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. So, I'm here with Steph Smith, the one and only. How's
it going, Steph? Things are good. How are you? Great. You are a very multi-talented person.
You run Trends.co, which is, I guess, kind of... It's my favorite part of the Hustle
newsletter, which was acquired by HubSpot last year. It's one of the best newsletters
in existence. You guys have, I think, 15,000-plus subscribers. It's paid. It's really awesome.
You also have a ton of personal projects that you've worked on over the years, including
eBooks, and you wrote a book called Doing Content, right? And you also have the project
that you're here for today, which is a newish podcast that you started called, Shit They
Don't Teach You in Schools. Is that right? Shit You Don't Learn in School. Yes, Shit
You Don't Learn in School. That's right. Love it. With a little asterisk in the eye.
So nobody knows what that word means. No swearing here. No swearing here whatsoever. I started
doing this thing on Indie Hackers. I don't know if you saw it, but we have a group called
Show IH on Indie Hackers on the forum. And anybody who posts in Show IH can just basically
show off something that they're working on that they think other Indie Hackers will find
interesting or useful. And I've made a commitment that if somebody posts something cool that
the community likes, I will bring that person onto the podcast and we'll talk about it.
So that's like Show IH the group. And this is Show IH the episode, I guess. And I think
you posted the coolest thing last month. You had a lot of comments and discussion about
your podcast, Shit You Don't Learn in School. And I just kind of wanted to chat with you
casually about what it is and why you started it. So maybe let's start there. Like why should
anyone start a podcast right now? Why did you start a podcast? There's obviously hundreds
of thousands, if not millions of podcasts. It's really hard to get started. It's really
hard to grow. It's hard to be consistent. Chances are you're just going to give up.
So why start a podcast? Well, I want to say first that I love that you brought up all
of those things, right? Like it's so hard to grow a podcast. It's not an easy thing
to commit to every single week or some people publish even more than that. But I think on
the other side of that challenge is something unique that you don't always get with other
content medium. So let me just ask you a couple of questions, Cortland. How many podcasts
do you listen to in your suite of podcasts? It's probably like five or six that I go between.
Exactly. So most people listen to, I think the number is around six is the average. Now
let me ask you how many newsletters you read in a given year. I don't know, a few dozen
that I'm subscribed to. I don't read them consistently, but I peek at some.
Exactly. So there's a lack of consistent interest and time spent with newsletters as compared
to podcasts. And if you take that to another level, let's talk about blogs as an example.
How many blog articles, different blogs out there on the web, do you think you'll read
in a given year? Probably a hundred. Exactly. And so if you imagine that on a spectrum where
on one end you're having these like really light touch experiences with people, often
when you read a blog, you don't even know who wrote it, right? You maybe you discovered
it on Hacker News or something. And so you have this light touch experience. You spend
maybe five minutes with that person through the internet. And then newsletters are maybe
a little bit less of a light touch experience. You're subscribing to the person or their
newsletter. Every time you read it, you're spending a couple of minutes and you're maybe
you're doing that every week and you're doing that with, I think the most or most people
I've asked give us that number of a dozen or two dozen newsletters in a given year.
Yes. You're spending an hour with the person often, right? So you really get to know them.
You get to hear their nuance takes on things. And you're only spending that time with like
a very select number of people. And so I liken these different types of content to podcasting
almost being like your best friends, right? The people that you're spending all your time
with, you're really excited to be around. Newsletters are more like, I don't know, like
that friend of a friend that you sometimes see every so often. And then blogs are like
those random people you meet at conferences once a year. So the reason I'm mentioning
this is because depending on the goals of different creators, podcasts may actually
be a terrible thing for them to launch, right? If they're trying to reach the masses or they're
trying to bring in huge amounts of ad dollars, podcasts are not the way, at least in the
short term. But if they are looking to have like deep trusting relationships with their
audiences similar to what you've built with indie hackers, then that's why podcasts can
be the right move. And that's ultimately why I decided to create a podcast.
I think you nailed it. Like, that's exactly what you get from a podcast. And it's so deep
to have somebody in your ear for an hour. Like you said, it's just like, you kind of
feel like they're your friend. You feel like if you saw them on the street, it's like,
this is a converse. This is a person I've been having conversations with for a year,
right? Except like, they have no idea who you are. You know everything about them because
you've heard them. I think that's a great way to look at it. And I think it's kind of
speaks to the fact that like not every channel is the same. And like you said, like it could
be a bad option for certain people. Like I know a lot of people who are like, I've got
a new product. I've got a new company. Like I need to have a podcast and a blog. I need
a newsletter. I need to be on Twitter. And it's like, number one, you can't do all of
these things and do the well, unless you have a team probably, or you're just like literally
full time content creator. That's it. But number two, like probably some of those things
aren't going to be that helpful. And even if you like succeed at Twitter and build up
this huge audience, it doesn't in any way align with sort of the pot of gold at the
end of the rainbow that you're chasing. And like they go in the wrong way. And so podcasts
are basically if you really want people to build a deep connection with you, why do you
want people to build a deep connection with you? I mean, like you don't necessarily need
that to happen. You already have other successful endeavors. Like why, like why does it matter?
I think it's for that very reason I've built a lot of other projects that give me these
like fun flashes of attention, right? They'll trend on product hunt or something, or maybe
someone will read an article of mine and they'll really love it. But then I don't have this
lasting connection with people. And I want to create for the next several decades. Like
that really is my intention. And that's also the reason that I continue to work full time.
And so that everything that I create is just this passive thing that I'm, I only do what
I'm interested in it and I can do for a long, long period of time and it's not dependent
on my financial stability. And so if I'm planning this thing, right, to be invested in it for
many, many years, if not decades, then I think forming these really strong bonds with people
is the best way to do it, right? And it also gives me optionality because if I create a
newsletter about something very specific and people get to know me as like Steph is the
writer or Steph is the X, Y, or Z, which people tend to do with creators, then I'm almost
like stuck in that lane. And so I think podcasting is a really neat way to almost like break
yourself out of that. And you said people view you as like their friends and I want
people to get to know me. It's not just Steph, the writer or Steph, the developer or whatever
it might be, but just like Steph and buy into me and what I might create like 30 years from
now.
Right. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And I think you picked kind of like the perfect topic
for your podcast to have that sort of like optionality and like general purview where
you're not locked into something. So the shit you don't learn in school, the description,
at least on the iTunes stores, formal schooling does a terrible job of preparing you to thrive
as an adult. The shit you don't learn in school podcasts exist to make up for the societal
failure. So it's to help you improve the quality of your personal and professional life. And
like that's broad. That could be, you could talk about literally anything that you want
on your show and get away with it. And no one's ever going to be like, oh, but Steph,
you're veering away from the topic. You said like it's anything like some of your episode
titles are like, and we'll talk about some of these, like should billionaires exist and
earning the trust of your team and what can happen in 300 years for now. Right. And then
you're talking about casinos and Russian Roulette with your life and technology. It's literally
anything.
Yeah. I mean, that's exactly why we structured it that way because we didn't want to be really
confined by a specific topic. And even hearing you read that description out loud, it sounds
a lot more controversial than I think we meant it to be, but it really is just like you go
through school for, you know, 15 to 20 years, at least in North America. And at the end
of that, most people stop learning or at least stop learning in as aggressive of a form as
they were doing in school. And I think there are just endless topics that people could
like really dive into that they would benefit from and help us have better discourse as
well. Like some of the topics like should billionaires exist? I'm not seeing that topic
talked about in too many forums in a way that's talking about both sides and talking about
how we critically think about this and not just like these like really brash conversations
that you see. And so that's that's why we created the podcast is because we were already
having those conversations behind closed doors and we just kind of wanted to open that up.
Honestly, I stopped learning like during school. I didn't stop learning after school. I stopped
learning before I was ready to be done with school like my junior year of high school.
And in college, I almost never went to class. And a lot of it was just like, just easy to
tell that most of the stuff I was learning, like I wasn't going to use because I was spending
so much time on the internet and seeing like how people were making money and having an
impact using different skills that I wasn't learning. So maybe this is off topic. But
I'm just curious, like, what do you think should be taught in schools? Like you have
opinions if you could control like sort of the high school curriculum or the college
curriculum for like Americans? Like what is what is not getting into people's heads that
should be, you know, it's so funny you asked this because I literally tweeted last night,
I'm going to pull this tweet up. But it asks this exact question. It says, what's the one
subject that you think schools should teach way more of and then also what about way less?
And so just reading through some of the responses, and then then I'll layer in what I think.
There's tons of responses around financial literacy. There are some responses that don't
even speak to a specific subject, but they're more like, we should stop teaching kids memorization
and grading and things like that and more so teaching them how to learn. I thought one
of the interesting responses that came up a couple times was like phys ed, that we should
be investing way more in that and teaching people how to be fit and healthy and and to
do that throughout the you know, the the rest of their lives. Some other things were like
philosophy or, you know, maybe some of the softer sciences a lot around critical thinking.
I kind of side with the the idea that and this is due to the way that school needs to
be done at scale. We focus far too much on teaching kids things that are graded. It's
due to the fact that we need to grade people to understand how that how they're performing
relative to their peers. But I just think through all the times when I just like optimized
for acing a test, I got very, very good at that. But then five days later, I forgot everything
that I had learned. And I, you know, reflecting on just one thing in particular, it's kind
of crazy when you think about it that tests these days aren't open book. If you think
about the society that we live in and how many resources are available online. If you
really wanted to mimic people succeeding in the wider world, it would be testing them
on their resourcefulness, not testing them on their ability to memorize something on
the spot. Exactly. Because real life is open book. There's no job you're going to take
where, you know, your boss is going to tell you you're not allowed to look things up.
Half the programmers I know it's been all their time on Google, googling out to do some
certain things because they've forgotten or they need to, like, and resourcefulness comes
down to it. And I like the point you made about not being graded to you, because I take
a lot of classes that, quite frankly, like now, like, I mean, I've taken lessons from
chess coaches and all sorts of, like, tennis lessons. No one's grading me. I'm just doing
it because it's interesting. And I go at my own pace. And I think there's, like, something
relieving about not necessarily being assessed that way. But on the flip side, oh, my God,
is money, like, such a strong incentive for people to do things. And, like, all of school
just comes down to money. It's like, go to school, get good grades, so you can get into
a good college, you can get a good GPA, so you can get a degree, and you can get a job
somewhere and then make money. And, like, if that is kind of, like, the thing everyone's
chasing and, in a way, it sort of corrupts everything and makes it all about grades.
And it's, like, so many people are incentivized to just ace the time. I mean, I'm sure you're
probably similar to me as a kid, right? I was just, like, how do I get my SAT score
popped? I was just, like, a school robot in a way, even though I hated it. And, like,
it worked out, but, like, I didn't learn anything. And a lot of other people didn't learn anything.
We just memorized stuff, pumped and dumped, and then got good grades.
Yeah. I mean, if you really reflect on it, what schools do, and I'm diminishing them
to an extent. I actually, you know, I think schools obviously serve a really important
purpose, but what they do is they train you to be a good citizen. And they train you to
be a good citizen as, you know, the government or, you know, wider society views a good citizen.
So what is that? That means that you probably, you know, are a nationalist. I mean, you sing
the national anthem, or at least we did, in our schools in Canada. You also, you know,
you show up on time. You prepare for, as you mentioned, like, a very specific type of career
trajectory. And so it is interesting to just reflect, and there's obviously reasons why
things are designed this way, but reflect on what schools really are optimized for versus,
you know, perhaps the narrative that you hear schools are optimized for.
Yeah. What's a subject, though? Like, if you had to pick a subject that you really wish that had
been, like, taught in schools, that wasn't. Because I've got, like, a whole list of, like,
okay, in my adult life, like, I did not have the skill growing up, and no one taught it to me. And,
like, it was known human knowledge at the time. And no one thought this would be, like, good to
put in school. And it's very frustrating. So I wonder, like, what's frustrating for you that you
wish you were taught? So, I mean, I think one very simple one that you took in school later is just
computer science. I think that should be, like, a given from the very, very early stages of school.
And I hope that changes are being made within schools. I think one thing that was optional in
my school system that I wish was mandatory was debate. I think one of the biggest problems in
our society today is that we can't disagree in a friendly, productive way. And I think that if
people were really forced to learn how to debate other sides and go down that rabbit hole, I think
we'd be in a much better place. I also think there's there's some more, like, strange classes
you could say. I created a product back in the day called Unoya. And it was all about
untranslatable words. I think there should be classes like that in school where you learn,
like, how cool would it be to learn about all these words that exist in other cultures? And
instead of being this nationalist, which not hating on nationalism, you actually were like, wow,
it's so beautiful that this, like, this culture exists in Russia, or that these people experience
this phenomena in Japan. And so those are some of the things that come to mind. But totally curious
from your perspective, like, what are some of those classes on that long list of yours?
Yeah, yeah. First of all, I second, like, the sort of, like, debate classes. And for me,
a lot of it just comes down to, like, just, like, I mean, as vague as it is, like, critical thinking,
like, if you give somebody, you know, the controls to, like, a fighter jet, say, like, here, Steph,
sit in this fighter jet, go ahead and fly this. You're immediately gonna be like, I have no idea
how to fly this. I don't want to even start it up because I want to kill myself. No, I don't know
how to do this. Right. Or if you give somebody, like, a very complex, like, math problem that,
like, math professors would understand, but, like, the average person, everyone just said, like, I
don't know math, or I didn't do very well at math. I don't know what this means. But there's a bunch
of topics where regardless of how well trained or not you are in it, everyone kind of thinks
they're good at it. You know, it's like, web design is one of them. Everyone thinks they're good at
web design. Everybody thinks they understand economics. Like, everybody thinks they understand,
I guess, in a way, like, the rationality and the reasons, reasoning that goes into, like, dissecting
arguments and debate. And it's like, actually, this is kind of a skill. And some people are
better or worse at it. Like, some people are more or less skeptical. Some people are more or less
logical. And I think it would be good to sort of train people in these, I guess, techniques,
so that people can, number one, self-assess and say, you know what, actually, I got kind of an
F in logic. So don't take my word for it when I'm trying to assess what this political candidate
is saying, because I'm pretty easy to fool. Right. Just, like, having that baseline as a society
would be good. And then I think we live in sort of an increasingly information-rich world. Right.
Like, anyone could, on any side of any topic, just go to www.imright.com, find whatever facts
they think fit their narrative, and then just, like, say, oh, this is true. Right. And, like,
there's all this confusion about what's true and what's not. And I think, you know, back in the day,
it was, like, much harder for people, or much easier for people to, I guess, discern the truth
from fiction, because there's just one that many sources, you know. Or even if everyone believed
the wrong thing, like, everybody believed the same wrong thing, because there's only, like,
two sets of encyclopedias and, like, five TV stations. And so now I think there should be something,
to your point, more about, like, open book. How do you be resourceful? How do you assess the
veracity of, like, information that you're coming by online? And that's not only just helpful for
things like debate and understanding, like, which political candidate's speech is to believe, but
also just doing your job. Like, how do you figure out if, like, the information you got is, like,
accurate? How do you go on Stack Overflow and figure out which answer to trust? You know, how
do you figure out which vaccine to take? Like, just practical choices in our lives. I think there's
lots of clues as to what's credible and what's not. And it's kind of a shame that in the world,
with, like, so much information, we don't teach that. Absolutely. And one thing to really drill
down on there is one of the reasons that certain subjects aren't taught in schools is because
there's no black and white, this is right, this is wrong, right? So math is taught in schools for
many reasons, but also because it's easy to grade at scale. And so I think the education system,
for obvious reasons, avoids teaching certain things that they can't grade. But I think it
would be interesting for our education systems to have, yes, some classes that are heavily graded,
but then also classes that are just pass-fail. And I get this actually from, I spent a year in
Sweden doing my degree there on exchange, and they had totally different grading systems. In fact,
many of my classes were pass-fail. If they weren't pass-fail, it was fail three, four, or five,
right? So very basic grading. And then the craziest part to me was their exams and their projects,
you could retake as many times as you needed, which I think, you know, when I first encountered
that system, I was like, this makes no sense. Like, why would they design it this way? But really,
it was like, you know, you submit an essay and they say, pass, you know, this is good enough,
you know, this is good enough, this is sufficient. Or they say, actually, this is where you're missing
out on things, could you please improve this? And you're like working towards it. And I actually
think that was kind of, or at least I left the system being like, this is actually a pretty
beautiful system where you're not teaching people to get our particular percentage grade,
but to become sufficient at that thing. That makes a ton of sense. And like,
seeing that kind of stuff, like, it just makes me wonder like, okay, when is that going to spread
worldwide? When is that like better system going to be adopted? And I think like with the internet,
it's like, I wonder the same thing sometimes, like, I just saw, I forgot who it was, they were tweeting
that like, hey, they almost know, they almost never watch Hollywood movies anymore. In fact,
most of the content they watch is on YouTube. And that's not because anything magical changed
overnight. It's because like, YouTube just needed like a few decades in existence for people to like
start getting good enough to like start making really good content. But like, if you think about
it, if you put like a video sharing website in the hands of billions of people, like the best
content should come from there, because it's literally the whole world. And I think the same
about education, like there's some educational startups called like, out school, for example,
is a good one, where it's literally just a marketplace of classes. And I believe pretty
much anybody can go submit a class to out school. And I think they have 140,000 online classes for
kids ages three to 18. And then if you're like homeschooling your students, your kids, or even
if you're not, you can kind of like pay for classes for them and just get the best classes in the
world. So you can go down and see, okay, like, what have like, what is the market determined
to like the best classes that are actually taught by the best possible teacher online for the best
subjects that aren't sort of created by like the school board that's stodgy and old and slow,
and like you can just kind of scroll down, you know, some of the most popular classes are like
sign language for beginners. And number two, critical thinking and introduction to logical
arguments are growth mindset versus fixed mindset for teens. And so I'm just kind of waiting for the
internet to like take over. I mean, I guess your podcast is a good example, right? You don't learn
in schools like you're doing it. Well, two really important points there, the ability for anyone to
create content, it democratizes it in a way where you don't need just these large organizations
dictating what people are viewing. And that's amazing because a large university similar to
a large newspaper would never create a course on, you know, untranslatable words because there's not
a big enough market for that, or they don't think it's important enough within their 12 courses.
But when you have 7 billion people creating things, like that may actually be important
enough for one person to want to go create. And it can also be created very, very quickly. So
when you have the bloated system, you're creating new curricula, what, every couple of years. And by
the time you create it, it's already outdated. Right. And so that's another beautiful thing about
this almost marketplace for ideas is that you can add to that marketplace in real time instead of
waiting for something to bubble its way up through academia. Yeah. And that's the same phenomenon
that basically enables indie hackers to exist as a class of people. If you have a tiny town,
you can't really put that large variety of stores in the town because there's not enough people.
You can't open an anime store in a town with 100 people in it because it's like, ah, there's two
anime fans. You're not going to make enough sales. You get to a bigger town or a huge city like New
York City, you can have almost every store imaginable because there's millions of people
in the vicinity who can come shop and some tiny percentage of them can be your customers. But on
the internet, it's like, all right, there's eight billion people who can be your customers. And now
that means that there's a ridiculous number of tiny little crazy niche classes and stores and
products and services and apps that people can build that just need to get like 0.00001% of people
to use them. And then you're making, you know, $10,000 a month and you're an indie hacker and
you're self-sufficient and that's good enough. So yeah, exactly. It applies to all of the internet,
including content creation, right? Like, as I mentioned with the newsletter,
the New York Times just won't run certain stories because it doesn't make sense for them, right?
At least when they were a physical newspaper. But now today you could write an article about
some super niche thing and you've got a market out there most likely. Yeah. Okay. So now you're
inspired. You're like, okay, I can create a podcast. People can have personal affinity with me,
like no other medium that exists. And also like there's this infinite, you know, number of niches
that I could fill. And essentially it's just like a very optimistic rosy picture, but also there's
still the challenges of making a podcast, which is that most people quit and most people quit, like
pretty fast in the podcast, which is like not to say that it's the wrong decision to quit. It's
like maybe they discover it's not for them, but it's hard to keep going. I thought you did something
really clever with your podcast, which is like the 30 day, 30 day challenge you and your co-host did.
So describe that to me. What was a 30 day challenge for your podcast? Yeah. So it was really simple.
It was exactly what it sounds like 30 days where we came to a decision, which is we want to start
a podcast, but I've come to many decisions like this in the past. And like you said, five days
later, I'm not at that same level of conviction. And so in this case, we said, why don't we test
our conviction? Why don't we test our ability to do this as well? So we set a 30 day challenge where
every day we would record, edit and produce an episode. And we did that for 30 days. If you go
back and look in the archives, those episodes weren't amazing. I think we've definitely upped
our game since then, but it was really a test for ourselves and less so for the audience to see,
could we do this? And at the end of that challenge, did we even want to continue doing that? And by
the end of that challenge, we had hit 200 listens per episode. So not huge, but you know, we had a
listener base. And I think what was really nice about that is that at the end of that challenge,
we had people being like, I really hope you continue. So it was also a little bit of
validation that what we were doing, even though it wasn't super polished, was, you know, serving
people or solving some problem for them. Yeah. So you ended up publishing all of these episodes,
even though they were rough, huh? Yeah. So easy to just like do practice episodes and then not
put them out. But then you're not really testing your actual skills and your actual commitment to
the actual full process, huh? Exactly. Like we wanted to truly like go through what it would be
like in real life to launch a podcast and do it every day. And it's really hard to also just
have enough to say every day for 30 days. And so that's another thing that I would encourage
people to do if they're thinking of launching a podcast or a newsletter or some form of content,
like for the next 30 days, go write down all the things that you'd want to tell the world,
like all the articles that you would write or all the podcast topics that you'd
you'd launch and see how much you can come up with. Because I think a lot of people at a high
level think they have a lot to say, but when it really comes down to brass tacks, it's like,
Nope. I think one of the hardest things for starting anything new is just acknowledging
that like you will be bad in the beginning. Maybe not bad compared to the average person,
but definitely worse that you like imagine yourself to be, you know, and definitely worse
than maybe your heroes or the people that you admire. And I have a friend who, or a friend of
a friend who like want, who's wanted to learn to play the guitar forever. And like he imagined
himself starting a band, but every time he picks up the guitar, he's like, I suck. And the process
of like practicing and realizing he sucks, just like kind of cast him into despair. He just gives
up on it almost every time. And I have another friend who's like been talking about starting a
podcast and she's having so much trouble getting over this like initial hurdle of like, I'm not
that good. I'm not that interesting. I'm like awkward. I stutter like I'm not like, and so she
just doesn't want to, it's very discouraging. Like she stops. And so somehow you were able to like
push, I don't know how you did it. You just push past that and for 30 days. So like, I'm not that
great, but like we're going to keep recording and then publish it live. Like, how do you get over
that hump when you were not that good at something in the beginning and just keep doing it and not
get discouraged? You know, we talked about schools before. And one of the things that I think schools
miss is teaching people a love for learning. And I, I definitely left school without that and then
have gained that in the last couple of years, honestly through indie hacking. And so an example
of learning something from scratch that was really hard for me at first was coding. And I went
through that same arc, right? Where at first I was like racking my brain and I was like, I'm never
going to be able to do this. Like, how does everyone else do this? And then with enough time,
I was building my own apps and I was like, well, oh my gosh, I don't know how I got here, but I,
here I am. And I think I've done that enough in the last couple of years that when you know the arc
the same way that if you've climbed Everest once, I'm sure the second time is a lot easier.
I'm, I no longer get as jaded or scared when I'm in that like trough as, as people say. And so
going into podcasting, exposure therapy. Yeah. I was like, I've been here before. I know this
feeling. And so it, that's why it was like, I think a little easier for me with podcasting
relative to something like coding where that was maybe one of my first
attempts at learning something truly on truly from scratch on my own.
Peter levels has this good analogy of just like entering a pool, right? And like, if you've never
swam before, like you probably don't want to jump into the deep end of the pool, right? It makes much
more sense to get in the shallow end where you're very unlikely to drown and then just sort of weighed
in, get a few practice strokes in and then go deeper and deeper. And it sounds like that's kind
of what you've done with learning, right? This exposure therapy method of like, okay. But like
learning to code is something that like you do in private, like the vast majority of all people on
earth do not see you when you're trying to learn how to code. So that's like maybe the shallow end
of the pool. And then something like putting out a podcast is maybe the deep end of the pool where
every single episode you put out, like people can listen to you. And in fact, you're trying to like
advertise that and market it to people. And so it's like, if you're not doing a good job, like
that's very public. There's a lot of, you know, embarrassment, shame probably just hits to your
pride that can be discouraging. And so like, it makes sense that like in your progression,
you kind of went in that order, where maybe some of the things you did were, I don't know,
just like you had a little bit of a safer environment for yourself to try and fail and develop
like a love of learning. Yeah, I think you could say I had some wins under my belt, which I know
not everyone has, but it is important to view it that way, right? Like how do you get a couple
quick wins so that you see that certain things are possible and you're not as scared to like
make yourself a little more vulnerable. And you mentioned, Peter, I think a great example
of this at play is Peter has made, I think I remember him posting about this recently,
70 projects in the last couple of years or maybe 10 years since he's been a creator and only four
have made any money. Another example of this is Josh Pigford, who he has this great page,
joshpigford.com slash I think it's projects or something like that. And he also has created
dozens, I think it was like over 50 projects throughout the last couple of years of which
many of them failed or sold for very, very small sums of money. The only one that was like a blow
out success was bear metrics, which he sold for a couple million dollars. But I'm mentioning these
because you only encounter other people's successes. So, you know, when we look at Peter,
like, oh, Nomad list remote, okay, great, he's making millions, but we didn't see the 60 plus
other projects that he failed at. And so I think it's all about jumping in that pool, as he says,
and realizing that you will have failures. I know this is like super trophy, but like,
you're going to have failure. So just jump in the goddamn pool and go for it because
you're not going to get to the other side, right? If, if you're never going to get in the pool in
the first place. Totally agree. And I think honestly, the best advice is very trophy,
like the things that people say over and over and over again, that we've all heard a million
times, like that's the best advice. And we end up, you know, chasing all like these like
very novel, creative pieces of advice that we're not even following, like the basic stuff, right?
Yeah. And like this tweet from Peter levels, like I talked to him about this on the show
last month, I'll read it out loud here. He said, only four out of 70 plus projects I ever did
made money and grew, which means that greater than 95% of everything I ever did failed,
my hit rate is only about 5%. So ship more. And then he posted a little screenshot of a text file
where he's got here's the projects that made money and grew, and it's four lines. And then just to
like actually see what it looks like to see like 70 other projects, it's insane, right? And like
saying that's so inspirational, because it's like you then you're like, can calm down, you're like,
okay, I'm not a failure. But it's the Instagram effect, right? You go on Instagram, all you see
is like hot models with their bang and bods, having fun and like, you know, with a bunch of
other attractive people by the pool. And you're like, dang, I suck. Well, it's not that fun.
You go on Twitter, it's kind of the same thing. All you see is like super smart people posting
about their revenue numbers and how successful they are. And you don't necessarily see the losses.
And what's funny about that is you kind of actually do sometimes like if you follow Peter
levels, every one of these projects that failed, he was out there like he built that sort of exposure
therapy that muscle, right, where he's like willing to learn and publicly fail. So he actually tweets
about all these projects that fail. He's super jazz about everyone. He has a huge audience of
like 10s of 1000s, hundreds of 1000s of followers. And when it something flops, he just stops talking
about it. And you kind of forget about it. And then everybody remembers the things that succeeded
and nobody remembers all the things that flopped. Exactly. I think I don't know if there's a reason
that our brains work this way. But yeah, you only remember the things that you have an emotional
attachment to. And I don't have an emotional attachment to Peter failing or some other
creator failing. I have an emotional attachment to someone else succeeding partially, maybe because
I'm excited for them. But also, you know, if we're all going to be honest with ourselves, because I'm
a little bit jealous when I see someone making millions a year, I'm like, damn, I want that. And
so that cements in my brain. And so that's, I think why you probably remember a lot of other
people's successes, and not their failures, which is important, because if you're worried about
failing, you don't really have to worry about people sticking with you and like remembering,
oh, remember that time that Steph launched that really shitty podcast, right? And so I think I
think that's important as well, where it's like, it's less about avoiding the failures, it's more
about finding the successes, which inevitably require a lot of failures. Totally, totally.
And I think when it comes to like all these posts, and especially like in the Andy hacker community,
like a lot of what people are emotionally attached to that helps to remember things,
it's just inspiration, like things that actually cause you to change your own behavior and your
life. And there's a psychologist, his name is BJ fog. He's a great model for like behavior,
like what gets someone to actually take action? And he says it's motivation times ability times
trigger. So motivation is like seeing something that somebody else has, and you're like, I want
that, right? Seeing like Peter levels, like succeed with the project, and then be like,
I'm making a million dollars a year from one of four projects, like, okay, that sounds awesome.
There's a motivation. I also want to make a million dollars a year, then ability, like,
can I do this? Is there something fundamentally different about this person? And I think like,
people who are inspirational tend to be very human. And so like, maybe the fact that he's posting all
of his failures makes it seem more human, like, oh, this guy failed like 95% of the time, I can
fail 95% of the time to, and then trigger, which is like the call to action, like the sort of starting
point. And once you get all three of those things, like you get started on something. And so
it's funny, a lot of people often ask like, why don't you start any hackers, but for failure stories,
and like, this is the reason why I don't, because it's not that inspirational to like,
to see a bunch of people who failed, it's more inspirational to see people who succeeded and
then to hear about all of the failures that they went through to get there. I mean, we,
I wasn't a part of this, but the hustle, I think did something around failures a long time ago.
And it didn't work out for that very reason. Because I think people often will suggest,
oh, there should be this company that talks about all the failures in the industry, because they
think if these stories are out there, it will stop other people from making these same mistakes. And
that's just not true. Like the road to success is paved with failures. So reading about them,
maybe we'll stop a couple of them, but ultimately it's like, you got to keep failing in order to
hit that success. And so your point is, I think spot on, you want to share those successes. So
you have that emotional connection of where you want to go and who you're inspired by and focus
on that, because that's also going to be much more sustainable, right? That emotion will drag you for
years. The failure emotion will, it's so transient, right? It's going to disappear so quickly.
One of my heroes, Charlie Munger is like super big on what he calls elementary worldly wisdom,
a lot of which he just lifted from Ben Franklin. But he's so big on this idea of like,
one of the biggest mistakes that we all make is not learning from other people's mistakes,
which is exactly what you're saying. Like very rarely do we say, we're not going to make any
mistakes because we've just read about everyone else's, but we just don't read those stories.
And then we just go out and make those mistakes ourselves. But he has a huge principle where he's
like, what's his quote? He says, I like people who admit that they're a complete stupid horse's
asses. I know that I'll perform better if I rub my nose in my own mistakes. This is a wonderful
trick to learn. So we kind of have this like built in reflex of like, I made a mistake. Let's
just pretend that didn't happen. Let's not tell anybody about it. Let's just move on. But like,
that's not the best way to learn from your mistakes. It's not the best way to learn from
other people's mistakes. So I kind of agree with him. But the reality is that people don't
people don't do that. And so the failure websites, they don't they don't work.
Yeah, I think Charlie Munger is probably a little wiser than the average person.
Yeah, I just saw he was on he was on the news the other day, dude is 98 years old.
Oh, Charlie Munger is he is Warren Buffett's business partner. He's kind of like the guy
behind the scenes. So he's a billionaire has been for decades. And he's 98 years old doing what he
loves. He was giving the interview. I think it was hating on cryptocurrency. It's about to turn
99. Hopefully I can be he's doing something right. Well, I mean, we had an episode on tech that
people have feared or like what's coming another one on what's coming in 300 years. And I guarantee
that when I'm 99, or the equivalent, I'm going to be hating on some technology that all the young
people are making fun of me for. And so I don't judge Charlie, he's obviously done some pretty
incredible things. So and we're all going to be in that same bucket. So let's talk about the
practicalities of growing a podcast, because it's not easy to like grow it like, okay, you get over
the hurdle of, you know, you don't care if you suck, you don't care if you're new, you're new,
you do 30 episodes in 30 days, which I think is super smart, you can do that challenge for
anything. And then you're like, Okay, great, we got 200 subscribers per episode. How do you
actually get on people's radar? Because like, as you mentioned, at the top of the top of the talk,
there's not that many tools in the podcasting world, like there aren't really podcast search
engines that people use very much, like there's no video, there's not very many analytics. It's
very difficult to recommend, it's hard to even advertise podcast episodes on Twitter sometimes.
So how do you how do you get to the point where I think you're like upwards of like 15,000 downloads
a month now, and 1000s of downloads per episode, so you've come a long way from like zero downloads
episodes. How did you get that? How did you get there? The infrastructure is so bad, from
from discoverability to engagement, but also analytics, like that is that is the most important
thing that any growth marketer will utilize in their toolbox, right? Whether it's video or
written content, but with podcasting, the analytics are so bad, you truly, for the most
part, can't really tell where people are coming from. And therefore, all of the experiments that
you can run aren't really that helpful, because you don't know which ones were successful. So
I'll just say that I think we're around 10 years behind written content, in terms of the tooling.
And so it's coming, and it's being built. And you know, there was even yesterday that
Spotify acquisition of chartable and pod sites. And so things are happening. But I think we are
10 years behind. So with that said, some of the things that have actually worked for us,
this won't be this won't be revolutionary for anyone. But the first is to use whatever
channels you do have traffic from, right? So in my case, it was Twitter, that's where I built up an
audience, instead of trying to drive your audience on your podcast, I would actually encourage people
to continue growing the other audiences they have, where they do have the right analytics,
or they do have the right discoverability. So again, for me, that was Twitter, and then
developing a growth strategy that's native to that platform. But and what I mean by that is,
what I see a lot of people do on Twitter is they'll launch an episode, and then they'll,
you know, write a little post being like, Hey, everyone, new episodes up. And no one cares that
you have a new episode, like, that's the reality, right? What they care is what you're offering
them, right? Like, what are you going to teach me? Or like, what, you know, what am I going to learn?
Or what's this controversial thing that happened on it? And so what I found worked really well
through testing on Twitter, because I knew I wanted to use this traffic, but I didn't know how,
but what I found really well was tweeting about the topic that I was going to write about first.
And this is also like a vetting mechanism, right? Like, do people engage with this? Is it something
that people are interested in? And then letting that tweet blow up. So for example, the first
tweet I did this with was, was commentary on the 40 hour workweek. And that tweet ended up getting
10,000 likes. And then I basically appended to that another tweet that said we just recorded an
episode. And that tweet, again, this is the first time I tried it, brought in like 1000 downloads
to that episode alone. And so I've played around with that a lot. I've also played around with
clips, right? Because they can grab attention in a way that a one hour episode can't because that,
that's just like asking too much from a person. And so those are some of the things that
have worked really well for us, I can go through some other growth tactics if you want. But I
would say that the very simple advice is grow other channels, invest in those, and then find a
way to convert those channels to your podcast in a channel native way. Agreed. Same thing I did with
Indie Hackers. Indie Hackers is already like a very popular blog and newsletter well before
there was a podcast. And the podcast would have zero listeners if I wasn't like pushing it out
to a newsletter that already had a lot of subscribers. And it's way easier to grow a
newsletter from scratch or a Twitter account from scratch or a blog from scratch than it's
a podcast from scratch because of exactly what you're saying. There's just no analytics,
it's not that many channels, it's just difficult. It's hard to, if somebody shares a link to a
funny Instagram post or a TikTok post or a blog post to me, I can just click it and read it.
Somebody shares a link to a podcast to me, I'm not going to listen. First of all,
I'm going to be upset at you because I don't want my friends recommending an hour burden
unless it's really, really good. And second, it's going to take me days or weeks to get to it,
and they're going to be pestering me to look like, it's just not that easy to share that way.
And so I really love the advice to start somewhere else. And again, you're not a novice
on Twitter. I'm on your Twitter account right now, Steph Smith, 10,600 tweets.
Oh God.
Been on Twitter for a long time. I think you build up some skills after doing that and you figure
out, okay, this is my channel, I can use what's good here. And then I love how you later on come
in and then add the link to your podcast after you already have a popular tweet. That's super smart.
We talked about the framework that I mentioned before of podcast being your best friends.
And you also use the term burden, right? A podcast episode is an hour long. And I think
if you really consider what you're asking someone to do, which is either to spend an hour with you
or listen to you every single week for a long period of time, the friction to get someone to
do that is so immense that that's exactly why it's hard to grow a podcast. And if you truly
understand that and internalize that you should realize that podcast growth should be slow,
right? Like not everyone's going to want to be your best friend initially. And so if you
work your way back, I'm a marketer. So I think in funnels, right? Build up the top of your funnel,
which should not be podcasts. Some people view podcasts as a top of the funnel channel. It's not
it's bottom of the funnel when people are bought into you and listening to you very, very frequently.
And so you can repurpose that as like, why would you expect someone to want to be your best friend
immediately? You wouldn't, right? And so you'd want to like meet them at a conference and then
go for coffee and then hang out within a group setting. And then eventually they're like, okay,
yeah, let's hang out like every day, just me and you. And the same thing is true with content.
Like don't expect people to take that leap. So help them, whether it's through clips,
whether it's through growing your other channels before you're asking them to listen to an hour of
your voice. Yeah. I think what helps you feel better in that process is just like understanding
how much more valuable a podcast listener is than somebody on another medium. Like I would
rather have 10 podcast listeners than a hundred Twitter followers any day, any day, easy, right?
So the numbers absolutely might not be as big, but you can kind of sort of pat yourself on the back
much harder for smaller podcast numbers. Because these are people who have much,
they're just much more devoted to you. They're much more bought in. I wonder like how,
how far do you want to get with your podcast? Cause I looked up some numbers, just try to see like,
okay, what, like what is a good podcast? The average podcast has like 27 listens per episode.
Yeah. Because there's no means to podcasts. The top 1%, you know, the top 1% of podcasts,
if you have just under 3,200 listens per episode, which is a lot, but it's like not that much. It's
not undoable. I think you're like basically there. And then you have like the, you know,
the very most popular podcast, like Joe Rogan's, which is like 7 million downloads for some
episodes. So it's like, there's a huge, huge range there. Uh, where do you want to get with your
podcast? Like what numbers do you consider to be successful? So we have a goal this year of getting
to 50,000 downloads per month. So that's not per episode, but if you're talking like way into the
future, I don't expect to ever be Joe Rogan, certainly not, but I would love to, if I could
one day get my podcast to 50,000 downloads per episode, what I think is so incredible about this
and it's totally an arbitrary number is if you think about the physical equivalents of these
things, like right now we are at around like 3000 per episode. And that's like a really big keynote
at a huge conference, right? 50,000 is Yankee stadium. Like that's, that's so cool that if I
could actually have a podcast at that scale, which obviously I do not currently that I'd be reaching
that many people who are invested in hearing from me, listening to my ideas, and also just like we're
learning together. And so that's, that's kind of like the pie in the sky goal in the future. Um,
but I'd be fine with, you know, even 10,000 downloads per episode, because I, again,
if you compare it to physical equivalence, it's just mind blowing how many people you're reaching
on the internet. Yeah, exactly. I just looked at any hacker stats and like our biggest months are
like around 140,000 downloads. And I never really think of it in terms of like the physical stadium
size, but I say, yeah, right now you're talking to 140,000. Well, maybe not that many people, but
talking to like tens of thousands of people, 15,000, I think per episode. And so like that
reaches immense. That means if you go somewhere on earth, it's not that unlikely that somebody
will have heard your voice and heard you had to say, and not only like heard it, but like heard
it for an hour in person. I guess it's very, it's very cool. What about you though, Kirtland? Like
you have this podcast, you said it's around 15,000 per episode. Is it something that you actively
want to grow? Do you have growth metrics or milestones? I don't think about growing the
podcast at all nowadays. It would be nice for it to grow. Okay. So let me, let me, let me walk that
back. Mostly I do the podcast because it's very good for the branding for indie hackers. And
because I find it fun to do, and there are times where I stopped finding it fun to do. And then I
quickly course correct. I'm like, Oh, this is not fun. Right. It's what it's fun. When I talk to
people like you, like we're friends, like we play chess, you know, sometimes it's fun to have a
casual, we should get back to it. It's fun to have casual conversations with people that I know are
like comfortable on the mic and we can discuss different things. Like we're real people. And
then I don't even pay attention to the fact that like anybody's going to be listening to it. Like
I just don't care. And I think that's cool. And I also think that like, that ends up being what
leads to sort of organic growth for me, because I think the episodes are a little bit less repetitive,
a little bit more free flowing and a little bit more connected to topics that people care about.
Whereas I think when I get into like super focused mode, like I'm only interviewing
founders about their story from start to finish, like those episodes are really good. And people
love them. But like you get tired after hearing like 10 or 15 of them, like you don't necessarily
need to hear 200 founder stories before you look I get it because there's a lot of similarities,
etc. And so for me, I focus more on growing the website, and much less on growing the podcast,
like I don't even I don't even do the bare minimum of tweeting out most podcast episodes.
I think that makes sense. Because like I said, growing a pod directly is just,
it's not going to happen. You want to grow those other channels. But I think one one really
interesting concept I've come around to is the fact that if we take the same idea that your
podcasts are the equivalent of your best friends, I've realized that the entertainment value in
podcasts is much more important. And that's why I have the same. I find the same thing when I listen
to podcasts that are purely intellectual. At first, I'm like super stoked to listen to them. I'm like,
oh my gosh, this is gold. And then by the third episode, I'm like, I just I can't do this anymore.
And it's like imagine if you had a friend who was like the smartest person in the world, but
just like had no sense of humor had no, like other features to them. Would you want to spend
all your time with them? No, it gets tiring. And so I reflected on this. And I think I think the
reason that I listened to specific parts today is yes, they offer some educational value, but I
just like the people. I just like listening to them. I find it fun. Yeah, I think that's exactly
it. So like the times where I have like sat down and analyze like word of mouth podcast, gross,
like a lot of it comes down to retention. Ultimately, like your show is not going to
grow every time somebody listens to it. They churn like, oh, that was cool, but I'm not coming back.
Right. So you need to retain your listeners. And what retains most people is exactly what you're
saying. The entertainment value, knowing that they like the person, they enjoy the content. And if
you look at like the podcast stats, like the types of podcasts that are the most popular, 22% of
podcasts are comedy. 21% are news. 18% are true crime. So people really like hearing stories
about other people being murdered. And then 17% of sports. And the rest is just like a long tail.
And so out of those four categories, like three out of those four are just pure entertainment.
Just like, make me laugh, right? Make me squirm, you know, make me excited. And then 21% is news,
which is like very useful, but it changes every single day. The news is not that by definition,
the news is new, right? And so like those two things are like very good for retaining listeners.
And I think people also want to hear the news delivered by people they like. And so ultimately,
if you want to grow, you got to do both of those things. Yeah, exactly. I think even podcasts that
I listened to that would be framed as entrepreneur podcasts, I actually don't listen to them because
I'm looking for these lessons. I'm just like, I like hearing these people's voices. I like hearing
their jokes. I like hearing them make fun of each other. And so yeah, I think that's something
that's lost a lot of the time because when people go to start a podcast, they're like,
it's time for me to start a podcast, as you said earlier in the episode. And they go to like the
most default thing, which is like, I'm going to interview some founders or I'm going to interview
people in my space and it's going to be these 45 minute episodes. And we're going to jump onto a
zoom and we have no rapport, but I have really good questions. And it's like, that doesn't work.
Like people don't want to listen to that for hours of their week. And so yeah, I think pods are a
different beast when it comes to entertainment as it compares to something like a newsletter.
Totally. Well, I hope people who listen to this tune into your podcast. It's called the
shit you don't learn in school. I want to end by just asking you to give a piece of advice
to everybody. And I'm going to sort of break my tradition. I'm going to also give a piece of
podcast advice to people. So my piece of advice is I think everybody should attempt to do a podcast
and not necessarily a whole show, but just record something. So get a mic that sounds good. Borrow
a mic from a friend, sit down with a family member or another friend and just impromptu record
yourselves having a conversation and just save it. Because I think the experience of like hearing
your voice and like radio quality audio and having like this conversation between you and
someone you already have rapport with is just priceless. I've done it with people who are
close to me in my life and it's been super meaningful. And for those things, you don't
care about the metrics. You don't care about the numbers. You just care about having a good
conversation. And that ultimately is what leads to good podcasts anyway. So I would recommend
anyone who wants to start a podcast, just do something like that and see how you like it.
Steph, what's your advice for people who are considering podcasting?
I think your piece of advice is really important and ties into mine, which is
that I think a lot of people when they think of a podcast, they're thinking of these business
metrics or they're thinking of getting to a certain size. And sure, that's important. But
as we talked about, the infrastructure makes that really hard. And so if you're starting a podcast,
you should be in it for the long term. But I also think there is so much room for people
to be way more creative with their podcasts. So as I just mentioned, most podcasts, at least the
ones that I have seen are interview style. And they're talking to a person who is apparently
an expert in a space. But if you think of the different types of YouTube videos out there,
there's people who vlog. There's people who do product reviews. There's people who literally
just hang out with their friends and film it. And I think there should be more of that in
podcasting. And there's not. I think a lot of people look to the charts for guidance as to what
they should do with a podcast. And I think one really important thing to keep in mind is the
charts are the way they are because podcasts have not great infrastructure. So if you actually go
just Google top podcast 2021, you'll get a list. And if you go down that list, I can almost guarantee
that pretty much every podcast on there either had a huge audience of their own. So someone like
Michelle Obama, or they're part of a large network, right? So they they're part of NPR or
iHeart or something like that. And so those podcasts aren't the top podcasts necessarily
because they're the best podcast, but because they had the reach. And the reason I mentioned
this is because if you then accept that you can maybe have a little more freedom of like,
I don't need to replicate what is at the top, because it's not necessarily the best. It's just
what had access to distribution. So I would encourage people to just break the norms of
podcasts and rethink like what can be done on a podcast, because I think it's it's a lot of the
same thing. And it doesn't have to be that way. That is stop copying indie hackers. Start your own
podcast folks. Steph Smith, thanks so much for coming on the show. Can you tell people where
they can go to find you where you are on Twitter, your blog, your podcast, etc. Yeah, I should say
Cortland, like this was actually I know this is like, so corny, but this was kind of a dream
because I started out as an indie hacker before all these projects. Some people think of me as a
writer or other things today. But like, I started my audience as an indie hacker on indie hackers
listening to the indie hackers podcast. So it's it's kind of cool and full circle. But yeah,
my projects are all at Steph Smith.io. That's my website. So you can find anything there the
podcast that we've talked about would love if people listened. It's called the shit you don't
learn in school and you can find it at listen and learn dot co. And I'm most active on Twitter. So
if anyone has any questions, they want to hear more nitty gritty podcast growth tactics. You
can reach out to me. Steph Smith.io is my handle. And the final thing I'll say is just because we
were talking about it so much is my book doing content right has a bonus podcast chapter that's
coming out in the next month or so. So if you want to check that out, we can probably throw like a
discount code in the show notes or something like that. I love that. It's a cool thing about
Internet books is you can just keep adding to them. Yeah, exactly. Very cool. Well, thanks,
Steph. I'm glad you completed, I guess, like the the full sort of indie hacker circle of
beginning and then eventually coming out of the podcast. I'll have you on more often. Thanks
again for coming out. Yeah, definitely. Whenever you want me on game.