What's up everybody, this is Cortland from MandyHackers.com where I talk to the founders
of profitable internet businesses and I ask them about their challenges and hardships
so that the rest of us can learn from their mistakes instead of having to make them on
our own.
Today I'm talking to Tracey Osborne.
She's the founder of a company called WeddingLovely and also a series of books known as the Hello
Web Books.
Two of them deal with teaching non-programmers how to code and the latest one helps programmers
learn to become good designers.
My original goal with this interview is to spend the bulk of it talking to Tracey about
design and some tips that non-designers could use to really make better looking websites
which is increasingly important in the world of today where it seems like every website
is professionally designed.
What actually ended up happening was that we started talking about Tracey's story as
an entrepreneur and never really left that topic and I consider that a good thing because
her story is so fascinating and educational.
It's really a story that proves how far you can get by simply refusing to quit no matter
what happens.
I actually saw a tweet today that said something to the tune of if you want to be successful
pick any idea and work on it for 10 years.
Tracey's story really is a great illustration of what that looks like.
So apologies to you Tracey for not initially sticking to the topic that I planned on sticking
to but if you're a listener you really get two for the price of one because you listen
to this excellent podcast and hear Tracey's story and you can head over to hellowebbooks.com
and buy her book on web design afterwards.
So with that, let's start the episode.
I'm here with Tracey Osborn.
Tracey, thanks so much for coming on the show.
It's a pleasure to have you.
Yeah.
Thanks for having me.
I don't know if you remember but we ran into each other briefly way back in I think 2010
at the Y Combinator headquarters down in Mountain View.
Do you remember that?
I was trying to think about which I knew was YC and I couldn't think it was it startup
school or was it if it's 2010 that must have been when my husband is going through YC because
I just went to.
Yeah.
I think that might have been it.
Yeah.
I just basically followed him along.
This is actually what got me into startups is I just he had a startup went through YC
and I was like whatever event you're going to I'm going to go to and I'm pretty sure
Jessica Livingston thought I was part of YC during that time I did a bunch of freelance
work with other YC companies in that batch.
I was at a bunch of the meetings and I went to like all the events and so I was like this
is also when YC was a lot smarter so I kind of use it to my advantage to make it look
like I was a part of YC which actually totally worked out but I was a really awesome summer
and it was cool because I got to meet you.
I guess that must have been it was probably I think it was probably startup school because
I ended up doing YC in winter 2011 in January and I went to startup school to fall beforehand.
I think they had a whole bunch of events afterwards.
Yeah, because the startup school had the like the invitation only event, maybe that was
it.
Yeah, something like that.
It was 2010 was a long time ago.
Seven years ago.
It's crazy.
I know.
It's not.
It's don't remind me.
I know, right?
But anyway, since I give me in the past six or seven years, it's hard for me to even know
where to start this interview because you've done so much, you've taught yourself a code,
you've gone from that to giving keynotes at programming conferences like DjangoCon.
Just booked another one today, actually.
Yeah, that's nuts.
You're an author, you sell publish several books to help other people learn the basics
of web programming so they can build their own web apps inside projects.
You started a company called wedding lovely, which perhaps is the best place to start.
Because from what I can gather, it seems like that was a genesis of a lot of the other things
that you've done.
Yeah, it's, you know, there's a lot of people out there I talked to, and this is totally
fine.
I worked this job for two years, and then I did this job for one year, and so their
life is kind of in these pieces.
And mine just feels like this long string of it started with wedding lovely.
I guess really before it started with that summer when I followed Andre around Y Combinator,
and I got in my head that I wanted to do a startup too, but I didn't know how to code.
And there's a longer story here.
I originally went to university for computer science and then like rage quit because I
hated programming and university.
It just did not we're learning Java, and it was very university computer science where
it's like, let's take this sorting function and reverse engineer and write a giant paper
on it.
And I'm like, this is the worst.
I hate this.
So I got an art degree and I vowed to never program again.
And I was just going to do originally label design and then I fell back into doing web
design.
So this summer, watch Andre go through I see and I was like, Oh, that looks awesome.
I want to start up too, as you do when someone else we see that process, you only see the
good things.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah.
So it started out with me trying to find my technical co-founder as you do with someone
who doesn't know how to code.
So it was like three months.
I did this hacker news post that actually got to the top of hacker news, totally different
world of hacker news back then.
Like the fact that this thing got to the top of hacker news, I was like, I'm Tracy and
I want to launch this startup and I'm looking for a technical co-founder and everyone's
like, wow, how novel.
And I had like 80 emails and I did this whole, yeah, it was just like, I don't know.
It was such a different time.
It's the seven years ago.
I can relate because I also found my co-founder in 2010 on hacker news via front page post.
It feels like hacker news has evolved from that.
So it's so different.
I think that's a lot bigger.
Yeah, definitely.
To cut this part of the story a little bit short, essentially I found someone, we got
a YC interview and then it like fell apart that night, like the day, the night before
the interview just completely fell apart.
So day of the interview, we kind of realized we didn't want to work together.
Did the interview anyways, didn't get into YC and it was like, oh, thank goodness.
Cause I wouldn't want to break up my co-founder like the day of YC interview.
And then it was like, okay, if I actually want to launch this startup, do I just learn
how to code or quit essentially?
I was like, I'm not going to do the whole co-founder process again.
So that's really what led me to picking up Python, much easier programming language to
pick up than Java.
Did you ever at any point in this process consider that you wouldn't learn to code,
but maybe you would just outsource and hire other people to write your code for you?
I think I wasn't really thinking about it as a startup.
And so then it was kind of like, I'm just going to launch this little website and try
to figure it out.
I'm pretty sure I was unemployed at this point and had time on my hands and not a lot of
money.
I think that's kind of how it came about.
So I was like, okay, oh, and then Andre, the person with YC, he's a master Python programmer.
And he was like, let me show you Python.
And yeah, I don't think it ever came in my head to outsource this.
This is kind of my whole life is with the books and everything.
I always just like, eh, I'll just do it myself.
And I think it was just like, ah, fine, I'll just program this myself and picked up just
enough Python and Django in order to build this, I don't know, it was a really basic
website.
And this is what I applied to YC for.
It was the one I applied for YC as I wanted to build this service to help people build
and design their wedding invitations online and then be able to print it at home.
So someone who doesn't have design experience and have to outsource that part, I could just
help them with that hard part, the design, and then let them print their own invitations.
But to a new programmer, building something that could do something like build a typographically
perfect wedding invitation, that was like, okay, I'm not going to learn enough programming
to ever launch this probably.
So I basically just built this directory, I decided to make it easier for people to
connect with designers rather than replacing designer.
And that was, it was a side project.
I didn't really mean to turn it into a startup.
So it's not probably late 2010, maybe early 2011.
It's you know, seven years later, it's kind of hard to figure out when things started.
How did you learn to code so fast, was your husband or was he your boyfriend at the time
helping you learn?
He did help me learn, basically in terms of Python, but I decided to use the framework
Django, because Django abstracts out a lot of things, like the whole database part.
It basically makes it a lot simpler for someone who doesn't know what's going on in the backend
in order to build a web app.
And this is actually how I started my books, is I took this process of learning how to
build a web app through with Django.
And I was like, okay, that was really awesome, I want to help other people do the same thing.
So when it comes to learning how to code, to this day, I don't, like, that sounds like
100% thing, like I learn how to, I know how to code now.
I basically learned about like the 5% that I needed in order to launch just something
really, really simple.
And I didn't know how to do anything else.
And so when I had to launch a new feature, I had to be like, okay, crap, now I need to
learn how to do that in order to launch this feature for this website I had, it was kind
of like learn by doing.
That's the perfect way to learn, I think.
Oh, my God, yes.
It's impossible to just sit down, read 10 books, memorize everything and come out of
the other side, like a programmer or anything else, really.
Definitely.
And this is, again, jumping ahead to when I decided to write Hello Web App.
It was because, you know, that whole learn by doing thing, it was like, well, crap, that's
like the best way to learning.
Spoiler alert to the book series, this is like four years later of working at a startup,
we can go back to wedding level, but essentially, the book series, Hello Web App, it's, it
isn't like, you're gonna learn how to build a blog, or you're gonna learn how to build
a polling app, something like specific, I try to write it so people can use the examples
in this book to write something that's unique to them.
And essentially, they can make a directory clone, or a Twitter clone, or a Facebook clone,
or something like that, something that I call it a collection of objects, because building
something real, like when you're trying to teach yourself how to code building something
that you actually care about, that's unique to you, I think is key for getting that information
to stick in your head.
And the thing that you were building initially was your own website.
Over the course of a fall and a winter, you're learning to build everything that you need
to get your new website out the door.
What's the first thing that you did when you got to the point of thinking that, hey, you
know, this is good enough to actually get people using it?
Wedding Lovely is the company, Wedding Lovely today has like 11 different websites.
The website I launched back then is called weddinginvitelove.com.
So it's part of the Wedding Lovely company as a whole.
But you know, this is the first thing I launched.
So that was originally on its own.
Wedding Invite Love is a directory of wedding mutation designers.
And I decided not to constrain it to a specific location, which nowadays I kind of wish I
did because that would have made something simpler.
But when I wrote it, I was kind of like, whatever, I don't know if people are going to use this,
someone let anyone sign up for it.
And doesn't have to be in the US, it could be people in Canada, I had someone really
early on from Israel, I let them know, I was like, I don't think I'm going to be sending
you any traffic.
And they're like, whatever, it's free.
And I'm like, okay.
So I wrote it so anyone could sign up.
And I launched it, I think I got 10 people to sign up for it.
And I was like, whatever, I'll just put it online now.
And so it's essentially useless.
It was not like if you went onto this website to try to find a wedding mutation designer,
there's only 10 options, and they're all over the US, like it was useless.
But people, it was free.
And I asked people to sign up for it.
I said like, hey, you know, there's not going to be a lot of traffic for a while, but you'll
get an SEO link, which too, you know, those small businesses are like, ooh, that sounds
fancy.
Sure, might as well.
Yeah.
And so they'd be like, and it's free again.
So I just like, hey, you know, as we get rolling this website, we live and then someday, hopefully
I'll be sending you enough traffic to make this worth it.
And that's kind of, I know what's happened.
There's been quite a few bumps in the road, but I basically launched it.
It was just a side project.
It wasn't like a big company, I didn't expect it to turn into a startup.
Who are these companies that you were, that you were convincing to sign up and, you know,
for that SEO link?
How are you finding those people?
That's a good question.
How did I find them?
I want to say I did like this gum bag thing where I looked at competitor and just started
emailing people, their own competitor.
I don't actually remember that process.
I don't remember where I got it, but that sounds like what I would do.
Yeah.
You scraped and you figured it out somehow.
I was like, I could do a better job than these other people.
You know, I don't think it's really that scumbag and you think it depends entirely on the nature
of the email that you sent.
Right.
And I wasn't using the service.
I wasn't like using the inner like wedding wire service to send the messages.
I like, you know, did some research, went to the website, found their actual email address.
Because Wedding Invite Love was the first directory I launched and I actually ended
up cloning it to a bunch of other ones.
So then that's where all the different properties came about.
Like there was Wedding Planner Love and Wedding Photo Love, and you can kind of get that.
They're all in the individual areas, different type of vendor types for weddings.
And as all those directories were launched for me, just sending out like a hundred emails
to people and being like, Hey, I'm launching something new.
Want to sign up for it?
And I do it manually.
It was definitely the do things that don't scale process to building these websites.
And what was your goal in these early phases?
Were you thinking, I just want to have a startup?
Did you have certain revenue targets you wanted to hit or a certain lifestyle that you wanted
to live?
When I first launched the side project, I don't think I had any expectations whatsoever.
I was kind of like, Oh, this is cool.
I'm going to learn how to program and maybe something will happen.
And I think if I remember correctly that at the time I was really into bootstrap businesses.
This is I think when GitHub was completely now they funded, but you know, they were the
big one that was bootstrapped and I met a few other bootstrap people and I was like,
that's the way I'm going to go.
And I was just thinking, okay, I'll build this website.
Maybe someday I'll make money for me.
And then that summer, which is 2011, I think in January, I went to New York.
This is like two weeks after the website launched, what wedding invite love, again, side project.
And I had this lunch meeting offhand with a Swiss miss Tina Roth Eisenberg, who runs
a Swiss miss design blog.
And she was like, what are you working on?
I'm like, let me show you this website I launched.
And then she put it on her blog and her blog, all of her readers are designers and people
that would be interested in something like wedding invite love.
And that kind of launched wedding invite love.
And that's the moment when I was like, oh, this actually could be something legit.
Like people could actually use this because I had so many emails and so many people signing
up.
And I think my traffic just went through the roof overnight.
So that's when I decided to start spending more time focusing on it because I had that
boost from her.
You mentioned earlier that you were in school and you kind of pivoted away from computer
science to an art degree.
You won 80 really.
Yes.
How much did your art degree contribute to your ability to get on the radar of people
who like design with your new website?
Definitely helped.
I mean, that's actually the whole reason why I did something for wedding invitations is
I'm not a weddings person at all.
I got married three or so years ago, and I eloped in Vegas, because I was like, I've
been working on wedding lovely for four years at this point.
And I was just like, oh, hell no, I'm not going to have a wedding.
I see what goes into those things.
It's like, no, that does not look very fun.
Went to Vegas.
Like even at the time, I was not like, you know, a big weddings person, but I love design.
I've always been to art as a kid.
And I've been building websites and you can't see me, but I'm doing air quotes, like websites,
their websites.
But this is like the nineties of when it was like frame websites and geo cities and age
of fire.
So I've been building websites since I was like 12 1996 or so.
So I like designing websites.
When I quit computer science, the one shining part, like the best part of computer science
is when we're working on GUIs.
I knew that I really liked working on the front end and what it looks like when someone
clicks something and then something happens.
When I went to art, I was just like, okay, I'm just going to do just design.
And then I started working at a startup in university that did web design.
And I was like, Oh, I guess I'll do design and a little bit of programming.
But the funny thing is, is when I was at the startup, I was a front end developer and designer.
So I was supposed to do HTML and CSS and normally front end developers also do JavaScript, but
I was like traumatized for my time of doing Java and they're not the same thing whatsoever.
But I still told them I refuse to do JavaScript.
It was too close to programming.
Like I had too much PTSD from this time in university.
So they need time to recover, maybe a little bit of therapy.
Yeah, you say time to recover.
This is still to this day.
I have trouble with JavaScript.
It was like this mental block in my head against JavaScript, which is a problem with all the
JavaScript frameworks that are happening right now.
Like I kind of feel like a dinosaur because I still promote Django.
I mean, yeah, now I have a book on Django, but a lot of people have gone away from using
something like Django or say Ruby on Rails in favor of these new JavaScript frameworks.
And I just have not been able to pick them up and I feel like such a dinosaur now, but
it's just like this weird mental block when it comes to JavaScript stuff.
It's so frustrating.
Well, I think we're gonna get into a lot more of your thoughts on that too, because you've
written books about Django, like you said, books about design, which I can't wait to
get into because probably one of the most common questions that I get asked and then
I see other programmers asking each other is, hey, you know, I've got the coding skills.
How do I pick up the design skills?
Everything that I make looks like crap and I'm tired of it.
So I can't wait to get into that.
But first, tell us a little bit about what happened with wedding leveling and all these
websites that you were creating, how did that all turn out?
Yeah.
So that summer of 2011 was like the rocket ship summer, Swiss Miss blogged about me.
I started cloning the websites.
By the way, this is still one I really couldn't code.
So I mean cloning, I mean like literally taking the repository and cloning it.
And so I had a whole new database and I had the same code on either both of these repositories.
Because at the time I had no, I couldn't think of a way to combine multiple websites under
one project.
So I was like, screw this, I'm just gonna clone it and launch them.
And then whenever I have to do like a feature update, I will go and copy paste it between
all five, eventually eight repositories.
That's been fixed now.
I know I got some help and I've learned a lot more since then, but it was a crazy summer
where I was just like launching all these directories.
I got into the designer fund in San Francisco, which has kind of evolved since when I was
a part of it, but I was like their second quote unquote batch when they're trying to
help designer founders.
So I got into the designer fund and through the designer fund, I was able to get an interview
with 500 startups.
And at the time 500 startups had no formal interview process like YC's application process.
I believe 500 has that now, but at the time, the only way you can get to 500 is to be introduced.
And so I had that contact through designer fund and I had my interview with David Klur
and then another partner of 500 startups at the time, the other partner had seen those
posts I had written, like that original post talking about finding a co-founder and I wrote
a couple other ones afterwards being like co-founder didn't work out.
So I just built this website and that also went big on Hacker News, like whenever I went
to meetups in the Bay area, they're like, you're that weddings person that keeps showing
up in Hacker News.
I'm like, Oh my God, I cannot believe this is my thing again, not being a weddings person
myself.
I just wanted to help small businesses that do design.
But essentially I got into 500 startups as a solo founder.
And that was the moment we're like, Oh, I guess I'm not bootstrapping this anymore.
I guess I'm doing a funded company.
That was when I got that offer, that was the biggest decision I had to make was like, do
I want to change how I thought about this company, throw myself into this whole funded
company stuff and fundraising.
Yeah, that's, that's when it gets real.
Yeah, seriously.
It's scary.
It's like, it totally changes the way a company is built too.
I definitely don't regret my time in 500.
It was hard because there was another weddings company in the same batch of us.
And they originally thought, Oh, that's cool.
These two weddings companies, they'll collaborate.
We did not collaborate.
We did not get along at all.
And this company has since moved on to other things.
So that's my one claim to fame, haha, I am still around.
But they, on demo day, three months later, demo day, they just kind of swept any investor
that was interested in, in doing a wedding startup.
There was a lot of drama during that time, but I was still like rocket shipping.
This is like still like the shining moments of wedding lovely.
I had brought on a friend of mine to be a co-founder.
We had an employee, we had an intern.
And then Etsy approached about an acquisition.
And that was amazing.
Where was your company at, like, at this point in time in terms of traffic and revenue?
So little.
I think, I mean, it's definitely going to be aqua hire ish, I don't know, the whole
acquisition thing was kind of crazy wedding lovely was, was making revenue.
It's that kind of thing where you're like, you're making revenue, but the sky, it looks
like it's just endless, like you can just go anywhere at that moment.
Like the sky's the limit.
And Etsy is like, I think they heard about me.
They liked what I was doing.
Then they really liked my co-founder at the time.
And we went through this whole process of acquisition stuff.
So I just put the fundraising on hold.
I was like, okay, you know what, this other company is taking all of the interest from
five hour startups for a weddings business.
And I have this opportunity to be acquired by Etsy, which I love Etsy.
So I just threw myself in the acquisition process and that whole story, we need more
than an hour, this whole thing has been crazy.
That whole story, long story short, uh, they ended up giving me an offer that was way lower
than any of my advisors thought that they would give me like, you know, I would try
to be smart about it.
I had advisors from 500 startups and other friends, people who went to YC, who've gone
through acquisitions and they're helping me out in this process.
And we all like try to, you know, guess, okay, here's the floor of what they could offer
based on what we were doing.
And then here's the super awesome, I'm super lucky offer.
And it turned out to be like way, way less than anyone ever expected.
Wow.
So there's nothing I could have done with that.
I had to turn it down.
Like, it wouldn't make sense.
And how much time did you spend going through the process of talking with them and interacting
with them before they finally gave you that low ball number?
Oh, I think over, I think it was like three months, I get, you know, it started out slow,
right?
Our original meeting in New York, which then turned into a meeting in San Francisco with
some other people, and then we had demo day end, and then they flew me, my co-founder
in for like the day of meetings at Etsy, where we met all the big wigs and Chad Dickinson,
who was the CEO, we had this like super long meeting with him that we didn't finish everything.
We had to come back to us and continue our meeting well, and then like a big dinner at
the end of the day.
And we just like went to our fancy hotel.
We were staying at like the fanciest, like the place that celebrities stay in Manhattan.
It was amazing.
Like they booked us this crazy hotel.
And it was just like on the top of the world, wow, we totally got this, like, we're going
to be acquired by Etsy and I'm gonna have that stamp, like next to my name, like acquired
by Etsy on my, you know, future startup resume.
So turning that offer down was just devastating.
Like we thought we did everything right, I thought everything, all this, everything was
aligned.
But it's just like, we couldn't, we tried to negotiate it up, like, uh, don't you mean
a little higher and they're like, nah, we're going to move on.
Like they didn't negotiate at all.
It was crazy.
And so depressing.
Yeah, I can't imagine how upsetting and depressing that would be.
How did you, how do you recover from that?
Because I mean, that's three months gone, basically, that's you put off your fundraising
for that.
You had your hopes up.
Well, that's when it started going downhill.
That's when most people probably will shut down the company at this point.
Uh, I over the next year, um, so we lost interest in fundraising.
At this point, we've been distracted.
The company didn't grow as fast as we said it was going to, uh, try to look at fundraising,
but it was like not, we kind of lost that momentum.
So we're like, okay, cool.
Launch this other product.
Uh, at the time it was just wedding lovelies working at businesses.
I decided to build in this wedding lovely planning app, uh, so then we could work with
users, kind of diversify our customers and then the users that we bring into this planning
app would start working at the businesses we work with.
So it kind of sounded like a win, win, win thing.
And we said, okay, we'll launch this planning app.
And when that rocket ships, then we'll do the fundraising process again, launched the
planning app, did it rocket ship, started running out of money, had to lay off the employee
intern went at her normal times.
That was fine.
And my co-founder just quit out of the blue to me, sat me down and said, she has another
job.
And then she's gone at the end of the week.
So then it was just me.
This is like six months afterwards, something like that, six to eight months, lost everything.
And just so like, I don't know, it's just like that last year was like so many highs
and so many amazing things that are happening.
And then it just like all went away.
It was a really, really hard time for me.
And I kind of, I was lucky that the way that Wedding and Lovely was built, it wasn't like
we had a lot of support requests, we didn't have to do things day to day, it was kind
of like we built it and it started running itself.
And so instead of, I think if I had to deal with support requests, or I had to continue
working on it, I probably would shut it down.
But I ended up just like, kind of just checking out for a month and let it do its thing.
And I just was depressed, I think this is December, did like nothing that month.
But Wedding and Lovely just kept tracking along.
I didn't shut it down because I didn't really have to, but I had to step away because it
was just really depressing time to have all these expectations just kind of crumble away.
Yeah.
I mean, this is point number two in your business where I think most people would be like, that's
it, I'm done.
I'm out of here.
Most reasonable people.
Yeah.
Because they're like, you know, fail fast, I would just shoot it, move on, move on your
life.
And we shut it down, it was also, it felt like the final admittance of failure.
And I was like, maybe this.
So.
Well, I think you hear a lot of stories about perseverance, you know, you hear like the
famous one is the Airbnb story about how these guys spent years trying to get their business
to work.
And it just kept not working.
And they're going into debt, and nothing they're doing is working, they're selling cereal just
to finance their business.
And then, you know, it's a happy story at the end, it all works out.
And every time I hear that story, I'm like, yeah, I would, I for sure would quit like
that's crazy.
They should have quit.
How did you decide after you came back from your month of doing nothing that you weren't
going to quit?
So I'm going to like briefly summarize, I think this is like, like that briefly quit
was like two years in and I'm seven years now.
So there's a lot of like middle ground.
And it's funny because I've done podcasts over the years, I've told the story.
And again, spoiler alert, this year, I actually am like, wow, this year has been a success.
And every other year when I was on a podcast, I'm like, yeah, we're doing pretty well.
It was like me, I don't know, pumping it up a little bit.
It's funny looking back on those five years where it's just like the company just kind
of plodded along, didn't really do much, but it wasn't going downhill.
I just kind of was lazy, also hopeful, also kind of hoping, hoping that I should back
up.
One of the things that I kept this hope is that it's a marketplace and it works better
the more businesses you have on the marketplace.
Like it's more useful to people that the more businesses that get on there and I didn't
have funding in order to like kickstart it up to like a hundred thousand businesses,
but people were still signing up for it.
And people were still sending me messages saying they found use out of it.
So I was like, well, I might as well just keep it going.
And it was still making some amount of money and that some of my money was still coming
back to me.
So over like the last five years was kind of like, okay, I work on this myself and people
seem to be finding some sort of joy on it.
And I do enjoy the process of programming it and doing marketing.
But that's one of the reasons why I wrote the books was that after years of just having
the same plot along, it was like a crap, I need to find something new to work on.
And I wanted to write, I had this idea is about how programming should be taught based
on that experience in computer science, based on experience of teaching myself, and then
also my experience of working in Django over the last few years.
And so I was like, okay, I'm actually going to create this whole other project, I'm going
to write this book called Hello Web App, teach Django and web app programming the way I thought
I think it should be taught, because A, I think it should be done.
But B, I also kind of need money now.
And the wedding lovely is still not, I think until this this year, like I said, it's the
best it's ever made.
It's probably gonna be on track to make like 60 to 80,000 something like that.
It's mind blowing, because all those years before, it was like maybe making 15 to 20,000
per year.
Wow.
So you were just surviving over that?
Yes, pretty much.
I was lucky to be in San Jose, the other, this is gonna sound amazing, and I'll say that
there's a story behind this that makes it not as amazing as it sounds.
But I had a five bedroom house in San Jose for free, it was a family's home.
And so I just worked, my husband worked in his startup there, I worked my startup, I
don't have to worry about rent.
Thank goodness, so lucky that I had that, because I think wedding lovely would have
a shutdown if I had to pay rent.
I was able to cut my expenses really, really low.
I brought in a roommate, that person was paying me rent.
So I had a little bit of income from that, and kind of just made things work over those
years.
That's huge.
I mean, I very rarely hear stories about people bootstrapping and Silicon Valley or in San
Francisco, just because of how expensive the rent is, like that alone will kill your bootstrapping
ambitions.
Yeah, totally.
Again, it's not just like I have a rich family member, it's like, hey, use this house.
There's a story, there's not a lot of good parts of it, I'm not going to say it here.
I'm just going to say to anyone who's like, wow, she's so lucky.
Like yes, I'm lucky, but there's also a story.
So yeah, to jump to the end of the story this last year, it's been kind of crazy, because
it's plotting along and I'm like, whatever, and sometimes I get tired of it.
And I was actually legit thinking about last fall, you know what, maybe I should finally
shut it down, because it's just like continuing to plot along, and it's taking up these cycles
my brain, and it's still running and people seem to enjoy it.
But there's so many other startups have launched during the time that I launched it.
And then since then, that seemed to be doing so much better than me, and I just I don't
have that drive anymore to make wedding lovely, a complete success anymore.
Like I'm just so weirdly burnt out, like still working on it, but not.
And at that time, someone who worked with me part time online came back like I couldn't
afford to pay your full time came back to me after a week, like a good year of not working
together.
She messaged me asking me if she can come back as part time because she loved working
on wedding lovely so much that she was going to make it work elsewhere like she was going
to pick up other writing jobs online writing jobs or editing jobs or something on the side.
So she worked on wedding lovely part time.
And I was like, you know what?
This person is passionate that I lost this passion over the last, you know, seven years
of working on this because it's just been plodding along and I've kind of, you know,
doing myself.
I just couldn't do it anymore.
And here's this person who wants to come back.
And so I took what I was paying myself, which I think at the time was 20,000 a year.
I'm like, hey, 20,000 a year, part time work, I gave her access to all the financials.
I was like, you can see the exact state of the company.
You can see everything.
Like you're basically in charge.
I'm not paying myself anymore.
And that was the moment when wedding lovely started taking off.
Finally, it's like I needed me to fire myself.
It's like ridiculous.
Look back on it.
I've been like plodding along this company for so long and it took me, you know, finding
someone who's passionate about it again, like I was ended up, I guess I was holding it back
by not losing that passion.
That's a crazy story.
Did you just completely stop working on it at that point?
Pretty much.
I guess I was fixing bugs, but yeah, the book stuff started taking off, which we haven't
talked about, but the book stuff started taking off.
My speaking career started taking off.
And again, it was just that laziness and not shutting the website down.
So she started working on it part time.
There was a person that was working for me part time as basically a WordPress assistant.
She was going to quit because she's been working, doing WordPress stuff for me for like six
years.
And I was like, okay, you work with Jenny, this person is Jess, I was like, you work
with Jenny and Jenny worked with her to change her duties, what she was working on.
And they started working together.
And I had hired a personal assistant in the Philippines, like you do as a bootstrap startup.
And she was full time.
They started working together.
So it's three of them.
And again, the company just is making more money than it's ever had before.
It's getting more traffic than it's ever had before.
The three of them are, as far as I can tell, super happy.
And I think last week, I moved Jenny from part time to full time, because the company
could suddenly afford it.
And then a couple days ago, I looked at the financials for the rest of the year.
And I'm like, well, I actually can start paying myself again.
So I'm paying myself very little as a contractor.
Those three are definitely the people who are in charge of the company, and I'm just
advising it.
But it's like mind blowing that a year ago.
Ridiculous.
Congratulations.
That's so good to hear that.
Yeah, it's I don't know, it's, it makes me so happy.
I'm so much happier running the company and having people who are passionate about it.
And every now and then, we'll have this stellar month, and so I'll just send them all bonuses.
And it kind of feels like I'm having that stack of 20s in my hands, and I'm just flinging
the money about.
And I'm making these three people really happy, as far as I can tell.
I think I might change my passion in the company, or maybe my passion has been reignited to
make these three folks, or in hopefully any future employee, you know, make them happy
and give them something they can work on because they have that passion.
And it now feels like instead of me being passionate about wedding lovely, it's me being
passionate about helping them build this company together.
It's kind of changed in my mind, and then I don't know, it's just, it's really cool
after six years, whatever, seven years of plotting on this company, having everything
change what feels like overnight.
And finally, like these awesome things are happening since the last awesome thing, which
was the Etsy stuff.
Yeah.
I mean, I think some people will probably think this is controversial, and some people
think it's obvious, but there's nothing like making somebody that you know, or somebody
happy on a very personal level, where you can actually hear their story and see how
you're affecting them.
And it's so different to do that.
Doing that I think is so much more impactful and feels so much better than even making
a website that reaches some gigantic number of people where it's just a number and it's
intangible.
Like if you're Mark Zuckerberg, and you create Facebook, I'm sure it feels good on some level
to be like, I've reached x billion people, but that's just a number, you know, like it's
not Yeah, that doesn't feel as great as actually hearing people talk about, you know, how you've
helped them or having somebody that you're working with super passionate about this job
that you basically created.
Yeah.
And, you know, sometimes, I mean, I'm on I can see them talk on slack or on the emails,
and there'll be a problem, and they work together to fix it.
And I'm just like, holy crap, like sometimes, I sometimes call my minions, and I don't mean
to be derogatory, but just like, here, these people that are doing the job that I was doing
before, and they're doing it better than me.
And they're solving problems better than me, especially since I was burnt out.
And they can, you know, ping me if you have questions, or they want to use some of my
background experience, I'm going to be lovely, but they're definitely going their own direction
and doing way better.
Ah, it's such a good feeling.
One of the things that you mentioned was that by the time you got to this point where you
were a little bit burned out on wedding lovely, you were kind of having your flame ignited
in other areas, you were public speaking was taking off for you, you were writing your
book, and that was doing really well.
How did you get into writing your book and then what kicked off that process?
Yeah, so the books came about because I was burnt out and I needed something else to work
on and I didn't want a job, you know, like, so throughout this whole process, I've kind
of determined that having a day to day job is just not for me, I got used to baking my
own hours and working weekends when I want and working nights when I want and taking
off the afternoons when I want that kind of stuff.
It's really nice.
Yeah, exactly.
So it was like, Okay, what do I what can I do to supplement my income so I don't go completely
broke and have to get a job.
So I, you know, at the time, I think, maybe not so much today, I think people are really
into courses now.
And when I decided to write Hello Web App, which is like, hmm, two and a half years ago,
like books were the big thing.
I think they're courses now.
But at the time, this is when Nathan Barry was releasing a bunch of books and getting
big on like Hacker News.
I think Nathan Barry is actually my inspiration for Hello Web App, because he wrote a lot
about the process of writing a book, and then how many buckets of money he was making from
his books at the time.
I was like, Yeah, he just told everything.
Yeah, I loved it.
And I'm like, Oh, I totally do that.
So and then okay, then my background in design definitely helped.
Because in university, my graphic design courses, I took an editorial design course.
And the process of formatting a book was super fun.
I love it.
It's something I don't think a lot of people will be into, but I just love the little nitpicky
parts of designing and changing the type and making sure paragraphs are perfect.
It's weird.
So those two things came together, I was like, Okay, I need to make money.
Here's Nathan Barry making buckets of money.
And I think I have an idea for teaching people how to program that is different than what
other people are teaching.
Because again, people were saying, here's not a program with a specific project idea.
And I want to build something that people could use as a template in order to build
what they were passionate in.
And last but not least was in Django, the framework for Python, which still to this
day, I am the biggest fan of Django, I think they're doing still really great things for
helping people build web apps, and abstracting out all the little nitty gritty things that
are happening in the background.
I'm a huge fan of Django for teaching people how to code, especially when it comes to web
apps.
So yeah, that's kind of where it started.
It kind of just snowballed into this bigger thing, because I thought about pitching a
publisher on this, and I actually got a publisher offer for the idea of Hello, web app, I think
I wrote the first like 2000 words, I submitted it to a book apart.
And they're like, no, there's people who do all those like fancy books, never run a list
apart and end of it apart.
And that was my real dream.
I was like, okay, I want to become a book apart author, because that means I've made
it.
And they're like, no.
So I was like, okay, what do I do next, I submitted it to another publisher.
And they said, they gave me their standard terms, which was something like $8,000 advance
for like 5% royalties.
And when I looked at that, and then Kickstarter was a thing, I looked at Kickstarter.
And Kickstarter is essentially if I can do a successful Kickstarter, it's the money raised
from a Kickstarter is essentially in advance.
But then I also keep 100% of the royalties.
I lose someone to design and publish their, you know, design and format the book for me.
But you like that part anyway.
Exactly.
So then I was like, well, shit, I just, you know, told the publisher, thank you, but no
thanks.
I took myself into the Kickstarter process, which also is a good way of proving an idea.
And I scheduled the Kickstarter around, I believe, PyCon, which is the biggest Python
conference and launched a Kickstarter, went to PyCon, and I just like found all the bigwigs
in Python.
It was like, hi, I'm Tracy.
You don't know me.
I'm doing this Kickstarter.
I want to write a book on Django, which is Python.
Can you help me tweet out the Kickstarter link, which was cool.
It was a really cool way of hustling that whole process because Kickstarter's done three
now.
Kickstarter's are so much work to get them out, right?
They look exhausting just watching the videos that people make for their Kickstarter's and
all the awards that they give out.
Oh, yeah.
I had a friend of mine who did a Kickstarter himself while I was doing the Kickstarter
for my third book, and we got in this gigantic fight.
And it's just because both of us are just so stressed out during Kickstarter's like
afterwards.
It's like, okay, the whole reason we have this fight was not because we're not friends
is because we're just stressed out from running as Kickstarter's.
Maybe we shouldn't talk to each other until both of our Kickstarter campaigns are done
because this is not working out.
Yeah.
So I think it's really interesting that you decided to write a book about Django.
Because if you look at the beginning of your story, way back when in 2011, here you are
copying and pasting all of your code because you're not sure how to duplicate it and reuse
it.
And then a short time later, you're writing a book teaching other people how to use Django
where did you get that confidence from and how much did you improve as a programmer and
that amount of time?
I've improved as a programmer, but I also strongly feel that beginners teach other
beginners better.
When you're an expert programmer, you kind of lose some of the, you know, you kind of
forget how hard it is to learn programming when you don't, it doesn't come naturally
to you.
So I definitely wrote Hello Web App as a beginner, Hello Web App itself is very simple.
And again, it's just kind of just the process I did to launch the first version of my website.
And all it is, it walks someone through building a website, adding a database, getting website
pages up.
The other cool thing it does is that I really focus on websites as a result rather than
say command line.
I don't like programming tutorials for new programmers that just does show us everything
through the command line because I don't think that feels real to someone who's not used
to the command line.
So it's like build a website and then launch on Heroku.
That's essentially what Hello Web App is.
And then you have some Django things in there.
So as, yeah, as a beginner, it was easy for me to teach because it was all beginner stuff.
And it was scary because I did some tutorials for Hello Web App at PyCon and DjangoCon like
the year afterwards.
And I always had to make sure my friends who are good at Python came with me because people
would ask me questions.
I had no clue how to answer because I was still a beginner and still not an expert Python
or Django programmer.
Now that I'm doing public speaking, I actually did a keynote at EuroPython this year.
And it was essentially on this whole problem of I'm not an expert programmer.
I'm not an engineer.
I can never be hired by someone by Google or Facebook.
But I've written books that teach people how to program.
I feel like I've really contributed to the Python and Django communities by not an engineer.
So that's what my keynote kind of explores is this problem where people think that you're
either an engineer or not or you're a smart person or not kind of.
Yeah, it's not so black and white.
And you can contribute a lot without having to be a super deep expert in any one area.
Yeah, just to call it EuroPython on this, actually, their badges were perfect for this
because they're like the largest Python conference in Europe.
And their badges had this thing where it's like Python power and you could do one to
five stars.
And I was like, this is what I mean.
Here I am doing a keynote at a major Python conference in Europe.
And I put three stars out of five because I didn't want to be like two stars.
Like what are you doing on stage if you only have two stars?
But that was the thing I don't like is like when people say beginner, intermediate, advanced
programming when there's so many different things you can do with programming like write
books or run tutorials or teach beginners or start a startup like I built all of wedding
lovely not feeling like an expert programmer, but I was doing company worked the code was
probably atrocious, probably still is atrocious.
It's a lot better.
But it's like, it worked, right?
Right.
I mean, that's not the main point of starting a company is not to write the world's most
beautiful code and be the best software engineer possible, it's to produce something of value
that customers want and will pay you for.
Exactly.
And I think a lot of people get confused about this.
I mean, I talk about ad nauseam, so I won't go into my whole diatribe here, but you did
it right.
Yeah, well, it's good to hear that in hindsight, you know, at the time, it did not feel like
it was the right thing.
It's when I teach people I haven't done a tutorial in a while, but sometimes I'll do
a tutorial based on the books I wrote at these conferences, and I always pull up the live
wedding lovely code, because even as beginners, people who don't understand like this, they're
very new to this, they can see like how crazy the code is, like it doesn't look like those
pretty examples they would see on Hacker News, they can see that, you know, here's a website
that is running and as making money, and here's what the code looks like.
And so you don't as beginners, you don't have to worry about your code being beautiful and
perfect, you just have to worry about whether your code is working.
Exactly.
And then just go from there.
So I think another thing that people struggle at in the beginning is design.
You wrote Hello Web App, you wrote a follow up to Hello Web App, and now you've written
a new book, your third called Hello Web Design.
And the idea behind it.
Yeah, it's been clever.
You've got a theme and you're sticking to it.
The idea behind it is that you want to help people who don't have a design background
to learn the basics, and the shortcuts behind good design.
Is that an accurate description?
Yeah, you know, I've I mentioned briefly, I've been doing a lot of public speaking recently,
because that's, you know, you release a book, and then you can use that to start speaking
at conferences, and then you speak at conferences, and then you can use that to release more
books is kind of something that people do to kind of fell into that myself.
And I did a bunch of Hello Web App presentations.
And then I made this new presentation, I called design for non designers.
Because with Hello Web App, again, I thought I had something new to say that can help people
learn how to program.
And then I started thinking to myself, what if I could teach design in a way that I wasn't
seeing it being taught by other people, because in both both of these fields, even though
they're the opposite, I do not like best practices, I don't like it when experts try to teach someone
the best way to do things.
Like Hello Web App, I'm teaching people not the best way to do programming, but they can
learn that as step five.
So I thought, okay, if I take this idea behind Hello Web App and apply that to design, how
can I teach beginners how to design that kind of defies best practices and teaches them
shortcuts?
Because I think if you get someone to that initial success, it's more likely they'll
continue with whatever they're learning.
So that's where it started ruminating my head, okay, maybe there's another book in me, maybe
there's something new that I could teach.
I originally did it as a conference presentation.
And this was last year, I gave, I probably gave it like 10 conferences, it was crazy,
like all of them are picking it up, which was amazing, because I got to travel a lot
during this time.
I wasn't being paid, but I was going, I went to Berlin, I gave it a few source was a few
source, I gave it in Hollywood at a GitHub conference, it was a great way for me to like
test that people were interested in this idea of and they are interested in what I had to
say, this design for non designers, these, like shortcuts, that I've kind of like figured
out would be like the best way to help someone jump into design really quickly, if they know
nothing about design, just having some knowledge about the web.
So that's where it started was last year.
And like every one of those conferences, I'm like, I'm gonna write a book about this.
I only started working on the book this year, because they kind of got really intimidating.
I kept telling more and more people about doing it, which this works for everything.
Like me tell a bunch of people, you're going to do something, it makes it harder to do
it.
Like startups, writing a book, anything, I told way to be people, I was gonna work on
this book.
And then I was like, Oh, no, I actually have to do it.
So in January, I did the Kickstarter, and I raised 22,000, which is pretty damn awesome.
That's huge.
Again, it's a really good advance.
And I started working on it before the Kickstarter, but I'm still working out today.
It's delayed.
Sorry, Kickstarter backers, I'm working on it as fast as I can.
It's not a Kickstarter if it's not delayed.
Right?
You know, actually, with the first two books, I had a Kickstarter for them both.
Every time I expect this, every time I get someone who emails me going, so I paid for
your book, but I haven't got it yet.
Can you tell me what happened to my book?
And I'm like, Oh, it's a Kickstarter.
Like you're not paying for a book.
You're paying, you know, like I do updates, uh, people, I got so stressful.
So hello, web app was actually a year delayed.
That was my fault.
And these emails would happen and whenever they popped in, as soon as I saw you have
a new message message from Kickstarter, I grabbed my husband and make him read it and
to let me know what it said, because I just couldn't read those anymore.
Cause it was so depressing to have these people being like, uh, where's my book?
Are you ever going to release this?
People are happy now.
Well, it sounds like you've gotten really good at Kickstarter too.
I mean, raising $22,000 for a book on web design is no joke.
Yeah.
I was trying for 30.
That's always the thing, right?
Yeah.
But the 22 is huge.
Yeah.
My minimum was 15.
I hit 22.
I was trying for 30, but yeah, that's always the, you know, raise, try to go higher.
It's like put your minimum at half of what you want, but hope that you're going to hit
between your minimum and what you actually want.
There's a whole thing.
I could do a whole podcast on kickstarters.
Like I've learned so much from kickstarters over the years.
Well, you mentioned that you had, you kind of were in the cycle of speaking and writing
books and then using the popularity of your books to get more speaking gigs, et cetera.
How much did that help you?
That also slows me down.
It slows you down for sure, you know, but you're also building an audience I presume
and meeting influencers who can help you promote your books and your Kickstarter.
Give us a quick overview of some of the things you did to drive traffic to your Kickstarter
page and convince people to contribute.
So some things, I will say that I look back in this last year promoting Hello Web Design.
I think I could have done a better job.
I think everyone will say that for their stuff.
But for me, there was an opportunity to really sign people up for email lists.
And that would be a really good thing if I really worked on it and I actually didn't
do as much.
So my email list only has like, my Hello Web Design email list, I think has like 20 people
on it.
It's kind of silly considering the Kickstarter.
But I still have the Kickstarter list, the separate list.
I don't immediately subscribe them to this main marketing list.
And then I have the Hello Web App email list, which I think has like 3000 people.
So just FYI, the whole, like all these conferences, I should have done a better job of being like,
and now sign up for the email list, like I really should have done that a little bit
better.
That said, during the Kickstarter, I decided to try something new and it wasn't 100% successful.
I'm glad I tried it.
I didn't schedule it during a conference I was giving, I decided to try to do this little
tour aspect where I would go to companies in New York and in San Francisco, give an
internal talk or like an evening talk and be able to talk about the Kickstarter during
those talks.
And so ideally, those companies would be paying for me to fly in because I was going to give
a talk with their company.
And then I'd have this opportunity to promote the Kickstarter, and then hopefully also get
the company to help back the Kickstarter.
It sounds like a really good idea, considering my public speaking experience.
And it was also I wanted to have corporate speaking experience on my like future speakers
resume.
And that would be a really good opportunity for me to combine the Kickstarter with this
idea I wanted to do more corporate speaking.
It didn't work out.
Well, we're wrong.
I really wish it did.
I did one internal event in Toronto, that's where I live.
I'm originally from California, but I moved to Toronto last summer.
And I did an internal event at this company, actually that company, PagerDuty, that was
awesome.
They actually backed the Kickstarter.
So that was successful.
I didn't have to travel for it.
So that was awesome.
And then I did an event in New York City.
And I'm not going to disparage this.
I'm not going to say the company's name, because that's just being right.
I don't want to be like, I had a bad experience and say their name.
Yeah, no need.
But there's this.
Yeah, there was a big company that did an event internally and they're like, Oh, we're
not going to pay.
But you can do this talk.
And then the talk was like 10 people.
I had no idea.
I was going to be that few people.
Oh, that's rough.
Yeah.
And then it ended at noon and they just like kicked me out.
And I'm like, not even lunch, like big company.
I know you have a kitchen and all the people are going and getting their lunches and whatnot.
And at least I knew it was ending at noon.
And I thought like the chances were high that at least I get a meal out of it.
And they just basically just like shoved me out the door after this talk.
And I was like, Oh, I regret spending the money to fly to New York and stay in New York
and like get up here for this stupid event at this company.
I was really bad.
I feel like I have betrayed.
And I emailed them saying, okay, well, you'll least we'll least back to Kickstarter.
And they're like, nah.
And I'm like, Oh my God, I did so much work for this.
So that didn't work out.
But I was able to kind of salvage it by booking a local Python event, Python meetup.
And so I was able to go to the Python meetup and give a talk and then promote the Kickstarter
there.
And then I flew to San Francisco and gave a talk at Stripe.
And that was awesome.
Stripe didn't back the Kickstarter, but they did an open event, like a public event.
And I think this is the first time and only time that I've headlined a event just around
me.
And that was awesome for my and my speaking resume.
So I gave my design for non designers talk oddly.
That's probably the worst talk I've ever I've given the talk multiple times and just remember
bombing it.
For some reason, I got really nervous.
I mean, I bombed it, but it wasn't as smooth as my other talks.
But it was so cool.
I was able to go to San Francisco.
I talked to probably maybe 100 people at an evening event at Stripe.
And I was really happy that they were able to support me in that way and and host this
event and bring in food and all that.
So that was cool.
Yeah, that's super cool.
I work in Stripe and I had no idea that happened.
Yeah, it was.
Oh, my God.
I forget his name.
Romain.
He wasn't the person who he was surprised by it too, but he's the dev rel at Stripe.
I think I surprised him because I just emailed someone at some contact I had there like,
hey, want to do this?
And Stripe's like, sure.
So, yay, Stripe.
I'm a huge fan.
Like my second book for Hello Web App, where I never really mentioned this, Hello Web App
is a tutorial.
Hello Web App intermediate concepts just kind of does individual chapters of advanced things
or intermediate key things.
It's like to call it.
And one of them is on Stripe.
And I did that because Stripe is amazing and I want to help people use Stripe.
So I'm not paid by Stripe.
They didn't pay for the chapter either.
They backed that Kickstarter campaign and they did it as a silent partner because they
didn't want it to look like they promote.
They did sponsor that content.
It was all me, but they backed my Kickstarter and helped me run this event.
And they've been big supporters of me, which has been awesome.
So yeah, hey, public thank you to Stripe.
I mean, I think the kind of vibe I'm getting from your entire career, I mean, your entire
last seven years is that you're a pretty scrappy person and you figured out how to make things
work and stick with them regardless.
I mean, the fact that your strategy for getting a Kickstarter funded didn't really work and
yet you still got $22,000 as an advance to write a book.
So many emails.
It's a perfect example.
Yeah.
I mean, so there's a whole other thing I can say about Kicksiders.
That was this one tactic I had.
I need to write like a blog post about my new marketing tactics for Kickstarter is one
of the things I don't see people talk about is that, you know, Kickstarter generally
is 30 days.
So you have essentially four weeks and the beginning of Kickstarter and end of Kickstarter
are very different.
They're the hype, but there's like this middle doldrums period where if you're running a
Kickstarter the first week, you're like, yeah.
And then the second week you're like, oh, and then the third week, like nothing happens.
You're like, oh my God, I'm going to fail.
And then the fourth week comes along and then it starts taking off again because people
get excited because it's about to end.
It's like the natural thing that Kicksiders do.
So I had set up my marketing tasks depending on the week.
So there are things I would do in the first week because it made sense like emailing personal
contacts emailing email lists, but there had to be things that were scheduled specifically
for those middle periods that I knew that the doldrums are going to come.
And that's only because I did this before I had this experience of running a Kickstarter
that I was able to anticipate that middle period, which always sucks.
And that's when I scheduled those trips so I could continue to do marketing and continue
to promote the Kickstarter, even when it's arguably harder to do.
I did ads, I had those email lists, like there's a lot of things I did.
I really should write a blog post.
Yeah.
I mean, this sounds like it could be a book.
You could do a Kickstarter for a book about how to do a Kickstarter.
It's funny because I do this public speaking a lot.
I had that Design for Non-Designers talk that went big.
I'd give a talk that's called Marketing for Developers.
Essentially, I got into this whole like, I'm going to teach beginner concepts to a different
group of people, generally developers.
So this marketing for developers, a lot of people have been like, oh, so you're going
to have Hello Web Marketing or whatever.
That's going to be your fourth book.
But here's the thing is like with marketing and these other talks I give, I don't have
that, that's something different.
Like the design, I have these shortcuts, these things that people aren't teaching.
With the Hello Web app, I have something that's people aren't teaching that I'm teaching.
And I haven't figured that out for anything else yet.
I can parrot what other people are saying for Kickstarter, but everything I've learned
people have said before, I haven't figured out what I could say that's different.
So that's what I'm waiting for.
For any future book is maybe a Hello Web design with my last one, or maybe there's other ones.
I just have to figure out, that's really what propels me to write a book is when I figure
out what I can say that's different than other people are saying.
It makes perfect sense and we kind of got diverted on this topic of Kickstarter, but
I personally would really like to know what are some of the basics and the shortcuts behind
good design?
So essentially, I try to teach a lot of the online, there's a lot of online resources
that can help someone out.
And when you look at design books, when I teach beginners, they're like, Oh, typography,
let's go into the history of typography and all the terms are in typography and start
teaching you the background and then what everything means and it gets really overwhelming.
So with like, for doing type online, the presentation started out being like, okay, typography is
a huge area.
So let's look at free fonts online, because this is based for people who are working on
the web.
So let's look at typekit and or type gets paid.
So Google fonts, essentially, but Google fonts is overwhelming.
So there's these websites where people curate the best Google fonts.
So then let's go these places that have 20 fonts that you can choose from, rather than
say 100 as a person who doesn't know design.
And so going on there, it's going to help you narrow down choices and make better choices
by using whether people have curated.
So I'm kind of like, okay, use that shortcut, like don't feel bad.
You know, if you're designing something for the first time, you don't want to like learn
the history of typography, you just want to have a good font.
And how can I help you find something that works for you, narrow down the choices and
make it easier for you as a beginner designer?
It makes a lot of sense.
You're just making the entire process less intimidating, less aggressive approach.
You don't need to be the world's best and most knowledgeable designer just to get something
out the door that looks good as a beginner.
Yeah, that's the thing with design is like the best way to learn design is not reading
about the hack background design.
The best way to design is by doing design, and you have to do design over and over and
over.
And if there's like this huge mountain ahead of you, where people are saying, let's learn
design, they teach you everything that's in the background, the mountain gets even higher.
So it's like, how can I make this mountain a lot smaller?
So then you feel comfortable actually starting to do design.
And then that's how you become a better designer, because you'll feel comfortable about doing
it.
Your first one is probably not going to be as good as your second one, and the second
one is not going to be as good as your third one, and you're just going to build up and
become a designer that way.
So it's like, how can I teach someone to start get on that process, you know, and shorten
that mountain, make it easier for them to summon.
So let's say I'm a programmer, and I just launched my side project.
And it's totally, poorly designed.
I have no design skills whatsoever.
What are some things that I can do?
What are some more tricks and shortcuts I can take to make it look better in a short
period of time?
So I tried to narrow down when it comes to visual design, because the two parts of the
design process is making sure it works, because you can have a crappy looking design.
But if it still works well, then boom, yeah, it's a good design, a lot of people rely too
much on aesthetics.
That said, when someone says how do I become a better designer, they're thinking probably
about aesthetics.
So I try to narrow it down to just one concept, which is to reduce clutter, all the principles
in the book are based around the whole clutter, like the visual principles are around clutter.
So it's like, okay, you add a grid, so things line up.
And then having things lined up under this, let this invisible grid reduces visual clutter.
And then when it comes to type, instead of doing a bunch of different fonts, which a
lot of newbie designers do, let's narrow down to just two fonts that you use in your design,
and that also reduces clutter.
And then you go into colors, take a color palette, narrow it down to a smaller color
palette, and just use the same colors over and over.
I'm paraphrasing and making things a lot shorter, but essentially, how do we color?
How do you reduce clutter with cutter?
Color.
How do you use clutter with white space?
How do you reduce clutter by reducing the length of your contents and making things
easy to read?
Because it's not just aesthetics, but it's also what you're writing, and that's going
to help your website work better, which is really, truly the thing you need to do, is
making sure what you're designing is working well, not just looking good.
So it all ties together.
That's perfect.
You heard it here.
A lot of people post their landing pages on IndieHackers forum, and a lot of people want
design advice.
And all the things that you've said, I think people would greatly benefit from learning
more about.
So can you tell people where to find out more about you, and where they can go to order
Hello Web Design, and your other books too?
Awesome.
Yes, happy to help.
So one little anecdote, I think actually would be funny, is that Hello Web App was only named
Hello Web App because I found out that the URL was available.
Like, boom, got the name for my books, like I can get hellowebapp.com, but then I launched
Hello Web Design.
I was like, oh crap, what do I do here?
Hello Web Design is not available.
What do I do?
So if you want to go to the website dedicated for the book, it's hellowebdesignbook.com.
That said, I have now an overarching domain for everything, hellowebbooks.com.
That will lead you to Hello Web App, or Hello Web Design, which you can pre-order now, the
process of building a video series, which actually is going to look at landing pages
and talk about the principles in the book and how they can apply these landing pages
to make them better.
So there will be a whole video package that I'm working on right now that will be maybe
interesting to IndieHackers.
I said, actually, I'm going to pitch something, I'm in the process of planning this video
series.
So if you are listening to the podcast and you want me to review your landing page or
your design, I would be interested in having it in this video series, send me an email
and that probably would totally work out because I haven't put out a call for people to send
me stuff to review yet.
That would be awesome.
Could I convince you to come onto the forum and Unity hackers will make a thread and people
can also get in touch that way?
Yes, that would also be very proactive.
Perfect.
I probably should do that.
There's a lot of things I like focusing on getting the editorial design for the book
done and the cover for the book done.
So this video thing is like something I'm working on, but that's like two weeks from
now.
So yes, I will do that when I can focus on it.
So that's Hello Web App, hellowebooks.com, WeddingLovely, you know, has all the vowels.
It's exactly as it sounds, weddinglovely.com and then my personal website.
My username I use online is LimeDaring, not LimeDarling, common mistake.
I now preface all of my presentations with, I'm LimeDaring, not LimeDarling, interesting.
I can't change my username now, people will be confused.
But LimeDaring.com, Twitter, LimeDaring, my DMs are open.
I love them when people email me, love them when people DM me.
You know, look at my books, send me messages, ask me questions.
I love it.
Perfect.
Happy to help people.
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It only takes about 30 seconds, but it actually really helps get the word out and I would
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In addition, if you are running an internet business or if it's something that you'd
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Basically a community of like-minded individuals, just giving each other feedback and helping
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That's www.indiehackers.com slash forum.
Hope to see you guys there.