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 talk to these IndieHackers to learn about the ideas, the strategies,
and the opportunities they're taking advantage of to get ahead, so the rest of us can do
the same.
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a quick rating for us on Apple Podcasts.
In today's episode, I'm talking to Jordan O'Connor, the founder of Closet Tools.
Jordan is one of the more successful solo founders I've ever had on the show, so we
dive into the mechanics of how his business works.
But in addition to that, one of the recurring themes that came up during our conversation
was how important it is to realize that as a founder, not only can your business help
people, but your business has to help people if you really want to have any shot at succeeding.
Enjoy the episode.
So you are the self-proclaimed winner of IndieHackers.
You tweeted about this earlier this year, that if you go to the IndieHackers directory
of products, and you sort by highest revenue first, and then filter so it only includes
solo founders who have no employees, and who have their revenue numbers actually verified
by Stripe, you come up at the top with your company Closet Tools.
So first of all, how much revenue are you generating?
Yeah, actually, it's pretty similar, probably back to when, well, when I posted that to
you, it was probably around like 35k, but it's up to like 38k a month now.
38k a month.
Okay, so that's crazy.
That's like $450,000 a year.
That is by far more than you can make at a normal job.
And again, this is you by yourself.
You have no co-founders, you have no employees.
I'm just picturing you in your living room, your underwear, just cutting away.
Yeah, I think the most wild thing is that just back in May, it was like 18k.
I started taking paternity leave in June.
And then we bought a new house in the end of August.
So I didn't do any code over the summer and the business doubled.
And I think that's probably the most crazy part of it.
I did do a lot of work before baby number three was born.
And I think that kind of led to it.
I did a lot of things that I knew was a lot of low hanging fruit that was going to draw
a lot of word of mouth kind of stuff.
So I like deployed all that right before we had baby and then I just kind of did email
support, which is like, you know, like a half hour a day or something like that.
And just kind of put it on the back burner and yeah, it was it's pretty crazy.
But to the point of the tweet, I mean, of course, there's Peter levels, right?
He's got two products that are like, number two and four or something like that.
So his combined, you know, efforts are way, you know, much larger than mine.
But I just thought it was funny at that time that, you know, going back a couple years
ago, I put out a post on indie hackers asking how to integrate Stripe with my product.
And I got some help from some users on there and to go from zero, not even knowing how
to integrate payments into my app to being, you know, the top solo product, basically
on the hackers is pretty, it's a pretty wild story.
Yeah.
And you mentioned, you know, baby number three, we're gonna get into this, but it's not like
you did this with like all the advantages and all the free time in the world like you
did this.
You had a bunch of kids, you know, wife, a job.
But before we talk about that, I want to talk about time, because it's pretty inspirational
that you're able to like double your revenue this year, while you run paternity leave,
while you really just weren't like working that many hours.
I think this is kind of one of the things that makes being an indie hacker is such a
big dream for a lot of people, which is that like your time is disconnected from your output.
So if you imagine like an employee, it's hard for any sort of employer to measure like how
valuable you really are for them.
If somebody is like, you know, a software engineer at Google, like how much money are
they making Google, they can't really tell.
And so they just kind of default to paying you for your time.
But if you're an indie hacker, that means you're selling directly to your customers.
And like your customers don't care at all how much time you're spending, like no one's
like, Hey, Jordan, you know, how many hours did you work today?
That's how much I'm going to pay for your product.
No, they're looking at the value that your product is providing them and they pay you
accordingly.
And it's just super straightforward, which means that your time doesn't matter anymore.
Like you can build something in a day that does really well and makes a lot of money.
And I just talked to James Traff a few episodes ago when he's making like, he's made like
$400,000, like a set of icons he built, you know, it wasn't that hard for him to make
these icons.
But on the flip side, you can also spend a whole year building something that ends up
not being valuable or helpful to others and make $0.
So as an indie hacker, it really is kind of a true test, like how much value are you actually
creating for other people?
And how much of that are you capturing?
Yeah, 100%.
You know, I think, I think that is the thing I think, you know, a lot of, you know, the
majority of Americans are employed.
And that is kind of the default mentality is that, oh, my time is what matters.
The time I spend on this thing is what matters.
That's what's valuable.
And you know, really, the value is not the time you spend turning the screw.
But I think, you know, like the cliche is, you know, your value is knowing which screw
to turn.
And I think the value is the value you provide, not the time you spend on it, I agree 100%.
So you also gave a talk recently, I watched a video that you posted to indie hackers about
this talk.
And you were talking to people about how they can get started and maybe, you know, do what
you've done.
And you said that starting a business comes down to three things.
Number one, focus on what you're interested in.
Number two, build valuable skills.
And number three, help people.
And I want to talk about that last one, because that last one is exactly what you're referring
to when you say, you know, which screw do you turn?
You know, how do you actually be valuable to others?
But I think even that framework itself, I think is unintuitive to a lot of people, because
most people would say that being like a business owner is kind of a selfish thing, you know,
you're in it for yourself.
Why do you think they're being helpful and being valuable to others is so crucial?
Being valuable to people, I mean, that's, that's just how you get paid in general.
I mean, like, if you don't actually provide any value, like nobody's actually gonna pay
you.
That's kind of like ground level.
But I think ultimately, you know, that's any business, if you look at it from a pure standpoint,
like it is helpful.
I mean, like, as much as, you know, like, Amazon gets flack for, you know, being this
capitalistic monopoly or whatever, I mean, it's pretty helpful that you can get anything
you want in the world in two days for free shipping, you know, at your doorstep, like
that's insane.
And the value that that provides is just kind of shrouded in this, like, you know, Amazon's
a monopoly, but the value is just insane.
And so, you know, ultimately, that's what business is, you know, you're providing, you
know, great value for people.
And so if you don't come at it from that perspective, you just come up from a perspective of like,
I need to make money, and I have this skill, and I'm going to spend a bunch of time doing
it.
That's like the wrong approach.
The right approach is to figure out what people actually need, you know, figure out what actually
is helpful to them, and do that, you know, I think the actually helpful thing is something
that a lot of people get wrong, because they try to be helpful.
But a lot of times, they just end up doing work that's not actually valuable to that
person, they'll try to fix complaints, but they're not actually solving like real deep
fundamental problems with you know, with their skills.
So yeah, I think it's an interesting topic for sure.
And I think it applies to more than just business, it's pretty much anything where you want to
interact with others, or you want something from others, like there's a post on indie
hackers recently, and there's somebody sort of complaining about not being able to get
engagement on the indie hackers forum.
And this post gets made, it has to be made like once a month for the last three years
where someone says, hey, I'm making posts, I'm not getting responses, what's going on?
And I always take the time to like look back through that person's recent posts.
And it's almost always the same thing, like their posts aren't helpful to other people,
they're just sort of asking for help, like, hey, can I get a review on this?
Hey, can I launch a pot of chunk?
Can I get an upvote?
And it's like, well, of course, that's not going to help because people are busy, they
have got stuff going on in their lives, like, they're not going to just go out of their
way all the time reliably, to just like freely give you help, you got to think about how
you're going to give them something of value, and you'll get something in return.
And I'm not talking about any sort of karmic, you know, put out good vibes into the universe,
and then the universe will just magically open up its arms.
I think you just have to be sort of clever about it, and figure out how you can help
other people in a way that helps you.
So like, what you're talking about is like, you just do something that's extremely valuable
for people, to the point where they'll give you money for that thing, and like, that's
a win-win, you've helped them, and they've helped you, and it works.
Or you can be like more indirect about it, like this podcast, people can listen to this
podcast, and they can learn a whole bunch of business lessons for free and hear interesting
stories.
And like, that's great for them.
And even though I'm not getting paid, like, it's valuable for me, because like, I get
to build an audience, I get more traffic to indie hackers, I get to meet cool people
like you and talk to you.
And like, it's kind of a one-win there too.
So I think it's not just business, the core part of any sort of interactions with other
people is thinking about how you can help them, but do it in a way where you're going
to be helped also as a side effect.
Yeah, 100%.
I think like that talk you mentioned, you know, that was kind of my core point is like,
you helping other people is also building your skills and your experience as well.
You know, so I think if you, if you just default to, I'm going to help other people, you are
building yourself up to, you know, you get a lot of benefit, but even if they don't pay
you, you know, even if it's not like a direct, like, one to one, you spent this many hours,
they paid for this many hours, like just indirectly, you're going to grow and you're going to figure
out what you like to do, what you don't like to do.
What's the best way to do this?
What's the wrong way to do this?
You know, that type of stuff.
Yeah.
And I think this is such a rare, like, skill.
Really it's like a way of looking at the world and business in particular, where you kind
of take the blinders off.
We all have these kind of blinders on where we have acclimated to the value that we get
from others.
You know, we all have running water, but we're not blown away constantly by the fact that
we have running water.
We just kind of expect it.
You know, we all fly on airplanes.
We're not blown away by the fact that airplanes can fly as places.
We just sort of complain about like the slight inconveniences.
But if you really focus on like the full exchange and you don't, you take the blinders off,
you don't like let yourself acclimate to the kind of the value that you're getting, the
world's amazing.
And we're constantly interacting with all these different businesses, which are really
just groups of people out there who are working really hard to make our lives better.
And I think you need to be able to see the world this way if you want to be a founder,
because otherwise you're going to start like a really selfish business and you're not going
to focus enough on helping other people and providing value to them.
And you're not going to understand why nobody wants your thing.
Yeah, yeah, I think you know, it's the same thing for closet tools, right?
The core selling point, at least initially was, hey, this is going to save you a few
hours a day.
You know, that's the core tool, basically automate sharing items and we can get into
the you know, how the product works and stuff like that.
But you know, it's going to save you a few hours a day and is that you know, it's a $30
a month product is saving a few hours a day worth a dollar a day?
Sure, of course it is.
It's an easy sell, you know, the product pretty much sells itself, because that's pretty much
the basic fundamental help that it's providing for people.
So they can spend the time, you know, with their kids or doing other things like, you
know, there's a lot of other aspects of selling on Poshmark, you know, you're shipping out
items, you're interacting with buyers, you're negotiating stuff like that.
So you know, to have all your time tied up in sharing, which is what calls the tools
you know, you're spending a lot of time doing things that aren't necessarily directly productive.
And so yeah, that that core sell is just so valuable.
I mean, people would probably pay, you know, I mean, if you're just thinking of dollars
per hour, like if you were paid, you know, very low, like $10 an hour, that's worth,
you know, three hours would be 30 bucks a day, you know, and you know, that's kind of
the upper limit of like what this tool provides.
And I charge a dollar a day.
And it's like, no brainer, it's an easy sign up.
So that's, you know, that's part of the reason why it does so well.
Okay, so let's get into the story behind how you started it.
Because I think, you know, in addition to illustrating how you can provide something
of value to people who are going to pay you for it, your story also kind of lays out a
path for how to do this as somebody who feels like the deck is stacked against you.
You don't have any time, you don't have any experience, you don't have any money, you
know, how do you make it work regardless and become an indie hacker.
And the reason I say this is because you graduated from school with a lot of debt.
And then you got married, you had kids young, you said you're on baby number three, you
had a full-time job.
I'm not even sure you knew how to code when you started doing this.
Give me the story here of like how you decided to go from all those disadvantages and to
become an indie hacker rather than taking the path that I think most people would take,
which is just to work a full-time job for the next 30 years and try to pay off your
debt and just go the normal route.
Yeah, so I did know how to code, but I didn't know anything about web development.
I knew how to code in C. So I actually graduated as a electrical engineer.
And I did, I mean, essentially, you could kind of wrap it up as like robotics code.
You know, I did a lot of like, you know, moving motors at my employment, I interface with
lasers and did a whole bunch of data analysis and stuff like that.
So that was kind of the field I was in.
But yeah, I mean, to your point, I mean, I spent, you know, the first three years of
quote unquote, indie hacking, just learning and practicing new skills, I did not make
a single dollar for three years.
I learned web development.
I did.
I learned SEO.
I did SEO for other people.
I made websites for other people.
I made it a full fledged back and front end app for somebody that had a trucking business,
did it all for free.
You know, and so, you know, I used all of those kind of stages, mostly just helping
other people for free to kind of learn these skills.
And so, you know, it kind of got to the point, like you said, I had a ton of debt, and like,
it was ridiculous.
And so, you know, I was the only person employed, my wife stayed home with the kids, you know,
just off the single income.
My debt, combined with her debt was taking up over half of our income.
And so, like, we were just like breaking even basically every month, and I was like, this
is not going to work.
So I either maybe get like, you know, a second job, or, you know, I got to figure out something
that works.
So, you know, this is like three years in, I get to this point where I'm like, I need
some extra money, or I'm going to be in this situation, like you said, for like the next
30 years.
If you back up a little bit, I was mostly just like, like we talked about earlier, just
being helpful, my wife actually jumped on Poshmark, and she's selling clothes and stuff
like that.
And she started spending a bunch of time sharing and, you know, interacting with the platform.
And I had just learned some web code, I was like, Hey, I think I can, you know, automate
some of that, like I can free up some of your time.
And so I did it, I wrote like a 30 line script, and I made a bookmark lip.
So like, in Chrome or something, you can actually put JavaScript in the bookmark, and you just
click it, and it executes the JavaScript.
So I made that, and I made it for my wife, and all of her friends who sold on Poshmark
did, that's actually how she started on it.
And so I gave it to all of them, and they thought it was the coolest thing since sliced
bread, because it was like, they can now click this one button, and it did, you know, it
saved them like a half hour.
And it wasn't smart, it wasn't like totally automatic, you know, there was a, you know,
it wasn't smart at all.
But you know, at a minimum, it saved them some time, and they thought it was super cool.
And so I, during the time that whole, you know, three years where I was learning new
skills and stuff like that, I was kind of just documenting journey on my blog, that
personal website.
And I wrote a blog post titled like, you know, Poshmark automation, or something like that,
Poshmark script or something like that.
After about a month or two, Google picked it up and started ranking it for some terms
related to Poshmark bots.
And I started getting emails from people saying like, Hey, what is this?
Like, how does it work?
How do I use it?
How do I, you know, how do I, you know, get it working on my closet and stuff like that?
And at that point, I was still so much in like the help mode that I didn't realize that
this was like a business.
I was just like, Oh, this is cool.
Like, you know, here's how it works, you know, like, here's how you get it working.
And you know, it was probably after like a good five to 10 people emailed me.
And you know, the combination of that and then getting to the point where I was like,
Okay, I need to do something that makes money.
That was when it kind of, you know, light bulb went on like, Oh, this, I can actually probably
sell this thing.
Probably it was like February 2018, I put a post up on the Poshmark subreddit.
And I said, Hey, here's this script.
It's free.
Here's how you use it.
And actually, I built a landing page where you just put in your email and then it redirected
to a page where it gave you the instructions on how to install it.
So I got all these people's emails.
And in exchange, I was like, Hey, give me feedback for what you would want to see this
thing do for you.
And from that one post, I got 200 signups for the free script, when I was within like
a day or two.
And so people tried it out for a few days and they were like, they were super excited.
And they gave me a bunch of feedback like, Hey, I want I wanted to do this, I wanted
to do this.
And then for the next month, I built out a front end for it.
And I you know, integrated stripe, which was actually probably the most difficult thing.
Because I had never I didn't even know how webhooks work.
I didn't know how the web work.
I didn't know how any of that stuff works.
I had to figure all this stuff out in like a month.
And then when I launched it, I had 10 paying customers right out of the gate.
And it's kind of just slowly grown from there.
And so that's, you know, that's kind of the origin story.
So let's talk about this helpful phase where you were just doing nothing but learning and
helping other people.
I know a lot of people who want to learn how to code.
I know a lot of people who want to learn how to pick up, you know, these different internet
skills, they want to learn how to write, they want to learn how to build an audience, how
to tweet, how to make YouTube videos or whatever.
And usually when I talk to people who want to learn these things, they're kind of focused
on like, how fast is it going to be, you know, it's gonna take me six months on how to code
is gonna take me a year, like how long is gonna take you spent three years just sort
of doing this stuff.
What was motivating you to actually do that because most people will give up after just
like a few months?
Yeah, so it was interesting.
Like when I first had this switch flip where it was like, I want to do something different.
Like I don't want to be in this job forever.
You know, like day one, I was like, I know I want to make some sort of app like I want
it to be like tech oriented.
So I knew that.
And so that's when I took a $15 Udemy course, and I learned basic HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
And you know, I did that for like three months.
And then I was for some reason, I knew about Hacker News back then, I was on Hacker News
and a post comes up.
And basically the core premises, code is the easy part, you need to learn how to do marketing.
That's actually the hard part, if you're trying to build something that you're trying to sell.
And so then I was like, Oh, I need to learn how to do marketing.
So then I found out about well, during the process of doing this, you know, I kind of
was exposed to SEO, like I said, from the closet to his origin story, I didn't really
know a lot about SEO at that point.
So I was like, Oh, like, I'm already kind of doing this, I'm going to go down the SEO
route.
And so I took a course from Viper Chill on Twitter, his course helped me tremendously.
That's kind of the pattern that I followed was like, I learned something.
And then I kind of executed on it.
So I learned something about taking a course kind of executed on it, did it for free for
other people, and then by the time I got to the point where I was like, dangerous enough,
I kind of learned that, oh, there's more pieces to this puzzle.
So then I would go learn the next thing.
And then I would, you know, get to the point where I was dangerous enough, and then I was
like, Oh, wait a minute, I need to know how to like, actually launch a product.
And I actually did that, I launched a physical product and Kickstarter that wasn't successful.
But you know, I kind of like, went through those different phases.
And then, you know, got by the time I got to closet tools, I had all these skills, and
I just put them all together, and it was, you know, not really that big of a task, you
know, it was it kind of just came naturally.
But I think the the core driver was, you know, I think I had a big chip on my shoulder, you
know, like you said, that the huge student loans, you know, I got kids, and you know,
I want to have I want them to have a really good life.
And now having gone over that hurdle, and you know, like we said at the beginning, making
38 k a month, you know, that chip is largely gone.
So I definitely don't have that massive drive anymore.
You know, I think that the level that I work at today is much less than I did back then.
So yeah, I think that was a huge driver, for sure.
So let's say you had to do this all over again.
But with the benefit of hindsight, you kind of know, okay, like this was helpful to do
this wasn't helpful to do, because a lot of people are trying to pick up all these skills.
And they don't necessarily have the patience to go through it for three years.
You know, what would be like your recommended path to pick up kind of the the stack of skills
you need to be a successful indie hacker?
Yeah, I mean, I think the course route is kind of underrated.
I think a lot of people don't have the confidence to bet on themselves to be able to capitalize
on what would be the cost of a course, you know, like the SEO course I took.
It was a stupid decision, but I maxed out a credit card on it, I put $2,500 down on
a credit card and paid for it.
You know, at the time, I was kind of like hiding in shame, like what did you just do?
But you know, now I'm to the point where I've made 100x on that investment.
I think the course route is very, it's definitely shortcut.
I think the other thing is taking action and actually practicing the skills, doing the
skills for free for people helps you figure out what you'd like to do and what you don't
want to do or like what works for you and what doesn't work for you because learning
what doesn't work for you is actually just almost more important than what you'd like
to do.
Because like, when I first started out, like I knew I knew I wanted to make apps.
But I know I knew I wanted to learn how to code that was easy.
But then when I started making websites for people, you know, as a as a service, then
some of the nuances came in where people are like, Oh, I don't like the way you designed
it this way.
I kind of want this.
And in the back of my mind, I'm like, Well, I know what I'm doing.
You don't like this, this is the way I want to do it.
And so I you know, you laugh, but like I did that like three times where like even with
SEO was like, here's it, here you go.
Like I want to dress you this way, they're like, No, like, let's do it like this.
And I'm like, you have no idea what you're doing.
I know what I mean.
I had to go down that road a few times before I was like, Oh, I need to do a product where
I make it.
And if you want to buy it, you can buy it.
But if you don't want to buy it, then you don't have to buy it.
And I can make it exactly how I want it.
And that's, you know, that's that's it.
So I had to go through that experience a few times before I really learned what, you know,
what was going to actually work for me.
There's plenty of people that a product doesn't work and a service works really well.
They just love working with people, they just want to do what they want, you know, like,
that's just not me.
Yeah.
And I think that action of going out and doing the work for people can help you figure that
out.
And I think people don't try things because they don't know if they're gonna like it or
not like it.
When really the opposite is what you should do, you should try it, even if you hate it,
even if it's the worst thing, you should at least commit to it and do it.
And that's going to help you figure out the path and you actually should take.
I had a stint in college where I was doing a lot of web design for people just like,
Hey, you need a website built?
Okay, I'm going to make it for you.
And I had the exact same like frustration where I got like really good at it.
I would make really good looking websites for people after a while.
And the people who had like no design sense whatsoever would start making all these suggestions
about how to change it and just make it ugly.
And like, I literally don't want to put this on my portfolio because it's embarrassing and
it's not fun.
And it's like a whole like class of activities or like skills where people like don't know
that they don't know what they're doing.
Like if you ask somebody to fly a fighter jet, like 100% of people will be like, I don't
know what I'm doing and I would crash.
Or if you ask somebody like, you know, like there's complex math equations, like 100%
of people who don't know would be like, I don't, I'm not good at math.
But when it comes to like design, for some reason, everybody thinks they're like an expert
product designer and that they have the best taste in the world.
And it's like, no, no, if you haven't practiced this, your design taste is garbage.
So I understand your frustration there.
Exactly.
You also mentioned the course route being the way to go.
And this also arises like arouses some strong feelings in me where I think there's a post
in Hacker News.
I forget it was called recently, but it's indicative of almost like a wider belief that
people have that teaching other people is somehow a disreputable thing to do.
And that it's this huge circular sort of thing where like, if you're teaching somebody what
to do instead of doing it yourself, like you must be a shyster, et cetera, and like, it's
like that it's a scam almost for anyone to buy any sort of courses online and that everybody
just some sort of course selling guru and no one's building real products.
But it's so dumb because it's like, there's a reason why people are willing to pay $2,500
for a course.
There's a reason why people are willing to pay $40,000 to go to like college.
Like, I don't think that, you know, trade opportunity worth it.
But it's because people are actually envisioning how these things like how this knowledge can
improve their lives.
In other words, how these things are valuable, which we talked about at the top of the show.
And like for you, like you're like a textbook case of like why it worked.
You took this course on SEO and then you learn skills that like made you a lot of money many,
many times over.
And I think from both sides of the equation, like, should you pay for courses?
Absolutely.
If you think that like you're going to use this course and like it's actually valuable
and you know how you're going to make money as a result of it, absolutely.
And should you sell courses or like do other sorts of businesses that are educational?
Like Indie Hackers is not a course business, but in effect, it's the same value to people
like the whole point of the website is to sort of educate and inspire people, maybe
not through like, you know, a traditional course, but like through interviews and podcasts
and a forum.
If you can help people and be on that side of the equation, I think it's super valuable.
So I like that, you know, your recommendation for how to go is just buy courses.
Really smart people have put out information and they've explicitly tailored it to teach
you how to pick up skills the easy way rather than spending like four or five years of your
own learning them.
If you can just buy that and skip ahead four or five years, like why not do that?
Yep, exactly.
I think one caveat I would say is another thing that the action and work does for you
is it kind of leads you to what courses you actually should take.
Some people might go out there and just like start buying up a bunch of courses like, Hey,
I'm going to learn all of this stuff.
But unless you actually take action on it, like I said, you don't know what you like
to do, what you don't like to do, but also like you don't have any problems to solve
with that thing.
So like when I got to the SEO part, I had already learned web design and you know how
to make websites, but now I don't know how to market this thing.
Now I got to figure out how to market this thing.
So then I learned SEO.
So like, I do think the action piece is just so crucial to learning your skills.
It's almost like learning to code.
I think a lot of people try to learn to learn to code in a vacuum where they're just like,
I just want to abstractly learn to code and it's like, well, there's like a million different
languages and frameworks and like little, like, how do you know what parts of coding
to learn if you don't, if you're not trying to build something, whereas people who like
are sort of pulled along, like they have a very specific vision.
They want to like build this website or this landing page.
And they're only trying to learn how to code to do that one specific thing.
Yeah, they have like all this hacky crappy code at the beginning, but they end up learning
like the right things because they're just looking up like, Oh, I need to put a form.
How do I put a form on here?
Oh, it needs to be able to submit.
Like how do I do that?
Oh, it needs a database, et cetera.
And like, that's the best possible starting place because not only are you going to learn
like the specific things that you need, but you're also going to be motivated to keep
going because you actually have some goal in mind for something you're trying to finish.
Yep.
And you also figure out what doesn't work because you try it and it doesn't work.
Yeah, exactly.
So anyway, you get to this point where you built up all these skills.
You're taking the courses.
Your wife is selling a lot of clothes, I guess, on Poshmark to help pay the bills.
And you realize like, this is something that you can help with going back to this theme.
Like you figured out a problem that somebody had, you figured out how you could be helpful
and provide value to them and you did it.
And what you got in return was basically a bunch of email addresses where you ask people,
hey, like if you put your email address in here, I'll give you this tool, but like first
you got to give me your email address.
What did you end up doing with all those emails?
Not much actually.
You know, I just, I, you know, I threw them on an email list, you know, I think it was,
I don't know what list that was using that then I use one called button down right now.
I just emailed them.
I think it was over the course of four weeks.
I may have emailed them like two or three times like, Hey, this is basically the first
one was like, Hey, give me feedback.
The next one was like, here's all the feedback you guys gave.
And you know, this is kind of the plan.
And then the last email was like, Hey, I implemented it.
Check it out.
You can buy it here.
Yeah, exactly.
From there, you know, I've kept that email list and that email list is actually only
then people that have signed up for the app.
I don't have any content based like sign up here for updates kind of thing.
It's purely just people that have tried the app or at least installed it in an account
from there.
The first couple months I still did use that Poshmark subreddit for another month or two.
I would launch a new feature and I would put it on there and be like, Hey, you can automatically
do this now.
Go check it out.
But then the Poshmark subreddit started not liking me because I was just doing a bunch
of self-promotion.
So they kicked me out.
So I couldn't use that anymore, but luckily, you know, the need was pretty drastic and
it's a very clicky kind of tight knit group and there was a lot of word of mouth.
So you know, I didn't need a huge list to start getting, you know, that traction and
people telling other people about it because it provided good value for it.
When I think about business, I think of it as kind of having four crucial parts.
And the order that you look at those parts matters a lot.
So most people want to start with the solution, whatever product or service they're building.
But what you really want to start with is the problem, which is, you know, who has this
problem?
What is the problem?
How valuable is it to them?
You know, what are they doing to solve it today?
Do they care enough to pay for it, et cetera, et cetera.
And you know, after that, you've got like the distribution channel.
How do they find you?
CrunchSpace, I was like Reddit and SEO and word of mouth.
But if you look at the problem kind of space here, which is these people are trying to
sell clothes on Poshmark and they need tools to help them.
I think that's kind of crucial to understanding why your business worked.
So why don't we talk about Poshmark for a minute, which is a very cool business.
I didn't know anything about it until very recently.
CrunchSpace describes it as the largest social marketplace for fashion where anybody can
buy, sell and share their style with others.
So what does that mean to share your style?
Is that just like a fancy way of saying clothes?
Yep.
Yeah.
100%.
I mean, I think, you know, they they've done the best they can to make the platform a lot
like social media.
It's also very picture oriented, so you can almost compare it to like Instagram.
And similar to Instagram, your closet tends to have some sort of vibe or, you know, style
of fashion, you know, and so that that's kind of what they push basically.
Yeah.
And so you're basically taking photos of like clothes in your closet, or maybe you wearing
your clothes and these are like used clothes and you sell them to other people who are
trying to get a discount on clothes because maybe they don't want to pay like three, $400
like these designer shoes.
I think if they can get them for like, you know, 100 bucks from somebody else on Poshmark.
Yep, exactly.
And that's what it primarily started out as and they've expanded to boutiques where they're
actually selling new clothes, but you know, it's it's not designer brand name prices.
And they also expanded to wholesale as well.
You can actually sign up for Poshmark wholesale and buy from Poshmark and sell you know, for
you know, for a little bit more.
But yeah, yeah, so that's it.
And so the way they've built the platform is really unique to basically just like social
media, you follow other closets and you have this main feed just like you would have on
my Twitter or Instagram.
And if you're a seller, if you don't share your items, the items don't show up in your
followers feeds.
Poshmark has kind of designed this engagement model where it kind of keeps people on the
platform.
People have to come back to see their feed updates, see if there's any, you know, like
new items or something like that.
And the sellers have to stay on the platform to like share their items and like interact
with buyers and stuff like that.
And another thing they do is they have parties.
So there's actually real time parties, where rather than sharing to your followers you
share to this party and there's a party feed and everybody's in there, you know, checking
out what you know, what people are selling and obviously the sellers are sharing to it.
They're trying to get their items seen.
And so they do all of these little things to get people in the app real time.
And so that's, that's kind of the reason why there's this arbitrage where you can cut that
time out for people.
I can automate certain things that allows them to make it seem like they're engaging
with the platform, but they're actually not, they're doing something else.
The computer's engaging with the platform.
That's why the tool is very unique to Poshmark.
You know, I don't think this works on like eBay or something like that, you know, where,
you know, it's not like that, even though it's a similar thing where you're selling products
on a website.
So that, that piece is what makes it unique for Poshmark.
You know, I think closet tools could easily be reproduced as some sort of engagement tool
for other social media platforms, you know, like a Twitter bot or something like that
where it's going through and liking items and stuff like you're liking posts and stuff
that, you know, that type of thing.
That's definitely more what it's like for sure.
So Poshmark is doing the thing that pretty much every major social network does, which
is it pulls out every bag, every trick and it's bag of tricks to try to ramp up engagement,
get people on the platform as long as possible, which is annoying to you as a seller, because
you're really just like trying to sell your clothes.
Like you just want to put your clothes up and then go do other things.
But like now you've got to come back and do all the sharing and join a party or whatever
it is you described.
And that just sucks, that's a lot of time.
So what closet tools does is it's a browser extension and you install it and it basically
does all this sharing for you.
Yeah, so initially and still largely, it started out as literally just clicking elements on
the page.
So like there's a certain order that you have to click items to share them.
There's like a share button and then you have to like share it to your followers or share
it to a party kind of thing.
So there's like two clicks per item.
And there's sellers that have 1,000 to 2,000 items and it would take them a half hour to
an hour to just go through once and share all of their items once to their feed.
And so that's literally what closet tools did.
The very first iteration was just grab all of the items, put them in an array and go
through it and click the elements 1, 2, 1, 2, and then that's what it did and it worked.
It helped them a lot.
Smoshmark has some limitations in place that make it so that you can't abuse the platform.
There's certain share numbers that if you cross over them, then you're at risk of getting
your closet shut down and stuff like that because you're basically just spamming things.
So that's something to keep in mind and that's a lot of what I have to do as a developer
is educating my users like, hey, this is kind of how you use this tool.
You can't just go ham with it, but it does really well for them and if there's certain
people like I said, those people with 2,000 items on the platform, they're making thousands
a month on Poshmark.
It's a full-time income for them and the tool helps them make even way more than that, which
is just a huge value for them.
So not only is it saving them time, but it's making up more money and that's part of the
reason why it's been so sticky for a lot of customers because they just can't imagine
living without it.
There are very few problems you can start a business to solve that are more lucrative
than the problem with people wanting to make more money and something is holding them back.
And if you can get in there and figure out how to make them more money, you are in a
great situation because you can take usually some fractional percentage of that.
I don't know what you charge for closet tools, but if somebody's making $5, $10, $20K a month
on Poshmark, which I assume some people are doing, and you can charge them $100 or something,
that's nothing.
That's a drop in the bucket.
They won't even notice that.
Yeah.
I charge $30 a month.
I've actually never changed the price.
I charge us $30 a month from the beginning, and now it's a huge deal.
Back then, I didn't really know the value it was providing, so I was like, hey, I went
kind of based on the time thing, like a dollar a day type stuff.
But now, yeah, you're right.
I mean, I could charge hundreds of dollars.
There's one of my customers I know makes $50K a month selling high-end purses on Poshmark.
And so, but he uses my little $30 a month app, and that's all he has to do.
So yeah, it's kind of nuts.
I've seen so many tweets and blog posts from people who buy and flip companies, and the
number one thing I see across all these things is, yeah, I bought a company from the sky,
and I just tripled the prices on the first week, and now we're making three times as
much money.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You could easily do that with my business.
And the thing for me is, I like the number it's at now, and I think what I will do coming
up probably in the next half year or so is I'll introduce some more seamless automation,
I guess.
The way it's built now, it kind of has pieces of automation where it does one task at one
time kind of thing, but I can almost build out some sort of scripting-type automation
where it's like, hey, do this thing, and then do this thing, and then if this happens, do
this type of stuff.
So it's more of an intelligent observing app that can kind of respond to different events,
and so I'll probably charge more for that.
So what I love about this in general is you have a customer who's making 50 grand a month.
There's got to be hundreds, thousands of other people out there who are doing something similar,
just making a ton of money off Poshmark, and whenever you have people who are that motivated,
there's probably forums all over the internet and Facebook groups where people are sharing
tips and tricks with each other about how do you make more money on Poshmark, how do
you take a photo of your clothes from the perfect angle, all sorts of little things
that people are trying to do to get ahead.
And I think there's this trend that some people may or may not be aware of called the creator
economy where you just have these platforms like Poshmark, like YouTube, like Substack,
where they are creating just an easier way for people to kind of be indie hackers without
having to build anything.
You can create a YouTube account, and you don't have to build some sort of video hosting
platform.
You can just make videos, and you can make money off ads, or you can have a closet full
of clothes, and you don't have to build some sort of clothes buying application.
You can just join Poshmark and do that.
And I think the opportunity here for other indie hackers who can build stuff is these
platforms are usually never really that great on their own.
They're always missing tools.
They're always missing little ancillary features that you can come in as an indie hacker and
build.
And if you don't know what to build, you can just go to these forums with the people on
these platforms who are trying to share tips and tricks, and they're complaining about
problems and why they can't make more money.
Just go look at what they're saying.
And they're probably, at some point before your app Closetools was a Reddit or a Facebook
group with a bunch of people complaining about how long it takes them to share their stuff
on Poshmark and how to share faster, et cetera.
And if someone had found that, maybe they would have come to the same idea that you
kind of ran into when your wife complained that it was taking her too long to share all
this stuff.
Yeah, it's interesting.
To take a couple steps back, bots and automation is actually technically not allowed on Poshmark.
That brings up a couple interesting things about the way the tool came about in the community
guidelines where Poshmark, it says like if you use automation, like if you're caught
using automation, then Poshmark technically can terminate your account.
And it's mostly a scare tactic.
I think if you were to formally ask Poshmark, they would say, yeah, you can't use bots,
but they also aren't going to do anything about it because it's giving them a ton more
revenue because people are making more sales.
So that kind of thing exists.
And actually, I've had a lot of, I would say several acquisition requests of closet sales
are like, hey, this is cool.
You're making a ton of money.
And then I tell them that and they're like, oh, we're not going to get on the bad side
of Poshmark.
See you later.
So there's that thing that's almost unsellable.
But the other thing is to the SEO point, SEO as a marketing tactic is so powerful because
these people aren't in forums talking about how they can't spend all day sharing because
there's a taboo against it where people are like, hey, if you use automation, you're cheating.
You're not the tried and true Poshmark killer.
So it's actually the opposite.
People aren't talking about it, but they're searching for it.
You get these people that are in incognito mode like, I need a Poshmark bot kind of thing.
And that's why SEO has been so invaluable to the tool because from a social perspective,
it's not something that people are talking about, but they're very interested in and
they're going to search it and they're going to find something at the top.
And so I've actually talked about that a lot and we can talk about competitors and stuff
like that.
But that's primarily what they do too, because I say it works.
Yeah, let's talk about competitors actually, because my model for this would be, okay,
let's say you want to take this principle, you want to go to some sort of marketplace
where lots of people are making money, they've got problems that are valuable, they'll probably
pay for stuff, and you want to solve their problems.
If you go to something like Shopify, well, Shopify has a very explicit marketplace.
And there's a ton of competition there.
Everybody's kind of competing to fill up every single little niche in the Shopify app store.
That doesn't mean there's not room, but it doesn't mean there's a lot of competition
because it's just so easy and so obvious that you can build some sort of supporting tool
for Shopify.
Whereas if you go to something like Poshmark, where not only is there no Poshmark app store,
but it's explicitly banned.
You're not allowed to build things on top of the Poshmark API or that's kind of scraped
their website.
There is no API.
There is no API.
Great.
It's possible for somebody to compete with you and to serve the Poshmark audience.
That seems like the perfect place to, if you're willing to stomach that platform risk where
they could just shut you down, to make something that other people haven't made.
So what else are you seeing in the Poshmark space?
Do you have a lot of competitors?
Are people building other sort of tools?
I definitely have other people building the same thing that I'm building.
They're mostly just following what I'm doing.
Got a bunch of clones out there.
So yeah, there's a lot of clones.
Actually, I've had people steal my code and that was before I kind of did any scrubbing
or obfuscating and stuff like that.
But I think, like you said, there's room in the market.
I think there's like 20 million daily active sellers on Poshmark and I have 1,500 customers.
So there's plenty of room in the market for people that want to make some extra money
on Poshmark.
So that's part of the reason why I'm not even remotely concerned about it.
There's some other arbitrages, I guess would be the word, on the platform where a lot of
these people consider themselves resellers.
So if you were to kind of...
The customer that I'm serving is a reseller where they're basically finding items, finding
clothing items for cheap and they're flipping them for more.
And these resellers don't just sell on Poshmark.
They sell on eBay.
They sell on an app called Mercari.
They sell on Facebook Marketplace.
They sell on all these different platforms.
There's been a really large rise in automated reselling apps that actually automatically
list your items across multiple different platforms.
And it keeps track of where it's sold and you can update the price and it updates all
of them.
That's actually been a very legitimate tech solution to that problem so that these sellers
can get maximum exposure for their things that you're trying to sell.
Love it.
If you want to figure out a business idea, just go to places where money is changing
hands.
Whatever people think is valuable, look at what they're already paying a lot of money
to do.
Where people are making a lot of money and just hang around, look at some of the apps
and some of the problems people have.
And I think that's usually a good way to sort of not only figure out a good business idea
that people will probably pay money for, but also figure out distribution channels.
Because whenever you find people sort of sharing this information, that's usually a good distribution
channel.
For me, with indie hackers, that was Hacker News.
It's like, oh, people are sharing all this information by the thousands in this one place.
That's where I'm going to distribute my product.
And for you, maybe that was a little bit less obvious, because you had to go with SEO.
And there was no real easy way for you to just guess that people were searching for
bots on Poshmark.
But when your wife told you that, that was kind of a good lead-in for you to say, okay,
well, people are making money here and she has this problem, potentially this is a problem
that other people have too.
Yeah, and I think from the beginning, when we go back to the beginning where it was like
I was just trying to be helpful, I didn't know there was really any money in it.
My entire intention was to make a couple hundred extra bucks a month.
And that was it.
If I did that, I was riding off in the sunset and I was like, this is the coolest thing.
So I tell people, getting to 1,000 MRR was a complete accident.
But getting to 38K MRR was definitely on purpose.
I think once I got past the point where I was like, oh, this is actually bigger than
I thought it was going to be, that's when I kind of took it more seriously and actually
doubled down on it.
So what are some of the more impactful, purposeful decisions you can take to grow from 1K MRR
to close to 40 where you're at now?
Largely most of the work I've done is education, documentation, and not necessarily marketing,
but just being helpful to the right people, the people that actually matter to your customers.
I think that that has a lot more of an impact on people than your product alone.
If somebody just installs my app today, they probably don't know how to use it.
They don't know the best way to use it.
They don't know how to actually directly impact their sales using the tool.
So they can flounder a bit and they might not actually stick around because they don't
know how it works.
They don't know how to do anything with it.
So a lot of the work I've done is writing documentation, making videos, showing people
how to maximize it.
And a lot of that has doubled as SEO content where it's like, hey, this is the best way
to use a bot for Poshmark.
And it happens so you don't do well on SEO.
So I think that kind of combination of education and content combined helps double as marketing
and as kind of a churn reducer because people actually know how to use the app.
They actually are making money using the app.
And that helps the whole thing just kind of trend upwards, basically.
Yeah.
I love that point that just because you put something out there and just because it's
helpful doesn't mean that everybody's going to figure out how helpful it is and know exactly
how to use it.
There are people of different competency levels.
It's this whole idea of the early adopters.
These are the most savvy people where you could give them a stapler and a paperweight
and they'll figure out how to get out of any situation using that.
You can give them a tool, a class of tools and they're going to figure out how to crush
it.
But most people don't want to spend that much time.
Most people aren't going to think of every possible use case for your product.
So if you can really educate people, what I found works really well is sharing success
stories tend to be very motivational.
So if you're going to say, okay, here's how much money someone's making on Poshmark.
Money talks.
People see that and they're like, oh man, I want to make that much money on Poshmark.
How are they doing it?
If the answer is your tool, closet tools, then people are going to be like, oh shit,
maybe I should be on this closet tools thing.
And then if you're going to have success stories of people who are using that, that works well.
But also just like you said, documentation, guides, et cetera, customer support, all super
helpful.
How are you doing all this, given that you've got a family and given that you had a full
time job when you first started and given that you had a bunch of loans and debt and
other like the worries of life, like how do you structure and prioritize your life so
that you can be productive as a solo founder without any employees?
Yeah, you know, I think it's really interesting.
I don't I don't really think I did it on purpose.
I kind of didn't.
I kind of didn't.
I didn't really know why I was doing what I was doing, but I did it.
So basically, when I first started, you go back all the way to the beginning, you're
talking like five years ago, you know, I started getting up earlier.
I knew that I had kids or I had a kid coming.
And I knew that I did not want to spend my evenings working like I had a wife.
I had a kid coming.
I was like, I don't want to be away from my family.
Like I'm kind of a family oriented guy.
And I'm like, I want to be able to get deep concentrated work done and not spend time
away from my family.
And it turns out the only time that that happens is between like four and 7am when everybody
else is sleeping, and they're they weren't going to be awake anyway, so you're not taking
time away from them.
But it also works really well as just a productive time because nobody else is awake and distracting
you.
So that's what I did.
It was mostly like five to 7am for, you know, just about every day for about three years.
I was up working on something I was learning, taking a course, I was practicing, I was helping
somebody.
And then when it came to Closetools, once that app, once that launched, then I just
kind of transitioned all of my efforts into that.
So I was spending one or two hours a day in deep work, you know, executing the app, I
was doing support emails.
A huge reason why I've been able to do a lot of it is mostly because of automation.
And I use automation kind of as a broad term.
But you know, going back to what we just talked about where it's like, you have content that
works for you.
You have education tools that work for you.
When I start getting a repetitive question of like, Hey, how do I use this or whatever?
If I didn't make a piece of content that answered that question, I would be writing out every
email one by one saying like, Oh, it works like this.
And if you do this, this happens, yada, yada.
Whereas if I make that piece of content, instead of, you know, me having to write out all that
emails, honestly, people just find it.
I don't even have to get the email in the first place.
So that takes away a lot of the time burden of, you know, having to help customers because
you already are helping them, they found the help they needed, and they didn't even have
to bother you.
And so that's kind of always been this core philosophy for me is like, if I'm getting
a bunch of email supports for it, I need to automate that thing.
You know, like very early on, you know, this is something so little, but like, I didn't
have a password recovery for the tool.
And I started getting emails from people like, Hey, I made an account, but like, I don't
know where our password is, and I would have to go into my Firebase backend, then I'd have
to send them a password reset email, and sometimes they wouldn't get it, yada, yada.
So you know, I had, I started getting those emails, and I was like, you know what, I'm
gonna build this.
So I took, you know, a couple days and I built it out.
And you know, I haven't had a single email sense about password resets, you know, because
I made it obvious in the tool, like you need to reset your password, this is what you do.
You know, that kind of just underlying automation principle, I think has helped make the app
itself sustainable for one person to handle.
I think that also helps kind of restrict what I do, because I don't spend my time necessarily
selling every day, you know, I'm not like, out on social media, like, you know, trying
to engage with people and like, get them to sign up for my app and stuff like that.
You know, I have this very deliberate process of ranking for SEO, yes, he was working for
me in the background, I've got this, you know, content working for me.
The education working for me, so just automating all of those different things makes it so
that at the end of the day, the only manual tasks that I have to do is like support emails
and stuff like that.
And it ends up being not very many support emails, because I've already automated most
of the things that people ask for.
That is something that I did on accident.
I think it's kind of more core to my personality, rather than it being like a deliberate decision
I made.
I'm mostly just really lazy.
And I don't, I don't want to be doing things.
I don't want to be doing things over and over and over again.
So like, I had to automate those things so that I didn't do that.
And it ended up being this really blissful, like, oh, now I don't have any work that I
have to do.
And so any work that I actually do is actually just additive, you know, like, you know, in
the beginning of podcast, I talked about how the business doubled over the summer, like,
all of that work I did before that was just additive, like, nobody asked for it.
You know, nobody was, you know, beaten down the door for me to do it.
And I added a ton more value to the app, and people talked about it because it was really
cool.
And that has worked really well, I think.
And what are you doing with all this free time now that you've got?
I mean, everything's pretty much automated, the apps growing without you spending much
time on it.
We talked last week, and you were just like hanging up Christmas lights in the middle
of the day and just chilling.
You seem pretty relaxed.
What now comes after this this phase of being an indie hacker and getting a business to
the point where it's earned you your freedom, you know, you quit your job, and you're kind
of just on your own?
Yeah, you know, I mean, I think that is a huge part is, you know, like I said, I'm a
family guy, and, you know, I've got three kids now, and we actually plan on having a
few more.
And I think, you know, while the kids are young, I think it's so crucial to be a huge
part of their lives, to be able to train them up to, you know, be productive, and be educated
members of society.
And, you know, I don't think I have to be there for their entire 18 years necessarily
every day, you know, like in, you know, interacting with them, but you know, very early on, I
think it's almost a night and day difference, just being able to be there with the kids
and you know, help them grow and help them learn and give them, you know, the context
for how to behave in life.
So that that is a lot of what I'm doing.
And so the way I've kind of structured my days now is, you know, my block of time to
work is basically 6am to noon.
And if I, you know, most lately, most days, I've been getting up on time, and I'm actually
working, you know, you know, three, four hours during that time.
You know, I'm doing some reading and, you know, sometimes some exercise.
But if I don't get up early, I still have that block.
So like, I'm still done by noon.
If I got up at nine, I'm still done by noon.
And so like that kind of helps structure our day where the kids understand that like, okay,
like afternoon, dad's available, like, you know, we're gonna go play or we're gonna go
play outside, or we're gonna do some activity or something like that.
So I kind of structure my day around making sure that happens.
The work is actually almost secondary.
And so I've had to actually drum up a lot more discipline just to be able to, you know,
continue to get up early and actually provide more value for people.
Because like I said earlier, like, I don't really have that huge chip on my shoulder
anymore.
It's like, you're poor, and you have a lot of super phones, like now it's like, your
devices are great, and you're not poor anymore.
So you know, really, it is just like me focusing on a family and stuff like that.
You know, I think the, you know, the point you're alluding to is, you know, like recently,
I, I can't kind of came up with this idea that, you know, I call it a deep year.
And I think people think that's more impressive than it actually is.
But basically, it's just me kind of toying around with the idea of, you know, kind of
going deep on a brand new topic for a whole year and just learning all I can about it.
And kind of going back to what I did five years ago, where I was learning a new skill,
except taking it a couple steps further, where, you know, I'm not just learning enough to
be dangerous with it, I'm actually learning enough to make a profit off of it, you know,
I'm learning enough to not only use the tools or the skills that I learned to then make
money for myself, but I can also make money educating people on how to do the same thing
for themselves.
And so like, that's kind of something I've been toying around with recently, as more
of a long term approach to kind of my indie hacking journey.
And so I say long term, because for me, closet tools is always kind of been a short term
thing.
You know, I don't think I'm going to be doing this 30 years from now.
You know, so I, in the back of my mind, I've always been thinking like, what am I going
to do long term?
What are the skills I'm going to learn for like kind of a long term approach to income
and like your legacy and the value you provide for other people.
So the deep year kind of makes that a little bit of a reality, because I kind of constrict
it to a year where it's like, hey, if this, if this works in a year, great, I'm going
to keep going with it because it's kind of a long term thing.
But if it doesn't work in a year, okay, next year, I can try something else.
And yeah, so you know, I kind of have a couple years to kind of try a few things and kind
of figure out what I really want to be doing long term kind of thing.
Yeah, I love hearing about the results of closet tools, because basically everybody
whose life it touched got better.
So it's better for your kids.
Yeah, I can spend more time with you, like they're gonna have better lives and maybe
better life outcomes because you did this.
It's better for you because you get to spend more time with your, your family and your
friends and doing hobbies and just chilling.
It's good for your customers because now they're making more money on Poshmark than they would
if your app didn't exist.
It's better for like literally like every, it's like a win, win, win, win situation where
you just created this thing in the world where it's just like positive value.
And if there's anything I would want people to get out of this, it's people who are skeptical
of businesses, people who are super skeptical of capitalism, it's like you can make something,
usually technology that just improves literally everybody's life and like nobody is worse
off for it.
And your story is a perfect example of that.
And I think the sort of way that you're going now, you have this extra freedom to the sort
of deep year as you call it, I mean, you tweeted about it, you said, I'm obsessed with this
idea.
I'm going to pick a niche that I'm interested in.
I'm going to write and study daily about this topic, write 100 articles in a year, get some
SEO traffic, build an email list, and then ask these people what they want and build
it for them and then sell digital or physical products.
And so like that's super inspirational.
That sounds like a really fun way to spend your life.
You just get to learn about something that you're interested in and then also like kind
of repeat this process of doing something that just makes the world a better place.
I'm super excited about it because I just think that there are a lot of people like
you.
Not all of them are on the indie hackers product directory.
Not all of them are super public.
And when we talk about the revenue numbers, but there are a lot of people like you who
are like figuring out how to build these businesses as just so low individuals, and you're going
to keep doing it and keep making the world better.
And the more people who do this, the more people who can do it because you end up sharing
your stories and your knowledge and also building helpful tools for everybody.
So it's this kind of like ever accelerating sort of self-sustaining cycle where hopefully
10 years from now, the number one thing anybody wants to do with their life is to be an indie
hacker because it's just so cool and so reliable at the same time to do.
Yeah, I love just hearing that from you.
Just like you're right, it is just a win for everyone.
And I think that's such an attractive place to be.
I think if there was any aspect of it that was not a win, then it would not feel nearly
as good.
It wouldn't perform nearly as well.
But you're right, any good foundational business operates like that.
It's just a win for everyone.
And I think that any business that doesn't operate like that isn't a long-term thing.
It's going to be disrupted by something that is a win for everyone.
So I think that's such a good long-term framework of just providing value for others.
When all of the wins are up, that's a great value for everyone.
And that comes back to the first thing we were talking about where you don't have to
think about yourself because as long as you're providing a win for everyone, you're going
to get what you deserve.
You're going to get the value you provide for other people, or at least a fraction of
it.
So that's why there's such a huge emphasis on just being valuable to other people, for
sure.
And it's so unnatural to a degree because we mostly go around our days thinking about
ourselves.
We're like, I'm hungry.
Someone said this mean thing to me, like, how am I going to get back at them?
I'm cold.
I'm tired.
We just think about like, I, I, me, me.
But to be a business owner, you really have to deliberately step outside of your shoes
and into other people's shoes and think about, OK, what about them?
What do they want?
That's just not a normal exercise that most people go through life doing because like
usually there's just like there's no point to doing that.
And so I like that starting businesses is forcing people to be a little bit more selfless.
And I think it's a skill you have to practice.
Like, I'm curious how you're doing it with your deep ear.
You know, how do you decide what you're going to go deep on?
How do you decide, you know, what's worth learning about and what's your framework for
doing that?
Because I'm sure a lot of people listening probably also want to do the same thing.
Started business is actually going to work because it's doing something valuable to people
that they're willing to pay for.
Yeah.
So I mean, like this first year, I kind of decided on algorithmic trading as, you know,
my deep ear project.
And you know, algorithmic trading is, you know, it's it's something that people have
figured out.
And it is also tends to be more of a solo venture.
You know, it's not like a huge company that is doing this, like, you know, some guys that,
you know, try out some code and it works and they make a bunch of money to the thing.
But I think the way that I learn it in public, the way that I'm kind of doing things is like,
I'm studying this topic, I'm writing about it, I'm helping educate other people about
it.
And then I'm publishing my findings, I'm publishing the wins, the losses, the things that I figure
out.
And that kind of just congregation of just value ends up being pretty big.
And that's how I can make an impact on other people is just helping them understand like
how this whole thing works from first principles, like not, you know, relying on other people's
attitudes towards it, like just, I want to figure it out for myself.
That's actually just kind of a side point.
Like, when I posted on Twitter, like, hey, I'm going to do algorithm trading, everybody's
like, oh, here's all the resources you need to look at.
And here's all the people you can follow.
And I followed absolutely zero of them.
And I looked at absolutely zero of those resources, because I don't want to frame my opinions
and my learnings off of what other people do, I want to kind of figure it out for myself.
That's kind of the point of the deep year, and that's kind of the point of learning skills
to begin with, because like, if you're just doing what other people do, you're not actually
figuring out why they did that.
That's something, you know, like I said, it's just kind of a side point.
But yeah, I think the whole point of it is to do it all in public, and help other people
do the same thing.
And then when it gets to the point, like, if it's a year from now, I've written a bunch
of SEO articles, it's getting some traffic.
And you know, I've got this email list, and I can ask them like, hey, like, do you want
a book?
Do you want a course?
How I did this?
Do you want just access to the algorithms that I developed?
Do you want me to make a hedge fund where like, hey, this thing makes, you know, 100%
return on investment every year, and you just want to pump money into it, that thing then
becomes a helpful product that they can pay for, but the returns on that payment for their
product, you know, gives them, you know, exponential value.
And so that's a way that I can kind of take a cut of the value and actually provide huge
value for other people.
I love it, especially the idea that you're going to start from scratch, and you're going
to learn everything there is to know about like this new field.
Because a lot of people underestimate learning, people don't understand how far you can go
in something you have zero experience with.
If you're just like a dedicated student of the crowd, and you're not going to be just
kind of learning on nights and weekends an hour a day or something like you have pretty
much, you know, all day, every day to spend on this, because you've sort of earned your
freedom with closet tools.
And now you can go do this algorithmic trading stuff, and like, maybe you'll learn enough
to know you don't want to do it, or maybe you'll learn a ton, and you'll be able to
help a lot of other people learn what you know, and like maybe find a real cool product
to build as a result of it.
So I'm excited to see what you end up doing this year, I'm excited to see what your future
projects are going to be.
And I think your whole story as a whole is just really inspirational.
To close out here, what's your parting advice for aspiring indie hackers who are thinking
about getting started?
Maybe they have an idea, maybe they don't.
What do you think it should take away from your story and your learnings?
You know, I think, I think there's just so much value in getting your time right, and
learning valuable skills.
I think, you know, the fact that I have the skills that I have, you know, like I said,
web development, SEO, you know, copyright and all these different things.
I can take those to any venture that I want to do any time in the future.
And if you actually take the time to learn those skills, deeply and actually do them
valuably, you're going to have a prosperous future, there's no way you can't.
And so I think, you know, super critical to get your time right, and just stop wasting
a bunch of your time so that you can get a little bit of time to actually just learn
new skills, even if you have a full time job, even if you have kids, you know, figure out
how to get that hour, two, three a day, to be able to execute and learn new skills.
And then once you develop the skills, then you have time to execute on them and actually
make an income for them.
I think that's totally underestimated, and I would advise that to anyone.
Love it.
And I think it's one of the most overlooked advantages to starting a company, which is
that you have to learn a ton of new skills.
Even if your companies fail, even if you spend years making stuff that doesn't work, and
you come out the other side, like you're going to have way more skills than you probably
would have had if you just worked a full time job that whole time.
Like I got so much better at developing, designing, servers, marketing, like literally everything.
And like five or six years of me running businesses that didn't go anywhere.
So I think a lot of people are afraid to sort of invest the time, but like realize that
like you're not just trying to succeed, but also like along the way you're, you're networking,
you're meeting people, you're learning stuff, you're getting better at different things
that can help you in the future.
Yep.
100%.
All right, Jordan, well, this was fun.
Thanks a ton for coming on the show.
Yeah, no problem.
Thanks for having me.
Can you let us know where we can go to learn more about what you're up to online?
Yeah, I'd say mostly just follow me on Twitter.
It's at JDNOC.
And that's kind of where I post most of my stuff.
You know, my personal blog is JDNOC.com.
But yeah, Twitter's where most of the stuff's happening.
All right.
Thanks again, Jordan.
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Thank you so much for listening.
And as always, I will see you next time.