What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from ndhackers.com, and you're listening to the
Nd Hackers 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 did they get to
where they are today? How did they make decisions both 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 examples and go on to build our own successful companies.
Today I'm talking to Ben Orenstein. Ben is the co-host of The Art of Product, a podcast
about the intersection of code and business, but is also the CEO of a new company called
Tupel, which he and his co-founders have been bootstrapping for just over a year now. They
are in the very early stages, but they're on the path toward profitability, and it looks
like they're going to get there. So things seem to be going really well so far.
Ben, welcome to the show. I'm excited to talk to you about this journey you're on and how
you guys are navigating the treacherous waters of being an early stage startup.
Thanks, man. I'm super excited too. I've been listening to the podcast for a long time,
so I'm super psyched to be a guest on it.
Well, I like having founders like you on the podcast, Ben, because you're actually in the
thick of things. You're not remembering what happened five or six years ago. You are working
on it right now. A year from now, Tupel could be a wild success. A year from now, Tupel
could be dead and you moved on to something else. We don't know. You're in the middle
of it.
Yeah. It's real life drama. It's reality television happening now.
That's exactly it. And I can tell you, I've been surveying different segments of the NDIQ
audience a lot recently. And the vast majority of people listening to this right now are
way earlier than you. They have not started their businesses yet. They are perhaps tinkering
on side projects. They haven't launched yet. They aren't charging anyone.
So I'm excited to dive into your recent experience has been because of things you've been grappling
with for the last year, or the things that everybody else is going to be dealing with
very soon. So perhaps the best place to start here is to point out the fact that you were
a software engineer at Thoughtbot. You got to do a lot of public speaking, a lot of coding.
It was a very cushy job with a lot of autonomy and I'm sure a great salary. Why would you
ever give that up to start a business?
I guess because it sounded fun. I am very much addicted to trying new things that I'm
not good at yet. I like to say that my favorite thing is the steep part of the learning curve.
And so I tend to stay involved in a hobby or something, as long as I'm making rapid
progress and getting better quickly. And then once I've gotten my feet underneath me and
I can see, okay, now it's just a bit of a slog to get to actually grade this, I usually
lose interest.
Hopefully that won't happen here. I'm hoping that starting a company is dynamic enough
that there's enough new things I can jump into that it doesn't become boring. My hunch
is that's the case.
Yeah, I was actually planning to ask you what would have to happen for you to regret this
decision of becoming a founder. And I think your intuition, your hunch is spot on. It's
probably not going to get boring. It's never going to be easy. That's for sure.
I don't think I could regret this. So I'm a year into it now. And honestly, this last
year has been more interesting than several of the previous years combined, I would say.
And I'm very lucky. I had a great job and it was an interesting job. And my happiness
level and baseline back then was very high. It was great. But this is even more fun and
even more interesting. So if all the numbers turn south tomorrow and we like just went
down to zero, I wouldn't look back on this and be like, Oh, I shouldn't have given that
a shot. I would, it'd be okay.
That's cool. You're already happy before now you've broken through and reached an even
higher high. And you're not even that worried about failing. And I think if you could take
that, that zoomed out perspective and say, you know what, no matter what happens, it's
all going to be fine. Then it really makes it easier just to appreciate running your
startup in the moment.
Yeah. And it was interesting. When I first started doing this, I would tell people what
I was doing and they would say, wow, that's really brave of you to take a big risk. And
honestly, I didn't feel that way at the time. Like I didn't feel like I was taking a big
risk. It's like I have development skills. And so I have a pretty reliable thing to fall
back on. It was a risk in the sense that I was like eating up my savings and I couldn't
deploy that for something else.
But it didn't feel like the end result of this would be, Oh, maybe I can't pay rent
or I'm like some horrible thing is going to happen to me. I won't be able to go to the
doctor or something. It was more like, to me, the bigger risk was like regretting not
doing it.
So what was it like making that decision to quit your job? Was it a spur of the moment
thing or was it something you've been turning over in the back of your mind for years? How
did that go?
It was a little bit of both in a way. So it had been on my mind for a long time. I had
been feeling for a while, maybe like five or six years, like my eventual destiny was
to start my own company. It just seemed like the ultimate expression of challenge and interest
and like applying my skills to a thing that I was fascinated by.
And so it seemed like I was going to do this eventually. And so in some sense, it did not
sneak up on me. When I did eventually leave my last job, that did happen kind of quickly
in that I just over a couple of months, I just got the itch. I just got dissatisfied.
And I was like, you know what? I think now's the time. Like I've been saving money for
a long time and I don't actually know what I'm going to go do. I didn't have the idea,
but I just knew that I didn't want to spend any more time not trying something.
And so it was really over just a handful of weeks where I decided to pull the trigger.
The saving money part of it is so important because it just takes a lot of the stress
off. It gives you peace of mind. I did the exact same thing. I've been contracting for
a couple years. I had a year, a year and a half of Runway saved up. And this made it
a lot easier to quit. And then like you said, having developer skills to fall back on is
a pretty good form of insurance as well.
100%. I think if your audience, so your audience is possibly aspiring to do this someday. And
one of the key things I would encourage them to be doing now is actually just saving money.
Just get your expenses as low as you can and start putting away some cash. I have two co-founders
and the three of us all at the beginning of this said we can go at least a year with the
savings we have. And that was so useful for us. And now because we have, we're basically
at ramen profitability now. Oh, congrats. You're already there.
Thank you. I think basically this month is going to be, that's true if the numbers keep
going where I think they will. And we have all of our equity. So we split the company
evenly and we didn't have to give any of it away. And it's just like, wow, if we hadn't
had that savings, we could be in a very different position right now.
That's one of the best parts about bootstrapping and being in any hacker is you have 100% control
of your business. You can do whatever you want. You don't report to anybody and you
don't have to bag any gatekeeper investors for permission to follow your dream. I think
having savings is really what makes that possible for a lot of people.
Totally. And there was sort of an interesting, there was a point that made this very clear
to me, which is originally I was going to have one co-founder and the third co-founder
sort of appeared last minute right before we were getting started. And one of the key
questions that we had for him was like, what's your savings situation? Like, can you go a
while without getting paid and without raising funding? And because he said yes, it was easy
to add him to the team. And if he had said no, I don't know if he would be with us on
this journey, honestly.
Let's talk about this process of vetting a co-founder because this comes up in the
India actors community all the time. Hey, I found somebody that I might want to work
with, but how can I be sure that they're the right person? How do I vet them? What kind
of questions should I even be asking? And it's kind of a crapshoot because people are
complex. You're not sure how they're going to change over time. It's hard to know what
to ask. How did you decide to pick your particular co-founders been and how certain were you
that they would work out?
Well, so one I did the right way and then one I took a bit of a leap on. So I have two
co-founders, Joel and Spencer. Joel and I have known each other for years now, probably
six years. And we actually met through singing. We both sang in a barbershop chorus, which
is like an acapella men's singing organization. And we were friends for a long time and he
previously started a startup and then sold it to another company and was kind of getting
bored himself. And so originally he and I, I would go to his house and sort of pitch him
on various business ideas. And then one day I pitched him on the thing that became Tupel
and he said, yes. So that, that was kind of like the traditional or like the, I guess
the recommended approach, which is start a company with someone you know really well.
Yeah.
So I had no stress around that. I knew Joel and I liked each other and I was confident
we could work through any problems we had. Spencer joined the company. Well, he joined
before we were a company, but basically as Joel and I are ready to quit our jobs, Spencer
quits his job and reaches out to Joel and said, Hey, like I just quit my job. I'm trying
to figure out what to do with my life. Like what are you up to right now? Now, Spencer
had worked for Joel at Joel's previous startup. So Joel had a relationship with Spencer already
and he spent. And so Joel comes to me and says, Hey, look, Spencer's free. He was great.
I think we should seriously consider adding him to the team. We met with Spencer and we
talked about kind of like our philosophy, I guess, which is like, what kind of company
do you want to build? Like, do you want to raise money and try to make this thing huge?
Do you want to build something smaller and a little more sane pace? And like just made
sure that we agreed at like a lifestyle level of what we were looking for. But at the end
of the day, I was more or less just trusting Joel's judgment and hoping it all worked out
and got lucky because shockingly in a year of working together, I feel like we've had
almost no conflict. It's been like kind of ridiculously, um, idyllic in a way. This is
like the role that luck plays is so fascinating to think about because this could have easily
gone the other way. Like if you guys were at each other's throats fighting every day,
learning about the direction of the company and you guys split up months ago, it wouldn't
be that surprising of a story to my mind. Luck is really just anything that's out of
your control. Anything that you placed in somebody else's hands, anything that you didn't
really think about just sort of happened. I think you can't control and how much can
you really control another person? Even if you vet them, like how much control do you
really have? Yeah. Talking to my mom about this, she says she's a therapist and she says
as agreed to which, um, successful marriages are the result of luck because if you get
married at 25, you basically can't tell what that person's going to be like over the long
term. And so if you're lucky, you pick someone that who like grows in a way that's compatible
with the way that you grow, but you can just as easily not. I mean, they don't even know
how they're going to turn out at another 10 or 20 years. Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. You
can't promise that you're not going to do that. Now you can't. So let's, let's go out
to these early stages of you starting tuple. You said that you would go over to Joel's
house and you would pitch him on this list of startup ideas you had. What were some of
the ideas that you had on this list and how did those conversations go?
So I actually have my, um, list of business ideas, which I just have as like a note on
my phone. Don't we just read you some of these? Yeah, let's hear them. All right. Uh, quality
analysis for rails apps. This is kind of like code climate. Okay. SAS in a box rails kit.
So a tool for spinning up like a SAS really quickly, like a rails app is pre-configured.
Um, some of these are very generic like paid Ruby gem for something, for something, for
something, just charge for code for something. So it's, it's, it's a mix. And then some of
these are more like consulting, like webinars as a productized consulting service. The short
answer to this is like, none of these really caught us honestly, that some of these are
okay. I sort of like thinking of business ideas just as like a little hobby. Uh, but,
but doesn't mean that any of them are that good.
Does you have any formal process for deciding whether or not an idea was good or it was
just intuition. You know, I don't like the sound of this. I don't want to spend my life
doing this. Um, I wouldn't say it was a formalized process. It was mostly intuition and then
also just like shape of the business, which is I wanted to sell software. I didn't really
want to do consulting. I really, really wanted it to be something I could sell to my existing
audience. I think that was, that was like very important. And we can talk about why,
but I think that's a huge component of our success so far. Those are sort of the, the,
the big pieces.
Yeah. Let's talk about this because this is a very common topic of conversation. Should
you build an audience before you start your business? Should you have a bunch of subscribers
to your mailing list? Should you have a following on your blog or on Twitter? And even if you
do somehow have an audience, how are you going to successfully sell what you're building
to that audience? I talked to Mike Tabor, one of the founders of microconf on the podcast
last year. And then he had a pretty big audience for microconf from his blog about business
tactics and strategies. And then he built and launched a product that was completely
outside the realm of his audience. It was like email follow-up software for salespeople
or consultants or something. And none of his audience wanted to buy it. So I think it's,
it's, it's great that you decided to have that constraint that you're only going to
work on something that your current audience would care about.
So earlier I said, I gave one piece of advice, which is like, if you want to do this someday,
start saving money. That's a, that's part of it. I would say as important, maybe more
important actually, given the increase in funding options these days is start building
up an audience. That's kind of like the cynical take on it. Like build an audience. I feel
like a better way to think about this is be useful on the internet, which is a phrase
I stole from my buddy Adam Wath and who does this better than almost anyone. It's just
how can you be useful? How can you be helpful? How can you put out good things in the world?
It's less about like how many email subscribers do you have or how many Twitter followers
and more like how many people have seen you do good things and gotten value from it? Like
in the early days of tuple, we had people say, I will pay you several hundred dollars
just to support what you're doing because I've gotten so much value from you over the
years. Like I don't even need what you're selling. I just want to support what you're
doing here. And like, that's, that's pretty useful. Turns out be helpful on the internet.
How do you do that? How did you do that specifically? Yeah. So I worked at thoughtbot for many years
and thoughtbot, I sort of a core part of thoughtbot's culture rubbed off on me, which is that I
would say that sort of be useful thing is embedded deeply there. So we would be at stand
up and someone would say, Oh, yesterday I learned that Postgres something, something.
And someone would go, Oh, that should be a blog post. And there was just that the strong
undercurrent of recommendations to share stuff. So lots of blog posts, lots of conference
talks, um, recording videos, just being, being helpful and giving back to the community.
And so for me, that took the shape of a conference talks. I decided I loved speaking. I tried
a couple of times and really enjoyed it. So I gave a lot of talks all over the world,
which was amazing because first of all, I got to travel a bunch, uh, with thoughtbot
paying for it. Uh, I got to grow my own reputation and I got to build a group of people who had
seen me do useful things. And there are talks I gave back in like 2012 that people still
email me about today. I'm like, Hey, I just watched that talk you gave about this thing.
And it's like these, these, the dividends are still paying to me. It's, it's, it's amazing.
This reminds me of the marshmallow test. It's where they give kids a marshmallow and they
say, Hey, you can eat this marshmallow now, or you can wait 20 minutes and we'll come
back and give you a second marshmallow and half the kids eat the marshmallow and the
other half wait. And supposedly the kids who wait and get two marshmallows have better
career trajectories and make more money over time, et cetera. And it sounds like what you're
saying is the same, but for business, uh, if you can be farsighted enough to do things
that help others in the short term that provide value, then it'll pay dividends for your business
and the long-term.
Exactly. And the, the, the great thing is to me, I was eating the marshmallows the whole
time. Like giving a talk is really fun. I, for me personally, I enjoy it. And a recording
my podcast is really fun. It's not, it's not hard work for me. I don't, it's not a sacrifice.
And so to me, I feel like I'm eating the marshmallow and getting two later, uh, and life is, is
just great. And so I would, I would encourage people to try to find something like that.
Like for me, writing a blog post every week would be a chore. That does not sound fun
to me. That would be a thing I would have to make myself do. And I'd be like, okay,
you're doing this thing. Cause you know, it's going to be good in the longterm. Recording
a podcast does not feel like that for me. So maybe, maybe that's the opposite for you.
Maybe it's something entirely different. Maybe you want to make a vlog. I'm not sure, but
like, if you can find a thing that doesn't feel like that much work, that's going to
be like the sustainability matters so much more than like perfection, right? It's all
about how long can you adhere to this?
It's the number one reason businesses fail. People quit. And it's because they're doing
something they don't like, and it's not worth it anymore. Or maybe it's because they ran
out of money. So if you can sort of prevent yourself from quitting, we can make it hard
to quit. If you save up enough money, if you do things that you like, you're much more
likely to stick with it. And if you stick with it, you're more likely to succeed 100%.
And so these two things that I was doing, like saving money and, and being useful in
building an audience, I didn't really know what they were for. Like they, they had some
immediate benefits, but mostly I was just kind of like, I'm just doing this. And like,
I don't know why I'm putting this cash in this account. Like, I don't know what I'm
going to want to spend this on someday. Or like, I don't know, like, exactly why I want
a bunch of Twitter followers, like, or like why this will be useful. But it, it's just
like turned out like, Oh, hey, I'm making a company that sells to developers. This is
going to be really great. I have all these people on an email list and I have Twitter
followers and things like that. And it was great to have been like past me did, did current
me a real solid by, by working on this over the years.
So one of the things that stands out to me about your story is that you had all the skills
to really get this thing started by yourself. You were a software engineer, you built up
an audience, you had marketing chops, you're not afraid of public speaking. And yeah, you
decided to work with your co-founders. Why not start this as a solo founder?
I am very extroverted. I am very much a team player. Like I actually, so when I quit thop
up, I didn't know what I was going to do. And the first thing I did was I made a course,
like an educational course about how to do like, um, how to maintain slightly larger
rails applications. And the course did work pretty well financially, but I did not enjoy
it at all. Working by myself was just like horrible. That, that to me was like torture.
Um, I just, I, I don't do well with them if I'm not around people a lot.
What's the best part about working with other people? Is it just the day to day interactions
and conversation that shared wins? What do you find so magnetic about it?
Hmm. You know, I've never really dove into that. Some of it is that I have really high
natural empathy. So this could be kind of a bummer sometimes, because like, if I feel
like I've like hurt somebody or wrong to them, it really messes me up. But the opposite of
that is true too, where it's like, if I can do something cool for my teammates and like
make the, or make the company more successful, I feel like extra good about it. Whereas like
if I sign up 10 new trials this week, like I'm like, cool, that's great. But like the
fact that I know that like I'm helping like row this boat that the three of us are in,
it feels a lot better to me.
Yeah. Earlier you were saying that one of the reasons why you thought it'd be fun to
start a startup was that you just like being on the steep part of the learning curve. You
like having rapid progress every day. You like getting that sort of positive feedback.
And I think having a co-founder is kind of a hack for doing that. Like even before you
launch, even before you have any customers, before you have any sources of external feedback,
your co-founder can look at what you're doing behind the scenes and be like, hi, five, Ben,
you know, congratulations for doing that thing. Whereas if you're by yourself, really can
be kind of isolating. You can go for a long time without getting any feedback from anybody.
Yeah. I found even success kind of depressing when I was by myself. Like it just didn't,
it was just too hollow. It didn't work for me.
All right. So you're the opposite of me. I'm an introvert. I need my alone time. I started
Andy hackers by myself, but that meant that I had to launch pretty quickly so I could
get that feedback with any hackers. I went from idea to launch and about three weeks
with tuple. You and your co-founders took eight months, I think from idea to launch.
Is that right?
That's about right. Yeah. We're about one year old right now. Um, and yeah, that's,
that's about right.
I want to walk through the story of what happened in those eight months because there's a lot
you guys were coding, you were talking to users, you were doing pre-sales and even before
that, you had to all agree to work on tuple over all the other ideas on your idealist.
As you decide to work on this particular idea.
Hmm. So it, it had the characteristics that I wanted where it was software for sure and
was something that would be useful to my current audience. But I would say we were kind of
at, um, and it also had kind of a compelling story, which is there was this great app for
this called screen hero. And then, uh, me and old slack came along and bought it and
ostensibly rolled it into their product, but not really. And then shut it down and no one
could use it. And so there was kind of this awesome narrative of like, and we, the brave
little startup are coming along to fight back against Slack and bring back this, this awesome
remote pairing tool.
So that was kind of nice too, but, and, but I would say we were basically at like 80%.
So Joel and I had had like a meeting at a coffee shop and it was kind of like the, are
we going to do this meeting? And it was like, and it was, uh, we walked out of that thinking
like probably yes, it seems like yes, but we weren't, I would, we weren't quite at a
hundred percent. And so I reached out to actually one of the co-founders of screen hero and
said, Hey, I'm thinking about starting a company that would kind of be the spiritual successor
to screen hero because I used it and loved it. And I miss it. Could I buy an hour of
your time at whatever you think is reasonable to, to, to pick your brain about whether you
not, whether or not this might be a good idea. And he said, yeah, absolutely. And by the
way, it didn't charge us anything, which is what always happens when you do that trick.
Oh man. Yeah. It's that's, that's one of the best.
It would have been like, yeah, $2,000.
I mean, I would have paid it. That would have been worth it. That's because on that call,
he said, yeah, you should absolutely do this. I think there's totally still a market here.
I think there's like, you're capable of doing it. Like just, just go for it.
Is that what you expected to hear?
Um, well, uh, I don't know what I expected. Like, so I, I DM, DMed in this and he was
like, Oh yeah, there's definitely a need here. Like let's definitely talk. And so the initial
response was very positive. And so when he just sort of followed up with that, it was,
it was more positive than I was expecting, but that was when we went from like 80% to
like a hundred percent. It's like, okay, we're, we're doing it. We have to take a crack at
this.
All right. So you're all in at this point. You're definitely going to work on this idea.
You and Joel have quit your jobs by this point. You brought on Spencer, who's got savings
as well. What's the first thing you guys do to make this a real business?
The first thing that we did was Spencer and Joel started working on a prototype. So our
app is fairly complicated. So, so of all the products I've worked on, usually the risk
is not in text technical execution. It's more like, this is a rails app and we're going
to do form stuff and stick data in a database. And you know, it's a credit app. This was
very much not a credit app. This is real time, low latency video streaming. And that was
a core part of our value proposition, which is like, we think if we do this thing, right,
we can make remote like control and remote screen sharing much faster and more pleasant
than what we have right now on the market. So it was like, not only do we have to make
it work, we have to make it better than what most people are providing.
And so Spencer and Joel got to work on a prototype. And since the whole world of like real time
video streaming is complicated, they started just like with very basic stuff where like
this is, it was a, it's very much like a, we're not going to launch this to anyone.
We just want to figure out like the pieces and what this domain looks like.
That's pretty scary. Cause you guys are burning through your savings, building this technically
difficult app with no real short term plan to sell to anybody. Were you concerned about
that?
Very much so. Yeah. I thought that was probably our biggest risk factor in the beginning.
So while they were doing that, I was off pre-selling this product to like make sure that the risk
of like, no one wants this wasn't there. And I quickly discovered that that was, that was
not going to be the problem. Like I, I presold about $8,000 of this app before it even existed.
And so it was like, okay, clearly the dream is sellable. If we can make a thing that is
the dream, that part is actually very scary.
You're the exact inverse of 99% of the founders that I talked to you who are pretty sure they
can build what they have in mind. No clue if anyone will want it or agree to pay. What
was the pre-sale process like for you? How did you find people? How did you approach
them and how did you convince them to agree to pay for an app that didn't exist yet?
So I was helped very much by the narrative that already existed and the context that
was already there. So a lot of people knew screen hero and used it. And so my, my pitch
was basically like, Hey, did you ever use screen hero? And like, Oh yeah. Like normally
one slash shut that down. Like, Oh yeah, that sucked. It's like, yeah, we're going to try
to make that. And there we go. Oh my God, that'd be amazing. And that was basically
the wholesale pitch.
It's cool because we talk about idea validation. How do you prove that anybody will like your
idea before you invest a bunch of time and do building it and a vacuum where you're building
a totally new product that people haven't seen before. It's a lot of work, right? You've
got to put your ear to the ground. You got to talk to people. You got to try selling
it. You got to see what they're going to say. It's just a lot of proving to do, but the
alternative approach is if you build something that people are already kind of using or that
they've used in the past and paid for, in your case, you're building a better version,
a new version of screen hero, which is no longer available. In my case with ending actors,
I could see that people were already reading interviews like the ones that I put out. So
I just made a slightly better version. We kind of shortcutted validation. We already
knew there was demand for this in the world. And so we didn't have to go about proving
it from scratch on our own.
Yep, exactly. So I knew people loved screen hero. I love screen hero. And I knew that
what was out there was not as good as it was. So it was like, okay, there's just this very
clear gap in the market that used to be addressed and that is not now. And when I look at the
tools that people have in its place, they're not very good. And so it felt pretty like
a short jump for me.
You guys had screen hero as your product roadmap. And essentially, you could just copy what
screen hero did. But did any of these early sales conversations you have with customers
actually change your roadmap?
Not really, honestly, we changed, we were doing a lot, but a lot of it was not based
on customer feedback. It was more like things we were bumping into and decisions we made
along the way. Thinking of ourselves as like a spiritual successor to screen hero helped
a lot. But it also kind of hurt us in some ways, where there were things that screen
hero did that we assumed we would have to do, we would have to have an MVP that turned
out to be a ton of work and also totally not true. So it was mostly a help, but occasionally
mess this up too.
Okay, so you're out talking to customers, they're giving you feedback. Meanwhile, your
co-founders are building a version one, I presume, of your app, you said it was never
really intended to be put in front of customers. How did you guys make the switch into building
something that was?
So there were actually the version of tuple that we launched with was I believe the third
complete rewrite of the app. So version one was very much just like, let's understand
the world of video streaming and audio and all that, and remote control. Because it was
just such a giant technical task that it was like, let's just like build a thing fully
knowing we're going to throw it away. And just kind of get our heads around what this
might look like.
And so version one was built in Electron, which is this sort of wrapper for web applications
that you can run on the desktop. And Electron is great for prototyping, but it is unfortunately
fairly slow and uses a lot of system resources. And so we knew that to deliver on our... At
the end of the day, the value prop we wanted to deliver on was like low CPU use, low RAM
use, blazingly fast. And so wrapping this thing in a fairly slow, fairly bloated wrapper
was fine for just understanding how all these pieces fit together, but it was clearly not
something we could launch with.
Man I'm getting stressed just hearing this. It's just so much code that you're writing,
like so much extra work just to build a product. And like, that's not supposed to be the hard
part. But luckily you could do the sales part, you could do the marketing part and find customers
while your co-founders worked on this.
I was stressed too, to be clear, like this, this was the scary part about this business.
Like normally it's like what you said, it's like the opposite. But for me, it was like,
I know that when I tell people about beautiful, low latency screen sharing, they're excited
about it. And they'll even pay us money. I do not know that we can build this.
And so like even going up into our launch, like there was just like these giant doubts
in my mind, like, is this fast enough? Is it good enough? Can we make it fast enough?
Like we're like, if this were doable, why hasn't Slack done it already? Like why, like
why isn't this better? How is it really just this tiny team of the three of us are going
to improve on the state of the art versus these enormous companies? Like how could this
be true? So it was very, it was scary.
I talked to a lot of founders who have ideas they're excited about working on. And I think
one of the things I find myself saying very frequently recently is that a product idea
is not a business idea. You can have an idea for a product. And that's only one part of
your business. You also have to think about the market, right? Who is going to use this?
What do they value? You need to think about distribution, how you actually get this product
in the hands of your customers, because you could build the best restaurant in the world.
It's the middle of Sahara Desert. No one's going to eat there. And then you have pricing,
which sort of affects all of the above, your pricing model controls, what you can build,
how you distribute it, who's going to pay for it, et cetera. We've talked a lot about
the product that you guys built based on ScreenHero. We've talked a lot about the market, right?
These are people who knew what ScreenHero was, who really just wanted it back. But we
haven't talked very much about distribution and pricing. So let's start with pricing.
How did you know what to charge for tuple?
Well, I knew exactly what to charge by testing every possible pricing scheme under the sun.
I had no idea. And I think that's the right way to go about pricing is to just test a
ton of things. And this is definitely something I developed during my time at Thoughtbot.
And so in the beginning, I was selling vaporware because Joel and Spencer were cranking away
on it, but it definitely was not a product. And so I would go to people and pitch them
kind of on this like wonderful vision of the future. And they'd be like, that sounds great.
And I'd be like, great. So we're looking for, I'm looking for some people that are kind
of rare right now. So I'm looking for people that want this badly enough that they're willing
to put some money down, even though you can't try it yet. And that someone that's willing
to support the vision and really wants this thing to exist in the world. And so I'm going
to ask you to prepay for a whole year. And I'm going to give you access. Once we launch,
you'll have access for the whole alpha, which will be some number of months. And then a
year after that. And they'd be like, okay, cool. What's that cost? And then I would make
up a number. And I, the first number I threw out was like $149 a year. It's the first person
that paid that. And then with every, just about every subsequent person, I would walk
it up and say like, Oh, it's a, it's $200 per person per year, 300, 500, nine, 800.
And just like throw out different numbers and just see what worked. And that was a really
incredibly useful thing. Because if it turns out there's just a huge range of willingness
to pay across different kinds of companies and different kinds of people. Once we launched,
I kept, I kept testing. I'm still testing pricing. Honestly, I think I'm the closest
I've ever been to like settling on a price for at least, you know, the next quarter.
But testing pricing and just even like little tweaks about the trial and how much the trial,
how long the trial is and whether or not it's free and things like that. I think I have
a huge impact on your business. And so I think it's, it's a, it can be a huge mistake to
not just always be moving those things around and seeing what happens.
What are some of the things you learned from testing pricing? Like one of the most common
mantras is to charge more. Yeah. Did you find that charging more ever hit some sort of limit?
Did you find that it was always better to charge more?
It's a very nuanced question, I think. So I think I would have been more and just like
clearly charge more is not always right. Otherwise your price would just effectively become infinite.
So there's some number at which point you shouldn't charge more. The thing that I realized
is there's that willingness to pay varies a lot. So if you want to extract the maximum
possible dollars per customer, there are fewer customers that are willing to pay that. So
there were people that would pay us like a lot per user per year in advance, but there
just weren't that many of them. So I actually ended up dropping our pricing below a good
bit below the maximum we ever charged because I wanted more customers.
I wanted more feedback. So it's like, yeah, we could, we could make a really nice business
if we get 50 customers at this, but I think I'd rather actually have 200 or 300 just because
we'll have more word of mouth and a little bit more momentum and people talking about
it and more feedback. And most importantly, like at this phase, I'm less concerned with
optimizing like, what's the revenue in May? And more like, do we have good systems in
place to get feedback from our customers to make sure that we are not just building the
right thing today, but we keep building the right thing.
That makes so much sense. And I think it's one of the things that a lot of people don't
realize that pricing can affect. People think, oh, price is literally just the price that
I charge. That's pretty much it. But actually, pricing is everything. Pricing is how long
it takes you to get to profitability. It's going to take you two years, or you're going
to charge 10 times more. It's going to take you two or three months. Pricing is how many
customers are in your market. Pricing is what kind of customers can even afford you.
It's who you're going to be interacting with for the rest of your business's life cycle.
Pricing is whether or not you can afford to hire sales people to sell your product or
whether or not you have to rely on mass marketing channels. This is something we haven't really
gotten to. We've talked a little bit about how you've reached customers, primarily through
what seems like one-on-one sales calls. What other channels have you used to reach customers
or tuple?
My answer to this makes me slightly uncomfortable because I know the right answer is I'm supposed
to be testing a bunch of channels and getting our marketing engine going and all that. We're
sort of not. Just about all of our customers find us through Twitter or podcasts. And that's
about it.
One thing we do, and by the way, this is another tip I would have for people, is ask people
to do things for you, especially if you've built up some goodwill in the past. If you
sign up for our mailing list, after you sign up, you confirm your email. We say, thank
you so much for signing up. We're going to get in touch with you when tuple is ready
for you to try.
Hey, by the way, we're a bootstrap team of three people. If you would share a link to
this page on Twitter, that would be super helpful for us. And there's a tweet button
on it. And a ton of people do that. And they even just take the default tweet text. And
so I know they're just literally clicking that button and hitting share. And we get
dozens of these a week and people finding us through those. And so it's like, if you
built up a little bit of goodwill, or maybe if not, if you just have a story that you
think people will resonate with people, give it a shot.
Oh, man, I'm going to steal that. I got to start asking people to do that in my intro
email to indie hackers or something.
Oh, it's so good. It works crazy well. And it's just free. And it kind of gives you that
viral component.
Yeah. You guys are super personal in everything you do. I was checking out your homepage and
it's not... You have no illusion of trying to pretend to be this 5,000 person super professional
company. It's very obvious. It's three guys. Half of your homepage is kind of a jokey FAQ
about you guys personally.
Yes. Yeah. And that's very intentional. I think that's actually one of your advantages
as a small startup. I make it very clear. When we email our customers, it's like our
signatures have our... I'm Ben. I'm one of the co-founders. You're dealing with someone
who's working on this intimately. And there's just no filter between the people that are
building it and everyone else.
And I think people like the journey. So many people that have become our customers have
started off as listeners to my podcast and followed through Fall for a while. I'm like,
Hey, I'm working remotely now. I can use Tuple. Can I get in there? And by sharing as much
as I can, they feel kind of invested in there. They're more excited. I think people like
to buy from people. They don't want to just buy from a faceless company. They have no
connection to. It feels better to spend your money with someone that you know.
There's not enough written about how being personal and how having a story attached to
what you're doing can really affect people. I think I was watching Childish Gambino. He's
an artist. He was talking about the song and I'd never heard of the song before. I didn't
particularly care about it, but he just kept talking about the story of the song, how it
was written and how it was revised. And then so-and-so covered it. It was so great. Someone
else covered it and it was bad and it got changed. And by the end of him telling the
story of the song, I just wanted to listen to the song. Like that's all I cared about.
It's like, what is the song? But if we hadn't told that story, I wouldn't have any desire
to listen to it whatsoever.
Totally. I think our brains are super wired for stories. Like one of my, one of my conference
speaking tips is like, tell a story or two, especially like it's a great opener. I think
if you just start a conference talk and say, so three years ago I got this like really
terrible phone call. Everyone's like, whoa, what? And you have everybody's attention instantly.
Like we're just, we're just primed for that. I think everyone goes back to kindergarten
mode where you're sitting around in a circle and like, listen to the story. It's like,
it just, it just works really well.
Yeah. I like that you said you felt bad about not doing some of the, I don't know, the things
you should be doing around distribution channels, testing every single market, et cetera, et
cetera. I feel bad about the same thing. I don't think anyone, I work at Stripe. Stripe
is a big company. I think internally in Stripe, we feel bad about things that we should be
doing that we haven't gotten gotten to yet. What are some of the things you look forward
to doing that you're not doing quite yet?
I'm intrigued by the idea of doing fun, interesting things at conferences. So I have some friends
that work at Honey Badger, which would, by the way, they'd be good guests. They're definitely
like a indie bootstrapped rate, uh, exception monitoring service. And one thing they did
that I'm just totally going to rip off wholesale cause it's an awesome idea. They will sometimes
sponsor a bus to take people to like a good venue to get like food. It's like they, like
when, when rails comp, rails comp was in some city that had an in and out, but the in and
out was like three miles from the venue. And so they just rented a bus and like bought
people's burgers and like, we're like unofficial sponsors of the conference just by having
this like fun little event. And so I'm intrigued by the idea of doing some fun stuff like that.
It's one of the cool things about running a company is you can do whatever you want.
There's no rules. You can take people out to eat. You can take people to your acapella
concerts. You can do whatever you want. Yeah, exactly. And, and that's just, it's just sort
of more along that same line of putting your personality in your business and, and making
it sort of a personal story that I think is just, I think it works at a bunch of levels.
So let's talk about this process of you guys transitioning from this super private beta
under development company to January. You guys finally making tuple alive product. Did
you have any sort of big launch? What was your plan there?
Well, actually to be clear, we're still in early access. So you can't just sign up. You
still have to go through me to get into the product that will change someday. But we launched
to our alpha customers January 7th. So that was the people who had prepaid. And there
was about, I think this is like something like 10 teams or something like that. And
we launched to them. That was an amazing combination of like scary and exciting, I would say.
Like honestly, the, like the day before I was like, maybe we should push this back like
a week or two. The product is so shaky right now. And like, we like technically hit the
deadline and that we, and that we launched on time, but it was like the, it was just
classic MVP. It was like, just like a lot of duct tape and like the happiest of happy
paths worked. And if you veered from that at all, like you were going to have, like
the app was going to crash, like hard crash.
It's tough because you've got to figure out in the early days, okay, what do we absolutely
need to have in order to launch to people and what can we put off? Otherwise you're
going to be building for like 10 years. We're never going to release. How did you guys make
those decisions?
Well, we, we screwed them up all over the place. So like we were convinced. So screen
here had this great feature, which was dual mouse cursors, like for both people on the
call and we're like, okay, dual mouse cursors is great. We got to have dual mouse cursors.
And we spent hundreds of hours of development time on dual mouse cursors. Like the problem
is like dual mouse cursors is always a hack. There's just like no way to do like the operating
system is like, there is one mouse cursor and you will not convince me that there is
two. And so it's just like, you just hit, this is hacks on hacks on hacks to make it
feel like there's two cursors. And it just had so many edge cases and so many bugs. And
then, and so we launched with it and like there were just tons of problems with it.
And like a week or two in, I was like, you know what, what if we just like, did like
a, a really like a one click handoff. So like one person can control the mouse at a time
and you just click once and like suddenly you have control. And Spencer was like, I
could get that done like two hours. And I was like, great, let's do that. And so we
did that and we disabled the dual mouse cursors and like we get almost zero complaints about
missing the dual mouse cursors.
Nice. What are some of the things that changed when you guys finally launched tuple? I mean,
going from nobody paying you really to people paying you. And suddenly you have to support
this product. What was going through your head January 7th and a few weeks after that?
Well, so I was really nervous about launching because when every time I used the app, I
was like, man, there's so many problems. And there were lots of problems. Like there's
just lots of issues when we launched. But what surprised me was how forgiving our early
customers were. It's like on our, on our early calls, like I would demo the app and it would
crash and they would still be like, this is awesome. Like it's a bummer that it crashed.
I'm sure you'll figure that out. I love that you've done XYZ and they were just excited
and focused on the positives.
And that really shocked me because I was expecting people to just like be incredibly tough or
kind of like kind of ruthless. And instead they were like very understanding. And I think
part of it is just that they were developers too. And so I'd be like, Oh man, you're like,
yeah, this is really tough because this thing is like C++ and multi-threaded. So it's actually
really hard to know if we have a lock on the right thread and so on. And they're like,
Oh yeah, that sounds really hard. I totally get it. And they would just be like really
great about it. And that has actually continued and like been like a really pleasant surprise.
It's cool building any sort of business where the people who you're selling to are doing
the same thing that you're doing. Because I have the same thing with any hackers. Like
the form is full of people who are trying to start a business who are trying to make
these difficult decisions themselves. And so everyone's really nice to me. They're really
nice to each other. And it's, I've had the opposite experience in previous businesses,
man, where I get angry customer emails about bugs and issues. And it's, it's such a difference
in your quality of life as a founder to have nice customers who understand what you're
going through.
It so is. Yeah. And I'm so glad I sell to developers because I just, I understand them.
All right. Like we understand each other, I guess. And so we have this sort of instant
rapport and that, that just makes life feel better. Like I'm happy to keep serving this
audience for a long time.
Yeah. So do you remember what your revenue was like month one after launching?
Revenue in month one, probably almost nothing. I, well, so I was kind of continually selling
the product. So like, I like got that alpha group together, but then I was still trying
to sell. I mean, I can just go look, let's go. Let's answer this. Yeah. Let's check
it out. All right. Okay. January revenue net revenue was $1,500, $1,500, three co-founders
pretty far cry away from Robin profitability, but you guys are still living off your savings.
What's your revenue at like now?
So we're on pace to do over 20 K this month. Wow. That's huge. It's been like five, five
months, four months in January. Yeah. Yeah. Four months. Yeah. 1,500 to 20 K. What are
some of the biggest things you guys have done to make such a quick leap so fast?
The answer is, is not going to make anybody happy. I think is because it's, it's basically,
so we built up this email list as you do. So like the first, one of the first things
we got together was a landing page where it says, Hey, we're making a thing. And so that
email list has a close to 5,000 people on it now. And so I've just been steadily driving
people to that constantly. And so the reason for our, like, basically a ton of our trials
these days come from the mailing list. So I'll just pull off another 500 people and
email them and say, Hey, your invites up. Here we go. Like, do you want to use it? And
so we're sort of just like cashing in stuff. We're spending our savings of email subscribers
basically that have been built up over the last year.
Oh, cool. So you're, you're emailing like small subsections. You're not doing like one
big everybody's end. Why do it that way? Correct. Yeah. Um, I have been, because something
always goes wrong. Um, so well, there's like a bunch of reasons. Like one is like, man,
if you just like do it all at once, you can't do it again. It's like you've used it. And
if you screw something up or there's a link that's wrong or the thing crashes, it's just
like, wow, I've just now I'm really hosed. And that was this, I would say part of our
DNA. And for the thing we've been saying from the beginning is like, we don't have to be
in a rush. Like we want to get to ramen quickly because we don't want to die. Uh, but we also
aren't, don't need to be huge. There's no like VC pressure, any of that. So like, let's,
let's go at a sustainable pace. And so we do that with basically everything. Like we're
launching a major new feature this week. And so we're rolling it out to a small people
behind set of people behind this feature flag.
Cause we just want to make sure that like we, we do things in a kind of slow, uh, sensible
way. Also, if you launch the cohorts, you can change the price every time you do it.
So you guys are still tweaking pricing. You're still trying to figure out what it's going
to be. Not, not much anymore. It's pretty well dialed. Uh, people actually joke. People
will like email me back and be like, am I in the high price cohort or the low price
cohort for this one? Cause I talk about this on my podcast a lot these days. I mostly,
I'm just offering the same price to everyone. But at the beginning, I was very much testing
different, different pricing levels. And we still are iterating on things that are like,
not quite priced, but like pricing model. So in the beginning, so like we charge
per seat. And at the beginning I would be talking to someone and they'd be like, yeah,
I want to sign my team up. And I'd be like, okay, great. We charge expert seat.
How many people do you want to start with? And they'd go, Oh, um, I'm not really sure.
Let me go check. And then like, that was just like a huge road bump in the sales process.
And often they would just disappear. And then they would just never come back.
So I think that we switched to that has been huge for us is we do a hundred dollars for
your first month, regardless of how big your team is. And so there's no decision required.
You need to put a card down and by default, we're going to charge you per people, like for everyone,
like that signs up that you want to keep going with, but it makes it really easy to get into
the product and actually use it. Such a consistent theme that I found when talking to founders like
yourself that forcing people to talk to you personally, even if it's just over email or
something is such a great learning experience. Like you get this feedback that you would never
get if you just had a pricing page up and people looked at it and then just left and didn't tell
you why exactly. And you'd be like, my conversion rate to paid is 0.89%. Uh, people say it should
be 1%. I wonder why that is. Good luck. Good luck tracking that down. Are you like, well,
is that bad? Is that good? I don't know. And like, you wouldn't feel that pain of like,
Oh man, I'm losing a lot of people at this stage in the funnel. I actually think that this is a
very common failure mode for dev founded startups. Like I say the most common failure mode is not
charging enough, uh, or it's like not testing pricing enough, but then also it's, um, wanting
to over automate. So I'm pretty adamant that we only automate things that we're already doing
manually that we feel confident about and feel good as a process. And then when it becomes
annoying, we automate it. Yeah. If you loop yourself out of the business, you're probably
the most important part of your business, especially early on when you don't know why
people want things. And so you can't really code yourself out of the process too early. Otherwise
a hundred percent. Yeah. Just it's like, there is this beautiful idea. I'm like, look, I want to
build the like fully automated thing too. Like I want to, I want to be able to sit on the beach and
have like tuples revenue go up like that. That's where I want to get to, but I'm trying to do it
very slowly and piece by piece where like, I feel like I understand how a certain thing is working
and then like automating that. But like until like a month ago, like I told very recently,
like I was like generating every invoice on Stripe and manually emailing it to somebody.
And then when they paid it, I would go in the rails console and I would like, you know, team.new
and like, just like straight up build them their thing on the backend. And we have only like
recently started automating these pieces because it's like, okay, I'm doing so many of these per
month that it's annoying. But there have been things where like at first we're like, Oh, we're
definitely going to need to automate this. And then three months later, we've barely done it. And so
it's like, Oh, actually, we don't need to automate that. And like that we're avoiding like a real
cost there. I'm curious how you came to these learnings and these realizations, because like
you said, the intuitive thing, especially as a developer is that you've got to automate stuff.
And even when you're not automating it, it's taking up all your time every week. It just feels
wrong. How did you come to know that actually, it's the right thing to do to talk to your
customers? How did you learn any of the stuff? The way that just about everybody learns everything,
which is by doing it and screwing it up lots of times and then learning from my mistakes.
So tuple is not my first business. So I started a business inside of thoughtbot. I have run other
sass apps for thoughtbot. I have gone on retreats with friends and launched small sass products in
like a matter of days and run those on the side of side projects. I have built info products multiple
times and sold those. Like I've been trying to get people on the internet to give me money
for a long time. And so I've been able to avoid a lot of missteps right now because I have made a
lot of missteps already. Give me an example of one of these things that you started where you
perhaps made a lot of missteps. One example is I was running a product at thoughtbot called Formkeep,
which was form endpoints as a service, which is like if you need a place to post a form to,
to hold some data from a mostly static website, you could spin up a whole server or you could
just point at one of our specific endpoints and we'll capture that data for you and then forward
it to Zapier and things like that. And like a classic developer created tool,
we were dramatically undercharging for it. So like the original pricing model for Formkeep was
pay what you want, which is like, yeah, well, so there was like a scale. So you had to pay at least
one. And so it was like, there's like a slider, like one to like a hundred or something. And
guess what price both people want to pay when given that option? A dollar. Yeah, a dollar.
Exactly. And so we had a whole bunch of customers at a dollar. And eventually I scrapped that when
I took it over the product, I was like, no, no, we have to get rid of this and charge real prices.
But even then the prices I picked were like pretty low. And so one day I noticed that Uber
had signed up and was sending like tens of thousands of submissions to at the end point
that they had created. And I was like, holy crap, that's amazing. Uber is a customer. Hey,
what plan are they on? And it's like $19 a month. Oh no. And I was like, and I looked up,
so I went and I looked it up and I was like, okay, Uber is losing like $2 billion a year right now.
And I am $19 of that. I think our pricing might be wrong. So it's just like, learning how to
charge more is partly because I've charged the wrong amount a lot of times.
And that's another situation where like if Uber had called you on the phone or sent you an email,
you'd be like, holy shit, it's Uber. Like its price is $20,000 a month. And they would not have
linked. Exactly. There's a lot of value to that like enterprise call us plan.
Let's stick to this topic of learning. One of the things that I think makes you particularly
interesting as a founder is that the prototypical startup founder is this Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg
asked character who has rich parents and just aced everything in high school. They were a genius
programmer. They went to Harvard, just breezed on through and then started some world changing
billion dollar company. That's very much not your story. That's not the story for the vast majority
of people. Give us a little bit about your background and how you got to the point where
you became a developer and became confident enough to be a founder.
I do actually share a little bit of past with Mark and Bill in that I also did not have a college
degree. Although they left voluntarily. So I was actually kicked out of college due to
academic deficiency. I was someone that did okay in high school, mostly by not being super challenged.
And I could kind of coast a fair amount. And then I got to college and it got way harder.
And I had no self discipline and no study skills. And suddenly, like the courses were
much, much more intense. And I basically train wrecked. And so I kind of like failed my way
through several years of school, like just barely scraping by. And eventually, my GPA got low enough
that the university was like, you have to take at least a semester off. And I was like, I should
probably take more than that. And so I moved home and I got a job as a bartender at the Olive Garden.
And that was like my first entrance to the workforce as a quote unquote adult. And
that triggered a good period of self reflection, as you might imagine, there's nothing like a
healthy dose of shame to really force some looking at yourself. And I came to the pretty
fast conclusion that this is not how I wanted my life to go. And so I kind of just started
working on getting my act together. And I think honestly, just facing consequences in a serious
way for the first time was really the trigger. And that was like, I lived actually a pretty
sheltered life, had a really nice childhood, and a childhood very much sheltered from consequences
and negative feedback, I guess. And so for the first time, I couldn't run anymore. I couldn't
talk my way out of it. It was just like, nope, you got kicked out of school. You have a crappy
job that you're not happy with. And I was like, okay, I understand at a visceral level now that
my actions have consequences. Let me start making some better actions. And so I just literally
started bending the curve in the right direction. And so after not very long as a bartender,
I got a job as a server at a fine dining restaurant, which actually is a big step up,
believe it or not. And then fell back on some of my IT computer skills to get a job as an IT
consultant, driving around to different companies and taking care of their servers.
And then that turned into an entry level programming gig. And that turned into a
better programming gig. And I just kept upgrading my job every year or so,
and fighting my way into what I wanted, which was a really good programming job.
A lot of founders have anxiety about not being ready to start a startup. I hear this all the
time. I want to start, but there's so much to learn. I'm not necessarily a developer yet,
or maybe I am, but I don't have the business skills. What have you done besides just learning
from the School of Hard Knocks? Do you read blog posts? Do you read books? How do you,
I don't know, educate yourself as a founder? I'm in a weird spot right now where I want there to be
really good resources for me that will tell me the right thing to do now that I have to make
these difficult decisions. And the more I look for them, and the more I actually run a company,
the less confident I am that there exists this resource.
And it's just that I actually think there's just a lot of different ways to do this.
And so you can try to do it in the way that somebody else does. And for a while,
it would stress me out because someone would be like, oh, you need to know what your top
three marketing channels are. And you need to be constantly testing it. And I'm like, oh God,
I'm not sure. I'm not testing or iterating anything on the marketing side, pricing, sure.
And I just was stressed out because some blog post told me I should do a thing and I'm totally
not doing it. But it's also like things are kind of working. And so I think we're solving a very
complex problem here. It's like, how do you make an engine that spits out money at the other end?
And there's a ton of different ways to make these engines and they can be shaped in a whole bunch
of different configurations. And so I'm getting more and more to the point where I feel like,
you know what? I'm just going to kind of figure this out as I go. And there's some smart people
I like talking to. And that's actually probably been the most helpful thing is to actually have
friends that run businesses and to bounce ideas off them and like have like a little bit of a
mastermind or go to conferences like microconf and talk to other people doing it for ideas,
but also like rejecting those ideas when they don't feel right to me.
Yeah, I found the same thing, man. There's just no one right answer out there. And the
harder you look, it's just you're building a unique business. No one's ever built the exact
business that you built at the exact time with the exact customers. They're not going to know
the answer because there's too many variables. Yep. 100%. One of the cool things that you've
done though that I think I also kind of did to a degree I think anyone can do is to find
an analog, some sort of other company who's already done something similar to what you were
doing and kind of use that as training wheels in the earliest days of your company. You guys kind
of knew what to build because Screenhero was the thing that existed. For me with ND Hackers,
a lot of my early playbook was really based on this website, Nomad List. And I kind of copied
what they did and aggregating data in one place and then building a mailing list and then turning
that into a community, et cetera. Do you have any companies that you look up to now that you're at
this point where you guys are pretty much wrong and profitable and you've, I don't want to say
caught up to where Screenhero was, but you're certainly beyond the early days. There are,
yes, there are a few companies I really admire. One is Wistia, which is like a local company.
They're just down the street from us and they're a video hosting company. And I think the thing
I admire about them is that I feel like they've come to the same conclusion, which is like you
have to do things that feel right to you and run your business in a way that feels appropriate and
makes you feel good and makes you have a good time doing it. And so I look up to them for having
longevity and building a great product and having so much personality and everything.
And yeah, that's the first thing that jumps to mind.
You have a lot of crossroads that you're going to come to pretty soon. I mean, you guys are at the
point of Robin profitability. You're talking about building a business that lasts and staying happy,
but there's all sorts of questions that come into that. Are you going to hire employees and try to
grow as fast as possible? What direction are you going to take the product? How much money do you
really need? How many hours should you be spending working? How do you grapple with
some of those decisions? And how do you talk through making them when you have co-founders,
you might disagree? We're pretty good at agreeing with each other, actually. It seems like we're
pretty philosophically aligned, which is nice. We tried to try to make sure that was true.
And fortunately, luckily so far that has held true, I will say that it feels like our ambitions
are maybe not even so subtly increasing as we hit different levels of success.
So in the beginning, two months ago, I was just like, we just got to get to 15K
so we don't die. That 15K for us is like, okay, we can basically pay our rent and bills and whatnot
for the three of us. And it was just like, that's all I want in the world. And now it's like, okay,
we're above that. Now what? It's like, oh, well, now what indeed? I don't know exactly.
And so I feel my aspiration lifting a bit for sure, where it's like, okay, it looks like the
basic thing is going to work. So then like, what kind of company do we want to build? We had said
for a long time that we don't want to hire people. And I think we don't want to hire quickly. I think
we would rather bias towards small. But at the end of the day, if there are more people paddling
the boat, the boat can go to all kinds of new places and go there faster. And that sounds kind
of fun. A thing that people ask us for a lot right now is like a Windows client or a Linux client,
like we're a Mac only. And it's like, oh, well, you could hire someone that is great in the Linux
environment or is a Windows expert. And then suddenly you have new expertise on the team and
you can accomplish new things. It's like, okay, I could see why you might want to do that.
Yeah. What about work-life balance? Because I've seen you express some strong opinions about this.
Yes. How many hours are you working on tuple? How has that changed over time?
I have no idea how to answer that question. So if I am lying in bed from 9 PM to 11 PM,
and I'm just laying there looking at the ceiling and thinking about work, am I working?
I don't know, man.
Exactly. So it's like, I have no idea how many hours I'm working. I think about the business
all the time. It's my favorite thing to think about. I spend more time thinking about it than
almost anything. I don't know if you consider that working or not. Who cares? And in a way,
how many hours a week do you work in the business is almost one of the least interesting questions.
It's like, how many hours do you spend at practice? Who cares? Are you winning the games?
Are the games going well? Great. If you can practice 10 minutes a week and then win the
games, that's awesome. And so I'm not super interested in optimizing that except for maybe
just making sure it's the number I want it to be or it feels right.
I put in some time on Sunday night because I wanted to ship this one feature that I've
been hoping to do. And is it the most important feature for the business? No. But I felt like I
write a little bit of code and it made me happy to get it out the door. And so I spent some hours
on that. And counting that time towards work time, sure. Yes, I was working. My fingers were on the
keyboard, but I was just scratching my own itch at that point. So I don't really know how to
answer it, but to me, it's the wrong question. The right question is, are you working a sustainable
amount? Can you keep doing this for a long time? Can you marathon this pace? I think that's really,
really important. And then do you feel generally fulfilled while you're doing it? Or does it feel
like a slog? Well, listen, man, it sounds like you're on the right path. It sounds like it's not a
slog. It feels great for you. You guys are killing it on the revenue growth side of things. And all
of your problems seem to be the kind of problems that you want to have, deciding what kind of
business you want to build. Well, I appreciate that. I feel extremely lucky. I'm having so much
fun and it's working. It's amazing. I'm sure I would be giving a very different interview if
we were still at 1500 a month. And I would be feeling a ton of stress and kind of miserable.
I'm like, building businesses sucks. But since so far, everything seems to be working. I feel
great. I'm having a super fun time. Well, I've had a lot of fun talking to you,
Ben. Can you tell listeners a little bit more about where they can go to find you online and
the things you're working on and learn more about Tupole? Totally. Yeah. So probably the best thing,
given that you're a podcast listener, if you have room on your plate for another podcast,
mine is called The Art of Product. And if you like hearing people talk about building
businesses, I have a co-host and we're both working on startups. And so our podcast is almost
like a mastermind where it's the two of us chatting with each other and thinking through problems and
sharing numbers and just trying to get better. So if that sort of thing sounds interesting,
maybe check that out. I'm r00k on Twitter if you want some hot takes. And if you want to learn a
little bit more about Tupole, I'm going to put together a special page for indie hackers
listeners, which will be at Tupole dot app slash I H. Cool. Thanks so much for coming on the show,
Ben. It was so fun. Thanks for having me. If you enjoyed listening to this conversation
and you want a really easy way to support the podcast, why don't you head over to iTunes and
leave us a quick rating or even a review. If you're looking for an easy way to get there,
just go to ndhackers.com slash review. And that should open up iTunes on your computer.
I read pretty much all the reviews that you guys leave over there and it really helps other people
to discover the show. So your support is very much appreciated. In addition, if you are running
your own internet business or if that's something you hope to do someday, you should join me and a
whole bunch of other founders on the ndhackers.com website. It's a great place to get feedback on
pretty much any problem or question that you might have while running your business. If you listen
to the show, you know that I am a huge proponent of getting help from other founders rather than
trying to build your business all by yourself. So you'll see me on the forum for sure, as well as
more than a handful of some of the guests that I've had on the podcast. If you're looking for
inspiration, we've also got a huge directory full of hundreds of products built by other indie
hackers, every one of which includes revenue numbers and some of the behind the scenes strategies
for how they grew their products from nothing. As always, thanks so much for listening and I'll
see you next time.