What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making
a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to
discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of,
so the rest of us can do the same.
It's not uncommon for software engineers to get into programming because of video games.
The story usually goes that they played a lot of games when they were a kid, and they
were just so excited to be on the other side of that equation and eventually build and
design and create and produce these games as a game developer rather than just a player.
And usually when I talk to these engineers, I ask what they're doing now, and they've
completely sold out. They're working for the man, they're at Facebook or Google, making
hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to make web apps. They've completely lost that
childhood spark, that dream to go make the games that inspired them.
Not Dave Gettys. Dave is doing something near and dear to my heart. He's actually making
games that teach people how to code. He's not giving them away for free. He's selling
them for a lot of money, hundreds of dollars, in fact, and actually sustaining a living
by doing it. I had a really good time talking to Dave. He's somebody who follows his dreams,
doesn't give up on them. There's a lot to learn from how he was able to do that. Enjoy
the episode.
So cool. I'm glad you're here. I'm just going to jump into things. The origin of how I came
across you is five years ago, I was teaching my brother how to code. I was like, you should
be a front end engineer. It'll be super easy. You can basically work from home. You can
make a ton of money. And he wanted to be a writer at the time. So I was like, you could
basically work two or three days a week and then spend the rest of your time writing.
And so after I taught him how to code, I was like, before you apply to jobs, you need some
kind of project that you can work on. That'll be the culmination of everything that you've
learned, all the skills put together. And you can take that to potential employers,
wow them and blow their socks off. And also just help you make sure that you're going
to do good for interviews. And so I had a bunch of different ideas for projects at the
time. And one of them was this idea of a game that would help you learn how to code something.
So I've been playing these tower defense games. They're super fun. They're really intuitive.
Anybody, whether you're a gamer or not, could just jump into a tower defense game online.
And then you would just get super addicted and sucked in for hours at a time.
Yeah, I love those.
They're super good, right? And I was like, why don't you make a tower defense game Channing
and use that to teach people Flexbox? And so we did. We created flexboxdefense.com.
Basically anybody who needs to make websites needs to learn Flexbox. And his game turned
out super good. He launched it on Hacker News, got a lot of traffic, eventually got a job.
And this is again, five years ago in February, 2016. I've been checking his stats. Like I
just checked this morning, like his game still gets like 25, 30,000 page views a month, five
years later with him doing literally nothing. It doesn't even rank on Google when you search
for Flexbox, but it's working like people are linking to it.
That first tech job is hard to get.
It really is. And I like it. It helped him that he had me cause I was just on him every
time he was slacking off or I saw him doing something else. It's like, how's your game
going? So it took him a good couple months to finish the game. I mean, it's super basic.
It's really ugly. The graphics are terrible. It's kind of buggy, but it was good enough.
He put some donations on there and I think he still makes like a few hundred bucks a
month too from people just donating.
So you were like his brother slash PM.
Exactly. I was like, you gotta, I should have taken my cut. Anyway, like fast forward. I've
been telling people forever, Hey, this is like a really good idea. Why aren't more people
making games to teach people how to code? To be fair, I haven't done a lot of searching.
Many people are, but eventually you popped across my radar a couple months ago and I
found grid critters. You can find it at grid critters.com. I'm looking at it right now.
This is not a side project hobbyist game. Like this is a legit amazing graphics. You've
got sound effects guides, hence tips. It's an amazing game and you're teaching people
CSS grid through gaming, doing exactly what I've been saying and the hackers should be
doing. And this is not like, you know, a hobby for you. It's real. Like the game costs $99
it costs more than a lot of triple a games that it costs hundreds of millions of dollars
to make. And you sell this online and make a living for yourself. Are you full time on
this?
I am. Yeah. I have been for, I just passed the four year mark.
Would you mind sharing like your revenue numbers? Like how much do you need to go full time
on a game like this?
Well, so I started out with some savings, you know, I was working at Domo and I was
making a lot of money, you know, as a open web architect. So I was able to just save
it, save it. I was also running a tech conference that was paid. So my savings, I was just building
it getting ready because I've wanted to do my own thing forever. Ever since I was a kid,
my dad would make me weed in the garden. I hated it. I put all my energy towards finding
ways out of it. My dad has videos of me throwing a tantrum over a chore I didn't want to do.
But somehow maybe he manipulated me and tricked me into this. I don't know. But somehow I
got the idea that I should sell pumpkins to the neighbors. I planted the seeds. I started
growing these pumpkins and suddenly weeding was like a delight. You know, I was out there
weeding it all the time. If I saw one little dinky weed, I'd pull it. Yeah. It didn't feel
like a chore at all. Now that I think about it, my dad probably did manipulate me into
this. A little bit of a Jedi mind tricks on you.
Uh-huh. But anyways, I would grow these pumpkins and go out selling them to the neighbors.
And I didn't realize the implications of that until much later in life, but I've always
wanted to do my own thing. So fast forward to four years ago, I was working at my job
and making a lot of money, saving it up for something. And I was miserable. You know,
I just, I hated it. I just felt like I was withering away inside, even though I seemed
to have everything I needed. High paying job, insurance, working with friends. I recruited
a bunch of friends to come work with me there, but I was miserable. And then I took my family
to see Moana in the theaters. You're probably too young to remember this, but back then
you could take a group of people to a large room and watch a movie in a room called a
theater. I've heard stories. Anyway, so we watched Moana and the whole thing became like
a metaphor for my, my journey. You know, Moana was on this Island. Everybody seemed happy.
She had everything she needed except for that sense of fulfillment and purpose. And when
it got to the part where she's staring out into the ocean and start singing, it caused
me, I just lost it. I lost it. I was weeping in the theater, just hoping my kids didn't
see their dad falling apart, but that's what I knew. I couldn't stay at that job anymore.
I couldn't keep going against my purpose, you know? So I talked to my wife and she was
on board. She's so awesome and supportive. And I quit. I put in my two weeks notice.
I didn't have a whole lot going on besides the savings. You know, that was huge. I didn't
have much of a plan except I had been putting together my resume because I thought maybe,
maybe it's the job. Maybe I'll go get a different job. So I've been building my resume in Apple
pages and I couldn't, I couldn't center some texts. It was just driving me crazy. And so
I was like, I know I'll do this in CSS. I know CSS. So I started in CSS. I posted up
at McDonald's one day. I took the day off and was just working with an infinite supply
of Diet Coke. And this was back when you could go into McDonald's. So I was working on this
and I, I had the same problem. I couldn't center the stupid text with CSS and I'd use
Flexbox a bit, you know, at my jobs and whatnot. So I was a little bit frustrated that I had
to keep going to that CSS tricks page.
Yeah. I know the exact one with like the two columns and they tell you exactly like, here's
how to use Flexbox. I've been there a million times as a reminder. Like, how do you, how
do you center things again?
What does this property mean?
Yeah.
So yeah, I got frustrated that and I was like, oh, I should figure out, I should like really
learn Flexbox. If I'm going to go get a new job, I'm going to need to know this. So I
started coming up with these metaphors to remember the Flexbox properties and what everything
does. And I came up with this idea of a crossbow shooting zombies, you know, a guy shooting
some zombies using the Flexbox properties. So that really helped. I started using it
at work, Flexbox more, and I started teaching people because, you know, everybody struggles
with Flexbox as universal and it was actually really helping the people at work.
So one of my buddies encouraged me, he's like, Hey, you should share this online. I bet this
would help a lot of people. He's like, Oh, okay. So I created a real crappy email version
of it where every week you'd get a new email showing how to do certain properties and a
real junky little code pen exercise to go with it. And at the bottom was a newsletter
signup. I just put it out there. I didn't think much of it until near the same time
of this Moana show. I got all of a sudden like 300 people signed up in a single day
for my newsletter because of that Flexbox thing I had made.
How'd they, how'd they find it?
I got really lucky that I made friends with someone who's pretty popular early on. His
name's Kent C Dodds and he's a buddy of mine. We worked together at Domo. In fact, I helped
him get his full-time job there. We kind of course the CEO, but that's a different story.
He's a machine. He teaches so many people how to code. And I think he's got a bunch
of courses up on Egghead, I believe. He's just super good at teaching people.
He really is. He's an awesome guy too. Just all around good guy. But he posted on Twitter
about this thing and I think that's where most of the signups came from. Anyway, it
was just this perfect culmination of what I've been wanting to do, go do my own thing
with, hey, here's something that people are already kind of interested in. And so I quit
my job and I set out to build Flexbox Zombies as a real version of that Flexbox course that
I had made.
Well, let's pause here for a second because we can't just gloss over the fact that you
watched Moana and then you quit your job. I mean, what does that say about Disney for
number one, that they can make a movie that's really made for kids, but you can be there
with your kids trying to hold back your tears and then make these life-changing decisions
so that you too can be a Polynesian princess headed out to the ocean or whatever she wanted
to do. What was that like, quitting your job? How did you feel about making that decision?
Well, it really influenced me. I'm wearing coconut shells right now. You can't really
see it, but it was so impactful. And who knows? I may have arrived at the same destination
had I watched Aladdin or who knows anything else, but it just really struck me because
I think deep down I knew that I'm not really cut out for the nine to five, not cut out
for the working for somebody else. I need to have my own thing that I'm working towards
that I'm building and that sense of autonomy. If you've read the book Drive, I think it's
by Dan Pink. He talks about the three things that make a person happy in their work and
it's autonomy, mastery, and purpose. I was missing two of the three with the autonomy
and purpose. Yeah, as soon as that Moana came in, it was just the perfect time. And I was
like, you know what? I can't worry about health insurance. That's going to suck. There's going
to be trade offs, but I had to just make the jump. I had to kind of overcome that fear
and just do it.
Did you have a framework in mind for what success would look like once you quit your
job? Because the second you don't have a paycheck coming in anymore, like you're on the clock,
you've got a certain amount of time to basically supplement your income or replace your income,
or you've got to go back to having a job. And there's a little bit of comfort at least
in having some sort of plan for like, okay, here's what I'm going to do. And here's how
fast it's going to take me. And here's how I'm going to make money.
So at the React Rally Conference, I was talking to my friend, Ryan Florence, who I've always
looked up to. And I showed him a little side, another side project I had. I'm a big believer
in side projects. I think they're so important and they push you to learn new things. Anyway,
I was showing him a side project. It was a Trello app, a little bit different, but basically
a Trello clone. And I pitched to him, what if I started my own thing doing this? And
he's like, you're going to quit your job and do a to-do list. It was pretty crushing.
Plenty of people have done it. Plenty of people have regretted it.
Yep. But at that same conference, I was talking to John Lindquist, one of the founders of
Egghead. And he told me about a course by Amy Hoy called 30 by 500. And it's pretty
pricey. It was a couple grand, I think. It goes into the marketing and the audience building
side of things. I'm a builder. I like to build stuff. I didn't know at the time hardly anything
about marketing or launching my own products. And so I bought 30 by 500. I was devouring
the content and I started building that list. And to date, there's about, I think 70,000
people have played Flexbox Zombies and they're enrolled on my email list. You get some unsubscribers
every time you email. I think the standard is about 0.5%. This last time I lost, I think
300 subscribers, but that's just part of it. I've built up this giant email list. That
was part of my plan, but I don't know, you can't spend so much time trying to find the
perfect plan before you jump. You'll get paralyzed. You'll never find it. You'll never find a
perfect plan. And then, because things change and you'll learn so much just by doing it.
There's so much to be said for striking the right balance there where if you have zero
plan whatsoever, you're probably going to repeat a lot of preventable mistakes that
people have already made that you probably shouldn't make. And if you have nothing but
a plan, you don't have any bias for taking action, you're going to be one of the many
people I know who are always talking about how they're eventually going to start something
one day, but they're waiting for the very perfect thing to come around because they
don't trust enough that once you get started, you're going to start figuring out, so to
be able to build a plane on the way down. And that's just necessary. You can't predict
everything in advance.
And I like the fact that you decided to take 30 by 500. That's a course that teaches you
how to think about coming up with business ideas and how to prevent making some of the
preventable mistakes. And it really de-risks things because you're not aimlessly on the
internet reading random articles. You're reading material presented by someone who's an expert.
Amy Hoys taught a lot of people to start businesses and a lot of them have made very successful
businesses and I've had a few of them, like Brendan Dunn, on the podcast.
Yes.
So I'm just curious, what are the big takeaways you got out of 30 by 500, if you remember
any of them?
I think the biggest takeaway was to think long term. Your goal as an entrepreneur is
to build trust, build people's trust, to deliver value and value and value over and over again
through your blog posts and small products. And in my case, Flexbox Zombies, I gave it
away for free. That's why there's so many people that signed up for it. And people want
to reciprocate. If you give them so much value, eventually when you give them an opportunity
to reciprocate that, like I do with grid critters, $99, a ton of people want to reciprocate
and buy it and then they still get something out of it. So it's just this good cycle.
That was my plan, was to give that away for free and then figure out what was next. My
wife was a little bit wary of the idea of spending six months and giving the end result
away for free.
I bet. Doesn't sound like much of a solid business plan.
No. But when I launched that within about a couple of months, there were 12,000 people
all of a sudden signed up and on my email list. So I started just writing blog posts
about Flexbox and whatever other develop related things I could think of. And I had this experiment
in my mind, okay, I'm going to build this next game, just see if people will buy it.
I really had no idea. And I was actually had a lot of anxiety around it. Why would someone
buy a product when there's free versions, you know, there's free things out there to
learn CSS grid. There's a ton. I mean, you can learn all this stuff without spending
a penny, but I built this thing and I built my kept building my audience, giving them
some inside peaks into what I was building, you know, I launched the thing and I went
on vacation because I just couldn't take it. It was just too much to stress about. So my
wife and I, we went on a little staycation with the kids downtown salt lake at a hotel.
I remember I was sitting there at the pool with my legs dangling in the water, watching
the kids fight, you know, as they do. And my phone just started blowing up. I was ignoring
it and then it just kept going boom, boom, boom notification. So I, I took a look to
see what it was thinking. It was probably just that dang in-law group chat that just
drives me nuts. You know, everybody has one of those and you can't get rid of them. You
can't unsubscribe. You can't, uh, yeah, you can't, you can't cancel your end laws. Hopefully
my wife doesn't listen to this. But yeah, I thought it was that when I checked my phone,
I saw it was notifications from teachable, which is the platform I used to host my courses
back then. And it was just pre-order, pre-order, pre-order for, for grid critters. I just,
I couldn't believe it. That was my first taste of making a buck directly from my own thing.
And it just, it transformed me. And Amy Hoey, she said that it would, you know, she said,
you'll never be the same after you make that first dollar. And I thought that was a little
bit cliche, but it's true. It gave me the taste for that. And I made when I launched
that, I made like $30,000 crazy, which replenished some of my runway, just gave me so much motivation.
Such an interesting point about, uh, the fact that you're basically building your audience.
This is term I've been using a lot this year, social capital. And the entire idea behind
social capital is that you're building goodwill with people. We're putting out all this information.
You're telling people how to do things, how to learn things. You give them the behind
the scenes sneak peek as to how you're learning the things that you're doing and what your
strategies are. And it's all free. And it seems like you're not getting very much in
return, but you're actually building up this goodwill, which gives you basically four really
distinct things. Trust, reciprocity, sharing, and cooperation. So trust, like if you're
teaching people for free all the time, they start to build trust and like, Hey, this guy,
Dave is like a really good teacher. You know, when he puts stuff out, it's like usually
pretty high quality. So if he puts something out in the future, like I trust that it's
going to be good.
Yeah. And they try the solution you recommend and it works for them. You know, so your Amy
talks about you give them a tiny win and that builds, that builds the trust.
Exactly. And I think a lot of people's model of the world is that if you put out information,
everybody's just going to evaluate that information on its own. There's going to be like these
objective little robots that look at it and assess how good it is. But like, that's not
really true. We're always using shortcuts. And I think the people that we're getting
information from is a huge shortcut. We all use to say, do I trust this person? And if
so, like, this information must be good. Do I not know this person? And if so, you know,
I'm going to be a little bit wary of the information. So you're building trust, you're building
reciprocity. This is just like a thing that's woven into us, like at a very animalistic
instinctual level.
When somebody helps us, we kind of want to give back to them and figure out how to help
them in some way because that's kind of what helps society work. And so when you're giving
people stuff for free and then you launch something that costs money, there's kind of
like a personal thing there. It's like, man, Dave has helped me so much. Like, I want to
buy his course. I'm going to support him. Like I have good will towards Dave. That reciprocity
is so valuable.
I have had many people reach out and offer, hey, can I pay you for Flexbox Zombies? I
got so much out of it. And I'm like, nah, but you can go by that. I think you're so
spot on with that.
And the last two are sharing and cooperation. You know, maybe it's a form of reciprocity,
but people want to share what you're doing because you're putting out a lot of stuff
for free. There's more stuff to share and people feel like they owe you and they want
to help out. So they tell their friends about it. Happens a lot with indie hackers. And
then cooperation, like people want to cooperate with you. You know, if you ask them to do
something or you, you know, you want some help, people are willing to give you help
and work together because they're like, I trust you and I want to work with good people.
And out of all people in the world, like you're sort of de-risked as a person to cooperate
with. And I think it's so hard for a lot of people to understand like why it's important
to build an audience and put things out for free because there's no real gauge. Like there's
no real way to measure all these things. There is no like trust meter on Twitter that tells
you how many people trust you or how deeply they care about you. You just see the number
of people on your mailing list or the number of people you have on Twitter.
But I think if you're going to do something, especially educational, it's so invaluable
to have built up a ton of goodwill. So you get all that trust and reciprocity and sharing
and cooperation later on. And almost every single person I've talked to who creates
courses or who educates people, they all started by building an audience.
And the best way to do that is to give away something for free. But going back to that
sharing aspect, one of my favorite books for business is called Personal MBA.
Love it by Josh Coffin. He's been on the podcast before and we went through basically his book
chapter by chapter and then kind of explained the entire thing a couple of years ago.
One of the things I think has helped my games become so popular is I accidentally did one
of the things he recommends in that book, which is to build remarkability, he calls
it into your product. So I can think about the one wheel. Have you seen the one wheel
or heard of the one wheel? No, never heard of it.
So it's like an electric skateboard with a big old tire in the middle.
Oh, I've seen people riding these in San Francisco and Seattle.
Yeah, so I have one of those and I love it. And whenever I ride it around, people are
especially kids like, whoa, look at that. And they yell out from across the street,
what is that? And I yell one wheel, you know, and then they know to go buy it or they, you
know, beg their mom or whatever for Christmas, one wheel dot com.
But that product has remarkability just so baked in. And I don't think that they have
had to do any marketing and I haven't done any marketing. You know, my games are so different
from everything else that's out there that people, they're remarkable.
So people remark. So I haven't spent anything on ads. The only marketing I have is my content,
you know, the content marketing on my blog, but that's, that's it.
Yeah. There's a lot of myths out there about like why products get shared by word of mouth.
I think probably like the number one myth is like, if you just make something really
good, people will share it. People do like to make good recommendations.
Like nobody wants to recommend things to their friends that are crappy. But there's all these
other things that align with people doing word of mouth growth. I think, for example,
like aligning yourself with events that people are already talking about.
There's a guy actually who has a newsletter. I forget what it's called, but he writes about
like politics and specifically what he does is he takes the liberal point of view and
the conservative point of view and he kind of puts them, pits them against each other
on particular issues and tries to sort of figure out like, you know, what's the actual
truth here? And you know, when his newsletter blew up around election time because everybody
was talking about the election and because everybody already had a lot of energy and
interest in talking about that, suddenly, the thing he was building was being talked
about. It's not like his newsletter got any better around the election and which is sort
of on theme with something people were talking about.
So can we go and kind of like walk through your process for making some of these games?
Because we sort of just like blitz through the fact that you made Flexbox Zombies and
you grew that mailing list to how big did it get?
So 70,000 people enrolled and 60,000 people active on the mailing list.
First of all, you talked about the fact that you did kind of like some influencer marketing
for Flexbox Zombies. I mean, you had friends who were influential in the space and that's
how you got like your first few hundred subscribers. How did you go from a few hundred subscribers
to 70,000 people on your email list?
I don't know is the short answer. I mean, that's why I attribute it to remarkability
because as far as I can tell, people are just sharing it word of mouth. I had one guy tell
me he wrote in and said he's a junior engineer, just got his first job and he was working
with a senior engineer.
And the senior engineer is like, how do you know so much about Flexbox? Because he was
just flying through it, you know, because he that's the point of my games is that it
gives you that muscle memory, gives you that intuition about the text. You don't have to
go look things up. You don't have to stop. And this engineer, senior engineer was just
so impressed with this kid who was a master of Flexbox that he asked him, how'd you do
that? And so then the kid shared Flexbox Zombies. So I think you have to have a product that's
not just cool, but has to be really effective for people. And you know, you give them those
wins and then if they if you give them that, they're going to share it.
I mean, you're basically living the dream. I don't know very many indie hackers who would
choose to have to do a bunch of marketing when they could do what you're doing and just
work on making the products actually pretty good. And you know, you wake up a couple years
later and you got 70,000 subscribers. That's nuts. And one of the trends we've been seeing
a lot this year is people building apps that help people make money. So there's this whole
creator economy thing going on where you're like, hey, you know, don't just write a newsletter,
but write a newsletter that people pay to subscribe to you. And if you can make a platform
like that, people want to use it. And they can talk about how they made a lot of money
because they're on Substack or whatever platform you made. And what you're doing is you're
building tools that kind of make people into like badasses. So Kathy Sierra gave famously
a talk about I think the minimum viable badass or something like, how bad ass can you make
your users? And it's like this kid, he's talking to the senior developer is like a badass.
He's super really good at CSS Flexbox. And that's because you made him that way. That
in and of itself is really remarkable. Kind of a cool way for people to think about the
things that are building is like, okay, somebody actually uses the thing that you're creating
or takes the course that you're creating. Like, in what way are they going to be a badass?
Like how badass does it make them? And for you, maybe the way it makes them a badass
is they don't ever have to look up a reference because they're playing a game. And the game
is like one of the few things that people like to do over and over so they can kind
of instill that muscle memory in that practice. And so they come away from it, not just knowing
Flexbox, but knowing it reflexively to the point where they don't have to think about
it. And like, that's way more badass than almost any other tutorial or video course
is going to get you totally. I like what you said about what you're doing for the person,
the user that comes to you for help with whatever it is. I've made it sound all rosy, but there's
been ups and downs as there's going to be in any business. I went through a pretty dark
time when I was just pretty discouraged, pretty depressed. I got out through that, but I realized
thanks to the help of Alex, Amy's partner in 30x500, that I kind of lost track. I'd
lost sight of the customer. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about how my
business is going to help me and worrying about my own income, which is, it varies wildly.
And I'd completely lost sight of the customer. And as soon as I kind of locked back on, on
to them, like how I am helping people, then I got out of that slump, got out of that rut
that I was in, you know?
How did you manage to do that?
The 30x500 course gives you basically a way of doing customer research where you're studying
questions people ask and forums and problems people have. And you're looking for pain,
basically. You're looking for, you know, what is the problem that people are having? And
then your job is to go and fix it for them. Go and make something that can make that pain
go away. So I started just doing that a little bit every day. It mostly was a mental thing,
just kind of re-centered me. If you've done any pottery or seen any pottery, if you're
trying to make a pot and it's not centered, it's going to, you know, spin and fly all
over the walls. So you got to really be centered on the customer, centered on the person, on
the people you're trying to help.
And if you don't, things are gonna get out of whack pretty fast. That happened to me.
I've been through similar periods with indie hackers. I'm just looking at my internal metrics
and my internal goals and my to-do list and everything to do with me, which is pretty
unforgivable for something like indie hackers because it's a giant community. It's literally
a product that's made of people. And yeah, there's some code there, but it's really the
people who power everything. And what I've been doing recently is also directly related
to how I met you, which is I'll just take some time to just read the forum, go through
the product directory, read through Twitter. And whenever anybody's doing anything cool,
I just send a DM and I'm like, hey, let's talk. So we spoke maybe a month ago and it
was just cool talking to you and learning about what you're doing. I don't even have
really an agenda besides just finding out more about what you're up to and just learning
about it. And I think as a side effect of that, I end up saying, okay, this is how indie
hackers is affecting people and this is what people are working on and this is why people
are motivated. And it's contagious. If people are excited to achieve some goal, whether
it's getting better at Flexbox or making money or achieving like freedom so they can quit
their job, that's kind of infectious. And when you talk to people, you're like, okay,
yeah, this is why I'm doing this thing. I'm reminded of why I'm doing it. And people have
all sorts of ideas and suggestions. And it's just way more fun, I think, if you can find
a way to bake in that social interaction and talking to people. So you're not just like
heads down coding all day or heads down marketing or building all day.
Totally. See that, that's a good fit for you. For me, if I was talking to people all day
long, I would hate it. For me, I would rather be heads down coding all day. And that's,
I think that's cool that you can have a successful business that is a good match for you.
How did you acquire all the skills to do this? Because I'm looking through your games. Like
right now I'm literally playing Flexbox zombies and like the graphics are super legit. Like
these are professional level graphics. You've got a storyline in here too. Like you're a
good writer. Like where does one acquire the set of skills needed to make a full game like
this by yourself? And what are the set of skills? Like what else is there besides writing
and graphics?
Let's see. Writing's huge. I got the writing skill just from reading a ton as a kid and
as an adult. I love fiction, you know, I love sci-fi and I read a lot. And I think when
you do that, you just naturally become a pretty good writer. There's art. I'm an okay artist.
I'm not amazing. You know, I like to sketch things out and for Flexbox zombies, I wanted
to do it right. I wanted to make it, all my games just really awesome. So I actually hired
a professional game artist, a concept artist to create the final work. You know, so I'd
work with him. My role is a bit more of an art director, I guess you could say.
It's like you're giving him like storyboards and sketches and he's turning it into like
this final product, which kind of looks like a, I don't know if you ever watched Samurai
Jack, it was a show on Cartoon Network, maybe in like the nineties, but the theme of Flexbox
zombies looks exactly like that. It's super cool.
I'll check that out. But yeah, so I would work with him and I realized I had done all
the things myself for the first one and it turned out okay. But I realized if you can
hire people, maybe not full time, if your business isn't ready for that, but contractors,
people who are better at certain things than you are, then you can get a way better end
result. I did all the animations myself for that game and Grid Critters. And then for
Service Workies, I hired a professional game animator, you know, to take it to the next
level and add way more polish than I could have done on my own. So I think as an entrepreneur,
it's good to have a nice breadth of skills and maybe deep on a couple of areas like I
am with code and maybe writing, but areas where you're not as deep as you maybe want
to be, there's no shame in outsourcing part of it, you know, to contracting out parts
of it.
And how do you outsource like an artist or hire an artist? Like where do you go to find
a good artist? Do you like test out artists? How much does this actually cost you as like
a bootstrapper who basically is burning cash?
A lot. I've probably hired 10 different artists at this point. I go browse artstation.com.
I look for art that's got, you know, the style and the personality that I like. And then
I reach out to him and say, Hey, are you doing any contracting right now? And a lot of times
they're not, but if they are, then I'll have them do one piece, usually a blog post illustration,
and those can range. I've had some artists do a single illustration for 80 bucks. I've
had an artist want to do it for two grand for a single illustration and it's just all
over the place. But yeah, I try them out. And if the price is good and if their work
is incredible, then I go with them.
What would you estimate it costs to do all of the art for a game like Flexbox Zombies,
which has dozens and dozens of chapters and this cool character and like this little wise
wizard guy who's guiding you and giving you instructions. I mean, this is like a fully
fledged, everything is well designed.
If you don't count my own time spent into it, like just the amount I paid to contractors
on that one, I think it was about over a little over 10,000.
Oh, that's actually not that bad. It could be much worse.
Not too bad. We tried to, you know, limit it, but then on a game like Service Workers,
when there's way more characters. So Google sponsored that game. So I had basically unlimited
budget. They reached out to me and said, Hey, we want you to teach service workers and you
can keep the game. I was like, okay, sounds good. Deion Almer, who I was, I've been a
fan of forever, is the one that reached out. He's the manager of Google Chrome. So they
paid for the whole thing. So I went crazy with it. I probably spent 170,000 in contractors
between animations. I hired this German composer guy to write custom music and sound effects.
I got it all out. You know, I took it to the next level, which was really, really fun.
This is another, I think, example of why it pays to do something that's unique because
okay, maybe you're not the only person making coding games, but there's really not very
many people who are doing it. And certainly not many people who are doing it like full
time willing to put in as much effort as you are. And so if Google is sitting in their
boardroom trying to think about like, what are we, what are we going to do to like advertise
service workers? Can we do a game? Like, is anyone making a game? They're gonna do a search
and there's not going to be that many people who come up beside you, you know, and you're
going to be like the name of the crop. And so, so much of like the sort of arbitrary
sort of lucky benefits will fall into your lap because you're doing this thing that no
one else is doing. And I think it's one of the biggest reasons why if you're an eddy
worker, like you kind of want to just do things that are unique. If all else is equal, like
don't copy what everybody else is doing. The pressure to copy other people are doing is
immense, especially if you're like going off the rails, you're doing your own thing. It's
kind of like you want to look around and say, okay, you know, someone else is doing XYZ,
I must do XYZ. They're making a paid course. Like I must make a paid course. But I think
if you have a little creativity and you anchor to the problem that you're solving, like you're
still solving the same problems as other courses, you're helping people learn, but the solution
you're being as creative as possible. You're injecting your own like art style into it
and your own format into it. There's no reason to make your solution to problems the exact
same as somebody else's. And I think that differentiation, that courage, I guess, to
do your own thing is kind of what helps you accrue all the luck and all the benefits.
Totally. And it's a good, it's a good match for me. And when you find a good match, you
don't have to pretend or you don't have to like act like somebody else. Like if I was
just trying to make videos, I would suck at it. You know, I think I've made a couple of
videos and they take me like three weeks. Whereas one of my friends, Tyler McGinnis,
he can bust out a video in an hour, you know? So videos isn't a great medium for me, but
I've always loved video games and I got in trouble as a kid for playing it too much.
You got to find a good match, but to find a good match for you, I think you have to
try a lot of different things. Like I fell in love with the idea of pottery because my
dad is a potter, an artist. And so I bought a kiln. I bought a pottery wheel. I installed
them on my basement and then they sat there collecting dust for years and costing me wife
points on a regular basis. I probably could have found a cheaper way to try that, but
you got to try a lot of things to find something that's just really good.
So let's talk about your first paid game. You talked about the fact that you built it.
It took you what, like six, seven months to build grid critters.
So flexbox zombies was six months. Grid critters was nine months.
And you're, you basically didn't make a dime and those first like seven plus nine months.
And here you were hoping that you're going to have this big launch and that people are
going to pay you money for grid critters. What was your initial price for grid critters?
So I did a pre-order price. The pre-order price was 145 bucks. The full price was 229
when I launched. I've since kind of felt bad. Like I'll see, I would see someone purchase
it from UK and have to pay VAT tax, you know? And so they'd be paying $279 and I was like,
ah, it's just too much. So I took a page out of Henry Ford's book where he just kept lowering
the price of his cars and revenue. Every time he lowered the price, revenue would go up
and he'd just keep finding ways to make his cars better and make them more efficiently.
So I did that, lowered the price to 179 and sales went up.
And then last year I did, I put the game on sale to 99 bucks and sales have been way more
steady and way better since I did that. So I've just kind of left the price up. I recently
built a coupon feature so that I can give additional coupons. I have this idea where
I want to, if someone beats a game, I want to give them what I'm calling mastery coin,
maybe 10 mastery coins and maybe they're worth a dollar each. I don't know. But then you
could enter the coupon and take additional discounts off of the next game. So even more
incentive for people to finish the game to complete the course. So then the next ones
will be cheaper and they can just, or they can use it for swag. That's my idea. Eventually,
you know, buy a mastery games t-shirt using the mastery coin you've earned or whatever.
So I built this coupon feature and the day after I shipped it, I got an email from a
10 year old kid who had hacked it. He sent me this video. He was a genius. 10 years old
and he used this program. He proxied all his requests to this program called burp suite
that basically doctors the, the server responses. He used that to trick my UI into thinking
that grit critters was a free game, not a paid game. So he got the, he got the free
enrollment screen, but he was too honest to click it. So he sent me the video and said,
and I freaked out, you know, of course like, oh shoot, I didn't make this very safe. Luckily
I thought to verify had he clicked it, it would have verified on the server, you know,
before and enrolling him in the game. But he didn't know that he thought he had gotten
through and he was just honest. So I replied to him and I, I told him, I'd granted him
access to grit critters for free. You know, I was so inspired by the kid. Like when I
was 10, like I said, I was just trying to get out of weeding the carton. I wasn't hacking
web games for free. Crazy. So impressed. It's a, it's really cool to have to be inspired
by the people that you're serving also. One of the cool things about building for the
internet is you just get so much scale. If you're building something that reaches, you
know, 10,000, 100,000, a million people, then it actually becomes pretty likely that you're
going to experience like one in a million events. Like you're going to meet extremely
impressive people are extremely rare. Things are going to happen that are, you know, both
good and bad. I've had all sorts of crazy bad things happen with any hackers, but like
also a lot of really amazing people. And so there's kind of this like understated adventure
aspect to doing something ambitious and building something for as many people as possible where
you're just going to meet really inspiring people like that. And it sounds like you were
your ambition is sky high, right? You want to have a whole suite of games and you want
to have like a store and you want to basically spread as far and wide as possible. How do
you do this by yourself? Nobody plan on hiring other people or is it just going to be the
Dave Getty show forever? Right now it's just me with some contracting help, but I would
love, that's where I want to go is have a small studio, me and maybe four other people
just working full time, cranking out these games. Now I've been writing tools for myself
that make building new games easier and more efficient, but nothing can be having help.
So yeah, I would love a little tight studio where we're just cranking out these mastery
games.
This is like the programmer's dream. I know so many programmers who like they started
coding because as kids they played games and they're like, I would just love to make a
game and they get older. They're like, Oh, working for like a game dev studio sucks.
I guess I'm just going to be a web developer, but you figured out a way to like be a web
developer and make games and do it for yourself and design everything with like without needing
permission from anyone. And you're actually getting paid for doing this because like you
didn't decide to give your game away for free. Like, you know, my brother did and asked for
donations. Like you decided that you're actually going to charge money for this thing.
I don't know if the donation model works.
I don't think it does. Look at how much he's making compared to you. It's clearly not.
I see a lot of like Patreon pages and things, people trying to go with the donation. Yeah,
I don't know. I think, so I read this, I can't remember which book it was, but basically
the idea was over time, the amount of gratitude someone feels towards you for something you
gave them decreases. And over that same time, the amount that you feel that they should
be grateful to you goes up. So there's this disconnect, you know, you give someone something
awesome. Over time, they feel less and less grateful. You feel like they should be more
and more grateful. And so donations come in a weird spot where it's like, okay, they can
kind of clean their slate of that reciprocity by donating five bucks. And then they feel
like, Hey, I got what I wanted out of this, you know, whereas a paid game sets a price
or a paid product sets, okay, if you really want to reciprocate, this is what this is
worth.
Yeah, I think there's something about donations where like, you do feel really like kind of
smug and good about yourself if you donate to something. Like I did this person a favor,
I didn't have to pay and I donated. Whereas if you pay a price, like, Oh no, no, this
is fair. They charge, you know, a hundred bucks and I paid a hundred bucks and it's
fair and you don't feel like, you know, you've done this person a huge favor. I think also
there's something to be said for when you put a price on your thing, you're telling
people like this is valuable. You're kind of telling people that you think what you
did was great. Um, whereas if you don't put a price on what you're, you're producing and
you just sort of ask for money, you're kind of telling people, Hey, this isn't really
valuable, but you know, I would love your money. I would love for you to help me. And
I think that's like the first scraps a little bit. Yeah. This is the wrong message to send
if you've built something that like actually is going to help make people badasses or make
people money or help them solve whatever problem.
Oh yeah. Someone buys grid critters for 99 bucks and they master CSS grid within the
next 10 days. They're going to get that back so fast, whether they're building their own
side projects or working for the man. I think there's a huge value proposition in there.
And I think any product that you make needs to have something like that where it just
in, it transforms the customer into someone who can make money themselves. I was talking
to Tara Reed. She's a business where she's teaching people, uh, how to be like no coders.
So if you don't know how to code, but you want to build apps regardless, like you take
her course, I think it's like a couple thousand dollars and she teaches you everything from
how to use, yeah, using Webflow and Airtable and Zapier and all sorts of different no code
products.
And it works really well because she doesn't just teach people how to use the tools. She
teaches people kind of like the business mindset. In fact, she teaches that first. Like you
start off with the marketing and the growth type stuff before you start building anything.
And one of the biggest lessons that she talks about teaching people is like this idea of
positioning. Like how do you position and market what you're doing in such a way where
people are actually going to feel like it's worth something of value and pay what it's
worth rather than people are going to think that it should be free or only worth like
five bucks.
And then when I look at what you did, whether it's intentional or not, like the positioning
is really, really solid. A lot of online games are free. You know, if I think about just
like getting the game, I'm like, this should be free. You know, or if I think about like
an app, I'm thinking like this should be a dollar, but like your game is despite being
games like you pretty much position them as if they are courses, which they really are
giving the same value as a course. And for whatever reason, when people see a course,
they immediately think, Oh yeah, this is worth like a few hundred bucks. You know, this is
worth a hundred bucks at least. And you know, I mentioned earlier, like me interviewing
other people who've made courses on the podcast, I've interviewed Wes Boss, he's got six or
seven premium courses that just teach you things like how to master react or how to
use, you know, learn beginner JavaScript or how to learn node or whatever. And he charges
like 80, 90 bucks for these courses. And he's got like, literally, tens of thousands of
people who are acclimated to paying that much money to learn something really specific.
And so I love the fact that like, even though there really weren't that many examples of
paid games, like, yeah, maybe you weren't the first person to ever make a game to teach
people to code, but like how many of those games are charging a hundred dollars? One
of the things I did with Flexbox zombies, even though it was free on the signup page,
I put the price, I put $229 and then it was crossed out and then said free. So that's
a little something I got from Sean West. He basically says full price or free. And if
you're going to give away something for free, make sure people know what the value of it
is. Super smart. Love it. Yeah, I signed up for
that and I thought I was in the wrong place because like I thought Flexbox was free. Flexbox
zombies is free. And I saw the little price, but crossed out and I saw free. I'm like,
Oh, that's super clever. Because now I feel much better about what I'm like, I just got
some value. And now it's like probably that's even more social capital where I'm like, man,
like Dave really hooked me up. You know, I got in here for free. I don't even know why
it's free. I'm like, Oh, did I sneak in on the right weekend? Is there a promo? You know,
maybe it's not always going to be for a better signup like right now, because this $229 price
tag. Yeah. It's a, it sets the expectation that,
Hey, these things are premium products. They take a long time to make. It's worth a lot.
It's going to do a lot for you, but this one's on the house, you know? Yeah. So how did you
launch this game? Like you spent nine months making it, you had an email list, you had
pre-orders, were you like posting on product times or paying in your friends on Twitter
to tweet about it? How do you get like that first group of users in the door?
You know, by the time I launched that paid game, I had 12,000 people on my email list
and I was sending every couple of weeks, I was sending an email showing behind the scenes,
like, look at this cool concept art for this cute little critter. So I was kind of like
building the hype while sharing stuff. I was just excited about so that when I launched
it, people were like, yes, it's finally here. A little bit like a Kickstarter, you know,
you can start something. If it's something you care about, you're excited to see all
the updates. So I was given the updates, kind of the reverse order. I was given the updates
and then I opened up the pre-order and then I launched. I didn't know what I was doing.
It was just an experiment. And if it didn't work out, I was going to go back to working
at a job that I was really hopeful that it would work out. And people would say to me
like, oh, it's no big deal. If it fails, you can just get a job. To them, that sounds fine.
But to me, that sounded awful.
I'm just curious how people are finding this besides this word of mouth. And if I search
for something like Learn CSS Grid, Grid Critters isn't on page one, but it's on page two. And
it's like not that far from the top. Pretty close to getting there. Like if anyone searches
on CSS Grid, they're going to find your game. There's no free version of Grid Critters,
is there?
No. I have in the past made the first chapter free so people could get a taste. And I'm
probably going to do that again because I think that was, you know, people, they play
the first little bit, they get the introduction to the story. And people love stories, you
know, before branding these as mastery games, I called them story courses. I think the story
gets you hooked like, Oh, what's going to happen? These little critters are on a dying
planet. They need me to go and save them. You know, I'm going to do that again, I think.
I love that idea. I mean, also you were mentioning, you know, CSS Tricks has like all these resources
where you can just basically get like a little table that tells you, Hey, here's how to use
CSS Grid, or here's how to use Fuxbox whenever you forget something. And like you're so good
at making these visuals and these interactions. Like you could probably make a much cooler,
better resource than anywhere else on the internet. And even have like these little
animations that are happening when people are like making resources like a little interactive.
And I bet you that would be like super shareable. Anytime anyone has a grid question, they could
like link someone to that. And that thing could be can upsell for one of your games.
I'm just like my marketing brain. It's just like, what could you do? Give people like
a little taste of how amazing your game is? Because like right now there's no way for
them to get into it.
I know. I need to do more things like that. Like I said, I tend to just go into build
mode instead of marketing mode. I really need to optimize the SEO. I'm pretty sure I could
get grid critters to the first page at least if I had tried. But yeah, marketing, you can't
neglect it.
Unless you've got a super shareable game that everybody wants to share. I thought you're
doing anything.
Even then sales, like I said, are up and down. The only correlation or only pattern I've
noticed is when I send an email to my audience, then I make more sales. It's almost a one
to one relationship.
And what kind of emails are you sending to people? Like when do you send an email to
your 70,000 subscribers?
Usually I send it when I write a blog post. So I'll write a blog post and I'll send an
email saying, Hey, here's a new blog post. Like I just, I just launched one called how
to practice CSS, which shares a story about how my dad taught me how to learn oil painting
by practicing great work from the masters. In my twenties, I applied that to learning
CSS. I'd go and do great websites that I thought were beautiful and I'd try to build them myself
with CSS. So I go into more detail into that, but I'll send a blog post and then what I
like to call just cool finds, just random stuff that I have found throughout the last
couple of weeks. Most of it's usually tech, but sometimes I'll put a board game or a video
game, a soda that I really like. It's just kind of like whatever, like here's something
I like. You might like it too.
I mean, you're basically marketing. This is marketing. You writing this blog post and
then sending it out to your newsletter. It sounds like you're already doing a lot of
it. I just got to do it steady.
Exactly. And it's such a good point about how to learn CSS and master CSS by basically
doing the same thing an artist does. Find something good and copy it. I talked to you
Sam Parr who runs the hustle and the hustle trends and also a podcast called My First
Million. And he's like, he's got this really quirky strategy for learning how to write
where he's like, he literally, what was it? I think the catcher in the rye. He like read
the whole book and then he copied it by hand. He like wrote every single word of the book
and a notebook. He's like, Oh, I want to learn how to write. So I just copied that.
And I was like a bunch of like, and he's a super good writer. You know, like he writes
good stuff and like he swears by that or I'm learning how to code and like design stuff.
I did the exact same thing you did. I would go online when I was much younger. I would
see a website and that website's amazing. And then I would try as hard as I can to just
make the exact same website. And I did that probably a hundred times. And it's like, well
now like CSS is second nature to me and I have much better design sense, but like I
got that from just literally copying all the things that I thought were great.
And you're going to get really good at what I call in that article broad strokes, you
know, painters, they don't start with like fine details. You start, they start with these
super broad strokes. The artist Delacroix has this famous study of lions where he'll
draw like the broad shape of the lion in just a few quick broad strokes. And then he goes
in later and fills in the details. And you can do that same thing with CSS and the broad
strokes is the overall layout, the overall composition, which you're going to get with
grid mostly and then also flex box. And so that's why I picked those two things in my
games so you can master those broad strokes. So you can lay out the overall composition
really fast and then focus on little details without having to pause and go look things
up.
That's such a great analogy. I'm looking at your blog post right now and there's like
the sketch of the lion at the top. And it's just like, it's basically like, you know,
six or seven ovals and circles and it looks just like a lion. It's better than any lion
I could ever draw on. It's like these basic broad strokes. Super cool. Well, listen, Dave,
I could probably talk to you about this stuff forever. So much stuff in my notes. I want
to talk about like, how do you come up with an idea for a game and like these analogies
from fun games to like cool programming concepts. So maybe at some point I'll have to have you
back on and we can hop into all these other topics. But to sort of wrap things up here,
you've been doing this for years now. You've had a long career as an indie hacker. You're
full time, you're on your own. What do you think is something people should take away
from your journey if they're just now getting started as indie hackers?
Watch Disney movies? No, I think that's my biggest thing is just try something. Just
start. Don't wait around for the perfect plan. Find a plan and you're not going to find out
if it's good until you try it. So try it but don't be married to it. Try to find something
that pick something you're already kind of passionate about like I was with video games.
Try to find a way to make money from it. What about somebody who has gotten to the
point where you were when you quit your job? Where you're like, you know what? I am going
to try this thing. But then like you said, there's all these challenges, right? Things
you might expect, things you might not expect. There's hard times where you're like, I should
just quit. This is ridiculous. A side project is a great, almost risk-free
way of trying something out seen if you get some traction. But don't build the whole thing
and then try to launch it to crickets. Start with the audience. Start sharing what you're
working on. Start building up your email list and then you're going to be in a great spot.
If you do want to quit your job, you're going to have people that already dig what you're
working on. And when you launch it, you're probably going to make a few bucks and be
in a way better spot.
Love it. So basically, number one lesson is to try and if you're having trouble trying,
start small with a side project where you can really just start with your audience and
dip your toe in the water and you're not risking your job and your livelihood just to try something
out.
Yeah, totally. Oh, real quick, speaking of the coupon feature. So before we talked, I
made a coupon that your listeners can use for good critters if they want to check it
out. So it's just indie hackers, one word. And that knocks. So the game's already on
sale, 99, and that knocks 30% off of that.
Nice. All right. Use code NDHACKERS on gridcritters.com. Get a significant percentage off. 10-year-olds
out there don't hack it. Don't try to get it for free. Cool. I appreciate it. I'm sure
listeners will too. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Dave.
So good talking to you.
You as well. Where can people go to find out everything that you're working on? Because
you've got numerous games and blog posts and stuff that you're writing.
Yeah. So I recently rolled it all into one single URL. So it's mastery.games. So my blog's
there. All my games are there. Um, newsletter sign up, all of it.
All right. Mastery.games. Dave, thanks again for coming on the show.
Okay. Thanks. Talk to you later.