Okay, today we're going to try something new.
I'm going to be doing what I'm calling quick chat episodes.
And the point is I want to release a lot more episodes
of the Indie Hackers podcast, but that's hard to do
if I'm spending hours preparing for every episode
about what they're up to.
So my first guest is Pat Walls. Pat, how's it going?
Good, how are you?
Doing excellent. You posted a milestone to Indie Hackers
last week, I believe, and it was called 10 paying customers.
And you got your first 10 paying customers for a new app
you're working on called Pigeon.
Pigeon is a website called starterstory.com,
which is really similar to Indie Hackers
where it just interviews entrepreneurs.
And a lot of the work was like tons and tons of emails.
And I'm a software engineer, and dealing with tons of emails
is not really my favorite thing to do.
So I wanted a way to automate more stuff inside Gmail,
such as automating follow-ups, setting deadlines,
and just tons of stuff to make my email work faster
and spend less time on it.
So I had the idea to build it late last year,
and I kept kind of thinking about how I wanted to build it,
but I didn't actually write any code or anything
for three or four months.
And then about two or three months ago,
I finally started writing code and talking to people,
and then I released it about a month and a half ago,
and then got to about 10 paying customers,
which is why I posted that Indie Hackers milestone.
And I actually posted that because I had reached 10,
but I got most of the customers through pre-launch.
But now that I've launched it,
I've been working a lot on making the features better
and improving the product,
but now I've got to figure out how to grow the product.
So that post was kind of like...
And the hard part.
Yeah. That post was kind of like me.
I need to put myself out there more,
and I need to share my progress with the story
because I don't know what it is,
but I just don't feel like...
I don't know.
Compared to my last project, it's been harder for me
to talk about my progress.
Maybe because I've had a little bit of success
with my last project,
and starting with a new project that could completely fail
is hard for me to put myself out there.
I don't know if that makes sense.
It makes a lot of sense.
And it's kind of a recurring theme on the podcast,
how beneficial it is to put yourself out there.
And it's really easy, especially as a developer,
to just kind of want to lock yourself away
and just work on the product and have the product
speak for itself so you don't have to talk to anybody.
It's probably better if you actually just like
blog about your progress and tweet about it
and tell people what you're working on,
even if it's super small.
That's something I find hard to do, to be honest.
I mean, this podcast is probably the most
that I talk about indie hackers anywhere,
and I barely talk about indie hackers on the podcast itself.
So kudos to you for posting that milestone.
Well, I love when you talk about indie hackers on the podcast.
And I really did like...
I don't know if you've taken it down off the site,
but like how you started indie hackers
was obviously for me that was really inspirational
because my website is really similar and inspired from that.
But I don't know what ended up happening there.
Yeah, if you go to...
So there's actually a product page on indie hackers
for indie hackers itself.
And it's the same timeline that used to be the old blog.
So you could scroll all the way back to 2016,
almost got three years ago, July 2016,
and see the very first steps.
Launched indie hackers.
Got my first thousand mailing list subscribers.
Every month I would post a couple of milestones.
So it's all still there.
And I still add to it every now and then,
but not as much as I used to.
Nice.
We started talking about Pigeon,
but you actually started Starter Story, as you alluded to.
Let's talk about that,
because that's kind of like your first indie hacker business
that I'm aware of.
What's the story behind Starter Story?
Well, I don't want to go too long,
but basically I was living in San Francisco.
And this was, I think, in early, late 2016.
And I was a software engineer,
and I really wanted to start a business,
get into YC, and this is before indie hackers existed,
which indie hackers is a really typical reason
why I started that website.
But me and a couple friends tried to start a business
that would get into YC,
followed all their blogs, all that stuff.
And it just completely failed.
We worked on it for four months just to get to MVP.
Didn't get any customers, got a couple customers
that never ended up using the product.
We got a YC interview completely failed.
The whole thing bombed.
What was the product?
It was basically like an invoicing software
for small businesses.
So if you were a small to medium-sized e-commerce business,
you could send order forms
to 100 or 200 different retail stores,
and they could buy your product through little mini forms,
kind of like a little type form almost.
Ah, got it.
So did you have to pitch YC on how your invoicing software
was going to be a billion-dollar company
and change the whole world?
Yeah.
Well, we had gotten a couple customers
just to use it for just basic invoicing order forms.
And they're like, yeah, this sounds awesome.
We really need something like this.
But then they never ended up really using it.
And YC, when we went to YC, we were like,
oh, this is going to be the Google Forms for Business
or something like that.
I actually didn't know about Typeform back then.
So that was kind of our pitch.
But then YC was like, they really dug,
it was only a 10-minute video interview.
So it wasn't like the true interview when you go to YC.
But they're really smart.
They basically dug right down to the problem.
We've seen this kind of business before.
Can you tell us about the actual usage?
How much are your customers using the product?
And that was our weakness,
is that no one was actually using the product.
Yeah, it's just a small problem there.
No one's actually using this.
Yeah.
It was a nice-to-solve problem.
And we couldn't get anyone to truly adopt the platform.
They're like, yeah, we really want to do it.
But they never put aside the time
to actually switch over.
And it's like critical business processes,
selling your product.
So it was really hard to get people onboarded.
So how did you decide to start Starter Story,
which actually worked much better?
Well, after I started that business and it failed,
I definitely got the bug, like the startup bug.
I just found IndieHackers 2 at that point.
So I was just kind of reading a lot of IndieHackers interviews.
And then I came across this Reddit post
that was about this guy who started a content marketing site.
And I had just moved to New York at the time.
I was still a software engineer.
I just got a new job.
But I was still thinking, how can I start a business?
Because I had that bug.
But also, the problem with the business
before that failed YC was that I had to jump out of work
on lunch break to do meetings.
Because I had a full-time job at the time
to do meetings and demos and fix bugs
and try to sell the products.
We were selling the product to people
that were also working 9-5s.
That was really hard.
That was probably the hardest part about that business,
even if it was successful.
That would still have been really hard.
So I wanted something that I could work on
with my full-time job, like on nights and weekends
and still be able to like...
Because I was willing to put in the work.
I just wanted it to be a little bit less stressful
at my day job, if that makes sense.
And Starter Story is kind of like IndieHackers.
You interview the founders of e-commerce businesses
and you ask them how they got started and came up with their idea,
how they put up a website,
how they've grown since then and found customers
and how much money they're making.
And with IndieHackers, I used to charge for ads,
but I don't charge for that anymore.
What's your business model for Starter Story?
So yeah, it's super similar to IndieHackers.
I actually started it just because I wanted to just interview...
I wasn't actually the niche of e-commerce when I first started.
I just started interviewing friends that I knew were entrepreneurs,
some of the people I found online.
But then after I had like 10 interviews or 20 interviews,
I was like, okay, I have a bunch of e-commerce.
I want to like differentiate from IndieHackers and other websites
and be like in e-commerce
or maybe more the non-technical founder side of things.
And then I started monetizing through...
Well, at first it was like display ads and newsletter advertisements.
So people would just...
I didn't monetize it for like four months.
So I did the product, I launched it, all that stuff.
And then people slowly started reaching out to me.
And I was just... my mentality was like just always focused
on growing the business and monetize.
I wasn't really thinking so much about monetization.
So when people would ask me if I wanted to monetize
or if they wanted to sponsor, I would just be like,
all right, sure, yeah, you can sponsor the newsletter for...
I would just name a price and then they'd just be like, yes.
And then I have another person reach out and be like,
oh, well, I have this newsletter is booked up
but I now have the front page sponsor.
I have front page ad spot opened up.
And I'd be like, oh, that's 400 bucks.
And I kind of cobbled together all these different sponsors.
And then I had one company reach out,
which is still my main sponsor today, Clavio,
which is like a mail marketing.
It's like MailChimp for e-commerce.
They reached out to me and they had expressed interest
in sponsoring the newsletter,
which wasn't sponsored at the time for like a long period of time.
They wanted to sponsor it for a whole year.
So I was like, oh, that sounds great.
So yeah, they sponsored the newsletter.
And then after some of the deals ended for the website,
I went back to them.
I was like, hey, I want to get some more sponsors on board.
Are you okay with it?
And I want them to also sponsor the newsletter
so there'll be multiple companies sponsoring starter story.
And that's a longer story, but it was still really hard.
And I know you experienced this on indie hackers,
but it was like really hard to find and keep advertisers
and keep them on board for long term because, yeah, this was hard.
Yeah, it's not easy getting advertisers.
It's kind of a grind.
It never really ends.
You get some and you've got to find the next ones
because it's not necessarily a recurring business model.
People kind of churn.
But on the flip side, it's easier to get your first advertisers
than it is to get your first SaaS customers, I would say.
Like you said, you had people reaching out to you.
They're like, oh, hey, Pat, can I sponsor your mailing list?
I had the same thing with indie hackers.
And to just have somebody reach out and want to write you a $500 check,
it's pretty nice.
Yeah, and that's what I tell people all the time
because there's a lot of people starting kind of blogs
and content businesses or just the kind of stuff you see on product time
or indie hacker news where it's like similar stuff
to when indie hackers started or starter story started
where it's just like kind of like put together data.
And if someone reaches out to you and says, hey, I want to sponsor,
just send them like a $100 invoice or something like that.
They'll probably say yes.
And just that motivation of getting your website sponsored
for any kind of money is like that's what kept me going for starter story.
And it kind of just snowballed into what it is.
So you don't need to be looking for some massive thing.
Just experiment at first and there's really nothing that could go wrong.
So I know you eventually got to the point
where you were ramen profitable with starter story.
And you're like, all right, I'm done.
I'm done working full time and you quit your job
and went to become an indie hacker full time.
What was it like making that decision?
So the thing for me is that I had always had a job my whole life after.
And even when I was in college, I had jobs too.
So I'd never not had a job and it's really hard.
I never know what it's like to not have a job.
So that was like a big decision for me.
And especially because I probably could have kept working on starter story
for maybe another six months to a year
to get it to a higher revenue before I quit.
But I was just so ready to move on from that.
But the reason why I quit was because of this 24-hour startup thing,
which probably I don't need to go into.
It's a long story.
I launched a startup.
I claimed on Twitter that I was going to launch a startup in 24 hours,
which was not a startup,
but I was just going to build a product and launch it on product
from first commit to launching on product time
in a 24-hour span and stream the whole thing on Twitch.
And I did that and it kind of blew up on Twitter a little bit.
After that, starter story was doing well
and that was a really awesome experience.
And then I had this one-on-one with my manager two days later.
It probably wasn't the right decision at the time,
but I just had so much confidence that I could make it work
with no full-time job.
And I had some runway and some cash.
I was like, I think that's the moment.
And so I just quit my job right there.
That's so funny.
You had so much going on on the side that was so exciting
that it just kind of added up to enough activation energy
for you just to spur them home and say, boom, I'm done.
Yeah.
Yeah, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but I don't know.
I just felt it.
It just felt it's really a hard story to explain
or justify or anything like that,
but I think it was a long time coming.
So I don't know.
You sent me a message earlier this year.
Do you remember on Twitter, you're talking about a starter story
being very similar to Indie Hackers.
And you're like, hey, man, I've been wanting to message you
about this for a long time.
I've always felt sort of guilty that starter stories
are pretty similar to Indie Hackers,
but it's never my intention to clone you or anything.
And it's funny that you sent me that message
because I have so many thoughts about competition
in business and websites being similar to each other,
mostly that I have a very don't hate the player,
hate the game mindset, where I think it's important,
no matter what you do, to really understand the rules
of what you're going into.
And with business, I think one of the big rules
is that ideas are open to everybody.
You don't have a monopoly on your idea
just because you came up with something.
There are people interviewing entrepreneurs and founders
well before Indie Hackers existed.
And there are a lot of websites that are sort of inspired
by Indie Hackers, including Starter Story,
after I launched Indie Hackers.
And Starter Story is really the only one that I feel like has lasted.
All the other ones, I don't know what happened to them.
They're gone.
Well, just to go back on your point before that,
I think that's an interesting topic as well
because I think a lot of...
I told someone else that who was starting a similar site
to Starter Story and Indie Hackers,
and I told them to hopefully not feel that way
because I still feel that way sometimes
because I think everyone wants to have their own ideas.
And it does...
I don't know, it does affect my self-conscious a little bit.
For example, I'll see something on Indie Hackers
and I'll be like, oh, well, that's an awesome feature
and we have a very similar business model,
so I'm just going to copy it.
But I sometimes don't feel bad about that,
but then sometimes I'm like, oh, man, I'm just a copycat.
You ever feel like that?
Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about.
I mean, there are things that I probably should have copied
from other websites, for Indie Hackers that I haven't,
to avoid that feeling.
There are things that I've just shamelessly copied
and sometimes I feel bad, sometimes I don't.
But I really think you shouldn't feel that bad.
Obviously, for plagiarizing, that's one thing,
but if you're just inspired by something else,
that's kind of the engine that drives human progress,
being inspired by other people and building on top of it.
No one's ever like, oh, man, I opened up an Italian restaurant
and somebody else opened up another Italian restaurant.
How dare they?
But for some reason, in online businesses,
we sort of expect to have to be completely creative
and original in every way and it's not realistic.
Yeah, it's a growth starter story.
I mean, my goal with it has always been
to put out more content.
And that's my new product that I built, Pigeon,
is helping me and helping others produce more content
in less time.
And I've always been fascinated by the idea
that as much I can automate things
and build process around publishing content
and growing the website.
So I've always focused on, yeah, first, automation,
automating all the mundane tasks as possible that I could do
that I can publish more interviews with entrepreneurs
and then also just focus on more content.
So when I started the website,
I was publishing like three interviews per week.
And when I started this year, I had a goal
to release daily interviews.
And I've done that since the beginning of the year.
And then now I'm working towards getting
to two interviews per day.
That is a ton of interviews, like three a week
with indie hackers.
Yeah, I know, I know.
I watch your guys' outfits sometimes
because I'm curious what's the future for indie hackers.
Obviously, it's growing like crazy and this form's amazing.
And that's something that I'll look to someday, hopefully.
But my whole thing has just been,
I used to focus a lot on sharing on other platforms
like Hacker News and Reddit and all that stuff.
But SEO is starting to pick up.
So I've just been like,
all right, well, I'm just going to keep producing more content.
That's what's worked for me.
And again, good content as well, obviously.
It's tough doing interviews as a content format
and trying to grow through SEO, I found,
because usually interviews are around a particular subject.
It's this person, it's this company,
and that's the title of your interview.
That's the entire subject matter.
Whereas people searching Google are very rarely searching
for one particular company or one particular person.
They're usually searching for a topic.
They want to know more about e-commerce
or more about SEO or more about whatever it is.
So how do you get SEO working with an interview site,
like Starter Story?
It's just somehow started to work.
I will try to put it,
and that's the kind of similar concern that I had at first
because I didn't have any SEO traffic.
But then I just started picking up.
I don't get a ton, but I probably have...
I'm getting close to 1,500 Google hits per day,
and it's mostly just coming from long-tail keywords.
So I'll try to put the title of my interview
around some sort of keyword that I could target
or long-tail keyword that I could target.
But there's no one keyword that I'm dominating or anything like that.
My goal has just been to put out lots and lots and lots of content
and hope that I catch some of the long-tail keywords.
I don't know.
What has the indie hackers experience been like for SEO?
I don't even know how much traffic we get from SEO,
but I know that it's never been great.
We've always kind of thought about,
okay, how do we get people writing things that are more topic-based?
Less about just their story,
but more about things that other people want to solve
so we can get better SEO traffic.
Most of our SEO traffic doesn't go to the interviews.
It goes to the articles that people can submit to indie hackers
and also the forum posts.
Because people will make forum posts about like,
how do I find my first customers?
How do you get into Y Combinator?
All sorts of stuff that is more aligned with SEO.
But it's still not even our top five growth channels
for indie hackers, I don't think.
Hopefully that'll change in the next year.
I think it will.
I think it will definitely pick up.
Yeah, it's picking up.
The curve goes up every month.
It's a little bit higher than it was the previous month.
But I think to really do it well,
you have to actually be deliberate about targeting certain keywords
and certain topics that get a lot of traffic
and actually put real effort into it.
For us it's always been sort of an afterthought.
Yeah.
And is that kind of why you guys have been...
So folks, I'm not why,
but the user-generated content pieces
have been a big push for you.
Yeah.
You were talking about this earlier
when you were saying you wanted to automate things
with Starter Story.
And I think if you are running a content site
and you're a blogger, you're writing everything,
you kind of just resign to how much work it takes.
But if you are doing an interview site
like you and me,
you realize very quickly that you're not doing most of the work,
you're just asking the questions.
And you start to think about,
well, how do I make myself more efficient?
How do I streamline this process
so that I can get more content out faster?
And I think the process we have at IndieHackers
is pretty streamlined.
We spend a lot of time thinking about it.
But then you start thinking about,
what's the light at the end of the tunnel?
What's the ultimate version of this?
And for us, that's completely user-generated content.
We're not doing anything.
People are making posts on the forums
and asking each other questions.
And we're not, you know, prompting them or doing anything.
It just happens by itself.
So that's like the ultimate goal.
And we've tried some stuff that didn't work.
We tried being kind of like Medium,
where we just allow people to write articles,
no questions asked on IndieHackers,
and that didn't work out.
It was just...
Why is that?
It wasn't...
Spam.
People write spam.
People write a lot of low-quality articles.
You know, suddenly you have thousands of articles
on your website.
You don't have time to read them.
You don't know which ones are good,
which ones aren't.
It's hard to figure out which ones to put on the front page.
It's just not an easy problem to solve
with a small team of only like two people.
You know what I want to talk about?
I want to talk about your pension for doing new things.
Because you've got starter story.
I think you're making over $4,000 a month.
Is that right?
Yep.
But now you have Pigeon 2.
And I think you've got 10 paying customers
paying you about $30 a month.
So you're making $300 a month from Pigeon,
which is great.
But it probably would have been easier
to add $300 a month to starter stories revenue
than to start a whole new thing from scratch.
So why even do this?
Why work on more than one thing
instead of just focusing on your number one thing?
That's a great question.
I mean, it's especially important,
something that I thought about a lot
because of the 24-hour startup that I did last year.
Because I launched multiple,
I did the first startup in 24 hours
because I was just curious to try it.
I had an idea.
And since that kind of took off, I was like,
all right, well, I'm going to launch another one
two weeks later and just keep trying this thing again.
And I launched another one three weeks later.
And then I created the 24-hour startup challenge
because there's so much hype around the idea of live streaming
and products, especially last year.
I was like, I'm just going to try to capitalize on this idea
and see what happens.
And I think that also gets the maker community,
the product hunt area of the internet really excited
and it's really fun.
But I kind of had a bit of a revelation,
not a revelation, but after I had done
the 24-hour startup challenge
and I had starter story, I didn't have pigeon yet,
but I had starter story and I had the startup
that I launched in 24 hours
and then I had the 24-hour startup challenge
which was turning into another website
and then I had another website
and I had five different websites
and I had already quit my job at that time
and I was just kind of realizing,
this isn't really what I want to do
and I'm never going to be really able to move the needle
on anything if I have so many different projects.
So I basically killed all those projects.
I sold the 24-hour startup one
and then basically stopped working
on the 24-hour startup challenge offshoot
and then sold and killed all the other projects
and then I was just starter story
and I was just focusing on that.
My mindset kind of changed on the whole launching quickly
and the maker movement and all that
and I decided that I'm only going to focus
on one or two projects.
The reason why I started Pigeon,
the new one is that I wanted to build a tool
that was going to help me grow starter story
and vice versa.
So they go hand in hand
and also help other people launch similar businesses
as starter story.
But it's still a lot to manage two different projects
but I don't know if that answers your question at all.
Now I get to use everybody's least favorite business term,
Synergy.
You've got these two different products
and Pigeon actually helps you run and grow starter story.
So how does that work exactly?
So I mean the automation piece is really big
because it's basically automating a lot of the process
for doing interviews because it's all inside Gmail.
So I'm able to do like if someone agrees to do an interview
I can set a deadline
and I can set these kind of like automated follow-up sequences
that will automatically follow up with them with the deadline
and basically just get rid of most of the email work
that I have to do for chasing down interviews
and publishing content.
And also keeping like it's basically like a mini CRM
inside your Gmail
so you can keep a track of the status
of all of your interview or content stages.
So it's in progress
if it's published in draft state or whatever.
So that's been cool.
And then I've been working with a couple other
a bunch of other my customers
who are running similar type of websites or blogs
and they're doing very similar things to that.
Yeah, I'm looking at your website right now.
Trypigeon.co
and it says Gmail meets spreadsheet.
Pigeon is a powerful CRM and automation suite for Gmail.
And you've got your spreadsheet in there.
Living inside Gmail you just sort of track
the people that you're working with
and move them along this pipeline.
It's funny because I do something similar for indie hackers.
I've got sort of my own process.
What do you use?
Yeah, I just have my own internal process kind of.
So we use Airtable.
We've used Google spreadsheets in the past.
I've got some stuff set up on Zapier too
just to sort of automate the process
and not have to build a lot of it out myself
because that would take forever.
But this whole topic reminds me of another topic
that comes up on the podcast pretty often
which is that just in the course of running your business
you're going to encounter all these different problems
and some of them will have solutions
but a lot of them won't.
And you'll look for a tool out there
and it doesn't exist.
And if there was you would pay for it
but there just isn't anything.
And so you've got to hack it together yourself
or if you're a developer you're going to feel tempted
to just build it yourself.
And it's probably a mistake
but in your case it's kind of cool
because you built Pigeon to help you run Starter Story
and then you didn't just keep it to yourself
you actually released it as its own standalone product
and now Pigeon is out there making money.
I've had a similar temptation with indie hackers.
In fact someone emailed me last week and was like
hey I will pay you a lot of money
to build the indie hackers community forum software
for my website.
And I just had to be like no.
I obviously don't have time to do that.
It's impossible.
So I think it's a pretty common thing
for a lot of founders to deal with.
Yeah I think that you have to kill that temptation.
I think I just saw an indie hackers forum post
about someone asking how do I stop from like
seizing that temptation all the time?
And I think that a good way to do it
is just to actually fall into the temptation
and fail through that process of like actually
like what happened to me last year
of launching too many different things
and then experiencing how hard it is
to actually grow anything that unless you're like
laser focused on it.
I'm sure you've run into that before so.
Yeah you gotta learn from the school of hard knocks sometimes.
But the flip side to all of this is something
that I say pretty often which is that
if you're someone who has trouble coming up with ideas
in the first place that one thing you can do
that works really well is just give yourself permission
to start something really small and crappy
and like not that good.
And in the course of trying to run that business
you will suddenly find yourself coming up with lots of ideas.
Because there's all these challenges you need to solve
that there are no tools to solve.
And other people need those tools too
so you could just pivot and go build this.
But yeah if you're already building something
that's working pretty well
it's probably really distracting to start a second thing
and really hard as well.
What's your plan from here on out?
What are you going to do with Pigeon?
So the plan is to figure out how to grow it.
And that's, well there's this really unfortunate thing
called the Gmail API security audit.
So now Gmail is cracking, yeah they're cracking down on there.
They don't want to, I think that Cambridge Analytica
Facebook scandal has kind of spooked them a little bit.
So now you have to pay at least $15,000
to get your API, Gmail API code audited
by an independent security firm every year.
So that's something that I have to,
I'm going to go through with it
and I'm going to do it because I have
confidence in the product and in the market.
So I'm going to go through this.
So that's the big next step.
Because then I have to figure out how to grow it.
So I would like to get your advice on how to grow
a product like that.
Oh man, you know what I think is like the secret,
the secret growth weapon for startups?
It's nothing new, it's not that secret.
Everybody says do things that don't scale.
I think it's like a specific instance of it.
But I keep seeing it pop up over and over again
and it's just direct sales man.
Especially if you have a high enough price point
and I think you said you're charging like $30 a month.
Like if I were you I would probably raise my prices.
I would find customers for whom it's actually worth
the higher price, like at least $100 a month
or something like that.
And then just do a lot of direct sales,
a lot of outreach, a lot of just talking to people.
I talked to Cy Hill a few episodes,
the founder of Gumroad a few episodes ago.
And they were doing direct sales for Gumroad
for like the first four or five years.
It wasn't just like oh this is how we get off the ground.
It was like this is how our company grows.
We just sell the product one on one to people.
Nathan Barry famously did the same for ConvertKit.
It wasn't really working.
He was considering shutting it down.
He couldn't get past $5,000 or $10,000 a month in revenue.
And then he just started doing a ton of direct sales.
Just calling bloggers, emailing them.
And like sort of broke through the ceiling.
So that's what I would try if I were you.
And I wouldn't stop doing that until it like had been
a few months and it definitely wasn't working.
But even if it doesn't, if you're doing direct sales
you're always talking to people.
Which means they're actually telling you
whether or not signing up on like marketing.
Where people just go to your website and leave.
So you'll probably have a lot of good ideas
just by talking to people.
That would be my ugly sort of behind-the-scenes strategy
for trying to grow something like Pigeon.
Well that's great advice because that's really
what worked for Starter Story.
And I know worked for indie hackers
is like reaching out to when you got the business issue.
Yeah, just outreach.
And that's how I got the first 10 customers
for Pigeon to be honest.
And now like since I launched it, I feel like,
and I'm really glad you said that because I feel like,
oh I have to do content marketing
and I have to like do it legit.
I'm like doing air quotes right now.
Because I tried doing some outreach.
I emailed like 100 businesses like recently
and I felt really crappy about the process
because it felt spammy and all this stuff.
But I realize now that I probably just gave up
on that too quickly and like that's,
I feel personally like that's my bread and butter.
Like I'm pretty good at doing direct outreach
from a lot of the Starter Story experience that I have
and for getting the 10 customers.
So I'm glad you said that because I think it's super true
and like that's the advice that I usually tell people too
when they ask me and I'm not even,
I wasn't even going to follow it for a second.
I do the same thing.
I'm trying to grow different parts of Indie Hackers.
I'm trying to grow this new milestones feature
and I realized the other day it's like,
I should just be doing direct outreach.
I know a lot of people who would really benefit
from using this feature who would be perfect for it.
Why don't I just message them one on one?
And I reached out to a few people yesterday.
I reached out to Nathan Barry and he already posted
a milestone about ConvertKit, his company
who's doing like $17 million a year in revenue
or something crazy.
It's direct stuff, it works.
I think it's one of those things that as a founder,
you just kind of need to hear other people
say they're doing it because number one, it's a slog.
It's not that pleasant to do.
So when you're doing it by yourself,
you kind of feel like it's wrong.
And number two, no one else ever talks about it.
They're just talking about how they've found
some sort of repeatable, scalable distribution strategy.
Or how they got to number one on product hunt
after like a week and you're like,
the reality is everyone's doing direct sales too
and just not talking about it, but it works.
Yeah, I mean that's what I think about
when I worked in Silicon Valley too,
is how big our sales teams were and how...
They didn't have any good content marketing.
They didn't have anything, but they were a billion dollar company
and they're just all sales.
No one talks about it, it's so weird.
Everyone only talks about SEO and social media marketing
and launching on product hunt.
No one talks about like, hey, we pay people
to just make phone calls and send emails.
And that's how we grow.
This is supposed to be a quick chat episode.
We're at like 30 minutes now.
I think we did it.
I would love to have you back on at some point
to talk about how there's so much we could talk about.
We could talk about all the similarities
between like growing Indie Hackers and Starter Story
because I know a lot of other people
will want to start content websites.
I think that'd be a really interesting discussion.
Yeah, and I just want to say that,
you know, I hope people thank you more
for launching Indie Hackers
and all that is done for me
as well as on people, so thank you for that.
Thanks, Pat.
People are nice, actually.
I get a lot of nice messages on the internet.
Anyway, I've got one more question that I'll let you get out of here.
You have been doing this Indie Hacker thing
for quite a while now.
You are completely financed by your own projects.
Starter Story makes enough money for you to be full-time on it.
What's your advice to somebody new?
An aspiring Indie Hacker who's just considering
getting started.
I've never really thought about that,
but someone had just reached out to me the other day.
They were saying that I do a good job of documenting my journey,
and they were like self-conscious
about documenting their journey
and having no one read the blog
or read whatever their documentation is
on how they started, but my advice
is to start something stupid.
I think that Starter Story is still like
it's not like a breakout success or anything like that.
It's not a brilliant idea or anything like that,
but it was just something to start,
and I just wrote about my starting it,
and I shared that with people, and that's a big part
of my story, and my journey is that I
kind of documented everything, and I had people reach out to me
almost every day that I can
point them to these old blog posts
that I did, and so my advice would be
start and just start writing
and start sharing that, because when you share
those blog posts or videos or however you
document it, it's like
motivation, and
it really does keep you going, and
like I said, I'm trying to
put the word out on my new product Pigeon
because if I don't do that, then
it'll probably fail if I don't talk about it
and spread the word, so
my advice is just start, and just
start blogging and documenting.
Good advice. Really pays
dividends to just put your story out there
and let people get to know who you are.
Where can we go to find out more about you, Pat, and what you're working on?
So you can
go to trypigeon.co,
or you can go to my Twitter
to search Pat Wall's Twitter,
and then in my bio, has starter
story, and Pigeon is linked in there.
Cool. Thanks so much for coming
on for the first IndieHackers Quick Chat,
Pat. Thanks for having me.
And if you're listening to this podcast and you're interested
in coming on the show yourself to have a quick chat
with me, go to
ndhackers.com slash milestones, and
post a milestone. It can be anything related
to a product you're working on. So people have posted
about launching and finding their first customers.
They posted about growing their
mailing list and hitting a thousand Twitter followers.
They've posted about getting to
a hundred or a thousand or a hundred thousand
dollars a month in revenue. Pretty much the sky's the
limit. Whatever you're proud of, come celebrate it
on ndhackers.com, and other
IndieHackers will help you celebrate. We love encouraging
each other and supporting each other when we hit
these milestones. And what I'll do is at the end
of every week, I will look at the
top milestones posted, and reach out to
a few people to invite them to come on the podcast
for a quick chat. So once again, that's
ndhackers.com slash milestones.
I'm looking forward to seeing what you post.
If you
enjoyed listening to this conversation and you want a
really easy way to support the podcast,
why don't you head over to iTunes and leave us
a quick rating or even a review. If you're looking
for an easy way to get there, just go to
ndhackers.com slash review
and that should open up iTunes on your computer.
I read pretty much all the reviews that you guys
leave over there, and it really helps other people
to discover the show, so your support is very much
appreciated. In addition, if you are
running your own internet business, or if that's something
you hope to do someday, you should join me
and a whole bunch of other founders on the ndhackers.com
website. It's a great place to get
feedback on pretty much any problem
or question that you might have while running
your business. If you listen to the show, you know
that I am a huge proponent of getting help
from other founders rather than trying to build your
business all by yourself, so you'll see me
on the forum for sure as well as more than a handful
of some of the guests that I've had on the podcast.
If you're looking for inspiration, we've also got
a huge directory full of hundreds of products
built by other indie hackers, every
one of which includes revenue numbers
and some of the behind the scenes strategies for how they
get through their products from nothing. As always,
thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next time.