwhile
for a day.
And then it was kind of gone forgotten and useless.
And so a lot of that can also be translated into just like the whatever the golden rule
just treat others the way you want to be treated.
So in our case, it's like, how do we build a piece of software that we like using?
How do we sell to our customers in a way that we would like to be sold to?
How do we support them?
How do we give support in a way that we'd like to be receiving support versus what's
the cheapest way what's the way every other company in our space is doing it.
And I think that also like for us, we realize it recognized, I think early in this company
that we didn't enjoy and didn't like the idea of building a massive organizations of people
working in this business.
So we never wanted to be 10,000 employees, 100,000 employees, whatever, like we were
never wanted to become the biggest business in our category in terms of headcount and
people because then it wouldn't be the house we would want to live in.
It would be like build a house you would like to sell.
That would be a house I would really like to sell.
It would be awesome probably because you'd get a lot of money if you scale to an insane
amount of employees, but it would not be the company I would want to work for I think anymore.
So we had to always grapple with this, the conflict between we like small, like we like
small teams, we like a small circle.
We like as little bullshit as possible in our lives, as much trust.
And at the same time, we're really ambitious.
We want to have massive impact, we want to accomplish big things.
So finding a way to say what is the right balance between these two ideas that would
be fulfilling for us.
And we've always said back in the day, we would say like, we'd rather be Craigslist
than eBay or WhatsApp than Facebook or just like, can we have a small team, small in relative
terms, could we be 100 people doing 50 million revenue, 100 million revenue to 300 people
doing a couple hundred million revenue.
That would be amazing versus could we do 10 billion in revenue and be 100,000 people,
which is obviously probably even harder to do or just as hard.
It's not hard or better.
It's just if I could choose between a 10 billion revenue company with 10,000 employees or 100
billion dollar company with 100 employees, I would choose that.
Any day of the week, that to me is much more appealing because I could still see myself
working in that business.
So to us, it's like, can we build a company that has significant impact with a relatively
small team in ways where five years from now, 10 years from now, I would still actually
truly like working in it, that'd be incredible.
That's hard to imagine.
It's very difficult, I think, to accomplish and so that's why it's appealing.
I think a lot about the longevity of indie hackers as well and also how do I continue
growing this but also turn it into something where it's just really fun to work on and
it's something I could see myself doing indefinitely.
And so it's very much what you said, building the house that you want to live in, not just
the house that you want to sell.
I guess in my case, I already sold it, but I'm still living in it.
I'm still here.
The owners are like, hey, you stay there and take care of the house.
And so I'm in your shoes or it's like, yeah, let me make this house as great as I possibly
can.
And for me, when I think about my ideal life running indie hackers, it's getting to talk
to interesting people like you on the podcast, 3 or 4 days a week, it's getting to travel
around the world, which right now is on hiatus, but going to indie hackers meetups across
the globe, going to pretty much any country in the world and knowing there's going to
be 30, 40, 50 people there who are excited to meet, want to show me around, who are cool
to talk to, and I can learn from them and broadcast their messages to other indie hackers
so everybody can build their businesses and learn from each other.
I've been running this online community where it's super cool and I get to code whatever
I want.
And it's like a living breathing thing and people give me their feedback and complaints
and compliments.
And that seems to me like super fun and very mission driven because I know the things that
I'm doing aren't just fun for me, but affect other people.
And at your company, I think you're at a much bigger scale in terms of revenue and hackers
make $0.
You've got a much bigger team.
We've got like four or five people working on any hackers.
You've got I think you said 45.
And I think the house you want to live in has more constraints, more rules.
But also you have more power to kind of do whatever you want.
For example, I talked to Jason Fried and DHH at Basecamp who have their four day work week
and they have all sorts of different side projects they're spending up just to like
enjoy working on the things they want to enjoy working on and DHH is driving race cars.
And I talked to Natalie Nagle at Wildbit and she's also got a four day work week and her
whole vision is her employees having this playground where they can grow and learn and
thrive.
Do you have anything like that at close?
How much are you focused on the core mission?
Do you ever get distracted by these little side things and these like meta projects working
on your business?
What's the balance there?
That's a good question.
I think when we started early on, we assumed that we would have a ton of side projects
and run our businesses very similar to some of the examples that you shared.
And we just never gotten around to it so far.
I think that one thing that has always been pretty amazing is that the people that we've
hired have always been incredibly entrepreneurial.
And we've always encouraged them.
When people came to us and said, hey, I just want you to know, I want to work here for
two years and really dedicate myself and grow, but then I want to go on and do my own thing,
we'd always go awesome.
Just keep us in the loop.
We want to support you.
Maybe we'll be the first customers, maybe we'll be the first investors.
Like we want to be part of that journey.
And we caught the closed mafia.
And there's all kinds of people that have been kind of part of our journey for a number
of years that are now running their own businesses.
A lot of them are customers of ours.
And we've had all kinds of cases where even people, we had somebody, Ryan Robbins, who
was quite well known in the kind of blogging space and helping people to make money online.
His blog was much smaller and his kind of online stuff was much smaller when we got
to know him and work on some content stuff.
And then I told him, I wanted him to join us full time.
And he said, hey, dude, I'd love to.
I think the team is really amazing, but I will always work on my blog and podcasts and
my other projects.
And ultimately, I want to do that.
And we just talked honestly about it and I was like, all right, we'll try to help you
on your journey there.
You'll help us on what we are trying to accomplish on our journey.
This doesn't always have to be forever, right?
And so for like, I think two years, we rinded amazing work for Close.
And we tried to help him as much as possible.
And then eventually, he was making so much money that we're like, one day, we'll all
have to come and work for you.
It's just like working for your blog.
And then we part of Waze again, and we're still very good friends and constantly in
touch.
So we've always encouraged side projects.
We'll always encourage people to follow their dreams if they're entrepreneurial, and lots
of people at Close do have kind of ultimately the goal to do something on their own one
day.
But in terms of launching different products and having all these different product brands
and all these new spin up companies within the company, we thought we would do that.
And then so far, we've always been like, well, there's all these things we want to do at
Close.
There's all these projects that we're passionate about, there's all this stuff.
And then anytime we discuss, well, this would be a neat idea.
Nobody was more passionate about that neat idea that the other stuff we were doing.
And so nobody would ever champion, just take a project like that and run with it.
I used to think a lot about it, will one day will we change it?
Will we start doing more of these things?
That idea or that thought faded in the background and it might pop up at some point at a different
cycle of the company.
But so far, it's not been the case.
It's very ironic considering how Close started because we're running elastic sales and Close
itself was one of these distracting internal side projects that eventually did so well
that it blew up and became your primary company.
And you stayed so focused on that and not had that same thing happen again.
And it's great.
Most companies have the opposite problem.
They're not that excited about the thing that they're working on.
They're constantly chasing cars and they're distracted and it's hard for them to focus.
What is it about Close that gets everybody so excited in your team?
How do you make a product that everyone is super enthusiastic to keep working on?
This might sound cliche and I don't want to make it sound like there's not any days that
people are frustrated, this business or over it or like the last seven years since we've
been running Close.
There have been a dozen of times where my co-founders and I were like, what are we doing
with our lives?
What is this?
Isn't this really the meaning of life?
Are we choosing making the right choices?
So I don't want to sound too much like, oh, we chose such a great thing that every single
second of every day, it's just not true.
Butterflies and sunshine and rainbows.
Yeah, no, that's just not realistic, at least not for us.
So we do have days where we're like, I wish I'd do something fun that was like new and
had not all this baggage that comes with an adult-ish company.
And you make any small change and there's like thousands and thousands of customers
and users that will complain and will resist the change.
It's like, when you start with a clean slate, everything is pretty, everything is beautiful,
you just do whatever you want.
So we definitely have those days.
But I think it all starts and ends with a customer.
We just serve customers that we care about.
Similar to what you described, it's like a lot of our customers are very entrepreneurial
startups or at least interesting companies that are moving differently, that are changing
differently.
I often describe it as like, we have a lot of the type of businesses that we love to
serve as the businesses of the future.
Smaller companies, a lot of them distributed, a lot of them tech-enabled, even if they're
not a technology company, they're more tech-savvy than a lot of companies in the industry.
Very entrepreneurial, very international.
And so when we talk to our customers, we are consistently inspired by what they do, but
who they are.
We're like, this is an awesome product that they're building.
These people are really smart and really good people.
And this is kind of fun, the stuff, how they figured out to have success so far.
And so we get passionate about the type of customer we're serving, and then it's easy
to be passionate about building things for them, helping them succeed, giving them advice,
supporting them.
I think one of the best decisions that we made from day one was to say no to the enterprise.
And this is something that most SaaS businesses don't.
And from most of them, they will never be able to become a 10 billion revenue business
without going to the enterprise, maybe for many of them, at least not.
But for us, from day one, I said, the enterprise is not the type of business I care about.
It's not a type of business I'm intimately familiar with.
I didn't have a corporate career working at these large organizations to have a real connection
to the people that work there, the problem they have, the way they operate, and to be
passionate about changing it and helping them.
I am like, I don't care about you people.
I don't care about your problems.
I don't understand it.
And I don't want to be in that world.
And that also means like saying no to a lot of money once in a while, right?
That there's always going to be an enterprise customer that knocks on our door and waves
with a huge potential check and is like, wouldn't this amount of money be really great for you
people right now?
It's going to be really easy for you to get it.
Just take one meeting with us.
And I'm really happy that we've always said thanks, but no thanks.
Not because it's not good, but it wouldn't be the house we want to live in.
It's almost like how much money would you accept in order to be bored for the rest of
your life?
Like how much would someone have to pay you to be bored and live an unfulfilled life?
How much money would somebody have to pay you so you marry somebody that you really
don't like and you have to spend every day with them at least eight hours a day talking
to them?
I don't know if there's a check size.
There's not enough money for that.
Is there enough money to be like for the rest of my life, I'm going to be spending eight
hours worrying, talking and interacting with somebody I really don't enjoy?
That sucks.
And that would be the reality if we went into enterprise for me.
At that point, I would be like, all right, if this is what's right for our company, and
this is what's right for everybody else here, then I need to move on and there needs to
be somebody else that's going to be doing my job because I would just take my life.
And then I wouldn't be I would not be passionate about the things we're doing in the sometimes
we're building features that I know will serve our customers, but I'm not passionate about
I'm not using this functionality every single day, it's not benefiting me directly.
But I care about the people, and I care about helping them.
And when we then launch it, and I see how they respond and how much it helps them accomplish
their goals and dreams, that I'm like, this feature is amazing, like, this is awesome
that we built this.
So I think really caring about the audience you serve helps with longevity, it helps with
still being passionate five years, seven years into the journey.
If it's just I think it can be fun to just chase money on opportunity and be like, wow,
we are like making all this money, we have this nifty idea in this nifty market, I think
that can be incredibly stimulating and fun, but not for 10 years, probably, right?
Eventually, you're going to be like, I hate the people I serve and the people I interact
and the things we're doing here, no matter how much money it is.
So so I think that that's kind of that's been our hack to still feel passionate about what
we do seven years in.
Do you think making so much money has changed your perspective on it?
Because last time when we talked to you already doing millions in revenue, I can only imagine
that it's more now and it's it's been years of you making this much money having a successful
company.
Has your perspective changed?
I'm sure it had like my, you know, I want to say no, because I don't like that idea.
But I do think it has.
But I, I went through a number of changes of having a lot of money, a lot of money contextually
for me at the time, and then having no money contextually for me at the time, I went through
this cycle a couple of times early in my life, and that really helped that helped significantly.
So I feel like this hasn't impacted me as much because I had recognized early on already
that money is really amazing.
It's important.
It's great.
But it's not what drives me makes me really happy or fulfills me.
And at some point, the numbers start to become you lose touch with it.
They're all just meaningless.
They're not exciting.
I think at the beginning, like, first time I made 10k in my life, it was like, wow, like
this is I'm rich.
Like I'm this is it.
Like I, I can buy everything I want.
Like I was like, at a 19 years old, I'm like, this is incredible.
I'm so rich.
Because most people that I knew, and the family that I, you know, my mom was making like 30
k a year, right?
10k.
I'm like, I'm fucking the richest person I know.
But then I was also broke many times.
And then, you know, when you I remember raising money, I was like, if I ever raise a million
dollars, I don't know why a million because that's what we see in movies and the stories
we read in books.
So it was like a million dollars is going to be meaningful.
It's going to fill me up with fulfillment that make me feel great.
Life will be different after that.
Yeah.
And then you do it.
And you realize three weeks later, it's like, you know, what's next.
And you go through that cycle off and off.
And eventually you stop even believing in it.
Like many years ago, I stopped believing once we hit this revenue number, once I hit this
number of whatever potential net worth, I will feel different.
I'm like, I that all doesn't really matter.
It really doesn't anymore.
The reason I'm asking all these questions is because most people listening have not
built a successful startup that's generating millions.
They have no idea what it looks like, kind of at the end of the tunnel.
I talked to a lot of people who were just getting started, who were just sort of in
the thick of it, and they're not sure how things are going to turn out.
So it's kind of cool to see you go through these teenage years and adjust to the money
that you're making and figure out what's actually important for you.
And I think when I talk to founders in your situation, the answers are pretty remarkably
consistent that the people that you deal with are what give you meaning.
And so in your case, you get to work with a lot of entrepreneurial people, like the
employees that close are very smart, very talented and ambitious.
And quite frankly, those are the most fun people to work with.
I love working with entrepreneurs as well.
That's kind of how we've set up ND hackers, because you could just talk to them and they
know what you're going through and you know what they're going through and just fun to
cheer them on and see how talented they are.
But also your customers are people that you want to deal with.
Like you said, you made the conscious decision not to take more money and sell to the enterprise
because that would be super boring for you, but to work with customers who you're inspired
by.
And I've seen the same thing in ND hackers.
I've seen the same thing that I've talked to other people around.
If you're going to start a business, probably one of the most important decisions you can
make up front is, who do you want to work with and who do you want to work for?
And that kind of puts you on track to live a good life as a founder and get through these
aqua teenage years and keep going and keep being excited about your product even if you've
been doing it for seven years.
Let's talk about some of the hard parts.
Your co-host on your podcast tweeted a while ago that the most difficult part of sales
and marketing is getting used to the grind, doing the same thing over and over and over
again.
Do you think that applies to being a founder?
What's difficult for running a company as long as you've run one?
Intuitively feels to me that there's a kernel of truth in that statement.
I saw that as well.
I was curious.
I'm recording tomorrow, so I'll try to figure out what inspired that.
Yeah, what prompted that?
What prompted that?
And I've many times talked to salespeople that are like, hey, first year of sales was
exciting, but I've been doing this five years now and having these quotas that are erased
every three months and you have to do another batch of prospecting, calling, emails, negotiating
closing, and then you hit the goal and then again, it's erased and you have to start from
the get-go.
People burn out and they feel kind of that this is a tough grind and what's the meaning
in all of this.
I've always been telling people that the approach, if you're able to find new ways of looking
at this and different ways of looking at this, it makes a significant difference.
And with salespeople, oftentimes, the most surprising thing is because salespeople chase
the closed deal so much.
In their mind, they're not thinking about the customer as a lifelong relationship.
Most salespeople aren't.
They're just thinking about it as a deal.
I'm going to close this deal and once it's signed, I got the money on the board, this
thing is done for me.
But the moment you think about these interactions as relationships, I've taught this to many
salespeople, I think pretty good success.
If you think about these people, not just as customers, but customers for the business
as your customers and as your potential lifelong relationships and partnership, all you can
do, no matter how high the frequencies, how many deals you're dealing with, you can at
least pick one customer a week that you're interacting with where you're like, this is
a winner.
This is somebody that's going to do awesome things in their life.
This is somebody I really like, I really enjoy.
I think that if I had money to invest in people, I would put money into this person, Inc.
Then, don't just treat that person as a deal or as a decision maker in a deal, but treat
them as a new friend, somebody that you want to nurture a relationship with for the rest
of your life.
Because this person is probably going to go on and be a decision maker in many other companies,
do many other interesting things.
You're going to keep going being a salesperson in other companies, start your own companies.
You're going to have a lifelong career and you're going to be able to benefit and get
so much bigger of a return and so much more of a fulfilling return because some of these
relationships, hopefully many of them will turn into friendships as well.
If you look at it that way, then it's not just a number that's erased because I hit
my quota this month, but I actually have added five more people that I am inspired by that
I'm hopefully, if I nurture that relationship, stay in touch with for the next 30 years.
And now, selling is building my career, is building my network, is building my relationships
and not just chasing numbers that I have now chased again and again and again.
And I think the same is true in many other situations.
I think there's a certain grind to being a founder, a grind, let's say, I can't even
say founder as if it's a generic thing because Thomas Anthony and me were three co-founders
in this business, we live very different lives and do very different jobs, but I'll speak
from a CEO perspective.
The CEO grind, I think, is probably the, in many companies, there's a consistency of you
dealing with difficult problems or the most difficult problems bubbling up to you because
people don't know how to solve them on their own.
And at times this can be stimulating and fun and at times it's a grind and it's painful
and it's difficult.
There's no one you can go to above you to be like, hey, solve this for me, I don't feel
like solving it.
Yeah.
And I think you turn into the type of person, you probably already are that type of person,
but it turns you even more into the type of person that just becomes incapable of ever
asking for help to anybody else and is just always in the mindset of all problems in the
universe flow to me.
I solve problems and when I have problems, I just solve them.
How would I need help?
I'm the center of the universe, I'm the sun that everything evolves around.
And I think that that then turns into really unhealthy and unbalanced human beings that
then become terrible CEOs.
And I've done this and I'm still in that process of getting better at asking for help myself
or even sharing my problems.
It's been a five year process of learning to tell a friend or a family member or my
co-founders or anybody, I have a problem.
I have something that's a problem in my life right now.
This is still difficult to me, but I'm learning to get better at it.
But I think that if you purely stay in that mindset of I'm going to do this like superhero,
solve all the problems, having all the answers at all times, if you stay in that mode for
too long, then I think it can become very, very burdensome and it can burn you out for
sure.
I think this concept of work-life integration, where you realize that these relationships
you're developing with people because you're trying to grow your business are actually
still real human relationships and doesn't have to just be business, business, business
work all the time.
I think most of us are naturally like that.
We talk to people, we realize they're humans, but there's something about having this overarching
mission where you have to grow this company and it has to work that can turn you into
a single-minded, single-focused robot at times and you start treating people like they're
not people.
And when you take a step back, like I've been here, I've been there before too, you take
a step back and you realize every interaction you have with someone can be like a really
meaningful fun interaction and a lot of people that you work with probably can and should
be lifelong friends because you spend so much time talking to them and they have stuff going
on in their lives and you have stuff going on in your lives and you just slow down and
have conversations.
This is part of why I really like going to Indie Hackers meetups all over the world because
yeah, I mean, part of it is like I'm doing customer research and I'm trying to figure
out why people are using the site and how they're running their companies, but a lot
of it is just like, hey, show me around Cape Town, I want to know what life is like in
your shoes.
And there's people that I've met all over the world who I still talk to a ton.
And I've realized that, again, going back to this idea, the business that you build,
the house you want to live in is not just for your bank account, it's not just for your
professional accomplishments, it's also just for your happiness.
And if you can use a business to help you build the kind of life that you want to live,
for example, if you start a company that helps you meet the kinds of people you want to meet,
there's this company Cameo.
You can go on their website, you can find any celebrity, not any celebrity, but a lot
of them.
And you can pay them a certain amount of money to send a cool video to a friend for their
birthday or send a video to your mom for Mother's Day or something.
And if you start a company like that, I'm sure the people who run that company get to
talk to celebrities all day.
And maybe that's their dream and that's what they want to do.
And that's something that extends beyond their business, it's something that is now a part
of their personal life.
They are part of these circles that they weren't before.
And there's tons of companies where people get to meet people and talk to people and
live and do all these different things that they couldn't do otherwise.
So right there with you, I think it's super cool to have kind of this awareness that these
relationships aren't just all about work, they're not just about the bottom line.
Somebody once said, if you wouldn't want to work with somebody for the rest of your life,
don't work with them for a single day.
It's a beautiful idea.
And I've always been telling people and I've been living this, this has been the single
biggest impact thing I've done in terms of my happiness and fulfillment is that any relationship
in my life, I'm thinking of it as a 30-year relationship.
So if I don't want it to be a 30-year relationship, I know I don't want to deal with you at all.
And I'm not the right person to be in your life.
But if I do, I try to think very long-term and there's real power in that and benefit.
I know that when you are at the very beginning, all this sounds like a luxury, like it almost
sounds like us discussing which color of Ferraris are the best when you're a founder.
It's like, dudes, I'm trying to get my first customer.
It sounds like this is the type of decisions I'm going to make once I can afford making
them.
This is what I would have thought.
But I don't think it's true.
I think that you make these decisions and then you are able to afford to have that life.
But oftentimes, how many times people reach out to me and they're like, A, very selfish,
which I get as founders, they're trying to get something started and you have to hustle.
You have to be a little shameless.
That's totally fine.
I've definitely been that many times in my life.
There's just a, I have this thing I need from you.
Steli, I read a blog post, I listened to you on a podcast.
I want your advice.
When can we talk for an hour or two hours this week and you give me everything you have?
And it's like, that's a very selfish proposition that assumes that I have nothing better to
do than to give all my time to you.
But also, the funny thing is that when I then ask them, hey, can we first start an email
and you tell me what it is that you need, and then I'll try to help by email and eventually
we can graduate to a call, 50% of people just fall off the face of the earth, you never
hear from them again.
Same thing with advisors, people all the time email me, we want you on our advisory board,
we want to give you shares to be an advisor in our startup and I always go, go easy, right?
Let's not get married.
I don't even know you.
Why don't you decide to email me once a month, your progress, ask me how I could help.
And if over the next couple of months, we both find that I am truly useful and helpful
to you, and I enjoy helping you, then maybe a year from now, we'll put a ring on it, right?
And you'll give me some advisor shares and I'll be a formal advisor, but let's start
one step at a time and everybody's always like, that's a great idea.
And then again, 90% of these people I never hear from again, right?
That's how you know it's going to be a waste of time.
If they can't even tell you what they're going to talk about on the call, they don't want
to talk over email, you just dodged a bullet.
And then there are people that follow my advice on this, I've written about this and where
I said, hey, make me part of your journey, just let me know how things are going over
long term.
If I keep hearing from you for 12 months in a row, in month 12, I'm much more invested
in your story, I understand you much better, I have much more context and I'm much more
willing to help versus the first time that you ping me where I'm like, I want to be helpful,
I have to ration how much resource and energy I give you.
And I think people underestimate that they're like, I want everything right now.
But they underestimate if I keep in touch with these people that I find useful and helpful
and I want to have in my life and I want to learn from, then a year will pass very quickly,
five years will pass very quickly and you'll build up and five years from now, maybe you're
really good friends with these people, maybe these people are willing to go to bed for
you and really move mountains because they care about you.
And all you have to do is stay in touch, keep investing a little bit in the relationship.
And that's not instant success, riches and wealth, but time passes fast, and it's like
this Chinese, I'm all with motivational quotes today, it's like this, best time to plant
trees today and second best time, best time was 30 years ago, second best time is today.
It's like, start now and you'll see time will pass faster than you think and a year will
go by like this and then these relationships that at the beginning were quite cold will
warm up and you're going to benefit a lot from that.
People get so impatient when they're just starting off as founders, they're like, well,
I don't have time to invest in a year and anything, but that time is going to pass anyway,
like a year is going to go by no matter what.
And so would you prefer that year to go by where you invested in these things, like a
few hours a week, maybe even less than that, or would you prefer that time to pass and
you look back on that year and you didn't do any of that stuff because you were so focused
on the short term.
And also like two years from now to be the exact same position you are now when you need
help from certain people where you just send cold, like think about this, think about being
six, like 30 years into your entrepreneurial journey and still having to send cold emails
to people going, I need your advice, can you give me an hour and these people going, I
don't even know who you are and I don't have time.
That idea should suck to people, imagine that, so you don't want to be that person, well,
the only way not to be that person is to build relationships and invest in those relationships.
So let's talk about the modern era, I think it's safe to say we've entered an entirely
different era.
Do you remember when COVID-19 sort of first popped onto your radar and you started thinking
about how it affects you personally and also affect your business?
Yeah, so it started popping up in my radar, I think in January, but it was more of a thing
that's happening in China sort of thing.
And so I was very passively consuming some information, I was more like, ah, interesting,
I wonder what this is.
Then in early February, it started kind of becoming more serious and I remember I was
traveling to Thailand and there was even a discussion, should I go, shouldn't I go?
And one of my best friends has lived there for 15 years and I wanted to visit him and
spend some time with him and he was like, you know what, yeah, I mean, I feel it's still
kind of stable here, I feel it's still safe, you know, do these precautions, wear a mask,
wash your hands, you know, keep your distance and it should be fine.
And I went there and I was there two weeks and then when I came back, you know, kind
of mid-February, then I started to read, like then all of a sudden my Twitter feed started
to heat up and then I started following all these people and all these kind of virologists
and experts and everything.
And then I started to go into probably like many people as well to the deep hole of like
hours and hours of reading and studies and metrics and 4K, you know, very dark forecasts.
And then I was like, holy shit, what is happening here?
And I think towards the end of February, I was convinced, okay, no matter what it is,
it's going to come to Europe and the US in a really big way, it's going to impact me,
my family, my business.
So what do I do now?
And the first job was trying to convince like my friends and family members to take this
more seriously.
And that was such a trip.
That was the weirdest things about this whole thing.
Because they all looked at me like a tin foil hat conspiracy guy that's just weird.
And they're all like, why are you so negative and why are you so scared?
And literally they were making fun of me and I was like, this is, I've never been in this
position in my life, this is weird, why I'm like the person that screams like, hey, you
need to take this seriously.
And everybody's like, this guy is crazy.
And it was like an awkward time.
And it definitely like ramped up my anxiety to death come level red.
Like I was just like, you're the people that I care about.
And none of them care about this.
And I don't exactly know.
I don't even know if I'm right.
And I don't know exactly what advice to give them what to do.
So it was kind of a weird phase.
But eventually I got around to convince my immediate family and then kind of like go
through a couple of steps that just felt like preparation.
Right?
I mean, that's all it was.
And then then I had to do the, went through the same process of the company where I'm
like, all right, I need to convince my co-founders to take this more seriously.
At that point, I was the one that was like, this is going to be a huge deal.
And they were like, no, we don't think so.
I had to go through that and then come up with a game plan.
And I'm like, this is, you know, this is going to become a huge thing.
And we need to prepare ahead of it right now.
And we shouldn't go slow and we shouldn't wait and see.
I think for most people, they went in their own little universe through that, these cycles.
But for me, it was like, I think early January, I started reading and paying attention.
February, I started thinking it's going to be a huge thing.
And then March was kind of a month later was when every, when it started to do the lockdowns
and everything else going on.
Yeah.
And putting my founder hat on, I kind of went through the same period, but there was always
this uncertainty in the background of, okay, with indie hackers, how is this going to affect
the company?
You know, they're going to be more people on the website, fewer people on the website.
And a lot of ways, I think I was so focused on my personal life, my friends and family
that I just kind of put that on the back burner and just said, whatever happens will happen.
I'll just react.
You know, I don't know how to plan for this.
I'm just going to react.
And at your situation, I think, you know, you've got a much more substantial company.
You have a lot of advantages.
You've been remote for many years, for example, it wasn't this awkward transition that you
had to make.
But you're building a CRM tool, you're a SaaS company.
I have absolutely no clue, I honestly have no clue like how the sheltering in place and
lockdown has affected clothes and the CRM space in general.
So what are some of the biggest changes that you've had to react to?
And were you able to predict any of these things?
Or are you kind of also, you know, doing what I'm doing and just like being in reactionary
mode and just trying to react very quickly to whatever happens?
I think for us, some of the things that we recognized earlier was that if we're going
to go through this, like, there's a global pandemic, and if it's going to have this massive
economic impact, then cash is king, and we need to make sure that we can finance things
if we experience a big dip in revenue, because maybe lots of businesses will churn or lots
of businesses will fire salespeople.
And like for us, that means downgrading seeds or canceling seeds, right, which brings us
down in our overall revenue.
So we decided fairly early, a couple of things.
One was that we would shift our attention away from contracts, like our sales team would
focus a lot on signing these one, two, three year contracts that would be paid monthly.
And we thought, well, in an economic downturn, when there's like a massive shakeup, a contract
is not really worth that much, right?
If these businesses go out of business, the contract is not worth anything.
If they have to break the contract to not go out of business, we're not going to sue
them.
A contract is good during certain stable times, right?
But it's worthless during these insane times.
So let's not worry about contracts right now, and then shift all our attention to prepays.
Let's push to have our customers prepay for a year or two years, give them a great deal,
because they're buying during uncertain times, and see what they say.
We didn't know if people would do it or not, or if people would get upset with us with
even proposing.
I remember when I early talked to this about this with other founders, they're like, people
are going to get really upset with you asking them to prepay during these times.
That's a herd of ask.
And kind of every single month since February has been a record month in prepays for us.
And it has significantly impacted our cash position, right?
And hence, it really stabilized the business really quickly, like, wow, our cash position
has gone up.
We are in a much better position to weather any kind of big decline or multiple declines
of revenue.
And I was even surprised how good this worked.
And even still to this day, every day, even on the self-service side, where smaller customers
just log in, create an account and buy, I'm surprised how many choose to prepay for a
year right now, feel the confidence, feel that the deal is good enough that they want
to do that.
That was a very good decision for us that we made fairly early, and that helped us.
And then we went through some of the things that everybody else went through, probably
is like, how do we cut costs as much as possible?
Like, we made a simple math in February, March was like, if we lose 30% of our revenue, but
we want to keep the entire team afloat.
We have a small team.
There's no fat to cut here.
There are no people that we don't like.
There's nobody, anybody that we would have to let go now, it would take us another two
and a half years to find another person like that and hire them again.
This is very costly.
So how can we cut costs drastically and save as much as we can without letting anybody
go?
So we can weather the storm together.
And then we got very creative and we came up with a lot of aggressive ideas and we did
move mountains in that way also fairly early.
But we had told the team that we'll do all this together.
And then we have this like worst case scenario that you will all know we can weather without
any more changes, right?
So you know, like, we've done everything up front, and now we can like weather the storm.
And I think that really helped tremendously make people's anxiety, like the relief because
people are just so on the edge with their families at home with worrying about their
jobs.
And what we didn't want to do is we didn't want to be the type of company that's like,
in March, everything is fine, we're just going to cut some server costs and cancel some subscription.
And then April, it's like, it's not we have to do these other measures in May, it's like,
well, we have to let go of some people, but most others will stay.
So where people constantly feel like, in the next couple of weeks, there's going to be
more news, more bad news, we didn't want to have that.
And that was a really good decision.
And we acted quite fast.
Now we didn't know what the impact would be for us.
And the reality is that we did at first see a lot of like teams firing salespeople downgrading
to a lower tier plan, or some of our smaller customers going, I'm out of business, I wanted
to build a tool to sell to schools.
Forget about it.
Or I wanted to build something to sell to bars, a software tool for bars or restaurants.
Forget about it.
Or I'm in the tourism industry.
Forget about it.
So we saw a lot of cancellations on the lower levels, or we lost some revenue early on.
But things stabilized, like in terms of our review, that was mostly kind of our existing
customer base, being conservative, saving costs, right, acting early as well on their
end.
But in terms of new customer acquisition, nothing changed.
We still kept like bringing new revenue, lots and lots of new customers.
And that has continued and even improved.
And now kind of it's stabilized where our customer base feels like, okay, we can start
adding some seeds, we can maybe upgrade again, we're in wait and see, we don't see these
kind of big wild swings of downgrades or cancellations anymore.
And we've been in a, you know, in a better position than what we predicted and projected.
It's always good.
That makes always everybody feel like, wow, this we're in a good situation, much better
than what we had anticipated.
More bad news can come and this company can weather it.
And so that gives people I think some peace of mind, which is kind of important right
now.
It's so smart to focus on prepayments like you're doing.
And I've seen kind of a trend of people doing this recently, even separate from COVID-19
and this looming recession that people are worried about.
A lot of people have come on the show and said, yeah, we're not even offering monthly
plans anymore.
As a sort of fledgling company, trying to build up cash flows, it's much more lucrative
just to charge people for a year and get them in the door and you can just like spend way
more to require customers that way because you're making way more per customer.
You're not as worried from month to month.
And now, like you said, it's extremely important because you're not even sure if a lot of these
customers are going to be in business a year from now.
So these month to month contracts might be completely worthless.
How do you, if you're sort of already charging a certain way, go to customers and ask for
these big prepayments?
And how do you, you know, get them to say, yes, do you offer them a discount?
Do you offer them a deal?
Do you change things up?
Or do you just kind of say, hey, look, things are changed.
This is kind of, you know, our new ask.
I think everything is on the table, right?
I think that people are too afraid of things.
So in our case, in general, I think that people feel like whenever they want to change something
about pricing or the way they do contracts or the way they charge, they feel like it's
almost a, like, we can't go to people that we have won a certain way as customers and
now tell them things are changing.
And it's like, but why?
Who says that?
Who says that you can't?
Like, is your support team still the same?
Is your service team still the same?
Is your feature set still the same?
Is any customer that buys from you never asking for more things or demanding any changes from
you?
There's no such concept where this is how we got into business last year.
And so this is the only way we can be in business for the next 30 years.
That doesn't exist.
I think especially less experienced founders and teams have a lot more anxiety around these.
Like they see they need to change something, but what holds them back is the fear of confronting
customers that might get upset.
And I think that you shouldn't.
Some people will always get upset.
Some people will get upset, but if you respond calm, cool, and collected, they'll relax.
It's funny how people are like, this is outrageous.
And then you go, I get that you feel that way, but if you think about it, it really
isn't.
And then they go, yes, it isn't.
What?
Like one email ago, you're screaming at me and now you're like totally agreeing with
everything I said.
In our case, to be specific, like we just offered people a great deal and we told them
it's simple.
You buy now, you get a great deal.
You wait till the world is more sane and certain.
You get the deal that the sane world gets, that everybody else gets, right?
It's a kind of a riskier time to prepay so you get a better deal.
A lot of people felt that that was appealing, but we've also done other things like when
we did the cost cutting thing, there were certain customers that were doing things that
were costing us a lot of money for a variety of reasons, right?
That we didn't care as much about it holistically.
We're like, amongst all customers, our margins are great.
And if a few of them do things that eat into that margin, we just weren't paying attention
to that.
That was not that big of a deal.
But as when we went through the every penny counts exercise of what if the world changes
forever and we need to save every penny.
We had to approach a couple of customers and go, hey, you're doing all these funky things
with our API or with these other things that you've done, and it costs us too much money
and you need to change it, right?
It's not up for debate.
And it's also not a question of if you like it or not, because none of them liked it.
But it was like, we need to do this.
This is the deal.
We cannot have a sustained partnership if our relationship isn't healthy.
Right now, the way you're using our service, it's not healthy for us.
So it needs to change.
And I've had this before.
I had to renegotiate once with a customer that had prepaid and signed a contract for
three years.
And then when we looked at kind of how we charged them back then how the deal was closed,
this was in the very early days, we'd given them an insane discount and we're like losing
money on them, right?
And so I had to renegotiate and tell them you either have to pay 50% more and this was
a customer that was paying us hundreds of thousands a year, you have to pay 50% more
or you have to go, right?
And they shouted it, but I always came back to the, I get it, but for this relationship
to work for us to be able to serve you long term, we need to make money.
We cannot lose money.
We're losing money.
So even you need to bring your money somewhere else, or you need to give us enough so we
can do a good job serving you.
It's just that simple, no matter how upset you are.
And sooner or later, especially the ones that scream the loudest, they get on board, they
just go with a program and go, okay, well, I guess they have a point.
So if you need to change something about your contracts, how you want to charge, you can
make it optional.
Some companies might be in a situation where they can't, they have to say, this is the
only way we're going to do business now.
And you have to take it or leave it.
And that's always going to be harder.
Like people are going to respond stronger to it.
But if it's the right thing to do, if you think it's still fair, then you'll have to
do it.
Or not.
And you don't have to be that afraid of it, it's just part of doing business and part
of life.
What about running your company?
And the fact that you've already been remote, like I was saying earlier, I imagine a lot
of stuff is kind of the same.
But there's some differences.
For example, a lot of your employees probably are spending a lot more time working with
their kids around than they were earlier.
You've written a lot.
You've talked a lot about running a remote company, elsewhere online.
But what's changed with you trying to motivate the troops and keep your company running?
Yeah.
First, I think it's important to recognize that working from home during a global pandemic
with your entire family is not the same as working remotely, right?
They're related, but they're not the same thing.
And so for us, we had decided fairly early that we would want to move a number of our
teams and people to a four-day workweek, which is not what we usually do.
We usually work for five days.
There's still some people that are very customer-facing and they didn't want to do the four-day workweek.
People that are not at home with their four children and are having a hard time dealing
with homeschooling, a number of children running a school from home and doing a bunch of other
things that they didn't used to while they were working.
We made it optional, but a lot of people, we gave the option to go down to a four-day
workweek because a lot of our team members were telling us that it's become very stressful
for them to work and they have so many more responsibilities at home, having to take care
a lot more of the children, having to deal a lot more with family issues.
And so we wanted to relieve people a little bit of pressure and give a bit more space
for people to deal with it, even if we didn't do, like even we said it's still a five-day
workweek, just deal with it.
People would just not work, like they just wouldn't, but they just would feel more stressed
about it versus now they can not work and relax.
So hopefully be more sane, be better family members, but also be better employees for
us.
So that was a big change that we made for us to keep everybody sane.
And then we had to like definitely increase the amount of like, usually a lot of the social
interaction and fun interaction and games and all that for us would happen during team
retreats.
We would do every six months, we'd fly everybody into a city for a whole week and those weeks,
those retreats are our second best product.
Like over seven years, we've really built them to a science and it's not just like let's
hang out and kumbaya and get drunk or whatever and work from the same room.
Those weeks have become very important strategic tools of how we run the company.
And it was taken away.
Our first retreat was supposed to be in April, and we had to cancel it in February seeing
that we didn't think we would be able to make it.
So we had to start doing more of this, you know, having game nights virtually, doing
a lot more of that and we changed the way we do meetings in the sense that every meeting
that's happening now at close starts with a personal update.
And so when we do meetings, people go, okay, since last week, you know, things are fine,
I'm happy and I started gardening and so I feel a bit better.
And then the next person would go, well, my mom is sick.
I'm stressed the fuck out, I'm constantly on the phone with her and I'm really worried
and I can't focus.
And everybody goes, oh shit.
And then the next person goes and says, well, we're moving right now and we're having this
and that trouble and this is going on.
And that personal update, we didn't use to do that in every meeting.
And now we do and we see, especially during these kinds of times, it was incredibly important
because we would have these moments where people would say things that made everybody
go, holy shit, this is going on in your life.
And it would, A, be just good for everybody, just air out what's going on and be able to
communicate that.
But it also helped us to understand how are people doing, what is going on in people's
lives and be more supportive and be more understanding and have just more context.
And for many, it was also just like a relief to hear that everybody was struggling with
the same stuff they were struggling with.
And so it just made them feel a little bit better, a little bit more connected.
Those are just some things that I can think of that we had to change.
Sounds like one of those changes that might last, you know, wow, this is like nice to
hear everyone's personal update.
Maybe we just keep doing this indefinitely.
At IndieHackers, we have a community manager and she's got five kids.
And you can imagine her life is like right now with five kids at home.
And she already does like a ton of work.
So my brother and I have like kind of taken over a lot of the community management to
sort of help her out, especially on days where she's just, you know, once spend time with
her family.
And that's also a habit where it's like, hey, we should just be doing this all the time.
You know, even when all this is over, we're just going to keep doing it the same way.
And it's interesting to think about what's going to change, you know, the point that
you made that remote working is very differently, very different than having to stay at home
with your family.
They're kind of related, but they're not necessarily the same.
I think a lot of people are assuming that, oh, this is just going to completely change.
You know, everyone's getting a taste of remote work and everyone's going to see exactly what
it's like.
But it's not necessarily the case because this isn't exactly what it's normally like.
And so a lot of people might not like it because it's completely different.
What do you think is going to stay the same at close?
And also, you know, what do you think is going to change and the SaaS industry?
And you know, what do you think we're going to see on the other side of this?
I don't know.
I'm not sure yet.
At first, I was very cynical.
Like I did a lot of counter tweeting to the tweets of like, this is the moment of remote
work.
Everybody is going to fuck it.
I was like, dude, you know, people like the people that are forced to go home while screaming
babies in the background, downloading a bunch of software that never used, trying to figure
out how to do work in that environment, they're not going to be like, this is the future.
This is how I want to live my life every day from now on.
They might not.
This is not a soft, gentle introduction to this world, right?
But now I'm like, well, you know, it is a rough introduction.
But still, I do think that ultimately is accelerating.
I think there's going to be a pullback.
And lots of people are going to be like, I could never work from home long term.
But I do think that a lot of companies are going to go, well, massive office spaces.
Maybe we want to shy away from that, giving people more options to work from home.
Like many companies will see that certain teams just the same amount of work is getting
done or the same work product.
And they're like, ah, interesting, these people were able to responsibly work without us,
you know, having them confined in a specific space.
So I do think that it's going to ultimately accelerate the adoption of technology in many
areas of life.
It already has zoom that my mom knows what zoom is, is blowing my mind, it is mind blowing.
I never would have thought that my mom is as untech savvy as you can be.
And so I think that this has pushed even more technology, not less.
And that probably is going to continue just accelerating it a little bit.
Not that that was not a trend before.
Same thing with distributed and remote work.
The other thing that's interesting, I'm not sure if this is true or not, it really will
last.
But I am wondering, I'm hearing a lot of people's sentiment being maybe living in a city is
not as awesome.
Maybe I want to live somewhere else and then work remotely, right?
I could have great career opportunities, but live somewhere that's beautiful, that is nature
that's closer to my family.
It's not as stressful.
And that's not as vulnerable to these types of things.
Maybe that is the future I want to be in.
And so I see a lot of desire from people to move away from stick cities.
And that is not something I was seeing before, I personally.
And so that's interesting.
I wonder if that's going to last.
I worry about travel, I love to travel, I'm slightly worried about the future of travel.
In the next two, three years, how difficult would it be?
Could you read Brian Chesky's letter?
So Airbnb did a huge round of layoffs.
Yeah.
Like frankly, a heartbreaking letter to a huge part of the company.
And a big part of it was kind of things have changed for now, and we're going to make it
through it.
But at the other end of this, we're not sure what travel and these sort of short-term stays
are going to look like.
We just don't know.
And so I'm right there with you.
Travel is going to be different.
Yeah, and I'm not sure if it's going to be in a better way, I'm afraid not.
But we'll have to wait and see.
But the thing I'm waiting for mostly right now is like over the next, I think six to
twelve months, I'm waiting for some, I'm expecting some dominoes to fall globally that are going
to feel surprising because they're not in the headlines right now.
They're not something we're all thinking about, but they have been affected by this in ways
that will be impactful, then like nobody talks about it, nobody talks about it, and then
all of a sudden it's a big deal and it's impacting us.
And I wonder what that's going to look like.
I also feel like we have just entered the stage of this pandemic where it's not like,
I think we all think as humans in like storylines for movies, like there's a beginning, a middle
and an end.
And I feel like February, March was the beginning for most people, the way they felt about things.
And then April may now feel like the middle.
And so people are thinking about the end, like there's just one more act and we're out
of this.
And I wonder if it's going to be like multiple movies, one after the other, if this is going
to be a trilogy or like a five part series.
And so we're not going to just get out of this in the next whatever three, six months.
And then it's behind us as like a distant memory.
And so it's going to be very interesting times, I think, for a good amount of time ahead.
Yeah, maybe it'll be like the Lord of the Rings where there's like eight endings, just
ending scene after another ending scene.
And it never quite ends, but at least at least it had a happy ending.
I mean, happy, you know, relatively, yeah, hopefully we'll get a happy ending this time
too.
Anyway, Steli, it was great catching up to you, catching up with you and hearing what's
going on in your life and how you're navigating all this stuff at close and also just getting
a snapshot of what it's like to be the founder of a maturing company.
A lot of indie hackers are listening to this.
They've been trying to start fledgling businesses and now they've been like hit with this sort
of existential crisis.
Okay, well, now it's real, you know, now I might not be able to get a job if this doesn't
work out or I might not be able to quit my job if I don't grow my company.
What's your advice for people in that situation?
Do you think they should be thinking differently about being indie hackers?
In general, I think this is a better time than ever before probably or in recent history
to start something versus to look for a stable career.
Right?
I mean, let's be honest.
Like trying to look for a company that has stability over the next five years and can
give me a secure job that's not going to change and not going to be in jeopardy is harder
now than it seemed in 2019, 2018, 2017.
And so doing something entrepreneurial seems smart to me right now and investing in that.
And then I'll just say one thing that we've been repeating in the company, I think it
might be also useful.
I really am a quote machine today.
Another quote that I've been repeating a lot is it's not the strongest that survived.
It's the most adaptable that do.
And so I do think there's beauty in being an indie hacker.
Like everything that you have always seems to suck, right?
If you're like, if you were joking about this, you run a community and you're like,
I wish I'd run a SaaS company.
I run a SaaS company.
I'm like, I wish I'd just run a podcast and community and life would be so much easier.
Like whatever we have, we kind of devalue.
But being small feels that way it's like, I'm in such a disadvantage against anybody
out there.
But it's not true.
There's beauty in that.
Being an indie hacker right now gives you such nimbleness.
You can be so adaptable.
You can change your mind in a second and change what you do.
The numbers you need to drive are not that big to be meaningful and significant.
And you can take risks maybe now that you didn't feel comfortable before because the
opportunity cost was too high.
Now what is the thing that you're really losing out on?
Where are all these companies that are offering amazing salaries and like a 10-year contract
where you're never going to have to worry?
They're not out there right now.
So might as well invest in you, take some risk on you, and build something for yourself.
So I think this is an amazing time to be an indie hacker.
And being small means you travel with less baggage, you have less responsibility, you
have less commitments.
So you can move faster and you have to just accomplish very little to start doing meaningful
things and have meaningful impact on your life.
So I'm excited for all the indie hackers out there.
There's a romantic side of me that's like, be nice to be an indie hacker right now.
Be adventurous.
So I think it's a good time to be that and people should feel excited and confident about
their position in the world right now if they're an indie hacker.
I think that advice is spot on and it's happening.
There's more indie hackers right now than I've ever seen on the website.
The numbers are just going up and to the right.
People are realizing that there's a lot of uncertainty, there's a lot of change.
It's a good time to start a business.
And I think indie hackers tend to be just kind of an ambitious sort of opportunistic
crowd where they look on the bright side and they're just like, are optimistic.
They see crisis and they see how they can change their lives for the better as a result
of it.
So indie hackers take Sally's message to heart, realize you can be more nimble, you have all
sorts of advantages that other companies don't have.
If you want to change your mind on something, you don't have to write a sad letter and fire
3,000 people.
And it's a great place to be in.
It's Sally.
Thanks so much for coming on the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
Can you let listeners know where they can go to learn more about Clos and what's rough
to you?
Yes.
So you can go to Clos.com and visit our blog to check that out.
You can send me an email, steliatclos.com.
We put together a few resources for people that are trying to sell and acquire customers
during this crisis.
Email templates of good emails and bad emails and strategies to get your first couple of
customers during this time.
If that's of interest, you can just send me an email, steliatclos.com, say indie hacker
book or crisis toolkit and I'll know what you need and I'll send it to you.
And then if you're into podcasts, as you mentioned Heaton Shah, the living legend and I, we have
a podcast together called The Startup Chat.
You can go check that out at thestartupchat.com.
Yeah, if I can ever help anybody from the indie hacker community over the last couple
of years, people have always stayed in touch with me and reached out and asked questions
that I love the community that you've built.
Always feel free to reach out and ask for help.
I'll do my best.
I want to second the recommendation for the Startup Chat.
Full podcast and the fact that Heaton is so focused on marketing in your sales, it's like
the two of you have the bases covered and you always figure out like some new interesting
topic to talk about.
I don't know how you guys keep coming up with so many things to talk about, but the episodes
are short and sweet.
I think if you listen to this podcast and you enjoy it, you're really going to like
the Startup Chat.
Thanks again, Steli for coming on.
Hey, thank you so much.
Listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, you should subscribe to the Indie Hackers podcast
newsletter.
You can find that at indiehackers.com slash podcast.
Every time there's a new episode, I do my best to write up my thoughts, my takeaways,
and send them out in a newsletter.
Once again, that's indiehackers.com slash podcast.
Thank you so much for listening and I will see you next time.