What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making
a ton of money in the process. And on this show, I interviewed these IndieHackers to
learn about the ideas, the strategies and the opportunities they're taking advantage
of so the rest of us can do the same.
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Today, I'm talking to Tyler King, the creator of Less Annoying CRM. How's it going, Tyler?
Good. How are you?
Excellent. It's good to have you back on the show. You were here last October, and episode
number 128, I recommend people go check that one out. You talked about how you spent 10
years building your SASH product, Less Annoying CRM, which as people can probably guess from
the name, is a less annoying CRM tool. And you got to the point where you had 22,000
paying customers, you hit $2.6 million in annual recurring revenue. What are you up
to nowadays?
We are just almost at 3 million ARR. So we're trying to hit that, not for this pandemic.
We'd be there by now, but we had a couple rough months, but things kind of bounced back
around the summer.
Yeah, that's a pretty cool progress milestone to report regardless. And I think what I like
about your company in particular is that you're sort of building it to last. You're not trying
to flip it, you're not trying to sell it, you're not trying to figure out the new thing
to work on. You're thinking about how you can still be here doing kind of the same thing
in the next 20 or 30 years. You have a whole podcast devoted to that called Start Up to
Last that we're kind of going to talk about later on.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, we're getting like 10% to 15% growth year over year, which
if you're trying to exit in two years is pretty pathetic. And if you're like, we're going
to be here 30 years from now, you're like, okay, that compounding can really add up over
that time span.
So if people want to hear a story, I recommend they go check out that episode. Today, we're
going to talk about something completely different, which is this topic that you brought up to
me a few times in recent weeks, which is bundling. And I think kind of the trigger for this was
the Slack acquisition by Salesforce. So first of all, let's start there. What do you think
about Slack getting bought by Salesforce?
Yeah, it's huge in SaaS because Slack was arguably the biggest success of the most recent
generation and them getting acquired is sort of viewed as a failure. I mean, it's obviously
a financial success. It was $27 billion, but everyone's saying the reason they had to sell
is because they couldn't cut it as a standalone company.
Yeah, I've seen a lot of negative press that's basically Slack had to sell because of the
pressure from Microsoft Teams. You know, Microsoft has got this Teams product. It's competitive.
A lot of people are using it. I talked to my mom. She doesn't know what Slack is, but
she's on Microsoft Teams at her company using that every day, and she doesn't like it, but
she's using it. And that's kind of what matters in terms of revenue. And, you know, I think
from my perspective, people underestimate the degree to which Slack could have grown.
I think Microsoft Teams was a very competitive product, but Microsoft was kind of selling
this into like old, mature companies. And Slack was selling to startups. And it's really
easy to underestimate how quickly startups can grow over time. But like, if you're selling
to Lyft in 2014, then come 2020, like that's a huge customer that you suddenly have that,
you know, a few years ago was like a very tiny customer. And it seems like whenever
I talked to tiny startups, like they're not using Microsoft Teams. They're using Slack,
which I think could explain why Salesforce is willing to pay so much money for it. But
it is a little bit disheartening to see Slack sort of throw in the towel and join Salesforce
rather than stay independent and kind of be, you know, their own standalone tool.
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, especially given that I think most people who have used both
Slack and Microsoft Teams prefer Slack. So the idea that the better product and what
by all rights is a huge company still kind of failed in a sense is concerning, I think.
Yeah, that's it. I have some friends at Slack and they are very happy with their recent
boost in their stock price. But let's talk about bundling. What does this have to do
with this idea of SaaS bundling that you brought up to me?
Yeah, I'll be curious to see what Salesforce does with Slack. Maybe bundling is related
to it on that end. But the reason it's really relevant to me is why did Slack quote unquote
lose to Teams? It's because nobody bought Teams. Nobody bought Microsoft Teams. They
bought Microsoft or Office 365, whatever it's called. And Teams came with it. And by virtue
of it being in this bundle, even though it's an inferior product, it kind of beats Slack
in terms of usage and adoption, which in a sense, it's just like classic, you know, Microsoft's
a monopoly and used its power. But I think it's a little more interesting because it's
not it's happening across the industry.
Right. And so the whole idea of bundling is you get this advantage by even if some of
your software is crappy, you can bundle in that crappy software with better software
that people were already buying. And now you've sold two pieces of software, and people will
probably just use both of them. And so it's kind of a way to win without having to make
the best possible software.
Yeah, like Slack killed HipChat. If HipChat had been built into Google Workspace, or G
Suite is what it used to be called, HipChat probably would be doing really well right
now. It's not it's like less about the product differentiation and more about distribution
at that point.
Okay, so what are some other examples of bundles? There's Office 365. Microsoft has been very
good at bundling. I mean, they got that little antitrust case in the late 90s, basically,
because they're bundling Internet Explorer with their operating system, which made it
impossible for other competing browsers to sort of compete. Who else is bundling that
people listening might recognize?
Yeah, so one of the originals was when Adobe put out Creative Cloud. They had all these
standalone products, Photoshop, Illustrator, whatever, that you could buy individually.
And then they said, no, pay us $50 a month or whatever it is. And you get all of them.
You don't have to choose which product you want. I think that's a really classic one.
And then Google Workspace is basically Google's version of Office 365.
Yeah, it's kind of copy pasted Microsoft's Office strategy and put it on the web.
Yeah.
I have Google Workspace and I have Adobe Creative Cloud. I don't have Office. I haven't opened
a Word document in probably 10 years. When people send them to me, I just send them back.
I use it just for Excel. But everyone at my company has at least both Google and Microsoft
and a lot of us have Adobe as well.
Right. And the thing about all these examples is that they're all kind of like older examples.
These are very established companies. If you're an indie hacker, you're probably not going
to build a Google Docs competitor. You're probably not going to build a Photoshop competitor.
You need a huge team, a lot of money. Let's talk about why bundling matters for indie
hackers. Are there any examples of small or more recent companies that are able to successfully
use this bundling strategy to actually get ahead?
Yeah. So if we're talking about the ones who have already done it at this point, they're
bigger, but they're more like startups than Microsoft or Google Dropbox, I think is doing
a similar parallel where they started with just files, but then they acquired, I forgot
what it was called, but it turned into Dropbox paper. They just released a password management
tool. They acquired hello sign to do document like e-signatures. And so now if you subscribe
to Dropbox, you think of it as a file storage company, but you also get all these other
things so you don't have to subscribe to a different note taking or a different e-signature
app.
I was also listening to Rahul, the founder of Superhuman. And he was talking about why
he decided to build basically a competitor to Gmail. And he was talking about all these
different add-ons and extensions that people have installed into their browser to kind
of make Gmail more powerful. So he had built one of these 10 years ago called reportive,
where you open an email and it would show you like, here's the person's email is from.
And then there was a clone called sidekick that did kind of the same thing, kind of help
you figure out things. They're Streak. I interviewed the founder of Streak. It's kind of a CRM
that lives inside your Gmail inbox. There's a million other tools inside your Gmail inbox.
And ultimately, they just like slow down Gmail and make it like this really very convoluted,
difficult to understand and just like buggy, slow product. And his kind of idea was Superhuman
is like, what if we just rebuilt this experience with the ground up, Google is very slow at
you know, improving Gmail, we'll just bundle all of the stuff into our native email product.
So you go to Superhuman, it's got kind of like a ton of these features that like previously
you needed to combine like 10 or 15 different features into one. And you know, Superhuman
is obviously doing pretty well. They've got like a wait list of 200,000 people. People
are paying like 30 bucks a month. You can do the math on how much money they stand to
make if they can convert the people off their wait list into actual paying customers.
I'm a user. Are you? Yeah, you're super human to you. What do you think about it? Is it
as good as advertised for you? No, I think it's better than anything else. And that's
worth $30 a month to me, but it's not like changing the way I use emails just like a
little bit faster, which I like. They're very good at marketing in particular. I mean, the
way they describe it is it's the fastest email experience ever built. I think you're right.
I think maybe that's true, but it's also like not that fast. I still feel like I'm checking
my email. There's a lot of analogies to like Superhuman being like a game, like they're
doing a lot of research on video games to figure out like how, how people play video
games and like what makes you, what gives you all the little dopamine hits when you're
playing and what makes it fun. And like email is yet to hit the point where like it's fun
for me to pretty much run from it. Yeah, it's still email. Exactly. And I don't know how
to get over this problem where like at the end of the day, you still have to read each
individual email and like respond to it and act on it. You know, they're having really
nice keyboard shortcuts. It's fine, but like, what's going to, like, what's the magic that's
going to get you out of having to do that actual process of making sure this is not
an important email and, you know, archiving it or responding to it. Like I don't, I don't
see an innovation that's going to really help with that. Yeah. I tried out Hey, where they
try to just make it so you don't see the email in the first place. And I was like, I'm missing
a whole lot of email here. Okay. I still need to read every email. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I
built a product that was kind of in the space when I was in college, I was called Siffer
and kind of the original idea was my co-founders are both PhD students at MIT and they were
doing the software that was AI based that was trying to predict like, you know, which
emails you want to read and which emails you don't. And like the problem is you just can't
trust it and people send the same thing. Like they had something to you with like, Oh, this
is important. This is not. And you just end up reading both boxes. And if you let one
go without looking at it for too long, you just look and you see a bunch of important
emails in there that you missed. So ultimately, uh, never really been blown away by any of
these products. But the point is it works, right? Superhuman has marketed itself as being
like the better product. They bundled all these different features into one and now
people want to use it rather than using Gmail and like using, you know, 15 different add-ons
try to get the functionality that they want earlier. You said like, why should indie hackers
care about bundling? And we kind of talked about one, it's an opportunity that anyone
starting a company might consider. Should they bundle? But I see two other reasons to
care about it. One is if you know that bigger companies, like we mentioned Dropbox front
is doing this right now. There are a bunch of different companies that are launching
multiple products. A part of me thinks, should you stay away from this? If you're an indie
hacker, if you see a type of product that's starting to be an add-on to a core product
rather than its own standalone thing, does that indicate a problem? The other side of
me though, thinks it's an opportunity. If everyone's building appointment scheduling
into their product, almost all of these are acquisitions. Dropbox did not build four different
products. They built one and they acquired three others. Front is adding appointment
scheduling. They acquired that company. Is this potentially an exit path? I mean, I personally
am not interested in exiting, but if you are, being a part of a bigger bundle might be one
way to do that.
I like this point that like maybe this is what you avoid. You see these companies being
bundled. Don't build that because you're now competing with this behemoth. But also like,
you know, if you're trying to figure out how to exit and you're looking at who's exiting
today, you're probably already too late. By the time you build that SaaS, you get it in
customers' hands, you grow to the point where it's meaningful. We're like three, four, five
years in the future and like maybe bigger companies aren't buying things like paper
or Slack anymore. We're on to the next evolution and you're building for yesterday's world.
That's another reason not to do whatever you see being bundled. But I can think of a counter
argument which is that often when companies get bought by bigger companies, like Slack
is bought by Salesforce, bigger companies are just poor stewards of that software. That
software degrades and three or four years from now, maybe no one's on Slack anymore
because it's been sales-forcified. That's sometimes a really good gap where you can
basically come in and build something to replace it.
I bet you people are already hard at work on Slack clones and they're like playing up
the news. Slack's going to go to hell. It's not going to be the same Slack. It's going
to get all super slow and bloated like Salesforce, like use our new thing. I bet you some people
are probably jumping ship because of that.
Absolutely. We said earlier Slack lost to teams. Slack only lost because they're on
the venture capital roller coaster. If they were an indie hacker company, a bootstrapped
company, I'm sure they'd be perfectly happy with their hundreds of millions in revenue
or whatever they're making. It's very possible that it creates enough oxygen for a smaller
company to come around, but there probably won't be another Slack, is my guess. The products
commoditized at this point.
Here's a crazy idea. Do you think indie hackers who are working on kind of individual products
or businesses could benefit by joining forces into their own kind of bundles? Let's say
you're someone and you've got a note-taking app and you're somebody else, you've got like
a task management app or something. Do you think the two of you and maybe like a few
other indie hackers could come together and say, we're going to have like a bundle for
all of our software, get all of us together for like some cheaper price. That way, maybe
it's easier for you to sell what you're doing together with other people than it is by yourself.
I think the mechanics of this, it's a good deal if you turn out to be kind of a below
average player. If you bundle yourself with four or five other companies and it turns
out on your own, you would have done worse than them. You probably want to be bundled
together because you get kind of like the rising tide lifts all boats if you're in that
particular tide. It's a bad deal if you're the winner. If you're going to do better than
everybody else, you probably don't want to be bundled with them and bring down your prices
as a result because you could have done well on your own.
I think for startups, maybe that math is a little bit skewed because most companies are
probably below average. It's not like five out of 10 are below average. It's like eight
or nine out of 10 are below average because most companies just fail. If that's the case,
is there an argument to be made that almost everybody should be bundling together with
other companies because there's so much uncertainty in the beginning and then if it turns out
that you are one of the winners and your company is growing much faster than everybody else's,
you unbundle and you go off on your own.
Yeah, and it's a form of diversification. I hadn't thought of that before, but that
makes total sense. If you win, if you're the top tier in the bundle, you're probably fine
with half as good of an outcome as you would have gotten. You're still rich and happy,
so probably it's worth the risk. That's a really interesting approach to take, I think.
So there's a company in my YC batch way back in the day called Humble Bundle. I did YC
in January 2011. I think they started maybe like six or seven months before that and what
they did was indie game bundles. So they kind of rode this trend, this wave of indie developers
just making their own video games. What they would do is bundle together like five or six
indie video games at the same time and then if you wanted to play one of these games,
you could buy the whole bundle for just like one price and they also did like pay what
you want. So you could pay zero dollars or something, you could pay like ten dollars
and then you could allocate, you know, I want this percentage of my payment to go to the
indie game devs, this percentage to go to charity, you know, and this percentage to
go to Humble Bundle and they absolutely crushed it. I think they were making like millions
of dollars from these sales and eventually they got by IGN, which is this huge media
company in the game space in 2017. And I think they're kind of a cool example of like what
you can do as an indie hacker with bundling. They weren't actually, you know, one of the
companies being bundled. They were kind of like this third party that bundled other companies
together, which I think is cool because it gave them sort of a neutral kind of stewardship
position. And they also like didn't have to make any video games. It just kind of curated
like the best of the best, which anybody could just like do today. It's pretty easy to get
started. And then there's a huge marketing advantage from the bundle because instead
of just promoting one company or two companies, they promote five or six video games at the
same time. All of those creators would kind of jump in on the promotion and you get the
scenario where when everybody's talking about something like suddenly that's news and then
other outlets pick it up and it becomes much bigger than it would have been if everybody
was sort of promoting their games on their own. So it kind of made sense for everybody
involved to be involved with this bundle.
You touched on something that I think is an important part of why bundling works. Like
part of it is the monopoly power thing if you're a big company, but it even works in
smaller examples like that for a lot of reasons, but it has a powerful impact on how people
view products. And one of which is I think humans don't like too much choice. And SAS
is just there are an overwhelming number of things to choose right now. I have customers
tell me all the time. They're like, okay, I chose you for CRM. I'm good. Can you please
pick my email marketer, my calendar? Can you pick all of this for me? Because I don't have
to go through this process 20 different times to pick all of my SAS products.
It's funny too when people are building their products and they're so worried about the
competition and losing their customers to like up and coming competitors. And it's like,
you know how small a percentage of your customers are like actively looking to switch to some
competitive product? Like usually once people are like in your app, assuming it doesn't
suck and it's like, it's good, they're happy. And they're not spending all their time thinking
about all these different choices they can make. They're not doing like a giant matrix
of every single option of CRM they could use and like figuring out like what they're going
to do. Like some people do that, but like the vast majority would prefer to just like
start using something and then just keep using it. And this is why like, yeah, we have notion
today and we had Google Docs before that, but like people are still sending around like
office documents, they're used to it and they're not going to switch.
Absolutely. And especially if you're on the cutting edge of something, probably I think
you're differentiated in any number of ways. But if we're talking about CRM or appointment
scheduling or note taking, kind of all these products are roughly the same. And I feel
about saying that because I build a CRM, but like the reality is we don't have any features
that every other CRM doesn't have, you know?
Yeah. So let's talk about your product, less annoying CRM, because you've mentioned to
me that you're thinking about doing some bundling with your own indie hacker sash product. How's
that going to work? What are you thinking about bundling?
Yeah, my thinking on this has shifted a little recently because I've always wanted to bundle.
The reason being I don't want to move upmarket. I don't want to sell to enterprises. So how
do you provide more value to small businesses when they want a simple product? It's not
by continuing to add features to the product you have, right? That would be counterproductive.
So I've always kind of known it's by solving more problems for those same people. In the
past I thought of it more like it's just one big like CRM does everything. And with this
bundling world, I'm starting to think maybe it makes more sense to basically position
them as a bunch of separate products, even if it's all still in one app, but say, you
know how you have 20 tabs open just to run your business? What if I could get it down
to 10 for you? That's kind of what I'm thinking of makes sense for the position.
I like the idea of sort of bundling within one company because like you're not thinking
about, I mean, maybe you are, you think about like buying other companies and having them
sort of fill out this feature set or is it like developing it all in house? You're going
to add new features and then create new bundle, like one big bundle where you, you know, are
not just a CRM, but your other things too.
Yeah, I think buying probably makes a lot of sense. That's not in my DNA. I'd get everything
wrong. I don't want to have a different code base to deal with and all that. But I also
think if you buy what you end up with is a bunch of different products that probably
barely talk to each other. If you build what I want, you've mentioned Notion. Notion is
the dream because it's one thing that replaces Trello, Airtable, in my case, Dropbox paper.
It replaces a bunch of things, but it's one tool. Asana. Asana, yes. If Notion had acquired
a spreadsheet tool and acquired a note tool and so on, it would be fundamentally different
from what it is.
I know this is kind of against what I just said. I just said, like, position it as a
bunch of different products. But I almost think that the user experience should be the
opposite of that. It should be like, here's one thing that does everything.
It's interesting to dichotomy because when I think about Notion, like I'm a huge Notion
advocate. I'm constantly trying to get people onto Notion, like our little notes for this
podcast are in Notion. I want to try to convince people to use Notion. They're like, what is
it? Like, it's too many things. Like the website's confused. They don't know why to use it. I'm
like, no, no, no. It's this cool document thing that's also a spreadsheet that's also
a task. And they're just like, this doesn't make any sense.
And so I think the way that they bundled by not having these distinct things actually
makes their value prop very confusing. But the experience, I think, as you're hinting
at is actually really good. And once you sort of rock it and you get into it, and you see
that it's not like all these different products stitched together haphazardly, but it's done
in a very natural way where it makes a lot of sense, then it's really good.
So probably retention is good, but user acquisition and conversion is tough, because people have
no idea what it is that you're building.
I did this multiple times. I signed up for Notion because everyone talks about it, and
I tried to figure it out, and I was just like, I can't wrap my head around this. And then
just a couple months ago, I finally got into it, and now I'm converted. I love it.
What do you think clicked for you?
It's cheap enough that even if I only use it for one simple thing, it's still worth
it. So I just moved the company Wiki into it. And then as soon as I had that in there,
I was like, oh, well, maybe I'll tack on my meeting notes, and maybe I'll tack on this
other thing. And it eventually completely took over Trello, Dropbox paper, and a handful
of other things for us.
Maybe it's kind of a wider trend of what bundling is good for, because I think there's this
drive when you're doing productivity work, like you're drafting posts or something, you're
taking notes, you're checking your tasks and your calendar. You're kind of in the same
headspace when you're doing any of that stuff, and you just really want it to be in one place.
So before I was using Notion, I was using Asana to track my tasks, but then some of
them were in my GitHub issues. And then I have my Google Calendar and my inbox and Superhuman.
And I'm using Google Docs to take notes. And it's like a million different things. And
they all need to kind of reference each other. I might take notes. I'm like, here's my strategy
for March. But then I have tasks associated with that. And those are in Asana. So it's
like I'm awkwardly linking from one to the other. So any productivity tool that can seamlessly
bundle all of these different things together is going to have a huge advantage, because
then you don't have to go from place to place. Whereas maybe I don't need Twitter to be bundled
with Facebook or something. I'm cool with my social networking tools, living in different
places, and there's no real advantage to bundling those in that way. Although that's not true.
I would like to get all my messages in one place instead of having to check 10 different
places.
100%, because Notion, the note-taking experience in Notion, in my opinion, is just awful. The
actual text editor is so much worse than Dropbox Paper. The Kanban board is certainly worse
than Trello, but maybe comparable. The table's worse than Airtable. Honestly, just the fact
that you can click on any of them from the sidebar to get from a table to a Kanban board
to a note. Yeah, that's huge. I almost wonder if there's an opportunity to bundle products
you don't make. Could you make a Chrome plugin that basically builds a Notion sidebar but
for other products to combine them together?
Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, it might be a little kludgy. Because I think one of
the things I like about Notion is that not only can you click all these things in the
sidebar, but you can put one in the other. You can take notes, and then inside your notes,
you can put a table that's basically an Airtable. And then below that, you can put a Kanban
board if you want to, and it's just seamless. And then put your task list below that. I've
worked with some VAs where I'm like, okay, I need my VA to do these particular tasks,
and I need to also explain the tasks. And previously, it's like, oh, how do I do that
in one place? But now I can write an explanation of the tasks in one doc, then put the task
list where she can then check them off, and I'll get little notifications that they're
checked off, and then send that whole page to her, and it's all one thing. So if you
can figure out a way to somehow combine these other tools that seamlessly, that's a huge
engineering challenge. But does it work with anything besides productivity tools? I guess
games. Games seem to be bundled. You've got the Xbox store or whatever. You've got the
PlayStation store. You've got Steam, Humble Bundle. And the people who play games want
to go to one place, ideally, to access all of their games and talk to their friends who
are playing these games. There's productivity tools. I can't even think of anything else
that comes to mind off the top of my head where bundling seems like people really want
to be in one place to do all these different things.
Yeah, every once in a while, you see one of these products that is effectively like a
fork of Chromium, and it's just a browser that is better at keeping you logged into
your... It's almost like every website is a little app experience, and it's kind of
like its own operating system, basically. That's maybe a version of a third-party bundling,
a bunch of products they don't control. But yeah, I don't think there's a huge amount
of opportunity there in different spaces, I don't think.
Well, let's talk about unbundling then. So unbundling is this recently popular discussion
topic. It's kind of popularized by Greg Eisenberg, who got it from... I forget who wrote about
this. It's like a CEO of some big company. But they talk about this constant cycle of
bundling and unbundling. So Notion is kind of a bundler. They're figuring out how to
kill all these other products and put them all into one product. But people are probably
going to unbundle Notion. Once they see very specific use cases for Notion, they'll start
building very niche apps that are much better with that.
And there are other bigger properties and websites that people have been unbundling for
ages. So the most obvious one is Craigslist. Craigslist is this god-awful, hideous collection
of a bunch of different... Buy tools and rent your apartment out and meet someone to date
all on this one website. People have just completely verticalized Craigslist and created
startups for pretty much everything that it does. And unbundling something doesn't mean
that thing dies. Like, Craigslist is still going strong. But it does give you an opportunity
and ideas. I think you're a founder. What could I build? I see in this one corner of
Hacker News, people are talking about this particular topic. Maybe I could build a website
for that. That's Andy Hackers in a nutshell. It's just an unbundling of one part of Hacker
News. People have been talking a lot about unbundling Reddit recently. Reddit is kind
of this sloppy collection. Millions probably of different subreddits and different communities.
A lot of them are thriving. But is it really true that the best format for every single
one of these communities is this very stereotypical subreddit structure? Probably not. And if
you figure out what makes that community tick, you can go in and unbundle it and make your
own website for one of those verticals. Greg's been doing that a lot. What do you think about
unbundling? Is that a good idea? Do you see any platforms that are ripe for unbundling
if you're an indie hacker trying to figure out what kind of business you can build?
I think it's a great idea, especially for an indie hacker. What I referenced earlier,
an outcome for us that's acceptable can be much, much smaller than for someone else.
The opportunity for Slack maybe wasn't big enough, but for an indie hacker, it probably
is. I think the classic unbundling opportunity in B2B, almost everything you named was B2C.
In B2B, it's Excel. It's what our company is doing in Excel and how can we pull that
out and make it a standalone product that, yeah, it's not as powerful as Excel. I can't
do all of those things, but it can do this one specific workflow really well. Now, that's
not a new idea that's been out there for a long time, but I think that's kind of the
classic.
Yeah, I like that one. I think that one's kind of hard too because you can't just look
at Excel, the tool itself, and tell how it can be unbundled. You can go to Reddit, you
can see, okay, this subreddit should be unbundled, that subreddit's fine, this subreddit should
be unbundled, etc. But if you go to Excel, nothing in the tool itself tells you how people
are using it. But if you go the customer development route, you can kind of go into these companies,
you can figure out how they're using Excel, and you can ideally see some patterns and
figure out what you need to unbundle. And I think, you mentioned this is kind of the
classic one, a lot of this has already been done. A CRM tool, for example, is a special
purpose tool that people were probably using Excel to do. You track all your customers
in Excel, you've got all these spreadsheets set up, and then somebody deletes one sheet
or changes one formula and the whole thing's ruined. It wouldn't be much better if you
had a CRM tool that was built from the ground up to kind of let you do this and it was less
touchy and less hacky than an Excel spreadsheet.
Yeah, absolutely. Another version of this that I find interesting, I'm not sure if you'd
consider this unbundling, but it's basically swimming in the wake of a bigger acquisition.
So we were just saying Slack got acquired, probably a lot of companies are now saying
we're going to be the next Slack. One of the best bootstrapped success stories in the last
five years is Tuple, in my opinion. I'm not sure they did this intentionally, but you
could. What happened with Tuple? There was a company called ScreenHero that made pair
programming software for developers. It hit product market fit, it was doing well, Slack
acquires it, but they didn't care about pair programming, they just acquired it for video
chatting and stuff like that. As soon as that acquisition happened, you can say, well, that
creates oxygen for someone else. Tuple just did this. Tuple was like, we're just going
to make what ScreenHero was, but ScreenHero is gone. The opportunity was proven, all the
market risk was de-risked for them. I bet there are other opportunities like that to
effectively, as soon as a bigger company bundles something, take that as an opportunity to
immediately unbundle it.
Yeah, just jump in and get all the people who don't want the bundled version. Especially
if it's a bigger company that people hate. If Facebook buys something, guess how many
people are no longer going to use that thing because they hate Facebook? Probably a lot.
If you can build a better version, there's also a good PR opportunity there too, where
you can position yourself as like, we're the anti-Facebook and we hate Facebook, and anyone
who agrees with you will use your thing over Facebook. I'm sure the same thing is true
with Salesforce. Probably a lot of people who just, for whatever reason, refuse to use
any Salesforce product and are going to hop ship off Slack. I talked to these guys from
a product called Honey Badger on Indie Hackers a while ago, and they also did the same thing.
There was this other product called Hop Toad. It was sort of error tracking for your Ruby
applications, and I used it back in the day. A lot of people used it back in the day. I
think the founder just kind of sold it, and it got sold a few times. It got rebranded
to Airbreak somewhere during this, and eventually it just started to kind of suck. Everyone's
like, what happened to this tool that we loved? It's just been bundled into these bigger products
that have not really done a good job of stewardship, and the Honey Badger guys, their whole pitch
early on was just like emailing disgruntled Hop Toad customers or Airbreak customers and
saying, we're going to rebuild this. We're not really going to change very much. We're
just going to make it good. I think it's probably pretty reliable that a lot of these companies
that get bundled just lose their quality, and then they suck. If you're an indie hacker,
you could kind of just keep your ear to the ground. Whose product is slipping in quality?
What is a product that lots of people use and pay for, but they're complaining about
it. Who just recently got bought or acquired by some very old slow-moving company that's
probably not going to do a good job?
The perfect recipe is not just they won't do a good job, but they didn't buy it to run
that product. They bought it to incorporate the technology into their own or an aqua hire
or something like that, because then it's not a matter of quality. They're just going
to shut the product down entirely. You know that that's the playbook of these big companies.
Right. So think about some other things that are ripe for unbundling. In the same vein
as Excel, or it's kind of like this one-purpose tool, but you can use it for a million different
reasons, I think website builders have kind of gone down the same route where there's
obviously like, there might as well be infinite different reasons why you would use a website
builder like Squarespace or Wix or Weebly or Webflow or any of these, but they're all
very general purpose. They let you build pretty much any kind of website you could imagine,
but it turns out there are some very specific types of websites that a lot of people want
to build. And if you can identify those, you can make a product just for building those
specific kinds of websites. And I think not intentionally, but like AJ the creative card
did this, where he's like, I'm going to make a website builder, but it's only for very
simple kind of one page websites. And it turns out like a huge percentage of the websites
that people want to build on the internet are these very simple one page websites. And
so like he gets like a huge portion of that market kind of unbundling these very general
purpose website builders are with Andy hackers. Like right now we're kind of building this
mailing list product where you can kind of run a mailing list on any hackers, like your
own little sub stack mailing list, except unlike sub stack, we'll let you sort of help
with distribution. We'll try to put you in front of the Andy hackers audience. And like
one of the things we need to do for that is like give you a landing page for your mailing
list. And I bet you there's like a million people out there right now who want like a
really good landing page for their sub stack mailing list, or maybe for their podcast or
something. So like if you can kind of unbundle these bigger website builders and say we're
just gonna have those like one very specific use case, maybe there's like a way to carve
out a niche like that probably a million different niches for any hackers who are trying to figure
out you know what they can do in that space.
Yeah, so the pattern we're seeing here is for if you want to unbundle, it has to be
a general purpose product that's used for a lot of different things. And where the market
is so big that even if you only take 1% of it, it's still a good outcome. I mean, I think
with that framework, you can narrow it down pretty well that as soon as you started talking
I was like, well, CRM has to fit in here. People buy Salesforce, they do a million different
things with it. I would argue application applicant trackings ATS systems, which is
like a recruiting tool, that's basically unbundling a CRM, you could use a CRM to manage your
recruiting process. But now they make these other products that are specifically for hiring,
I bet there are a million other unbundling CRM project management. Yeah, anything with
a huge market, and that's used in a lot of different ways is probably right for this.
But I think about education. So when I think about Andy Hacker Businesses, one of the ways
that people get started sort of the most easily is by educating, just like one of the easiest
ways to start because you don't really need very much to educate, you just need to know
something that other people want to know. And you got to start putting out content that
teaches people and that can be courses, books, it can be tweets, it can be a newsletter,
it can be interviews, it can be anything, a podcast, maybe in a way like educational
businesses are unbundling college. So you know, you go to college, you get like a whole
bunch of different things, you get like social connections, you get kind of a piece of paper
that says that you know this thing and people should hire you, you get, you know, allegedly
an education that's going to help you do better in the workforce. Maybe you could unbundle
college to some degree, where you look at, okay, what is college providing? Like, you
know, there are a lot of people who really struggle with the social experience, and they
don't have very many friends, especially as like, sort of the workforce modernizes, and
we all sort of move around for work, it's harder to find connections, like I'm gonna
unbundle the social experience part of college, and create like some sort of program where
like, you know, you just spend a lot of time with a group of people who are somewhat similar
to you and similar in age, and you make good friends. Or maybe you unbundle like the educational
part where it's like, we're just gonna teach you like, you know, just like the raw computer
science stuff, and that's all we're gonna teach you. And you don't need to go to college,
you don't need to pay like $40,000 a year and go into crazy debt, like we're just gonna
be 100% of what you need here. And that's it, the rest of college you don't even need.
Well, I love that because college, you think of it as an educational institution, but depending
on what school you go to, it might be 30% research and 20% sports or something like
that. You can definitely strip that out. I had a friend who was a, he got a PhD in math,
and he's like, it's ridiculous, I'm at this world class institution with all of this money.
To do math research, you're literally just, you need a pencil and a notepad, like you
don't need any other equipment. So why am I giving, you know, 50% of my grant money to
the university so that they can buy me a notebook?
To subsidize all this other stuff that's going on, exactly.
Yeah.
That's really interesting. Could you unbundle academia? You've got all these different scientists,
all these different researchers working kind of under the same umbrella, but they're doing
very different things. Some require like much more funding or less funding. I'm sure somebody's
already doing this. There's like lots of institutions that have already like, you know, focused
on one particular thing. And then in the private sector, you see companies like Google, which
are spending a ton of money on research. And they're like actually peeling off a ton of
researchers from universities to do things like AI research, et cetera. So maybe that's
already happening. People already are unbundling academia. And maybe there's like more room
if you're an eddy hacker to try to look at, you know, what's going on there and what doesn't
necessarily need to be connected to the rest of academia. That's only sort of connected
for traditional reasons, but like in terms of like the physics behind how it works, it'll
be much better off on its own. And maybe that's better than it being part of a college where
like, you know, a lot of the tuition money is funding, not just the research, but also
the football team and student dorms and other kind of irrelevant stuff.
It makes a lot of sense to me.
Yeah, me too. But I also don't know what I'm talking about. I don't know anything about
academia. So we're getting very off topic here. Another thing you brought up that I
think is really worth going into is this notion of subscription fatigue. Explain to me like
what subscription fatigue is and why it's related to bundling.
Yeah. Subscription fatigue is the idea that, you know, 10, 15 years ago before everything
was SaaS, you would buy a thing, you'd get it, you'd own it, you'd have it for however
long you need. Now more and more things are becoming a monthly subscription and a lot
of things are unbundling like cable turned into Netflix and Hulu and whatever else. And
I think both as individual consumers and especially as businesses, you look at your credit card
statement and you're like, I just have way too many subscriptions. This has a lot of problems.
One, just the cognitive overhead of like having to keep track of this and is this thing worth
it?
From a business standpoint, it's a big problem to say, you know, we're only a 19 person company.
We're about as small as businesses get. And every time we hire an employee, we forget
to get them added to one of these subscriptions, I guarantee you. Whereas with Microsoft as
much, I don't really like any of their products, but it's great. They're in there. And if someone's
like, I also need a digital whiteboarding tool. I'm like, I bet you already have that
through office 365. Just go find it, download it. We're already paying for it. It's much
easier than like, well, let's get the credit card out and find one of these other tools.
Yeah, it's very true. I was gonna say like, I don't know if I really experienced subscription
fatigue because I didn't hack because I got a ton of subscriptions, but I've never like
have too many subscriptions. But in part, that's because I use kind of like the stripe
issuing card. So I get like a text message every single time my card is charged. And
I also get like a slack chat. And it says this is the vendor that's charging your card
on this date for how much. So it kind of feels like all my subscriptions are in one place.
And if I didn't have that, like maybe I would be extremely fatigued by it. But I think number
one, not everybody uses that product. Number two, there's certain problems it doesn't solve.
Like I lost my personal credit card a few months back. And that was a nightmare. Because
it's like, what is even like charging this card? And how am I going to figure out like
all the different subscriptions that are on it is like 30 or 40 of them. And I have to
kind of go one website at a time, log into that website, I basically like search my email
for charges and try to figure out what was going on. And it took like, literally like
a month of just me looking at every charge in my bank account to figure out what I'm
being charged for. There's probably some stuff that's like yearly subscriptions that I'm
subscribed to that I don't even know about. So maybe there's an opportunity here to like,
I don't know, like build some sort of like subscription roll up tool does this already
exist? This has to exist.
I wonder if you had that, it would be so easy to then also turn that into like one of these
kind of group bundle things we were talking about earlier, you could you could really
grow that into an interesting product where any group of SaaS products could bundle themselves
together through your billing system. That'd be really, really nice.
Yeah, yeah, that would be cool. I just searched for it. I'm getting like charge B, simplify
subscription management charge B.
Yeah, that's not what they do. I don't think all those subscription tools are for the they're
for the SaaS company to manage their subscription.
Right, not for the customer. Well, business idea for any of the actors out there, it sounds
incredibly difficult to probably convince these companies to do this for sure.
Maybe it's in their best interest because it's kind of a bundle for them. If they can
like get some free marketing out of it, like, hey, you know, we've integrated with this
new subscription management thing, you can maybe give them some users to some press.
Like if I knew that like I had to choose a CRM and out of like the six options I had
only one of them was like on the subscription management tool, that would let me sort of
easily cancel my subscriptions all at once or change my card all at once, then I probably
go with the one that's on there.
Okay, so there is a tool for this and it's called iOS, right? Like, is this part of the
reason why people like buying an app?
Mobile stuff. Yeah, I use Android, but it's the same thing. I kind of like have one credit
card. I don't want to put in my credit card number once I'm paying for an app or something.
And then I can easily just see like, here's all the apps that you're subscribed to from
one place. And it's super easy.
On the topic of this subscription fatigue, I also want to say it pairs really nicely
with the idea of things being commodified. Like I think these are two separate issues,
but they work nicely together, which is to say, I'm not going to go out and use a worse
CRM. CRM is really important for a company that uses one. I'm not going to use a worse
CRM, but I might use a worse calendar scheduler, not much worse, but like they're all kind
of the same.
So if one's bundled in, I can get rid of that subscription, partially to save money, but
also just to save the fee. So subscription fatigue is not a problem if the products differentiated
and awesome. But in a world where there's just a million clones of the same thing, at
that point I start to say, why am I paying separately for this?
Yeah, it might be nice to have them all bundled together. I'm thinking about other things
where I've had subscription fatigue recently, like Substack. I had this like, this like
frenzy, I don't know how else to describe it, where I subscribe to like, you know, 10,
15 different sub stacks and like a week. And this is a few months ago. And like, maybe
I was willing to do that because they were all on Substack and it was this kind of one
credit card. They're all bundled together. It's easy to sort of cancel and change it
up. And maybe that's like to Substack's advantage that like, okay, you know, you could put your
newsletter on some other, you know, framework, you could use ghost, you could use MailChimp
or whatever. But like people haven't put their credit card in yet. And since like Substack
is bundled together, all of these people's newsletters in one place, it's just easier
as a subscriber to subscribe to like a Substack newsletter than it is to subscribe to something
else. But now I'm starting to get like kind of the fatigue where it's like, well, I've
subscribed to so many of these things, I can't read enough of them. And I'm also subscribed
to so many different like just sass tools, like for any hackers, if I go into, let's
see what I'm paying for friendly hacks, let's see what what recent text messages I've gotten
on my Stripe issuing card to see what I'm being billed for. Okay, so I got, as we discussed
superhuman, I've got notion, we got my podcast editors, GitHub, chartable, which hosts my
podcast and transistor, which also does my podcast stuff. I've got Calendly for calendaring,
I've got Google Cloud for hosting Firebase, I've got render for hosting my website, I've
got spark post and postmark for sending transactional emails, I've got to script for editing podcasts,
I've got Adobe Creative Cloud for both Photoshop, and Adobe Audition, I've got zoom, I've got
Riverside, I've got like just a million subscriptions. What's the end game here? Do you think people
are just gonna keep subscribing to more and more stuff? I feel like you know, for an indie
company of my size, 510 years ago, I wouldn't have even half this many subscriptions. And
like, these are all useful products and companies. But like, somebody's got to give this can't
just keep going. Like 10 years from now, I can't just have 1000 subscriptions.
I can't imagine that. And I mean, aside from the fatigue, they cost money. Yeah, I know
people say, Oh, well, if you use this product, you'll save 10 minutes a day. And that adds
up to whatever. But if that were literally true, you just go out and the more SaaS products
you bought, the more money you'd make. And like, that's not really how it works. Like,
there is a limit to how much you can actually utilize. You said it earlier, I think there's
cycles, right? I think we've gone through a really long unbundling cycle over like SaaS
has really only been a thing for the last 10 years. And most SaaS products have been
standalone products that in a sense, unbundled the previous generation of enterprise like
Oracle or whatever type products, right? This is one of the reasons why I think bundling
is a trend that's coming up is that what you just described, where you have 1000 subscriptions
isn't viable, I don't think. Yeah, maybe 10 years from now, I won't be paying for any
of this podcast stuff because Spotify will have bought all of it and just bundled all
up into their sort of mega podcasting empire. And then maybe like all my hosting will sort
of become like, you know, consolidated into the Google, which is already kind of happening
to sort of bundling all the different hosting things, just use Google Cloud or use Amazon
or use Microsoft. So I think I think you're spot on. I think the way we sort of avoid
the subscription fatigue is because these companies end up bundling everything because
we don't all want to have 1000 different bills and we have a limited amount of money in our
bank accounts anyway.
Yeah, and that's terrifying because the big tech companies already have enough power. Do
we really want only the only products we use are from Google or Microsoft or Apple. But
I think there's hope of small businesses, indie hackers, bundling stuff as well. Or
we talked about Notion, sorry to keep going back to that, but they're becoming a bigger
company, but they did a lot with a very small team before they raised a whole lot of money.
I think that's probably, if we look forward five, 10 years from now, after everything bundles,
there's going to be a counter response to unbundling again. And I think Notion might
be a model of what that looks like. Take a bunch of different things, merge them all
into one product. It's now differentiated. It's not a commodity anymore. And people will
switch away from the big bundles, hopefully.
Let's talk about the indie hackers podcast network, which is not really a bundle in the
sense of what we're talking about, or is it? Would you describe the indie hackers podcast
network as a bundle?
I think loosely. If you think of a bundle as separate products grouping together for
easier distribution, it's stretching the definition a little bit, but yeah, I think so.
It kind of is. If you think about a traditional media company like The New York Times, that's
definitely a bundle. You've got a bunch of different journalists writing different columns,
and maybe you only care about one or two of those columns, but once you go to The New
York Times, you discover a whole bunch of different other things in the newspaper, and
it's kind of bundled together, and kind of stronger together than they are separately.
And the whole idea of the podcast network is it's not just the indie hackers podcast
anymore, but it's your show, Startup to Last, plus four other great shows, and we're sort
of combining forces into one podcast network, and they're like internal benefits and external
benefits. So the internal benefits are pretty obvious. The six of us, really like nine of
us, because a few of the shows have two hosts, including yours, get together on a regular
basis. We talk about our shows. We talk about how do we make our shows better? How do we
promote our shows? How do you sell sponsorships on a podcast? How do we kind of mutually help
each other? And I think that's really great, because typically people working in any particular
field either don't collaborate, or worse, they see each other as competitors, and like
none of this knowledge gets shared. But if you can kind of join forces together, then
you like improve together much faster than everybody who has like their own podcast by
themselves. Plus, there are all these other theoretical benefits that we haven't really
gotten yet, where we could like, for example, kind of pool our resources and share resources.
So like, you know, maybe we could all be on like one transistor account, theoretically,
and like save money on that. Or we could have like the same podcast editor who, you know,
knows exactly how to edit all of our shows. And we give them enough business to sort of
be satisfied. And like, we don't want to look for different podcast editors, or, you know,
we have the same advertisers or the same distribution channels, like we can kind of join forces and
then just focus on what makes our shows different, and kind of have like, you know, one central
entity handle kind of the shared resources across our shows. So those are some of the
internal benefits of the indie hackers bundle. What, if anything, are the external benefits?
Like if you're a listener, is there any benefit to the fact that like, our six shows are all
part of the same network now?
Yeah, I don't think they're as obvious as the ones you just said. But let me just throw
some ideas out there. One is we've bounced around the idea before of like, what if all
of the podcasts on the network picked kind of themes or topics? So let's take bundling.
Let's say everybody's going to do a bundling episode now. Would that be interesting for
the listener to say, oh, I can, you know, I can follow along on these bigger trends
that normally wouldn't be covered. The other thing I, this is probably a stupid idea, but
I wonder if there were a single podcast stream that picked one of ours per week or something
so that the listener could actually consume these different podcasts in an easier way.
Whereas right now, even though we're all still, we're in a podcast network, they still have
to subscribe to each of them separately. It doesn't really simplify the distribution for
them at all.
Yeah, that's the problem. Like we don't control podcast distribution. We don't own a podcast
player. We could theoretically build one. I mean, like I built a sort of an RSS feed
reader for Andy hackers. So if you go to ndhackers.com slash podcasts, it's just every 15 minutes
pinging each of your RSS feeds and pulling in your latest episode. If you have one and
like what else is a podcast player besides just a list of shows that you can play on.
So what if there was like a very niche podcast player, you're an Andy hacker, but the only
podcast to even listen to our Andy hackers podcasts. What if we had like a podcast player
for our show? And that was kind of the feed.
Yeah, I mean, would anyone use that? Probably not with just that, but you could imagine
building it out more, right? Could there be more discussions because you're using this
app or something like that? Yeah, I don't know.
Someone should build this because you could do it because all of our podcast feeds are
open sourced and you shouldn't make it so I can plug Andy hackers comments into it because
my pet peeve isn't so hard running a podcast to get any sort of feedback at all from listeners.
And so if I could like plug like the Andy hackers form into it and we could just get
comments directly in our episodes while people are listening from their player, like that
would be sick. I would pay for that podcast player in a second.
I 100% agree. It's so frustrating that all podcast conversation happens on Twitter basically,
which is a terrible format for it. And it just doesn't make any sense, but there's not
really a good option aside from that.
And the problem is that you listen to podcasts usually like in a very particular context,
like you're in your car driving somewhere or you're walking somewhere or you're like
doing chores around the house. Like the reason you're listening to something on audio is
because like, you know, your eyes are preoccupied and your hands are preoccupied, but like you
still have your ears and your brand available to you. And I think you use Twitter in a very
different mode where you're like distracted, you know, you're kind of bored or like you're
sitting at your computer or you're on your phone, like looking at your screen. And so
it doesn't overlap. So like the podcast conversation that happens on Twitter happens when like
people have already listened to the episode like a few days ago or a few weeks ago or
something.
It'd be really nice if there was a way where these podcast players would like encourage
people to actually interact while they're listening or like, you know, like just after
they listen and it doesn't really exist yet. But let's talk about your show. Your show
is called Startup to Last. I mentioned it at the top of the show, how you're building
Less Annoying CRM to basically last for decades. Is that what you talk about on your show?
Yes and no. That topic gets dry pretty quickly. So it's more how do you run a business with
that kind of in the background?
So we're still talking about normal, you know, how do you do marketing? How do you it's just
my friend Rick and I helping each other through business problems. But the answer to the questions
I think are the same as any other startup podcast. But the answers are different if
the goal is to last for 20, 30 years versus, you know, get acquired five years from now.
Which is a goal I think, you know, I hope more people strive for. On the internet, we
kind of measure businesses in terms of months or years. Like I was just listening to Ben
Orenstein on the Run With It podcast. They're also on the network. And I think they call
it his product tuple, kind of like the old guard. And it's only been around for two years.
And only on the internet the people refer to businesses that way. But I think yours,
I mean, you sort of like put your money where your mouth is. You got the experience. You've
been building Less Annoying CRM for 10 years, 11 maybe. And Rick, your co-host on the podcast,
he's got like kind of a brand new thing where he's like just now kind of getting into it.
How long has he been working on his product?
Probably this year. So going on one year now.
Yeah, it's a cool juxtaposition where like you're sort of dispensing wisdom from the
top of the star, the Andy Hackers mountain. And he's like kind of climbing up the mountain
himself. But like, you know, learning a lot of different things, because I'm sure building
a business today is like very different than it was when you built yours.
Yeah, it really is. And after you've been doing it for 11 years, it's also it's fun
in both directions. Like maybe I have a little wisdom, but it's easy to like get complacent
and lose a little bit of hunger. So it's great to hear the other side of it and be like,
Oh, yeah, I should probably be moving faster. What's your favorite episode of your show
so far?
My favorite episode of the show, the one that got the best reviews was when Rick wanted
to learn how to code. And I just told him how I would self teach, although that's probably
not representative of what the normal episodes are. I got to be honest, one does not stand
out to me. But recently, because you've been giving us a lot of feedback, we've been talking
more about kind of trends and topics that are not necessarily just what we're working
on in our business, but kind of zooming out and saying like, what's going on in the startup
landscape? And I've been having a lot of fun with that. Because if you it's important,
like entrepreneurs should be thinking big picture, but it's really easy to get bogged
down in the day to day and forget to think about that stuff.
Yeah, I like the one you did recently on the topic of community fatigue, because I kind
of had me like screaming at my phone, because I was like, I wanted to jump in and talk,
but it's a podcast, so I just have to listen. But you're talking about how there's just
so many startup communities, right? Twitter itself is a community and has a bunch of different
sub communities, and the hackers is a community. There's a million other slack groups and discord
groups and telegram groups and little communities you can belong to as a founder. And in the
same way, we have like the subscription fatigue, we have community fatigue. And so the two
of you were talking about what your thoughts are were on it. And I just wanted to jump
in. Now you're here, I can actually say it. Like my thought was, I think about communities
almost exactly the same way I think about offline communities, online and offline are
kind of the same. And I think the answer is like, you don't have to belong to all of them,
right? You don't go to like every single barbecue that's ever been thrown, you just go to kind
of like the barbecue with like the friends that you want to hang out with. And I think
the same thing is true with like the community stuff. I feel the same way about newsletters,
you know, it's like newsletter subscription fatigue, how can you subscribe to all of them?
And it's like the answer is you don't have to, you know, you just read the ones that
you like. And I think that's kind of what makes it possible for so many indie hackers
to succeed, which is that none of these communities and none of these newsletters or whatever
are like kind of winner take all, right? Like all of them kind of have a small group of
subscribers or readers or community members. And even if they only grow to like a hundred
or a thousand or 10,000 or something, that's enough for their founders to make like a really
good living. And there can be a million other newsletters and communities and things work
out.
I buy that, but my pushback would be, I think a lot of people running these communities
aren't thinking about it that way.
No way, any hackers is going to be the biggest thing ever. It's going to be winner take all.
Well, I mean, it's funny talking to you about it because indie hackers is the winner in
in a niche, but there's nothing bigger than any hackers targeting this kind of bootstrap.
I mean, you basically invented the term, right? So I think you have the problem is everyone
else is trying to start indie hackers part two. And it's like, there's only going to
be one indie hackers. There's only one hacker news. I love what you're saying about it could
be like a barbecue. It could be 10 or 20 or 30 people. Those have been my favorite communities
I've ever been a part of. But there's not like a business there. And when people are
trying to start a business built around a community, it has to get bigger than that,
I think.
Yeah, that's very true. You've got to get bigger than 10 people to make this work. But
I think some people are doing it like there's weekend club, they are based out of London,
I think they do like Saturday co working sessions. And it's like 50 60 bucks a month. And if
you charge that kind of price for a group of any hackers to get together, like you only
really need 100 or 200 people for you to make a living off of a group like that. And it's
probably not like a 40 hour a week job for you. It's probably pretty easy to run something
like that. And there could be lots of those, lots and lots of those and they're still like
at the level where it's still kind of a, you know, there's a personal connection there
where people can know each other. And I think, you know, probably some people will be doing
this with an eye towards killing any hackers and making the next big indie community. But
I think I'll probably be okay. I think I've got some really good network effects going
in my favor.
Okay, well, that looks like pretty much everything on our list.
I think it is. Yeah.
Cool. Well, thanks for doing this co hosted episode with me. Hopefully we'll have you
on again if you're up for it. Where can people find you and your podcast, Tyler?
Yeah, so I am Tyler M. King on Twitter. The podcast is startup to last on Twitter or www.startuptolast.com.
And my company is at lessannoyingcrm.com.
All right, thanks again, Tyler.
Yeah, thanks, Cortland. It was fun.
Listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, and you want an easy way to support the podcast,
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much for listening. And as always, I will see you next time.