Hey, dude, what's up? What's going on with your apartment? How's it going?
It's a disaster. I mean, did you see a guy tried to burn my entire apartment down?
You've been telling me about this guy for years. This is the same dude, right?
Yeah, for a year. He's, he like lived above me. I don't really know where he is now. He's
in prison somewhere. But basically, it's this guy, he's got like, some kind of mental illness.
So it's really unfortunate. But the result is that he's, he's also, you know, I think they're
trying to evict him. So long story short, he's like tried to like flood his apartment. He shoved a
he shoved a hose into a sink and flooded his apartment. So that drip down that was one
disaster. He set fire we're next to an alleyway with all these like trash bags, he threw a match
or something into their set fire to the entire alleyway one time. Both of these situations were
in New York City. So for whatever reason, they're like, well, you can't evict him. He's got these
mental health issues. We don't have like a way, a place to put him. So we're just gonna keep him
in the apartment. And essentially, a few days ago, the straw that broke the camel's back moment
happened where he literally set his and his personal unit on fire entirely. And like just
on purpose. Yeah, on purpose. And then he and then he bolted. Then he was just at large.
He was a two time two time arsonist, one time flutter, who's doing all this intentionally. And
the renter laws are friendly enough that he just he could just come back to the building. He's
trying to burn down. Right. But this time, this time, it wasn't it wasn't okay. So like I'm outside,
freaking out my girlfriends out there kind of freaking out all these people that I've never
met in my apartment, my apartment building are all like meeting each other for the first time
sharing horror stories. Apparently, the girl that lives directly below him, this guy was like walking
around with a crowbar. He was definitely like at his wits end. And he just knocked on her door. She
told us that morning, right before he set the building a fire. And he goes, Hey, I'm the I'm
the guy from upstairs. And she's like, she had no idea. She was like, Oh, okay, cool. She just
moved in. What got upstairs? Yeah, it is. She's like, she's like, you guy, guy, everybody knows,
she described him. And she's like, this guy had on a coat with no shirt on underneath. He had skinny
jeans on mismatching shoes, and just knocked on my door and was like super polite. He was like,
Hey, you know, I'm, I'm the guy from upstairs, you know, like, they're trying to evict me, they've
been trying to evict me for, you know, a few years. And, you know, they gutted my apartment,
hey, do you want to come up and like, check it out? And she literally was like, no, cut an hour
later, and he tried to burn the place down. So anyway, so he was gone, he ran away, there are
cops, there are fire, firefighters, the whole nine yards, right? It was pandemonium. I don't know,
it was this huge mess. Who's that? Who's that an apartment building on fire? Hey, Laura. So this
guy lived a few stories up for me, Laura, and long story short, he tried to burn it down. And
there was no fire damage or anything in my apartment. But then the firefighters went into
his apartment, and they just like flooded his apartment with me, like they just hose down his
entire apartment. So by the time we got back in, it's like seven different, like faucets were
opened up essentially. And my ceiling, like every ceiling, like we have like these recess lights,
they were all like faucets, my bathroom. And it was like, it wasn't just flooding water. It wasn't
just dripping water. It was brown, basically fire water. So it smelled like a campfire in our
apartment. What everybody wants in their apartment. Can I come visit? You know, when, whenever the fire
crew finishes like re plastering and like, there's all this work I had to, I've been working in my,
in my gym for the last few days and only today, basically in my back in my, in my, in my office.
So yeah, it's been, it's been very dramatic. Laura, how are you? It's been a while.
Good. Yeah. Things are good. Yeah. You're a podcast better. You've been on the indie
actress podcast. I think it was five and a half years ago. You're episode number 10.
That's crazy. That was like April, 2017. You came on. Wow. I had no idea I was number 10. Now I seem
very like cutting out. I will agree to your podcast. I think you have something. I don't
know. Close to 300. It's been, it's been almost six years. Laura, you're a serial indie hacker.
Your last company I interviewed you for in 2017 was called meet Edgar that did millions in revenue,
I believe. And then you sold it for like a life changing sum, which is something that most
indie hackers can only dream of doing. And then you got to leapfrogged eventually to your new
company, paper bell, which was ramen profitable. I believe at the time that you sold meet Edgar,
which was again, a goal that most indie hackers don't reach. And now paper bell,
I don't know if you share revenue numbers, but I saw on your website, you processed multiple
millions of dollars in payments just last year. So I guess my question to you is when is enough
enough? How many successful companies do you plan to start? Yeah. So yeah, we've, we've processed
multiple millions for our customers. We are not at multiple millions revenue yet, just so that's,
that's clear to listeners. But I think, I think we'll definitely get there. And yeah, I mean,
I, I love to start SAS businesses. I love to start indie businesses. You know, when I sold
Edgar, I mean, I had already started paper bell by the time I sold Edgar. So I kind of knew that's
what I wanted to do next, but I did, I did actually force myself to take just a week off when I sold
Edgar. I'm like, okay, I'm going to take the next week, you know, not a holiday, but just a week,
not working just to have at least some experience of I, I could live my life and not work. Like
let's take a week and see what that's like, just so I make sure I have the experience. And it's
like, yeah, that was one whole week. I want to get back to work. You have like a restless leg
syndrome that entire week. I mean, you can't, you can't turn off the brain is the, is the problem.
So you love starting any businesses, obviously starting any businesses is hard, right? It's a
lot of work. What is it that you love about it? Why do you love it? You know, I was thinking about
this the other day when I was having a hard time with my kids. So I have, I have two kids and
they're four and seven. And I was thinking my business is just like the opposite of the
challenges that I have with my kids because kids are challenging because you, you kind of have no
control at the end of the day. Like you're trying to sort of shape things and you're trying to test,
you know, your input to see what their output is going to be. But they are independent humans
who kind of do, who kind of do what they're going to do. Whereas I feel like in a business and not
like I have total control over everything that happens, but it's kind of like a little, a little
game where you get to create your own universe, you know, like I get to hire all the people in this.
So I get to choose everyone who's in the universe. I get to choose what kind of customers we're
going to have. I get to choose what kind of marketing we're going to have. It's like this
fun little thing where it's like a little, it's like a sim city. It's a sim city experience
or some tower, which I was also a fan of where you get to build, you get to just craft your
own little world and every detail of it. And sometimes it is, especially because I work
physically alone. I have a little office that I rent, you know, I have people I work with
online, but they're just remote. And so sometimes it really does, I kind of look up and think,
this is kind of strange what I'm doing in my own little crafting, my own little world on
the computer by myself. That's funny. Cortland and I, I think literally yesterday we're having
a conversation about almost like two kinds of people when it comes to businesses. There are
people that enter their businesses and they're like, okay, this is the system that I can control.
And I can look at all like the sim city. I can think about all the different people and how they
interact. Cortland's all about like the forfeits, like, okay, the business has a product and it has
a fit with a channel and a price. Like you can kind of see it that way. And then there's also
sort of a way where you're just like, okay, well, this is kind of like this sort of lottery ticket
that I pull. And if I just have like the right idea and kind of just, you know, launch, like
close my eyes and jump, then, you know, then I can be financially free. But you would take obviously
the first, the first path. I like the kids versus business comparison, you know, like it just,
it's just to be like a little game out there. Like, okay, would you rather start a business
wrapped kids? Would you rather make millions of dollars or would you rather spend millions of
dollars? Well, I'm doing both. That's why I have to have the balance. But it is sometimes actually,
I do have to kind of remind myself not to be frustrated with my kids because I do spend a
lot of my day in this little world that I have a lot of control over, but I can't just say
brush your teeth. And then they do it and I have to be like, okay, what should baby shark brush
your teeth video? Are we going to put on to get them to stay in there and brush for the whole
time? So I have, I have to remind myself that in not all areas of life do I get to be, you know,
the emperor, like I do. There's a Stephen Covey quote about this that Cortland and I, we do a
lot of bickering sometimes, and we have to remind ourselves. And he says that you should try to be
efficient with things, but then you have to be effective with people, right? Like you can't
control this thing. You have to like kind of let the thing flow in this, in this way. That's not
like, you know, input output. Yeah. That's the way to do it. I think Channing is like the most,
like the most efficient person that I know. And so when we meet Channing is like, we're on a timer.
We've got exactly, you know, 45 minutes and then hard cut off bubble. I'm like, dude, I'm your
brother. Just chill out. But let me describe your new startup. So the listeners know what you're
working on now, Laura. It's called Paper Bell. I'm going to do my best to sort of pitch it because
your homepage is really cool. You've got like this like long form sales letter as our homepage,
which is not very common for startups. But basically, let's say I'm an executive coach,
or let's say I'm a life coach. And I spent a bunch of time learning how to be a good coach,
learning how to find clients. And it's really hard. Most life coaches are not that good,
but I'm a rare example of a good one. So clients come to me, I work my magic. They have these
breakthrough moments and they live better lives and then become a better version of themselves.
And I'm awesome. They're awesome. Everything's awesome. I'm an awesome coach. But even though
my coaching skills are great, I'm also having to be sort of this amateur, no code expert on the
side, plugging together all these random tools online. I don't know how payments work. I don't
know how to build a website. I don't know how to do scheduling and some finding 50 million different
tools. And it's all just hacked together. And it's just a crazy mess. And I don't even want to
worry about that kind of stuff because I'm just trying to be a good life coach. Enter Paper Bell.
So Paper Bell is my savior here. You guys are like an all in one tool designed specifically
for coaches. You handle payments, you handle scheduling, you give me a nice landing page I
can customize, you handle signing of contracts and a million other little specific things that
coaches might want. So I just use Paper Bell, turn it on, pay you guys. And I don't have to
worry about anything after that except for my coaching. Other people's pitches are always so
much better than your own. I feel like I would make it way too, way too. I'm just going to take
that video and put it right on my home. And you said, I'm a life coach. So everyone will be like,
oh, life coach Cortland just describing how he uses this. But yes, that was a very, very good
overview. People coming from the SaaS world, which I know a lot of listeners are, I would describe it
as an industry vertical SaaS. There's all these SaaS businesses that focus on a specific industry,
a specific vertical and say, here's the tool to manage that vertical. And that's what Paper Bell
is for coaches, executive coaches, life coaches, relationship coaches. That type of coach who
primarily works online is really our core market. Have you ever had a life coach yourself? Yeah,
I've had more, like right now I'm working with a business coach and a mindset coach. So the mindset
coach is kind of more like a life coach. For me, usually the stuff I want to focus on with a coach
is more business stuff, but the two definitely become intermingled life and business. I've never
had a life coach. I've dated two life coaches. One was a sex and relationship coach. So she worked
with couples, but it feels like it's exploding. It feels like it's this sort of avenue for a lot
of people who want to be self-employed, who don't want to work for the man, who want to work with
people, who want to help people and feel like they're having a positive impact and to want
the possibility of making a lot of money. Like my ex, she did coaching. She made literally millions
of dollars a year. I don't think that's a standard outcome, but she was super good. She'd been doing
it for years. She was charging her clients $400 a session, sometimes more. She was booked
completely. She was turning down clients and then she started teaching other people how to do what
she was doing. And that's an education business. So she was charging them like 14, $15,000 a year.
She had hundreds of people signing up for that and she was just making bank. And I feel like a
lot of people are aware of how lucrative and how promising coaching can be. So it's a really
interesting niche to me. Yes. It's a huge industry and it's very much growing industry. It's something
that a lot of people are still skeptical of and they're not sure what it means, especially a life
coach. People will be like, is that a joke to have a coach for your life? And I'm like, I don't know.
It seems like a great thing to have a coach for my life. I want my life to be good. And that's
also like, right, right. If you're not familiar with coaching, I think that's kind of a good way
to describe it is it's someone who helps you achieve your goals in a certain area because
often people will be like, oh, well, I could just, my friends help me do that. And it's like, if you
have a friend that wants to talk to you for an hour every week about just your own stuff, cool.
That's a very, that's a very good friend and maybe that will be enough for you. But yeah,
I think it's incredibly helpful to have someone who's just, who's just there to help you write,
whether it's a relationship thing or a business thing, who's there to help you
just get better results in whatever area of your life you want better results.
I'm so fascinated by this. Quirtland will probably attest. Maybe my biggest obsession is
performance is like improving my performance across a lot of different things, right? We
got indie hackers and try to get good at that. I didn't go to business school. I am like an
aspiring novelist. I have a literary agent, but I'm still working on it. But one of my weaknesses,
Quirtland will also tell you this, is that I'm like a man on an island, right? Like everything
I learned, I'm like, oh, I can figure out how to learn how to write novels by just reading a lot
of novels and like seeing how, and I feel like the missing puzzle piece is to just find someone who
can coach me and be that outside observer. But it's like, I don't know. I guess I'm not like
vulnerable enough with you. Is it like, Hey, I vaguely know I could be better. So I just want
to have this coach. Or is it like, do you start with specific problems and specific like concerns
with how you do things and then say, Hey, I want to coach for this or I want to, how do you know
that you should hire a coach? Well, there's a coach whose podcast I really like named
Itamar Murani. I haven't worked with him. I just like his podcast and his blog and stuff. And
something he always says is, I'm not phrasing exactly like he does, but basically if someone
else with your same abilities could get different results, then you know that there could be a
mindset issue there. They have the same abilities. If they have the same skillset, let's say they
have the same sort of conditions in life, you know, similar sort of resources that you have in life,
but they're getting a different result than you. Then there's, there's something else
in the equation and it could be useful for you to work with the coach to see where you're holding
yourself back. And of course, coaching, you know, means so many different things. It's not always
holding yourself back, but it's definitely something that we all do as humans. We have
our own lens that we look through the world and we automatically discount certain opportunities
as not for us. We don't go for certain things because we think they're going to be painful
or too hard or think we have to make some sort of sacrifice that we don't want to make in order
to have that. And a coach is someone who can point all these things out to you. I mean,
it can also just be simple accountability. It can be like with your novel writing example,
it can be someone who's like, Hey, Channing, you told me that you want to get this novel written,
but your behavior is looking very different than someone who wants to get a novel written. What's
going on? But that is why I think that mindset piece does often come up because there is some
reason why you're choosing different behaviors. You say you want to write a novel, but you're
doing something else. Okay. What's going on in your brain that leads to those choices.
It reminds me of actually joining Stripe. Like back when I was doing Andy Hackers in 2017,
my ambition was basically like, I want to pay my rent. Like, wouldn't that be cool if this website
paid my rent? Wouldn't that be cool if I could like, you know, pay my bills and I have to work
a job? Uh, that's awesome. And then I joined Stripe and I was talking to Patrick Collison
and he was like, what if Andy Hackers changed the face of the startup landscape and inspired
millions more people to start businesses? And I was just like, what? This is a totally different
mindset, like a totally different outlook on, and like, you just make different decisions,
you know? And it's like interesting cause it's like, you don't necessarily know that you have
like these limitations or these blockers or these like, just like ways that you're not even attempting
to think you're not even considering. Cause I see the same thing all the time with a lot of my
friends who like work, you know, nine to five desk jobs. I'm like, what if you started a company?
And it's like, there's sort of a mindset shift there. Sometimes people are like,
I never even thought that I could do that. You know, never even seem like it was possible.
Yeah. And often the value of coaching is, yeah, just someone else sort of reminding you
that anything is possible. I mean, I think that's also a huge value of a podcast like this one.
I think the reason people love this is you listen to stories and you do think, okay,
if she did it, if he did it, then, then maybe I could do it too. If they thought it was possible
for them, then it's, it's possible for me. And that's also what a coach can help to kind of
remind you of. So I'm curious about the business of life coaching a little bit. Do you see like,
you know, which coaches are telling it, which coaches are struggling? Like, for example,
like life coaching is a really broad niche. It's almost like starting a business that has like the
broadest niche possible. Like you have any problem coming to me, I can coach you through life.
And there's all these like specific coaches, like relationship coaches or executive coaches or
mindset coaches. Who's killing it? Well, you know, we're gonna get more data on that soon,
because we actually just launched a directory for coaches, coach compare.com, because it was a big
hole in the market, there wasn't a good directory to find a coach. So we launched one. So we have
about 1000 coaches on there now. And with paper bell, we actually don't have because we don't make
them like select a category of what type of coach they are. But with coach compare, you know, we do
have that. So once we have people that are on both systems, we'll be able to put that data together
to be able to have really interesting data on like how much people and different niches are
charging and things like that. For now, I will say I did look through one time and see who was
earning the most we can see who's earning the most in Stripe people were connected to people's
Stripe Connect accounts. And it was interesting how there was like, no trend with the top earners,
it was all different niches. It was also very interesting that a lot of the top earning
businesses were not slick at all. One of the top earners did not have a website, they just
used paper bell landing pages, because we can make landing pages, but we're not like a full
website builder. So a lot of people have, you know, a separate fancy marketing side that they
connect paper bell to these people did not have a separate fancy marketing site, they just had
obviously a type of coaching that they did really effectively. And then other people referred them
because they got great results. And that's how they built their business. They had a group
coaching model. But yeah, I was surprised by how simple a lot of the businesses were,
it was largely one on one. Like you mentioned, Portland, you can make a lot of money just in
one on one coaching, just by continuously raising your rates, a lot of people doing one on one or
simple small groups. You know, you see so much out there about putting together online courses
and programs. And that can be a whole thing too. But yeah, it's a much simpler business to start
to just do one on one or small group coaching. And it can be a really great. I also feel like
this is probably one of those spaces where the 8020 is really, really vast. So for example,
when I think of life coaches, I tend to think of like high performing people, I mean, just
right out of the bat, the kinds of people that want life coaches are going to be people who are
like professionals, et cetera. But I listened to like some podcasts. And you know, if you are a
top performing athlete, like Michael Jordan had a life coach, like LeBron James has a life coach.
Naval Ravikant has a life coach named Kapil Gupta. And I've just like gone down the rabbit,
like I have clicked down a few clicks with like his products. And I think I saw him selling a
course or a book to just the general public for like a hundred thousand dollars or something crazy.
It might not have been a hundred thousand dollars, but it's like one of those things where I'm like,
wait a second, like, like what, you know, like, yeah, it's all about his market, right? It's like,
it's not like life coaches make bank like writ large, right? It's like, right. I just feel like
there's like this sleeper, you know, group of, of life coaches who are like going for the top tier
people and they're making more than that's what I would do. That's what I would do. If I had to like
design the perfect business as a life coach and I'm coming at this like with my business hat on,
like I don't actually care about coaching. I'd probably be a terrible coach, but I would try to
make as much money as I possibly could. Like number one, I would try to choose a really
lucrative niche. It's like who has a lot of money and has something they need coaching with that's
like very valuable to them. So like my ex, like she's located in San Francisco, she's targeting
like mostly tech executives and the problem is helping them solve is like their broken relationships,
their broken marriages, which is a problem of almost infinite value to people. They'll pay
almost infinite amount of money if you could help them, you know, repair this like most important
relationship in their life. And so I would do that business coaching is another one coaching
executives who are growing their businesses. They have a lot of money can be potentially even like a
business expense where the money's not coming out of their pocket. And if you help them, they might
make millions of dollars or billions of dollars or something like that. So it's super worth it to
them. So I would do that. And then I would grow through word of mouth as well. I would try to be
an extremely good coach, play on the sort of exclusivity. Like you don't have access to me
because you're essentially trading your dollars for time. So I don't want mass marketing. I want
like sales and the best sales is like a word of mouth recommendation for a friend or something.
Yeah. And then I would channel that and I would leverage like my big name clients,
like you were saying with this, uh, Naval Ravikhan's coach, and then I would leverage that and then
start marketing myself and then probably try to transition into education, like scalable selling
courses, selling books, something. Yeah, at some point. And then laugh my way to the bank
as a successful, very rich coach. Yeah.
Okay. Yeah. I mean, there, there is that whole game plan and there's also, you know,
it's worth pointing out little, of course, in case it's not obvious, most coaches don't make a lot
of money, um, which, which is also okay. You know, there's also a lot of people that go into coaching
because they want to have a small business that where their time can be flexible, where they can
make money without having a job. So there are also plenty of coaches that are making, you know,
$3,000 a month. And they're like, awesome. I have flexible work hours. I love what I do.
I love the people that I work with. It's a, it's a pretty easy business to line. So I just want to
point that out because there is so like, so often you hear about the trajectory you just described,
which is a great one, but it's also like, it's cool if you're just, yeah, that's very much the
outlier and it's cool if you just want to make a side income or replace your income with coaching,
it can be a great way to do it. I think it's, it's kind of ironic because like you're an outlier
among Andy hackers as well. The vast, vast, vast majority of Andy hackers, you know,
haven't put their jobs yet. Haven't made a single dollar in revenue yet. Might not even have an
idea. You're a serial entrepreneur on your like third or fourth business and you haven't blinked.
So why did you stop working on Meet either? I mean, you're making millions of dollars. You could
have just done that. I'm sure that all sorts of challenges and all sorts of places that could have
grown. Somebody bought it. So clearly somebody believed it could grow. Like why did you decide
to stop working on that and start a new business? Yeah. I mean, it's, it's a really complex answer.
Probably the simplest truth was that I was largely bored with the product. I was bored
of social media marketing. It's a tough space to be in because you get less and less permission
from your vendors over time. You know, our vendors, our supply chain, you know, whatever you
want to call it was Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and their permissions. And over time they always
instill do just degrade the permissions that tools have. Like I was just doing a promotion for
Paper Bill on Instagram and I was like, oh man, I have to do so much just with the native app
because they don't like third party tools use reels. They don't let third party tools do
stickers on stories so you can put the link. And I know, I know so many people look at the tools
and go, why can't they do that? I'm like, I know why they can do that because Instagram doesn't
give them permission to do that. That's why, because Instagram wants you and it's just like,
when Twitter like, yeah, for indie hackers, when Twitter was like, oh, you can't do like scheduling
in advance and you had to like issue this like, you know, sort of newsletter announcement, et cetera.
Yeah. Yeah. Twitter decided that you couldn't repeat the exact same content, which technically
is still the rule on Twitter, which a lot of people don't know because it's a ridiculous
rule. Twitter is technical terms of service is you can never repeat the exact same. You can't,
you can't write hello on the same Twitter account or even two Twitter accounts that you own because
that's the exact same tweet. They don't, they don't enforce it. But as a tool, we always felt
like, and I still feel like it was the right call. We can't risk our users accounts by going against
Twitter's terms of service. So we just decided we're, we're not going to repeat content. So yeah,
it was just a really tough market when you're at odds with the people that your, your business
relies on. You know, now shout out to Stripe, you know, Stripe is a core partner for us because we
connect with our customer Stripe accounts, but our incentives are very aligned working with Stripe.
Like we're just trying to make our customers more money to put through Stripe. There's no reason
for Stripe to limit our access. They want to give us more access and want to let us
do more things through our tools that our customers, we can make it easy for our customers
to Stripe. So yeah, Edgar, it was just a tough market in that way. I do think that
social media marketing isn't something that will go away, but it's been, you know,
Buffer has now also publicly seen a flatlining and decrease of their growth. And I'm not surprised
because it's, it's a hard place to grow a business when the tools are fighting against you.
I think it's fascinating to be kind of a serial entrepreneur because you have these experiences
where you've actually done it and you've actually seen how it went. And then you get this image in
your mind of like how it's going to be all so different next time, right? Like every single
thing that I know you're going to do differently, it's kind of like getting into a relationship
and then you break up and you have all these things you don't like about the person and you're
like next time I'm not doing this, that, never dating a redhead again. No more coaches. No more,
no more coaches. I'm tired of being coached. What are some like general things you learned from,
you know, running Meet Edgar that affected how you approach your future businesses?
Do you have different thoughts about like, I know you bootstrapped Meet Edgar, I think.
Do you have different thoughts about fundraising, about how to build a team,
about working from home versus an office, about industries you want to be in like?
Yeah. So the biggest thing I am doing very differently at this time is the way the team
is structured and async. So at Edgar, we were always a remote company, but we called it real
time remote, meaning we were all in the US. We all work to US working hours. We had a lot of live
meetings and a lot of live, you know, standups and things like that. So while we were remote,
it was very different than what you read about Gumroad or Basecamp where they do a lot of
asynchronous work. You know, we worked online, but we were not focused on asynchronous work.
Also, everyone was W2 from the very beginning of the company. We didn't use that many freelance
resources. We did a lot more focused on just hiring full time employees as we needed them.
And those are all things that I've done 180 on at Paperbell. So at Paperbell, our whole team
is freelance and plans to stay that way until we have a really good reason to bring on
the full time employee. I don't know if we will. And not just freelance as in,
oh, technically, you're a freelancer, but you work the same, like a truly different way to
look at the business where we only want to bring in fractional specialists for only as long as
they're needed. And I think what I now view as a mistake at Edgar is sometimes we've brought
people in as a full time employee that, in retrospect, could have just been a three-month
project. We could have brought someone in to clean up that area of the business or solve a
problem with the business and then moved along. Instead, we brought them in. They do the three
months, and then you have to find something else for them to do. And that's not how you see it at
the time. You're not like, oh, you're kind of done. What else are you going to do? You generate work
for them. They generate work for themselves. But you can end up with definitely a bloated team,
or you end up with a lot of busy work being done at the company that's not really doing anything
to move the needle. So at Paperbell, I'm like, okay, we're going to look for specific problems.
We're going to bring in freelancers to solve those problems. I mean, I cannot tell you how
much I use Fiverr. I use Fiverr so much. And we do have regular people that are working on
the business in a freelance capacity. But also now, whenever there's just a random little thing
that I need done, I just go in Fiverr and find someone to do it. And it's so effective to work
that way. What about your personal happiness as a business owner? Is there anything that you've
changed from like, meet out here to now that makes you happier running your business? Or is
there just mostly stuff that makes you more effective at running your business?
Some of the culture stuff is different. And it's just kind of what I prefer now. I really might go
back to the Edgar way in the future. So at Edgar, also, we were very focused on having a great
culture, a fun culture, making sure people really knew each other, even though we worked remotely.
At Paperbell, now I tell people, I'm like, we don't do any social stuff at work. So like,
if you're the type of person that wants to do his work as a social outlet, you will be
miserable here. I'm like, there are no dog photos on flat.
I wonder if this connects, you wrote an article about empowering, how empowering your team is
stressing everyone out, basically about like the new wave, right? Where if you're a knowledge
worker, if you're in a startup, employees have like maximum freedom, right? And it's like, just
figure out, like, everyone's like a little like entrepreneur inside of the company. And now that's
not really good analysis paralysis. People aren't like, they don't have the time for the deep work,
et cetera. But I kind of think about that with you as a founder, because that's kind of my biggest
issue as a founder, right? Because I wake up when I want to, I work on indie hackers, I also work on
other products, et cetera. And for me, I'm like, well, I want to, I want to have good lifestyle
design, but I also have to then figure out how I'm going to constrain my own freedoms in a way that
like actually accommodates my happiness. Was your like, sort of like kind of narrowing things down
related to that? Or how do you think about that stuff? Yeah, I think I just, a lot of it was kind
of the fun of building a new SimCity, you know? It's like, okay, when we did the social thing,
there were some things about it that I really loved. And sometimes it was really fun. And
sometimes I felt like, why do we do all this bullshit? Like, let's just do our work, you know?
So it's like, okay, with this company, I'll try the, let's just do our work. And I'll see,
maybe I'll get bored and want the social outlet. Maybe my team won't be as cohesive and it won't
work. But I'm kind of curious to try because there were parts about it that were really
appealing. So I think also having that timeline, like I've never been a person who's like, yes,
this is going to be my company forever. You know, I just, I don't feel any tie to like,
I need to pass this on to my children. It's like, I'll do it for a while and then I'll probably sell
it, you know? Yeah. I'm like, no, my children need to fend for themselves. First of all,
like that's not good to pass on too much to your children. But so yeah, I think it does give me a
freedom in a company being a kind of experiment. And that's also that the post exit freedom is,
I try to remind myself all the time, you know, I am doing this for fun. I'm doing this because
I enjoy building a company. I need to enjoy the day to day work. And that's a philosophy that I've
always had before I had an exit. I've always been a big believer that it's your company,
you should build something that you really like. So I think it does give a certain permission
to experiment and be like, let's not do social stuff. If it's a disaster, we can change it.
But like it, let's, let's say it slowed down the growth of the company. Let's say that, like,
that was true, that if you don't have social stuff, people aren't as cohesive and it slows
down your growth. I'm like, okay, I'm willing to take that risk because I want to try building
that kind of company. See if I enjoy working in it, other people enjoy working in it, and we'll
see what happens. I always hated social stuff during the times where I worked with other companies.
A lot of people do. I had a few internships at some startups in SF and then always be like,
oh, we're going out to the baseball game afterwards, even blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like,
I just want to kind of like hang out with my real friends. I don't want to leave work and just be
done. My best friends are from the last two companies that I worked for, like in my twenties.
Yeah. See, and this is why it's like so good. There's so many different types of people in this
world, right? And people, and that's why you need to be transparent about it as a company.
And this is something that I really focused on. We just brought on two new people to the
customer service team, which obviously is something that you can't be just a specialist
coming in once. We need a specialist every day. We need customer service every day. So
I was really clear in the job listing, like the type of company that this is, and if you like to
chat with people and make friends at work, like you are going to be pretty miserable here, but
then you're going to attract the perfect people for you who are like, oh my God, finally, a company
with no social stuff. Finally, a company where I don't have to talk to these people. So I'm
curious about like the origins of Paperbell. You sold Edgar for millions. I assume a life changing
sum. You then, you know, you're faced with this idea of like, okay, you love entrepreneurship,
but there's an infinite number of companies you can start. There's an infinite number of potential
ideas. How do you sit down and figure out what idea do I want to work on? What is my North
Star? What is a good idea? And how do you filter out the bad ideas? So I did have some parameters
because I had a lot of ideas over the years for sure. So some parameters were, it had to be able
to be bootstrapped because before Paperbell, I had another company that failed that we raised
a little bit of money for. I absolutely hated having raised money. Not even the fund raising
that part wasn't even that bad. I didn't raise any VC. It was just friends and family or friends
and friends in my case, as I always like to say. Other entrepreneurs that I've met along the way,
I raised some money. I hated that feeling of being beholden to my investors. I felt like it was so
much pressure and my investors were just like literally just my friends, all super friendly,
no pressure at all. But I just felt like, okay, I can lose my own money for losing their money.
No, thank you. I got to interrupt for a second to say I feel the same way about joining Stripe
where it's like before joining Stripe, no pressure. It's my own company. If it fails, it fails. It's
totally fine. After joining Stripe, it's like this other person bought my company and expects things
for me. It's way more pressure in a way that- It's like a non-consensual life coach.
I didn't even ask for this accountability. Yeah, you're just suddenly accountable. I think a lot
of entrepreneurs probably feel exactly the same that you do where it's like, ah, it kind of sucks.
For maybe some people, that's a great motivator. Maybe some people are like, yeah,
that's a great motivator for me. I get it done because other people's money is on the way for
me. It just made me panicked and I did not enjoy it. Also, that company, not only did I raise,
but the reason it failed, one reason it failed is because I realized I would need to raise more
to make it successful. I was like, no, I can't keep doing that. It needed to be an idea that
could be bootstrapped. I work with my husband. He is a developer. I do the marketing business side,
so it had to be something that we could just build together, that he could build on his own.
I also learned from the failed one. The failed one was a DevOps tool. I don't know anything
about DevOps, but I thought, okay, I know about marketing. I definitely discovered during that
process how much I had underestimated the value of my own personal brand and audience.
It's not like I'm known in the coaching world at all, but I have an audience of creators,
entrepreneurs, indie hackers, whatever. There's crossover with coaches. I can speak to coaches.
Coaches are entrepreneurs. Coaches are small business. These are topics that I love and
I'm absolutely passionate about. Do not care about DevOps at all. That taught me it needs to
be something in the small business entrepreneur world. Chris and I can bootstrap together
something in the small business entrepreneur world. It took a while before we had a really
good idea because I am so not a believer in the find the problem thing. I hate it when people
are like, just find the problem and then make a solution. Making a solution is the hard part.
It's really hard to make a good solution. You can't just be like, oh, people want a
better way to record podcasts. Then you have to actually give them a better way
to record podcasts, not just like, oh, I had the idea. I do feel like it took us a while to find
something where it's like, okay, not only have we identified a problem in the market, but we do
actually have a better idea for how to address this problem. I think we are in a place now
in the software world where like, yes, an MVP is a thing, but it can't be that crappy if you want
people to pay money for it because there's too many other choices out there. It had to be
something that we could bootstrap to a point where it's like, okay, you can call the MVP.
It's not totally done, but it's good enough for someone to pay for. We came across Paperball
because I was doing business coaching. I was advising other entrepreneurs about their business
and it was just a classic. I assumed it existed already. I was like, okay,
I just need a way for people to buy a package of sessions. They'll pay and they'll schedule the
sessions. There were workarounds or there were tools that could do it, but the tools were
crappy and buggy. I just found this need. Oh, there's not a good tool that does what coaches
need. To that point, you had your checklist. You wanted to be in a space where you could leverage
your brand. It was a space that you knew, and then you came on the idea of Paperball. How do
you actually go about validating that solution? Well, I would say the core solution that we came
up with then and still is the core of the product is just a way to sell a package of sessions,
which doesn't really sound like anything until you try to do it. Then you realize with acuity
and calendly, you can put a payment link on an appointment, but you can't actually sell a
package of three appointments and have someone pay. Or you definitely can't do a payment plan,
which is very common for coaches. You can't do a subscription. Tying the payment and packages
together. Actually, my audience did not resonate with this at all, but I thought of it as like,
oh, it's kind of like a Shopify for coaches. It's like a backend system to be able to sell
your coaching in all the same ways that Shopify is like, oh yeah, you need to actually ship things.
Oh yeah, maybe people order multiple quantities, right? They put all the things together that you
need for e-com. That's what we're doing for coaching. That was kind of the core idea of
the solution. Then as far as validation, we did about 10 customer interviews, but honestly,
I've never had the experience of that being incredibly useful. It was the same for Edgar.
It's like, okay, we sort of did it. Maybe you can get a reaction at that point if it's the worst
idea ever. You can validate that it's terrible. Yeah. Maybe you can validate that it's terrible.
I've definitely never validated, okay, I know that people will pay for this before it's built.
I basically just talk to people kind of around just the classic, like finding out what problems
they do have around collecting payments and scheduling and payment plans and things like
that. But I wouldn't say I felt like at that point, yes, I'm 100% sure that people will buy
Paperbell. We did kind of the early research and we built it and then we launched it to the Edgar
list. We started at a few thousand MRR right from the beginning from the Edgar list. Actually,
something interesting about that though is then it only got worse, which I didn't really think
through. The problem with launching to like an existing list, because we had a big list for
Edgar, it wasn't a targeted list for coaches, but there were enough coaches. So we launched,
it's like we get kind of all the people from the Edgar list, but because we were brand new,
it's not like we had other marketing sources after that. So then for the next six months,
maybe like nine months, the MRR just dropped as we built up the organic marketing over time,
because SEO is our biggest marketing channel. And that's another interesting thing about being
indie, like it was good, especially when your boot stopped, right? Because we had the maximum
cash right at the beginning, but if I was showing that chart to an investor, it would have looked
like shit because it was going down every month. It's funny because we were losing people,
but we weren't bringing new people in. This is like, did you ever see Paul Graham's
like trough of a trough of sorrow graph for like funded startups where it's like, it's almost the
exact same shape where they've like the tech crunch of initiation or they'll launch on tech crunch
and read this huge spike because they just launched this huge audience. But like the same
thing happens. Like they don't really own that audience or they don't like, they can't repeat
launch there. And so like after that, it's like you're super happy on day one and then like day
two, it's like less. And then you're just like, Oh, shit. Now you're in the trough of sorrow
where you don't actually have a repeatable marketing channel and your numbers are going
down. Right. Like I had the exact same thing happen to me with Indie Hackers where I launched
on Hacker News and it was awesome. Like the first day I had like a thousand email subscribers.
I saw people come to the website, thought it was amazing. And then like every day for the next
four weeks, there are fewer people come to the website and it's like, shit, I haven't actually
figured out anything. And I've got, I've got like, you just feel worse than if you're at zero
sometimes when it's going down. Yeah. I mean, the good part is you have to remind yourself that you
have validated it because you're like, okay, humans paid for this. And sometimes there is some
tweaking to do. Like for example, the humans that paid from the Edgar list already had a huge trust
in me as a founder. So part of the reason that they paid us are like, okay, this is like the
new thing from Laura Ritter. She makes good things. Whereas then when we're marketing to new coaches,
they've never heard of me. So that's not going to be a selling point that's going to influence
their decisions. What would you say is like your, your sort of reputational superpower? Like if
people know Laura Ritter, what do they, what do they think? They think she makes really good
products. Do they think, you know, she's badass. She's inspirational. Like what is,
what is like your specific mark that you leave on the things that you do?
I think people probably, I mean, I feel like it's one of those questions that maybe I'm not the best
one to answer. I think people associate me with a lot of work-life balance stuff because I talk
about that a lot because I've always worked part time in my businesses. I launched Edgar when I
was pregnant and I took maternity leave in the first year. And I've been very vocal about that
largely because these are a lot of issues that affect female entrepreneurs. And I think a lot
of female entrepreneurs feel very left out because they feel like, okay, I want to work part time,
but that means I'm not a serious entrepreneur or I want to even just take a two month maternity
leave instead of a, you know, entrepreneur three day maternity leave. But I feel like I'm not allowed
to do that. Obviously these issues affect men as well, but you know, very commonly affect women.
So I don't know. I feel like it's, it's part of, part of my job as, as a visible female founder to
like talk about these other things that are happening in my life because I'm not embarrassed
about them, which I think sometimes people can be made to feel embarrassed if there's any other
focus besides their business. And then they're going to listen to this episode of the podcast,
the part where you said, okay, then I decided I was going to take an entire week off from work
between startups and like, just to see what it felt like it was like five days too long.
So how do you, how do you get out of this Trafisaro period? How do you get to the point
where it's like, you know, you've got your product, you got, you've got in mind that like
some people love this, some people paid for, I validated that there's a need here, but like,
you don't have a consistent marketing channel. You're not sure if the product is even the right
one because your numbers are going down, not up. Like how do you, how do you turn that around?
Yeah. So I think something that I do differently than a lot of entrepreneur stories that I read
is, is I do focus on scalable right from the beginning. And I should say like,
when I was looking for the criteria for the next business, I know self-serve marketing.
I've never had a sales team for any of my businesses. I've never done any outbound.
It's all been inbound. So like I know how to create a self-serve, you know, online
marketing machine. So what I haven't done, which a lot of people do is like the kind of
do things that don't scale early. Like so many SaaS founders do one-on-one demos
with all their customers. Even if they're at a lower price point, I was always like,
we can't do demos. We cost $50 a month. So I've never, I've never done a demo. I'm like,
no, we need a strategy that can keep going. Like if the strategy is they like me,
so they're going to buy from me, like that's not going to, that's not going to work out down the
road. So our core focus has always been SEO from day one. And so while our MRR was going down,
our search traffic was going up, you know, it wasn't large in early days, but it did exist.
So I think I always knew that that was my strategy. So I had to just keep my eye on like,
okay, are we, it's not huge numbers yet. Like are we seeing results from the strategy? Is the
strategy effective? And I know eventually those graphs will cross in the right way and we'll
actually start building significant MRR from our SEO in a way that can overcome the MRR we're
losing. And we did get there. That's super smart. When you target a niche, like you're like,
obviously paper roll targets, what'd you call it? It's like sort of an industry focused SaaS,
like vertical focused SaaS, like essentially, you can just learn everything about that niche,
you know who these people are. And that makes research way easier. And I think that also
contributes to figuring out like how you're going to grow. Because you can see like what channels
are they on? Like our coaches on Hacker News, like probably not, you know, our coaches like
googling these different search terms, like probably our coaches on Twitter, like maybe
a little bit less so. And so it feels like you picked the right channel SEO for your exact
audience and what they need. But it's obviously like not easy to grow SEO. Like SEO is one of the
ones that requires like I think the most patience, it's the slowest. You can put in a lot of work,
you know, in month one and not to pay off until month six. How do you navigate that? Right? How
do you navigate like, Oh, this is going really, really slow. And I want this to work. And then
you're right. Like it's a hugely scalable marketing channel, like you can get
hundreds of millions of page views with SEO and other channels sort of peter out.
Right. Like how do you succeed at SEO? Well, I think first of all, SEO is still,
people think it's harder than it is. So I would say that SEO requires patience, but is not
complicated per se. Anyone who wants to learn SEO, watch the Ahrefs blogging for business course.
I love that one. Yeah. It's so good. It has everything you need to know to be successful.
And then obviously there's a ton of other free content out there. SEO people create a lot of
content about SEO. So it's not, it's not hard to find. But yeah, if you, if you watch the blogging
for business course and then you actually do all the things that are in that course,
because I find what happens in SEO is a lot of people will half-ass it, I guess, because
it is that kind of bad, vicious cycle where it's like, they're like, well, I don't really want to
put too much effort into it until I really see that it's going to work. But then it doesn't work
because you didn't put much effort into it. And then it compounds, it gets worse and worse.
So just all the little things like, you know, having an image for every blog post. I mean,
it sounds really obvious, but I find a lot of people don't actually write SEO optimized content
like through and for through, like maybe the kind of poke around and find some keywords. And then
they write an article that's sort of related to the keyword, but they don't do like all the best
practices of, you know, make your age, choose, match up with secondary keywords. Like none of
this stuff is top secret information. It's all in the blogging for business course, but having
clear processes of things you do every time is really effective. And a lot of markets are not
as crowded as people think. Like, yes, it's hard to do SEO, being a credit card points affiliate
or SEO. But if you are a, you know, lawn care industry vertical, or even like in the SaaS
world, if you're like, I help you with your cap table, like most topics out there are not
incredibly competitive because I mean, it's really just incredibly competitive. If there's
affiliate monetization, if there's not affiliate monetization, why else would it be super
competitive? So I think a lot of a lot of startups cut themselves off before they start and think,
oh, SEO is going to be too hard. And it's like, you don't even have to be number one. You just
want to be on page one. And in a lot of industries, it's not incredibly hard to get there.
I feel like SEO is really similar to investing in the sense that the problem is emotional. The
problem is like you get cold feet because you're like, okay, I'm putting this work in. You get very
little intermediate feedback. Like it's not like a graph that goes over, it goes up over time.
Like you're putting in all this work and you feel like you're just basically punching a lot of
different, a lot of tickets and it's almost like you kind of have to have faith. And so I'm curious
with you because it seems like, unless I'm mistaken, it seems like SEO was like your big
strategy to get this trough of sorrow, like, uh, you know, turning up in the right direction.
Like what was the point where your revenue started increasing? Was it just like you just
kind of had faith and you did this the right way and eventually it happened or were there any like
cold feet moments? The six months mark is when we started to get like, okay, now we're getting
consistent growth month over month. And now that growth is starting to really add up,
which is not really that long. But I think the hard part is, like I said, you do have to kind
of invest in advance, whether that's with your time or your money. You know, for me,
I've always hired people to take care of the SEO. So I hired SEO specialists to write the briefs
and then I hire writers to actually write the articles. So I'm spending money on it.
Obviously, if you're writing it all yourself and doing all your keyword research, there's going
to be a lot of time. So I think if you told people like it'll take six months, a lot of people would
be like, well, shut up, six months to it. So that's not that bad. But because you do have to put all
of the time and money during those six months where maybe you're seeing, you know, almost nothing
during the six months, it really puts people off. And it did help, of course, that I had done
a company before. And it's not like, Edgar, we actually didn't do amazing SEO. We started doing
better SEO later. And I saw how effective it was. Most of the company, we did the kind of half-assed
version, like I said, like, oh, I think people are sort of interested in this. We'll write an article
about it. And that was pretty effective too. You know, like over time, like even that worked out.
So it's like, okay, over time, if you do it badly, something will happen. And then if you do it well,
a lot will happen. How do you hire like SEO specialists? Is this something we want to work on
for Andy Hackers? Like we're not that good at SEO. We should be. There's so many topics we could
cover. Like what's your playbook for like, I guess, finding people to help with that?
So my playbook for hiring SEO specialists, it goes back to what I said about finding a specialist
freelancer. So I haven't hired bigger agencies. Also as a bootstrap company, often, you know,
the price points don't work out with agencies. Also big agencies, you're paying for a lot of
overhead to put all the pieces together. So, you know, if you go to that Ahrefs blogging for
business course, there's a lot of different moving pieces. It's like, do the keyword research,
put the keyword research into a brief. You know, the writer who's experienced with SEO
writes a brief, somebody else does the graphic for the article. Basically, you can save a lot
of money by being a project manager, putting all those pieces together, which is exactly what I've
done. And I think it makes it a little easier to find the right person because you're not trying
to find this person that can do the whole process. Like for the writer, I always recommend Pro
Blogger Job Board has a lot of amazing freelance writers. You can find people with a certain
specialty. Our writers are from the coaching industry, you know, they like they know about
coaching. They're not the cheapest writers. They're not crazy expensive either. It's like middle of
the road expense, but they're handed a complete brief with like all the topics that their article
needs to cover so they can do a really great job on on just that part. Well, listen, I know you
got to run. What's your advice for fledgling indie hackers? What's something you think they
could learn from your experiences sort of take with them as they try to come up with an idea
and try to build a business? I would say there's a blog post that I really like that I wrote that
I like in the room. It's a brilliant blog post. That's a brilliant blog post. And it's called
You Get What You Go For. And in the post, I'm talking about how, you know, often we say these
things are our goal. But if you look at your actions, your actions aren't really lining up
with what your goal is. So the story in the blog post is about these brothers here in the UK that
are self-made brothers that bought Asda, which is like the Walmart of the UK, like they bought the
entire Asda. They're like their bootstrappers who bought Walmart, you know, is basically
it's basically their story. They started bootstrapped. Obviously, they raised a ton of
money along the way. And it's an example of like, okay, if your if your goal is to buy Asda,
are you, you know, for example, doing your own SEO, or are you putting together, you know,
800 million of capital, like you're doing the ladder. So I think you just need to look at
are my actions, the type of actions that someone who's trying to get the outcome that I'm trying
to get is doing? Because it's very easy to spend a lot of time kind of playing around with this,
playing around with that. It's like, okay, well, if I if I look at my day, do I have any hope of
getting to where I want to be? Or not really. And if you don't know what to do, it's like read
indie hackers, listen to these interviews, you know, watch great free online courses from Ahrefs.
People have put the pieces of the puzzle out there. Are you every day in some little way
executing those pieces? I love that. If you're trying to go to the moon, make sure you're
building a rocket ship and I'm building a car. Yeah, it's not gonna work. Yeah, Laura, thanks
a ton for coming on. Can you let listeners know where they can go to find out more about you
and about Paperbell and anything else you're working on? Yeah, so the best place to find me
is Twitter, LKR, go to coachcompare.com. I feel like probably there's more people listening to
this looking for coaches than there are coaches. So if you're looking for a coach, if, you know,
if you were convinced by this episode to find a coach, it's a free site. You can find a coach
at coachcompare.com or paperbell.com. All right. Thanks so much, Laura. Awesome.