What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process.
And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and
the strategies they're taking advantage of, so the rest of us can do the same.
I'm here with Amjad Massad, founder of Repl.it, Repl.it, one of my favorite companies, probably
because I think your strategy is just so cool, like I'm like very captivated by the strategy.
But for listeners who don't know, Repl.it is, maybe you can introduce them to your product.
Yeah, totally.
So Repl.it is an online programming environment, collaborative environment, but also a community,
a community of builders, a community of learners, a community of educators.
It's a sort of one-stop shop to go all the way from writing your first line of code,
learning programming, to shipping something.
So we'll host it for you.
We'll also give you primitives to build on top of, we'll give you a database, write in
your IDE, we'll give you auth, give you pretty powerful compute infrastructure.
And our vision for this is that you at least initially should not worry about all the other
torture of setting up a development environment, maintaining the packages, maintaining the
environments.
And we just want to make it really easy to get started, really easy to share with other
people, really easy to collaborate with other people as well.
Yeah.
It reminds me of like, in a way, like video games.
Like I just started playing this game the other day called Hades, and I don't play a
lot of video games, but once I do, I just like get deep into it.
And like, if you get really good at this game, there are so many different options and configurations
and different variables and different powers and power-ups and like a million different
things.
But the very first time you go through the game, all of that's turned off and they just
have you play through the level with most basic stuff and you don't have to see any
of the complexity.
And back in the day, that used to be good enough for being a software engineer, but
like today, it's like you immediately jump in with all the options turned on.
And so I think what's cool about Repl.it is like you kind of like, I guess you can give
users like sort of a graduated experience to learning how to code, like they don't have
to see all that crazy stuff, but they also don't ever have to like stop using Repl.it
and be like, well, this is as far as Repl.it can go.
Now I've graduated.
I'm going to go use a real quote unquote programming environment.
But I think like stepping back for a second, one of the things that's really cool to me
about Repl.it I mentioned earlier is the strategy.
And like, I think the strategy that you guys have is very connected to your ambition.
And so maybe I can try to give you from like an outsider's point of view, looking in like
what I think your strategy is.
And you can tell me if this is like, if I've got it or if I'm off the mark.
Please.
That'd be fun.
So I've taught a lot of people to code in my life, maybe five or six people to code.
It's very frustrating.
There's a lot that quite frankly, doesn't get done very well.
And there's a lot like coding websites don't teach you like, you know, it's almost like
if you teach someone to drive a car, you just, you know, show them the clutch and this
steering wheel and the brake.
But then like, they have no idea like how to actually read traffic signs or how to actually
parallel park or go into a parking garage or all these other things that you need to
know to do a car.
It's kind of like that with programming.
And so with Repl.it, it seems like the strategy is to get in on the entry level and be like
the best possible place for somebody to learn how to code.
You're thinking about all these different gaps so that people can actually be real software
engineers and not just kind of learn parts of code, but not learn how to set up their
environment or not learn how to use their computer or not learn how to host a server.
And then I think what's really cool is that that is positioning you at the top of the
funnel.
Like these are the people who are just now learning how to code like teenagers in many
cases and instead of saying, okay, well, off you go, like we've taught you how to code,
go use a different development environment, you're configuring Repl.it so that they never
have to stop using it.
They can keep using it and they can build like real world applications on Repl.it and
like, that's just how they code.
And I think that's super cool to be at the top of the funnel like that, like Paul Graham
has a really good quote.
He said, the most important thing he learned that he used in both IOF and Y Combinator
is that the low end eats the high end, that it's good to be the entry level option, even
though that's less prestigious, because if you're not, somebody else will be the entry
level option and they'll squash you up against the ceiling.
And I think that's kind of like what it seems like Repl.it is doing.
It's kind of like, all right, we're going to be the entry level option.
And from there, like once we capture all these people, we could direct them where we want
to go, where we want to direct them is to keep them on Repl.it.
And so there's kind of this ambitious vision where like, I don't know, 10 years from now,
some humongous percentage of people are not only learning, not only learning how to code
on Repl.it, but also writing an actual code on Repl.it and you've captured a huge percentage
of the growth and the software engineers that exist in the world.
How do I do?
How does that do for describing Repl.it strategy?
Yeah, I think that the business strategy is absolutely 100% correct.
And what Paul was talking about, Peter Thiel talks about is the idea of like toys, someone
like Chris Dixon also talks about the idea of things that look like toys at the start.
And this actually goes back to Clay Christensen's idea of the innovator's dilemma.
He introduced the concept of disruption, which became a buzzword, but actually had a very
interesting and very precise meaning, which is a technology that is actually not very
powerful to go compete with incumbents and captures the low end of the market, the underserved
part of the market that no one's paying attention to.
And then by nature of technology, by nature of how things happen, it ends up being a disruptive
force and eventually eats up market as well.
Like the most known example is the PC, the microcomputer, the x86 architecture, there
was like the mainframes and many computers and those were like the business computers.
But then you had the early Apple computer and things like that that were looked at as
toys.
There was no killer app yet for Apple.
People bought them for educational purposes.
The big like mid-frame computer manufacturers never saw them as a threat until like really
late for them to react to.
And the Clay Christensen's idea is that actually it's like very rational for the incumbent,
the one who's already winning, who has the top side of the market, to not pay attention
to low end of the market because your customers are not asking for this disruptive technology.
They're asking for better performance, they're asking for more advanced features.
They're dragging you actually up an up market.
And by the way, the economies of it is also dragging you off market because this is where
the money is and you see it with a lot of, actually a lot of startups when they start
selling to their enterprise, the whole startup changes, it becomes less user friendly.
And the reason is because there's no incentive anymore to be consumer friendly and then your
main goal is to sell the enterprise.
So this is like the whole cluster of ideas is very much like the innovators dilemma idea.
And for us, it seems like things are playing that way.
For us, thinking strategically and being business savvy is very important for us to survive
as a business.
But when we're thinking day-to-day, we're not thinking in this very Machiavellian way,
how do we get people to capture them and all of that.
We're just thinking about what is the next awesome thing we can build to make the experience
of Replit a lot more powerful, a lot more exciting, holding constant the entry to programming
and actually improving the entry to programming.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The business strategy stuff is fun and it's worked in there and it's cool how nicely it
fits in with you just making a better product for more people.
How did you get to a point where you wanted to build something so ambitious?
I mean, this is a tremendously ambitious vision, right?
You just raised a ridiculous amount of money, close to a billion dollar valuation.
I mostly talk to Andy Hackers on this show who aren't raising any money and they're
just like, I want enough money to feed myself and my family, right?
How did you as a person decide that you wanted to build something that was so world changing
when obviously you could use your talents to do something that's like, I don't know,
simpler, easier, more laid back?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So when I was a teenager, I thought that I'd been programming since I was six years old.
I grew up in Jordan.
There's no computers for a really long time.
It was early 90s, very few computers.
My father was still is an engineer and he was really intrigued by computers, although
they were really, really expensive.
They were above our means.
He took a loan to be able to buy this computer and he bought a computer and we were like
the first people I knew that we had computers and I was fascinated by them.
I was like six years old and one of my earliest memories was standing behind my dad's shoulder
and seeing him type like MKDIR, you know, make a directory CD and DOS commands.
I was like, whoa, this is insane.
You can talk to the computer and they can do stuff for you.
So I got really hooked early on and I always love to think about the future and what the
future might hold.
So I built my first business when I was a teenager.
I loved going to LAN games and play Counter Strike.
I was really obsessed with that.
And one of the interesting things about it and Jordan, I don't know if the same in the
US, but they didn't use software to manage these LAN cafes.
I was like, wait, like you have all these computers yet you're doing everything by pen
and paper.
You're like tapping people on their shoulder to pay more money.
And so I offered to write software for them and that was the first business that I built
was like just a complete LAN management system.
I was 15, 16 years old.
When was this?
What year around?
2000, 2001.
I think I started working on it when I was 14.
So that would have been 2001.
Are you 34 now?
Yeah.
Okay.
We're the exact same age.
So you have like this perfect skill set like that's born in 1987.
So you're a computer programmer from an early age.
Also you have like a pension for entrepreneurship and seeing problems and it's like the late
90s.
It's like the perfect cocktail to become a startup founder basically.
Yeah.
But here's the interesting part.
I was like convinced that software was going to be automated by AI and I had this vision
of like, oh, AI will generate all the code and then we're only going to be servicing
the computers because the computers will do most of the work with screwdrivers and wrenches.
Exactly.
And I got into computer engineering instead of computer science instead of software because
I'm like, you know, I'm just going to build the computers and they're going to program
themselves.
It's like, you know, I need job safety, you know, and now in retrospect, like once AIs
can generate software end to end completely, that's like the end of everything that we
know that's the singularity because they can do whatever.
They can write programs to do whatever.
But eventually I got deeper into programming.
I started learning about the history of computing, started learning about lists and scheme and
you see that in a lot of replates lineage.
One thing that really jumped at me was that programming is such a unique artistic endeavor.
It feels like the programmer is one of the most useful, interesting profession of the
21st century.
So the fundamental observation that I made back then was like this idea of like AI automating
software.
It's kind of crazy.
That's not going to happen anytime soon.
Not only that, but the programmer is going to be so, so valuable in the future that like
one of the things to work on is to build tools for programmers.
And the other thing is to make sure that that opportunity is open to everyone in the world.
And so that kind of started the multi-decade adventure of, you know, making tools that
took me, you know, to Facebook, I worked on React and React Native and, you know, with
Code Academy and then Replit, it's about like making programming more accessible, getting
it to more people.
But when we were starting Replit, we were thinking like, you know, like a bootstrapping
mindset one of your entrepreneurs, it's like, what is the beachhead market?
What is the first thing that we go after?
The first business we went after is an API business.
And we actually got it to like 2000 MRR or something like that.
I was actually paying enough of the bills.
I don't think we were ramen profitable, we were very close to it.
So give me the story behind that.
That's super fascinating.
Because I think there's a lot of paths to raising money.
A lot of people come out and they're like, I've got to raise money before I start.
It's not as common for people to like bootstrap something that's profitable and then say,
okay, I'm going to raise money.
So how did you come up with the idea for something that could be, I guess, ramen profitable?
Yeah.
So, you know, we had the advantage of this being a side product for many years, right?
So when I was in Jordan, we built the kind of predecessor to Replit, which was an open
source project that allowed you to run code in arbitrary languages in the browser, right?
And Code Academy ended up using some of that software.
And that got me to the US to work at Code Academy.
All the while, Replit as a product was there, but it was like more like a demo page.
You just, what this technology could do, it didn't have any signups.
You can only write like one file and run that.
It had a few languages only.
Did you license it to Code Academy or were they paying you for it or did you just like
sort of give it to them?
No.
No, it was open source.
I just open sourced it and a bunch of other, yeah, a bunch of other companies started using
that.
And, you know, I was really excited about it.
Udacity used parts of our software as well.
So it was open source.
It was free for anyone to use.
I believe we're the first to kind of make that like, you know, in browser sandbox.
And so I was thrilled that I got a job.
I kind of abandoned the project because like Code Academy also like had a really ambitious
plan and mission.
And so the project was on the side, you know, I was like running itself in, I left Code
Academy in 2013, went to work Facebook, moved to California from New York.
And then my wife and I, my wife Haia is a designer and we work together on a project
all the time.
And so we worked on a game at some point, we worked on a, on multiple different apps.
Some of them did not launch.
And at some point Haia was looking for a job.
She was having a lot of trouble finding a job.
I don't know why.
She's very talented.
She's like the VP of design at Radford right now.
She's our co-founder.
And she would go from interview to interview and she would not get even like past the first,
the first thing.
And so we had this idea of, okay, what if you built more projects and kind of fortified
your portfolio so that when you go into these interviews, they can see your skills.
And we're like, okay, let's, let's go through the things that we can build together.
And we started going through them.
I was like, Oh, whatever happened to Replit?
I was like, yeah, it's still running.
I get emails every now and then there's like 10,000 users on it a month or something like
that.
And Haia was like, okay, let's dig into that.
And so she constructed a user interview research.
We set it out, we sent out a bunch of surveys and started looking at like what people are
using it for.
We started looking at more qualitative, also user feedback, what people are looking to
do with it.
At the same time, I was also really interested in playing around with Docker with Go.
I was learning Go and I was like, okay, one of the limitations of Replit is that it runs
in the browser.
I want to be able to write it on the server so that we can do a lot more for the user,
including access to packages, including access to the entire language, more languages, make
it easier to add languages.
So I started rewriting it on the weekends and nights while working at Facebook to be
this like container execution system.
We built one of the first ones out there, now there's a lot of people that are building
that.
And as soon as we released it, it added a few languages.
Haia had the idea of adding signups and users.
So that was 2015.
And we start seeing like insane amount of growth.
And we're like, okay, interesting.
This is becoming more than a side project.
Where were these users coming from?
I think some SEO because Replit was around for a long time and people linked to it.
When you search Python, online Python IDE, whatever, it was popped up.
And then retention just got better.
People were just cycling through just because it did not work very well.
And so the MAUs went up a lot and then people started talking about it.
And then when we dug more into the user research, we found that one of the ways people found
out about it is from their teachers.
So if high school, bootcamp, college teachers were really interested in it, unsurprisingly,
because my use case for it was essentially at school.
And so we're like, oh, okay, interesting.
That's an interesting use case.
We found out flag in that.
And then one thing that started materializing was that a lot of people were trying to create
these in browser coding experience, similar to what happened when I released the open
source kind of browser sandbox.
A lot of coding sites started popping up for training, assessments, all these things.
And we're like, okay, interesting.
We can be the platform that provides this technology because people were still using
the old open source projects.
So I started directing people.
We have an API.
I started doing some user research and we immediately got a couple of customers just
based on the open source project.
And so I wrote a documentation for the API and it was really easy.
You kind of select a language and you eval, and we return the results for you.
And then put up a landing page.
Actually, I think Replit was mentioned on your podcast at some point, your podcast with
Vincent of quarter pad.
And I think Vincent was inspired by Replit as well to create, I don't know if you use
some of the source code initially, I bet he did.
And he built this experience here on coding interviews.
And so there was a ton of people trying to do things like that to build code experiences.
And as they're doing the research, they'll find their open source project and left a
link from the open source project back to, to, to like the actual site where they can
sign up and pay.
And so I guess it was like an open source led kind of marketing.
We, we, we got up to like, you know, a couple of thousand MRR at that point, the idea of
starting a startup started becoming more real.
I wrote a thread the other day about all the ways I didn't want to start a startup, all
the ways I try to not start it.
So when it started growing, I went to my boss at Facebook and said, look, I have this like
side project.
It's growing.
I don't use company time to work on it.
It was all on the weekends.
My wife is working on it.
Like what if, what if I, you know, bring you back to Facebook and start working on it there?
And you know, he was so nice.
We try to find a home for it.
There wasn't any appeal.
I emailed Zuck at some point, it was like, Hey, let's like, you know, buy this thing.
I'll work on it.
He did reply.
We have a lot of investors in commerce, I'm sure he'll learn about us.
And then I was like, okay, like then some of the customers that of the API all were
interested in buying a replant.
I was like, okay, what if I merge it with them and I could like go work on it as like
an employee?
I wouldn't be a founder or at least like, you know, a co-founder or I have other co-founders.
And so I tried to merge it with a couple of different startups.
What's interesting is that we're way larger.
We're like 10 to 100X larger than those startups that I tried to sell to early on.
This is exactly what I mean, like in the early days, like you might have had the vision,
but also it's like, it's hard to be like that we're going to do with replant.
You know, it's like, actually, why don't we sell to these people?
Why don't we get Zuck to buy it?
Why don't we?
Because it's just not that obvious.
Like how big you can take it on your own sometimes.
Yeah.
And look, I'm an engineer and like I want to code and I want to invent.
Like I knew the CEO job was going to be tough.
Like it's going to, it's going to take you away from everything that you enjoyed.
You know, that's the tragedy of startups.
The thing that makes you excited about the thing you want to build end up being chores
that you have to do to just support the business and make it a sustainable thing.
So if you're really like what you're doing, don't make it a startup is my advice.
Or if what your vision for it is so important that you're willing to take some sacrifice
in terms of like what your job could be, at least for a long time.
Right now I'm getting back some of the enjoyment of the early days because I have leadership
team that I can depend on right now.
And I'm starting to build in time to like learn new things and, you know, imagine the
future and like talk to you and go out to talk to people.
But for a really long time, like just like bootstrapping a business is so tough.
What was the turning point where you realized like what's the next step would be?
Because eventually you figured it out.
I mean, you're here today.
Like what was there like a singular turning point?
You know, at some point, Haya and I sort of went on a, went on some kind of trip to look
into our souls and understand whether we really want to do this and understand whether we're
willing to take some sacrifice and we're willing to go into something really, really hard.
And by the way, you have to remember 2015, 16 was a way different venture environment
than it is right now.
Like startup environment that it is right now was entirely clear like how big tech and
startups is going to be.
So it's like totally different world.
And ultimately we're like, okay, we have this thing that's exporting onto the world.
It has a lot of expenses.
It has a lot of users.
It has a lot of needs.
There's no way for us to find like a good home for it and continue to work on it.
And then we really look deeply into ourselves and ask the questions like, do we care about
this vision?
Do we care about this mission?
Are we willing to risk a lot of things?
Because it was very risky, especially as immigrants, we don't have a lot of savings and we're
not putting something like 20, 30 K in the company before we got venture investments.
And so that was the main thing was that really answering that question is like, do we care
about it?
Do we really care about it to work on it for the next five to 10 years?
You applied to get into Y Combinator.
They rejected you today.
Paul Graham's an investor in rebel and one of your mentors.
Why do you think they didn't spot the potential in your company back then?
I mean, in many ways, it's probably like, you know, arguably a failure on waste waste
these part, like they should have spotted you, you obviously have become like a much
bigger company.
There's a huge potential of what do you think was going on?
It could be my issue of like not pitching it correctly.
It's also, you know, the idea of like things that look like toys that actually have a really
high potential is one of those things that even if you take it into consideration, you're
still going to miss some startups.
I'm sure you've had friends who you were so supportive of, you didn't think their startup
idea was great, but then they blow up.
I've had that experience.
Yeah.
And startups are so counterintuitive.
Honestly, like, you know, VCs get a lot of shit on Twitter for being, you know, pattern
matchers and for having these very simple heuristics, but like, how else would you deal
with this like weird thing is like Google is the 10th startup to do search, but somehow
it became this like, you know, multiple trillion dollar company instead of the other nine.
Like how would you think about that?
And so like, I don't fault YC for missing as one, not twice, three times, but it's hard.
So like, you know, I don't know what to say.
The other thing about YC is that I think for a while there was this shift towards like companies
with more business traction.
I don't know that that's still the case.
I think now they widened the funnel a bit, but I think for a period of time, the companies
that were making it into YC had like more like SaaS business attraction.
And I think the 2015-16 was like, I don't know if it was a hype, SaaS is still pretty
hype, but people were really excited by the idea of SaaS.
Like it made startups more predictable, right?
It's like, oh, you have the play book.
Yeah, it had a playbook.
And I think a lot of the funding went to that.
Right.
That makes sense.
I mentioned something that I found to be true, which is that often like taking on the role
of being a founder can mean that something that you once loved is now kind of just hard
and unpleasant.
Right.
There's like lots of hard things about being a founder in your particular case.
Like I can tell that you love programming.
Obviously you've loved coding.
You like, you love, like you talk about like the different features of right below with
like clear, like a smile on your face because you're very excited about this kind of stuff.
What was hard about being a founder for you in particular, you know, what were like the
hard parts where when you decided, okay, it's not going to be a project, we're going to
actually try to turn this into a company.
What does you have to sacrifice to do that?
I think a lot of just plain chores you have to do when starting the company, you have
to set up the company correctly, you have to pay attention to all the legal work, you
have to learn what does it mean to be a corporation?
Once you hire people, you have to be, you have to treat them right, you have to think
about the benefits, think about their compensation, think about their salaries.
There's all these ways in which the thing that you were doing that you were good at
is not the main thing that you start doing as a founder, right?
So like I was good at programming, good at designing products, good at infrastructure,
and I wasn't like, I never had to really spend any significant amount of time in Excel.
I had to do some kind of like cash flow statements or a balance sheet, I had to learn all these
finance and accounting terms.
When it came to fundraising, I had to learn what VCs were, what are their incentives,
how does the venture world works?
And all that stuff is like things I wasn't intrinsically interested in.
The hardest thing is being on this manager schedule of being very interrupt driven, doing
things in 15 to 30 minute increments versus actually going deep.
If you spend a lot of time in that mode, interrupt driven mode, you actually lose the ability
to go deep in a lot of ways.
Paul Graham has this article, the manager maker schedule, which absolutely works.
You should do it, especially if you're bootstrapping, if you're building and selling.
The way I did it was like 9am to 3pm was the interrupt driven kind of management work.
And then 3pm, I would like go to the gym and then work out and then come back at four to
start my maker shift and it will go until 12pm or something like that.
And that helped a lot and that kept me kind of sharp and kept my skill going.
What is sort of getting really, really stressful and really detrimental to my health was how
difficult our domain is.
The thing about giving compute for free on the internet is you're giving something really,
really valuable, especially in the age of crypto, you can turn compute into money.
We have alchemy for the first time.
You transmute, compute, you transmit electricity, compute into actual dollars.
And so if you're someone who's considering to do anything with coding online, that's
something you're going to have to deal with, which is people will come to your service
and exploit it to do crypto mining.
And that was the hardest thing I had to deal with.
I'll tell you a story that kind of gives you an idea of how hard it was to protect the
service.
I think it was Thanksgiving like 2017 and we're like three people working in the company.
There was like dark web group that figured out that Repl.it is this really powerful compute
infrastructure that you can use in very interesting ways.
So they reverse engineered our protocol and they figured out how to spin up containers.
And then they started selling attacks on the dark web for Bitcoin.
So you would go to them through Tor, whatever, and you would buy an attack on say indiehacker.com.
So what they would do is they would like start all these Repl.it containers and do like a
UDP flood attack on, on any hacker, they'll do a DOS attack or like a botnet attack.
And we had to fight them for months because every hole we, we, we kind of block, we see
them kind of finding another one.
And we did a lot of, yeah, we did a lot of social engineering as well.
We got into their discord server, start figuring out what they're talking about and how they
found the next hole.
And so it was like this multi month thing where I'm waking up in the middle of the night,
you know, fighting hackers and attackers and, and all of that stuff.
So that was the really, the hardest part about it is that not only building, selling, finding
the business model, but also finding fraud was like, it was like, why am I doing this?
Like why am I doing this to myself?
It's crazy.
I've had similar things with any hackers.
I mean, not that intense.
Uh, and I didn't respond as cleverly.
Like I didn't go into their discord chat groups and stuff, but like, there's a lot of lists
online where like, Oh, you want to promote your startup, you know, pay us 30 bucks.
We'll spam these websites and they'll put any hackers on the list and they'll just create
bots and create accounts to just make crappy posts.
And there's a lot of people who do a SEO spam to you where they'll be like, Oh, there's
a soccer game.
We've created an illegal live streaming site for it, but we need to rank high on Google.
So we'll make a post on Andy hackers and that post was just linked to our live streaming
website and the hackers is highly reputable in Google's eyes.
So then they're, you know, at the top of Google for a day and I'll log on and be like, wow,
our traffic's through the roof.
What's going on?
We're going to this one post because these spammers are posting stuff and it's relentless.
Like I kind of closed off the community a few months back.
It might just be temporary.
I'm not sure, but I'm like invite only.
And I started getting DMS on Twitter from spammers who were like, Hey, I can't get back
into the site.
Can you give me an invite code?
And I look at their account on Twitter.
They're just like a straightforward, like unabashed spammer.
Like, no, you can't get it in my absolutely not.
But it's a, it comes with the territory.
When you build any sort of a large online free tool, there are going to be people out
there who try to figure out how to use it for their own gain.
And don't particularly care about what you're trying to do and whether or not they're ruining
it for you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's why we can't have nice things as a thing.
Is there anything that as a founder that you've, I guess, didn't plan on doing when you went
in because you just wanted to do Replit itself, but that you actually grew to like, you know,
do you like talking to investors?
Do you like running a company and managing a team?
I grew to like some of the finance and accounting things, surprisingly.
I was very surprised about that that I'm like actually interested, especially like, you
know, I started like playing around with Robinhood a while back just for fun and ended up doing
relatively well.
I mean, everyone's doing well now, but you know, you started getting interested in like,
how do you value businesses?
How do you look at companies?
How do you read financial statements?
And it ended up also helping me think about our business.
And so that's, that's something I started enjoying.
I enjoy fundraising as well.
Like it's not, it's always brutal, always kind of like saps you of your energy and you
need a lot of time to recover after that.
But it's also, you talk to the people, you talk to your heroes.
Like I had the last fundraise, I was able to meet Peter Thiel, obviously Paul Graham
is involved before that, Martin Greason, I met everyone that I looked up to in tech.
And you know, that's, that's amazing.
And that's, I'm very blessed about that.
You know, that's one reason to, to enjoy fundraising, even the like, you know, HR and employee
stuff and compensation, all of that, you start thinking about like, how can we do it differently?
How can we be better?
How can we ensure that our employees are, are happy, well rewarded and all these things?
And it ends up being an interesting challenge, especially if you're thinking about things
from first principles.
And you end up, you know, seeing a lot of things that actually are not working and people
do them anyways, because that's what you do.
And so you start questioning things and actually end up being fun to kind of design the organization.
The culture is a really fun thing to design, especially if you do things differently.
And so the, the idea of like running businesses becomes not only tolerable, but kind of interesting.
And I see why, I see why entrepreneurs do it multiple times is because it becomes a
skill that you're good at, that you're good at structuring companies, you're good at structuring
teams, you're good at recruiting.
Yeah, it's crazy that your list of things that you grew to like is longer than your
list of things that you didn't want to do.
But I think it's kind of true in life that often things look scary or hard or annoying
from the outside.
And then once you start doing it, and you get a little bit of confidence, it starts
to be really rewarding and entertaining.
Getting out of code is honestly no different.
I think it's much more fun to know how to code and be able to do all sorts of stuff
than it is to be frustrated in those first few weeks and months struggling and fighting
against your tools.
I want to let you go.
Amjad, thanks so much for coming on the show and sharing your story with the Indiehackers
audience.
Is there anywhere in particular that Indiehackers should go to learn more about what you're
up to?
I share a lot about our community, our product, our tools, our vision on Twitter.
It's A-M-S-O-T-A-M-A-S-A-D on Twitter.
Check out Ruplet.
I really want it to be at some point a great place for Indiehackers in your community,
bootstrappers, independent creators.
And look, try to use it.
Try to run part of your business on top of it.
Try to use it for prototyping.
Tell us what's missing and I will be happy to build it.
Cool.
Thanks again, Amjad.