What's up, everyone?
This is Cortland from ndhackers.com and today I've got Clifford Orvek on the show.
He's the founder of Tambu and the author of a very popular series of posts on Medium entitled
The Epic Guide to Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup from Scratch by Yourself.
Today instead of doing a one-sided interview, I'm going to mix it up a little bit and we're
going to be doing more of a two-sided free-flowing discussion.
Our goal is to talk about things from a beginner perspective, so if you haven't started an
online business or maybe you only recently started making money online, then we're going
to talk about things like why you should take the plunge, what the trade-offs are, what
kinds of knowledge and skills it's important to develop early on, what kind of pitfalls
you should avoid, and stuff like that.
I'm pretty excited to see how this format works out and without further ado, we should
just jump right into it.
Clifford Orvek, how are you doing?
Doing great.
How about you?
I'm fine.
So let's start with the question of why should anybody try to independently make money online?
That's a fun one.
So when you say independently, you mean just by themselves?
Not necessarily.
So let me zoom out and look at the status quo.
If you are, let's say, a software engineer working for a traditional software engineering
company, then who is your customer?
It's not actually the users who are using the software that you build.
It's the company that you work for.
They're paying you a salary and return for a lease on your time and your skills.
And as a result of that, they care a great deal about how you use your time and your
skills, right?
They care about what tools you use.
They care about who you work with and how you get the job done.
They care about how many hours you work.
They care about what location you work from, all that stuff, because that's what they're
paying you for.
Alternatively, if you are making money independently, at least in the way that I'm using it, then
instead of selling your time to a company or an employer, you are trying to create something
of value and sell that directly to the users themselves.
So the question is, why go this route instead of getting a job?
That is a great question.
Having a job is a great way to secure steady income.
So if that's something that's important to you, having a job is a great way of doing
that.
The downside to working a job is, it might sound a little cynical, but you're basically
owned, right?
They tell you when to show up, what you can and cannot do.
It's someone else that's going to determine how far you advance in your career or within
the company and what your pay will ultimately be.
Again, it's a trade-off.
If financial security is important, having a job is a good thing.
So there's actually some steps in between having just a regular job and going all the
way of going independent online.
One of them would be doing consulting or contract work or freelancing or whatever the cool term
is nowadays.
That's a little bit closer towards the independent route, but it gives you a little bit more
of the financial security in terms of you're still working for a company or maybe a handful
of companies that are paying you for your time to help them do something that they're
trying to achieve.
That's also a good way of doing it.
There's a little more risk involved because if you can't find a client, you're not going
to get paid, or if a client decides all of a sudden to drop you or your services, then
you're scrambling, trying to figure that out.
But all those options there, you're tying your income to your time.
So there is a theoretical glass ceiling that you can only work so many hours in a day.
Even if you optimize for 24 hours a day, if you could pull that off and be able to bill
for every one of those, your income is going to be tied to your ability to work hours.
Not only that, let's say that you're super efficient, you're still going to be subject
to market rates.
So if the market rate for whatever skill set you have is X, chances are you're going to
be somewhere in that neighborhood.
There's really no economies of scale that you can really get out of that type of thing.
Again, it's a great trade off if you need the security and the consistent revenue, but
it can be limiting.
So if you go to the other side where you start to go independent, the allure I think for
most people is getting control of their time back.
So if I don't want to wake up at six in the morning and go have an hour commute to get
to work and then stay there for eight, 10 hours, hour commute back home and all this,
that's usually what a lot of people want to jump on is I want my time back.
It doesn't really work that way, but that's what a lot of people want.
The other side too is basically not having that glass ceiling there.
If I can sell something and it doesn't cost a whole lot to make, so digital goods and
whatnot, like software, and I could sell that over and over and over again, well, then I
can make a lot of money that way because the theoretical limit would be the size of the
market that I could capture.
I think the final one would be there's a separation in that model.
There's a separation of time and money.
If you choose not to work an hour, in theory, you're still making money or I could work
one hour and make more money in that hour than just doing a straight exchange like you
would with an employer.
Yeah, I think that sums it up perfectly.
Especially what you're saying toward the end really hits on some of the advantages
to making money online as a developer because if you're a developer, you can write code
and code obviously can continue working even when you go to sleep, hence passive income.
If you write code that works online, then your target audience, the market of people
who could buy what you're selling is humongous.
There's billions of people on the internet.
Even if you only target a small percentage of that, that's still probably millions of
possible customers.
You stand to gain a lot more than you ever could if you're trading eight hours a day
for whatever services you can provide.
Out of all the reasons that you listed, which ones are your personal favorites for why you
decided to be an ND hacker?
For me, I'm your classic overachiever.
Working in a corporate environment, you're limited whether it's because they don't have
a need for what you'd like to do or you have people that don't want to see you succeed.
That does happen.
For me, I enjoyed consulting a lot.
I did a lot of consulting for years.
I got to work in a number of different environments.
You felt like, okay, well, I'm getting paid top dollar for my time and I get to choose
which projects I get to work on.
That was fulfilling for some time.
The thing for me is I got tired of just doing the same thing over and over again.
You get a new client or you do a new project.
It's like, okay, let's go through this process of building something again or whatnot.
I got tired of just project work after project work after project work.
It just felt like a never-ending cycle.
When I write code, I want it to achieve something and I want to be able to leverage that and
build off of that.
I found that very hard to do in consulting.
I went back into the corporate world trying to do that.
We're basically building on your successes.
I found that it doesn't really happen.
It's really hard to climb a corporate ladder all the time.
For me, being independent means that I can build off of those successes.
I can take my drive for wanting to continue to do things and I can build off of those
successes and see returns on the time that I've invested.
For me, that's the biggest compelling reason for it.
Yeah, I have similar reasons.
I think one of the coolest things about being a developer is that the code you write can
work in the background and perpetuity forever, whether you're there monitoring it or not.
Let's say you take a job at a company and you optimize their sign-up form and you increase
conversion rates by 20% or 30%.
That's a permanent change.
Things are permanently going to be better for them and yet you're only really compensated
based on the hours that you put in.
You move to another project after that or let's say you quit or you get fired or something,
then your conversation stops and it doesn't really matter how well the code you wrote
actually performs to the company, you're done, you just get paid for the time that you worked
on it.
I think what's really appealing to me is the idea of having alignment between the value
that I create and the reward that I get.
It's really hard to get that alignment unless you're working independently.
The other trade-off would be let's say you're able to automate something that's really time
consuming at a company.
Your reward for doing that is more work.
You don't buy back your time.
Let's say that there's something that would take you 10 hours a week to do and you were
able to automate that in some way.
You don't get those 10 hours back.
It's basically, well, thank you for doing that.
Here's now more stuff that we've been meaning to get to that you can do in those 10 hours
that you just saved yourself, whereas if you're on your own and you're like, hey, I saved
myself 10 hours a week, well, you can choose what to do with those 10 hours.
My second question is why software?
Why try to sell software as a service rather than any other alternative?
What are the alternatives to SaaS?
SaaS is the hot kid on the block.
The major alert from a business model perspective, at least, is sweet, sweet recurring revenue.
That's what seems to attract a lot of people, and it's software.
We all like writing software as developers, so this is a perfect fit.
I write software and I get recurring revenue, which means after I get enough people, I can
just stop working on this thing and go sit on the beach with a Mai Tai.
It doesn't really work that way.
In fact, SaaS is probably the hardest thing to actually make work from a business and
a product design perspective.
There are a lot of easier ways to make money online than going after SaaS.
They're not in all cases pure software based, and I think that that's a big reason that
you don't see as many people going after them.
For example, if you have specialized knowledge, you could create an info product and you could
sell an e-book or a course or something along those lines, something that's more of a transactional
type of sale where you're not going to have that recurring revenue component.
You're going to have a one-time purchase or maybe you could cross-sell or up-sell to get
some additional dollars out of a transaction.
For a lot of people, they're like, well, I don't want to do that because once I make
that sale, it's done and it's over.
I really want the SaaS side.
The thing is it's much easier to get someone to commit to a transactional sale than it
is to get them to commit to an ongoing payment type of plan or a subscription basis.
You see this yourself, like you're scrolling around on Amazon, you're looking for some
books or something.
Oh, here's a book that tells me about something I need to learn how to do.
It's priced appropriately.
You probably don't even think twice, you just hit buy.
The minute someone's like, oh, well, we're going to charge your credit card monthly for
this, you're like, I don't know, even if it can give you a lot of benefits.
There's a lot of objections that you have to overcome and there's a lot of value that
you have to demonstrate on a consistent basis.
Other ideas in between going all the way to the SaaS side is downloadable software.
A lot of people seem to shy away from that, but that's still a thing in a lot of industries
for a lot of different purposes.
You could call it on-premise or you could do a desktop, but again, a lot of the times
those are a single transaction, maybe with some sort of an annual support commitment.
You could go the e-commerce route if you're creative and you could open up your own storefront
or you could get into productized services.
Let's say when we're talking earlier where, hey, I'm really good at this and I'm really
efficient at this, but I can't command the hourly rate that I would that represents my
efficiency.
Well, you could turn that into a productized service.
If you're really good at slamming out landing pages and you can do them in under an hour
and you think that's unfair because when you charge someone for an hour of your time and
it would take someone else five hours to do what you did, okay, great.
Package it up and say, I will build you a landing page for this fixed price and if you
can get it done in an hour, great.
You're making up the difference on that margin there.
There's also some other things that you can do like WordPress plugins or something that's
often overlooked.
I read a stat like 25% of all websites run WordPress, but yeah, you have a lot of non-technical
people on WordPress that need to do stuff.
They're using WordPress for their business.
If you can give them something that they can buy and install and run with, that's a great
thing too.
The plugin economy is something that's often overlooked, but I would say look for things
like Shopify, WordPress, that kind of thing.
That's a nice step before getting into SaaS.
It's still software, but SaaS is actually much more difficult than a lot of people think.
Yeah, it's a lot harder to succeed with SaaS than people think, I agree.
It's easy to get confused about that because when you go on TechCrunch or you go on Indie
Hackers and you look at the businesses that are doing the most revenue, you see SaaS companies
and you get stars in your eyes.
You think, okay, that's exactly what I want to do, but oftentimes it's better to start
somewhere else.
I know Amy Hoy, for example, tells her students, hey, don't start with SaaS, start with a tiny
product first.
She even has a checklist of things that you should, milestones that you should hit before
that you're ready to start a SaaS company.
You need the requisite marketing and sales knowledge, you need the free time and the
resources to actually commit full-time to a SaaS because it's going to be more work.
I think there's a lot of wisdom there because it just helps to start in a place where you
can get some practice and get your first paycheck.
Indie Hackers itself is not a software as a service solution.
It's me interviewing people and selling space for advertising.
That's not SaaS and only continues if I keep reaching out to advertisers and doing manual
transactional sales and I would continue putting out interviews, but that doesn't mean that
I don't learn a lot from doing it and that doesn't mean that I'm not building an audience
that I can't utilize in the future if I want to start a SaaS company.
I think a lot of people jump too quickly into starting a SaaS company when they don't really
understand the alternatives and they haven't looked into the alternatives and they don't
understand the benefits of the alternative approaches.
One thing I see a lot among developers specifically is that they say, well, okay, what is the
point of me having my skills as a programmer if I don't start a software business?
If I just start a blog or an ebook or a course, then it's like my software development skills
are going to waste and that's not actually true because if you compare yourself to somebody
who's not a programmer and they try to start any of these businesses, well, there's all
sorts of ancillary tasks besides your main product that you actually have to take care
of or start any sort of business and if you're a developer, a lot of times you can provide
a website that's faster or sleeker or more reliable or you could automate all sorts of
time consuming tasks using your skills, so it's important not to underestimate the degree
to which your skills as a programmer, assuming you are a programmer, can help you even if
you don't start a software business.
Yeah, I would say on top of that, one, you have a huge cost savings, right?
So someone who's not a developer who needs to hire a developer to do any of these things
is going to have to pay for that time.
Developers aren't cheap and that can stop a lot of people from being able to go and
do an online business because they can't afford to hire a developer to build it out.
So you get a save on that, right, if you can do it yourself, right?
But I think I would add one of the biggest reasons to do something that is not SaaS to
start out is, in my opinion, most SaaSes don't fail because of the underlying technology.
I'm sure you could find me one or two examples where it couldn't scale or this or that and
the other, but I mean, most of the times if people are like, I'm going to go build a SaaS
that does this, they can go and build that, that's not really the problem.
The problem is there's a lack of business experience or there is a broken business model,
right?
Those are really the things that, or, you know, product market fit, which I'd throw
into lack of business experience.
And those are the things that usually cause failure, right?
By getting out and doing a smaller thing, like a WordPress plugin or an info product
or product service, you're getting the experience to learn how to run a business with something
that's easier to sell than a recurring subscription, right?
So you know, stepping into this, you don't know much about sales or marketing, right?
It took you years to learn how to develop and write code.
Learning how to do sales and marketing if you're not a natural at talking to people
and learning how to get people's attention and being able to convey things in a language
that they understand or shows how this is beneficial to them, that can take years to
get really good at as well.
So trying to do a SaaS where it's hard to convince people to be charged on a monthly
or an annual basis and trying to learn sales and marketing in that environment is much,
much, much harder than saying, I'm just going to sell a book or I'm just going to sell this
WordPress plugin and trying to learn about sales and marketing that way.
I think that's, to me at least, that's the hugest advantage.
And you get the feedback of, oh wow, like this worked and I sold something, right?
So if you sell a WordPress plugin for like 25 bucks, I mean seeing that $25, you know,
show up is, is, is an amazing feeling.
And even though your paycheck is probably much, much larger, that $25 is sweeter than
your paycheck.
I guarantee you when you see it, right?
And another thing that happens once you start generating revenue, even if that revenue is
coming from one time transactions is that you start becoming aware of all of these potentially
valuable business ideas that were not obvious before you actually had a business.
So because you're actually selling a product, you're probably focused entirely on how do
you generate more revenue?
How do you get more customers in the door?
How can you effectively increase pricing without driving customers away?
How can you upsell customers to different products?
How do you improve your marketing efforts and get more followers on Twitter or get a
higher search engine ranking or decreased customer churn or increased customer retention,
etc.
So solutions to every one of these problems is a business idea and depending on what you're
doing, chances are other people are doing something similar.
And if you can come up with a generalized solution to that problem, people will probably
pay you for it because it'll increase their revenue.
So I always think that the best way to come up with a good business idea is to start a
business and then identify all of the things that help you make more money.
Right, right.
And there's a lot of people if you if you go back and look at the interviews that you've
done, I'm sure there's a lot of people where that's been the case, like Nathan Barry, for
example, when he was selling his ebooks and whatnot, he did a lot of email marketing.
And you know, natural that ConvertKit would come out of that, right?
He ran a blog, he was a very popular blogger and ConvertKit targets bloggers, right?
I think when he started ConvertKit, he was actually trying to target authors, you know,
that were writing books and whatnot originally because he, you know, he had that experience.
And he's like, well, here's how I use this in what I was doing.
If I find people that are like me, you know, they'd use it.
It turned out, I guess, that that wasn't the best market for him.
And he switched over to targeting professional bloggers of which he is one as well.
So yeah, by doing some of these, you actually can find an idea that people would be willing
to pay for on a subscription basis.
Exactly.
So another concern that a lot of people have, and rightfully so, is what kind of outcomes
can they expect from going to Indie Hacker out and trying to make money online independently?
There's a lot of advice online that quite frankly makes it seem a lot easier than it
is.
But in reality, it's risky to quit your job and start a business.
It's risky to give up your free time and do all sorts of entrepreneurial things.
It's risky to change your lifestyle.
So what kind of results do you think people can expect out of making the transition to
become an Indie Hacker?
And what do you think their chances of success are realistically?
Well, definitely don't expect that you're going to launch something in a weekend, take
out some Google AdWords, and you're going to be crushing 20,000 MRR within the first
two weeks.
That doesn't happen.
And there's a reason that we talk about people who have had something like that happen, because
it's abnormal, right?
It's an anomaly.
So you're like, wow, they did this and they crushed it.
Yeah, the problem is you're not going to be able to reproduce that.
They got lucky.
They did something right.
They got in front of the right people, the right time, and they got lucky.
What you should really expect is, I mean, it's going to be slow.
It's going to be way slower than you could possibly imagine.
Getting your first customer to sign up and to actually use it and to pay is going to
be a process that I don't think most people are really prepared for, especially when you
look at how e-commerce works or any of these transactional sales, you're like, okay, I
put this up and people bought this.
SaaS really doesn't work that way.
You've got to go through a grind and you've got to fight for every single customer.
In a lot of cases, you're not going to attract people through marketing and get them to sign
up at your first pass, your marketing message, your value prop, other aspects of your marketing
site or your onboarding process or your product itself.
People are going to shy away from.
I mean, a lot of times you've got to go hand to hand and you've got to go sell people directly.
You've got to go cold email.
You've got to connect with these people, understand what they're trying to do and walk them through
your funnel by hand and get their feedback at every stage of the funnel.
I mean, it can take a long time before you've got someone who's like, yes, this exactly
solves what I'm looking for and I'm willing to plop down my credit card and continue to
pay you month after month for this.
I think that's something that gets overlooked as a lot of people look at the end result
of, okay, hey, we're at 30,000 MRR.
All of us look at them, they're like, well, that sounds really good, but I know of very
few overnight successes and those are flukes.
It usually takes two to three years to get to something like 30,000 plus MRR, especially
for a first time SaaS person.
Second time SaaS people, they kind of understand things, they have a little bit of an advantage,
but there's still that whole product market fit, song and dance that you've got to go
through and there's also the other aspect, there's going to be word of mouth referrals,
which are a pretty big thing that can help you to grow, getting those takes time.
Starting out, nobody knows you, well, who else uses you?
People always want to know that, right?
Why should I use you versus these other guys and a lot of times you're going to go off
the recommendation of a friend if you're at work and you're like, hey, what can I use
to do this?
Maybe there's a recommendation that they have, you're going to go check it out and you're
going to be like, yeah, let's go check that out.
It takes time to get to the point where people are going to refer you to people and so starting
out, don't expect much.
I mean, just being honest, probably expect zero for quite some time, being serious.
It's not easy to get the ball rolling and I think the problem, or one of the problems
that a lot of people run into, one of the most common mistakes is to look at a super
successful company and say, I'm going to do what they're doing.
When in reality, the things that they're doing now that they're super successful are probably
completely different than the things they did when they first started.
So when you first start, things are usually, as you said, really slow and hard to get off
the ground because you don't actually understand your business yet, right?
You don't understand who your target customer is and who's ideal to buy your product.
You don't understand what price point they're going to buy at.
You don't understand what marketing copy appeals to them and exactly why they're buying.
You don't understand where you can find and reach them online and the most efficient manner
possible.
You might think you know these things.
You might have ideas for how you're going to do these things, but in reality, those
ideas are just guesses and you're not going to actually know until you put in the hard
work of engaging with customers and learning from them one on one.
And oftentimes this represents itself as just a lot of rote manual work, sending hundreds
of cold emails over a period of months.
For a good example is Tyler Tringis, the founder of StoreMapper, who I interviewed for Indie
Hackers a few months back.
He would actually go to job boards and he would find store owners who were looking for
contract developers to add a map of all the stores locations and he would say, Hey, I'm
Tyler.
I'm a developer.
I could add that map for you on your website or you could use my service StoreMapper that
I built, you know, and just put that on your website, pay me a monthly fee, it'll be a
done deal in like five minutes.
And so then he would actually hear from customers, yeah, here's why I'll use StoreMapper, here's
why I won't use StoreMapper, and he would learn from that and improve his product.
So that's a process that obviously he's probably not going to be doing once his company gets
around 20, $30,000 a month in revenue, which is not scalable, right?
But early on, he was pounding the pavement and putting in hours of hard work, talking
to people one on one to figure out what it was that they needed.
And that's a trend that I've seen over hundreds of companies that I've interviewed.
So it's very important if you're just getting started to manage your expectations and understand
that to get the ball rolling, it's going to take a lot more work at the beginning than
it does at the end.
And if you're going to learn from other company stories, you really need to understand what
they did in the very beginning and not be tricked by the marketing and sales techniques
that they use at the end.
Right.
Yeah, absolutely.
And most everyone doesn't talk about the early stage, right?
There was so long ago, they forgot about it, they don't think it's relevant, they're embarrassed
by it, or they're just super jazzed about their current success.
And it's that early stage expectation that can make or break you.
If you're starting out and you're like, well, hey, why am I not at 10,000 MRR after the
first month?
Well, I mean, if it was that easy, everybody would be doing it.
Like full time is their job, right?
They wouldn't be trying to do it on the side.
But to go off of what you were saying with the sales, I mean, there's another aspect
that a lot of people don't realize.
Because if you're targeting a certain market, you can't reach them online, or you can't
do it very easily through marketing.
People aren't really searching for solutions in your space.
Pretty much the only way to make them aware that you exist is to reach out to them one
on one and say, hey, I know that you work in this type of a role within this type of
a company, and we do this for people like you.
It's not like they're going online and they're doing searches for these types of things where
you can capture them through SEO or you can write some really clever article that's going
to catch their attention.
Sometimes you just got to pick up the phone or you got to send an email just to get in
touch with these people.
And that's, I think, another thing is a lot of people are like, well, hey, I just set
up marketing and people just show up and buy.
You can get it to there at some point, but when you're starting out, that's not a great
approach.
You're robbing yourself of the opportunity to talk to people and really understand who
they are, things that maybe you don't understand about the type of people that you're trying
to reach or the market that you're trying to sell to.
And not only that, someone that comes in through your site, they've never talked to you.
They don't owe you anything.
So when you sent an email because they didn't convert from trial or they churned out, they're
like, I don't know who you are, right?
So I really don't need to give you any explanation.
Go away, right?
Or they think it's just an automated response, right?
Even if you sent it by hand, if you brought them in by hand, there's some sort of a connection
that you have.
There's some sort of expected reciprocity from just a social perspective that I at least
give this person an explanation for what I'm doing.
So by going one on one with people, you get a lot more information than just playing the
passive game where I put up a website, people show up and give me money.
Maybe they do, but think of how much more money you could be making or how much better
your product could be if you were actually talking to these people and really understanding
them and how they'd use it.
Yeah, a direct quote from your epic guide to bootstrapping a SaaS starter from scratch
is just remember that if you can't sell your SaaS one on one, you probably aren't going
to be able to market it at all.
People don't realize that sales is actually the easy thing compared to marketing because
you have one person in front of you at a time and this dynamic conversation and you can
actually listen to their complaints and you can respond to their objections and teach
them and convince them to buy your product.
Whereas marketing is this mass thing where you blast a message out to tons of people
and you have no idea how they react, right?
They might say, Oh, this message is an appeal to me, right?
So it's really not something you should worry that much about until you've done sales until
you've actually talked to customers one on one and learn from them and you understand
what message resonates with them.
You understand what kind of objections they have to buying and you understand what gets
them to buy in the end.
And on that note, let me ask you what kind of knowledge and skills do you think people
need to have or that they should have to get started?
The biggest problem you're going to have starting out is getting people to use your app, right?
So the skills that I would say that you need to know is really there are more business
skills than technical.
You're going to have to understand, I think first and foremost, why people buy things.
Why would they want to buy this?
You know, a lot of people think with entrepreneurship that you have to be an inventor, right?
So how many times have you done the, oh, I have this great idea.
I run to Google, I type it in and then it's like FML, right?
You know, someone else already did this, so I can't do this now, but that's not true.
That's not true.
And I'll tell you why, just because someone else has done it before doesn't matter if
people don't know that it exists.
So what you need to do is you need to say, okay, well, I am aware that there's some other
people that are doing this.
Let me go find the people that I think that would be using this and let me go ask them
what they use to solve this problem.
If you hear these company names coming up, they're like, oh, we just use this or we just
use this.
That's what I would call like a Coke and Pepsi market.
Basically there are a handful of dominant players that everyone knows on a name brand
recognition basis.
Those markets can be really difficult to get into unless you pull like, you know, like
you pull a Sprite, right?
Like we're the uncola, right?
You have to differentiate yourself from those market leaders to be able to get in there.
But if you go and you're talking to people and they're like, huh, that's really, yeah,
I really don't know.
I've never found a good solution or I'm using spreadsheets or wow, if you had something,
I would throw money at you.
That right there should be an indicator that there's a situation where the market, the
people that are offering a solution in this market have not gone out and educated the
market that they exist.
People don't know they exist.
So that's actually a good thing if you can get in front of these people and make them
aware that you exist.
And like, I mean, but like I said, where it's what skill do you need?
That's a business skill.
That's not a software development skill, right?
Like being able to go through that kind of process and understanding why do people buy
or how do people become aware of brands or how do you sell to somebody, right?
And the secret there is you don't sell, you help people buy.
And those are the skills that you really need to have in order to be successful in this
space.
And that's usually a skill none of us have starting out, right?
Yeah.
And it's actually really unintuitive because you think, okay, you know, I'm a consumer.
I've been buying things all my life.
I know exactly why people buy things, you know, and then you go out and create a business
and you create a product that nobody wants and you put up a landing page that no one
understands and doesn't convert any users because it's not intuitive.
It's not enough to just bought things your entire life.
You actually have to get some experience selling and get some experience marketing and get
some experience, you know, iterating on product ideas and building stuff that people actually
want.
Right.
Well, I would say the other thing too is really understanding psychology, empathy, understanding
people, how they think they feel they perceive things.
That is something that can go a long way too.
When you get so focused on your product and you're just like, it's me, me, me, right?
This is my company.
I'm building this product.
Well, none of that matters if people don't actually find it useful, if people aren't
intrigued by it, if people don't see the value and so putting yourself in their shoes and
understanding how do they perceive your product and your value proposition and your offering,
it takes a lot of practice if it's not something that you're a natural at.
But the more that you can develop that skill of having empathy, of being able to look at
yourself through the eyes of someone else, the more things you will see that were hidden
from you before, even though they were hidden in plain sight.
Yeah.
One of the things that I see a lot is that an entrepreneur will put up a website for
their product or their service and nobody will use it or people will come to their website
and they won't sign up.
So they come to the India Actors Forum, they make a new post on the forum and say, hey,
check on my website.
What do you guys think?
And 99 times out of 100, their website just goes on and on about their product and the
people who created the product and the features in the product and how this feature works
compared to this other feature and not one place on their website.
Do they say anything about, hey, here's how my product is going to make your life better
as a customer.
Here's how you're going to get that new promotion, here's how you're going to make more money,
here's how you're going to close more sales, here's how you're going to be smarter than
your peers.
They just don't appeal to the customer and it's not, like I was saying earlier, it's
just not intuitively obvious that people buy because you're making them feel better or
be better.
It's kind of the intuitive thing to do is just describe how badass your product is and
hope that that connects with people and in reality, it never does.
They just don't appeal to the customer's interest and the customer's desires.
And like I was saying earlier, it's not intuitively obvious how to convince people to buy what
you're selling, right?
The intuitive thing is to just list all of your product's features and just talk about
yourself constantly and hope that people are as excited about that as you are.
You're going to make money because other people are going to give you that money because what
you're putting out there helps them.
They're not giving you money because you're awesome.
They're not giving you money because you're UX is so hot.
They're giving you money because they care about themselves and they care that what you
have is going to help them get some superpowers.
You're going to help them make more money.
You're going to help them save money.
You're going to help them get some time back.
That's what they care about.
They don't care about you.
Exactly.
And that's something that you have to learn.
And if you're somebody who listens to a lot of podcasts like this, if you read a lot of
ND hackers interviews, or you just read blogs or business books, then you probably will
find yourself in a situation where you think, okay, I'm learning tons of stuff, I'm getting
so much advice and it seems maybe a little bit overwhelming, right?
So the question is, how do you learn effectively?
How do you actually incorporate the knowledge that you're hearing so that when you start
your business, you don't make all the mistakes that people have warned you about?
This is a great one.
So I made this mistake and I wanted to save all of you the time.
You don't need to read crap.
What you need to do is you need to go and you need to do something.
So a lot of people, this is what they do, they stand back and they're like, okay, well,
I'm going to be the next Elon Musk, right?
So I need to make sure that this startup idea is just going to crush it out the gate.
And they sit there and they overanalyze the heck out of all these different options for
what they could do and so on and so forth, trying to nail it out the gate, right?
And that's a mistake in my mind.
It's good to think about these things because if you go in blind, right, you could be targeting
a market that has absolutely no potential.
But if you overanalyze it, you wind up not doing anything.
And you got to keep in mind, your first attempt at this is not going to be the last thing
you do, right?
Not a lot of people marry the first girl that they date, right?
So you got to treat your first attempt at this as, okay, this is a first date with somebody
and we'll see where it goes.
You can't be planning out marriage when you're on like match.com and you're looking at someone's
picture, right?
You know, like, that's a little creepy, okay?
Now you might say, well, I'm looking for someone who's going to be marriage material and that
can help you to filter down the type of people that you're looking at.
But just don't try to crush your first startup out the gate.
Don't try to crush your second.
Just do something that you think that has some potential, that you think that you're
going to have some fun doing because you're going to have to put in a lot of time and
effort to do this.
And you're going to have to write a lot and tell people a lot about it.
So it better be something that you actually care about because otherwise you're going
to get bored with it and hate it.
But start doing that, okay?
And because a lot of the books out there are going to be for, you know, Silicon Valley
style startups, right?
They're going to be for VC funded startups.
They're going to be for startups that are way further in their stage than you are just
starting out.
That would be like reading a book about marriage when you don't even know how to get a first
date.
Your goal is to get your first date.
So what you should do is if you're having trouble with your first date, go find books
about dating.
Not about marriage, not about successful relationships.
Just dating.
Go figure out what you need to do there.
And I hope the analogy isn't lost, but I mean at each stage, only focus on the thing that
you have to do that's right in front of you.
Stop trying to plan 50 steps out all the time.
And if you, because you're going to get the learnings, right?
So if you know how to get dates and you're just, you're like, Hey, I'm having a hard
time finding the right type of person up.
Well, you can go read a book about that.
Now you know how to get dates.
You don't, that's not a problem.
And you, and you progress along that line, right?
But you know, so many people wind up worrying about super Mario brothers, level eight,
when they're still stuck at level one and it does them absolutely no good.
You worry about level eight when you get to level eight.
So my advice is read books that solve the problem that you're having right now.
If you don't know how to sell to people, if you don't know how to market to people, go
read some books on that.
You know, it's put the books down unless the book is helping you with something that you're
struggling with right now, not something that you think that you're going to run into three
months from now.
Forget that worry about that three months from now, focus on now, because otherwise
you're going to spend way too much time gathering up a knowledge of, you know, late stage startup
that you're never going to get to.
Exactly.
And so I've taught by way of analogy, I've taught about four of my friends to code.
And you know how nobody ever learns how to code.
They don't just read like 10 books on programming and then pop out of the other side and say,
I'm a programmer now.
Right.
You actually have to kind of see saw it where you're learning and then you work on a project
and then you get stuck and you look back at the books as a reference and then you learn
some more new stuff and then you work on a project and you learn from that and then you
look back at the books as a reference over and over again.
Right.
And if you don't learn this way, then the things that you read and the advice that you
get, it's just going to go in one ear and out the other because you don't have any sort
of actual experience to connect your learnings to.
Right.
You actually need something in your brain, a structure in your brain where you've tried
something so that people give you advice, you can say, oh, okay, you know, I tried it
the wrong way last time.
Let me do it the real way this time.
And that's not to say that you should totally neglect reading, right?
You need practice, but you also need to read.
You also need to talk to other people who've done it.
Otherwise you're putting yourself in the position where you're attempting to re-derive every
business learning that's ever been discovered from scratch by yourself, which is, you know,
not smart.
Oh yeah.
I mean, yeah, if things aren't working, you've got to debug it, right?
So if, you know, you don't want to, yeah, you definitely don't want to be doing project
after project, trying to get something off the ground.
You've got to learn from why it did or didn't work.
And yeah, so you can't be like, you can't just throw your hand, you know, like with
your example of the forum, you know, like they come in, they're like, oh, people didn't
like my landing page.
I suck at this.
Let me go do another startup.
No, they didn't like your landing page.
You need to figure out what's wrong and you need to bang at that.
And guess what?
It can take weeks.
It can take months before you actually get that messaging nailed in or you actually think
through why people should actually pay you for this, right?
You know, so if you throw the towel in because you're not getting results and you never understood
why you weren't getting results, you didn't learn anything.
I'm sorry.
You went through exercises that bought you nothing.
You just delayed, you know, your, your time.
You know, you just, you spent three, you wasted three months of your life.
If you can't go back and figure out why this didn't work.
Yeah.
Another reason I see a lot of beginners quit is because they will come up with an idea
and they'll say, this idea is the best thing since sliced bread.
I can't wait to get it out.
And then they'll put their head down and they won't talk to anybody and they'll just code
and work and hack at it for six months before they show it to anybody.
And then they launch it.
And of course it's a total dut because they didn't test it on anybody and they just assume
that their guesses for what people would need would be immediately correct when that's very
rarely the case.
So, you know, this is just another low hanging fruit, you know, piece of advice.
Build an MVP, build a minimum viable product that when people use it, you know, their feedback
is enough for you to say, okay, I'm in the right direction or I'm headed in the wrong
direction.
And that shouldn't really take you more than, you know, a couple of weeks.
The average person that I've interviewed on Indie Hackers took three weeks to get their
product launched and then the hands of customers.
So don't spend six months building something and not getting feedback because it's going
to be super demoralizing.
It's probably not going to work out and you're probably going to want to quit.
What you want to do, and this is very common advice, is you want to build a prototype,
sometimes called an MVP, which stands for minimum viable product.
So you just want to build the smallest thing that you possibly can that you can actually
show to your potential customer and say, hey, would you buy this or would you buy something
like this or, you know, or will you buy this thing itself?
So a good example is Josh Pigford who created Baremetrics.
It took him about seven days from after coming up with the idea to build a product and actually
get it to his first customer and have someone say, hey, I'll pay you for that thing.
And the average company that I interview on Indie Hackers takes about three weeks to go
through that entire process of building something and getting in the hands of their first customer.
So you don't really want to spend six months doing it.
It's going to demoralize you and you're going to be wasting a lot of time.
Well, and the other thing too is if you realize, hey, the reason that this hasn't succeeded
is because I haven't sold enough or I haven't marketed enough, don't shut it down until
you've actually done that, you know, like it's like, oh, I've been working on this for
three months.
That's gone nowhere.
And it's like, well, the reason it's gone nowhere is because I haven't really promoted
it.
I'm just going to throw this away and go start something new and interesting.
No, go and sell and market it and go, go see if you even have a chance or see what people
say.
You know, like, like I said, you have to learn from it and you have to say, is this an obstacle
that is overcomeable or not?
But you know, there are some things that are out of your control and you have to make a
choice.
Do I want to stop doing this because of that?
Yes or no.
But if you keep coming up with, well, I didn't do this or I didn't do this and that's the
reason that's going nowhere.
Well, guess what?
You need to start doing those things.
Exactly.
Right.
You don't have to actually build your finished product, right?
We're not saying that, hey, your whole product needs to be done in like three weeks.
In fact, you need to be in it for the long haul and realize it's going to take you a
long time to get to the final version of your product if there ever is a final version of
your product, right?
But initially you need to get creative and you need to test your hypotheses and you need
to get something in customer's hands and learn about what it is that you're doing and who
your ideal customer is and what they care about as fast as possible.
And sometimes that means not even doing something that requires code at all.
No, I actually think, yeah, three weeks sounds about right to me.
Um, well, I mean, the thing, like sometimes people are like, oh, well, this is, this is
too like for it, for it to do what it needs to do.
I can't do this in three months.
Well, the trick is, well, figure out one of the features of what you want in this end
product that you can do in, let's say even under a month, right?
And go do that and then stop after that and go see what you can get.
You know, I mean, 30 days, that's not too bad.
You could, you could probably do 30 days worth of something if you had to build something
to show people, but I would say push it further and see, can you, can you sell the idea to
people before you have to write a line of code?
Or if people are like, well, I'll see it when I believe it.
Can you write a prototype that you can just throw away that you could just, you know,
do a Skype call with someone say, well here, it's working on my local box here.
This is what I was thinking it could do, right?
Or can you even do like, like a high fidelity, like wireframe where, well, this is what I
think it would look like.
Always look for a way to cut down how much time or energy you think you have to invest
in it.
You can almost always reduce a problem far, far further down than, than you would believe
if you, if you actually spent the time to say, well, what is the minimum thing that
I could do here?
Someone was telling me about, there's a company that was doing like a, like a, like a, like,
I need a caterer, right?
And so it was like a service for like finding caterers and like the whole thing was, you
know, basically spreadsheets behind the scenes, right?
Like there's no, aside from like, tell us where you're at, right?
And your email address, everything was just people, like it would get an email in their
inbox, they'd go do spreadsheets and they'd say, okay, well here's caterers in your area
that you know, that you can contact or something I, you know, that's an MVP.
You're testing your idea, you're seeing if people use it, there's zero code to it.
Exactly.
So you can't place too much faith and your initial thoughts about whatever it is that
you're trying to build.
Definitely don't place so much faith in it that you're willing to put your head down
for six months and code something that in all likelihood people aren't going to care
about.
So the last thing that I want to talk about is something I try to bring up in every interview,
which is psychology.
What do you think Clifford are the biggest psychological hangups that affect founders
and what should people watch out for?
Right.
Yeah, yeah.
And that, and that's yes, to spell that out explicitly is really crucial.
We're saying rather than sit on something for six months to a year, right?
You're working your weekends, your nights, you're, you're, you know, you're, you're,
you're dreaming about this right for that timeframe.
And then you go to finally put it in front of people and you find out nobody wants it
or the market's not big enough rather than go through that, you know, nightmare of an
exercise.
Use it as low down as you can before you have something that you can put in front of
people and start to get that feedback.
But expect that everyone's going to go meh when you show it to them out the gate, you
know, unless you've really nailed it, in which case kudos to you, but that's not really how
it works.
It can take you a solid year just to get initial traction.
And to get it built up to a point where it's, you know, the kind of money that you're probably
looking for, you're probably talking two to three years in a lot of cases, if, especially
if this is your first go round, it's, it's not something that just happens overnight.
It's, it takes a lot of work, a lot of refinement, a lot of feedback.
You know, if once you've done it a few times, you might get better at it, but you're always
going to have to go through this product market fit.
You know, little song and dance.
It's you can, you can cook up whatever you want in your head.
If people don't see how it solves a problem that they give a crap about that they're willing
to give you money for, it doesn't matter how awesome it is, you know,
it's demoralizing to hear no over and over.
I think a lot of the things you talked about are very interesting because they create kind
of these self fulfilling cycles that make your business a lot less likely to succeed.
So for example, let's say you're a perfectionist.
Let's say you're super, you know, nervous about people not liking what you built.
And so you just don't show it to anybody because you don't think it's ready yet.
And then you keep working on it.
And then it gets further and further away from what customers actually want because you're
not getting any customer feedback because you're not showing it to them.
So now you're even more embarrassed about it and you're more likely to build a product
that fails.
And the cycle continues until you end up just quitting because you built something that
nobody liked and you never wanted to show it to anyone.
It happens all the time.
Or maybe you don't have a good support network of other entrepreneurs who understand what
it is that you're doing.
And so you end up just getting terrible advice from people who don't understand what you're
doing.
You know, they tell you, hey, you know, your launch didn't work out.
You should just quit when in any entrepreneur would probably tell you to keep hacking at
the end.
Here's what you could learn.
Here's what you could improve and make it better next time.
So obviously if you quit early, then you're not going to build a successful business.
So just a whole lot of things like this that if you're not aware of, can easily sync your
business.
And my favorite hack, which I think is just a super quick and dirty hack, it's just to
be radically transparent about everything.
Go online, go to the Antiochus Forum, go on Twitter and follow some people who are entrepreneurs
and founders.
And then just every other week or every month or so, share what you're working on.
Tell them how much money you're making.
Tell them what your marketing plans are, your sales strategy.
Share screenshots of your product development and ask for their feedback.
And at the very least, what I found is that people will be encouraging and tell you to
keep going, which is really what you need to hear because it's probably going to take
you years of going to succeed.
And the worst thing that you could do was quit early because you got discouraged.
That's a big topic.
Well, I mean, there's a number of things that can go wrong in that department, I guess.
It depends on who you are as a person and the things that you're more sensitive to.
One of them is going to be, if you're not a social person to begin with, getting out
there and talking to complete strangers over something that you've placed a lot of importance
on can just be fear crippling.
And so there's a lot of fear that you have to overcome for a number of reasons.
One, you're afraid of failing, right?
I think that's one of the biggest ones.
I'm afraid of putting myself out there and getting shot down because I need this to work.
Well, the funny thing about that is if you never put yourself out there, you've already
failed, right?
So the other side is there's actually people who are afraid of succeeding.
They don't know what to do when that happens.
Maybe they think they really want to quit their job, but they're really not ready for
that.
So they're afraid of it succeeding.
And that's a tough one, too.
What's nice about communities like IndieHackers is it's bringing together people that are
going through this type of experience.
And I would recommend that you talk to people that are going through this type of experience
because you can have someone to relate to.
One of the things that I find is that if you're – unless you're over in Silicon Valley
where everyone's got a side hustle going on, it seems – if you're in just a suburb
or something like that, you're probably not going to have a lot of people that you know
that are trying to do the same thing.
So your support system is really limited.
You're going to have a lot of pressure from people that don't understand what you're
trying to do to spend time that you don't want to spend, right?
So after work, if you're working on your startup or on weekends, if you're working
with your startup, well, they're all not working on a startup.
They just – they punch their clock and go do their thing.
So there's going to be some weird things like that where the way that you're living
your life, at least for now, you're going to need to find people that have a shared
experience that you can relate to because you're going to feel very out of place, very
alone, and having that community can really help you.
So I'd encourage that you find those things.
So kind of fear, loneliness, or not fitting in.
Those are two things.
I'd say depression is something that people don't talk a lot about but should be talked
about because this is a very frustrating experience.
If you're easily discouraged, if you're easily put down, you've got to temper your expectations.
That's the only way that you can do this because otherwise if you come in and you're
pushing hard and you're not getting anywhere, you're going to start to think, oh, I suck.
I'm a failure.
I'm not going to go anywhere.
And that's not the truth.
The truth is you're learning a new skill.
So just like when you were trying to build your first program, usually we all start with
hello world.
You don't start with building an enterprise application as your first program that you
ever write.
Well, the same thing here.
When you're starting out and you're learning how to market, learning how to sell, this
is your hello world.
Your code is going to suck.
Your marketing and your sales skills are going to suck and you have to put in the time to
get good at them.
But because we're so used to feeling good at, we're all professional software developers.
We feel good that we know how to write code and we feel good that we know how to be good
at our job.
And so we think that we should be good at everything that we do.
And it's a different world with sales and marketing.
If you have zero experience, it's a different world altogether and there's rejection.
With code, I can get angry at my IDE and I can just bang at it until I make it do what
I want it to.
Well, you can't do that with people.
People do what they want to do.
And so if you go up to people and you're like, hey, I want you to check this out.
And they're like, no, you do that enough times.
You're going to start to feel not good about yourself.
It helps just to hear other people say, yeah, I've been there and you're not alone.
And the cool thing is when you start taking action and you take action on a regular basis,
and this is the other reason why you got to push this stuff out.
If you wait six months to a year, you're getting no feedback, right?
If you're pushing things out week after week, you're getting constant feedback.
You're getting constant either validation or you're getting the data that you need in
order to correct things.
But if you're not putting things out on a regular basis, you're just, you're wallowing
away in a cave, right?
By constantly making progress rather than just constantly spinning your wheels.
And to me, the definition of progress would be that you're putting something out that's
demonstrable, spinning wheels as I'm just working on the same thing, but I'm not putting
anything out.
By doing that, you're going to feel better about yourself and you're going to actually
see progress.
So always look for demonstrable progress that you can get feedback from or validation from.
Cool.
And on that note, we'll end the episode.
It was awesome having you on the show, Clifford.
And for those who want to learn more about Clifford's writings and his startup, search
for the epic guide to bootstrapping a SAS startup from scratch by yourself.
That's his Medium post or a series of posts on Medium.
And if you're running a website and you want to know exactly why your visitors are signing
up or what's causing them not to sign up, head to gettambu.com where a Clifford's product
will show you actual visitor recordings so you know exactly what's going on as if you're
looking over their shoulder.
That's G E T T A M B O O dot com.
If you enjoyed listening to this conversation, you should join me and a whole bunch of other
Andy hackers and entrepreneurs on the Andy hackers dot com forum, where we talk about
things like how to come up with a good idea and how to find your first paying customers.
Also, if you're working on a business or a product of your own, it's a great place
to come and get feedback from the community on what you're working on.
Again, that's www dot nd hackers dot com slash forum.
Thanks and I'll see you guys next time.