What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense
of what it's like to be in their shoes.
How did they get to where they are today?
How did they make decisions, both 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.
One of the things that makes this show possible is that we're in the middle of an explosion
in the power of the individual.
You can set out on your own, build something cool, get rich, and change your life, quite
frankly, without really needing a whole bunch of other people to help you out or a whole
bunch of investors to invest in what you're doing, because there's so many tools now that
just give you more leverage than ever.
I mean, you can do this without even knowing how to code.
And if you do know how to code and you know where to look and which tools to use, you
just have insane amounts of power and leverage.
My guest today, Prema Koyetsky, is a great example of this.
He's embracing artificial intelligence in ways that I don't think most people realize
are possible for the solo indie hacker.
And hearing his story just gets me really excited about how much you can get done as
a solo founder and what the future holds for indie hackers.
Do you think AI is overhyped, underhyped, or it's at the right level of hype?
So I think it's both in the sense that it's overhyped because it's still not doing everything
like it's supposed to do, like it's presented in media right now, especially if you look
at popular media.
But it can definitely do much more than we think in general that it can do.
So I think AI is still in its early days.
It only started like 12 years ago, maybe eight years ago with 2012 and like some competitions
around computer vision.
And then it's gaining this momentum where we have better hardware, more data.
So actually, it's not hyped enough for what it will be able to do in a couple of years.
Yeah, I figured you would say it was underhyped because you are super into AI and you're doing
some really cool stuff.
From my perspective, AI has always been kind of a big company game.
I think AI, I think Google, I think Facebook, opening up these super expensive research
labs and hiring PhDs and spending like tens of millions of dollars to collect terabytes
of data to train their models.
And then here you are, a solo founder indie hacker, you're not spending a ton of money,
you're not taking a ton of time.
And so far, you've been able to use AI to your advantage in a way that's pretty good.
So just briefly here, when did you start your company Contentize and how much revenue is
it generating?
Right.
So basically, I started Contentize in January 2020.
So this year, nine months ago, and I'm basically generating between $4,000 to $5,000 per month.
Most of that is still coming from actually the content we generate.
So that's a funny model because we generate so much content on our platform that we are
able to monetize some of that through advertisements, sponsorships, affiliate links.
And then some of the revenue is coming from paying customers on the platform, but that's
still a minority.
And I want to flip that and actually have more of that income, more of the revenue being
generated by the SaaS platform itself.
What's cool about making $5,000 a month is that, as you said, you just started this year.
So that's pretty good.
And you're not doing this from Warsaw, Poland, I believe.
And I just looked it up this morning, the cost of living there is three times cheaper
than it would be in a place like New York City or San Francisco, which is really the
cool thing about being an indie hacker.
You can just live somewhere cheap, but you're doing business online, you're earning dollars
as if you're living in the richest place on earth.
So I imagine you've got to feel pretty good about how things have gone so far.
Yeah, definitely.
I mean, it's super interesting also for indie hackers from that perspective, because I think
it's much easier to actually start working with someone remotely.
And there's an expectation even that you work remotely because we're in a...
I mean, the pandemic, maybe there's second wave, maybe there's not.
But in general, probably things won't go to normal.
And that's a good bet for the new future because there's no vaccine inside.
And looking at statistics in various places is probably going to be much more spread.
So taking that into account, building a team anywhere you live is very doable, and you
can hire people from around the world.
So also your hiring costs are coming down because you can look for people in places
where you have more potential buying power with your dollar, like Warsaw, but also going
even east, like Ukraine, or going even more east, like Russia, China, anything like that.
So there's really a lot of potential for that right now, growing your digital online business.
Yeah, and this is what I look for when I'm looking for people to interview, when looking
for things to talk about, what are the new trends, the new platforms, new technology
that's enabling solo founders and individuals to do much more than they ever could before.
And nowadays, as you're saying, it's easy to use all these tools to basically build
a business no matter where you live.
You don't need to live in Silicon Valley, you don't need access to a ton of investors,
you don't need super expensive tech, you could do this from any place on earth.
You could be a digital nomad, living in Bali, charging people hundreds of dollars a month
for your SaaS product.
And I think the other thing you're doing that's particularly high leverage, that fewer people
have caught on to you, besides the remote working thing, is just using AI to your advantage.
And people are sleeping on AI, I think, because it just seems so inaccessible and so expensive.
But it turns out that's actually not quite true anymore, or maybe it won't be true in
a few years.
And you've done some cool stuff that I think we're going to get into in more detail, but
just briefly to give people an idea, you know, about some of the cool things you're doing
with AI.
Number one, you've got this company, Patacrunch.
And it's an AI media company.
And you're interviewing founders.
How big is the team there at Patacrunch?
How many founders are you interviewing exactly?
Yeah, so basically, the team is one person, and that's me, and the rest of the team is
actually AI generated.
So they're like AI journalists, and they're fully scripted, contacting the founders on
behalf of themselves.
And basically, they managed to interview over 1000 founders in like three months.
So that's like a huge volume of interviews done over email with founders from around
the world.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
So really, that's an exciting part.
And this is like, I started doing Patacrunch before Contentize, and then Contentize came
as like the next level on actually doing the platform, which can help you leverage content
ideas.
But yeah, Patacrunch is still working, you can still go to patacrunch.com.
And right now, it's working as a side business for me, because I'm no longer actively using
those algorithms to scout for the new startups to take them on, but rather, but you can still
buy an interview, buy a press release from Patacrunch and just have this publicity there.
But yeah, really, Patacrunch was a starting point for me to go into Contentize and build
the whole SaaS platform to generate content at scale.
I love writing, I love automating, I love optimizing.
So that was my dream come true.
It's a perfect combination of skills for what you're doing.
You're a writer, you are a productivity nerd, you're into AI, and now you're doing AI-generated
content.
And you're kind of putting me to shame, because I've been interviewing founders for like five
years, four years at Indie Hackers, and I've done like 500 interviews on the website.
And you did 1000 interviews with your AI journalist in just three months.
So we're going to talk about that.
We have to.
Now your current business, Contentize is also similarly impressive.
How many writers do you have employed at Contentize, and how many articles and distinct pieces
of content are you putting out every month?
That's a great question.
So I have no writers or almost none, because I sometimes take contractors to generate articles
for me just for comparison.
So I have only developers, and those people are helping me write up to like 100,000 articles
per month.
What?
So it's something upside.
100,000 articles a month.
I thought you were going to say a thousand or something.
Okay, so mind-blowing stuff, you got no writers on staff.
And we're going to get into this.
We're going to get into how you do this, but maybe the best place for us to start is back
where you got your start.
I believe you were getting your PhD, you were in academia, and that's where you discovered
AI for the first time.
Right.
So I was doing PhD in mathematics, so that wasn't that far from artificial intelligence.
Then I went to Oxford for a research fellowship, and at some point I decided that, okay, I
want to quit academia and go into business, and then change from pure mathematics to machine
learning.
Basically, because I was fed up with academia at that point, I wanted to have more impact
on the world, be able to have something tangible, have some faster feedback loop on what I'm
doing, not having to wait like years, basically, to see the outcome of the research that I'm
doing, but basically be able to do something, and then within weeks, within months, or even
faster sometimes, be able to see what I created and how well it's performing.
So that was my thinking when it comes to my character.
I mean, character logically, I think being an entrepreneur is just a cool thing.
And going from mathematics to machine learning was also natural, because I love automating
and optimizing stuff.
So being this productivity nerd, I really wanted to do something more in that domain,
and coding was supernatural in that respect.
So that was a couple of years ago.
I went from academia, and I started starting my first startups.
Both of them failed.
They had two startups prior to Confentise, prior to Peta Crunch, and they failed for
different reasons, but both were actually a great way to learn about being an entrepreneur.
Most people, I think, find it very difficult when they've got a lot of momentum and skills
going in one direction, and it's safe, and they understand it, to just throw that in
the trash can and say, you know what, I'm going to be a completely different thing.
Going from academia, where you've got, you know, you're working on your PhD, you've got
other friends, I can only assume, who are also working in their PhD, you've got the
social circle, do people think you're crazy to leave and try to start a company?
Oh, yeah, totally.
I think it's super hard because, especially, academia is such a bubble that if you go out
of academia, it means that you're some kind of a loser for not getting another job in
academia.
You know, it's like really a bubble.
So it's super hard to actually go out for the first three years after going and deciding
that I want to go out of academia, and I was really battling my thoughts about whether
I'm a loser or not for going out and whether I should stay, but then I was so hard convinced
that staying in academia would make me miserable in the long run, that I just had to quit.
And still, that was like a continuous process because it wasn't like one day I go, that's
it, stop, and I quit, but it was like, okay, maybe let's do less research and try to find
like a consulting gig, try to get into business.
So this process of switching from academia to business actually took me like three years
to go like fully, like right now I'm like fully entrepreneur, 100%, but that took me
literally three years after deciding that I want to quit.
So it's definitely not easy.
And only right now I don't feel like a loser going to being an entrepreneur and choosing
that path.
But back then, you know, I was like super insecure about switching from this well-defined
career that I had, and it could have going for like decades, because you have this very
linear path when you do research, become a postdoc, become a professor at a university,
and then go on, teach others, then you're 60, 70, basically, you have a tenure track
job.
Well, and that's it.
I mean, super interesting intellectually, because you keep on thinking about very interesting
problems, but in the end, your career is very linear, you can't do really crazy things.
And I wanted something more, I mean, that wasn't that appealing to me, I mean, I was
doing that for 30 years of my life, and then I decided that, okay, let's try something
different.
Yeah.
And you can certainly do lots of crazy, innovative things as a tech founder, but you got to hop
from one bubble into another, because tech is its own sort of bubble.
What did you do to come up with the idea for your first company?
I mean, you're out on your own, you never started a company before, what are the first
steps that you take?
Yeah, so actually, I was doing those different consulting gigs for like, you know, trying
to help others with AI, and at some point, one of my colleagues over drinks, he offered
me a stake in his company that I mean, it wasn't formed at the time, he wanted to have
someone from more technical background, him being a businessman before, to do something
together.
So what we did was we formed a company, and basically, that was the story of Brink.ai.
And our goal was to build the last mile delivery platform, something like Postmates, or Google
Global, to deliver products within a city within 90 minutes, so you could shop something
buy something online, and we could deliver that for you, or for example, take your envelope
from one place to another, deliver your keys that you've forgotten from your work, something
like that.
Basically, we underestimated the costs involved in the startup, those are for both of us,
that was our first technological startup, and we really miscalculated how much we should
pay drivers, how much should go to marketing, and it's super like those kind of businesses
like which are uber like are very capital intensive.
And we weren't prepared for that.
And we actually were bootstrapping everything.
So we couldn't make it, even though the growth was pretty nice.
How long did it take you to figure out that this is too expensive, and it wasn't going
to work?
Basically, a year.
So after one year, we were running out of cash, and we decided to just pack things,
and that's it.
Meaning that we were on the slope, we had a couple of weeks of a runway, but we didn't
have any investor, we're not really advanced talking to investors, and we decided that
we don't know whether we can make it work.
And we decided that, okay, that's it.
And how did that feel?
You had all this pressure on your shoulders having just quit your job, your sort of research
path in academia, and now your first company fails after a year, you have really not much
to show for it.
It felt bad in the beginning.
But after we decided we actually have, it was like taking the weight off your chest,
in a sense, because, first of all, we had the experience, it was really great learning
care that we had over the startup.
And I wasn't expecting much, I mean, I was expecting that to be kind of like the going
to the business school, like, I don't believe really in being able to learn entrepreneurship
at the university, and you really have to become an entrepreneur to learn that.
So I was looking at this experience as kind of forming experience of becoming a founder,
becoming a CTO, CEO, and that was that.
So I wasn't that unhappy about that happening.
I mean, yeah, I was pretty sad for some time.
I think one of the interesting things about your first business is that until you actually
start something, you have no idea what it's going to be like, you can read all these stories
and magazines or listen to podcasts about founders, and come away with almost any impression,
you know, you might think, Oh, I've got to be an expert, I can never do this, you might
think, Oh, it's so easy, I'm going to knock it out of the park of my first business.
But until you actually try, you don't really, you know, all you have are thoughts and hypotheses,
what it's going to be like, you don't really know, what would you say surprised you the
most about being a founder for the first time?
But it's not really about brainstorming new ideas, I mean, it's really you have to get
your hands dirty.
And for example, either start driving around, or like, really, you don't have really customer
customer support in the beginning.
So you really have to respond to every single mail that's coming your way.
And there are many different layers of problems that are appearing either from customers,
something.
So for example, if something doesn't work on the platform, it's your responsibility
to fix it as soon as possible, especially that clients are paying for the experience
for the platform.
So probably this, that was like head on meeting with customers, customer service and building
the whole customer experience, that was really that was really a struggle in the beginning.
And I think that that's the hardest part in building any customer facing application.
Okay, so here you are.
You've learned a few lessons, you got some experience under your belt, you're kind of
sad about your company not succeeding, but you're not down and out, obviously, because
you started a second company after that.
Tell me about that process.
How'd you come up with the idea?
And how'd you get started?
So the second one was board technology.
And the idea was that we use quantum computing to optimize processes in logistics and transportation.
Very ambitious.
Yeah.
So actually, that was like super deep tech, we know those super fun, we actually did the
company with a different colleague of mine in Toronto, we went through creative destruction
lab, that's like a well no accelerator in Canada, it's also the only one with this quantum
computing path.
So we were super happy to actually be there.
We spent a couple of months in Toronto.
So that was going good, we were like security, pre seed funding, but there were two problems
back then.
So the idea we actually brainstormed the idea before my co founder was a lawyer, he already
had like a one small contract with one of the companies in Poland about developing something
in the space.
So it's still it was natural in a way that we started brainstorming and that was this
idea for the company that we could create something in quantum computing space.
To some extent, I was also too naive about the technical difficulty of the problem.
So I said yes, very quickly, the whole thing because I wanted to do like different things.
But I was very challenging later on, especially I mean, I have this PhD in mathematics, but
still learning about quantum physics and how quantum computer works, that was really challenging.
And I was super happy that in the end, like I learned a lot about quantum physics and
quantum computing.
The idea came naturally, we moved to Toronto at some point.
But there was this problem that first of all, we are super early to the market.
And it was super hard to convince an enterprise to actually buy our solution, and actually
trust us to find something like a solution.
So the selling process was going very slow.
On the other hand, we started having many differences in how we want to operate, how
we want to go with the company with my co founder.
So those were two main reasons that actually we decided to split.
I mean, there was not enough track record to progress.
So there was like a natural decision that, okay, we should stop here.
We can't really make much more of it right now.
So I'm just curious about this product, actually, because you're doing quantum computing.
And I think practical quantum computers aren't even a thing yet.
So what was it that you were selling to companies or trying to sell to companies?
There are no quantum computers, which are better than classical computers yet, but you
can already experiment.
So our sales pitch was basically that you should prepare for quantum computers right
now and experiment with them and build some kind of applications on top of them, which
you can do right now, because later on, when the real quantum computers come in, you'll
be just left out of the game because it will be like already too late, you won't be able
to acquire talent as well.
I mean, because, you know, like this is a super small niche and there are not so many
talented players being able to, like, for example, to build quantum machine learning
algorithms for your application.
So these things exist and that was our sales pitch.
So we were actually selling to R&D departments of, like, large corporations.
And that was super hard sell, especially in the beginning.
Yeah, I bet.
So we...
Yeah, we...
That was, like, B2B, but B2U enterprise, really.
So you're having trouble selling this, like, prototypical quantum computer, you start having
co-founder issues, which a lot of people don't realize, but are often the number one reason
why companies die, because your co-founders don't see eye to eye, you disagree, and you
try to go in different directions, which obviously doesn't work when you're a fledgling company
that's having trouble with sales.
And usually, you know, when a company is doing really well, and you're crushing it and making
a ton of money, your co-founders get along splendidly, because it's kind of obvious what
you should be doing.
But when, you know, there's cracks in the surface, and your product isn't selling the
way that you wanted, and it's harder to build than you thought it would be, and it's taking
longer and you're running out of money, I think that's when the strife really starts
to show up.
Yeah.
And it's like a real test of your relation, basically, with your co-founder.
So we didn't pass this test, this relationship test, with my co-founder.
Yeah, and this is like one of the main reasons.
I mean, the second main reason is probably lack of capital and other estimating costs.
So I went through both of them with my first startup and the second one.
Yeah, but founding a good co-founder is like a crucial thing, if you want to have one,
because so that's a funny thing.
So for example, right now, I'm like raising seed round for content types, I'm talking
with a lot of investors, and I had like a couple of calls when this like minority, but
I had a couple of calls when actually one of the investors asked me about, okay, do
you want to find a co-founder?
Like, do you need someone from the like more sales background?
And at this stage, I'm just saying, no, I'm finally solving the whole thing, because it's
more interesting from my perspective, and I think I can do it.
And if there's any lack of skills that I will have on board, then I'm happy to hire someone
and maybe give them like a small portion of equity, but not on like the co-founder level.
So there's still I think there's still this thinking that you should have a co-founder
and the best startups are the startups run by two people or more.
But maybe it's not true.
I mean, I think the statistics are that both are equally successful in the end, like you
have solo founders, which are very successful.
Yeah, my sort of hierarchy is, if you can have a co-founder, and you know that you and
this person have complementary skills and a history of being able to get through conflict,
then that is the best situation.
Right below that, rather than having a co-founder who you've never worked with before, and you're
not sure how you can handle challenges, it's better just be a solo founder.
If that means you've got to shrink the scope of your ambitions, you should just shrink
the scope.
But I think nowadays, it's easier and more, I think, higher leverage than ever to be a
solo founder, just because there's so many tools and things are so cheap.
So it's not as much of a disadvantage as it was back when people were first going to write
about this kind of stuff 10, 20 years ago.
And then below that, all the way at the bottom is like working with a co-founder just because
you heard you should, but you guys have never worked together.
You're not tried and true.
You haven't tested your relationship, and your company is going to be the first and
true test.
And often that doesn't work out very well.
And this has kind of been the arc of my career as a founder as well.
I always started things with co-founders.
And sometimes it went well, sometimes it didn't.
But with IndieHackers, I just worked by myself, and then later on, I brought on my brother
as kind of like a late co-founder.
And I know we have years of conflict resolution because we're twins and we fought all the
time growing up.
So if we disagree about something, we know we can resolve it because we've done it a
million times before.
And I've seen the same pattern with a lot of other companies like Stripe founded by
two brothers.
I don't think that's a coincidence.
So I have a brother and from my perspective, it's also scary to some extent because I trust
him and I think he's an extremely talented person.
But on the other hand, I'm scared that that will influence our family relations and maybe
make it worse.
So weren't you scared of that?
How was your thinking process going there?
I've followed my brother for so many years that it's like there are no fights that we
could have that are going to influence our relationship.
So maybe that's what it comes down to.
If you and your family have had a lot of conflict, maybe you're a little bit more sure.
But if you haven't, you've always had just like a peachy relationship, then maybe you
don't want to risk that.
But for me, it was pretty clear like we can get over anything.
Okay.
Now I'm pretty sure of that as well.
I mean, you can probably get over anything, but you know, like having family dinner and
then awkward silence because actually someone fucked up something on the business side.
Yeah.
What's been interesting during COVID actually is my brother's in Brooklyn.
I'm in Seattle at the moment.
My mom is in Atlanta.
We're all kind of separate.
I have no plans to like fly to Atlanta and see my mom and like get COVID in the airport
and like get her sick or anything like that.
But she just misses us.
And so my brother and I have these daily zoom calls and she'll just dial in.
She always ask like, what's the, what's the zoom URL today?
And she'll just like listen to us talking.
So there's good and there's bad, you know, but I think it's cool to kind of bring the
family together.
And it's, I'm just a big proponent of just stacking things in your life.
You know, there's all these articles you can read online about like, okay, you know, what
are you going to do in your life?
Are you going to have a fulfilling career?
Are you going to have good relationships with your friends?
Are you going to pursue hobbies?
Are you going to spend time with your family?
Like what are you going to do?
You don't have time for all of it.
And I think actually you do have time for all of it if you can find clever ways to combine
two or more things.
And so for me, Andy hackers is very much a fulfilling career.
It's family time in a way, because I'm with my brother and now my mom all the time.
And it is a hobby because it's not just one thing.
I get to spend a lot of time writing code, doing design, hosting a podcast, and I think
almost anyone running a business, if you design it from the ground up, you know, in terms
of choosing what you're going to work on and who you're going to work with, you can kind
of stack a few of these things and in the same eight hours a day, instead of just getting
one of these boxes checked, you can get two or three of these boxes checked and live just
a better life.
So I'm a huge advocate of working with family if you think you can make it happen.
That's actually a great thought.
I mean, I've never thought about that way, but definitely, you know, like I like stacking
things together in the sense of like trying to work on something which I'm passionate
about and finding projects that I will like.
So even if I fail in the end, I will have the pleasure of going through the process
and enjoying the whole process instead of thinking that, okay, it's really shit right
now, but maybe in like two years, it will be something fun, which is I think super important
when it comes to entrepreneurship, because there will be many failures along the way.
And you should expect them to happen over and over again.
And unless you do something which is exciting, you will be pretty miserable otherwise.
Yeah, and apparently, that's what you did, because you failed at your first two companies
and yet you weren't discouraged, you kept going.
So you must have been having a good time along the way.
I think it's something with my character that I even like, like when it gets worse and you
get tested, because at least something's happening.
So I had this amazing chat with my friend who's like a young film director, he's also
like super ambitious here in Warsaw.
And he was saying that he has this motto recently done, the worse it gets, the better it gets
as well.
So like, he likes things turning like, right now he manages the crew of like 40 people
and he's like 27 right now.
And it's like, from my perspective, it's like complete chaos, because you know, like film
crews probably are not as organized as startups or like companies where everyone, but basically
you have actors, you have some kind of copywriters and like, having everyone fill their role
is super challenging.
I like this as well in being an entrepreneur that you have the ability to actually test
your skills in battle.
It's really like going to war and then you practice before, you can practice before,
for example, by reading books, by doing some small exercises, like writing a business plan
or whatever it is, but in the end, you have to test yourself in battle and that battle
is the market.
In the end, everything is decided by the market and by other people, by customers who either
like your product or they don't.
You've been in battle a couple times.
You've tested the market, didn't particularly go well, but you're still determined.
You're enjoying yourself despite the hardships.
What are some of the lessons that you took with you after the failure of your second
company and to going into your third company?
Right.
The most crucial thing is that patience is key and I have to really think long term when
it comes to building the product, getting the customers.
The other thing is I'm executing better on ideas.
I think in the end, entrepreneurship is really about executing on ideas and thanks to the
previous failures, I'm able to execute on ideas much quicker than before.
I have this feedback loop much shorter.
I'm able to build apps, build certain features super quickly.
I think that's crucial in the end because one thing is brainstorming and thinking what
can be done next, but in the end, someone has to execute on the idea.
It's better be quick because the quicker you are, probably the better you can position
yourself on the market.
That's the crucial finding from the two previous failures.
One is I can probably do solo with the entrepreneurial route and I'm fine doing that.
The third one is I'm not scared of failures.
If content ties where to fail, I'm fine with that in the sense that I know I can find new
ideas, new markets, new products that I can invest my time and my money in and I'd be
okay with that.
I really should focus on enjoying the process and being the things that compound in the
sense that they compound assets, they compound knowledge.
Even after the failure or success, I can come out stronger than before and I think that's
the key.
You've got this mindset that you're in where you're like, the idea is important, but execution
is what matters.
After these two failures, you realize you're not afraid to fail and you also realize that
you're comfortable being a solo founder and you don't necessarily need to work with anybody
else, which I can understand after having this blow up fight with your second co-founder.
How do you take all these lessons and move forward to eventually start petacrunch and
content ties?
Yes.
Basically, I was thinking what to do next.
Basically in March 2019, that was the moment when board technology ceased to exist.
We decided that we closed everything and I took some months off just to go on holidays
and think about stuff, but then I decided that I want to do something in content because
I was always a huge fan of literature.
I was always reading a lot, writing a lot, so I have published five books.
One of them is almost entirely generated by AI, so that was done later on, beginning of
this year.
But I was basically doing a lot of writing before coming to content ties and my idea
was that in the first place, I want to build a tool for myself to boost my own performance.
When I was doing that, I first tested that on petacrunch, that was the first initial
product where I was thinking like, how can I automate media industry?
How I can make something purely autonomous in the media market?
And then I went on to thinking that, okay, I can build this platform where actually this
kind of algorithms can be shared with other people and they can use it as well to create
content.
Basically, that was a year later.
So walk me through exactly what that looked like, how you set it up, just so we can have
an idea in our minds of what it looks like to build an AI-powered company as an anti-hacker.
So after my previous business failed, this one with quantum computers, in the first place,
I wanted to just talk with other founders about especially the one who raised a lot
of capital or had great product or something like that.
How did they do that?
What's the recipe?
What did they write?
What went wrong and what kind of advice they have?
That was the initial idea.
And then after thinking a little bit about it, I decided, okay, maybe I can do it at
scale and ask 10,000 founders at the same time.
That went into being a petacrunch, actually.
So I did it for myself to actually learn about how do you build the business.
That's almost exactly why I started IndieHackers, to be honest.
I really want to understand what other people know that I don't know.
Let me just go talk to all the most interesting, successful founders and say, hey, this is
an interview, but really, I just want to mind you for information and figure out how you
came up with your idea, how you made your money, how you found your first customers.
But you did it at a way bigger scale than I did.
I think I've interviewed like 500 founders on the website in the last four years.
You interviewed more than that in just a couple of months.
Yeah, that's true.
But yeah, that's the power of AI.
But I'm sure that they are not as high quality as what you did on the platform, because basically,
to some extent, those were like early days.
It's mostly scripted conversations, but I managed to get really interesting people on
the platform.
It wasn't me who was doing all the talking.
It was this AI journalist who were contacting people, and they really managed to get to
talk with CEOs of startups who raised like $100 million or something like that.
So I won't name names here, but you can check them up on the platform.
It's really cool, so I mean, I learned a lot in that process.
And that's what led me to contentize in the end.
Explain how that AI works, because I'm just curious.
Who does it choose to reach out to?
How does it find them?
What does it send them?
What point do you come in and do some human intervention, if at all?
Sure.
That was actually super simple, because you basically were scraping the data of the startups
who got funded in a particular amount.
For me, it was between $1 million to $100 million and sending them emails.
That's it.
And then you had like, if you go to the response, you send them the questions.
That's it.
And what part did your AI do?
All of that?
All of that.
No.
All of that was done by AI.
I only intervened when someone asked some non-standard question.
Like in the beginning, someone asked one of the AI journalists, are you AI?
And it proved me that you were not, and I'm happy to answer your questions.
And the AI was requested to tell a joke about anything.
So that was actually the human intervention.
I went online, I searched for a joke, and basically emailed this person this joke.
And that was it.
And then AI took over from that place.
Wow.
So tricky.
And so then you would just send them a bunch of questions, I guess, and they would answer
your questions and you'd publish the interview.
Yeah.
And unfortunately, the last part was also needed the human intervention.
And that was all of the interviews were in different formatting, in different styles.
So I had to make them more appealing visually, I had to do it myself, unfortunately.
So that was the painful part.
I think that's the beauty of AI though, because I think people think of AI as kind of this
all or nothing thing.
If your computer can't do all of it, it might as well not do any of it.
But that's not true.
As a founder, if someone could take off half of your workload, you click a button and suddenly
this bot is going on crunch base, finding all these founders who got funding, emailing
them initiating an interview request, and you're only intervening just to polish it
up at the end or to tell people jokes when they want proof that it's not an AI.
That saves you a tremendous amount of work, and it's more than worth it, even though the
AI can't do 100% of it by itself.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, it's the same with content guys.
We're not promising to get a perfect article on whatever topic you think about, but what
we promise is that you're going to save a lot of time, whatever you're writing, because
you can just submit a headline, you can submit the whole article and we summarize that for
you.
And it's like that with any kind of AI right now, because we don't really have any kind
of perfect AI doing everything for you.
It's mostly about automating some small stuff so that you can be more creative yourself.
And this is how I view AI in the end.
AI is just a tool to boost your productivity so that you can be more productive by not
focusing on repetitive, boring, tedious work you would have to do every day otherwise.
So why not keep working on that?
I mean, it seems like it was working.
You're much more efficient than dopes like me who are doing interviews by hand.
Why not keep working on Pedicrunch and make that your main thing?
No, actually, it's still working.
So what I decided to do is actually, I just didn't want to spend my days editing the
end interviews.
So right now, you can still go on the platform, but actually, I switched to the pricing model.
So actually, Pedicrunch is making some money because you can submit your interview for
like $99 and be featured on the platform after some approval.
So no, it's fully working, actually.
It's something in the back of my head because I'm mostly thinking about content ties.
But from time to time, I'm just thinking, how can I automate even more of Pedicrunch
so that it's fully autonomous?
It wouldn't require anything from me and it would be just like fully working media service.
So basically, I would like to have TechCrunch, but done by AI.
No human intervention.
That sounds super fascinating.
That's one of the coolest business ideas I've ever heard.
I don't know how good these AI journalists can be.
Maybe they can do interviews.
I don't know if they can write entire stories, but maybe...
The whole point is actually that this is what we're trying to do with content ties.
In the end, content ties is the missing part in the fully autonomous Pedicrunch.
That's the...
This is like the huge subject is the whole synthetic media landscape.
And by synthetic media, I mean exactly media which are run by AI or algorithm scripts.
Just no human intervention in the middle.
So that can...
Synthetic media is, for example, this articles generated by AI, but also Twitter bots and
many other things that you can think of.
For example, videos can be also fully generated by AI.
They are just not as good yet as those recorded by humans.
But this is another direction that synthetic media is taken.
So when you started content ties, was that where your head was at?
I want to turn Pedicrunch into this full media organization and I just need this one missing
link.
So I need to go build that first and then maybe come back to Pedicrunch.
Yep.
Yep.
That was my motivation back then.
And then doing that, I remarked that actually, maybe I can make the whole platform public
and actually have other people use the platform.
And then basically this would happen and I'm happy interacting with other people talking
about content ties because I'm getting a lot of ideas from customers, users.
It's really great.
I couldn't be able to do it all by myself.
So tell me about the first month with content ties.
You come up with the idea.
You're like, I'm going to build an even more advanced AI system that you can give it a
prompt and it will write an article for you.
What's the first thing you do after that?
Exactly.
So the first step after I had the idea, I drew all the dashboards that I wanted to have.
I drew the architecture infrastructure that I would like to put in place.
And basically I contacted my friend who was a great Python backend developer to do the
backend stuff for me.
And that was it.
We called it together some parts that took us basically two months to do it.
It was great.
It wasn't as good as I thought in the end, in the sense of like how UI and UX design
and everything.
But then I decided, okay, it's cool enough to actually keep working on that.
I have a lot of fun doing that.
So I started looking for contractors, which could take me to the next level.
What exactly was it that you had built with your developer?
So that was a platform.
That was a platform working on the cloud.
But basically the only thing you could do was you have a place to put your prompt, to
put your headline or like a short sentence, click on generate and get a text out of that.
So I could say like 10 ways to come up with business ideas.
I would write that in a text box and click generate.
And then your AI would write an article that's like 10 ways to come up with business ideas.
Yep.
Yep.
Basically that like a draft for the text.
So with that version, we got to like 100 users.
So definitely there was some interest to the platform.
It was growing super slow and I was thinking of ways to make it more appealing.
You know, like UX design, product design, and like how to make it much better.
Because I know that I have a technology in place to make it really appealing, but the
whole product side was what was missing.
So I went on and started looking for people to do front end for me, design more things
on the back end, add different machine learning models and stuff like that.
So I decided that, okay, I can grow it to something much bigger by myself.
And it was a good decision.
Like in the end, like we finished the second iteration in June, 2020.
So after three months and basically from then on, we had this great growth of users.
So AI, you know, to my mind is a little bit intimidating because it just seems like something
that's super expensive to do.
It seems like you need to have a lot of experts, a lot of PhDs, and then it's also going to
take a ton of time to get it right.
And yet here you were with like a small scrappy team, somehow bootstrapping this and funding
yourself and somehow getting it done in three months.
How are you able to be so efficient and so productive as just such a small team and it's
a little time?
Well, to be honest, it's part of my own expertise.
So I didn't have to look for someone who designed the whole infrastructure.
I did it myself.
And then I needed people from very particular pieces that I know that either I can't do
myself or maybe I can do myself, but it would take me like a couple of weeks.
And if I get an expert, he could do it in like, I don't know, like one week or like
a couple of days or something like that.
So I was able to be, I was able to optimize my own time and resources thanks to the fact
that I'm able to understand all the pieces coming into the platform.
So I was lucky with that.
I mean, I didn't have to take any black boxes.
I could understand every single algorithm that I was using.
And in the worst case, I could code myself the whole thing.
So that was the, that was the, on the good side.
I mean, I'm feeling confident that I could do the whole thing myself.
So even if I couldn't find a person to do it, I could always do that myself.
That was a great thing because that gave me a lot of freedom to pursue the whole thing.
And would you have been able to do this by yourself, let's say like two or three years
ago, or are there new tools and platforms that are making what you did this year possible?
No, well, I couldn't do that two years ago because of the, of the breakthroughs in AI
machine learning and what's new on the market.
And I couldn't do that for another reason, because I wasn't that good in programming
back then that I am right now.
I mean, I'm still learning because, you know, like computer science is definitely, it's
always learning.
There's always something new.
There's new research coming.
So you have to get to, you have to learn more, but no, definitely contentized couldn't exist
like a couple of years ago.
So it's cool that the timing is really perfect as well.
So give me a sense of some of these breakthroughs, because I think this is kind of what's enabling
any hackers to do things that they weren't able to do before.
And unless, you know, we are ex PhDs who have our sort of ear to the floor of what's going
on in AI, like we don't know about these breakthroughs.
So what's new and what's possible for an any hacker to do today that they couldn't do a
couple years back?
Right.
So if you don't have this technical background, then still you can do a lot of things because
you have a lot of open source models or like models which are readily available from like
IBM, Google, Microsoft, Amazon.
They all have models which are easy to connect to through API.
And that really drives down all the costs because the cost of, for example, if I were
to say, like, say I want to build an application for recognizing cat faces or maybe recognizing
a particular dress and then searching for that dress on the internet.
Right now with like open source tools from one of those big tech companies, you could
probably do that under one or $2,000 if you can just hire people on like Fiverr or Upwork
to do particular beats of the technical stuff for you.
So it really drove the whole cost of building the solution down.
And it's really great.
So the first thing is that technology is much cheaper to do because there are so many ready
to use off the shelf components.
And on the other hand, because of the whole world going now right now to the remote work,
it's super easy to find people on Upwork or Fiverr to actually do that for you.
So you can iterate very quickly on your ideas and it doesn't cost you much to do that.
It's pretty fascinating that it's not so much that you're trying to build out an impressive
team and compete with Google or Amazon or Facebook, but rather they're just releasing
a lot of their work for free on the internet.
And even if you don't understand it technically, you can hire someone who does and package
it up and build like these solutions and bring them to people or industries that just don't
have a lot of sophistication.
Maybe they're doing everything in an Excel spreadsheet, or maybe they're hiring people
to just repeat a bunch of manual tasks and you could whip up a quick script and sell
to them for 30 or 40 bucks a month.
It's going to enable them to just get a lot more done, assuming you have the domain expertise
to spot these problems and figure out the inefficiencies that companies are going through
and match them up with the right algorithm or the right model with AI that can actually
solve that problem.
Yeah, definitely.
Especially that there are many industries that are still using Excel spreadsheets as
the main resource.
And even without any technical background, you can be a broker for technologies connecting
that AI with a particular domain.
And if you're an expert in a particular domain, logistics, transportation, maritime, whatever
it is that is your passion or your career background, then you can really find solutions
which are easy to sell for a particular market.
And I think that's great.
I mean, that's definitely doable for indie hackers to do it.
If, for example, you have your corporate job, but you have enough of that you want to quit,
then probably the easiest way is to look for ways how AI can automate some of the processes.
And it's not even that hard because it's mostly thinking in terms of processes and the things
you want to automate because AI in the end is just a tool for automation.
It's nothing magical right now, but if you can find processes which are repetitive, tedious,
boring, then you probably can call an AI machine learning algorithm who will do that for you.
And if you have no technical background, then probably the most practical advice would be
think about this process, describe it well, and then start writing to different software
houses specializing in AI data science, machine learning, asking them for a quote about particular
solution that you have in mind.
And then with that quote in mind, you actually can go back to this particular industries
at the margin on top of that, like 20, 30% and maybe start selling from that point on.
And I think that's the best way to build something technical without actually having any technical
background at all.
That's super fascinating.
I want to get into more detail on that a little bit later because there's just so many different
types of AI models and technologies that you can use to do different things.
And I'm not sure everybody knows like what the options are, like what's the difference
between a natural language processor and a recommendation engine and whatever else is
out there.
But before we get into that, I want to understand how you were able to basically finance what
you were doing.
Because you said you started this in January 2020, you started Content Ties, and it wasn't
until June 2020 that you had kind of your second iteration out, and which is I can only
assume much better than the first, more accurate, more impressive.
What you're hiring during this time, you're presumably surviving and eating and paying
your rent during this time.
How are you funding yourself and how are you making enough money to keep this operation
going?
Yeah, so basically, I have some savings, that was part of it.
But also, I was sustaining myself for consulting, I was able to freelance consulting.
And when I was starting, I was consulting for up to like 20 hours per week.
And it went down basically, so right now I'm still have some consulting projects, but there
are no more than like five to 10 hours per week.
So I'm thinking myself, I have this approach that whatever I make for consulting that goes
to me, and then whatever the company makes for content, the subscription that actually
gets reinvested into the company itself.
So I had this lack of actually being able to do things on the side with consulting.
So I didn't have to quit any kind of a job, but maybe just reduce the amount of clients
that I have to focus full time and content dies.
And thanks to like the the growing revenue of content dies, and all the content generated,
I was able to cut on the hours and cut on the clients that I didn't need anymore.
For my consulting business.
I love that approach of actually working a job or doing consulting.
So you're generating revenue.
And then in the early days, not just saying, okay, well, I've got this job and I'm going
to squeeze, you know, my company into like nights and weekends or whatever few hours
I have remaining.
You're like, no, no, I'm going to take the money from my job, and I'm going to use that
to hire people.
I don't take money for my savings, I'm going to use that to hire people so I can grow my
company faster.
And so then you're not really trading anything off.
Yeah, you don't have a ton of time to work on your business.
But you're generating all this money from your job.
And now you're pouring that into actually making your business grow faster.
I think most people don't do that.
They either do one extreme or the other.
They either quit their job cold turkey and say, okay, I'm going to burn through all of
my savings.
So I have no income anymore.
And that's like super scary.
I've been there.
It's pretty stressful.
I'm not going to work out.
Or other people will do the other extreme, which is like, I'm not going to quit my job,
but I'm also not going to take any risk whatsoever.
I'm not going to spend any money hiring anybody, I'm going to do it all by myself.
And I think the sweet spot is exactly what you did.
And especially if you have a consulting job, you can gradually reduce the contracting and
consulting work you're doing down to five days a week or four days a week or three days
a week as your business ramps up its revenue and becomes more and more successful.
So it's never really this huge risky thing.
Yeah, I also think that's the best way.
Of course, it's not always possible that you can just simply reduce the amount of previous
work, though sometimes definitely this, especially right now, probably, you can ask your boss
your employer about like reducing your time from like full time to part time and maybe
start with that.
And I've heard like many stories about people doing that, just think openly that they have
something they work on a site and they want to take more time to do that.
And I think that's a great approach as well.
But definitely, if you're like a freelancer, then you can already start doing that.
And you just can think about how much income you need each month and then reinvest everything
else into your business.
But I think that's the most tricky part because probably many people could do something like
that.
But it's super scary to actually invest your old money, especially in like uncertain times,
like global pandemic, for example.
Because reinvesting in business, you don't know whether you will have that back, when
or if at all.
But it's the only thing, in order to make money, you have to spend money.
And that's the only way to make that work.
So you have to spend either on building the product or marketing sales or whatever it
is in order to make everything faster.
Yeah.
And even if you're not technically spending money, you're just investing time.
Well, your time is money.
The time you spend on your company could be time that you're working another job or doing
contract and getting paid.
So I think that that insight is 100% true.
You have to spend at least some money to make some money.
And if you are currently working a job and actually continually earning money, it makes
it much less scary to actually start investing and spending a little compared to quitting
cold turkey.
And your particular situation, Content Ties, started making money on its own, not from
paying customers, but from basically taking advantage of your own AI writing well before
you had paying customers.
What did that look like exactly?
Even before Content Ties, I already started working on some kind of a side income because
of all the situations with startups failures.
And then I quit academia, so I didn't have any...
The first startup, and up to probably the middle of the second startup, I still had
a position in academia, which was basically doing research.
And that was fine, because I still had a couple of research papers going in.
So I had this super stable position.
And I could do startups, because even if I fail, I can go back to academia.
After my second startup failed, I had no...
There's no way of going back to academia.
I have no side income.
So I had to work on something more in order to feel more secure.
And that something more actually started with Medium.
So medium.com, my favorite blogging platform, I still publish a lot on Medium.
And at some point, I noted that you can turn on monetization.
And it works the same as it works on YouTube, meaning that you get paid for how many views
they are, how many people are actually engaging with your content.
And I started getting a couple of hundred dollars in the beginning, and that was mid-2019.
So that kept me motivated in the first place.
It wasn't enough to sustain myself, but it was already enough to think about this as
a direction, what to do next.
So I was developing my writing, writing for others, writing for myself.
Then I discovered affiliate marketing, and that was a great discovery.
So this idea that actually you can promote some products, put the links to this product,
and if somebody buys something for this link, then you get paid some percentage of that.
So I was writing a lot about data science books, machine learning books, different technological
stuffs, and I just started putting those links, not to be ordinary links, but to be affiliate
links.
And suddenly, my income grew to over $1,000, $2,000 in a short time.
And I said, okay, that's great, and I can keep on going.
And that was basically the start also of Content I.
So I was thinking to myself that if I can do it myself and reach the level of $1,000
per month, then maybe if I start to employ AI and do various content on a much larger
scale, then maybe I can do much more than that.
And how much more did you do than that when you actually started employing AI to write
content for you and put in affiliate links?
The highest I got was probably $5,000 per one month when I got to, but then I was fully
focused on the content, and I took the decision to actually leave it as it is.
So that started to fall off actually, but then focused more on the platform because
I felt like in the long run, I think I can make and generate more income from the platform,
the licenses, and doing everything around Content I's than the actual content.
So you've got kind of like this fork in the road where it's like, you can either generate
a ton of content and try to make money from affiliate fees, which is cool and very innovative,
but also probably not as big of an opportunity as building out this Content I's platform.
So other people could pay you a monthly fee or something to come and use your platform
to generate whatever articles they want.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So I decided that I want to stay at this level of a couple thousand dollars per month with
this affiliate links.
And that's fine because that gives me freedom to reinvest all that into hiring people, to
buying ads on Facebook, whatever it is that needs to be done with business.
And I don't have to worry about going through my savings and having nothing at the end.
But then I decided that I don't want to develop more of that side because that also takes
a lot of time and I just want to build a better product.
And with better product, if Content I's doesn't work well, I can always go back to that part.
It's still fascinating to me, even though maybe it doesn't have as crazy of a potential
as this other product you're building.
But for a lot of people, a couple thousand dollars a month is super meaningful income.
And the fact that for you, it's more or less like you've got an AI just doing it.
How much manual effort do you have to put in to these articles to keep generating a
couple thousand dollars a month in revenue?
Probably like five hours per week, basically.
Because I have to curate some of them and then for some of them, I have to set up also
ads to make them more popular.
So I would say like up to five hours per week.
Right now.
I would like more time to be put into that to create all those digital assets.
But right now to actually sustain it at this level, it's not really that much of a time
that I need.
Which is great.
I mean, if you look at that from the perspective of the lifestyle business, I definitely could
go into that direction, meaning working like five to 10 hours per week and then drinking
coffee, hanging out with friends, for playing video games for all the other time.
But for me, I would be so demoralized after like one month.
I mean, I had this period in my life when I was trying to do something like that, but
I just couldn't.
I mean, I have like really hard work ethic and I had to work to feel fulfilled and happy
with my life.
So I can't do things like that.
I think a lot of people hit that point and it's like a checkpoint.
They want to get to this point where they feel stable and they feel supported and they
feel like they have some sort of machine that's running that can generate income and they're
not going to go broke and starve.
But then once you get there, the same thing happens.
You're like, okay, well, this isn't really enough money or this isn't really as ambitious
as I'd like to be, or I do really want to spend my time working on things that are harder
and challenging and so you don't really stop there.
But still, it's hard to get there for so many people.
Walk me through an example of like what one of these articles looks like.
What's the process?
Do you have to come up with a topic idea yourself or does AI do that?
And then how are you getting people to actually read these articles and click the affiliate
links?
What's the whole process look like?
Yeah.
In the beginning, that was like super manual in the sense that that was the pieces of advice
that I would give myself.
For example, like what books do you have to read as a data scientist?
And there's a book for like each level, whether you're like beginner, intermediate.
So everything was about data science, machine learning technology, and that was working.
And still, you can see that on my blog on Medium.
If you go there, like most of the text that I'm writing, I'm either writing myself or
with little extra help from AI to generate some of the drafts.
But basically, I curate everything.
But then to go on like with that on a massive scale, then basically what you have to do
is you have to look at the keywords that people look for, but there's not enough content,
and then try to provide that content.
They're like services like Bassumo or Ahrefs, and both of them, both of them, you're able
to look for like what people are googling particular month.
And then within the particular niche, within particular region.
And then you look at the questions people ask within the web browser, and basically
that's the title of the article that you want to write, to have like the organic traffic
coming to your website, coming to your blog post.
So that's what we currently doing in an automatic way.
But there's definitely much more to be done.
Again, like if I were to do it properly, this is like totally different business that would
take full time job, and unfortunately, I can't do everything, and I had to decide what I
need to do.
Yeah.
And I decided to go, you know, like go with content ties, so go with be more on the content
generation part rather than content research content marketing part, right?
It's cool that you had a little foray into this, because you're basically dogfooding
your own product, you're getting to see what it's like to be a customer of content ties
and how you might be able to use content ties from a customer's point of view to try to
make money.
And then you decided, okay, well, let's focus on the platform.
What did you learn from using content ties yourself to make money that informed how you
built your product and how you would find and entice customers to try using it themselves?
The most important thing I learned is that UX design is like super important.
And unless the product is super intuitive and easy to use, nobody will use it.
And for me, that was the last, like, it was super easy to check because often, like in
the beginning, especially content ties was already working on the cloud, but then still,
I was more involved with actually working with my own scripts in a JupyterLab Jupyter
notebook.
So I decided that it shouldn't be like that.
I mean, if the product is to work, then it should be more appealing to actually work
with content ties than trying to code it yourself.
And I was iterating on the content ties until it reached this point where actually right
now I'm less working with my own code than with content ties, because it's much simpler
to actually do everything with content ties rather than to code it yourself.
So definitely that allowed me to have this super short feedback loop because I didn't
have to talk with anyone about what to change in content ties to make it better or easier
to use because I have myself and myself and I was able to ask myself, like, is it enough
or should I push it a more and I'm trying to be pretty transparent with myself, pretty
open.
So I wasn't lying to myself about, oh, it's going great when it actually was absolutely
awful.
So I was like, literally iterating very quickly.
It's fascinating how much of an advantage you get and how much more adoption you can
get when you have this easy to use interface.
There's another AI model out there that's super popular, and I think in part it's just
because it's so easy to use and it's a GPT-3.
And so essentially, you just get access to their API, you send them a prompt or a text
and it can be like almost any question or instructions using English, and it can generate
like a whole wall of text for you that is almost indistinguishable from a human writing
it.
And this technology has been around for a while, maybe it's not quite as good, but people
just haven't used it because it's always been so hard to use, like you have to set so much
stuff up.
But now when it's just like so easy, and this is easy to use API, I think people are getting
super creative, Peter levels, I think he got access and built this thing called like ideas
AI.
And every day it generates a few new ideas using AI, and you can upvote the best ideas
and it's got all these business and startup ideas that it's generating and people are
applying it in all these new ways.
So it makes sense to me like with your business, figuring out how to like make the interface
more intuitive and easier to use would increase your revenue and increase the number of people
who are interested in using it and understanding like, okay, here's how I can use content ties
to get ahead in my business or to do something else that no one else is doing.
Yeah, this is actually something I learned and I keep on learning is that it's not always
about technology, it's often about like how you present the product was the product design.
So this is something which of course, Apple got really well because they don't produce
the best laptops, like they definitely like don't have the best components.
But what they do really well is the whole experience of using a MacBook and how intuitive
it is, how easy it is to use, how well performing is actually the software.
And that's something super important to remember especially for me as you know, like coming
from this technical background, I have this inner thinking of like building cool technology
will actually solve all the problems where actually it's only halfway through or maybe
even not halfway because technology itself is it's nothing like it's just a tool that
you can use well or not and selling the thing or presenting the things actually even more
important in the end, like getting the technology to proper hands to make it really appealing
to the particular audience you have in mind.
This is the challenging part for me, but it's something that I keep on learning.
And this is really great to keep on iterating about and keep on iterating on product design.
So where are you finding these customers because even if your product design ends up being
super slick and it's great, most people don't know that you can generate a lot of content
and articles and product descriptions or whatever with AI.
And I think you probably have to do a lot of evangelizing and educating people and convincing
them that like, Hey, this is possible and this is like a new way of working.
How are you actually finding customers for content ties?
So right now it's pretty much natural.
So it's kind of funny because we generate so much content that actually we have organic
reach plus social media, and we try to explain as much as possible how content ties works,
what natural language generation market looks like and like what kind of tools you can use.
So it's like you said, it's all about educating potential users, clients, and I still believe
that it's a long process.
So and we have just started, but this education process might happen that, you know, like
you will see one video of content ties right now, maybe another one in like half a year.
And then you come back to us like in one year and that's fine.
But basically it's like writing a lot about what you can do and how you can make your
life easier by automating some parts of the writing process.
And give me an example, like, you know, a customer to you have who's actually using
content ties and what they're using it for.
Sure.
So for example, there are many people in real estate using content ties to turn spreadsheets
into actual plain English explanation.
So for example, one person has a company which aggregates data about rent prices in the cities
in the US with like how those changes from week to week, what's the like hottest neighborhood
in Chicago, what's what's trending in LA.
And then he has this bunch of data, large spreadsheets, but in the end, his users want
to have like a short report.
And this is what content ties does.
You can like quickly implement the template, which would give you this summarization of
the text of what's going on within like the particular city.
Another example might be that so there's that's another customer is a person is running health
lifestyle blog.
And basically, she generates the blog posts.
So have a couple of headlines, have a couple of articles he wants, she wants to base the
whole text upon.
And based on that, content ties gives her like a draft of the text that she then modify
and puts on the platform on her website.
Cool.
So there's like a whole bunch of different use cases.
Yeah, and that, to be honest, that's also problematic from my perspective, because I
don't know where exactly to focus my attention on.
But it will be easier if that would be like one type of customer, like for example, on
the real estate or like only commerce, because they're like also like bunch of people from
commerce or only like marketing people.
In the end, it will probably boil down to me choosing again, after which particular
market I want to go because you have to make some kind of a choice in order to make it
easier.
Yeah, that's the difficulty with building any sort of technology where you're enabling
people to do things that they've never done before is suddenly there's all sorts of use
cases.
And you just have this kind of like very generic lukewarm message that doesn't strongly
appeal to any one group.
So it's hard for it to resonate with people.
I talked to Vlad Magdalene who runs Webflow, and they're kind of the same situation where
they're enabling people to build websites using this intuitive 8 UI that they didn't
have before.
And people are building websites, obviously, for all sorts of different reasons.
And so I think he eventually just like narrowed down to like three or four different target
groups who seem to be the the heaviest users who got the most benefit from the product
and just like built out landing pages and documentation and all sorts of resources for
those three or four groups.
And that kind of means excluding everybody else and not focusing on them.
But I think it's important to kind of get that foothold in the beginning.
And then you can run with it.
And I think, you know, a related concept here is that there's this book Crossing the Chasm,
which is super popular in the 90s.
I've talked about it before, but like there's this idea of you got, you know, the late adopters,
and you've got the early adopters.
And at the very earliest edge of the early adopters, you have the innovators.
And these are people who are often entrepreneurs themselves.
And they're working on things where they really want to get ahead of everybody else.
And they're visionaries.
And so they're always on the lookout for anything that's new, anything that they can take advantage
of that others aren't taking advantage of.
And like they care a little bit less about the product being polished or, you know, full
of bugs because, you know, that might be an advantage to them.
Maybe that means that they can use content ties before anyone else can use it.
And they can, you know, start pumping out content and automating what they're up to
well before anyone else.
So I'm curious how many of your customers are in this camp, you know, how many of your
customers or indie hackers are people who are just way ahead of the curve and who want
to take advantage of AI before other people do?
I think most of them for now, I mean, definitely people who are using content ties are visionaries
to some degree because it's not still, it's not as easy as I would like it to be to get
on the platform.
There's still like a learning curve you have to go through.
So you have to be determined to actually at least spend like half an hour on an hour learning
all the possibilities within the platform to actually do something meaningful.
So it's still definitely visionaries.
But from my perspective, you know, that's exactly the goal of building the product which
is appealing to as wide audience as possible is trying to make it as simple as possible
as well.
So whenever you log in onto the platform for the first time, you right away know how to
do things in a way that brings you value.
And I think that's super important.
So it's literally about having product design, which is great, easy, compelling and easy.
Great to use in the end, like that's the most important thing.
So when I think about all these indie hackers trying to get ahead, trying to start new things,
and I think about that in the intersection of AI, there's really two different approaches
that stand out.
And you're kind of doing both of them.
So one approach is you try to innovate, you try to build some new AI solution that allows
other people to take advantage of AI in ways that they haven't before.
So with Contentize, you're doing that because you're allowing people to generate all these
articles, like a massive number of articles or product descriptions or whatever that they've
never been able to do.
And that strikes me as pretty hard to do, because you need to be an AI expert yourself
or you need to hire AI experts.
And you've got to innovate.
And the other usage of AI that I think is empowering for indie hackers and solo founders
is using it kind of behind the scenes.
So you're not providing an AI product to somebody else, but you're using an AI product, or maybe
you're even building in-house tools to help you become much more efficient as a founder.
And so as a team of one, you can interview 1,000 founders or something, or as a team
of one, you can provide customer support to hundreds of users while you're coding your
product at the same time.
Which of these two paths do you think are more promising for indie hackers?
Because I'm leaning towards the latter, that if you really want to take advantage of AI,
you should be using it behind the scenes.
Definitely.
I mean, probably the second one, because especially, you know, like, I think we're going to the
world of no code, or at least minimal code, where you can do, you can implement a lot
of things without actually knowing how to code.
And you can just, by connecting various APIs, maybe adding some kind of a layout on top
of that, you can quickly build new solutions, which would cost you thousands of hundreds
of dollars before.
And right now they cost you a couple of hundreds, maybe at most, like just dollars or even less
than that, because it's just connecting different APIs.
It's super important to actually try and understand what people might expect and then give them
that solution.
So give me an example of some of these APIs you can use, or ways that you can use artificial
intelligence to make yourself more efficient as a founder and avoid doing a lot of repetitive
tasks.
Right.
So for example, so the product that I've discovered just lately, and is built by another solo
founder is n8n, that's done by n8n.io, that's a product done by one solo founder from Berlin.
And he recently secured the founding, so the whole thing is growing.
It's already pretty popular within the dev community.
What it does is it's basically like Zapier on steroids.
So it allows you to connect various of like Google Sheets with email, with like Airtable,
with like a couple of other stuff.
Super simple to use.
You have to code, but just a little bit to start using that.
But it can really save you a lot of time, especially as like a solo founder, because,
for example, you could, if you're running a block on WordPress and maybe publishing
some kind of, I don't know, like you want to have statistics about your blog posts,
then you can connect WordPress to Google Sheets, to email.
And suddenly, you hit some major milestone, you get a trigger on your email saying, hey,
you just got 100,000 views.
And then that's being written down in your Google Sheets where you monitor all your statistics.
So things like that, which would take you a lot of coding before, you can do like basically
with just a couple of clicks.
So that's like one example of the productivity tool using heavy AI, actually AI based.
Another thing, which is pure AI, and it's great to use as Lumen 5 and Synthesia.
So those are two other startups, I guess, both in more like computer vision.
So what Lumen 5 is doing is that you provide a script and by analyzing the script, you
get the whole video, for example, like an explainer video or like a sales pitch or something
like that.
And it literally takes like five minutes to create the whole video from your script.
Of course, you can modify it later on the platform and stuff like that, but it just
makes the whole process of building things much faster.
You don't have to spend money to actually build an explainer video.
Of course, still, like if you have money to actually find a professional person to do
every all the animation, do all the design, then that will be better in the end.
But if you're on budget, if you're like a solo indie hacker, and you just want to just
focus on the product, then that can save you both money and time to do that.
Synthesia, on the other hand, is automated anchors in the sense that you can create this
virtual persona who will talk from the script.
So you can just, again, like you submit your script, and then you have someone AI-generated
talk in this artificial voice for your script.
So quickly, you can have this whole staff of people saying things on camera for your
company.
Those are like small things that add up together to something much bigger, which is you can
literally automate many of the things you're doing currently by one AI startup or another,
or just like different solutions.
And that, again, drives the cost of doing startups much lower.
Yeah, I think this is so cool.
You're thinking in a way that's very different than most people are thinking, because most
people have never heard of these startups, and they don't know this exists.
And so when they go into a particular task, they don't think, well, let me first Google
this to figure out if there's an AI startup that's got this unlock.
I don't have to make this video, and AI can make the video, and I can just edit it.
Or I don't have to write this article, and AI can write this article for me, and I can
just come in and sniff some things around and add some content, and then it's done.
And it's got to be 90% of the way there, and I just do the last 10%.
And it's super cool that it's not all about just hacking things together yourself, but
it's actually just about going out and paying for somebody else's product, which is usually
pretty affordable and worth it.
But let's say you want to actually compete with some of these bigger tech companies.
Like one of the hot companies now is TikTok, obviously, and their entire main feed of all
these funny videos and these posts people are making is kind of AI-recommended.
So you don't have to follow anybody.
You don't have to subscribe to anybody.
You just go on, and they see all the videos that exist in the world, and they look at
your viewing habits and basically recommend, okay, based on how much time you spent watching
this post or which post you liked, here's what we're going to show you, here's what
you like.
And then the hacker, is it possible to build something that competes with that, or that
mimics that behavior in your app, or is that still years away?
No, no, that's not possible.
So I also won't lie about the fact that in some use cases, you won't be able to compete
with the big players because of the fact that some of those much learning models take a
lot of data that you won't have as an indie hacker, and on the other hand, it also takes
a lot of capital in terms of computing power.
So probably to do something like TikTok debt, because they recommend their system, it's
really great, really unique, you literally would like, you probably need to spend this
couple of million of dollars for the computing infrastructure, not counting in the cost of
senior data scientists, much learning engineers, and people like that around the whole thing.
So no, so definitely that's not doable by indie hackers, GPT free is also probably not
doable by any hackers because of the size of the model, but there are ways to actually
shrink it down and make it more affordable, but then you still have to be an expert in
the field to do that.
So it really depends like you oftentimes you won't be able to compete with those tech giants
by going on a head on battle who's got the better model because they will have more data,
they will have more computing power than you and they can just keep on throwing resources
at that particular problem.
But what you can do is you can be smart about it.
And by being smart, I mean, you can find this different hacks and different small things,
like for example, like generate this video by AI, because you can use this startup technology
and use technology from the other startup and then have this, it's kind of like suing
your own solution from the what's available on the market.
And with that would be much faster than any big company, because you know, like the whole
process for them is going through different decision makers, they have to design a budget
and maybe until they start doing things, it will take them a couple of months.
And in a couple of months, you have you will have a perfectly working solution, sued from
those different pieces, which are available as open source as other startups, I think
that's the biggest advantage right now for any hackers, you can be definitely much faster
than any big company.
And what do you think about the risks of AI, I mean, obviously, there's a lot in the movies
and trending discussions about artificial general intelligence, which is this idea that we're
going to create some actually intelligent machine, and it's going to be like Terminator
Judgment Day, it's going to attack us, we've got to worry about that.
But even even besides that, just the democratization of relatively dumb AI, really specific tools
that just do exactly what you tell them, is still pretty risky in my eyes, because it's
enabling people to do things they just never could do before.
So you could put out a million articles right now, which also implies that you could create
a million bots on Twitter that all look like humans and act like humans, but are really
just bots, you know, influencing a particular political opinion, etc.
This has been a problem since 2016, when people weren't even really using bots to do this,
they were paying people to do this.
But now it's in the hands of an average person who's got a few hundred bucks to generate
this kind of content.
What do you think this means for the world?
Should people be worried?
Or is it really an overblown fear?
Yeah, I think it's a valid question.
And we should fear, but we also should think about solutions.
Because in the end, AI is just a tool.
And it's like a knife that you can use to cut vegetables or kill a person.
So ideally, you would have some kind of regulations which would limit how AI can be used in those
cases, or at least some tools to prevent those especially harmful behaviors.
So I think especially Twitter and other social medias are getting better with catching bad
players, like catching people who actually want to spread misinformation, or like buy
political ads.
But on the other hand, it's not going fast enough, so that it won't catch everyone.
And especially bad players who have more budget, more capital to hire people to do really bad
things, they can still do that.
So I wouldn't be scared of average people doing really bad stuff for fun or whatever
is the reason.
But still, organized groups of people with access to capital and talent can do really
bad things.
And they can do even worse things than before.
So that's probably problematic.
I mean, there was this great documentary on Netflix recently, The Social Dilemma, which
touched upon the subject.
But I think it's just the beginning of how we treat social media and general direction.
Because I think we're still early in the process, even when it comes to the internet and how
we deal with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media.
How can we get all of these things so that we don't lose all our time watching something
on Netflix, YouTube, scrolling through different social media feeds?
How do we limit those things?
Because I think that's the bigger discussion.
Because in order to limit and prevent the harmful behaviors and harmful usage of AI,
you have to limit how we spend time with electronics, internet.
Yeah, I think The Social Dilemma in particular was fascinating because there's this question
of, okay, what about bad actors who use these huge platforms and who might use AI to influence
public opinion on these platforms?
But then there's the flip side.
What about the platforms themselves?
Is it stopping Facebook itself from using artificial intelligence to radicalize people,
maybe even unintentionally?
Or to waste tons of people's time getting them to scroll feeds and look at ads?
And then on top of that, you've got this present unbundling of these bigger social networks,
where we're seeing the rise of smaller communities.
So ND hackers is an example, but there's all sorts of communities that aren't necessarily
run by these huge companies that are run by people who have smaller budgets.
And as more and more people move to these communities, what kind of difference do they
have against bad actors?
If a country decided they wanted to build a ton of AI to flood all these smaller communities
with all sorts of fake opinions and posts, do these companies have the resources to build
a counter AI?
So I think it's a pretty fascinating problem and in some sense, almost seems like sci-fi,
but I think it'll be the reality in another year or two probably.
Yeah, I think it's super interesting what you just said about the smaller communities
because I hadn't thought about it this way, meaning that there's a lot of discussion about
how Facebook is bad, like we should go out and maybe go to something smaller.
But then on the other hand, Facebook gives you also the protection, like it harnesses
your data and of course, it tries to monetize you because your data is valuable and it tries
to monetize on your actions.
But on the other hand, it also gives you protection from really bad actors, from like spamming
behaviors and stuff like that to the extent that you can.
But with smaller communities, you don't have this protection at all.
Yeah, so we'll see what happens there.
This is all fascinating stuff and I would love to have you back on the show at some
point in the future to give us an update on the state of AI and how indie hackers can
take advantage of it.
But for now, you've gone through a lot of stuff.
You started a few companies that failed, you started a few companies that seem to really
be taken off.
What's your advice for other indie hackers who are listening in, who are trying to just
figure out how to get ahead, come up with ideas and start their own profitable internet
business?
So I think that the crucial thing is persistence and passion for what you're doing.
So those two things.
So basically, you should work on something which gives you a lot of fun, a lot of pleasure
on a daily basis, because probably you'll be grinding a lot.
And even if things fail, and if you lose money, time, then you should still have pleasure
and fun working on a particular project.
And then take your time.
I mean, it takes really a lot of time to do great things and build great products.
I love that combination of persistence and passion, because I think if you're passionate
about something, but you're not persistent, you're just going to try one idea, and it's
going to be your passion project, and when it fails, that's going to be it.
But the reality is, if you're going to go passion first, it might take you several shots
because you're really focusing on what you like, but you also need to do what the market
likes.
And so you might need to keep doing it until you find the one that works.
And I've talked to so many founders who operated that way.
Peter Levels, with his 12 stars in 12 months, he was always working on cool things that
he liked, but it took him a bunch of months to find one that actually hit it off.
And he wasn't afraid to sort of cut the cord on one, but he was persistent and he kept
going with another.
He is French Snyder, who always works on little passion projects that he thinks are interesting.
And guess what?
A lot of times, the rest of the world doesn't care.
They don't think it's interesting, but because he's combining that passion with also persistence
and releasing lots of different things, eventually he gets on something that works, and he's
in this great spot where he gets to work on something that he both loves and that the
world loves and is willing to pay for, just like you are.
So I think that's great advice.
Thank you.
No, I really think persistence is key here, because as you said, if you have just passion,
it's not enough to actually build anything against the attraction.
All right, Premik, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thanks for enlightening us to the state of AI and what's going on and what's possible,
really, for people to do.
Can you let listeners know where they can go to find out more about what you're up to
at Contentize and PetaCrunch and anything else you might have going on?
Yeah, so thank you, Rachel.
That was really a pleasure.
And to find me, either you can go on LinkedIn and find me there, or you can go on Medium
and find more articles there.
I think it's medium at p.hojetski, p.hojetski, so that's my surname, or you can just Google
me and find all the resources there, I guess.
All right.
Thanks again.
Thank you very much.
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Thank you very much for listening.
And as always, I will see you next time.