What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com. And you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet
businesses. And I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they
get to where they are today? How did they make decisions both in their personal lives
and at their companies? And what exactly makes their businesses stick? And the goal here,
as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our
own profitable internet businesses. Today, I'm sitting down with the one and only Corey
Zoot. Corey, how's it going?
Yeah, it's good. I had no idea you had that whole thing memorized.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
As soon as you would always read it off.
I'm sure it was probably 140 times by now.
Nice.
So we are in an Airbnb in Cape Town, South Africa, where you live.
Yes.
And I think you grew up in the United States.
That's right. Yeah, I grew up in Boston, in the suburbs of Boston.
And how long have you been in South Africa now?
So going on my fifth year now.
Your fifth year in South Africa. And your last three years as an indie hacker. So your
background is pretty interesting. You were working as the CTO of a high growth startup
that had hundreds of people. And you went on a sabbatical and decided that you didn't
want to come back, and that you actually wanted to be an indie hacker. So for the last three
years, you've been working on a variety of side projects. So you sort of choose breadth
over depth. In total, your side projects are bringing in about $26,000 annual profit. And
your goal is, I think, to reach the point where you never have to work again by 2023.
That's right. Yeah.
So that's a pretty wild journey. Why breadth over depth? Why so many projects, rather than
just focusing on one project that's better than the others, that's growing faster than
the others, and that can get you to your goal a little bit earlier?
Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, the answer might be that I'm not optimizing properly.
I think one thing that I value very, very highly is enjoying what I'm working on and
enjoying what I'm doing. And I have a little bit of a short attention span, I would say.
So sometimes I get a project to a certain place, and I get a little bit bored with it.
And so I kind of want to move on to the next thing, build a new thing, challenge myself
in some different way.
I think the term for it is shiny object syndrome.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
You get the new idea, and it's so amazing. And all the old ideas are suddenly boring.
And you move on to the new one.
A lot of shiny objects.
Yeah, I think your approach, though, is a good one, because you're not just sort of
accidentally working on things. You've been very transparent about your entire process.
And one of your top goals is that you want to enjoy the journey of being an indie hacker,
and that you want the entire process to be enjoyable, which I think is a great goal,
because for a lot of people, it's stressful.
Yes.
It's going without the sort of comfortable paycheck that you're used to, stressing over
whether or not this thing you're investing a lot of time into is going to work.
How do you enjoy the process of being a founder?
We spend so much of our lives working, and to not be enjoying your work, to be working
to reach a certain income, retirement level, or whatever is, I think people can do that.
But for me, the idea of just always making sure that I was having a lot of fun has been
super important to me.
And that's really, I would say, probably the primary reason why I have been doing the indie
stuff for the last three years is it's so much fun. Launching stuff, getting users and
having people do something with a product that you've built and then send you an email
about it.
It's such a fun, rewarding feedback loop, and it's a blast.
How do you deal with the stress? Actually, is there any stress at all? What are your
techniques for actually enjoying this when so many other people find it hard?
I suspect that one of the reasons why it's not that stressful is I probably keep my expectations
very low. And yeah, so it might even be a bad thing. It might even be the case that
it would be better if I was more stressed out, because I'm probably not trying hard
enough to be successful. But on the same token, I don't want to be stressed out. And so maybe
that's fine.
I don't know.
I think I have a sticky note or a note somewhere at home that says the secret to happiness
is low expectations, which sounds, in a way, demotivational and not that inspirational.
Like, oh, just keep your expectations low. But it doesn't mean that you can't achieve
something extraordinary. I mean, the fact that you're working your way towards independence,
towards a life where you basically don't have to do the things you don't want to do and
all of your time is free is very inspirational. And the fact that you can do it in a way where
you don't have to rush, you don't have to be there tomorrow, and you can still get there.
Yeah, maybe that's not the most ambitious Elon Musk-esque thing that anyone's ever said,
because at the same time, it's probably the case that you're a lot happier than Elon Musk.
Well, he's probably very fulfilled in his own way. But I agree with that. And it's also
not the case that stress equals ambition or something like that. I think you kind of said
this, but at one point during my indie hacky journey, I was sitting there and I was really
not challenged at all. And I was thinking like, oh, wow, I'm bored and probably even
maybe too comfortable. And with the whole shiny object syndrome thing, that was when
I was like, oh, okay, I need to launch a harder product. And I need to do it in a way that
is much more challenging to me because I'm getting too complacent right now, even though
the numbers are trending correct. I'm not stressed out. And so I think the decoupling,
the ambition from the stress, you don't have to be stressed out to also achieve things,
although maybe you do to achieve them at a certain pace. I'm not sure.
So let's talk about how you got here. Because as I mentioned earlier, you were the CTO of
a much larger company. And you decided that wasn't for you. But that was your life for
many years. I mean, you were working not as an indie hacker, but managing other people,
running a larger company. What were some of the lessons you learned there? And what was
it like to be a part of a company that was that big?
So the company Demagi, I joined in 2006. And I was employee number one, essentially, it
was me and the two co-founders. And then I was CTO till 2016, 2017, when I started the
indie hacking journey. And in that period, Demagi went from three people to about 130.
So it wasn't VC, we didn't grow super fast. It was kind of like 10, 20% a year. So it
went from two to three, three to seven, seven to 10. But over that course of time, eventually
there was 130 some odd people. There was like a 30 person tech team that I was sitting on
top of. And my job was obviously very, very different than it was as sort of employee
number two and the trenches writing code. Yeah. I mean, in terms of learnings, there
were kind of like two parallel streams of learnings that I had. One was sort of a whole
lot of skills that ended up being very useful for my career, obviously engineering skills.
I'm a coder by background. And I do all the development of all my projects. I do everything
100% by myself, basically. So obviously learning all the technical skills, a lot of the, I
mean, just sort of like how to be a reliable human being stuff. So like, you know, being
good at email, like figuring out a backlog and a priority list, how to manage something
like that. I did support for the organization for a long time. I did DevOps. So I learned
all these skills that would serve me very, very well. And in my Mandy hacking journey,
the other side of the coin or the other thing that I learned is sort of like the types of
work that I like and the types of work that I don't like. And I'm going to bring this
back to this whole enjoyment thing again. But you know, I realized like, I love building
stuff. I love coding. I love the creative process. I love tight user feedback loops.
I love seeing my software or the things that I've built out in the wild, you know, performance
reviews I could take or leave. You know, it's nice mentoring people. It's nice seeing people
grow, but there's a whole organizational aspects to performance management, onboarding and
in a growing organization, especially sort of at, at the top of an organization or near
the top, your job just, you go from maker to manager. And so like, I found myself, like
I wanted to be in the trenches writing code still, but instead I was, you know, reviewing
architecture docs and like, uh, you know, chairing meetings and, and these other things.
And I, and I realized like, Oh, like these, I can see why this is valuable and I can see
why it's good that I'm doing them. And I can see why it's like really beneficial for the
company that I, that I continue to do them, but they're not bringing me joy in the same
way that this, you know, creative building process, this, this tight, you know, product
feedback loop, this like user journey stuff, like all that, all the aspects of that I've
come to like really love about, about sort of the indie hacking, solopreneuring lifestyle
were slowly like getting pulled away from me. And so that was, those were kind of the
two elements was like one, like very practical, useful stuff. And then two, just like more
introspective figuring out what I wanted out of, out of a job and sort of like, you know,
starting to think through like what that might mean for my, for my future.
Yeah. Every large company that has a lot of employees has a lot of jobs and roles and
tasks that only exist to support the fact that there's a ton of people doing performance
reviews and all this kind of stuff. It's like, that's not actually building the product and
building stuff is inherently super fun. The CEO of Stripe Patrick has sent several emails
where he spends lots of time doing different things within the company. And every now and
then it'll take some time to just join one of the development teams and write code. And
every single time he's super surprised by how much he just loves writing code, how much
more fun that is than a lot of other tasks that would seem to be pretty fun. So it's
not shocking to me that once you see your job go from, you know, employee number one
or two, writing the code, building the product, suddenly you're managing a team of 30 people,
you're kind of bored. You kind of wish you were doing some other things. But also like
you've worked so hard in your career to get to that point. And that's kind of the role
that gets the most respect and you're the highest on the totem pole. So it can be pretty
hard to leave that job and say, I'm going to set it on my own and start from scratch
making $0 on my own projects. What did it look like to make that decision in the middle
of your sabbatical?
The CTO job. And I should add, I went back to the organization part time after my sabbatical.
So I took sort of a six month sabbatical where I was like, I don't know, I need to figure
out my life guys and I'm going to like try a few things. And then came back and I was
like, yeah, I still want to be a part of this, but I don't want that leadership role anymore.
It was tough and it was tough coming back also because I no longer, I didn't realize
how much cache I had just because I had the power until like I didn't have the power.
And then I would be like, wait, why does no one think that like all my suggestions are
brilliant anymore? And like, it was because like, Oh, they're not just saying yes to me
because I'm like the CTO. So that was definitely an interesting adjustment. And at times was
kind of like, Oh man, like I really, yeah, I think I'm right here, but okay. I'll like,
but no, I mean ultimately like, I think I just, I took a lot of time to during the sabbatical
thinking about like, okay, if I could just design my life from scratch, what would that
look like? And I was like, okay, well I have to make money. Like I'm not independently
healthy. I can't just like sit here like living on. So, so I was like, okay, I need something
that will earn me money. And I was like, and I want to like, enjoy it. And like, I know
that sounds like really, really simple. And I should say like, I don't, those aren't necessarily
the only two things that you should optimize on. I think Elon Musk wants to save the world.
And like, I'm so in awe of that guy. But like, for me, I was like, what's right for me for
right now is, is I want to enjoy this. And so once it became, once that became clear
to me, it then became clear to me that I wasn't going to enjoy that CTO role the same way
that I would enjoy sort of like pushing on the India hacker thing and trying to make
that work.
Do you have any fears around financial security and like getting rid of what I'm sure was
a cushy salary relative to being a broken hacker with no income coming in?
Well, it was a social enterprise. And so it wasn't that cushy, but it was, yeah, it was
pretty easy because I was throughout the whole past three years, I've never actually been
full time on, on an, on my sort of personal projects. So I have continued to work part
time for Demoggy, the organization I was CTO of. And I continue to do some freelancing,
which is like extremely lucrative on an hourly basis. And so I always knew that I had the,
this like easy fallback plan of, you know, I'm a person with like, I'm a good enough
coder that I will always have a safety net of being able to take on contract work or
get a job if, if worse comes to worse. And so I knew I, that wasn't really going to be
an issue. And at, at no point did I even really dip below my sort of burn rate, except during
the sabbatical where I was earning basically nothing.
So it was never really a risk for you then to quit. It was always a positive experience
of finding yourself and potentially building an amazing life or worst case scenario, just
working as a developer.
Yeah. And when you say it like that, it sounds like maybe I should have gone bigger or something.
Yeah, no, I played it very safe actually. Maybe in hindsight, I should have taken a
bigger boulder step, but it's interesting in that, like, you know, our lives are long,
like you said at the top, like my goal is to get to financial independence, passive
income sort of fully supporting me in by 2023. And yeah, like if, if I wanted to be more
ambitious, you know, maybe I could have done it already. Maybe I could do it next year,
but you know, what three years in the, in the scheme of a life to sort of hit that point,
like that doesn't, it doesn't necessarily make me think that that's too slow.
Okay. So let's talk about your very first project that you worked on out of the gate.
You quit working full time, you decided to be a freelancer and stay on your other company
part time. And the first project you made, which is still your most revenue generating
project was called placecard.me. What is it exactly? How does it work? And why did you
decide that that would be the very first thing that you would build?
Oh man. Yeah, it's, it's almost still embarrassing for me to talk about it. And when people like
when this comes up at dinner parties and stuff, I'm, I'm kind of like, I have to like explain
the placecard thing. But essentially, like, if you've ever been to a wedding, you know,
you often will see either on the table or like on sort of like a table by themselves.
There's like a bunch of place cards with people's names and the tables that they're sitting
at. And then you grab the thing and you take it to the table. And so my placecard, me,
my app is basically a way to make those yourself. So you upload a spreadsheet of your guest
list and the tables, and it just sort of generates that for you as a downloadable PDF that you
can sort of cut up and fold yourself. And that that's, I've got a bunch of different
designs that you can choose from. I've done some work to sort of like add different layouts
for all these different printable paper formats that, that exists. But, but that's basically
all it does.
So you're basically making weddings cheaper, cheaper and easier for people who are stressed
out trying to plan stuff in total, how to get these place cards.
And what happened was it was our wedding was the genesis of the idea. So we found out three
days before our wedding that we like had to provide these things and we were like, Oh,
like, okay. And then I wasn't going to like sit there. Like you could download all these
word templates, but I was like, I'm a coder. I'm not like going to, I refuse to sit here
and type these like names into these, like all these should be automated. Yeah, it should
be automated. And it turns out there is like this way that you can do it in Microsoft word.
It's called mail merge. And if you know that that's the thing you need to do, then you
can like figure that out. But anyway, so we did actually do it all by, we ended up writing
them by hand of all things because we thought that would be like a little classier, but
I was like, surely this must, there must be a better way to do this. And then, so when
I started my sabbatical, I was just sort of like, I had no idea what I was going to do.
I knew I wanted to like try my hand at, at indie hacking or I don't know if that's a
verb, but, uh, you can use it however you want to use it. But, uh, so I kind of just
like, I was just throwing ideas at the wall. This was one of the ideas and did some research.
There wasn't really anything that was that good. And I was like, okay, well, like it
seems like this is like, I had this need probably other people have this need. And that was,
that was basically it.
So how did you actually get this in the hands of your first paying customers and how long
did that process take? Cause I know a lot of companies will take, you know, many months
or even years to get from the point of I've got this brilliant idea to the point where
someone has paid me my first dollar for this.
Yeah. Well, and, and going back to that, you know, maybe my expectations are too low thing.
So my goal for the sabbatical was to make literally $1 in six months, which again is
like a super risk averse goal maybe. But, uh, yeah, so I would say it took, took about
six months to make the first dollar. And yeah, the site, it only took like a week or two
to actually build the site. So I built the site. I, you know, had no, obviously when
you first put a site up on the internet, there's no basically doesn't exist until Google decides
that exists. So I'm trying to figure out, you know, how do I like SEO this thing? Where
can I like go be one of the, like, where can I like go find forums and link to this thing?
And it was like, I was doing all these sort of like, Mark, I was learning about these
marketing things that you do and then, and then trying them and feeling a little sort
of dirty about it. Um, because like, you don't want to go, you like go into the forum and
you pretend to be adding value, but then you're like, oh, it's just trying to sneak in a link
to your thing. But, uh, yeah, eventually. So I, I like ran some AdWords stuff. I mean,
I blogged about all this stuff and I was at the time, this was sort of in the heyday of
medium before medium kind of went off the rails. But so I was blogging and then I was,
I was putting stuff on medium and it was getting picked up by like hacker noon and free code
camp. And I was, I was actually, I was cross posting on indie hackers as well. And eventually
all of that, and I was just blogging about the journey, what I was doing, and then all
of that blogging, I would stick in a backlink to place card me with like, I'd be like print
place cards and wedding place cards and I would stick it in my blog site. And eventually
it started slowly like climbing up the ranks of Google through that process. So then eventually
sort of like three, four or five months after launch, it was sort of like, you know, somewhere
on page one, bottom of page one, maybe page two or three for a few obscure keywords.
And so then just a slow trickle of, of money. So I think it, you know, it made $1 and then
the next week it made $1 again. So I was selling templates for $1 after, cause I, I started
at $10 and I was like not making any sales. Like I'll load to five and I loaded five,
like no sales. I was like, I'll just lower it to dollar. Like I need to make this dollar.
And so, and then it was like $1 a week. And then it was like $2 a week. And that was like
$3 a week. And then, and then sort of at some point it got to like, it reached the critical
mass of being high enough on Google that it was actually getting like reasonable traffic.
And then that was when I was when it started to go up to, you know, what the water is still
very modest traffic and revenue numbers, but, but are much better than a dollar every six
months.
So a lot of people when they start something expect the users and the traffic and the customers
to just magically appear. And when they realize that that's not the case, they spend kind
of like you did months looking at different avenues, different channels to try to get
customers in the door. And it's really easy to give up when it doesn't work after a few
weeks of doing that. Why didn't you give up and move on to a different idea? Why did you
stick it out for six months after your product was already built with nobody paying for it?
Yeah. I mean, I think that was actually the, the most pivotal moment of the whole process
for me was deciding to continue in that moment where I was like, this just isn't working.
Like this is a terrible idea. No one wants this. Like just stop, go do something else.
So I, what I did is I sat down and I was like, okay, just like rationally write down every
possible reason why this couldn't be working. And so I was like, okay, maybe like no one
would ever pay for this. Like maybe it's just like a terrible idea that no one would ever
pay for. And then I'd go on Etsy and these people were selling basically the exact same
thing, but you couldn't do all this like automatic placement of names and all this other stuff.
And they were like selling it for like $8 a template. And I was like, okay, no, people,
people will pay for this. Like, and I basically went through all these reasons and eliminated
the one by one. And at the end of it, I was like, I know that this product is better for
the thing it's trying to do than anything else on the internet. Like I, I, you know,
I'm probably like the, I never thought I would say the sentence in my life, but I like, I'm
probably like one of the top 100 most knowledgeable people about place cards in the world.
And like, so like, I know that this thing is better than anything else that's out there.
And if that's true, like it can't be the case that it's not going to make some money if
people are also paying for this thing, which I also saw. And so I was like, okay, it has
to be traffic. Like it just, it has to be traffic. And so I know that if I can just
crack this traffic nut, then like I'll get on a path to someone. And at that point, honestly,
it helped to have like very unambitious goals because I even remember thinking like, okay,
like if I could just get this thing to like a hundred dollars a month, like that'll like
pay for my breakfast. And that'll be like, that'll be like a nice little, like, that'll
be like a nice little, like I learned a lot that six months I'll have this little bonus
in, in my back pocket every month. But yeah, so that I just, I knew I could get it somewhere
and I didn't know whether some somewhere was like $5 a month or a hundred dollars a month
or a thousand dollars, you know, I still don't really know what the ceiling is. So I just
I was like, well, if that's true, then I like, it's not time to quit.
You know, I've, I've been on other podcasts before I was on the YC podcast. I think the
title of the episode was your whole goal is not to quit as a founder. Because the reason
why most businesses fail is because the founders quit, but I'm making money fast enough, et
cetera, et cetera. And so if you could figure out a way to structure your life, to spend
less money or to grow your company faster and make it more fun to work on, then you're less
likely to quit, which means you're more likely to stick around until you figure things out,
which is exactly what happened to you because you kept your expectations low enough that
it was never a complete failure. It was never like, Oh, this has taken six months. Therefore,
I have to quit. Your goal was just to make a dollar. And the fact that making a dollar
is just so small and so doable. It's cool to see the fact that it helped you get to
the point where you figure things out. And it seems like you figured things out successively
a few times since then, because that was what, 2017 when you started or 2016?
Yeah, that was, uh, March of 2017 was when I started.
And that first year, how much money did you make like $800 maybe. And in the last year,
how much money did place cards me make in. So in 2017, it was about a thousand dollars
in 2018. It was about $10,000. And then in 2019, it was about $20,000.
So it's like doubled from its $10,000 revenue memory in one year. How did you figure out
how to make the revenue double? What goes into that?
Yeah. I mean, it's, it's interesting because I've kind of, I haven't worked on it that
much this past year. And so honestly, I think a decent amount of that is just organic growth.
Like because of that, because of it being the best thing out there, I think it naturally
has this positive feedback loop where the more people discover it, the more they want
to use it, the more they refer other people, the more they come back to it.
So I think that's been a big part of it. I have done, I've continued to do small, small
things. I've played with pricing a lot. I mean, that's, that's always been the biggest
lever raising prices and then sort of like making the free tier worse. I haven't eliminated
the free tier entirely, but there's, there's a free tier where essentially you can, you
can make blank place, place cards without a design that also have a link, like the place
card me branding on them.
Do people want that at their wedding?
Nobody wants that on their wedding website. Nobody wants their that on their wedding,
but the like people who run the lunch room at schools who are using it to make like chocolate
chip cookie labels or whatever, like they're, yeah, they don't care. So I think, and I'm
happy to, you know, they're never going to pay for anything and I'm happy to serve them.
But so this year I've been experimenting a bit with expansion revenue. So I started adding
other offer, like other offerings in a similar space. So I do table cards now as well. So
like that was the thing you put in the middle of the table to tell people what the table
name is or the table number. I might go into like seating, like it's all very like crazy
wedding stuff that I never thought I would be into or sort of focused on. And then I
think the, the other aspects of that question is just that like my attention and my energy
has shifted into some other projects. I'm honestly, I'm probably not doing everything
I could be to, to be growing it. And that's, that's something I often think about is like,
well, shouldn't you just suck it up, like suck it up for a year, do some stuff that
like you don't think is that fun and just like, see if you can like double place card
me because that's going to be way, that's going to contribute way more to your bottom
line than launching in fourth product that makes $50 a month. Right. So I think about
that a lot. And yeah, I don't know. I haven't decided to do that. I haven't decided to do
it all that often. But what would that look like to do things that aren't that fun to
you, but that you're pretty sure would help you grow the revenue and grow it faster than
any other option? Like what would I do? Yeah. There's a few big ideas that I imagine would
move the needle. I think one would be setting up some kind of like affiliate referral program.
So the entire, I've learned all this stuff about the wedding industry by sort of being
in the space. But one thing that I've learned is the entire wedding industry runs on affiliates.
So there's all these wedding blogs and there's a whole community of wedding bloggers and
they are referring people left and right. And they're all making money from affiliate
revenue for getting a kickback whenever someone buys something that they follow a link. And
I think that would be a huge way to get more traffic because, because they're so many people
are just getting their, they're building their wedding based on something on Pinterest or
a blog that they follow or whatever else. And they're like, I do well on Google, but
if you never even enter the search term into Google, then I'm still missing on that traffic.
So that's one, I think getting into the printing game would be another huge one because like
I charged $5 for a digital template. I need to sell a lot of digital templates to make
any sort of money. But if you're selling printed cards, like people typically charge up to
even a dollar per card sometimes. So I'm talking 200 person wedding, $200. I have no idea how
much that actually costs. And one of the downsides of being in South Africa is just like, it's
most of my audience or the market for place card is in the States or in Europe. So it's
harder for me to figure out how to deliver a physical cut place card. I'm sure I could
do it, but it doesn't sound that fun to sort of like contact a hundred vendors, negotiate
like these terms, figure out, you know, how that would work and what the revenue split
would you would rather be coding. Yeah, but you're making me feel bad about it. Well,
nevertheless, your revenue is growing and it doesn't sound like you've had to do a crazy
amount of work to get it to grow. And assuming nothing else changes, it'll probably continue
doing that in the future. And I think one of the coolest things about the way that you've
sort of run your journey as an indie hacker is that you're keenly aware of how much time
you are spending on all these projects. It's not just sort of a nebulous, Oh, you know,
the revenue grew and I spent a decent amount of time on it. Like, you know, down to the
hour, how much time you spent working on place card me in 2019. So what is that number? I'd
have to look, but I know that the number for the total is around 450 hours, 450 hours total
working on place card me. Yeah. That's crazy. That's basically like what 60 work days or
something. I know. It's like, yeah, it's like 12 work weeks. Wow. And that has resulted
in you making $30,000 on a project that basically not only generates income, but increases the
revenue generates passively on the side for you while you work on more fun things that
lets you code more for now. This is kind of the holy grail though. I talked to a lot of
founders who want to be indie hackers. And the ideal thing is that you create passive
income where you don't have to continually put in more and more hours to build your business
and grow the revenue. But it's really hard to do that because as your business grows,
your ambition grows and you have this feature you want to put in and you have these customers
you didn't have before. You want this request, you have more email, et cetera, et cetera.
So you end up working even more as your company gets bigger sometimes or just the same amount.
How do you build a company that's actually passive and that grows in revenue? Yeah. Well,
I mean, I think it was done very deliberately from almost from day one. So I think that
was a, it was a strategic decision and it eliminated huge swaths of potential products
that I could take on. So pretty, pretty early on I was, I was quite clear that like, you
know, when I was, when I was a demagi, you know, as the CTO, like it was also the bottom
line, like all the bucks stopped with me when it came to like a server's on fire. And so
I just, I had so many late nights where I'd get an email and like, something's not working
and I'd be out at a bar or something. I'd have to go home. I'd have to like, I was like,
I don't want to be in that position. So I was like, okay, I like, I need to do something
that is not ever going to be mission critical. Like I, like, so I came up with all these
criteria and one of them was like, it needs to not be mission critical. The more passive
the better. It shouldn't be something that scales with people. Like I knew I wanted to
stay very, very small, if not sort of independent. So I was like, okay, I can't do any sort of
like services model. I can't, I can't do something that requires like a big support team. And
so I, I did like a silly and almost like dumb as an idea of this like place card thing is
like it, it was chosen because it had a lot of positive attributes that I knew would allow
me to, to sort of get to the lifestyle, like have the type of business that I knew I wanted
to run. And that's true with sort of with all the things that I've been working on so
far.
This is a super important idea in starting companies. It's the idea of a validation checklist.
You sort of have a checklist of items or requirements that your business has to meet in order to
be a successful business or a business that's actually enjoyable to run. And it sounds like
yours was so informed by basically your time as a C2 of this huge company. And it was just
a list of don'ts like don't do this. Don't have a huge support team. Don't be mission
critical, et cetera, et cetera. But like you said, it was very deliberate. And as a result,
you have a business that can grow passively. And you also have certain things that probably
weren't on your validation checklist. And as a result, like, you know, maybe you don't
like those. You didn't have an item on your checklist that said, work on a business that
I'm proud to tell my friends and family about. And so now you're like, Oh, I'm embarrassed
to be running this place card business. And I don't want to talk about it, but
I work in an industry that you want to work in. Yeah, the wedding industry is strange.
And honestly, my customers are great. And almost 99% of the feedback I get is everybody's
super positive, but it is a strange, a strange space. And that was also not in the checklist.
I think having a really good checklist that's tailor made to you personally is one of the
best advantages that you can have as a founder. And it's something that comes as a result
of basically working in lots of projects and having lots of experiences. Really, like actually
internalizing what you don't like my own validation checklist for things is basically just a list
of things that I hated from previous projects that I worked on. How did your list change
as a result of working on place card me for a few years? And how have you sort of applied
that to the new projects that you started? Yeah, so certainly, the project you can tell
your friends about is sort of, I wish that was on the checklist, because I also can't
tell them about my newest project really not not because I'm ashamed of it, but just because
it's really hard to explain to people what it is. And especially people who aren't sort
of coders are in like the startup ecosystem. The industry is definitely one. So I think
I forget who said this, but someone I read somewhere that was advice that I wish I'd
taken with place card me, which is like, choose the customer that you want. And so like, you
know, I think, I think a lot of developers would love to have developers as a target
customer because you understand them. They're, I mean, developers have some downsides, right?
But by and large, you sort of understand them. They, they can overcome bad UX. Usually they're
sort of willing to tolerate bugs. They're very understanding about, you know, certain
things. I think Ben Ornstein, the founder of tuple or tuple talks about this as well.
Sort of like how nice it is to build a product for developers. And so I think that was one
take away from place cards. You know, stressed out people planning weddings, maybe not the
best customers. Thankfully, if you have sort of like a very simple product, then, then
you don't bear the brunt of that too much, but a, but choosing a customer base that you
would, you would want to work with as one. I'm interested in recurring revenue. I haven't
cracked that nut yet. So I think that's another one where I ended like you said, you know,
place card me will just continue to grow passively. Like I don't believe that is true. No, I
think, well, I mean already, you know, because at least in part, because I'm transparent
with the numbers and everything else, like people, people saying the same things you're
saying recently, whoa, this is a great business. Like no work. It's like super easy to build
and just like make like, so let me compete with place card me. Exactly. So I have seen
basically clones start popping up. I, I know I think you were talking to, who was the founder
of one second every day about how like clones aren't really going to threaten you because
those people don't have the same passion and the same work. Although maybe in my case,
like I'm not sure I have that same passion either. So maybe, maybe the clones can come
and, and usurp me. Um, it's another very common item to put on your, your sort of validation
checklist work on something that you're passionate about. So you have that competitive advantage
against other people and you're going to stick with it and you can't really be threatened
by clones of people who don't care that much, but that's a good one. That wasn't on your
list for discard me. And so on to the next thing. Yeah. Anyway, so that's why I think
recurring revenue is much more interesting to me. Um, and I know that's like a common
sort of stair step approach that, that people take to bootstrapping is to sort of like get,
get the one time sale thing out, get the e-commerce thing out, and then sort of like jump into
like the harder SAS models where, you know, it's a, it's a slower ramp, but it's much
more predictable and much more longterm viable. Um, so that's, that's another thing I'm thinking
about, um, just to sort of protect myself from either clones or Google just sort of
like, you know, I think 90 something percent of my traffic comes from Google. So if Google
changes their algorithm in some way that penalizes me, then again, sort of my place card me
could evaporate overnight almost.
So let's talk about this business that you said was almost too difficult to explain anybody
who's not a developer or a startup founder, uh, because you just so happened to be on
a show that's listened to primarily by developers and startup founders. So let's give it a shot.
What is Pegasus and why did you decide to start this particular business?
So yeah, so Pegasus is basically, it's a code template that allows you to get up and running
with, with a SAS application quicker. And so, you know, in a typical web framework,
you have sort of like your base language, which might be Python or Ruby or JavaScript,
and then you have your framework, which might be Django or rails or node maybe. And then
it essentially sits on top of one of those on Django specifically and provides a lot
of stuff out of the box, including sort of like basic user stuff. So like user account
management, forgot password, all that type of stuff, login with Google, some like team
based stuff. So like, if, if you have collaboration features and sort of this multi-tenant, you
know, siloed areas where you have different organizations working, then it provides some
stuff out of the box for that as a UI template and basic Stripe integration and a few other
things.
So the ideal user is kind of like a Django developer who wants to start a project or
a company, and they want to get further ahead than just starting with nothing but Django,
they want to kind of start like a few months ahead and development.
Yeah, maybe weeks. But um, exactly. And, and again, it goes back to this, like one thing
that I think about a lot, which is just like time is even more important than like, people
say time is money, but like time is actually the only really like true currency of anything.
And so like, you know, if, if I'm going to sit here and do the same, you know, four things
every time I make a new project, then like, what, like, why wouldn't I want to automate
that? And then like, the theory is then like, why wouldn't you want to pay for that? Like
if you could save a week of development time, that's a good trade to make. And so if you
want to use Django, and you like the way that I've structured things and want these features,
then the theory is that this is a great investment for someone to choose to use.
How's that panning out so far? Have people found it to be a good investment? And do you
have anybody paying money for it yet?
Yeah, so I've got a few people, I mean, so I, I charged $200 for it right now. It's a
one time sale for sort of like a one year license, which I haven't even really figured
out exactly what that means. But it at least means that I, that you get a year of upgrades
and once a year comes around, I'll, I'll figure out, you know, in more detail. And yeah, it's
averaged about a sale a week, I would say. So it's, it's, you know, anywhere from the
$500 to $1,000 a month right now. I'm excited about it because I think there's, I think
it's, it's already valuable, but it's not nearly as valuable as it could be. And so
it's something that I'm, I'm like, I'm still excited to keep working on it and making it
better. And I think it has the potential to be, to be a really great, but it, it's honestly,
I need some, some love first.
It took you six months to make your first dollar for place card me. How long did it
take to make your first dollar for Pegasus?
Almost since I launched start place card me because I started working on Pegasus in that
period where place card me was not making any money. And I was like, Oh, this is not
going to work. I should like, I should be hedging. I should even, you know, two and
a half years ago was when I first sort of broke ground on it. And all I knew at the
time I had been reading a lot of sort of like bootstrapper porn or whatever you want to
call it, but like, uh, all these articles and, and, uh, since I was just getting started
info products was something I was like, okay, like that's, that's the thing that people
use, you know, like Justin Jackson got his start with, you know, marketing for developers
or whatever. Nathan Barry had a bunch of eBooks before he sort of built convert kit and I
was like, okay, like, uh, I should, I'll build an info product and I know a lot about Django.
So I'll like, so I bought the domain build with Django and I, I just sort of like parked
this landing page there and I was like, what is this? This will, this will be cool. And
then for two years I was like, this info product idea was just kind of like spinning in the
back of my head and I would, I would work on it and sort of downtime. And, and then
eventually I was like, Oh no, I, like, I'm not going to enjoy building an info. Like,
I don't actually like writing technical content that well, and I don't really like making
screencasts and I was okay. So like, how can I turn this into code? And that's when, that's
when the idea for converting it into a SAS template came. And, and this, the SAS template
thing is not, it's not like a novel idea. Like these things exist in lots of, lots of
other frameworks and, and other places. And, and they're kind of like, I think growing
in the indie hacking community right now, but, there wasn't a good, I couldn't find
one for, for Python and Django. So I was like, Oh, this is perfect. Like, this is, this is
my framework. This is like, I know this really well. And there's like a gap here again. And
so, and that was, you know, two and a half years ago. And then I launched Pegasus in,
I think it was June of 2019. So about six months ago. And actually I made a presale
before it was even like maybe a week before it was live. I made a presale and then sort
of within a few days of launch, I had made a few sales cause I had been building up an
email list over time. So Pegasus had much from launch to cut first customer had much
quicker traction than placecard me, which, which was fun. Although it, it hasn't grown
at all since. So it's, it's been very flat ever since, ever since launch, which, which
is sort of like, I haven't been trying to market it. And so that's kind of, that's why
I hope.
Where do these customers come from? Why was it so much easier for you to get customers
paying for Pegasus than it was for, for placecard me?
Yeah, that's a good question. Well, so one is, so after I built that domain and I parked
it, I sort of, when I thought I was going to build an info product, like I was always
trying to build artifacts on the internet that might be useful one day. So I had this
build with Django site. I published a few blog posts. I had, it was, I was starting
to collect email addresses. I had like a small audience from the people who had been following
my blog. There was just this sort of like parked asset that was targeting the people
who I wanted to target with Pegasus that was collecting, you know, a handful of email addresses
a month. But so when I launched it, I could hit up that list and leading up to the launch
and then the actual launch sort of announced that it was available. And a few people were,
were still interested. And that was another thing I did much better. The second time around
was like, I, I had so many conversations with, so when people would sign up, I would email
them set of questions. I'd ask if they'd be willing to jump on the phone. So I think I
was just, it was a lot more mature of a product development process as well. I was talking,
I was actually talking to my customers before launching the thing, which, you know, is surprisingly
works. So yeah, I think it was a, it was a better informed product that I, I expected
to be more successful from day one.
It's not shocking that the project where you actually found yourself talking to customers
was the one where you were selling to developers, people you like talking to versus the one
where you're selling to stressed out people planning weddings.
Yeah. Although I did talk to several of my friends who were getting married.
One of the difficult things about selling to developers, even though they're demographic
that you might understand well, even though they're demographic that has generally a lot
more disposable income than the average person is that developers are kind of spoiled. They
all think they can build whatever app they're using and don't want to pay for it. And then
we're so used to open source projects, giving us so much stuff for free that we kind of
last year when someone wants to charge in your case, $200 for a project that would even
save us, you know, maybe dozens or hundreds of hours of time. Yeah. How do you convince
developers to actually pay for something?
I don't really try because there are your total, like a huge percentage of developers
do you think like that? Some of them don't. And I think that people who are, I'm not interested
in trying to have an argument with a developer who thinks that they can, you know, build
Twitter with open source Linux clients or like, I think, uh, I would rather spend my
time, uh, making something great and having the people who it's, who want to take it.
Then trying to convince people who are going to sneer at it to, uh, to try and convince
them to, to give me money because I just don't think they're going to. What does the marketing
message say? If I were to go to like Pegasus's website, like what do you, what do you say
to get people interested and explain to them what this, you know, arguably complex product
even is, and then who it's for.
Yeah. Oh, I mean, I think the tagline is, uh, is a Django SAS template for your next
big idea or something like that. And that's probably part keyword optimization and part
actually what it does. The basic message is sort of start with a good foundation. Cause
it's one part, this is done for you. And then it's one part, this is done for you by someone
who hopefully knows what they're doing. So I don't claim to be this like remarkable coder
or anything like that, but I have been using Django for almost as long as it's existed,
like pre 1.0, which is seven, eight years ago or something like that. So like, if you're
a person who's just started using Django and most of my customers are not sort of the Django
gurus who've built a hundred applicants, like these, those guys already have templates.
Uh, they already have sort of systems like paradigms that they like, but if you're someone
who's just getting started and you sort of are interested in, well, like how does someone
with a bunch of experience do things? Then I think those, those are the people I'm trying
to speak to. And so I'm saying like, yeah, you get all this stuff and it's like done
in a way that's like, you know, there's a hundred ways to do everything, but it's done
in one way that someone thinks isn't terrible. Who knows something?
It's pretty cool to see like the, the specific niche you can target. Cause like you said,
it's not just all Django developers. It's only like kind of novice or newer Django developers
who also want to build, you know, an ambitious new product from scratch. It's like a bunch
of different overlapping circles and you're like right in the middle of all of them. Totally.
But the internet's a big enough place where if those overlapping circles are each big
enough, you can still have many thousands of customers and have to potentially sustain
your entire lifestyle off just the revenue. Yeah, absolutely. And I view it as in with
the place guard thing too, is like you establish a foothold in the most like tiny specific
niche that you possibly can. And then once you're, once you own that niche or once you're
sort of like sure that your product is like really good for that particular niche, then
you can start expanding out. But to get those first users, the more you can niche the better,
right? I mean, then, then like you're really speaking to them and they're there, you know,
they feel like, Oh yeah, this, this is for me. And that's a huge advantage. I think in
any, probably any endeavor that you would do.
So place card me has done pretty well as a relatively passive endeavor. You don't spend
that many hours on it and the present. What about Pegasus? Do you think it will succeed
as well as sort of a passive business? And if so, what do you think will contribute to
the fact that it is a passive income generator rather than something that takes a lot of
sustained effort on your part to maintain and grow?
Yeah, well, it's certainly designed that way. I mean, so, so the, I mean, the first thing
I'll say is like Pegasus doesn't feel close to finish yet. So it's, it's certainly not
passive yet. I think it's worth what I believe in an obviously biased perspective that it's
worth what it costs, but it could be way, way better and I know that. So my first goal
is to just like make it way better. Could it ever get complete? I mean not in the sense
that like libraries are always upgrading. There's always bug fixes, always patches,
but the whole product is again designed like it's a code template. Like you get the code
template you kind of done like no one's going to call me in the middle of the night because
the code template is down. So again, I, it, it was pretty deliberately chosen to be a
future passive income machine that if, you know, fits, fits the same sort of lifestyle
goals that I have.
It's kind of like the same, the same template for place card me where because you didn't
do something that has recurring revenue, you're able to provide sort of like a one shot piece
of value to your customers and then they buy it, they download it, they print it, whatever.
And then you're sort of done with them. You're not going to get a ton of customer support
calls to keep adding new features to make this particular user happy. But on the downside,
you don't get the recurring revenue that makes it easy to sort of grow and become a self
sufficient Andy hacker. What do you think you're going to do in the future about that?
You said you're exploring this idea with recurring revenue. Will that come in the form of a totally
new product or are you going to add that onto Pegasus?
Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, actually the, I don't even know if I should bring this
up at this point, but so I actually have a third product that I sort of built on a whim.
It was just like a, it was a hot, I built it over the holidays in 2016. I, it was a
toy project. I like wanted in the world that I sometime in 2017 I decided to, or in 2018,
I decided to just like add a paid tier to it. And so this, this product makes like almost
nothing by, by my current standards, which is like a hundred dollars a month or something.
But I'm first going to add it there because it's a nice testing ground. And one of the
reasons why Pegasus is such a great product for me is that like, I love building and launching
these products and I can use them to inform how Pegasus should be built and what, what
should be in it. So like, I can add subscriptions to this thing and I'll be like, okay, that's
how subscriptions works. That's how recurring revenue works. And then now, okay, Pegasus
gets a recurring revenue module or it gets a subscription module or however you want
to describe it. That's where I'm going to start. And then beyond that, I have like a
big internal struggle right now over like, okay, am I going to like actually do the B2B
subscription thing and like sign myself up for like a little bit more of a like on call.
I might have to have like a support SLA and these other things, or am I going to continue
to like try and find ways to continue to do this sort of like lifestyle projects hack
and I haven't figured out the answer to that yet. Decisions, decisions. Yeah, I'll let
you know in a year. Well, you've been doing, from my perspective, a great job, Corey. You've
gotten a lot further than a lot of aspiring indie hackers have gotten so far in their
journey and I think you're making it look kind of easy, launching all these different
projects and sticking with them and never really quitting even, even when the going
looks tough. What for you have been sort of the ups and downs of being an indie hacker
and making the transition from working a full time job to sort of depending on your own
projects to bring in some of your income. Like you said, I mean, I guess I haven't taken
enough risks and it has felt relatively easy because I had the sort of the freelancing
income and the part time job and these other things. Certainly with the indie hacking stuff,
the highs are higher and the lows are lower. So, you know, like I'll go three weeks without
making a sale of Pegasus and I'll just get like really down in the dumps and I'm like,
this product is stupid. I hate it. And then I'll make a sale and I'll be like, ah, this
is amazing. So it's definitely like my identity is tied up in it much more in a way than that.
I think only founders really get their identities mixed up with the companies that they have,
I think. So that's a big one and it's both a positive and a negative. I think I've been
very, very fortunate in a number of ways. One of the ways that I suspect will end at
some point is this whole like passive up into the right behavior that I've been seeing with
place cards and with all of my projects really. And so I have to believe that at some point,
something's going to happen and I'm going to go through this crisis and that's going
to be really bad. It's going to be really, I thought this was so easy and turns out that
no, it's just like only easy until you start to make enough money that someone actually
cares enough to usurp you. And maybe I like cross that threshold and then everything plummets.
So I am nervous about sort of the fact that things have been a little almost too smooth
so far.
Every founder I talk to has this fear at the back of their mind that everything's going
to come crashing down and there's some future point where it's going to stop working. Because
it's pretty normal to have a job where someone's giving you a paycheck and you're like, well,
there's this magical fountain of money that pays me every two weeks. But when you're the
one like creating that revenue stream and you see every aspect of it, you're just like,
when is it going to stop? Right? When are people going to stop paying me? And it's luckily
for most people that fear never gets realized. And it's something that you eventually just
grow out of. But it's funny to see that you're still sort of in the midst of wondering if
that's going to be the case.
Oh yeah, definitely. And that's reassuring to hear that.
It goes away.
Well, it helps getting bought.
So what's your advice for somebody who's listening to this and they're, you know, maybe working
a full-time job and considering quitting or moving to part-time so they can become an
indie hacker or maybe advice for someone who just got started and is trying to figure out
all this on their own.
Yeah. I mean, we've kind of been talking about it the whole time, but I think my advice is
just like, it's actually much easier than you think. And again, like maybe I'm just
a product of luck or something, but like, for me, it feels like success is inevitable
if you keep trying and you give yourself the time. And so like, I think for a lot of people,
the problem is they have day jobs. They maybe don't have savings that they can lean on.
Or in my case, like I had a partner that I could lean on. But if you can give yourself
the time, you are very self-aware about sort of what success looks like and what, how you're
marching on the path to it.
I really think it's, I've tried to monetize like three products there. One of them is
like so crazy stupid and like still somehow it's just, it's like makes a bit of money.
And like, like the fact that is true, it just makes me think that like, it's like, all you
need to do is just try and not give up. And I mean, it's like you were saying, my advice
is the same as your advice, basically.
I happen to love that advice, Corey.
Probably stole it from you.
Well, thanks so much for coming on the show and telling us about your journey, Corey.
Can you tell us where we can go to find your products and find kind of the space on the
internet where you write about the things that you're doing transparently?
Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, so CZoo on Twitter, C-Z-U-E, uh, not like the animals and, uh, CoreyZoo.com
is where I do, I do my writing. I sort of do this like monthly, very like public retrospective
process where I like looking all my time and my revenue and everything else. Um, and, uh,
I have some, I'm very transparent about, about all that stuff that's going on. Yeah. And
if you need place cards, placecard.me, uh, if you need a Django SAS templates, SAS Pegasus
dot com.
Thanks so much, Corey.
Thanks, Karlin.
Listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, I would love it if you reached out to Corey
and let him know he is at CZoo on Twitter. That's C-Z-U-E. Also, if you're interested
in hearing what I thought about this episode, you should subscribe to the Indie Hackers
podcast newsletter. You can find that on the website at IndieHackers.com slash podcast,
or just go to IndieHackers.com and click podcast at the top. Thanks so much for listening.
And as always, I will see you next time.