What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from
ndhackers.com. And you're listening to the
Indie Hackers podcast. More people than ever
are building cool stuff online and making a ton
of money in the process. And on this show, I
talked to these Indie Hackers to learn about the
latest ideas, opportunities, and strategies
they're taking advantage of so the rest of us
can do the same. If you've been listening in and
enjoying the show, do me a favor, leave a quick
rating for us on Apple Podcasts. Today I'm
talking to Chris Oliver. Chris is a solo
founder and Indie Hacker. He recently passed a
million dollars in revenue from his products,
which is super impressive. And he's kind of had a
cool journey. At some point, he was recording
screencast and helping people learn Ruby on
Rails. And he got to the point where he was
literally working the four hour workweek. He
would spend four hours putting together
screencast and then have nothing to do the rest
of the week. And he's making a full time salary.
So he decided to expand an entire suite of
products. Now he's got a bunch of different
business models, a bunch of different stuff he's
built. And they're all kind of targeted at the
same group of people, this little empire that
he's built for himself. At his company, Go
Rails. Enjoy the episode.
So your plan on Black Friday is to raise your
prices. Yeah, sort of like I'm basically selling
this Rails app template. But as time goes on,
like there's a lot of maintenance to something
like that to keep it up to date with the latest
rails and everything. So right. Yeah, it seems
like the logical time to be like, yeah, and part
of our deal is prices go up after Black Friday.
So that should work pretty well. Fingers
crossed. You said it was like, what's the price
before and after Black Friday? It's $149 for
single use and $449 for multiple use. And what
I'll be doing in the future is not including
free updates every year. So you'll subscribe
like on a yearly plan, kind of like sketch does,
I think. What do you think about Black Friday in
general? Keep seeing all these tweets. Like what
are your thoughts on Black Friday as a creator?
What are your thoughts on Black Friday as a
consumer? And people are so charged about this.
People are like, it's mindless consumerism and
it's terrible for the world. Other people are
like, no, it's great. I get a lot of free or
cheap stuff. What do you think? Yeah, it's
interesting. The stuff that I don't like is like
Walmart making special TVs just for Black Friday
that are like slightly crappier, but they don't
tell you that. But as a business owner, it's
great because that ends up being like a couple
months of revenue over a weekend sometimes,
which is awesome. But you don't want to go too
far with, it seems like a lot of people this year
are doing like 50% off, which it is a pandemic
year, which I understand that's a good way to
like help people out. And that's kind of how I
treated as like, I'll do Black Friday deals for a
way to give back. But probably the best thing
that I ever heard was a friend of mine runs a
pizza restaurant chain, a small one. And he told
me he'll never discount his pizzas, no coupons or
anything, but he is happy to give them away for
free because that does not discount the price of
it. So they always know it's worth the, you know,
$22 for a pizza. And I thought that was like a
really good thing. So I try and do my deals like
that if I can, but for some of it, it's just
easier to do. 50 bucks off or something. So
these kind of discounts always remind me of
Groupon, where they were getting all these brick
and mortar businesses to do these ridiculous deals
pretty much all year round. So like 50% off, 80%
off, 90% off in some cases. And what happened was
none of the customers ever came back. Like people
were just cheapskates and they're like, yeah, sure,
I'll go skydiving for 20 bucks. And they would go
and they would never, the businesses would never
hear from them again. A lot of businesses went
under because they were losing so much money
giving these deals, hoping that people would show
up again and nobody ever came back. Yeah, that is
the worst thing to happen. You don't want that.
And it's the whole point of doing these deals is
usually you want them to be repeat customers.
It's why Starbucks has their loyalty stuff. They
get you to come back again. And, you know, it's
just a little incentives. But yeah, if you're
doing it at a loss or anything, then that's not
going to help you really.
Yeah, I like that you mentioned these loyalty
programs. Like at best, most of these brick and
mortar businesses have little punch cards where
you get a discount when you get your 10th coffee
or something. And that kind of sort of gets people
coming back. But it's super primitive compared to
what online businesses have where you've got all
your different products. And I guarantee you've
got probably a pretty big mailing list where you
can re-engage your customers whenever you want
to.
Oh, it's huge because it's grown to like 23,000
people. And these are people who gave me their
email address to really, they want to hear updates
from me. And that's much more deliberate than a
Twitter follow or anything like that. So that has
been phenomenal. And really going the distance on
that I think is setting up like automations and
ConvertKit has been phenomenal because I used to
not do that. And I used to not really take
advantage of my email list or even really collect
emails. And for the people who stumble on your
site for the first time, get them on your email
list and go send them something, an email that
you pre-planned out once a week. And that makes a
huge difference because then it just builds trust
with them on who you are and all those like other
little nuances to the relationship that you have
with this person. You don't even know they exist,
but they're like, huh, who is this guy behind go
rails? And you know, it builds up a lot of trust
and they learn things and you just teach them over
your email list and eventually they're going to
buy something because they're going to trust you
and know that you do good stuff. And they're
interested in that. Otherwise they're going to
unsubscribe, which is totally fine too.
Yeah, exactly. And you mentioned trust here. You
tweeted recently that you had a million dollars in
total revenue across all your products. Most of
that comes from teaching people how to be better
developers, teaching people rail stuff. And a lot
of that comes from trust. People have to trust you
in order to decide they want to buy your products.
And I've seen this pattern again and again and
again when I've interviewed people who are
educating software engineers or educating anybody
really. Some good examples would be Wes Boss who
sells courses and he builds up a lot of trust over
Twitter. Same with Adam Wadden and Steve Sugar.
They just tweet lots of educational instructional
stuff. In Wes's case, he'll release free courses
and people can take the free courses and be like,
oh, this guy really knows his stuff. And then when
he releases a paid course, people trust him
because of the free stuff and they'll buy the paid
course. I've talked to Tara Reed who teaches
people how to build apps without knowing how to
code. And she built up a lot of trust in the early
days just by basically giving talks, I think is
how she first got on people's radar. And then she
would go on people's Instagram accounts and do
takeovers and like teach people through kind of
influencer marketing. And that's how she gets
people to trust her. There's Egghead.io where the
founders originally had a YouTube channel where
they're giving stuff away for free. They had tons
of subscribers and email list. And then eventually
they started charging. So I think there's this
consistent pattern here. If you're going to
educate, you need to first build up trust and you
do that through giving away free products.
Yeah, when I started, no one knew who I was. I was
posting a few blog posts about if something took me
more than say four hours to figure out a bug in
Ruby on Rails or something, I would write a blog
post about it, what my solution was because
clearly I spent quite a bit of time and I couldn't
find the answer. So it's probably going to help
somebody else. And if not myself in six months or
whatever when I hit it again. So that was kind of
SEO was really the thing that I started with
because people would start to follow my blog
because I was posting about things and I would
share them on Twitter too. But like I didn't have
a big Twitter following even today. I don't have
that big. It's not even 8,000 followers on Twitter
yet. So really SEO has been the big thing. And
then I was posting tutorials and sure enough, they
started being linked to on Stack Overflow and
stuff, which really built the audience. And I was
like, maybe I could turn this into a business. So
SEO was really my first place that I stumbled into
kind of on accident. It wasn't on purpose. And I
it's probably one of the harder things to do. But
as long as you're writing about stuff that no one
else really is, that can help.
Yeah, I think just writing for developers in
general is such an advantage because we're
always searching for stuff. We're always
Googling stuff. We're always on Stack Overflow,
trying to find the answer to some obscure
question. And if you write about something obscure
enough and unique enough like you were doing,
then you're not going to have a lot of
competition to be the front page of Google. So
you're doing a lot of that. You're driving a lot
of traffic. Where do you go from there?
Yeah, I turned into trying to sell a course, but
nobody knew who I was. And I realized I'm going
to sell like two courses a month for 40 bucks each
and that's not going to pay the price. Then I
realized like, okay, the guy who was screen
casting before me that I really liked was doing
a free video every other week. And the free
videos are a way for me to do marketing and very
few people are screen casting. So I can publish
those and give them away and link them out. And
there's other newsletters like Ruby Weekly that
goes out to 40 some thousand Ruby developers. If
I can get my videos in there, amazing. So that
goes out and starts, you know, building the
audience for me. And, you know, over time, that
really helped because I was able to just have new
content every other week that was for free that
people would discover me by. And then having
email capture next to that allows me to push
those updates to them every week instead of them
randomly stumbling upon it on accident or
whatever. So that, you know, built more of a
direct relationship with people, which was
pretty much crucial to building a screen
casting education business.
Smart. So you just had kind of dumb traffic
coming in from Google and Stack Overflow. And
you took that, added a newsletter capture form
to your website. And now it's not just traffic.
It's an actual audience and you can re-engage
them whenever you want, build up trust, eventually
sell stuff to them. What is it that you're
selling and what is it that you're teaching
people?
It's pretty much how it's been for almost seven
years, I guess now, where I post videos every
week. The content has changed quite a bit, but
I cover Ruby on Rails topics and I try and
teach stuff that is almost like we're sitting
down and working together. So I want to record
not basics. Everybody that's doing YouTube
videos and screencasts on a lot of programming
stuff just default to, here's, you know, intro
to HTML or Ruby on Rails or whatever it is. And
there's a lot of that. So I'm deliberately
trying to do a bit more advanced stuff and do
topics that people aren't able to find easily. I
take those learnings and turn them into
screencasts. And a lot of it now is we've got a
really good Slack community of a couple thousand
people in there that are talking every day about
Ruby on Rails and stuff and encouraging each
other and working together. And it's awesome.
And we've also got the forum where those are
great for other people who don't want to be, you
know, they want to ask a question about something
that like an architecture question of how would I
build this feature doesn't really fit Stack
Overflow well, because they want specific like
here's an error. How do I fix it? And these are
like more philosophical programming questions.
Right. So Stack Overflow is kind of like a
universal question and answer site where you ask a
question and millions of people might have that
same exact question. But on your forum, people
can ask more personal questions and things that
no one else cares about just that are really
specific to them.
Yeah. And so I try and provide like a place for
that that doesn't really exist. And that's kind
of been really useful. It's hard to keep up with
all those, but I try and answer as many of those
as I can. And I spend a lot of time just messaging
people, you know, on the forums or on Slack or on
Twitter and email. That's been a tough one to
keep up with. But you know, all of those are like
ways for me to help people out for free. But that
hopefully gets them to come back and watch
screencasts and pay for those, you know, so
everything's really about educating people and
certain topics are much more complicated and
take a lot more effort. And those are the ones
that fit as, you know, paid products or whatever.
Yeah, it's almost like a sub stack where on sub
stack, people have got these paid newsletters and
they send them out once a week, twice a week,
whenever, and people pay a monthly fee to subscribe.
And you're doing the same thing except you've got
paid screencasts. But I'm on your pricing page
right now. You're charging 20 bucks a month or
$200 a year, which is a pretty good amount. It's
more than most of these paid newsletters cost.
And you've also got a custom community forum
just like sub stack has for all their newsletter
authors. And I'm assuming people are just
subscribed because they just want to watch your
videos every week. Or is it more of like people
have a very specific problem? And so they just
want to go search your archives for like the
exact video that will solve that problem.
Yeah, it's interesting because there's very
clearly in my if I look at people's usage, there
is very clearly two groups of people, people
who want to just be up to date on stuff and just
keep an eye on what is going on in the rails
world will stick around and they'll stay
subscribed for a longer time and they'll probably
be more involved in the slack. But then there's
the other group of people who are like, Hey, I'm
building this app for my job and I need to go add
Facebook login and here's a video and I'll go
pay for that and watch that. And, you know, may
not stick around. And so there's kind of
naturally higher churn and that that group of
customers, which makes sense, but it also makes a
business really hard to grow. They're here for
specific things and don't necessarily stick
around, which isn't great for the business as a
whole, but it does help them, which is at the end
of the day, what matters.
Yeah. So I've seen this exact same pattern,
putting out content with indie hackers, where
it's very tempting to do this kind of like
evergreen, very functional, educational, how to
content, you know, here's how to solve this
specific problem. But the problem is like the
only people who care about that are people who
have that very specific problem. And once you
solve it for them, they just don't come back.
They kind of hit run. And the opposite is
informative content. If you can teach people
about what's going on in their world, keep
people up to date, people don't really churn
from that. Like it's the dichotomy is like, you
know, I look at it like school versus news.
People graduate from school and then they don't
go back because they got what they came for.
But nobody graduated from reading the New York
Times. You go back to find out what's new every
day or every week. So it's not shocking to me
that the people who just want to be informed
about rails are your highest, your sort of
lowest churned subscribers. But there's an
exception to this that I've seen, which is if
you're doing educational content, and you want
to have like an endless fount of people who are
searching for educational content, even if
they're sort of hit it in Quitters, if you can
get it on any sort of search channel, because
that's where all of these like, these one time
visitors come from, like Google search or
YouTube, that's pretty good. So how are you
thinking about YouTube? Is that a channel you
want to be on even more?
Oh, definitely. I publish my free videos on
YouTube, mostly just to keep them free for me.
So I don't have to pay for the bandwidth and all
that. But I think that part of the problem is
it's not going to bring the intermediate or
advanced developers that I'm generally selling
to, I would have to then go tailor more content
to beginners. Honestly, I haven't been a
beginner in programming for a long time. So
there's so much that I take for granted. You
know, to thoroughly explain something as a
beginner would take me a lot of time, but I bet
if I did go that route and I've toyed with the
idea of doing it, I probably would be able to
like very thoroughly explain stuff that, you
know, a lot of the tutorials will just gloss
over basics. They'll be like, don't worry about
what this does. Just type it. And you're left
wondering, like, what just happened here? Or
like, if you change something, you don't know
how to fix it when it breaks. Because you
didn't ever really learn why, how or why it
worked. Right. So yeah, I think that's something
that I will probably do in the next year is is
trying to do more basics and like beginner stuff,
because that also helps the funnel of, you know,
the market size for my intermediate content grows
the more that I can get people to become
intermediate, you know, rails developers or Ruby
developers. So it's something I probably need to
do. Let's go back to the beginning, because
obviously, the crush on it now, your business is
doing very well. Like I mentioned, you've made
over a million dollars in revenue from your
products. But I know the first few years for you
are pretty tough. You made like less than minimum
wage for a year, you ended up having to go back
and work a job, maybe the first three or four
years for you were not easy. Yeah. Tell me about
those early days. Oh, man, they still regularly,
I feel like affect some of my decisions, because I
was I had to be so frugal. But I knew my
personality wasn't super risk taking. So what I
did was I was consulting, and I saved up, I don't
remember how much exactly, but I had roughly like
nine months of rent and food and whatever expenses
saved up. And I realized, from all these years of
trying to build something on the side, and, you
know, at nights and weekends, I needed to really
go cut myself off from that, burn the bridges,
force myself to figure it out, because I knew I
could, but I wasn't putting in the effort that I
needed to. And so I did January 1st of 2014, and
I went all in on, on Go Rails after I had had a
little bit of, you know, I knew that there was
like 6000 visits a month to Go Rails website. So I
knew I had some audience to sell stuff to. And the
first year I tried to do screencast and just do
that course originally. And boy, I was that hard
because I'm a programmer, all of my work is
generally in my head. And so I'm thinking, but not
talking about what I'm thinking out loud. And
that's really how I need to teach in a screencast.
And I couldn't stand my own voice. And I couldn't
even sit down for 15 minutes and record a screencast.
Like I would just get frustrated and give up. And
so I had to force myself to record for 15 minutes
a day, whether or not I threw it away. I just
needed to build a habit. So that took me like the
first half of the year to get my first 15 videos
that I turned into a course together. And then I
launched it to basically nobody. No one really
bought it. No one knew who I was. I think I made a
couple hundred dollars on that course, like selling
one every two weeks or something. And then when I
moved to switch over to the weekly screencast to
get more, you know, exposure, I was running out of
money. So I'm applying for jobs and I get a
interview with a YC startup. And that's when I
realized that things were starting to take off on
Go Rails because the day of like my first interview
or second interview, Go Rails was like number one on
Hacker News and someone I didn't know submitted it.
And it was linked on Hacker News like the whole
day right at the top. And I was like, well, this
couldn't make my interview go any better. And then I
was like starting to doubt, like, should I even get
this job? Because clearly it's going somewhere now.
Like I know that I had always struggled with the
term product market fit. And I realized then that
it was like when people are pulling me to do more
of something, that's when I know that I'm starting
to get towards a product market fit of some sort.
And I'm being, you know, encouraged to continue
doing more. And, and I had that feeling before. So
that was kind of a fascinating time. But it was
like out of money, and it's grown to like 500 bucks
a month or 450 a month or something. And that
wasn't quite enough to pay my bills and whatever and
catch up in time. So I took the job, moved to New
York City for a year, learned a bunch of stuff, and
it didn't work out. And so I went back on my own
for Go Rails. And I'd been working on it that time
while I was at the job. So it continued to grow.
And I was just kind of doing it on the side there
and not worrying about making money with it for a
year. And when I decided to leave that job, it was
like, okay, it pretty much pays my bills if I move
back to the Midwest, but it was like 36,000 a year
or something that it was pulling in. So it wasn't
great. But I was like, it's close enough that I
think I can wing it. And I don't have hardly any
expenses. And we'll see. So I did and putting in my
full time at that point, got it to grow quite a bit
better. And it's perfect timing to be talking about
this right now. But the original Black Friday sale
that I did was it's $9 a month and this isn't
sustainable. So I'm going to raise it to 19 a month
after Black Friday. So that's my Black Friday deal.
Get it now before the prices go up more than double
the prices. Yeah. And I got a ton of people to sign
up and that added like 2000 MRR or something around
that. Wow. First Black Friday that I did. And that
was huge because now it made it like sustainable for
me where I could live full time on this. Not ideal.
I still want to get to like, I still dream of having
a full like regular engineer salary, but it's
enough. I'll survive on this. And I don't have to
answer to anyone. And that was that was a pretty good
milestone. I like, you know, very happily remember
that moment.
And you probably wouldn't have believed at the time
that you were eventually going to make much more
money. You're eventually going to make a million
dollars from all this stuff. But it's not shocking to
me that you had product market fit. I mean, you kind
of were the successor to Rails cast, where they would
publish these weekly videos. And they also had
subscribers. And I don't know who was behind Rails
cast, but apparently he like stopped working on it at
some point.
Yeah, actually, Ryan Bates was the guy who did Rails
cast. And I learned everything from him when I was
learning Rails. And that was the inspiration when I
was like, I'm going to sell a course or something,
because I miss Rails cast. And maybe I can teach
some stuff. I know I can teach a few things. And
yeah, that was my inspiration. And when the course
thing didn't work out, because I didn't have an
audience, the weekly screencast and basically like,
what if I can be sort of a successor to this, I'll
never teach it the way he did. I'll be my own kind
of, you know, educator. But people miss that. I
dearly miss it. So why don't I go, you know, try
and fill that void. And you see that working really
well right now with Ben Ornstein, building tuple,
everybody missed screen hero. Yep. And tuples grown
amazingly. So it's an interesting approach to use
if you're trying to find a business idea, like what is
something you really wish still existed? Yeah, go
recreate it. And you see that all the time. I'm
looking at your Hacker News post from 2014 when
somebody submitted you and it's like, out of the top
five comments, four of them mentioned how much they
missed Rails cast and heard it talking about Rails
cast. And it's like, you're just like hitting that
spot where people used to get a thing and it was
taken away from them. And now you've slotted right
into that, that desire. Yeah, it worked really well.
And, and Ryan Bates kind of burned out, I think from
it. And so he like disappeared from the internet
for a long time. And actually he just popped up on
Twitter again after a couple of years. And, you
know, he still keeps Rails cast alive. And he had a
sponsorship with DigitalOcean and had some trouble
with that, but they, he tweeted about it and
whatever. But it's like nice to see him pop up once
in a while, know that he's still doing well and still
exists. So this is one way to come up with an
idea. You see that something was already popular,
then either it got really crappy or disappeared and
you can kind of just copy what they were doing.
And you know that the demand is there. They sort
of proven that it works. Another idea I have in
this space that I've always wanted people to do is
games. I just don't understand why there aren't
more games that are helping people learn how to
code because learning how to code is like, quite
frankly, not that fun for a lot of people. It's
pretty hard. But if you can actually have fun
doing certain things, I think games are addictive.
And I kind of tested this once with my brother.
I've taught a lot of my friends how to code. I
taught my brother how to code. And for one of his
final products, our projects, before he applied for
jobs, I was like, you should have some sort of
game that you make that teaches people some coding
concept. And so he decided he was going to teach
people CSS Flexbox and he was going to do it
through this game that was like a tower defense
game. So a tower defense game is like, you've got
all these enemies. They're trying to get from one
side of the screen to the other. You build like
these attack towers to shoot the enemies before
they get to the other side and destroy your
castle. And the trick with his was that you have
to use CSS Flexbox to position your towers. And
so every level will teach you a few more concepts
and you have to be really good at Flexbox to be
able to like move stuff around fast enough to
not lose. And to this day, I mean, this is like
five years ago. To this day, people still are
like streaming his game on Twitch and they are
like donating stuff and they're tweeting about
it. It's just a cool resource that people find
that they're like, it's just the coolest way to
learn CSS Flexbox. Like there isn't a better way
to learn it. And I'm shocked. No one's like no
one's copying this. Like nobody did this for CSS
grid or a bunch of other concepts. And it blows
my mind that people aren't more creative here.
So there are downsides. I mean, like it's hard to
sell a game. People aren't going to pay money for
this, but I wonder what you would do. You know,
would you put a price on this? Do you think games
are something people could use for learning to
code? I think that seems like the perfect free
thing to give away that you can turn into. You
know, let's make a CSS course where we build
games to learn the CSS properties or something.
I would probably do it as something like that,
where the game is clearly super valuable if it's
free because it attracts so many people. I
wouldn't try and monetize that because you're
going to dilute the value from it pretty quickly.
But if you do say like, hey, if you really
enjoyed this style of learning, I've turned this
into a course where you can learn JavaScript by
making games and you can learn CSS by making
games in this other course or whatever, you know,
you're building your trust and you can turn that
into products. And you know, this is like one of
those things that I loved about Adam and Steve
Shoger when they were posting all those CSS tips
kind of they had struck on something that no one
else had done. There's a lot of people who are
teaching CSS in front end and design for developers.
But there's had a nuance to it that was like,
here's what you would probably do. And here's how
you can tweak it to be just a little bit more
polished because there is so much of that in
design that I'm like, yeah, I can use bootstrap
and like roughly get what I want and I can put a
little detail into it. But honestly, it never has
the polish that, you know, a professional designer
would put on it. And they were showing those
little things that no one else had taught, which
was like, use this kind of shadow or like, if
you're putting gray text on a green background,
try using a light green instead of gray, and that's
going to fit way better. And you're like, oh, duh,
of course. But they were the only one that was like,
the only group that was like posting those types of
things. And by doing it for free, they got a massive
audience, which was perfect to launch, refactoring
UI and tailwind UI and everything that they're
doing. And I really liked that approach of like,
make something free that people just swarm to.
And then sell stuff, because don't sell that
directly. Sell things around it, because they're
going to trust you now. And that you don't want to
dilute at all. You want to continue that, because
it's a wonderful funnel to have for your business.
That makes perfect sense. And I think people often
struggle with like, okay, how do I make something
that's going to, that people are going to swarm to.
But one of the things that I've noticed, if you're
putting out any sort of content, is that people
just flock to novelty. We're just, we're hardwired to
like anything that we've seen or heard a bunch of
times. Like we just sort of phase it out, because
our brains want to pay attention to whatever's
new. That's the threat. That's the stimulating
thing. And if you think about, okay, well, I live
in a world with 7 billion people, how am I going
to make something new that no one's ever done
before? One of the tricks that I found is just
like, you just start combining things. Like you
take one idea, and you combine it with another
idea. And suddenly you get something that like
very few people have done. And if you combine it
with a third idea, then you get something like
probably no one's ever done. So in the game
situation, it was like, okay, CSS flexbox plus
tower defense. Suddenly, that's a really
interesting thing that no one's done before.
There's another guy I saw on Product Hunt who
made this avatar library. And it's called
Toy Faces. And it's basically like these 3D
avatars that look like toys. And they're also all
diverse. And so it's like diversity plus avatars
plus toys. And you got like 1500 upvotes on
Product Hunt. Just sort of like combining these
three things. It's like no one had ever seen that
before. So I wonder if you kind of like teach
people to code or do something, you just got to
figure out like what are you going to combine to
be unique? So you stand out and no one's ever
seen it. Yeah, that is, I mean, that is the thing
that I usually am thinking about when I'm trying
to figure out what to teach. It's a lot of stuff
that I'm like, what do I wish I could learn? And
I'll go teach it to myself. And then I can go
teach it in my own way. So those tend to be things
that like, I can't find good tutorials on or
whatever. And by going and doing the hard work of
figuring it out myself, then I can condense that
down into a course or something and save you a lot
of time. One of those examples was the strong
customer authentication rollout at Stripe was like,
you know, a lot of documentation, but it was
hard to wrap your head around how has this
changed from before. So I actually spent some time
learned the changes for that because before I
could implement Stripe without reading the docs,
I had a basically memorized and SCA comes out
and everybody's kind of confused on what are
these new things like payment, intense and set
up intense. And why do I have to do this now?
And a lot had changed. And so that's one of my
courses where I went through and spent the time
learned how to implement this and turned it into
a course for Rails developers. So if you want to
implement Stripe, you can definitely read the
docs. But also if you want to see something super
specific to rails and, you know, go through all
those steps, I made a course on it, you know, and
it'll save you hopefully quite a bit of time
because you're all be able to go explain the
concepts and whatever and in the right context
for those people that, you know, the Stripe docs
are going to be more generic because they can
apply to node and rails and Python and go and
whatever. And just a little tailoring towards my
audience can turn into a course, which is kind of
cool. That's super smart. And it's novel again in
like a bunch of different ways. It's novel because
number one, it's new. Like you weren't writing a
course on some old thing. There was a brand new
change of Stripe in your courses about that. And
that guarantees you're going to be writing about
something that people are searching for, people are
talking about, because it's just like new thing
that just happened and you're not going to have a
lot of competition because no one else has really
had time to put out like a screencast on it. And
then number two, you're doing the combinations,
right? It's like, okay, it's not just Stripe. It's
not just Rails. It's the combination of Stripe and
Rails. And assuming both of those buckets are big
enough, it ends up still being a really big
audience. Like Rails is a massive, massive
programming framework. So even if you combine it
with something else, like you're still going to
have a market where you can make a decent amount of
money and get customers in the door.
Yeah. And this was always the thing that I think
about. If you've been in high school or college and
had a career advisor, they're like, do you want to
be an architect or a programmer or whatever? And
really what everybody wants is like a blend of
things. You don't want to just be a programmer.
You want to be a programmer who can run a
business who knows a little bit of marketing and
whatever. And it's always a combination of them.
And those are always the most interesting jobs.
You're not just a plumber or something. You're
like a plumber who specializes in fancy geothermal
stuff or whatever. And all of a sudden now you've
jumped from the commodity job to like a very
specialized, high end, unique thing. And you don't
have much competition. You can charge your higher
prices. You're adding value because you're
specialized. And that's what has been nice about
Go Rails as well as you can take that first thing
that worked and then go add another piece in. So
for example, I'm doing screencasts on Ruby on
Rails, but at a point I was like, one of my
tutorials is how to deploy it. And it's deploying to
your own servers. And I got tired of doing that
myself. And one of my friends was like, why don't
you just automate that and turn it into a product?
And so we did. And it's like now I'm tools for
the Rails community. So I'm teaching them things,
but I'm helping them deploy their code. Now I
have a template that you can buy as your app with
payments already to go and Teams and all these
other features. And that'll save you 100 hours
out of the box. And there's all these new
combinations that I can add in that give me
ideas for new products and it just continue to
grow. And the education stuff is not, I'm good at
it, but I don't love just doing screencasts
because there was many, many, many years where I
was about ready to give up on the screencasts
and just shut it down. And adding these other
things were some things that hosting has way
less churn. So that makes things more sustainable.
And that gives me a lot of ideas for the screencasts
and all of a sudden it started to come together
and fix a lot of like frustrations that I had
with just the one specific product that wasn't
really working out for me personally. Like I
wasn't fulfilled just creating content. I'm
right. I'm naturally a good teacher, but I don't
love only teaching. I like explaining stuff
because I like learning. And the only way to
be happy then is just to be building new things
all the time. So if I'm just teaching what I
know, I'm not going to be happy.
Talk to me about screencasting a little bit
because I've never made a screencast. I imagine
it's not easy to do. And you mentioned that
when you first started, you had like this
conscious incompetence where you're very aware
that you weren't good at it and it didn't feel
good to do. What are people using to record
screencasts nowadays and what makes people
good at it?
Yeah. I mean, the big thing is use some software.
Like I use ScreenFlow and love it, but use
something simple to work with. Like you don't
want to be recording screencasts and making
mistakes and you export four hours of video
and you import it to Final Cut Pro and you
spend another 12 hours editing. You don't want
to do that. You want to be like my philosophy
in screencasting is like, I would love it to be
like we sit down and we pair program together
and it's just our discussions and our thoughts
as we go. So you can understand how I think
and how I solve these problems. So that is what
I end up doing and I'll use ScreenFlow and I
can record the screen and the webcam and mic
all in there, edit all in there, and it allows
me to record as I go. So I will sit down and
know roughly what I want to talk about. And
I'll usually build it say two or three or four
times ahead of time. So that if you're
programming and you run into a bug that you
don't know why it happened, you're going to go
off the rails for a good 15 or 20 minutes
and you don't want that in your video. So it's
helpful to go practice it say three or four
times. And then when you sit down, you can be
very like vocal about your thoughts as you go.
I'm like, okay, we're going to start here. We
need to add this library. We need to set it up
and configure it. And then we need to create
these database records or whatever. And you
can just step by step through that and explain
kind of the, my goal at least is to explain
the thought process. Like I'm not trying to
just give you, here's a bunch of code to copy
paste, really trying to teach you the thought
process. And so that's the real thing I'm
selling. That's the hardest thing to learn. And
I think really hard to learn for some people
in a written tutorial. So videos can be
really valuable for a certain style of
learner. Not everybody learns best in video,
but yeah, I pretty much just go and practice
it a few times record. If I make a mistake
or mumble something, I just delete the last
minute and rerecord that. If you include
those, it makes the viewer kind of question
your, your like ability and you are like
just distracting them from the core topic
you're trying to share. So I try and avoid
those, but I really love making some videos
that are specifically on that where it's like
here, I have this weird error. Let's actually
make a video specifically about how we figure
out what's the problem? How do we fix it? So if
you're deliberately talking about those things,
then I think that's better. Somebody would
start this today. Would you recommend that
they take your approach where your, I mean,
you built Go Rails from scratch. It's a custom
built custom design website. You have to go
to your own email list. It's all 100% in-house.
But there's all these other platforms. I mean,
we mentioned YouTube. There's Egghead.io where
they're basically hiring, working with course
creators to put courses out and they sort of
handle the distribution for you. There's
platforms like Teachable. So if you're like
trying to make a course, they've got a bunch of
different tools that allow you to build a course
super easy. So you just focus on just like the
content. You don't have to build the sort of
website around it. What would you recommend
somebody do if they're just starting? Yeah, I
would probably recommend using something like
like Podia is really great because you can
sell a membership. So if you wanted to sell a
weekly screencast like I'm doing, you could do
that built in. But they also have courses and
digital downloads and other things. So you could
easily extend and add other products that
weren't necessarily screencasts. Originally, I
built it myself because I wanted to teach how to
build it. And I thought that would be really fun
and kind of meta. But of course, I was very bad
at screencasting back then. And I built the site
and tried to record some, but it just didn't
work out. I was bad at the beginning. And so I
recorded it and I think I just threw it away
because it was like, this is not coherent enough
to really enjoy watching. But that was my goal
was like, it'd be really fun to see how these
things are built that you're using. It's really
cool to think about how do you go build indie
hackers and what approaches do you use and how do
you implement these certain features. And that
is the sort of stuff that you don't find in
tutorials generally. That's one of those unique
things that you can plug in. It's like, I'll show
you behind the scenes how things work. And you
don't find much of that. So I like deliberately
going that direction. I like that idea of, here's
how indie hackers was built. Here's how your other
favorite website was built. It's going back to
that idea of, okay, you're trying to create stuff.
You want people to pay attention. You need to
make it unique. One of the easiest ways to make it
unique is to combine things. And so if you're
going to do programming tutorials, maybe combine
those with popular websites that people want to
know how to build. I know at MakerPad, Ben Tossle
does this really well in the no code space. And
you won't just be like, oh, here's how you can
build a profile page with upload. He'll say,
here's how you build Airbnb, something very
specific that people are interested in. And it's
very vivid and people are like, oh, I want to
build Airbnb. And I think his tutorials just do
really well because he's combining both something
that you know about and this technology you want
to learn. Yeah. And it's not trivial. It's not like
just the profile page. It's like, no, you have to
think about the entire workflow, people searching
and checkout and all those things. And that is a
thing where like, oh, wow, I can't just read a
one page blog post that teaches me that entire
thing. That is many, many steps and lots of
decisions that you need to make. And you're
probably not trying to build a Airbnb competitor,
but you're trying to build this for a different
market. And that is perfect because then you can
go grab that and say, cool, let's try and apply
this to some other market that I think is really
good inspiration for people. And yeah, I enjoy
those. That's another interesting thing about
like the weekly screencasts don't have to be as
advanced or as thorough. I can cover like a
specific feature of Airbnb and I don't have to
spend say three months figuring all that out and
turning it into a course. It's a lot smaller
investment, which I kind of like about the
screencasts, but I've also gone and done some
courses. And there's an interesting balance there
where it's like some of these things are three
months of hard work and a launch and you make a
bunch of money and then you got to maintain it a
little bit, but you're basically done. And then
the screencasts are like, okay, every single week
I got to sit down one day and record the video
for next week. And it's a bit more of a treadmill,
but it also has a much steadier revenue compared
to a course launch. And for me that was like more
important because I was originally like, how do I
replace my salary? And I wanted steady. I didn't
want to make 40k in one month and then nothing for
the rest of the year or something. That was too
risky for me personally. Yeah, it's kind of a
preference where I also don't like the idea of
working super hard on something, kind of keeping
it hidden and then having this one pivotal moment.
This huge all or nothing launch. It has to work
and you're just sweating bullets the whole time
wondering what's going to go well. And whenever I
see people doing things this way, I'm just like,
I will literally never do anything that way. I've
never done anything with indie hackers that way,
besides maybe the first launch and took three
weeks to get the product ready before the first
launch. So it wasn't like, all my eggs in my basket
here was super simple. But everything I've ever
done after that, like the forum, I just sort of
like it was a gradual kind of like, hey, this is
here, but I'm not going to launch it. The product
directory, even the podcast just kind of like, I'm
going to put it out quietly, and then keep working
on it and iterating on it. And then what you can
do is you can launch things later. So the indie
hackers forum existed for like a year and a half
before I put it on product time. And by the time I
put it on product time, it was already really big.
I had iterated all the kinks out. And I felt
confident about the launch. And even if the launch
was a dud, I knew the forum was doing really well,
regardless. Yeah, that is what I just did for a
course that I actually haven't like officially
launched it yet either. I had a sort of fake launch
originally, maybe a month and a half, maybe two
months ago. And it was basically, it's now in early
access. And if you want to review the course, you
still pay for the course. But if you want to review
it, and give me feedback, and I will go and take
your feedback and improve the course, and then answer
questions that you have in the course, it was a way
for me to get students more involved who were
really excited about it. And I could do that. And
then when it's pretty polished, and reviewed and
everything by actual people, then I can do an
official launch later on. And that was kind of nice
and actually just charging for the pre-release
version of it. Yep. To some people, they were
like, why is this not free? And I was like, well,
it's not free because I'm actually going to be
doing extra work for you personally, while it's in
this beta period. And I think I saw that with Adam
Lavin's tweet somewhere that he mentioned, there's
actually a good argument to be made that a pre-release
version of tailwind UI or something might cost more
than the actual final version, because it's not as
polished. And he's going to have to do more work to
help you specifically. And I thought that was kind
of interesting. It's counterintuitive. People would
think, no, I'm not going to pay more for this early
crappy version, but they are getting something in
return, which is getting a first look. Yeah. They're
getting in the line well before anyone else. And
some personal connection with the creator because
they're actually getting involved. And once you
have with however many sales they've made on
tailwind UI, they can't go personally talk to every
person at this point. But when it's in early access
and they have a significantly smaller group, you're
going to have much more access to shape the direction
of it or whatever. And that can be really valuable
for some people. So it is absolutely worth paying
for in the early days, but not for everybody.
So in the process of running Go Rails, you sort
of discovered that there's more ideas here than
just screencasts. You've talked about putting out
courses, you've talked about putting out templates,
you've talked about the fact that you've built this
kind of SaaS application to help people deploy
the Rails apps, but we haven't really gone into
detail into any of those. Which of those do you
think is the biggest business opportunity for you?
Probably Hatchbox, which is the deployment tool.
That one, in a sense, it's kind of competing with
a Heroku or AWS in a way, competing with a Beanstalk
or something, but not servers itself. We just
launched that in January of 2017, somewhere around
there, as a like, this would be nice if we have
something to save me time. We'll just automate
this script. And that's been one of those ones
where people have been continually asking me to
add features and do all kinds of things. And I've
been extremely surprised because I was worried
about, it's a complicated product, super complicated.
And I was worried about, I'm going to build it,
and I don't know if I'm going to build it right.
And I don't want to break stuff. So I don't want
to market it at all until I'm pretty confident.
And I still feel that way. But there are people
just continuing to sign up, even though I'm kind of,
in a way, trying to discourage them. Because I
give you a five-day free trial, but you have to
put your card in from the beginning. Things I
wouldn't normally do. But even though I'm discouraging
people from signing up a bit, they're still doing
it. And so I'm quite amazed with that. The trouble
has been, now I'm responsible for helping people
fix their code that's broken to deploy it. And so
now I have to go learn pretty quickly how someone
else's app works, which is, in general, Rails is
kind of standardized, but people customize all kinds
of things. And so it's really forced me into doing
a lot of support, but it also has the most potential.
And it's also the lowest amount of churn as well.
So if I deploy your app, chances are you're going
to continue paying as long as you want that app
running. So it's a good, you know, comparison to
the, or a compliment to the screencast business,
which has high churn and sometimes struggles
growing because churn is as high as growth is in
screencast sometimes. And that's just how that is.
So it's been really interesting to see that and
have those together. And, you know, both of those
are subscriptions. And I was at some point, I was
like, just kind of curious about like, how is
selling as a one-off purchase, you know, and
everything I was doing was, was not that. So I
eventually stumbled into like, I'm building all
these apps. Go Rails needs payments and teams and
all these features. And so does Hatchbox and other
like, every other project that I've done for
consulting kind of needs the same things. Why don't
I just go write a Rails app that has all these
features and ready to go from the very beginning.
And you can configure it and turn certain things
on and off and whatever, but I'll sell it for a
one-time purchase. And boy, that blew up too. And I
was like, I'm amazed with that. And what's
interesting about that one is it's partially the
most fun to build, but also it is like the easiest
out of all of them, because it's like I can dive
in, you know, once every quarter and fix a bunch
of things and kind of batch my work on it, but it
just keeps selling and I don't have to do a whole
lot to it. And it's like, both of those products
have kind of blown my mind because I've realized
they work now because people know me from the
screencasts. Right. And maybe eventually the
idea would be to give all the screencasts away
for free because the people probably who can't
afford them could use them the most would make
the biggest difference in their lives. So
eventually if I can get the other products to a
point where they can replace that revenue, then I
would love to make Go Rails free. And that would
be especially unique because no one really talks
about those intermediate and advanced things. And
right now they're behind a paywall, but if you
made those free, that's going to be really unique
to find for free. So long term, that would be
pretty cool to do. But it has been interesting to
now have a business that's a subscription with
high churn and then one with low churn, but a lot
of support and then a one off sale that I can
kind of like work when I went to on it, but it
just keeps selling. And the only downside with
that one is that there's no recurring payments
from people. So maybe I saturate the market at
some point, but I don't know, maybe not. So it's
just been fun to have all that combination and
see how they all work differently.
You're really experimenting with the tradeoffs
of the different business models that you've
picked. And what's cool about this, I wish people
would think about this in advance, is a lot of
this is kind of predictable. You can go on any
hackers and listen to someone talk about their
business. And you can see, for example, I
interviewed the guys buying Honey Badger and
they also have a SaaS application that's kind of
like this utility that runs in the background,
like you install it, you kind of set it and forget
it. And it's very mission critical. It's very
important. If Honey Badger goes down, it's pretty
stressful. But the upside is because it's a
utility, it's super low churn. So when they add
customers, they typically keep those customers
for life, which is a really great way to start
growing your revenue to something substantial.
You can kind of just look at that and say, okay,
these are the tradeoffs. Do I want to have a
mission critical business where I have to do a
lot of customer support, but my revenue can grow
almost indefinitely because I have low churn? No.
Do I want to deal with the sort of weekly cadence
of having to release a new screencast or a new
podcast episode or a new newsletter, like a lot of
these businesses, but no, it's not mission
critical. And if I miss, nobody dies, there's no
customer support. There's all these tradeoffs.
And I think the other thing about it is you're
kind of illustrating what I think is one of the
most important tools in any indie hackers playbook,
which is the ability to sort of pawn jump, to take
your successes in one area and parlay that into
kind of the next thing. Because you didn't raise
any money. You bootstrapped all of this from your
own savings, from your own time. And that means
that you probably can't start big. You couldn't
have just started with Hatchbox from day one and
just acquired a bunch of customers through
advertising. You had to start with something
really small. You had to start with a blog,
but you didn't stop there. You understood how to
take your blog and parlay that traffic into
getting subscription revenue. And you took the
trust that you got from your screencast and
parlay that into building the SaaS application.
And now you're looking forward to the future.
And maybe that means that your screencasts are
just 100% free. And you're making a lot of money
from Hatchbox. And somebody who comes along and
they're like, oh, I want to do what Chris does.
He's got this really cool SaaS hatchbox. Maybe
like five, 10 years from now, they won't know
that you started off so small. But that's really
the kind of crucial skill. How do you take
something small and successively get something
bigger and bigger and bigger?
Yeah, I think this probably resonates with a
lot of people who are indie hackers. But at the
beginning, you're like just struggling to find
anything that works that you can actually make
money with. And you're not really choosing what
kind of business you are building. You're just
trying to find something period. And so for me,
it was like, yeah, I'm going to get on the content.
And actually, this is something I thought about
when I started, which is why I did courses
originally. I didn't want to get on the hamster
wheel because I didn't know if I was going to
stick around and continue doing it. And so I did
the course, which was a low effort kind of gamble,
low risk. I'll put out the course. If it works,
it does. If it doesn't, whatever. But because I
hadn't committed to anything, it didn't work out.
So by pivoting to I'm committing to doing
video every week publicly, now people are like,
okay, this guy committed to that. I'm happy to
throw a few bucks his way. And that ended up
being a hamster wheel that really, really burned
me out for a long time. And I didn't really
choose it because I was just happy to have
something that made money. And now I have more
choice. And I've also looked at that business
and tried to figure out how do I optimize it
from what it is to something that is
sustainable for me. Because that was one of the
things I remember hearing about. Ryan Bates
from Rails Cast, he had mentioned somewhere
that it takes him like 40 hours per screencast
to make, which is a full time job to make one
video a week. And I didn't want to do that
because I want to be building other things.
And I realized that if I am building other
things, that means as long as it's fresh on
my mind, I can record a video on a topic
in four hours and edit it and publish it and
stuff and really compress that work down
from a week. I can compress it down to a
single day. Then I have four days a week
that I can do whatever I want. And there was
a time where it was pretty burnt out, but I
had optimized it down. And I realized I was
actually doing the four hour work week, but
literally the four hour work week where I made
a full salary working about four hours a week
where I'd record a video for a couple of
hours, edit, publish it and email everyone.
And that was it. And I was like, this is amazing.
But then I started getting antsy after a while
where I had relaxed and recouped and got out
of burnout. And then I was itching to work
on something else. And you just have to like,
once you get something working, figure out,
is this sustainable? And if it's not, how do
I make it sustainable? And I didn't have to
hire an editor or anything. I was able to do
it myself, which kept it more profitable,
which is good, especially in the early days.
And that I think is really important.
Like you get something working, but you got
to figure out how to make it sustainable.
Otherwise, it's just not going to work out
for you long term. You're going to burn out.
And that's not good.
Well, I think your story is pretty inspirational
because you've been a team of one. You've
been incredibly productive. And somehow,
despite being a team of one, you were able to
work this storied four hour work week.
People listening in probably are very
inspired by what you've been able to do.
What would be your number one tip takeaway
from your story that you think people should walk away with?
Oh, boy. I really think you got to throw
quite a bit of ideas at the wall at the beginning,
but you got to be public about it. Go build
your audience and talk about what you're building.
There's a lot of people who are on Twitter
documenting their like, here's my business,
and now we're making $5 a month, and now we're at $500
and whatever. And those kinds of things,
sharing those metrics that no one else is talking about,
is that novelty that helps build your audience.
And once you have the audience, it's a lot easier
to sell stuff to people and make a living.
So to me, that was really valuable to go build the audience.
Daniel Vassallo on Twitter is one of the best at doing that.
His Twitter course was pretty obvious
when you look at how he tweets, but he's just sharing
his progress all the time, and people love that.
I wish I had done more of that at the beginning.
I think that would have accelerated things significantly.
And it doesn't matter what you're building.
You don't have to sell content or screencasts
or courses or anything.
If you're talking about building your SaaS product
that could be for nurses or whatever,
it's going to be interesting to nurses,
and they're going to find you.
Because if you're not talking about it,
you're going to have a pretty painful launch in the beginning.
So that was the thing that I really undervalued.
Collect your email list.
Talk to these people as much as you can.
Just learn about who they are and what they're doing.
You don't need to ask them about,
will they buy your product?
How much would they pay for it?
Get to know these people, because you want to understand
all those nuances in their life.
And you might discover, wow, we should just pivot
to doing this thing, because no one could have told me
that that was a problem.
But I've seen it 35 times talking to these different people.
And I think that's where a lot of these unique things come from,
because Jumpstart and Hatchbox and all these other products
just came from talking to thousands of Rails developers
over the years.
And now it's very easy for me to see new ideas all the time,
because I'm like, well, I've talked to several thousand people,
and I know them pretty well these days,
and I know what they struggle with.
And it's more obvious to me now to see what I struggle with.
And especially if I struggle with something,
I know I can make that into a product or whatever.
So yeah, I think just become friends with these people.
You don't have to interview them or do anything fancy.
You just want to get to know them.
Yeah, I love it.
The Chris Oliver playbook, throw spaghetti at the wall,
build in public, don't be afraid to show off what you're doing.
If it's not going well, get these people onto a mailing list
and then talk to them in a casual way,
and you'll get all sorts of ideas.
Yeah, I think it's just, it seems a little obvious.
There's no strategic framework to it or whatever,
but I think it just works.
You get to know people.
And at the end of the day, that's what people want to buy from.
They want to buy from companies that are just humans behind it.
I think that was one of the things that I loved the most
about GitHub in the early days.
It was like, I knew every single employee of GitHub by name,
just because they're public.
And I didn't know them.
I've never met them, but I knew exactly who they were
and they were just talking about what they were doing.
And I was so inspired by that, watching them build it.
And I was like, yeah, I think the human connection
gets lost so much in building businesses.
And I guess I get that for free, doing screencasts.
Everybody sees my face in the videos and hears my voice.
And actually going to the Ruby on Rails conference,
for the first time, I went a couple of years ago.
And every time I sat down at a lunch table with strangers,
they were like, I heard your voice in the office last week.
And I'm like, this is the weirdest thing.
That's so cool.
So yeah, it was pretty fun.
But it really pointed out to me and emphasized
that human portion of this makes such a big difference.
So yeah, I would just say that is really undervalued
and it seems too simple to work, but it does.
But it does.
Yeah.
I talked to a lot of developers who listen to the podcast
and they're like, you know, Courtland, talk more about SaaS apps.
I just want to write some code and put it out there.
I don't want to hear about people building audiences
or writing mailing lists or doing the grind.
And it's like, you know, it's just really hard
to have one of these faceless, nameless,
and human businesses that work.
It's really, really hard to do that.
Like you said, people want to buy from people.
People want to know a story.
And I think if your dream really is to build
one of these SaaS applications,
you still have to do that storytelling.
You still have to be an actual face and a personality
if you want to get there in any reasonable time frame.
Yeah.
Anyway, Chris, thanks a ton for your insights
and sharing your story.
Can you let listeners know where they can go to find you online?
Yeah.
You can find me on Twitter at EXC ID 3.
Exit 3 is my username basically everywhere.
So you can find me there or just go to gorails.com.
That's where pretty much everything centers around for me.
So yeah, thanks for having me on.
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Thank you so much for listening.
And as always, I will see you next time.