What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process.
And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and
the strategies they're taking advantage of, so the rest of us can do the same.
Kyle Golly, welcome to the IndieHackers podcast.
You're the founder of a company called Gravity.
I think you are a solo founder, and your company is bootstrapped, correct?
Yep, that's correct.
And you've been, I think, growing your revenue at a pretty significant rate.
You've been posting on IndieHackers about how you threw extra revenue during COVID.
So we're going to get into that story, but first, I'm going to ask you to do something
challenging.
I'm going to ask you to describe what Gravity does in a way where even people who aren't
software engineers might understand it, because this is a very, you know, business that's
very targeted at programmers.
Yeah, and this is where I have a benefit because I can talk very technical to people that may
understand it.
But the non-technical pitch is, high health finders and software companies save around
three months of development time whenever they're building their software as a service
web application.
I love that description because it's easy to understand as a layperson because you're
just talking about benefits.
You're like, who is this for?
Software engineers and web developers, you know, what is the benefit?
I helped them save 30 months of time.
But if you're describing it to like your actual customers, if I go to your website, use gravity.app.
It's build a Node.js and react to SaaS app, set up a new SaaS product, you know, using
other boilerplate.
You know, it's very specific, which is probably what it should be because like your customers
actually know what you're doing, but like anyone else who's not your customer is like,
what the hell does any of this even mean?
Yeah.
I was actually doing a webinar earlier today and they weren't techy and they were like
they were reading the description on it and they were like, what is this, SaaS, how did
I pronounce it?
SaaS, like sassy.
Yeah.
What is SaaS?
That's pretty funny.
Well, it's going really well.
Are you transparent at all with your revenue numbers?
Have you shared, you know, bar park estimates or what they actually are?
I used to.
I used to share them on IndieHackers.
I've kind of removed it recently because I've had some issues with copycats.
Right.
I've been a little bit less transparent than I used to be, but usually doing around 10,
about 8 to 10k a month.
Yeah.
There's always a point I think where some companies will be transparent and then decide,
I'm pulling the plug on this.
It's getting to be substantial enough where I don't want to clue my competitors into how
successful I am.
And in a way, that's like almost a telltale sign that you are successful.
It's like, wait, what's, this guy used to share his revenue, what happened?
He must be crushing it.
But also it probably takes you off the map a little bit because people are so attracted
to seeing these numbers.
You know, if you do like an AMA, for example, on IndieHackers, you say like, I'm Kyle Golly.
I'm making, you know, XYZ dollars a year or a month.
People will click on that way more than they'll click on something that doesn't have the revenue
numbers.
And so it's like a sort of double-edged sword where you're less likely to get competitors,
but you're also less likely to get, you know, customers or fans or, you know, compatriots
who want to basically help commiserate with you and talk to you and collaborate with you.
I did notice that like, as gravity got better known, and I was putting out, I was being
like completely transparent about all this stuff.
People were getting in touch in my web chat going, I'm going to copy this.
And then I've actually had some incidents recently where people are like, I've copied
the product.
They've even ripped off like chunks of the landing page trying to replicate the SEO strategy
that I'm using.
So I'm a lot more wary now about what I'm putting out there.
That's super sketch.
It's weird that people do this.
I mean, maybe it's not weird.
People are trying to succeed.
They have a huge financial incentive.
They see exactly how much money you're making, like, that would change my life.
And then they see kind of the facade of what you're doing.
They look at your website, they look at your SEO strategy, they don't see what's going
on behind the scenes, but they see what's kind of the outer layer of what you're doing.
And then they assume that's all that you're doing.
And they say, oh, if I do that, I'll also make $10,000 a month.
And so they copy it.
And they copy your design, they copy the color schemes, and they copy the language you use.
And as far as I've seen, 99 times out of 100, it doesn't go anywhere.
Because people who aren't imaginative enough or aren't strategic enough to do anything
more than copy the outer layers usually don't succeed.
But it's still pretty scary as the person who spent all that time creating all the stuff
in the first place to see somebody else try to get what you've got.
Yeah.
The product part, I'm not so worried about, but it's the fact that this person has copied
and pasted all the metadata from my HTML.
They've copied, they've basically copied my FAQs, copied chunks of my license.
You can do a...
There's an HTML tag called the canonical URL.
And what's funny is it'll kind of tell Google, hey, this page is not only one of many pages,
but it's the main page.
So if anybody ever copies this page and they have this tag, this is the actual page that
matters.
Don't rank the other pages.
And often copycats aren't sophisticated enough not to copy that.
So they'll put in their code like the same canonical URL that points back to your website
and not know that they're giving you the credit because they're just like copy pasting everything.
It's pretty funny.
It's smart.
So let's talk about your journey to get to where you've gotten because not very many
solo indie hackers get here.
It's like something to be celebrated I think if you can get to the point where you're making
a living.
Are you full time on this?
Yeah.
I started this journey around eight years ago now.
So I started another company, it was called Get Invited, that was an online event ticketing
platform.
Raised Venture Capital, it was basically doing a complete opposite to what I'm doing now.
Raised Venture Capital had hired a team.
I was spending a lot of time travelling and then trying to grow really quickly.
What happened was I had this bacteria living in my stomach, but the doctor took years for
it to be diagnosed.
This bacteria doesn't respond well to stress.
So I was getting mega stressed like dealing with investors and investment around it falling
through.
There was one point where I had to let like half of the team go and I was relatively young
and new to this.
The stress was just like compounding, compounding, compounding.
And then one day I actually was making my lunch and I started to vomit this black stuff.
So I googled it, it was like vomit and black stuff and it was like, yeah, this is a medical
emergency.
You've got to urge medical attention.
So I went to the hospital, I remember just lying in the hospital bed and everything just
went completely white.
And then I woke up and I had all these like the ECG of me and all these tubes in my arms.
My mum was like standing at the end of the bed just looking completely horrified.
And then I remember just lying there that night thinking, I'm either going to die or
something is like seriously wrong with me and like my life is going to change forever.
And I remember thinking I've just been like investing all of my energy and time into trying
to build this big company.
I haven't really been doing any of the other things that I want to do, I haven't been travelling.
So I promised myself then if I got better, I would go and do some travelling and I would
try and find a better work-life balance.
And that brought me to Thailand.
So like I came to Thailand for a month.
And then, bizarrely, I met this guy who actually sat down beside me in a co-working space and
he used to go to my high school back home.
So as I was leaving high school, he was starting high school and I asked him like, what are
you doing?
He was like, he used to work for a startup in Belfast and I didn't like it.
So I quit my job, moved to Chiang Mai, Thailand and become a digital nomad.
And I was like, what's that?
And he was like, oh, you just travel around all those different countries and build your
business.
So I found this idea really interesting.
So I went back home for Christmas and I booked a one-way ticket to Thailand and then I spent
the whole year just travelling around Thailand, Vietnam, Bali, Japan.
But I was completely lost because at this company that had raised this money for and
I was trying to grow it, I kind of realised that that's not the life that I wanted.
I wanted to be travelling around, I wanted to have a lot of freedom.
And then two years ago, I was in a co-working space and I knew I wanted to start another
product.
I wanted to build another SaaS product and I wanted to do it myself and I knew that the
process of like spinning up a new product, it was really time consuming and I knew I
would have to spin up a few different products, try out a few things to get it right.
So I basically built this template that had like authentication, Stripe payments, like
a user interface.
And the idea was I could spin something out really quickly and then it would save me a
lot of time.
And then I just showed it to this guy who was sitting in front of me in the co-working
space and he was like, what is this?
I was like, oh, this is just like a sweet like crappy template thing that I've made
to make my life easier.
And he was like, and this is amazing.
People will pay for this.
And I was like, no, the one developers will build everything themselves.
And he goes, no, no, there's a couple of like people doing like they've got like a Ruby
on Rails version, like I've never seen modern JavaScript.
And he was like, you should go on the indie hackers and try and sell this.
And I was like, what's indie hackers?
Well, it's this community of people that are just building their own products.
You know, they're not raising venture capital, they're just trying to do everything themselves.
And I was like, this sounds like exactly like what I want to do.
And then I think I went on, made a few posts, then I talked about this boilerplate that
I was making.
And then I sold three copies by indie hackers in the first month.
And then I was like, okay.
Very cool.
Where's my cut?
I don't want to cut this revenue.
No, I'm just kidding.
This is such a cool story.
So let's go to the beginning of it.
You're lying on your potentially your deathbed, right?
You don't even know what's going to happen to you when you're trying to think about all
the different things in your life that like you wish you could have done.
How long does that feeling last?
Because I've had like a similar experience where I was like, I don't really know if I'm
going to survive this.
And it was very striking at the time, you know, it was like, well, like, what do I want
to do?
How do I want to live the rest of my life?
And that wasn't that long ago.
That was like a few months ago.
And now I've completely forgotten about it.
And I'm back into my sort of normal habits, doing what I would do if I'd never had that
experience.
What's it been like for you?
I mean, it completely changed my life.
So like, I mean, it changed how my approach to business changed my whole lifestyle.
So like, I've been spending the last few years spent most of my time traveling or living
in Thailand.
I completely changed my diet, like because I had problems in my stomach, I went plant
based.
I've stuck to that for five years now.
So it's like it basically like it changed every aspect of my life.
And it still, it still affects me every day.
Like sometimes if I find myself like slipping into like a negative thought pattern, I always
bring myself back to like, I was sick for like five years and I was in a lot of pain.
I was vomit.
And every day before this all like came to a head in hospital, I lost my like four top
teeth.
They basically just disintegrated because I was puking so much.
So anytime I like feel myself getting into like a negative thought pattern, I like just
bring myself back to this time.
It was like, think of all the suffering and like that night in hospital, we just thought
like everything was going to end.
It's crazy that like a lot of these changes have lasted for you because they are such
firm commitments like buying a one way ticket to Thailand.
Like that's a thing where you make that decision upfront and you buy the ticket and you get
on a plane and you fly away and then you don't have to like keep making that decision again
every single day, right?
You're in Thailand now like you're living this lifestyle and it's like the decision
has been made versus other types of decisions that you make like dietary decisions.
You do have to make that decision every single day.
Like every single day you have to decide what am I going to eat?
And those seem to be the hardest kinds of lifestyle changes to maintain.
But I think in your sort of corner, you have like this obviously really horrible traumatic
experience that you went through, I can kind of serve as a constant reminder.
And so even if you're like, I don't know if I want to eat like more plants again today,
like that steak looks pretty good.
You can remember like, well, I don't also want to be like vomiting it in the hospital.
To be honest, I think for most people, the idea of traveling around the world trying
to build a business, it sounds pretty stressful.
It's expensive to travel.
It is full of uncertainty to build a business.
Maybe let's talk about the finances of that.
How did you how did you finance moving to Thailand and traveling the world for years
while trying to build an online business?
It's not actually that expensive to live here like you can probably have like a very luxurious
lifestyle in Thailand for like $1,500 a month.
Yeah.
I've heard stories of people living in Bali for like $20, $30 a day.
And that's everything.
That's like housing, food, Wi-Fi, like transportation, which is absolutely nuts to me because it's
like I've lived in San Francisco for 10 years in Seattle for another year.
It's like $20 an hour to survive here.
Yeah.
Like if you're trying to bootstrap in San Francisco, you've either got like your runway
is going to be so short like if you just moved to say Bali or Thailand, Vietnam, you're going
to extend that runway by like 10 or 20X.
Exactly.
So I guess it's kind of an ideal, stressless way to be an anti-hacker if you can combine
it with being a digital nomad.
But then there are other stresses of travel.
So for example, I grew up in Atlanta, I was there until I was 18.
Like most of my family is in the southeast, all of my friends up to that point lived there.
And then I lived in Boston for five years and I went to SF for 10 years.
And like every time I've moved, it's been kind of like a clean break with the social
structures and the people that I have known there.
You know, I still keep in touch and we'll see each other every so often, but it's like
I don't have to form like entirely new social connections.
And I imagine if you're being a digital nomad and traveling around, it's kind of the same
thing where it's like, well, probably none of your family live in Thailand or Southeast
Asia.
So like how are you making friends?
How are you like nurturing a social life for yourself when you're in a place where you're
not connected to anybody?
It is difficult.
And the first year I was doing this, I was moving around a lot.
So I spent like two months in Bali, a couple of weeks in Vietnam.
And that was challenging.
Like it wasn't very productive because you've all that stress of like moving to a new place,
trying to find somewhere to live, trying to find the places to eat, et cetera.
Whereas now I tend to spend like most of my time in Thailand.
So I'm probably more of a digital expert than a digital nomad.
But what you notice is like if you spend a lot of time in a couple of different places,
you see the same people kind of moving around that circuit.
So making friends with local people who are constant here.
So every time I come back, I have Thai friends that they're always here, which makes it a
lot easier.
Because every time I do come back, there is a different group of people, still a few expats
that are here long term.
And I find that environment is much more productive for building a business than constantly moving
around.
I've done some traveling for like indie hackers meetups, for example, I've been to Cape Town
a couple of times.
I met a lot of the indie hackers out there and Toronto and the UK and all over the States.
And it is cool when you get familiar with the place and like, oh, here's all the places
to eat.
Here's the part of Thailand I want to stay in.
So when you come back the second or the third time, you're not going through this whole
process of like spending eight hours a day just trying to figure out like how to live.
And you can just like immediately set up shop.
And if you need to work on something, just like start working.
So tell me about this process of coming up the idea for gravity.
You mentioned that you're sort of working on I think something to make yourself faster
or to potentially just like help improve development speed.
And then somebody told you like, hey, this could be something people would pay for.
Whenever I started this, I had no vision for this being like a business or any kind of
commercial product.
I just wanted to create a boiler pit that made my own process of like shipping products
faster because I just didn't want to be wasting a lot of time on every project, like setting
up payments, authentication or all the kind of boring stuff that the customers don't actually
care about.
I just wanted to like deploy the boiler pit and then spend like a month or two building
like core MVP features.
So it was like a classic case of like, I was just trying to scratch my image and then it
just had this serendipitous conversation with this guy who pointed out that, yeah, people
will pay for this.
And my initial assessment was like, no, developers will, they will spend the three months building
the stuff themselves and a lot of them do, to be fair.
But I think like you've got this like intersection of like developers and entrepreneurs on indie
hackers that can see the value of, yeah, I could spend three months building this, but
like it's a huge waste of my time, you know, I should just buy this off the shelf and spend
those three months building the core features that the customers are going to pay for.
And I think that, that sort of fear you have that like, no one's going to pay for this
because they can build it themselves is number one, super common.
And number two, as you pointed out, like half true, it's not true that nobody will pay for
it, but it is true that a lot of developers will, will talk about the fact that they're
going to build this themselves or already are building something like this for themselves.
And it's easy to get discouraged by that.
It's very easy to like start building something and look out and see like, Oh, a bunch of
other people have already built something like this.
And even my ideal customer who hasn't started using this is just telling me they're going
to, you know, use it on it, like build it on their own, like, why should I even do this
at all?
Right.
And it turns out that most of the businesses that I talked to that are successful persist
despite that, you know, like McDonald's is a successful hamburger chain, despite existing
in the world where like people can make hamburgers at home and there are already other stores
that were selling hamburgers.
And it turns out that that's kind of true on the web as well for a large variety of
products, at least any products like our social networks or sort of winner take all markets
where network effects make it so that there should really only be one winner.
Will you apply that thinking to anything?
It doesn't make sense.
Like you could say, well, people would just build their own email service provider or
people would just build their own like payment processor.
The smart people don't want, they want to build as little as possible.
And then they want to buy as much as they can or outsource as much of it as possible.
Yeah, exactly.
And this is the entire beauty of software is that essentially, it's extremely scalable.
So it might take me three months to build my own version of gravity, or it might take
you three months to build a version of gravity that I can use.
But then I can pay you a relatively small amount for it, because you can just copy the
style like the software infinitely, right?
So if you want to build like, I don't know, a burger chain, you got to make a hamburger
for every person who wants to sell a hamburger to you, you build internet software, a SaaS
business, like you don't have to do that.
So you can sell it for much cheaper than it was for you to develop over three months,
which means that like, it's actually a steal for me to buy it from you rather than spending
those three months on it.
And so I think the essential sort of calculus of people are getting wrong when they're afraid
that people will build things on their own is they're just not valuing their time enough.
And they're not valuing other people's time enough.
And they're sort of underestimating how much people are willing to pay five or $10 a month,
you know, okay, I'll pay like, yeah, $15 or $35 or whatever it is, rather than spending
three months of my life building something that someone else can build.
It's kind of a no brainer.
And especially if you're selling to our developers, it's like, you can almost look at time and
money is like somewhat interchangeable.
A lot of people who don't have time will spend money to gain time.
And a lot of people who don't have money will spend a lot of time to get more money.
And like, you're talking to developers, like software engineers, like they have money for
the most part, they're very highly paid professionals, they're just short on time.
And so they will exchange that money for time.
It's one of the things that I think a lot of people don't think about when they're becoming
founders.
So not only will your customers do this, but a lot of founders will do this as well, where
they're trying to work on a side project.
And they're like, I just don't have time, you know, like, I'm trying to build this thing
on the side of my full time job, and I've got a family, and I've got responsibilities
and friends and hobbies, like, how do I do this?
And some of the smartest indie hackers I've talked to, rather than starting a business
from scratch, will be like, well, I've got tens of thousands of dollars saved up, like,
why don't I just buy a business, get a huge head start, and work on that, trade in a little
bit of money to gain yourself a ton of time if time is the resource that you're short
on.
And I think a lot of people also underestimate, like, what exactly they need to do to even
just build, like, the plumbing code for a site, so, like, gravity has about 15,000 lines
of code to just do the most basic stuff, like login forms.
But I know everyone thinks, oh, I can build a login form in, like, two hours, but whenever
you actually, like, think about all the security features and the things to do properly, it's
actually a huge amount of work.
And then the same thing with payments, the same thing with user interface, and all these
different, like, features that everybody really cares about, or actually, or the customers
don't care about, are actually a huge amount of work to do properly.
And then I think people maybe start it and then realize, wow, yeah, this is not going
to take me, like, two days to do, this is going to take me, like, three months.
Right.
Because there's so many other hats that you have to wear as a founder.
And so if you can minimize the code part of things, then you cannot actually spend time
marketing and selling your app, and, like, that kind of stuff is super important.
You clearly did that with gravity.
I'm looking back on your NdHackers product page, you've got, like, a timeline of all
your different updates.
And if I go all the way back to, like, January 2019, you posted an update talking about how
you just crossed the 30 user mark today, so you finally had 30 users, and then people
were commenting and asking, like, how did you find, how did you find these first users?
And you said, oh, you know, 50-50 NdHackers and SEO at the beginning, now it's more like
40% NdHackers, 40% SEO, and 20% ad campaigns that you were running.
So walk me through, like, your mindset back in the day.
Like, how exactly were you using NdHackers to find customers?
How were you using SEO to find customers, and how did you end up using advertising to
find customers?
So, with NdHackers, I was basically just posting product updates, and then I was looking for
conversations where people were talking about boilerplates.
The thing I was so surprised to learn was, like, if you go onto Reddit, and you look
for these topics that you're like, hey, I'm working on something that people just don't
want to know, but on NdHackers, people are open to, especially, like, you're basically
trying to sell them in a way, but I think because you're going to get them something
that they can see the value of straight away, they're much more open to it.
And I think there's, like, a good sense of, like, camaraderie in the Nd community where
people do want to buy each other's products, and they want to help each other out.
So, it was a mixture of, like, just getting involved in a lot of discussions, not just
discussions about boilerplates.
Like, I was making sure that I'm going to NdHackers every day, and I'm answering a couple of questions
about different things, and then keeping the product page updated, making sure I'm always
posting milestones, and then posting those milestones on Twitter, and promoting all those
achievements.
With SAO, it's kind of a happy accident, because nobody else was building a new JS SaaS boilerplate.
There were a couple of competitors that were doing Ruby on Rails stuff, but I wasn't competing
with them in search engines, so I was able to get up to number one relatively easy by
just picking the right keywords.
The best channels for me have been NdHackers, SAO, and also Twitter now, because I've been
much more active on Twitter in the last year, so I do get sales via Twitter now.
Have you thought about hiring?
Have you thought about bringing people on to help you out, or is it only just paying
contractors and stuff to help you out?
I've thought about it.
Like, in my last company, I had two co-founders, and we hired people.
My issue is, I do like doing everything myself, and I've got at the point that I'm extremely
happy with by myself, and the freedom that comes with being a solo entrepreneur is really
appealing to me, so I know that maybe six years ago, things were a bit different, because
we had a physical office, everyone came to the office every day.
That's not going to be the case now, because a lot of companies are open to remote work,
but I still find that there's a sense of freedom with being a solo opener.
Do you feel like in a way that you want to build a team of people around you eventually?
It's one thing to hire out of necessity and say, oh, I should hire, because it's a good
skill to have, and it will help me grow, but it's another to hire out of desire, this feeling.
You know what?
I would really like to build a team of people to work with me and to have a social lifestyle
built into my business.
Does that come into play at all?
I mean, some days, I do think it would be nice to have a team of people that you should
advance your ideas with, but I know from experience, I'm terrible at managing people, so I just
try and stay away from them.
What I find is a good replacement is just being active in the community and making friends
with other entrepreneurs, and then just picking up on them and bouncing ideas around.
I think whatever I'm managing people, I get very stressed out, and I don't like confrontation,
don't like dealing with issues, so I'm just working on my own.
I'm working with contractors because the dynamic is always very different to an employee, means
my stress levels are usually very low.
That's actually a good point.
I'm an anti-hacker and one sense is a way to, I guess, create a business that allows
you to surround yourself with people that you want, but in another sense, it's a way
to create a business that prevents you from having to deal with the burden of being surrounded
by people in a capacity that you don't want, so then you can get your social interaction
and make friends elsewhere.
Yeah.
I think because I've done both, now that I'm super happy with Crowd3 because I'm actually
back working on the product, whereas my last business, I started working on the product,
and then I just worked on spreadsheets and dealing with investors.
Right.
Now, I feel like I've actually come back to doing what I love, which is like sitting thinking
of a division for the product and then executing the development, the design, and I also enjoyed
some of the marketing as well.
You also had a sense, before you did any of this, basically working in venture capital,
which I think is ironic because you are now building a bootstrapped indie startup.
Have you ever been tempted to, quote unquote, go big, to raise a bunch of money and try
to see if you could take gravity to venture scale rather than indie hacker scale?
No.
Because I've had that experience, at some point in the future, I may start something
else and I may raise money and I may try and go big with it, but from experience, that
experience of trying to go big or go home, that's what stressed me.
I felt that I never really had a sense of satisfaction with my work.
It was always like, we've got to shoot for this milestone and then when you achieve it,
then the next bigger milestone comes along.
Whereas what I'm enjoying now is the very deep work that I'm doing on the product, thinking
about other products that I can add, other things.
I'm very involved in the work.
Whereas I felt that with venture capital, it was just moved.
Everything was just moving so fast, I didn't really enjoy it.
But who knows?
Maybe after this experience, I want to do it again and I'll do it differently.
It's pretty wise to be able to look at what you were doing and – because there's two
things to get caught up in.
One of them is like, every time we hit a milestone, we've got to go bigger and go harder and
that's not very satisfying.
But then the other part of it that I think is very tragic to lots of people is like,
I'm doing this huge thing and setting these huge, audacious, ambitious goals and there's
something that's satisfying about that.
And to not get so caught up in that latter part, which is kind of like external validation,
people will praise me for achieving this huge goal.
And to allow yourself to look at the day to day, which is like, I don't like the feeling
of always having some bigger goal that I always have to hit and never being able to be satisfied.
I think this is very wise and I like that having this experience in VC catapulted you
into being an indie hacker.
Before you even knew what indie hackers was, very cool.
Well, what's your goal with gravity?
You don't necessarily want to build a big team, you don't want to raise venture capital.
You're sort of cranking out code and building features and working on your marketing to
grow the app.
What kind of life do you envision for yourself?
I'm pretty happy with the life that I have right now because I'm able to travel, live
anywhere I want, do whatever I want.
I have a lot of freedom with the business I can choose when I want to work where I want
to work.
I'm very happy with what I'm working on.
I suppose the challenges for me are like, how do I grow the business?
So I'm looking at other products, so I built a product called Firelab, which is an automated
user testing product.
So my strategy is to build more of these satellite products around the main boilerplate to provide
other tools for people to solve different problems because testing is another thing
that I find.
Indie hackers, they just don't want to spend the time writing tests or setting up tests
because it's always just low down on the priority list.
So I'm building Firelab so that they can just like they can just set up a test in a briser
in like a couple of minutes and then forget about it and then the test will just like
continually run.
I like the idea that you've set up your life in such a way where you can like keep building
new things.
Like I talked to Saba, the founder of a company called Veed earlier this year and Veed is
like video editing software but then you look at like the other apps that they've like bought
or that they're building and it's like they're doing media recording software and podcast
recording software and a screen recorder and a webcam recorder and like all sorts of like
different tools and things like for adding effects to videos that aren't necessarily
part of their core product.
But it's kind of fun to work on because it's like they've created a business where they
don't have to just work on one thing and only one thing for the rest of their life.
And like I kind of have the same thing with Indie hackers where it's like, oh, I can build
a job board or a co-founder dating tool or something else and you got the same thing
with what you're working on.
So there's not only all the freedom that you mentioned and the lack of stress but like
the infinite variability to keep building and working on what you're doing and know
that it all kind of contributes to the same thing.
You've been through quite a lot with this journey.
Obviously it started off in like sort of a scary traumatic place but now you've gotten
to this point where you have all these great benefits and you're sort of a self-sufficient
project building machine.
What do you think other Indie hackers can take away from your journey?
A lot of people are trying to get to where you are.
They have no idea what to work on or maybe they're working on something and it's not
really seeing very much traction.
What advice would you have for them?
The mistake I always used to make was the kind of classic like, you know, try to find
this thing moment of divine inspiration for an idea to work on and then go and sing.
And I've done this even recently.
They go and sing like months into building something.
I know with Gravity I just kind of haphazardly stumbles across this idea about solving my
own problem but now I have a very structured approach to things.
So I've just read Arthur's book Audience First which is awesome and like I'm really
into this process of like finding the audience and then trying to find the problems.
And I did experiment with some stuff a few years ago.
I think before I built Gravity I was just looking for something to build and I was going
on to Reddit and I was just going to all these random subreddits and asking people what their
problems were.
So I find I was in like a subreddit for firefighters asking them like what problems do you have
and they were like actually managing our inventory is like a huge problem.
It takes hours every day and it's all done on paper and I was like this is right for
a SaaS product.
I was like what if there was a software product that just did it all for you?
They were like that was amazing but with no budget.
So I was just like okay.
But I think just that process of like just going into communities and talking to people,
even talking to people that you would never normally talk to like firefighters and just
trying to find out what problems they have.
I think once you find the problem that's painful, the customer has enough money to pay your
reasonable fee for it.
I don't want to say the rest is easy but the rest tends to fall into place because I've
built like 10 products in my career and like 80% of them have failed.
But the thing that I've noticed about the two that have been successful is like they
got traction early on.
There was a very clear value proposition and people were prepared to park with cash very
quickly.
So you just get into that point where people give you some money as early as possible.
Once you figure that part out and you know you're solving a valuable problem, the rest
tends to fall into place much easier.
Yeah.
I love that because that's like the core thing you need to get right and you can get everything
else right.
You can get like an amazing logo and just have like the best marketing strategy in the
world and a really well-designed website and it's like a bulletproof product that's been
like tested and coded perfectly well but like if you don't have a customer who has got a
burning problem and they don't have the money to pay you to solve it, then like nothing's
going to work.
And if you do have that, somehow even if everything else is broken, your business will make money
and like people will say yes and you ask them to buy your things.
So I think that's the best place to start and it's not surprising to me that you ended
up selling tools to developers, especially indie hackers who are motivated to buy something
because they understand how buying your tool will save them time and help them make money
on the journey to make their own indie hacking business.
Yeah.
The point you just said about the opposite being true is like whenever like the first
version of Gravity was terrible, it didn't have any of the features that it has now.
The code was a lot of it was rushed to just get it out there and test it but bizarrely,
developers didn't care.
Like the code still worked and it was it was robust.
It just wasn't as elegant as it is now and I was like, oh no, they're going to be put
off but they weren't.
You know, they were just like this solves the problem.
I'll tidy the code up myself and then eventually like once I got a little bit of traction,
I fixed all those problems and then just give them a update.
And there's like this concept of the early adopter like the visionaries like these are
the people, the customers who are just so ambitious that they can look at a pile of
trash and figure out like, oh, how can I use this to get ahead of everybody else?
You know, or they can look at a brand new app, you know, they can look at gravity when
it's like its earliest alpha version and it barely works and they're like, well, no one
else is using this.
Like I'm willing to deal with the rough edges to get ahead.
And if you can find those people, you don't have to make something that's super polished
or super nice.
You can do that later and focus on like these visionary customers first.
Well, listen, Kyle, I think your journey is an inspiring one.
I love talking to any hackers like you who essentially are just living the dream and
not making a big deal out of it.
You know, you're not trying to be on the front page of TechCrunch telling everybody what's
going on and just sort of traveling the world and building cool stuff.
Hopefully I can check in with you again on the show another few years or months and see
where you're at.
But in the meantime, thanks a lot for coming on the show.
And can you tell listeners where they can go to find out more about what you're working
on?
Thank you very much for having me.
If anyone wants to find out more, I'm most active on Twitter.
So my username is just my full name, Kyle Golly, G-A-W-L-E-Y.
If you'd like to find out more about gravity, it's usegravity.app.
I also have a blog on there where I do mostly talk about building SaaS products.
Cool.
Thanks so much, Kyle.
We'll see you next time.