What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet
businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How do they
get to where they are today? How do they make decisions, both at their companies and in
their personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here,
as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our
own profitable internet businesses. Today, I am talking to Nathan Rossidi, the founder
of Stratuscratch. Nathan, how's it going?
Good. How are you doing?
I'm doing excellent. Welcome to the show.
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
So tell us a little bit about Stratuscratch. What is it exactly? And why did you start
it?
So Stratuscratch is a platform to help you improve your analytical skills by building
a strong technical foundation for your career. So what I mean by that is it really just helps
you prep for your technical interviews. It's aimed for data scientists, marketing scientists,
anybody getting started in analytics in general. That's essentially what the platform does.
It helps you prepare for your SQL and Python technical interviews. And so I got started
mainly because I'm an adjunct professor at a local university in SF, and I teach a lot
of non-technical students, and I wanted a platform to help them just kind of get better,
ramp up faster, and also try out real questions out there in the world. There are no other
platforms that really allowed that to happen. And so being somewhat technical and also having
a career in analytics and data science, I thought I would just create one to see if
people would be interested, but also really to create one to help me run my class a lot
more efficiently. What I really wanted to do was just save time, myself time, and then
save the student some headache.
That's pretty cool when you can combine two things that you're working on, in this case,
being a teacher or a professor, and also being a de-hacker and creating a product that you
can charge money for and help your students find jobs. It's cool to have that overlap.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when I think about it, it was really a platform that helped me
save time. It was like solving my problem, because in a lot of classrooms these days,
you have to set up the technology yourself. You have to set up your own SQL server and
then set up your own data sets and import that in, and a lot of students don't know
how to do that. I really hate it to be the IT guy to help debug and troubleshoot all
of their stuff. I really just developed this in the beginning to save myself some time,
but then when I was thinking about it, and when I launched the first version and had
a few months to iterate and think about what this platform actually is, I thought about
my own journey while getting started in my career, interviewing at several places, trying
to become a data scientist, trying to get into analytics in general. I wanted a platform
where I would be able to find real questions that the big tech companies give, find real
world problems that you would find in industry, and then practice on them so I can get better
at that. Hopefully that would help me in an interview, but also help me in my career,
in my day-to-day life. That was really what my vision was towards the beginning months
of launching Strata Scratch.
You posted on your Andy Hacker's page for Strata Scratch recently that you reached 2,500
registered users and you're at $1,500 a month in recurring revenue. How long did it take
you to get to this point?
I've hit this revenue probably earlier this year, early 2019. It took me two years to
get to this. I launched in 2017 and by 2019, I felt that I finally understood my audience
a little bit better. I made a few pivots along the way, but by 2019, I kind of knew where
I was. It took about two years of iterations, two years of experimentations, and I'm still
doing both of those even now.
It's crazy how much patience you need to be a founder, to be an Andy Hacker. I think before
you get started, it's really easy to think, I've got the right idea. I know exactly what
I'm doing and I'm going to be making X amount of dollars in like six months. Then you get
started and you learn all these different things along the way. You learn more about
your users and your customers and what features you need and what features you don't and how
to find them. It takes a while. It takes years to get to thousands of dollars in revenue
sometimes. How have you been able to be so patient? I think a lot of people will quit
before they put in two years in anything.
This is not my full-time job. This is sort of a side project that I have. I have a full-time
job and then I'm also an adjunct professor, so I teach one to two classes in the evening
after I work. Then on the weekends or late at night, I'll work on this side project.
It's sort of just like a passion project that I have that I spend maybe five to ten hours
a week doing. I have a team that also helps me, but they only spend about five to ten
hours a week as well on this. It's kind of a blessing and a curse to be able to move
slowly because I don't have to rush into things. I think when it's a full-time job
and you really need the money or you're taking VC investment money and you really need to
prove your worth to the next milestone, there's a lot of pressure on you and you might not
necessarily prioritize things in the right way. It's kind of nice to be able to take
a step back, though you're not under a lot of pressure, have the time to reach out to
your customers, reach out to your users, run a few experiments and prioritize things in
the right way so that you slowly scale up. For me, patience is key because as long as
I see things trending in the right way, as long as I'm able to get honest feedback from
my users, that allows me to figure out what I need to build or what I need to write and
market so that they get exactly what they want. That's kind of how I've been sticking
to it. It's kind of a blessing in disguise.
I want to talk about a lot of these challenges that early-stage founders and indie hackers
run into because you've been able to surmount them and I'm sure there's a lot that you're
still struggling with. I think probably the very first one is just getting started. For
a lot of people, it's scary to start something. It seems like a big risk. It seems like a
huge time investment or maybe they're not confident that they have the skills. Is this
the very first profitable project that you've started and what kind of gets you over the
hump in order to start something?
Yeah, no. No, it's not the first project that I've started. I had a startup that kind of
went through the gamut, like taking in investor money and all of that. It was a full-time
gig of mine a few years ago. I learned a lot from that and I learned a lot from my failures
both in Start of Scratch but also from my past companies to kind of like get over the
hump of just starting. It's really just about starting. I failed at that my first time around
in that I was planning to perfection and never really building out anything that the customer
would want. I never really interacted with the customers because I thought I knew what
they wanted and then I was trying to make everything perfect to give them the best experience.
We were never really able to launch until much, much later and that's kind of like when
the pressure starts to come. This time around, it was really just about starting. It was
about two things. It was about reaching my users and customers to see what they want
and whether or not I'm getting a signal out in the market and then two, building something
that they can just test. Something really, really shitty that they can test. The most
MVP thing that you could find and that's what I did. I just cobbled together like a backend,
a really bad frontend and connected them together and just tested out the content to see if
this is exactly what they want. Then we started to iterate after that.
Who's we? Is it you by yourself or have you been working with other people from the beginning?
It's me by myself and I have a developer also and he's working on this 10 hours a week as
well that I talked to about just feature development and prioritization and we just kick it back
and forth for the most part. He's been with me for several years also with my previous
startup. We have really good chemistry in terms of just getting things off the ground.
What would you say to somebody who is maybe early on and they don't have the skills to
develop a product and they need to find a developer to work with that they have chemistry
with? How do you go from not knowing anyone to meeting somebody like that?
I think it takes a long time. It takes a lot of iteration. It could take you meeting several
people before even finding the right one. I did two things. I went on Upwork.com which
is a website to find freelancers and I went to meetup.com which is a platform that allows
you to search for physical meetups to go to to meet like-minded people. It's really big
here in the Bay Area but I found the people that way for the most part and some of them
stuck with me, some of them didn't and just throughout the years you meet the right people
that vibe with your personality, have the same goals you have and just have the same
working style that you have and it just sticks at the end of the day.
How long did it take you to take Strata Scratch from basically just an idea, an inkling that
hey this might work and to this sort of minimum viable product that you were talking about
that was just the bare bones shittiest thing you could release and get in users hands?
That was fast. That took me a month. I built the back end. It was like a database. We started
out with an idea that it's going to be just SQL. We're not going to add Python modules
to it or Python education modules, just SQL modules and so I have a lot of just technical
skills with the back end, developing the back end and all that. I built that and then I
got basically a free IDE or open source technology to slap on a front end and that's what my
developer did. It was probably like 10 hours of work on my side, 10 hour work on his side
and then I seeded it with as many questions as I can and that came from my professorship
at the university. Everything was kind of there and it only took me like less than a
month to get it launched out. I launched it to on the web as well as to my students for
free just to get people's feedback and experience.
What did you learn when you got this in people's hands?
I learned that they seemed to like it, that they were using it for the most part, but
I had no idea whether or not they would even pay for something like this, whether or not
they found it really useful versus the competition.
So it was free at first.
Yeah, it was free at first, exactly. Then I kept it free for my students and I kind
of slapped on a payment portal for the public to use because I really wanted to... It's
great to have a freemium product, but will somebody actually pay for it?
For me, the question is, do you find this valuable? If you say yes, then I would expect
you to actually pay for it. When I think of valuable, I think of somebody actually is
willing to pay for a product.
What did your business model look like in the early days? Because it's sometimes tough
to figure out what you're going to charge and how much you're going to charge when so
far you've just been giving things away for free.
Yeah, so we launched the freemium tier because what I think about is when setting this up,
this business model, is I think about the entire funnel. I think about how to get users
onto my website. How do I get users to use my product? That's kind of the two-step funnel
that I had in the very beginning, but I needed more of a journey. I wanted them to be able
to get on my website, find some value there, sign up for a freemium account just to test
the product out, get it using, and activate the user, quote-unquote. Then after that,
I wanted them to, if they found it valuable, see if they would pay for it. Then that journey
became my business model.
Did you ever consider having a journey where you just skipped most of those steps? Where
they show up on your website, they read it, and then they have to pay immediately before
they use anything?
That was one of my first versions, and nobody paid for it. I literally got zero sign-ups
for several months. I was just talking to a friend about this trouble, this problem
that I'm having. He's like, yeah, man, it's a really simple problem. Nobody trusts you.
You're a small company. Nobody even knows your brand. Why would anybody pay for it without
using it first?
I don't know why I didn't think of that, but as soon as he said it, I just started to develop
this freemium version of my platform. Then as soon as I launched that, I got sign-ups
immediately.
That's an interesting story because really that's advice that came from your friend.
It came from somebody who wasn't actively working on a product with you, and yet they
served as an advisor for you and opened your eyes to a potential blind spot. Every founder
has blind spots. All of us are doing things that either don't make sense or it could be
done better. Someone else out in the world knows the answer, but we don't.
I think a lot of early stage founders struggle with this because there's just so many places
to learn. There's so many books you can read, so many Twitter accounts that are tweeting
startup advice. How have you learned what to do and what decisions to make as a founder
yourself?
I go on Twitter. I go on indie hackers. I go on several blogs just to read everything
that people have done, have tried, have experimented with. I rely on a lot of my friends that have
side hustles, startups of their own to just talk to them about it. We meet very regularly
too because we're all really passionate about just creating products for people to use,
giving somebody something valuable. Between my friends slash advisors, between all the
blogs and websites and podcasts I read and listen to, I didn't start to just curate things.
I take a ton of notes. My Trello is just filled with it. After I read things, after I curate
through it, I sit on it. I never am too impulsive about it. I sit on it and I think about it.
When I'm ready, I promote it to developing a new feature or writing some content to my
users or something like that. As a single founder, that's how you're able to get feedback
from other people.
That's such a mature and measured approach because I'm very susceptible to recency bias.
If I hear a piece of advice or I get an idea and it's fresh in my mind, it just dominates
my thoughts. I can't stop thinking about it. All the old stuff that I've thought about
just goes out the window. I find myself having to be deliberate and making sure I don't just
act on the latest idea that I have because that's usually not the best idea. I think
sitting on it really helps the way that you do it.
I found that out the hard way. I used to do exactly what you said. That's a great idea
and then immediately email my engineers to start developing this. After that, two weeks
go by, they're still developing it. After you're sitting on it, you start to realize
it's not a great idea or maybe it is a good idea, but it's not the number one priority.
I've had a lot of experiences where that's really just turned sour. Now I have this more
measured approach.
A lot of the challenges with doing pretty much anything in modern life, including being
a founder, are just problems of abundance, where there's too much. It's not like there's
not enough information. It's not like we don't have enough feature ideas, but there's just
so much out there that it's hard to prioritize. It's hard to say, what should I work on first?
Or even just focusing as a founder.
It's really counterintuitive because very often you feel like, I'm not doing enough. I hear
all this advice. I should be doing X. I should be doing Y. I'm not doing this right. This
part of my funnel's broken. This part of my website's not great. I'm not doing enough.
But if you try to do everything, then you're just going to pull yourself in so many directions
that you don't do anything well. It's kind of the case that in order to be operating
well as a founder, you should always have this feeling like you're not doing enough.
That lets you know that you're focusing.
Absolutely, yeah. It's really hard to prioritize, especially when you get feedback from so many
different people with different viewpoints. I guess the way I kind of prioritize this,
I just listen to my users. I try to... I email every single one asking them why they like
my platform, what features would they like to see. If you're on the premium tier, what
would get you on the premium tier? I get a lot of feedback back. I actually prioritize
feature requests and building out my platform based off of what people are saying. I don't
necessarily go off of what's in my head anymore. I just go off of what people want. I'm building
something for people to use. In order for them to use it, they need to find some value.
That's more or less how I've been prioritizing things.
At some point, you figured out that you needed to educate your users and give them a chance
to basically use Strata Scratch before they would pay. You switched that on and you finally
got people beginning to pay you. What was the next step in growing your business?
Yeah, the next step is sort of what I'm still struggling with right now. It's how do I reach
more people? I am not at all good at sales and marketing. I have no idea what to do.
I don't understand SEO. I don't understand really like content marketing and how that
leads to just an improvement in SEO or an improvement in ranking or whatever it is.
I just don't get it even though I've been trying to do it for two years plus.
What I've actually been doing is just forgetting all of that. The way I've kind of done my
marketing is I write articles that I feel that my users would find valuable. My platform
itself has this thesis of improving or getting started in your analytical career. Whether
you're a student, a young professional, old professional, or trying to change careers,
I want you to use my product or my platform so that you become better technically and
that you become better in your analytical career. I want to also write articles to kind
of guide you through that journey from becoming a novice to becoming an intermediate to becoming
an advanced analytical person. I've struggled through that my entire career as well like
really not knowing what to do and how to start. I didn't really have anybody else to talk
to during that time. A lot of the articles that I write, it's just coming from my personal
experiences, questions that I've had, things that I've struggled with. That has been sort
of my marketing play now, just kind of writing things that I find that people might find
valuable and then kind of throwing it out on the medium blogs. There's a data science
publication there that I write for, that I contribute to, that a lot of people will read.
So that's helped a lot.
I look at business sometimes as really having four different parts. There's the product
that you're building, there's the market that you're selling to, in this case, aspiring
data scientists, and there's your business model, which you've settled on, and then there's
the channels that you use to reach these people. I think that can oftentimes be one of the
most challenging things to figure out because those channels can be super competitive, super
crowded. It can be really hard to break through. I often hear stories from founders where they
have to try channel after channel after channel before they finally figure out what's working.
In your particular case, that's content, that's writing, that's blogging. How's that going
so far?
Yeah, it's going really well. But from what you said, that was my experience. That is
my experience. I read this book called Traction. I forget who the author was. It's a pretty
–
Justin Mayors. He's been on the IndiaX podcast.
Okay, there you go. Great book. It really helped me think about how many marketing channels
there actually are, how to think about them. But the piece of advice I got was, you're
really only going to leverage one to two marketing channels that's going to work for your platform,
for your business. Also, you're probably not going to really find value in channels
that are already saturated because everyone's doing it. So find something really creative,
something that nobody or not too many people are really leveraging, and try that out. Especially
if you're kind of doing this as a side hustle and you don't have a lot of time, you can't
be really doing a ton of experiments and leveraging all of the marketing channels. You really
have to be deliberate with them. So I started with direct email marketing. That was terrible.
I'd changed to Google Ads. I was getting an OK ROI, but not really great. I was doing
so many different things, but then when I just took a step back, then I looked at what
was working, I found one to two things that was working well, and I just stuck with it.
It was really just content marketing, blog writing, article writing, for the most part.
One of the things I like the most about content marketing is that you really get a lot of
instances where you can try something. Every new post that you write is a new attempt.
You can use different language in it. You can talk about a different topic and you get
a lot of feedback. People will upvote your post on Medium or they won't. People will
read your blog post and share it or they won't. So you're constantly learning, whereas with
a lot of other channels and things you can do to try to grow, it's hard to get that feedback.
You might work on something for six months before you really realize the results, whereas
a blog post, you can write in an afternoon and publish it and see like, is this something
that I should keep publishing on this topic or is it something that I should change because
another blog post had better success.
Exactly. And you're just iterating through that and seeing what works.
I think another cool thing about what you're doing is just teaching in general. It's just
one of the best ways to basically get started as an anti-hacker because you're, number one,
doing something you're knowledgeable and passionate about. And number two, you're doing something
that quite frankly, customers find valuable. They can very easily, without you having to
tell them, understand the value of understanding and practicing interview questions so that
they can get jobs. And it's just a really great way to get started with your business.
Yeah, I know. Absolutely. I mean, there's not much to add on to that really. It's keeping
my value prop very simple. This is very similar to my teaching profession as well. I do this
for fun. I have a full-time gig that it's not at all about teaching. It's something
completely different, but my passion, what I really like is to teach, to give somebody
the younger generation something valuable that they can find in themselves and improve
on. So that's really what drives me. Otherwise, I don't know, why would I want to work on
the weekends? Why would I want to work late at night if I didn't care about this stuff?
And so yeah, it's really just all about passion and purpose that has gone me through a lot
of the tough times with just all ventures in life, not just Strata Scratch.
What would your advice be for other indie hackers who are listening who are passionate
about a particular topic and might want to start a business around helping others learn
how to do it well?
The biggest advice I would say, and the first thing I would say is talk to the community,
be involved in the community. There's probably a Reddit community out there. There's a meetup
group. There's a ton of forums probably, but just find out where they are if you're not
yet a part of that community and just see what they want, what they like, and see if
it also matches your own passion. See if what you're thinking, what you're thinking is valuable.
They also find valuable. So once you kind of get that signal, you know you have a user
base. And on the business side, you know you have a market, and then you can start building
something. And so that's my advice in terms of getting started. Just get to the community
and be involved and show that you actually care.
Nathan, thanks so much for coming on the podcast and sharing your story with us. Can you let
listeners know where they can go to learn more about Strata Scratch and what you're
up to personally if you share that sort of thing online as well?
Yeah, absolutely. So StrataScratch.com, that's the website of my platform. And then on Medium,
you can actually find me by my name, Nathan Rossidi. And so all my articles are on my
personal Medium blog.
Thanks so much, Nathan.
Yeah, absolutely.
Listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, I would love it if you reached out to Nathan
and let him know. He is Nathan Rossidi on Medium.com. Also, if you are interested in
my thoughts on this episode, subscribe to the Indie Hackers Podcast newsletter at Indie
Hackers.com slash podcast. Thanks so much for listening and I will see you next time.