What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you are listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet
businesses and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they
get to where they are today? How did they make decisions at their companies and in their
personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here is always
so that the rest of us can learn from their experiences and go on to build our own successful
internet businesses. Today, I have with me the impressively multi-talented Danielle Baskin.
Danielle is an artist, a designer, an engineer, and an entrepreneur. She has built products
for pretty much everybody, including NASA, Nickelodeon, Amazon AWS, Mozilla, Salesforce,
etc. Danielle, I'm excited to have you on the show. Welcome.
Thank you for having me.
So that was part one of my introduction. You're a hard person to introduce so I have two parts.
The second part of the introduction is that you are the creator of a voice chat app called
DialUp. You are the founder of a conference swag company called Branded Fruit. You're
the founder of a company called Peddler Popups. You are the creator of Inkwell Helmets, etc.
and so on and so forth. And what's fascinating about this is you are running these companies
all at the same time. This is not a succession of companies. You're simultaneously running
all of these companies.
Parallel entrepreneur.
A parallel entrepreneur. That's what you are. How many did I leave out? I think I named
five.
I have a lot of small businesses. So I have like 23 distinct products that I sell on the
internet.
23?
Yes.
And how long have you been creating these?
I've been creating businesses, I guess, since 2008.
Wow.
Yeah.
23 businesses.
Only three businesses.
It's slow. I mean, for what, 2008 to 2011, it was just one.
I mean, I've been creating businesses since 2008 too and I have nowhere near 23 active
businesses right now.
I mean, some are just single products and they're not like entire businesses or a service,
but some are businesses and I have like nine employees for Branded Fruit.
Okay. Walk me through the mindset of somebody who chooses to live their life this way.
Why run this many products simultaneously?
I mean, it is, it is problematic. I have a lot of ideas and I like am very restless unless
I execute upon them. Like I just need to create them and it's very easy to put a product
on the internet, like create a landing page, take photos of something, just put an idea
out there. It's very easy. And I think most of my ideas were kind of accidental. Like
I just threw it on the internet to see what would happen and then people want that thing.
And so it's a surprise, but I haven't had to shut any down.
So what I do right now is a sort of toggle businesses on and off, or I work on what's
most exciting to me at that time.
So you've never had a job. You never actually worked a full time job for somebody else.
I've had weird jobs. Yeah. Okay. I was, I was a philosopher's assistant for five years,
but that was like twice a week. And then I also was a scenic painter for an opera house.
Those were my job jobs and a set designer. But I always throughout that period of my
life I also worked on my own businesses. So no, I've never had like a nine to five job.
And right now, are you full time on your own businesses? Do they fully support you?
Yes.
What is it that drives you to create all these things and be an entrepreneur and work for
yourself? Why not go get a full time job with all the skills that you have? I'm sure you
can make a lot of money.
It's really weird. Like every time I've done, I've done contract jobs before. And then when
I have that job, I think of a product that I can sell to the company. It's weird. Like
I'm just, I'm, I am like deeply entrepreneurial. I'm trying to look for things that people
are searching for. And then I feel like I'm the only one that'll create this solution
for this.
Yeah. There's certainly a lot of things you've created that I don't think anyone else would.
Well, I accidentally created a tricycle rental service in New York when there was no way
to just rent a cargo tricycle. So I ended up finding and then the goal was to like,
have it be just a tricycle for me to sell my own helmets. But I realized like, Oh, actually
no one's doing tricycle rental. I could sell this to other people. And then people were
actually looking for that thing. And strangers on the internet contacted me.
I love how in your mind in the market is that nobody is doing tricycle rentals. Is that
a real problem? Should people be doing tricycle rentals?
Yeah, but there's a lot of, so yeah, I started peddler popups kind of because there there's
a lot of pop up shops in New York, but super expensive to like rent out of space. And all
these shops were reaching out to me to, to bring my helmets there. And I thought, well,
what if I, you know, I could just kind of ride, put my helmets in the bike lane where
most of the cyclists are. I was actually walking around with a cart selling helmets in the
street when city bike launched. And my neighbor was like, Hey, I have this like old cargo
trike that's locked up in my basement. Do you want it? And I bought it from him. And
then, yeah, you're just like, sure. Yeah.
So I often tell founders that one of the best ways to come up with ideas is to just start
something. And in the course of running that thing, you will come up with more ideas. It
seems like that's what happened with your, your helmets leading to this tricycle business.
Yeah.
So maybe the best place to start is at the very beginning of your story is your helmets
business. Sort of the first of your, your many projects turned into businesses.
Yeah. I mean, that was the first, that was the first business that like within a few
days of creating hand painted helmets, I immediately like set up a website and tried to sell them
mostly because people on the street asked me where I got that thing.
So take me back to like the origin of that. This is 2008. Yeah. You're in college. It
was like 2007 when I painted my first helmet. Yeah. Why did you paint a helmet? Uh, I didn't
wear a helmet because I thought it was really dorky to wear a helmet and I just hated all
the helmet options. And then I forced myself to, there weren't actually, there weren't
bike lane in 2007. They were just putting in bike lanes and my commute was on a like
on Bowery. It was a crowded street with lots of traffic and I had some close calls with
some cars where I'm like, okay, I should really wear a helmet in New York city. Yeah. In New
York city. And I bought one and I didn't like the way it looked. So I thought it'd be funny
to camouflage it in a way. So I painted it to look like the sky, even though it's not
really camouflage. I just painted it to look like clouds and just like a blue sky with
clouds and I varnished it and the varnish had this illusion of the sun. And then I thought,
Oh, I need a nighttime sky and a sunset sky. So I have like my helmets for different times
of day. And this was just like a weird, a weird project I had, but it wasn't like supposed
to be a business. And then once I painted three, I thought like, Oh, I kind of want
like 10 helmets. Like I, there's so many designs I could do, but almost immediately when I
went outside in the street, just at an intersection, cyclists would ask me, Oh, that's a really
cool helmet. And I, my immediate response was, do you want one too? And I would like
give them my email address. And then eventually I set up like a very basic website with pictures
and a PayPal link. This was kind of, I mean, there weren't so many e-commerce options then.
So yeah.
I know a lot of people who I would call makers, tinkerers, people who love to do things like
paint helmets and build things. Yeah. Not very many of them are entrepreneurial. Not very
many of them when somebody asked, Oh, where did you get that? Would say, Hey, let me make
you one of these. Yeah. Where did that drive come from?
Huh? I mean, it is, it is problematic that I'm what that when someone asks like, Oh,
I want that too. I'm like, I can do that. I don't know. I mean, also like I, it's as
a 19 year old being able to sell artwork for, I was charging when I first started, I was
charging like 50 or $60 a helmet. This seemed to like so much money to me and like would
be a great income. If you're able to make something and you find it fun and you're doing
it anyway, and someone wants to think from you and you simultaneously have to pay rent.
It's natural to just be an entrepreneur, I think.
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So people are asking you on the street, Hey, can I get
these helmets? You are saying yes.
I said yes. And then I think like within I created a very basic website so I could direct
people to website. It was cool helmets.org. That was my first website name. It was kind
of a joke website, but there were images. I made 12 helmets for myself and for some
people in my college dorm and then I had like a little gallery. I think like my first helmets
for like people on my floor, they gave me like beer in exchange for a helmet, but then
I had a portfolio trade. Yeah. And then what the, but I think was really exciting is once
I, once I put this online, I reached out to local bike blogs and they blogged about it
and strangers and other cities wanted the helmets for me. And this was fascinating.
Like to be able to sell something I made to someone that doesn't know me or like didn't
run into me. It was just so cool. Like someone in Florida is like, I want flamingos on my
helmet. And I just was so excited about strangers contacting me at that time. Yeah.
So at this point, are you thinking, you know, you've got dollar signs in your eyes. You're
going to grow this into some sort of massive helmet business. Why not?
I think I was excited about the possibilities of designs on helmets more than I was motivated
by money. I was like, wow, there's thousands of designs I could make. I didn't think so
much about like how that would equate to revenue immediately, but I was just thinking like,
wow, I want this idea to exist. No one's doing custom helmets. Cycling is getting more popular.
This needs to exist. So I have a notebook where I just give myself deadlines and random
challenges. And I wrote, like, you need to, you need to paint a hundred helmets in the
next year. Like not necessarily to sell them. They just need to exist in the world. But
yeah, I mean, simultaneously, I also like wasn't making that much money on the helmets
because my pricing was awful. So how much did they cost?
I was doing like custom people. People were like, I can't afford it. I'd be like, no problem.
What can you pay? And I was just like, so excited to sell my artwork. And I think this
is a problem for lots of painters is that they don't actually keep track of how much
time they're spending painting. And they think like, oh, well, this is a meditative thing
for me. And like, whatever you want to pay, I'm just glad my artworks out there. So I
was charging, I don't know, sometimes a ballpark around $50 for a helmet when the helmet itself
was costing me 20. And I was making like $30 on a painting that would sometimes take like
five hours or, um, not a great deal. Right. Plus like not charging enough for shipping
or like offering to deliver it in person because I wanted to meet the people buying the things
and what I learned like, you know, after two years, how to increase my pricing. I mean,
I'm still learning about that. Yeah, it's an art, not a science. Yeah. Okay. So your
first foray into business, you don't charge enough. How does the helmet thing end and
how does the next thing begin? My next thing after the helmets was other bike related stuff.
I created this system to mount a phone to city bike when bike share first emerged. Like
there wasn't a way to use GPS while on, on the bike. So I created, I think I needed to
come up with some company name and I landed on trillo box. Cause it sounded like, I don't
know. It's sounded like an established trillo box. I use a trillo box and that was, I think
that was like my second company where I was able to like sell things immediately to strangers
on the internet. Um, and I was sewing these leather cases. They were like, or they're
like fake leather and, um, had had like bungee cord and, um, I was leaving notes on city
bikes to like purchase one and people contacted me, but also people were searching for that
thing anyway, which was really interesting. Like I could see that a lot of my web traffic
was just for people looking for like smart phone on city bike. And people were looking
for a way to attach their phone to the city bike. Cause the handlebars were, oh, I guess
I'll explain this. The handlebars for the bike shares, the bike share bikes then were
wide and all phone mounts were cylindrical. So there's no way to attach all the existing
amounts. So it had to be a system with like this bungee cord that wraps around and this
product didn't exist. And I, I thought it'd be useful cause like, no one knows where the
doc, you don't know if the doc is available. So you need to be looking at your phone and
there'd be all these people riding city bikes, like stopped in the intersection, just like
messing up. How did you notice this problem yourself? Was it like you wanted to attach
your case to a bike and you couldn't? Yeah. Like I wanted to see a lot of the docs were
totally full. So you would bike to what you thought was you would, I'd want to see availability
in real time. Otherwise I'd end up at a doc and then I'd have to like pull out my phone
and go to another doc and people would like honk at me cause I'm like stuck in the bike
lane. Like why can't I just look at my phone while I'm on the bike? It doesn't make sense.
I can't attach a phone to this bike and I could like Velcro it, but like I could also
design a case for other people. Yeah. Probably the oldest startup advice in the book is solve
your own problems. Yes. You seem to consistently solve your own problems. Yeah. Everybody's
got problems. Why isn't everybody else as good at you as you are at actually solving
them at solving them or, or solving them for other or like getting other people to buy
your solution or both? Cause I, when you run into this, it's like number one, you're like,
this is a problem and you recognize that it has some value. Then you solve it and you
get other people to use it. It's probably like, I worked for many years in theater and
film making props and I had a ton of budget restraints and things I needed to like procure
and produce within 24 hours. And so I got into this habit of making things really fast
as though there was a deadline when there wasn't and making things out of whatever was
around me with like spending as little as possible just cause I worked on so many low
budget short films. It's probably from that, but I also, I'm excited. I get very excited
about like figuring out how to make something. How would you, let's say make Trillo box from,
from conception to construction. Like how did I buy the materials? How does that work?
The first thing I did was I made a prototype of whatever I had. I think I put a nail in
some wood and a rubber band and then moved it around the city and then like another nail
and then sealed my phone in with like a piece of clear plastic, which I had lying around
like, okay, well this is way too big. I need to make this out of some materials. I went
to a fabric store and saw this like nice, like fake leather stuff and got like a small
amount of that. And I also needed like nice hemming. I had a sewing machine anyway, so,
but I didn't spend much on it. And then I decided to sell them for 24 99 cause that
was like a comparable price to the other, to the other ones, but I ended up manufacturing
them in Bangladesh later on. And what about the selling part of this? Yeah. You were going
from city bike to city bike. I was leaving. Yeah, I was going to crowded. I was going
to crowded docs and I had printed a card that said, you can attach your phone to your
bike, go to trilobox.com and I would leave them taped to the bike itself, which is like
kind of spammy a little bit real world spam. Yeah. But like it's solving a useful problem.
It wasn't like, come check out my comedy club, check out my band, donates, like fund me.
Okay. So you are this combination of this intense hacker slash hustler slash parallel
printer. Is that what you called it? Sure. How did the trilobox thing work out? Uh, yeah,
I actually got pretty overwhelmed with orders and I was trying to figure out how to manufacture
them and I, um, someone in, I was in a coworking space and someone in my coworking space, his
cousin in Bangladesh had a small shoe factory and he was visiting and he's like, what, what
have I brought a sample and like, we can test out making them. So I did a run of them in
Bangladesh and then for the next year, just like sold that, but I never remade them cause
I got busy with other stuff. I had like my cloud storage sculpture company, one business
interrupted by another business. That's yeah. So a lot of people have this issue where we
start building something and we never actually finished building things. You're like a whole
step further than that where you start building something, you finish building it, but then
you don't take it to like scale and get interrupted at that phase. Yeah. I'm trying to, right.
I think the solution is to delegate, to fire yourself from your own company and then delegate
all those tasks to something else, which is something I've learned in the last two years.
Like when you reach a point where you kind of understand how to run the business and
you're really excited about working on your next idea and just the day to day of your
previous business is like, it doesn't seem like it's dependent on your mind specifically.
And you find someone really excited about that idea. Like you could hire someone if
you have the revenue for it. And it's scary if you're used to doing projects all by yourself
to like give up that much control, but you've already figured it out and someone else might
join and work on it and have their own ideas of how to do things better than you. And it's
like a good experiment to try. And that would enable you to work on something else.
Let's talk about some of these lessons that you've learned, delegating something you've
learned recently in the last couple of years. I'm curious, what are some of the lessons
that you've learned from your first few businesses? We talked about not charging enough. What
else?
Okay. Here's like a very simple thing. Like make sure your forms work on your website.
I've launched a few things and I didn't like check to see if like all the different forms
or ways you can contact me on every single page is working. And actually like missed
out on 200 emails for my company from when I, when I launched like helmets for your corporation,
I think I will do a batch of 100 helmets. I missed out on like really great opportunities
because I didn't check to see whether or not the JavaScript thing was like working. And
so yeah, very small details. I think something that is super important is to always launch
your idea with a soup with an MVP that doesn't where you're not spending much money or time
at all just to see what people want and showing your idea to just people, you know, before
launching it and gauging reactions from that has been super helpful for choosing what to
actually pursue because I once started, I wanted to start this like huge platform for
sourcing props throughout New York for art directors and spent like weeks working on
this, but I never even went up to a prop shop and asked if they'd be interested in putting
their inventory on this website. And like, what a waste of time. I also like ended up
asking art directors or like set designers, would you pay if you could like use this platform
to search for like a 1920s telephone? And they're like, I don't know, like Craigslist
is fine. And I like go to prop shops and it's okay. And I couldn't find and maybe that changes
depending on like, what's going on that year. But like, I it's really important because
I could have done other things with my time. It's important to immediately start asking
like who your end user is or like who your customer is. Like if they would actually buy
that thing where you put any time and money into building it.
So you've been creating and selling physical goods in the real world for a long time. You've
also got some digital businesses, apps and websites and stuff like that. We're going
to get into those. But I'm curious about how the process of selling physical goods has
changed over time. Is that gotten any easier since you first started back in 2000?
Totally. I mean, it's fairly easy to set up an e-commerce website right now and to make
it look beautiful. There's so many websites and templates and like, it's easy to have
good photography.
When I was starting out with my business in 2008, I had to buy a digital camera and then
I had to sharpen it and I had to make it look like a professional camera. And it's just
kind of easy to seem like a large business online as an e-commerce company. It's also
you can sell things directly through Instagram and other sorts of channels. Things could
just go viral on Instagram. And as long as there's a checkout link, you don't need an
elaborate website. You do single page websites with checkout links.
Do you know a lot of other people who you could describe as... I guess using the same
terms you describe yourself as a parallel entrepreneur making these physical products
and competing with you. Who are the other Danielle Baskin?
I would love to meet... If you're listening to this, I would love to meet people that
are working on multiple businesses simultaneously because I... And people always tell me not
to do this. All the advice I get is to focus on one thing. But I know people working on
lots of projects, but not multiple projects involving customers.
Yeah.
I do too. I know a lot of people making stuff. They're usually not that passionate. It's
like if you're a singer. Most singers aren't that passionate about also marketing their
music and distributing it to customers and selling it to them.
Same with people that I know who are physical makers. Most of you guys aren't actually
selling stuff.
Yeah. It is. I try to encourage people to sell stuff, but I think it's... I mean, some
people, my friends who are artists and make a lot of stuff, I often tell them to sell
things. They're like, no, capitalism sucks.
It'll ruin it.
And it's not really... I guess that's an ideology that... I mean, they're still participating
in a capitalist world.
Yeah. There's no real escape.
And it's not awful to charge... It's great to charge people for services and things.
I mean, it'd be cool if you could just pay people all the time for weird performances.
If someone says a beautiful sentence, you could just tip them.
Micropayment. Here you go.
Yeah. Micropayment.
Here you go. There's a dollar. The sentence is amazing.
Yeah. Well, I think often people get uncomfortable with charging for something that they thought
was a fun problem to solve.
Especially engineers that are used to getting paid to have a full-time job. And so they're
side projects. They always consider side projects. They never consider that to be a source of
revenue.
With me, I haven't had a full-time job. So I'm like, what can I sell today? I wake up
and look around me. What objects do I have? What can I sell today? And I think that if
you're in a certain profession where there's tons of jobs available, there aren't tons
of jobs available for painters and sculptors. So you have to be like, what limited resources
do I have and how can I convert that into money so I can pay rent?
Right.
Cool. Looking at the aesthetic differences between different types of people and makers,
I was just at MicroConf a couple weeks ago. And everybody at MicroConf is kind of like
an indie hacker. They're usually developers who want to make some sort of software as
a service business and sell that. You're a physical tinkerer and maker. You've got this
drive to look around your house and sell things.
Yeah.
I think people in LA, I was talking to my buddy, Julian, they're really into e-commerce
in LA. Almost all the big startups coming out of LA are e-commerce focused. I go to
a conference in Boise, Idaho every year called Craft Plus Commerce. And everybody there
is a blogger. They all have blogs about Amazon shopping addictions and food products, et
cetera. And they're all different ways to sort of make money online, but people don't
really cross over. And then people sort of like, I don't want to say look down on the
other groups, but there's kind of these invisible boundaries. People are like, well, that's
not the real way to do it. So that's why I'm curious how you see yourself fitting into
any of these groups or you're just sort of like a free floating one person entity. Do
you look up to anybody? Are you inspired by anybody? Is there anyone that you're trying
to be? Or is there anything to do with someone else's done?
No, I have a list of things I want to create. I guess I'm very driven by ideas, not thinking
about myself as a person that has... I'm just excited about ideas existing. So I don't think
I need to be a person with all these businesses. It's more like, I want this thing to exist.
Oh, I guess it's a business. Sometimes it's not a project I'm really excited about. And
this is not, I don't just do e-commerce stuff, but I do a lot of exploration of abandoned
buildings. I'm very interested in just exploring spaces. So I have with lots of planning have
gone to interesting places that it's difficult for the public to go to. And so I started
this service called Last Tents Tours, where I actually borrowed a Matterport camera and
so I could create a VR scans of places. So people could access these abandoned spaces
and get a tour of it. And I've been pitching this to cities to have me do historical documentation,
but no one really will pay me to do it. But I'm just really excited about this thing to
exist. But sort of like, I don't know, I think I have lots of hobbies and interests. And
I tried to think like, okay, how do I turn this into some sort of product that will support
this hobby?
Do you think that the business side of things ever sucks the joy out of any of your hobbies
or projects?
Oh, yeah, totally. I used to love painting. And after painting, I mean, I've painted,
I don't know, 5,000 helmets, like a crazy... I don't know exactly how many helmets I've
painted. Lots of hours painting. I mean, I've painted for over 10,000 hours or something.
I hate... After four years, I hated painting. Or like, I had a complicated relationship
with it. It was no longer... It was like work. It's like, I was thinking like, as I'm painting,
it's just like, my mundane office job is painting. And I would not look forward to it, but I
forced myself to do it. And I liked coming up with new images. I was excited about the
whole project in a conceptual way, like the possibilities are endless for helmets. When
I stopped enjoying painting, I started researching ways to automate it, which I'm still working
on and I'm like partway there. But then it sort of like, I stopped drawing and I stopped
sketching, drawing and kind of lost my whole visual art drive. So then a year ago, I stopped
painting helmets entirely. And then it sort of has come back right now. I have an impulse
to paint again. So I think you could totally get burnt out once you start getting paid
for what you think, what your creative hobby is. When you start getting paid, you associate
that with money. It's not fun anymore. And it's good to like quit it and then come back
to it.
Yeah. I guess that's the good part of never really fully shutting down your business.
You can always come back to it. It's always there. You said that you are more passionate
about ideas themselves than any particular outcome. You're not like, I need to be Daniel
Baskin owner of 50 companies. It's just...
I don't need to be the CEO of a startup, even though I am.
Maybe that explains why your ideas sort of interrupt each other. If you don't have a
particular outcome you're going for and then you get a new idea you're excited to build,
then why not switch and start working on this other idea?
Totally. And I mean, that could be a problem because I think if I were to stick with one
thing, if I was like, I want to run with branded fruit and I want to like not only do branded
fruit, but figure out a new system for flu codes and I want to like be Daniel Baskin
of the produce industry. I could do a lot with that, but like I'm not... I'm conflicted
because I have all these other identities, I guess.
Yeah. I mean, you're pretty close to Daniel Baskin of the fruit industry. You came in
here, I don't know what you say, you're having a fruit day?
Yeah. I said today was a fruit day. That's why I'm late because I had a fruit assembly
line.
Okay. We're going to get to that.
And there are all these... Yeah.
We're going to get to that. Let's go to like the middle of your history before we go to
the fruit phase of your life.
Okay, cool.
When did you move to California and why did you make that decision?
Yeah, I moved three years ago, a little over three years ago. I was running out of... I
was running everything out of... I was in this weird live workspace above a bar in the
East Village, a cool space. I lived with a neon sign maker and we had a wood shop in
our kitchen and it was great, but I ran out of space for... My floor was just covered
in boxes with helmets. I had clients come over, which some of them were entertained
by my place, but it was not that professional. So I was looking for a new place to move to
in New York. I didn't imagine living in California. And my friends in San Francisco said, hey,
we're actually going to be leaving our apartment for three months. If you want to come here
for the winter, you can stay with us. You can stay in our place. It's not like, oh,
what if I just lived in San Francisco for three months and then I moved up and then
I never left.
Welcome to the club. Every single year I think I've got two years left. I've been saying
that for eight years.
Yeah. And I was in New York for 10 years. I think it's difficult. You can get kind of
locked into living in a city when you're not aware that you might enjoy a different place.
So I think it's good to force yourself to just live somewhere else because you might
end up moving.
Agreed. I haven't pulled the plug yet, but one day.
Yeah.
Okay. So you moved from New York. You're living here with your friends. Did you start a new
business once you moved here?
Yes. Many of them. Within a few months of moving here, actually, I mean, this was just
like a one week business, was like Pokemon Go craze. And I created a battery that looks
like a Pokeball, which went viral on the internet. And I sold lots of them and hired 25 people.
And we had an assembly line and made them for like three weeks. And that was like, I
mean, I only did this for a short amount of time, but I had my helmet business. I brought
my tricycle. I brought one. I had three tricycles in New York and just brought one over.
I also was doing my cloud storage units that were like these clouds you can store things
in. I started doing custom avocados when I moved here because the avocados were, I could
get better deals on avocados in San Francisco and more people are interested in avocados
here.
I also did a lot of my companies are sort of Bay Area jokes too. Like I started selling
sweaters for drones and
Walk me through the idea behind sweaters for drones.
Yeah. I made a sweater for my drone, just like one would have a dog sweater. And I
I, you knitted a sweater.
Uh, no, it seems like I knit the sweater. I wanted to spend as very little time as possible
on this. So I found some knit socks and cut up the socks and resewed them together.
And attached some to your drone.
And yeah, I mean, I made like a buttoned up and I attached it to a drone that was broken
because I thought of the idea and I didn't even have a drone, but just put a message
out into the world. Hey, can I borrow someone's drone? And someone gave me their like sort
of broken drone.
But this went viral on the internet and I then drone companies started sending me their
drones for sweaters. Then I had a pilot drones with sweaters and I, and I sold. Yeah, I get
inquiries about this a lot. I kind of don't sell them anymore. Cause I don't, I don't
think it's something anyone needs. Like I can't justify, I can't justify spending time
on drone sweaters.
There is actually a use case for it. If I wanted to, you know, if I wanted to work with
companies to, to figure out like sleek ways to conserve drone battery life when it's cold
weather outside. Cause batteries drain faster. There could be like the stylish solution with
like a heated drone sweater, but I haven't really, I don't care that much about drones.
So a lot of people are trying to start companies and come up with ideas and they're very serious
about this. You're starting companies as basically jokes sometimes.
I mean, it's, yeah, it's fun for me. Like I, I love launching ideas and setting up landing
pages. Like this is a hobby is to like set up landing pages for, for stuff. Um, so I
launched this as a joke and then people thought it was serious. And then I thought no one
would want to buy it, but people do people. And this has happened for a few products where
I think, Oh, everyone will hate this. And they'll understand that I'm making fun of
the Bay area, but yet they want the thing. This is my VC trading cards, which I sort
of kept anonymous, but VC trading cards, VC trading cards, sweater, sweaters for drones.
Why do people want these things? And like, I guess what I'm getting at is how do you
make something go viral? Like what is, what is the sort of common thread between what
makes something blow up? Is it because they're jokes or is there something else that you're
doing to really get people interested in the things that you're building?
Yeah. I mean, I think a percentage of the stuff that is a joke gets media attention
and people want to be part of that joke and they want to be part of the story that they
are the person buying that thing. Like this joke speaks to them. They are the recipient
of the joke and they want it to, but often it's totally unexpected. Like I put something
online like the VC trading cards actually were super popular in Japan because there's
both trading card culture is so strong there and similar. And there's also a sort of obsession
with Silicon Valley there. And so I sold a lot to people in Japan, but I didn't like
realize that, but I don't know why people impulse purchase things. I don't understand
it either. Like I'm not, I don't really buy things on the internet when I find something
funny. I think like it's very easy to be on Twitter and you find something at 1 AM and
you just, Oh, I want that shit to me in three days. Cool.
Yeah. I see funny things on the internet. I just laugh and then click the next thing.
Yeah. I don't buy either. I saw a, um, there's a community online. I think it's called the
cloud appreciation society and it's a community of people who appreciate clouds. Oh, I'd love
to, to learn more. Yeah. I think they charge like 25 or 50 bucks for membership and they've
got like 30,000 members. What does the membership include? Like a black, like a physical thing.
Really love being part of special clubs. I think that's it, especially with, I think
like a lot of brands have sort of this whole lifestyle. Like if you buy our shirt, you
are now like a person that can like, is part of our whole Instagram lifestyle.
I got a whole box of any hacker shirts right here. If you want one, you can be part of
the crew. So this is like, this is interesting because it's, it's maybe it's an under looked
marketing tactic, at least in like the circles that I travel in where like being novel and
funny and having personality and just, I don't know, just doing something different than
everybody else is doing can get you immediate attention beyond just building something that's
super useful.
That's the thing, right? Like, I mean, I, I like building useful things and can justify
my jokes as useful. Like the swag, like swag, swag produce, putting logos on oranges and
avocados is like seems really silly, but it's actually like kind of useful because there's
a lot of waste when you get your digit spinners and your stress balls and it's actually like
solving a problem of like not wasting as much plastic if you want to like promote something.
And it also solves this problem of like, Oh, nobody's taking pictures of the water bottle
they get, but they'll take a picture of an orange because it's novel. So there's like
some utility in it. I'd rather only make useful things. I just think of a lot of dumb jokes
and they are like, I mean, it's important for any, if you have like a useful product,
it's so hard to get press about it. Journalists love weird, controversial, like funny stories.
And so it's a challenge if you do have a useful thing, like how do you spin a, how do you
spin a weird surrealist angle on it so that you get some sort of press?
There's a new task manager that's making people 5% more productive. No one wants to write
a story on that.
Yeah. A to do list. Yeah.
So let's talk about, let's talk about your, your branded produce. Okay, sure. Branded
fruit is the name of your company. What is this exactly? Who's buying it? How did you
come up with the idea?
Yeah. Branded fruit. Um, I started as the company custom avocados.com and I did this
before I even had a website. My friend was having a barbecue and her company had recently
been acquired. And I thought it'd be sort of funny if I brought swag from the new company
name to the barbecue as though their life was like now owned by their new company. Like
your life has been acquired. Your barbecue has been acquired. So I brought these avocados.
I made four avocados and it's like left them on the table. And I noticed like all these
people were taking pictures of them and they were just looking at them and they were fascinated.
Like how did you do it? And they were putting them on Instagram. Like, Oh, actually this
is like great marketing. Like this company who didn't even buy these is now getting like
mentions on Twitter. And so I thought, okay, well, I think I could probably turn this into
a company and sell these. I set up and it took a, it took some time to actually like,
I think this was in New York. I moved to San Francisco. I set it up. I actually launched
the idea for the stupid ideas hackathon, which is a great conference that happens once a
year where your goal is to build something that is useless, which is a challenge. And
I think avocados don't even, they're not useless, but I launched it there and I, people tweeted
about it. And so companies actually saw this and I actually got an order with Salesforce.
They wanted 500 avocados out of the blue Salesforce make us five. They're like, Oh, this would
be great for our Cinco de Mayo party for our team. And they wanted 500. And then other
companies wanted smaller amounts and that was fine. Some people like wanted them just
as inside jokes. I did like a wedding proposal or marriage proposal on a series of avocados
that this person left throughout their apartment. And I did this for like a year. I mean, just
like, I don't know, a few times a month by yourself. Yeah. How long does it take one
person to carve? It's not carved. It's applied to the surface. You can. Yeah. I mean, it's
constantly getting faster because I'm using new technology. It was like I was doing a
very slow process going to the store and finding the perfect avocado. That is the perfect level
of un unripe ripenness is like that takes time. But then I, I found farms and I had
like an avocado supplier and I ended up expanding this. I did avocados for like two years. And
I thought, because in my spare time, I make landing pages and by domain names, I was like,
what about all fruit? Why not? Like why not carrots? Why not peppers? Why not pineapples?
And I just bought the domain name branded fruit.com because it was available. And it's
sort of like fake acquired custom avocados and the new direction of the, I think I did
on Facebook, but it was sort of a joke. And the new direction of the company was like
all produce, like brands on everything and sort of like a surrealist dystopian way. Just
like printed a bunch of brands. Like I put Airbnb on like a piece of broccoli and I made
all these samples and put them on my site and it ended up getting press in fast company
do. I mean, this was my own fault. I did, I did tip it. I did tip it to them, but it
got press and it made its way into like marketing or like promotional items, trade publications
as this is the new, like this is the newest swag. And I talked to people who had been
in the industry for 20 years and they're like, I've never seen logos on fruit before. And
it's to me, it's such like an obvious idea. I guess like, yeah, it is. Yeah, this hasn't
existed in like 20 years of weird promotional items. And so companies, I mean, yeah, pretty
large companies are reaching out to me and they want a thousand oranges to give out for
an event or 5,000 oranges or avocados or clementines, pineapples. I don't do bananas anymore, but
at one point I did. So when you, when you tip off fast company,
you get some press, you're expecting there to be about interest. You have a plan at that
point for exactly what your business is going to look like. No, this, okay. I didn't tip,
I wasn't a direct tip to fast company. Basically there was an article about how wasteful the
swag industry was. And I just emailed the journalist who wrote about it that this is
why all swag should be avocados or something silly. But like I told her I was doing this
like waste free alternative to swag. And she wanted to hop on the phone and learn more.
And we had a long conversation about manufacturing and the wastefulness of swag. Like I've manufactured
things in China before. So I know like if the logo is off center, they throw out the
whole product and it's like crazy how much stuff is wasted and how no one even cares
about the thing. Like it's just incredible that so much time, so many labor hours are
going into things that no one wants. But we have this long conversation and then she ended
up writing an article about it, but I didn't know. I didn't know that it was going to be
featured in fast company. So one day at 5.30 AM, my phone starts ringing and someone who
wants branded fruit, I'm like, Oh, that's interesting. And then like two minutes later,
my phone rings again. And I will check my, I open up my email and I just have like in
a row, I have like tons of requests. I mean, within the first three days I had like 150
requests for fruit. And this is just you by yourself at this point. I was, yes. Well,
I was home and then my co-founder for my voice chat app was on my couch at the time and he
observed this whole thing happen. And then the two of us sorted through all my emails
and set up an air table and like organized everything. And I didn't even have like my
website. There was no way to purchase it. It was just a form. And I just, I switched
everything to shop within a day, I switched everything to Shopify and change my photography
and like set up a nicer form and had a whole like way of tagging inbound orders and like
set this whole thing up in a day, which I should have done in advance, but I didn't
know.
Well, it's crazy. You're actually getting paying customers are people who want to pay
you for what you're building. You've built absolutely nothing besides a landing page.
I had done some fruit, right? Not much though. I mean, I had done probably under 1500 pieces
of fruit in my lifetime, which I guess it seems low, but yeah, like the whole branded
fruit business was pretty new and no one had ever purchased something from that domain
name. They had purchased stuff from custom avocados, but yeah, and I didn't spend like,
I mean, I set up the whole website in just an afternoon, bought a bunch of fruit, put
logos on it and used like some of my earlier client work.
That's what's amazing to me because I know so many people who will work on something
for like a year and not get a single paying customer.
Well, right. Then that's why you should test ideas without spending any time and money
on them. Like to see, like build, make your thing better as people are paying. I sort
of freaked out when I first started getting so many orders. I was like, there's no way
I could make this much fruit. Like I don't have a van. I don't have, where do I get my
fruit wholesale? I had to figure this all out. And I was thinking like, Oh, maybe I
should have an investor. And then I was like, Oh wait, I could just like charge people and
then figure it out incrementally and do like what I can. And I guess if my first like five
orders are not perfect, that's okay.
At what point did you start hiring people and scaling up your operation?
Within three days, I hired a full-time assistant because my inbox was just crazy. And I was
also working on my other company. And so I didn't want to spend 100% of my time on fruit.
I also couldn't brand out the fruit alone. And yeah, a friend of mine really wanted to
work on branded fruit. She was excited about the business. I was like, Oh yeah, let's try
it out. Like, yeah, come over and we'll sort of work on random stuff together and we'll
see. And she, yeah, she's been like my full-time assistant for like, I guess over three months.
Yeah.
And now you've got, how many people did you say you had working on fruit today?
There's nine people working at the fruit factory today. Yeah. It's ruling. I mean, some days
it's one person, some days it's three. It's depends on the order because we have to ship
out same day. So.
Describe to listeners this process of having a fruit factory.
A fruit factory in a studio, having a fruit factory. I mean, it's an assembly, it's an
assembly line. I call it the fruit force, but it's like fruit force or fruit factory.
It's an assembly line. I mean, it is, imagine 2000 oranges on a table and everyone's doing
a part and the oranges are coming off the table into boxes. And there's someone like
preparing all the boxes so that they have the right, they're packaged in the right way.
So they don't bruise in the mail. And like, there's someone putting the perishable stickers,
everyone it's like you divide everything into a micro task. I've done factories before and
like I learned each time, like how to set up a system and, and then try to make it fun.
Like I, I'm actually really interested in the social aspect of factories, like what
people are coming in today and what is their dynamic like? And do these people distract
each other? Like, what is the conversation going to be about? And so I try to, I try
to like curate and make socially engineering. I guess, I mean, there's only, I mean, you
can't really like do things happen organically. Also like don't know. Some people join the
factory and I haven't met them before. And, but yeah, I didn't people like I actually
have a, I actually have a wait list to work on my factory because people say they're a
lot of fun. I know. Yeah. Well, that's like my, yeah. I mean, I kind of want to have a
separate ticketed factory for all the people that are on the wait list and just start selling
tickets to fact to work on an assembly line as like, Oh, weird as a theater piece joke.
But like, yeah, I mean, I basically have an email list and then just will, if I need help
for something, we'll just blast everyone and see who's available. And I mean, it's a mix
of who's available that day. Cause I only do it last minute. I don't, I can't plan in
advance for, for stuff like fruit. Yeah. Okay. So I want to talk about your last company,
the one you're most excited about dial up. Um, before that, I want to give listeners
a snapshot of how well branded fruit is doing because you said you'd be okay sharing some
revenue numbers about that. Yeah. Uh, so, so, uh, the fast company article launched mid
December then, uh, took me like a week to set everything up to charge people. So since,
since January 1st, I have sold $59,000 in fruit, but that includes shipping and stuff.
That's not, that's not, but I've, but I've transacted $59,000 through my Shopify and
in just fruit alone in like bananas and oranges and avocados, which is crazy. It's a lot of
fruit, but no longer bananas. No bananas don't ship well. They, I talked to the, I talked
to the director of the international banana association through my app. Like we got connected
in a, in a way. And, um, it's the shipping bananas is like very difficult. I have ideas
for like how to improve banana shipping, but it's just easier to say no. No, just say no
to that idea. It's like the temperature changes and they're just bruised easily. And yeah,
let's talk about your app that connected you to this banana expert. Um, what is dial-up?
Okay. Dial-up is a voice chat app that calls your phone at specific intervals, like let's
say Tuesday at 7 PM, your phone rings and it connects you with a random person in a
specific line that you've signed up to. So like if you and 10 friends want to always
stay, stay connected with each other through phone calls, it just calls you and connects
you. And this could be, um, a group of people with similar interests. Like there's a, we
have a line for farming, uh, and by line, I mean like a channel, uh, but yeah, there's
like a line for farming. And so people that are interested in like ag tech will like on
Sundays at 4 PM, like their phones will ring and they'll get connected and they'll be matched
with the random person and they'll have a one-on-one and you can do this with a, with
just one person. So you'd be like matched with, you'd always match with them or you
can do it with like 300 people for your conference or like a thousand people and continue like
having these meaningful conversations, like pretty frequently. Is this another idea that
came out of you solving one of your own problems? Totally. It's both like my problems and Max,
my co-founder's problems. So years ago, Max, uh, created this, this art project called
call in the night. That was a library of people discussing their dreams and it would call
people in the middle of the night between 2 AM and 5 AM like at random days. And, uh,
they'd pick up, they'd be connected to a stranger. They'd discuss their dreams that would be
recorded. And so there's a library and 5,000 people were on this. There's like a library
of people talking about their dreams or 5,000 people voluntarily signed up to be called between
2 and 5 AM and all over the world. But it wasn't just about dreams and people would
like talk about all these different things. And he showed me the archives. I was very
interested in this. I've always been interested in like voice conversations kind of like from
being a painter. Like I actually can't at like, when my, when my day job was painting,
I actually like couldn't really spend much time on the internet. So I'd listen to lots
of podcasts and I'd have people call me as a way to communicate with me because I couldn't
like check Twitter. So I also have been making audio recordings for many years, but, um,
uh, so I learned about this and like kind of around the same time I was getting a lot
of emails from like entrepreneurs that wanted advice and I thought that, okay, it's kind
of like someone wants to talk to me for advice, but they kind of just want to verbalize what's
on their mind. And this is like this helpful therapy sort of thing. And what I noticed
also like with calm and night that like, it's very therapeutic and people have all these
realizations when they're just like talking to someone over the phone and I thought, okay,
well, what if I connected all the people that are reaching out to me with each other so
that like an entrepreneur could talk to another entrepreneur. And, uh, Max and I were discussing
this and thought like, okay, let's try it just with us and a small group of friends.
And so we were all self-employed. We were all calling each other. Then it sort of seemed
like we were each other's bosses and we created an app called your boss and it was like role
play as a boss for a stranger. And if you're self-employed freelance remote, we worked
on this for a few months, launched it in the app store. A few hundred people joined all
over the world. It was interesting. Like there are a lot of people on it that were not self-employed
or freelance and there were a significant amount of people that were self-employed
and working on all these interesting projects, like a shoemaker in England and like a set
designer in Mumbai and all these people working on their thing. There are a lot of people
that just had like, they had a full-time job. They were just like really interested in talk
and like having a, having a conversation with someone. And then we had all these, these
people say like, I want this, but I want to choose who I talk to. Like, I really liked
the person I just met on the phone. How do I get reconnected? So then we decided to just
be a voice chat app, not just for, not just for people pretending to be the other's boss,
but for like any sort of interest or group of people you want to stay in touch with.
And like kind of, it's relevant now because I have so many friends that are leaving Facebook
and Twitter and I'm just like, oh, just join my dial-up line and we can stay in touch because
I otherwise I'll have no awareness of what's going on. You'll just kind of like, if I don't
plan to like get lunch with you, I will never, I will never know what's going on in your
life. And it's really sad that I'd be dependent on Facebook or Twitter to like have an, have
an awareness of another person. So I'm like, oh, join my dial-up line. And like, I, I will
get connected to you over the phone at a specific interval.
So like you say Thursday at 5 PM, connect me to the specific person and then you calls
them. Yeah. I mean, or what I do with my dial-up line is I have, it calls a random person, right?
So I'm, I get connected to a random friend. Oh, okay. So you don't even know who it's
going to be and they don't even know if a call is going to come. Yeah. They don't know
that if they're going to get called or not, but like it could be, we could, I could set
up a one-on-one with someone and say that yes, every, every once a month on a Thursday
at 4 PM, our phones will ring and we will have a conversation. Yeah. And there's also
like this prompt at the beginning of the conversation that I like, I make my prompts weird, but
like, there's prompts. Like if you want to ask a specific question, like what are you
up to right now? Or like, let's go look at the moon and tell me what's on your mind.
I don't know. So like you reading these prompts to people, is there a voice? Yeah. I've recorded
for all of the lines, all the lines we have that are like dial-ups lines. Cause when you
join the app, there's like 12 different lines you could join. It's me and Max that recorded
all the intros with different music. So it's like 30 second clips. And it's like for the,
for the boss line, it's like this 80s synth music. And I'm like, when's your next deadline?
And then people talk to each other and try to answer that question. There's a line where
you just like talk about weather and nature. And I ask questions about insects or it's
like, it's random stuff, but it didn't, it's like having a very detailed question inspires
a whole conversation. So out of all the things we've talked about, this is the first of all,
how are we doing on time? Oh, I'm good. I'm just, I'm getting, uh, one of the calls was
just triggered from the app is calling me right now. It's the immersive. I signed up
the immersive design summit. And so every Thursday at 5.15 PM, uh, the phone rings and
I can see, yeah, I see the call coming in and summit is calling. Oh, I should have picked
it up actually. That'd be funny if I was like recording a podcast. So what happens if you
don't pick it up? It's, it's just, they get connected to somebody else. Yes, they get
connected to someone else. So if I don't pick up, it's like, you'll still get a match. Yeah.
So out of all the things we've talked about, this is the only business we've covered so
far. That's 100% pure app. Everything else has had some sort of physical e-commerce physical
good component to it. And your experience, what's, what are some of the differences?
How is this different than building a physical product? Is it harder? Is it easier? Oh, I
mean, it's so, it's so nice. Like, okay. Dealing with shipping physical things is so, like,
so limiting as to like how many people you could reach. And like, also you're dealing
with the forces of lost packages. And like, there's just so many issues with, with like
physical goods. And this idea I'm very excited about, but it like works for thousands of
people. Like if we build it well, like thousands of people can use it and more. And it's also
like, I mean, it's, this is such a different project because this is like, this is about
human relationships and connections and stuff versus like decorative whimsical things, which
is most of the other stuff I've done. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's totally different. Like
I'm doing, I'm doing UX design for this and it's like totally different. I've had to like
design things in very different ways. It's like, Oh, how am I designing? Like people
creating their username versus like, how am I designing like a tapestry contraption thing
for someone's wall? It's very different. I'm really excited about this idea. It's kind
of awesome that if we're building this technology that all these people can use it and it's
like one project versus like make something, ship it out and it's gone, remake the thing,
ship it out. Yeah.
Yeah. It was kind of a natural ending point. If you're doing physical goods where you've
made all the things you're going to make and now you have to order more, you can just not
order more. Yeah.
Whereas with your digital app. It's an evolving. Yeah. The app is like this, this like giant
evolving thing. It's never gone. It never, it will never die. Well, there's no end, right?
I mean, there's constant, the more, the more users you have, the more future requests there
will be the more possible, the, the, the, when your technology works, the more possible
directions you can go in. And it's sort of like, yeah, it's this like massive sculpture,
not a sculpture. Yeah. It is, it is sort of like a sculpture.
Well, you're talking about these different directions you can go in and you're talking
about, okay, well, you've got your boss, which is for entrepreneurs.
Well, that's not, it's now a line. Yeah, right. And you've got lines, you've got basically
you can create a line for anything. Yeah. You've got business users, you've got consumers.
It's true. How do you make money from this? How do you, like, where you go as a business?
Right. I mean, we don't, so, uh, if it's, if your lines under 20, this is like our basic
pricing structure. If your line is under 20 people, it's free. And if it's over 20 people,
you're going to pay like $10 a month. And if it's over a hundred people and you're a
conference, then it would be a different price. So this way, like, we're not going to charge
you if you want to connect to your family and like a monthly call, like that seems,
but that's something that people are not used to paying for. And also like, I want, I want
to like facilitate these conversations, but if it's like, uh, some meetup group that has
a budget and like has over 20 people in it, then that will be a monthly payment.
Sounds like you've kind of naturally settled on being B to B charging businesses and letting
consumers charging.
No, I mean, I think like, I think that some people would want to pay $10 a month for a
large group, right? It's not necessarily a business. I think there's also all these features
that we'll build later on. I mean, this is just the pricing structure we're, we're doing
for the next few months while, while we built out the lines feature. But like, I think that
there could be all these other features, like more frequent calls and all these sort of
like micro payments that people could do. Yeah.
Have you found that it's any more difficult to grow and get press for a digital app, which,
which there are many millions compared to like a very unique, you know, branded fruit
product or sweater drones?
No, I'm not worried about this at all. Cause I have like a bunch of tricks. I mean, I have
like, I think, I mean, so if you're launching an app, like focus on, and I won't reveal
what my stunts are, but like, I have good stories about this app, uh, that I'll release
in the next few months, but focus on one very small detail detail of the technology you're
creating. That's a good, that's a really good story.
You have a whole repertoire of tricks. You gotta give us at least like half of a trick
a half trick to do this. Yeah. Okay. Well, here's how I, I've had a lot of success telling
people about my app by pulling out a floppy disk, which unfortunately I didn't bring,
but, um, I have like tons of floppy disks that like give people the link to sign up
for the app and explain what it is, but it looks like a retro disk. I actually like for
the immersive design summit, I left like a few hundred floppy disks lying around the
whole conference that all look like retro video games and stuff. And some just looked
like weird save, like save files. I made a whole spectrum of floppy disks. Like what
is this? And then they went to the website. Well, I'm planning on doing like a mass mailing
of floppy disks, kind of like AOL. I don't know anyone else who's advertising their app
by mailing people stuff. Oh yeah. People love, uh, artifacts and things. I think people enjoy,
and maybe I'm biased because I enjoy this, but I think people enjoy game elements to
to technology, right? To signing up for something like it should be fun and exciting as opposed
to like, I would never want to like purchase a Facebook ad to tell people about like connect
with your friends. And then we're like spending like a dollar 13 per click. I would never
want to like give Facebook money to get people to sign up for our app. But like if I am giving
someone this like interesting story, like I got a mysterious floppy disk in the mail
and then it led me to this site where like, I wasn't sure if it was real or not. And then
I read it and I was like, Oh, actually I do want this. I think like that's like, that's
a good way to get people to sign up. Like also like it's, I think it's super important
to not take. I, I, I'm very worried. Like now that I have this app that I'll sound
like a startup when I'm like, sign up for my app. Like I tell friends, I like run into
an old friend. I'm like, are you on my, are you on my app yet? And I don't like this about
myself. So I also, I don't want to like take this idea too seriously, even though I do,
I don't want to come across as though I take it too seriously. So I think if it, if it's
playful in the way that I'm sharing it is, is both like revealing what the product is,
but is also playful and like a game and also doesn't seem too much like a startup trying
to disrupt how people communicate. Like that's a good way to market something.
You're trying your hardest to not be like every other person in San Francisco.
Yeah. Our landing page is really weird. You can see it. We have dialup.com and it looks
like a retro website. I'm going for like my, like I think Craigslist is beautifully designed
and I could, I could make a landing page that has like the flat humans and like the three
bullet points of icons and test. I mean, there's like a whole formula for like being a startup,
but like, this isn't that interesting to me. Cause I think so much of it is noise cause
there's just way too many startups that are do the same aesthetic. And a lot of these
are like work cause it's like, Oh, you trust this format, but I'd rather people think like,
Oh, I don't know if this is like an art project or a, or a company, but it's very much a company.
But like, I think I don't want to, I don't want to come across as like, we're a, we're
an app.
I think you have this drive almost to just like not fit in any particular box to not,
not be part of a group, which is really cool because it makes you so different. Like that
novelty makes you way more interesting to the press, to users, to customers. Yeah. And it's,
it's hard to do because I think when you're starting a company, there's a lot of uncertainty.
There's a lot of like, should I make this decision? Should I go that direction and you
don't know. And I think part of being human is when you're uncertain, you just ask other
people, you copy other people and you feel good about that.
Yeah. It's cool. This app, like I, when it was your boss, I connected to users all the
time. So I had a phone conversation with someone in Norway and like, I could ask anyone I was
connected to like, Hey, would you want this phone feature for anything else in your life?
And like, got tons of feedback. And, um, because I'm able to like talk to people using the
app, it's like constant, there's a constant, like there's a constant connection to the
end user for me. I think it's easy for a lot of companies to sort of build things in a
vacuum and they have this idea like, here's the market. Like I know about the market.
And then they have this hypothesis and they're like, pretty sure it'll work, but they're
not even talking to the person or like I'd have an understanding, uh, like a personal
understanding of who the, who the end user is. So I think like, I think that would also
be demotivating for me. If I didn't, if I didn't think like I was building anything
that was valuable for anyone and then continued to stick with my hypothesis. Cause I didn't
want to be wrong. Like I would not enjoy that for Max and I, we, we want to, we want to
design like the best way for people to have a, have like a meaningful conversation in
the year 2019, uh, with the thing that they have on them, which is their phone. So I think
that's such a great hack to building valuable products, to being able to talk to people
kind of using your product is a natural extension of building it. You kind of have to, to use
it and talk to people. Yeah. Like the other half of any hackers is an online community
and it's the same thing. Like whether or not I want to talk to people, I have to every
day, like they will let me know what they need to see in the product itself, even if
I don't ask. Yeah. So it's, it's sort of an unfair advantage. Yeah, totally. We talked
about focus a little bit earlier on and how hard it is to focus. I was actually on a call
with a couple of friends and one of them, she was asking like, how do I focus? You know,
I feel like I jumped from feature to feature idea to idea. The other two of us on the call
were like, we do the exact same thing. We have no idea. It's difficult. I mean, I kind
of always feel, I always feel like I'm not productive and focused constantly. I mean,
that's helpful to feel that way because if I felt too comfortable, then I would like
not make new things. But yeah, I think like, I don't know, it's important to have a percentage
of the time work on things at whim. And then another percentage of the time, like do really
boring stuff repetitively. Like, I mean, just force yourself to, I, I think it is important
to allow yourself to explore distractions. And I think like another thing that is important
to do without losing focus is to like think about what your mission is and then align
your decisions with the mission. For a lot of my other companies I had, I mean, for my
helmet company, like I had this grand vision to alter graphics on all helmets. And I ended
up manufacturing my own molds and made all these steps towards doing like mass production
of customized unique designs. But I needed to spend more time on that. But what I was
doing was I was just responding to the clients that were ready to pay me. They're like, I
need five helmets by Tuesday. Will you do it? I'm like, yes, because that is my job.
I should be working on this company and like fulfilling orders when it would be in my best
interest to ignore the immediate pile of cash and like work on the longer term vision, even
though I wasn't getting paid. And it gets really difficult to, it's, I mean, it's easy
to be swayed to be swayed or what you're working on by immediate positive outcomes as opposed
to like what your large vision is. And it'd be better for you to reject, to reject a lot
of things that bring you money or bring you some value if they don't align with like what
you want the larger thing to be like two years from that point.
What would you say is your mission for yourself as an entrepreneur? You talked earlier about
how you really like making new ideas. Is that what you want to do with for the rest of your
life? Do you want to work on dial up and turn it into something huge?
I do. I, I do want to work on dial up because dial up itself feels infinite to me. Like
if it was just a single, I get, I, if it was just a single product, like if we were a simple
like SAS tool for scheduling phone calls, I would not want to work on that from for
like many years. This feels infinite because like just based on all the, all the people
that are joining and requesting new lines and there are things I haven't thought of
before and also like the technology we have to connect people through phone calls. Like
it feels like there's many companies within the company. So I'm excited about it. I look
for these like fractal infinite ideas that I want to work on. So I think this, I definitely
want to run this for the next few years. I think like for like a lifetime vision of mine,
I don't doubt that I won't have more, just based on, based on what I know about myself
from the last 30 years, I will probably continuously think of stuff. I think a challenge I face
is that I have to like put things on the shelf, not act upon things immediately, especially
as like multiple companies of mine are scaling and require my attention. I can't just at
whim on a Sunday, create any landing page because it could, like people might want the
thing for me and then might actually, I know. And it's like, like I've learned my lesson
enough times that like, oh, I could launch something and people might want to buy it
even though the first few times it seems like luck and it seems magical. It's like, okay,
I actually probably shouldn't put myself in a position where I have to fulfill a bunch
of orders for my dumb joke. So I'm like, I have to be more strict with myself on launching
ideas or figure out how to hire people. And yeah, well, there are 30, 40,000 people listening
to this thing who themselves would love to have the magical ability of creating ideas
and having people actually want them. What's your advice after years of building business
after business for people who want to learn to do what you do?
Yeah, I think like it's, hmm, I think it's super important to launch things when you
don't think, when you're kind of nervous about it and you don't think it's polished. And
maybe only a few people told you it was a good idea, but like, it's really important
to just as simple as you can make it launch the thing and see whether or not you should
kill it or continue to do it. Because there's a few projects of mine that I feel like I
wasted time on and that's valuable time that you could be spending on lots of other things.
But there's also things that if I had waited to launch it, it would never have any reach.
It would never have done anything. And I just tried to launch things as quick as possible.
Also you don't necessarily need money and resources to do something, even if it's a
huge idea. How can you reduce that thing to a very simple version, even if it's just collecting
someone's email address? To actually know whether or not your idea is worth pursuing.
And then how can you incrementally take steps to make that thing real and figure out if
it's even worth it?
That's great advice. Channel your inner scrappy set prop designer to get an early version
out there.
Yeah, pretend that also the set designer I was working for, before she became a set designer,
she worked at a Ford factory. And so the combination of working for a set designer whose background
is assembly line. So you'd come back with a pile of trash to the studio and then we
had to form an assembly line and turn the trash into flowers. So it's a good philosophy
to pretend you're on an assembly line to actually make yourself do the work. Even when you're
making a landing page and you're like, oh, I have to make sure there's a way to email
me on every page. A lot of the work I do is kind of boring when I'm actually sitting
down and doing it. But it's important to do boring work, pretend you're on an assembly
line and also ease very limited resources.
Well, I'm going to have to get you on an indie actors AMA or an office hours or something
because I would love to see actual people from the actors community try to interact
with you and hear your advice directly. But Danielle, thank you so much for coming on the
show.
Oh, yeah. Thank you. Thank you for having me. This was fun.
Yeah, it's been a joy having you over. Where can listeners go to find out more about you
and the 23 things that you're working on?
Uh, you can go to Danielle Baskin dot com, which is just my name. Or you can go to you
can go to dial up dot com and maybe I'll create a maybe I'll create a line for the people
listening to this podcast. So we can all we can all connect with each other.
I got to get so many random phone calls. I can't wait. Yeah. All right. Thank you so
much, Danielle. Thank you.
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