What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process.
And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and
the strategies they're taking advantage of, so the rest of us can do the same.
So MakerPad, for people who don't know, is really the best place to learn how to build
apps and websites without code.
So if you have no idea how to code, you could go to MakerPad, and I don't know how long
it would take you to learn, but you'd eventually be able to build something like, I don't know,
your own Airbnb clone without knowing anything about how to code.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's one way to put it.
You can do it in minutes, you can learn how to do something, a quick automation to save
you hours of work or building website, building Airbnb clone, build an app, that sort of stuff.
Which is obviously world-changing because I don't know how many people in my life who
have been like, Courtland, if only you will build me this app, I can achieve this vision
or make this much money, et cetera.
I'm like, sorry, it costs a lot of money and I'm not going to do it for free.
But now those people don't have to bug me.
They can just go to MakerPad and learn how to do it on their own.
And I think when I talked to you, you had been running MakerPad for, I don't know, six
months or something, solo founder and you'd already done $100,000 in revenue and your
expenses were like nothing.
It was like 5% expenses or something and so it was like 95% profit and you were a super
happy dude.
And you hadn't even quit your job yet.
You're like, I'm still waiting to quit my job.
I think you quit maybe a month or two after the podcast.
Now, less than two years later, maybe like a year and a half later, you are at a $400,000
revenue run rate, you've got multiple employees and you just recently announced that your
company was bought by Zapier, which is kind of the premier no-code tool that people use
to automate tasks and connect different apps between each other on the web.
So congratulations, that's a lot of progress and very little time.
Yeah, yeah, it's been a bit of a rollercoaster.
I don't think it feels like that at the time.
It doesn't feel like, oh, this is all going really quick.
But yeah, when you look back on it, yeah, it was like 18 months of me actually going
full time.
And yeah, we've been acquired and couldn't be more excited with the outcome really.
I think it's huge and obviously we'll get into all the whys and the details and stuff.
But it's just like a credit to the movement in general has been growing and growing.
And we've been lucky that we've sort of been at the forefront of that community.
There's something about being like the entry level option.
Paul Graham wrote a good blog post recently and talking about kind of like different things
he's learned from things that he worked on and he said, there's this idea that the low
end eats the high end and that it's good to be the entry level option even though that's
less prestigious than being the high end option.
Because if you're not the entry level option, somebody else will be and they will eventually
squash you against the ceiling, which means that you should be kind of like wary about
prestige.
And when I think about MakerPad, you're the entry level option.
Someone knows zero about no code.
They know nothing.
They're going to go to you.
And that means you have a lot of power because that's where the most people are and you can
kind of sort of direct them.
You can say, hey, you should go use Zapier.
You should go use Airtable.
And it makes a lot of sense for a company like Zapier to want to own MakerPad because
they want to be the entry level option.
They want to be able to direct brand new people to where they want to go, ideally to Zapier.
So it's kind of cool strategically to look at how that's worked for you.
And Paul Graham said that was kind of the biggest lesson that he learned that helped
him start Y Combinator and VioWeb, his company before that.
Like Y Combinator is like the entry level option for startup founders.
And yeah, Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz might be more prestigious, but at the end
of the day, if YC disinvited them from demo day or something, it would be kind of crappy
for them because they wouldn't be able to take a look at all these really cool early
stage companies.
And so you're in a lot of ways like the YC for no code.
So when I was first doing MakerPad, it was like, oh, just finding out about these tools
and just figuring out what you could do, like pushing it to an Airbnb clone or whatever.
And I sort of made the mistake of thinking that everyone was learning at the pace that
I was learning stuff.
So if I'd find out something new about Webflow and Airtable together, I would teach that
and put that video out.
And then it was really clear that like, oh wait, there's more and more people coming
into the no code space at level zero.
They don't know what you're talking about with multi-level CMS items and referencing
things through Airtable and things like that.
It's just like, what do I need to get my foot in the door?
What's my first step?
How do I first do that bit?
So I pinged Wade, the CEO of Zapier.
Is he your boss now?
Do you report to him?
Are there intermediaries between the two of you now?
How does that work?
He's my boss.
Yeah.
I mean, he's a CEO.
I'm not sure what I would call myself now, but I run MakerPad still.
So MakerPad is staying independent, like it's staying at its own company within Zapier.
So essentially MakerPad, a Zapier company, much like I think you guys are, right?
In the hackers, a Stripe company.
Very similar to me.
I get a masterclass of how to be a CEO from Wade who's raised hardly any money, gone from
the YC to a $5 billion company, 400 employees, all completely remote.
I couldn't think of a better person to be holding my hand through how to run a company.
Yeah.
It's pretty amazing.
And your situation is...
It's hard for me to think of somebody who has a more similar situation to what I have
at Stripe.
I ran any hackers for about nine months, eight months, got acquired by Stripe, talked to
Patrick the CEO, just a whole bunch, and had the exact same thoughts.
Like, oh, cool.
I get to learn from Patrick Collison.
He's running this really amazing company.
There are no intermediaries between us, but I'm super independent, Stripe isn't telling
me what to do.
And it's like, you're the exact same situation.
So I have a bunch of questions for you based on my experience.
First of all, does it feel weird to have a boss having not had a boss for the last year
and a half, two years?
What is that like for you?
So it's kind of like I'm not sitting with way behind me and thinking, oh, that's my
boss.
I'm going to be making myself a busy type of boss.
I semi know what I'm doing and where I'm heading with makeup, having a team.
It's just sort of like almost like having a mentor that, or if you had a really close
investor friend who was invested in you and had done it all before and done it really
well before, you could just sort of ask them, hey, does this seem right to you?
Like, what would you do in this situation?
On paper, I feel like I have a boss.
In reality, I feel the same way as you, like I don't have a boss.
I'm kind of doing all the same things I was doing before I joined Stripe.
No one's really telling me what to do.
Like somebody on Indie Hackers the other day asked, like, hey, how come Indie Hackers
doesn't have like a gum road revenue option?
And then someone else was like, it's because they're owned by Stripe.
That's why they only have Stripe.
I had to come in and be like, no, no one has ever told me to build anything for the website.
It's a hundred percent me just doing whatever I want.
And there's a lot of trust there.
And so it doesn't feel like you have a boss and I think you use the word investor.
That's kind of what it feels like to me.
It feels like Stripe is invested in Indie Hackers and it feels like Zapier is invested
in Makerpad, which is a whole different kind of relationship where like now I feel like
this pressure to like do right by my investors.
I don't want to let them down.
I don't want to make them feel like it wasn't a good acquisition.
Is that the same thing as having a boss?
Like, I don't know.
Like I've literally never had a boss before, but I definitely feel like, you know, some
amount of pressure and I don't know how things are set up with you at Zapier.
You know, maybe you have milestones you want to hit or maybe you have goals you want to
reach.
You want to reach by, you know, Makerpad and say, keep doing you, let's not talk about
it.
But I would assume that like, if you're in my situation, like there might come some day
where you're like, you know what, I do feel a lot of pressure externally to hit these
goals that maybe you wouldn't, you know, maybe on your own, you'd feel like you have completely
different goals and it'd be easier to breathe easier because there's really nobody to disappoint
beside yourself.
It was a complete opposite for me.
I felt like when I was just running Makerpad before, it was you at the helm of everyone
else.
Like there's people relying on you.
There's customers relying on you, there's partners relying on you.
I'm relying on myself.
Like the no code movement of everyone else is sort of relying on me to do well with Makerpad
and make the right decisions and do the right things.
And there's just so many decisions to make as running a company and I keep on saying
to a few people who've asked, I don't think I'm delirious.
I think just tech Twitter in general or startup Twitter is like, oh yeah, I'm going to start
a company and one day it'll be like a public company.
I'm like, do you have any idea how different a company is at like so many different stages?
When it's just you, great, that's fine.
Like it's just you hacking away and it's like a side project together to try and get to
work and there's plenty of those people on indie hackers.
And then when you get to your first employee, it's sort of like two friends hacking away
at something and then you get to five employees, you're like, holy shit, this is a team.
And then you're like 10 people, you're thinking, wait, what the fuck am I doing?
I've got to like have team meetings and one-on-ones with people.
And there must be such a small percentage of people who have the skills to either learn
or just like have that in them to start a company from zero and then grow it all the
way up to like, all the way through those buckets of team, 10 people, 100 people, 1,000
people, 10 million in revenue, 100 million in revenue.
Like, it seems like an impossible task unless you're like a very small amount of people.
And I think fair enough that lots of people have that dream or have that like drive to
get there.
But I think when, if you look at what you want to do and how you want to do it, I think
it does take some looking at yourself to say, am I the person to do that?
Because I think it's okay that not everyone is.
And I think for me, I was like, if I make a pad to be what it could be, I'm going to
need some help here.
Not necessarily just help from we need an amazing team.
It's like we need someone or something that has done this before.
I don't want to necessarily go and ask for VC money, pretend I'm trying to build a billion
dollar company and that I'm the person to do that.
What I need is like a long-term partner that's going to help guide me through some of these
steps and let me screw up a couple of times and like guide us through the good stuff too.
So yeah, when this sort of happened with chatting to Wade and exploring this as potential, I
was just like, this seems like the exact perfect thing that I was looking for.
So in a lot of ways, it's like you felt like you had the weight of the world on your shoulders
because you're in this sort of like very important position at the core of the no code movement.
And you see all these like crazy ridiculous outcomes and lots of people with like the
Steve Jobs complex where they think it's going to be so easy and they're the chosen one.
And it turns out like you feel much more comfortable in a situation where you're actually working
with somebody who has done that to be able to get to that goal.
I think about this a lot actually.
Like if we were living like primitive humans lived in like a small tribe, you know, like
you might be impressed by other people who are really good at like thatching roofs or
really good at making a spear or you know, or cooking or whatever, but like there's not
that many people, you know, it's like 100 people or something to be impressed by.
And like, you're probably going to be pretty good at something.
And now we live in this crazy connected society where everybody's on Twitter, everybody can
search Google, anybody can watch TV.
And like the most impressive people are not like one in a hundred now, they're like one
in seven billion.
And it's really hard not to compare yourself to that.
And it's also really hard to even fathom like how good that person must be to be good enough
to get on your radar.
And so it's really easy to think, you know, misjudge and say, I need to be as good as
these people not really realizing like how crazy of a task that is.
And it's also really easy to just feel like shit all the time because you're comparing
yourself to people who like, you really shouldn't compare yourself to you.
So I think it's very wise for you to want like a mentor.
What I said before, where it felt like before, when Makepad was just semi independent with
how we had some investors, but it was like, we've got to make this work for them and for
like the no code movement and all this sort of stuff and take that weight on.
But no one's really applying that pressure other than yourself.
It's probably more of an ego thing of like, ah, I fucked it up.
I had something going.
It was sort of working in these ways and not these ways.
And that was down to me that I messed that up.
Yeah, we're always experimenting.
So it was just like constant experimentation the whole time.
I mean, I'll tell you my perspective, which is that no one's done this before.
No one has ever built like the premiere no code community that's going to usher us into
the future.
Like there's no one who knows what the answer is.
And people who've done it before in other arenas, like I've talked to some very impressive,
very successful people.
I'm like, you know, what would you do with any hackers?
And like they're throwing out the same ideas as literally everybody else.
So I'll keep tabs on what happens with Makerpad, but it'll be super interesting to see like
how joining Zapier helps because I truly don't believe anybody has the answers.
You know, like you're not doing a, you know, you're not doing like, oh, I'm going to do
a B2B SaaS company where there's like a giant playbook and a thousand people have done this
before.
You know, you're like pioneering a completely new space that like, quite frankly, no one
can even say what it's going to look like five or 10 years from now.
It's impossible to predict, but I'm sure you have like some sort of vision and I'm just
curious like, let's say you do do everything right.
What do you hope Makerpad is?
What is Zapier hope that Makerpad is if they buy your company, assuming like, you know,
they're really investors.
They're not buying you for where you are today.
They're buying you for what you can become.
Like what's the grand vision?
The thing that Wade and I both definitely aligned ourselves on was like, we hope that
no code is like not a thing in five years.
I hope that no code just sort of fits in or what we call no code today sort of fits in
the democratization of software development.
It is the thing I think that democratizes it to the point of we don't have to talk about
code versus no code anymore.
We talk about software development as a whole.
No code is probably that first rung on the ladder and writing actual code is probably
the very top end, the more specialist, highly skilled stuff.
So that's like something that we both like Zapier's more democratization of automation
and we are democratization of software development.
And there's a huge overlap, if not like completely overlap with those things.
How I'm in this position is because I chose to not listen to anyone when they said learn
to code or find a technical co-founder.
I just was not willing to say, okay, yeah, that's what I'll do.
I did just the complete opposite when everyone was like, you're doing it wrong.
This is not the way you're supposed to do stuff.
The no code piece for me is just allowed me to start a company, build a company, sell
a company, all while pushing the same thing that empowered me to do that in the first
place.
So I'm not going to ever stop beating this gentleman, I don't think.
So yeah.
I talked to a lot of people who have the same, I don't know if you can call it a contrarian
streak where they're just going against the grain intentionally, but it's more like they
don't even care what the grain is.
To be his friend Schneider, one of the lead designers at Spotify for a long time, just
brilliant designer and now like Andy Hacker and founder, he would make all these apps
that were just like, oh, I hate what the design community is doing.
He made this cool weather app where everybody was making these beautifully designed weather
apps and he just made a super under designed, really basic, just nothing but text weather
app.
It would say things like, it's fucking raining or just tell it straight like it is and wouldn't
be fancy.
He made a million or two dollars from this weather app just because he went against the
grain and Makerpad learned to build things without code and everybody's saying we should
all learn how to code and the hackers learn how to build a startup without raising money
when everyone's saying you need to raise money, et cetera.
There's a huge payoff in taking these contrarian bets, but also it's so risky because you just
don't hear about all the tens of thousands of stories of people who bet wrong.
Sometimes you're right, sometimes you're wrong.
I tried to do the app store for bots when Facebook bots and Slack bots were really hot
and they were just coming out.
I started with Mubs and Seth, two other indie hackers basically that was bot list and I
was like, oh, this is going to be huge.
It's like, it's going to be massive.
It's going to be this, that, and the other and like, who gives a fuck about bots these
days?
Like really, it's not like...
It just didn't work out.
Yeah.
It's just like, okay, fine.
We'll draw that.
We'll mark that one down as a loss, but you just got to keep going.
I hate listening to podcast where people are like, oh, it just sort of happened to be the
thing I was interested in and then it worked out in the end and all of that stuff.
And then it sort of happens for you and then you say the exact same thing and you're the
person you hate listening to bots from the podcast.
So I read an article on Business Insider about Zapier buying MakerPad and it claimed that
basically you tweeted about different apps and products that are like the most popular
on MakerPad and like Airtable and Zapier are at the top and there are a whole bunch below
them.
And then somebody else tweeted and they're basically like, Airtable or Zapier needs to
buy MakerPad quick.
They're fucking up.
They need to actually acquire this company and Wade from Zapier saw that tweet and then
called you because apparently he's just like trolling Twitter to find companies to buy.
Is that true?
Is that how he actually got in contact with you?
That is actually mostly true.
So yeah, Walter Chen said, oh yeah, Airtable or tagged, Airtable or Zapier need to buy
MakerPad ASAP.
So Wade emailed me a link to that tweet.
I mean, I replied to the tweet saying, oh, it'd be like picking between your parents
as a joke.
And then Wade pinged me that tweet and said, did you see this tweet?
He's not wrong.
Let's have a chat.
So we had a chat and here we are, six, seven months later.
And do you know like what was going through Wade's head at that time?
Because I assume you didn't like just then consider we should buy MakerPad.
I assume like they've had conversations internally at Zapier because of it and they had their
own process for it because you're literally the very first acquisition.
That's not something you do lightly.
I met Wade in person in the No Code Conf in San Francisco, November 2019, it must have
been.
So we had dinner with a few of the people.
So yeah, just got on and talked about the No Code stuff then and then sort of kept in
touch.
Zapier were a partner of MakerPads.
So there was a relationship there and Wade and I have spoken, follow each other on Twitter,
that sort of stuff.
But I've also spoken to Mike, one of the other co-founders, because he's like a product
person who builds a bunch of stuff and experiments and I've tested things with them.
So I knew some of the people at Zapier.
And from what I understand is Wade has been just eyeing up MakerPad for a while and seeing
how it's been growing and seeing the community grow and whole No Code movement grow and things
like that.
So maybe it's just a tweet to sort of say, oh yeah, let's kick this into an actual conversation.
So I'm forever grateful for Walter and Twitter.
It's pretty crazy.
I'm sure you've seen tweets about this trend right now of basically like really big tech
companies who are now trying to own media companies.
And so if you look at the long story of the internet, it has been 30 years of people figuring
out new and more efficient ways to go directly to readers, directly to consumers without
having to knock on the door of some gatekeeper and ask like, hey, will you publish our story?
Because in like 1990, if you want to get a story out to lots of people, you had to go
find a reporter for Fox News and the New York Times or whoever.
And they would basically say, you know, we're not going to publish your story.
We're only going to publish it this way, etc.
You had to do PR.
Whereas in like 2021, you have Elon Musk firing the PR team at Tesla because he can just tweet
whatever he wants and you have like lots of these acquisitions where like Stripe buys
and the hackers HubSpot bought the hustle recently.
And Business Insider bought a steak and morning brew like these huge newsletters.
And now you have Makerpad, which in many ways is kind of a media company.
You reach lots and lots of people with a really cool message and educational content.
And you have Zapier, which is this big SaaS company.
And yeah, they've got a blog.
But like a blog doesn't have the same credibility as like an independent media company like
you have.
There's a lot of stuff on Zapier's blog and it's really good and really well written,
but it's like kind of tainted because it's like, this is owned by and written by Zapier.
A huge bias there.
Whereas if they buy you and they leave you alone and you're sort of run independently,
you can basically make moves and kind of shift the industry and people trust you and they
don't really lose their trust in you.
People don't even know Indiehackers is owned by Stripe because Stripe just doesn't touch
it and we don't have a ton of Stripe branding everywhere.
So I'm curious how you think about this.
Like, what do you think about these sort of movement for companies owning media companies
and how does it feel to like potentially be one of those media companies that like is
now owned?
We fall into that bucket.
Definitely.
I don't know if we're a media company.
We call ourselves like a learning community and if it's, I think it makes sense in these
SaaS companies buying communities.
I think that feels like that sort of gets the whole bracket of morning brew trends or
the hustle.
I think we put out content that has a community that congregates around it.
And then if that's called a media company or community, then like there's two sides
of it.
There's the product teams who get the product right and build a really good product and
know how to do product stuff and then they use community incentives and community things
around it to help that product grow.
So that would be Zapier and they have amazing content that like drives people to go and
eventually use Zapier.
But the other side of it where we all sort of play is we're just focused around the content
and the community experience of how people feel and what they're experiencing.
And if that happens to point them to a product, not one that we're affiliated with or like
care which one, that's sort of a win.
It's just like helping them figure out the product for them or what they need to do.
So the alignment there is completely different anyway.
There's ways that they can be paired up together and work amazingly.
Like I think Zapier is probably our most used tool on all of our tutorials and stuff just
because it is the product that glues other products together.
As long as there is a true beneficial way that both can work like that and work independently
and not be, oh, we're a Zapier company now, all you've got to use is Zapier and that's
the only tool to use.
Use whatever tools you want.
We're not going to get involved in any of that stuff.
And I think part of the point of MakerPad is we're not just teaching one stack of tools
every time because that's not fair or right.
I think that would just tarnish it straight away and wouldn't work out the way ours all
have.
So you're making like 400 grand a month a year in revenue from MakerPad before Zapier
required you and you are also profitable.
I have to imagine that Zapier just doesn't care about your revenue because this is kind
of what happened in IndieHackers where it's like, well, Stripe makes so much money that
the amount of money that I make for IndieHackers will literally never amount to anything and
I might as well just completely stop doing this.
And the only thing that I can do that's of value is just make the community bigger and
better and reach more people.
Is it the same thing for you right now?
I don't think it's the same necessarily.
I think there's...
With our business model, obviously I've been upfront with you and anyone else.
There's a few ways to monetize this type of community, but which one feels right and which
one aligns with what we want to do in the future.
We want to reach as many people as possible about no code and teaching them that stuff.
So how does that align with how we make money?
Does that feel right?
And I think with the Zapier acquisition, it's just there's not a rush to hit revenue goals
now.
It doesn't need to be, okay, next month needs to be 50K, then month after that needs to
be 10% more and things like that.
I think it's just, let's figure out how we can make this community as big as possible
whilst having the same outcomes for the community.
We want Makeup Air to have its own revenue stream, have its own team that takes care
of itself.
But I mean, yeah, I mean, Zapier having 100 plus million ARR.
I know, right?
It's like, are you going to ever be able to touch that?
Why make money at all?
Why not just say, screw it, let's just be as big as possible?
That'd be both of those things.
I don't think...
What we did as Makeup Air before, or what I chose to do, I guess, is stunt our growth
because we had to make money.
Whereas in this scenario, it's not that way around.
It's let's grow as big as we can and figure out the right way to make money in that scenario
rather than, okay, you've got to hit revenue goals first and foremost, and that's the important
piece.
If we've got a team of five now and we want to get to a team of 10, and yeah, I mean,
all of that cost could be swallowed into Zapier, but I think it's more beneficial for us to
feel like we sort of take care of ourselves.
This independent company, as part of Zapier, we take care of ourselves, we do well, and
we're growing, and we're still reaching that many people.
I would like to do that as the person running Makeup Air.
That's what I want to figure out too.
Do you know very much about Free Code Camp?
It's run by this guy, Quincy Larson.
I was talking to him a couple weeks ago, and I was like, how are you so big?
How are you reaching so many people?
There's obviously a large movement to learn how to code.
There's a large movement to learn how to be a 90 hacker and a large movement to learn
how to know code.
They've got, I think, 4 million email subscribers.
That's a bigger email list than almost anybody that I know.
Even these other media companies, like the Hustle and Morning Brew, combined, I don't
know if they have 4 million email subscribers, plus they get over a million people a week
from SEO.
They get a forum.
They're getting 2 million visits a month, just crazy numbers.
I was kind of picking Quincy's brain about how he's doing this, and a big part of it
was just being free.
The fact that he's offering something that people are so used to paying for, but providing
it for $0.
The whole site's a nonprofit.
It's funded by donations, and you can go and learn how to code and have this cool bright
future in front of you, and you don't have to pay anything, it's pretty cool.
It's hard for me to look at that and not be like, hmm, this seems like a model that you
could use, although no code is just so much more nascent.
There's so many people who already understand the benefits of code, and you have this kind
of dual responsibility.
Not only teach people how to build stuff without code, but teach people that you can do it,
and here's why it's valuable, and here's what you can do if you learn these skills.
It's like a whole other level of responsibility.
I think that's part of this whole, let's get rid of the no code piece, or that's why I've
disagreed with maybe how the term has come about, because if my mum is searching how
to build a website, she's not typing with code or without code, she's just typing, how
do I build a website?
What you want to have there is the first thing is use card, or next level up, maybe use Webflow.
The next level up from that might be learn HTML and CSS.
I think that should be the path.
How do we get that across well?
There's loads of things we need to improve at Makepad.
The first thing on the homepage is learn how to build software, learn to develop software.
I know that there's going to be a ton of people going, what?
That's not what I'm after, but I struggle to figure out what that thing is to get people
in, but I think it should be as much free stuff as possible.
We've got loads of blog content that's been coming out.
Most of our content is free, so it's just behind a wall to get people to sign up.
Maybe that'll go away, and maybe it'll just be like, okay, you can just read this.
I think what we're looking at is how do we triple that content on there, because you
need to get that content in front of the people when they're searching that thing, which is
one thing that Zappia does extremely well, is if you're searching for something in the
tech world, you probably land on a Zappia blog post about that thing, or how to use
that thing, whatever.
It's a case of, do we have our education structured in a good way, and then are we getting in
front of the people when they are weighing up these options of how to build a website?
One of the things that happened when Stripe bought Indie Hackers was because it's a community
site, a lot of people feel ownership of the community.
Therefore, a lot of people had very strong opinions about how this should all go down.
I'm sure it's the same with MakerPad, but one of the big things that people were worried
about was, is Indie Hackers going to be able to be independent?
Another big thing that people wanted to know was just, what are the numbers?
Korgland, you've always shared exactly how much revenue you're making.
You've always shared where it's coming from.
What's going on with this acquisition?
Why is it all secret?
What's the deal with your acquisition?
Are you sharing the price, how much you got acquired for?
Because you've always been super transparent about revenue numbers.
I found this really odd, actually, because Sam Parr did the same thing, where he's always
really open about numbers.
He talks about, he always looks up people's numbers and talks about it.
Then when his announcement came out, he said, oh, you all want another price?
I'm not telling anyone.
I'm taking that to the grave type of thing.
Now, I think once you've gone through an acquisition, I don't know that there's anything beneficial
to come out of it, other than people going, oh, cool, now I know how much I could get
my own thing for potentially in the future.
I think that is, there should probably be some sort of like glass door for acquisitions
where, okay, this was a big SaaS company buys community company, and it went for this much.
I think if you're in an acquisition and you go through all the lawyer stuff, all the agreements
and stuff, it's just part of the process.
That's just part of it.
It's difficult to then, if you're the one being acquired, to then say, I really would
love to tell everyone about this number.
Can I do that?
That's not your thing to do.
It's usually part of the legal proceedings.
It's not that people don't want to share it necessarily.
I think it's probably the same with you, right?
I would have shared if I could have, but it's also like, there's a second party there, Stripe's
going to make more acquisitions in the future.
It's not like you're just sharing your own finances of your own business.
You're sharing this transaction that happened with other people that they might not want
you to share.
That's what's missing from the outside perspective.
They might think that you're just being super mum and not sharing because you don't want
to.
Even if you wanted to share, you can't really.
Yeah, exactly.
If you share the whole purpose of the acquisition, there's a tarnished relationship straight
away.
Then you're in a long-term relationship with someone else now.
Do you want that to start off on like a, oh, this guy can't keep his mouth shut, or they've
gone against the terms of the deal straight away?
I don't think you understand it until you get through an acquisition that it's not that
easy to just say.
Can I just telephone the number?
There are some times where people share the numbers and it's completely fine.
Usually those are for bigger deals or deals where people just don't care about the things
that they're worried about.
If I think about the reasons why an acquirer might not want you to share, number one is
because they have to do future negotiations and they don't want to tip their hand as to
what they're paying for companies.
Number two, this is potentially adversarial, but because they don't want you to get a bunch
of advice from people like what you should have sold for.
I assume you had a negotiation process.
You had a whole thing.
If you go around telling everybody I sold for X and everyone's like, oh man, you should
have sold for 2X, how are you going to feel?
Probably not very good and then you might go back to them and it's just like, it's kind
of like the deal's done, move on, everyone would be happy.
So that's like two of the biggest reasons, I think, and I'm sure there's more, but I'm
curious about your negotiation process because with Stripe, I also had this deal that came
in that I wasn't really expecting and I think it was maybe four or five days from the first
contact that I had with Patrick to like, we have agreed to numbers and these are the numbers.
So like super, super whirlwind tour and I was just reading a lot about like, how do
you negotiate?
Who says the first number?
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
There's not enough that I could have read.
There's never going to be enough where it's like, I'm a master at this compared to someone
who does this for a living.
How did it look for you?
Were you practicing?
Were you learning?
Were you just like, screw it, I got a number in mind?
What was your process?
So yeah, when we mentioned that and then we sort of had a brief chat and said, oh yeah,
this is what we're thinking of acquiring you and we can do this sort of, trying to do quite
quickly, have a simple agreement, blah, blah, blah.
We went away and then I think we scheduled a call for like a week later.
So that week is like the longest week of your life and I'm thinking, ah, what are the numbers
going to be?
It could be, it could be this number, would it be happy with that?
It could be this number.
It could be, would I be happy with that and really just making up stuff and winding yourself
up like all week and there's no, no point there.
But that was like what I did and then got on a call and Wade said a number and I was
like, okay, cool.
Then we went away and sort of did some thinking about it and I was like, I was really happy
with what was offered.
I was just like, that feels good, but there's just a, there's just a process that my, luckily
my best friends, as I've known him since I was like two years old, he does this for a
living.
He's like M&A advisor and does a bunch of that stuff.
So like the whole process, he was basically on call with me all the time and I was like,
what do I do?
Do I say, yeah, that sounds good.
Do I say, no, I want more.
Do you start like throwing out what you want in employment?
Do you start saying stuff about your team?
Do you start saying like, when do you do on what thing?
And yeah, I was just like learning as I went.
Those are back and forth a bit of, actually, I think depending on how you look at numbers,
when you look at them, it could be higher, could be lower, like you sort of just play
that game.
So I think, I don't know if you felt like this, but I think everyone feels like, no,
my deal's different.
Like it's not going to be complicated like everyone else is.
It's going to be straightforward.
Me and the like acquiring CEO, like we get on really well.
So I'm sure that we're just like, there'll be a one page document and we'll both sign
it.
It'll be fine.
It'll be done in like a week.
It's just not that at all.
It's just the same thing for everyone.
It takes months and things getting away, things change, lawyers are telling me one thing.
You read that as one thing and then you speak to like the other company and you're like,
oh no, this is what we both thought it was.
It's like a crazy game of telephone where it's like you talk to each other, you agree,
you tell the lawyers, lawyers talk to each other and it's a completely different message
that gets into the thing.
And like that whole process just took two days and now you got to like go redo it and
there's some other translation error.
It's kind of comical.
And it's still like the, it's like the legal ease, everything's going to be translated
into the legal terms.
And every time I'm just like, right, can you guys just explain this?
Like I'm five years old explaining exactly why this is an issue.
But one of the few things I took away from this whole experience was remember to keep
on having contact with the person who is on the other end.
So like Wade and I having conversations really helped because we were talking about like,
what's going to happen after?
What are the things we want to do and what's the vision and what's that cool stuff?
Like I know lawyers are lawyers and they're speaking to each other.
So there's obviously like back and forth and it might be seem heated over there.
But us on this side, we're the ones still really excited and we've got to work together
after this.
So as long as you stay on that level, I think is just keeps reminding you like, oh yeah,
this is just lawyers talking to lawyers don't need to worry about it so much.
And another thing was you're an entrepreneur, like if you're in that position, it's your
company, you're an entrepreneur.
So you always think the best of something like you've thinking of the best case scenario
all of the time, because otherwise you wouldn't be an entrepreneur.
But lawyers are thinking of what happens in the worst case scenario in this deal.
So like for you to have someone who's trying to protect you and saying, well, this could
go wrong in this way, this way, this way, this way, what happens in that case?
What happens in that case?
And I'm thinking, yeah, but it's all gonna go fine.
Like obviously you hope that it will be fine, but it's just one of those weird games or
weird things in your head.
You've got to sort of draw a line and say, okay, I understand that I've got to consider
these things because that's the lawyer's way of thinking.
But I'm assuming the best, which is fine.
But just remember that there's different parts of this.
There's a lot of times where you see companies being just like real assholes about stuff.
And what's really going on is that there's just like lawyers at the company who are like,
you must do things this way or we might get sued.
And it's the same thing if you're going through like an acquisition, you know, like your lawyers
are just like imagining the worst possible case scenario and painting this terrible picture.
And you're like, yeah, but there's no way like Wade's gonna like take my company and
then send an assassin to my house and like shank me.
Like that's not gonna happen.
But your lawyers got like ever a detail for every single thing.
And so at some point you just got to draw the line and be like, I'm not worried about
this.
Let's just move forward.
Otherwise it could take forever.
And like your lawyers incentives are just like not do that.
Your incentive is to make sure you're extremely well protected, that no one can ever say that
they didn't do a good job with you.
And that also it takes as long as possible because they're charging by the hour.
So like, who cares?
So another thing that happened in my acquisition that still happens today, literally someone
had a Twitter post about it earlier this week, it's like people will try to guess how much
you get acquired for because you're not sharing.
So I'm gonna do that.
Even though I know you're not going to confirm, I just think it's fun to do.
So the first thing I think people don't realize about these deals is everybody thinks that
there's just like a single number.
Oh, you know, you got acquired, it's X.
But in reality is like, it's usually more complex than that.
Like, are you getting cash or are you getting stock?
If you're getting stock, is it going to vest over time?
Does it vest over four years, over two years, quarterly for the next three years, like,
all these different like numbers that matter?
And then like, do you have milestones and metrics that you need to hit, etc, etc.
So I would guess for Makerpad that you raised funding last year, right?
Like you've actually raised from some investors.
Yeah.
You're not entirely bootstrapped, probably since it was a seed round, you raised like
a $1 or $2 million valuation.
And probably to make you happy if right throughout a number and you felt good, it's probably
somewhere around at least double that, maybe triple that or something.
So I would guess that you got acquired for somewhere between $3 to $6 million.
Lots of it will probably be in zappier stock, which I think is probably a good bet.
And that since they want you to get bigger, there might be some milestones attached to
that, but maybe not.
And this is where you make your poker face and I see if I'm right.
We'll never know.
What about if I guess you'll deal?
You could do the same thing if you want.
I'm not capable.
No.
But it is kind of cool to have zappier stock.
I mean, they just got what, like a $5 billion, which is absolutely nuts because they're like
the ND hackerist of ND hacker companies.
Like they raised a little bit of money like a whole bunch of years ago.
And they just like said, screw you to investors, never raise any more money ever again.
And they finally just let some investors in and it's like, no, zappier is not worth like
a few million dollars.
Like zappier is one of the premier unicorn companies in the world.
It's pretty nuts.
So if I were you, I would probably take the stock.
Zapier is a phenomenal company.
And that's one of the conversations I had with Wade and the other co-founders was just
like, I just like that you do stuff weird.
You do stuff that isn't in the playbook of Silicon Valley startup stuff.
And I'm the same, I do stuff weird.
I like that we both do weird stuff.
There was a thread on Hacker News where people were talking about this $5 billion zappier
summary valuation.
And it's like the typical hacker news thread.
People are saying, I don't understand why anyone would pay $5 billion for this, etc.
I have my own thoughts.
Like I'm very bullish on zappier.
I think it's got what, 3000 apps that are connected to it.
It's got like more integrations than almost anybody.
That's a huge moat.
It's very hard for anybody to catch up to that.
It's not like building your entire app on Zapier.
It's kind of like, we'll help you connect stuff and do things in the background.
It's kind of like the glue that holds apps together, which is really cool because it
means that like Zapier doesn't necessarily directly compete with things that let you
build a website.
Like you can build all those other things and still use Zapier to like make it so that
when somebody adds a road to a Google sheet that it sends an email to someone else, etc.
And so like, there's really never a reason to stop using Zapier because you're using
something else for the most part.
And I think culturally, you know what you're saying about how they do things differently,
like they've been a remote company since the beginning, I think.
And everybody like in 2020 was like scrambling to figure out how to be remote.
And Zapier is like living 10 years ahead of everybody.
And they're probably just flying.
And so like, there's a lot to be bullish about.
I'm curious, like from your perspective, you know, where do you see Zapier and the ecosystem
and why do you think it's worth investing in?
Exactly that it's the glue that combines all the products together.
One of those things that make pads been hard to figure out is it's not necessarily a tool
you could live without, like you rely on it, rely on it every month.
So for me, there's to run Zapier, to run make a path, I don't run Zapier, to run make
a path.
There's my email marketing software, like I need that I need to use that every month.
So I'm going to pay for it.
And I'm going to continue paying for it until I don't know when I don't see ever having
to turn that off.
And with Zapier, it's one of those things like, they'll email you or the email me yesterday,
like one of our accounts, it said, this Zapier has saved you like 28 hours in the last six
months.
You're like, okay, am I going to now start doing that manually?
Nope, probably never.
So yeah, exactly.
You keep on you keep carrying on, I'll pay, I'll pay whatever it is to, to save that time.
I think it's one of those things that once you have a couple of use cases for it, then
it's just it stays in your product.
I think it shows their growth over the years of revenue and everything else.
Like they've built a product that works really well in like the SaaS world of it's very,
very sticky.
Pulling all those tools together, there's everyone else is sort of trying to be the
one tool that does it all.
And I just don't believe that there is ever going to be a one tool that does it all.
I know there's many who try and I just people like different things and different teams
working different tools and there's always going to be like at any company, some version
of like a suite of tools is never going to just be, oh, this is the one tool we use for
everything.
But I just don't think that's true.
So when there's more and more tools coming out exactly, it's just going to keep, keep
getting better.
I think it's cool that we're living in a world to where there can be a ton of tools and those
tools can be worth billions of dollars.
Like if you go back to the internet like 15 years ago, it was kind of the ethos was, you
know, you've got to be the category winner.
Like you've got to be number one in your space and number two has to be a super far distant
second.
Otherwise, like you're not even worth, you know, investing in or paying attention to.
That's kind of like the VC mindset.
And now it's like, well, there are a ton of like, I don't know, task managers and like
Asana just went public and it was worth billions.
You know, there are like a ton of like no code tools and like a ton of just a lot of
tools in every space that are like thriving because the internet's so big right now that
like a lot of people can succeed if they have their own unique approach.
And like, I don't think that's going to stop.
I think we've got like the creator economy and we've got more and more indie hackers
coming online and many ways like Africa and parts of South America and Southeast Asia
sort of waking up and billions of people who like previously weren't really engaging on
the internet are going to start.
And it just seems like, I mean, it's crazy like there was a report yesterday, I think
that Stripe's got a new valuation of $95 billion and like the entire Stripe is like worth more
now than the entire internet economy was worth when Stripe started.
Just to give you like a sense of like how fast the internet is growing.
And so I'm super bullish on no code.
I feel like almost no matter what path you take, like you're going to capture some big
part of it.
And even if the term no code goes away, like people are still going to be doing this stuff
and learning how to do this stuff.
And more and more people are going to want to make money online and make a living.
So I think you're in kind of a sweet spot, dude.
So how's your life going to change?
I mean, you've been through kind of the entire Indie Hacker journey, you know, you worked
on a bunch of stuff that we talked about the first time you're on the podcast, like didn't
really work out and it failed, you relaunched it and changed things.
And then you built something that worked and you've worked really hard on it for the last
few years.
And now you got acquired.
Does this feel like the end of the road for you?
Does it feel like the beginning?
Does it feel like anything's going to change?
You know, are you going to go out and make a big purchase?
What's different for you?
Yeah.
And again, it's one of those things that you listen to podcasts and you expect someone
to say, oh, my life changed overnight and it was like this crazy thing happened, but
I'm still sat in my little room of just like doing the same stuff.
But yeah, there's like, there'll be lifestyle changes that happen by a house and things
like that, which is amazing.
But yeah, personally, I think I'm still just mostly the same.
My girlfriend might want a few presents and stuff and the wedding can finally go ahead
without worrying about it.
Other than that.
You were talking to me about your wedding last March when we were in Mexico City and
it's just been a year, dude, like it's been, do you have a plan now?
Do you have a date?
A fourth date.
A fourth date.
This is a fourth date.
So yeah, I think there's something to be said for starting a company where it can make money
and it can earn you your freedom and it can get you to the point where you don't have
to have a boss and your life is comfortable.
But beyond that, it has some cool effect on other people in the world.
You know, you're not just sitting down making an app that can make you money, but you're
making an app that's teaching people to develop skills that change their lives.
And so when you have this cool liquidity event where you sell your company and presumably
you're rich now, you're not like, well, I'm going to quit because this sucks.
You're like, hey, I still have this cool thing that I'm really doing.
And you kind of get to the higher level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs where you're no
longer worried about your freedom and you're no longer worried about your bells or anything.
You have this cool mission that you're excited to work on.
And I've met a lot of people who have something where they've sold it or it's gotten really
big and suddenly they feel super lost because it's like, I don't really want to work on
this.
It accomplished all the goals in my life that I wanted it to accomplish.
I've got this money now.
I'm done with it.
But I think it's pretty special to be in your position where you build something that has
kind of the next level of goals built into it so you don't have to quit and try to go
find out what you really want to do with your life because you're kind of already doing
it.
Having already gotten, I guess, to this point, what's your advice for indie hackers who are
just starting out?
You just nailed that where this is the thing that I wanted to do.
I just made it.
The thing I wanted to do was build stuff with no code and just have other people who like
it.
I just don't want to be one of those annoying people that says like, follow what you're
interested in.
But I don't know what else to say from my experience.
Yeah, there's a few things that you're going to be interested in.
You just got to sort of pull that thread and see where it takes you.
It might take you actually nowhere, but that's actually part of the reps you've got to put
in, unfortunately, is some of that stuff just doesn't work out and there'll be a reason
for why it doesn't work out and you've just got to take that on and figure it out the
next time.
But I think, for me, it's just been, yeah, I've gone against what it was supposed to
be, learning to code, and luckily enough people also figured that out and realized that that's
an option and the tools got better and the community got better.
But yeah, I'm bad at advice.
I don't know that I've got it figured out.
I don't think anybody does, but I think that I've met a ton of people who have done the
same thing.
Follow your passion, follow what you're genuinely interested in, and then also prepare for the
fact that a lot of times it's not going to work out and you shouldn't get super discouraged.
You shouldn't quit.
You should just keep going.
And that's what you did.
So I'm super happy to have you on the show for a third time.
I wish everybody could come on the show for a third time and talk about their smashingly
successful acquisition.
Ben Tossall, thanks for coming back on.
Cheers, man.
Thank you guys so much for being here tonight.