What's up, everyone? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. There's been an explosion in the number of people who are
using the internet to build cool stuff and making a lot of money in the process. And
on this show, we explore the latest trends, ideas, and strategies these IndieHackers are
using to get ahead, so the rest of us can do the same.
If you've been enjoying the show, do me a favor and leave a quick rating for us and
Apple Podcasts. Not only does it help other people find the show, but it also leaves me
feeling pretty great.
Today, I sat down with James Traff. James is a designer and a serial IndieHacker, and
he recently created a set of icons in just a couple of hours that made him over $100,000
in six days. That was about a month ago. Today, his revenue from those icons is well north
of $100,000, and so I asked James how he did it and how this all came to pass.
And I think what really stands out from this conversation is our discussion around luck.
How much of a role does luck play as an IndieHacker? What kinds of tools and strategies are people
using nowadays to spot these opportunities and take advantage of them? And how can you
really press on the gas pedal and make a boatload of money when you have one of these lucky
situations like James did, rather than just having a quick flash in the pan?
James Traff, welcome to the IndieHackers podcast.
Thanks for having me, man.
Last month, you made over $100,000 in six days. And this was not from some course that
you had meticulously prepared. This was not from a mailing list that you grew over the
years and you sold them some ebook. This just kind of happened all at once, unexpectedly.
And we're going to get into the backstory of how this went down. But right now, I'm
just curious, what are you going to do with all that cash? That's a lot of money to just
show up in your bank account.
Yeah. People ask me that, but I don't really have a solid answer. I bought a new comforter.
I picked up the iPhone 12, bought some pillows. So little things here and there.
Dang. Well, I hope you splurged. You got some real nice pillows at least.
Comfortable for sure.
So what else? I mean, this is a lot of money. How is it going to help you in life? What
are you going to do with it?
Yeah. It's definitely the most I've made in that amount of time, no doubt. The biggest
thing that comes to mind is just using it to buy myself some more time. So I'm able
to now not take on as much client work, or if any at all, really, and focus on the thing
that I actually enjoy doing.
Yeah.
Because the real value of money for me is what I can afford to no longer do versus what
I can afford to buy or... Yeah.
That's a great way to put it. Let's say you had enough money to not have to do anything
you don't want to do. You don't have any bills to pay, everything's taken care of, you're
completely free. Do you still work on the same projects that you're working on? Do you
still take the time to come on this podcast? What do you change and how do you think about
spending your time and your freedom?
Right. Yeah, that's a good question. And I think I would be doing more or less the exact
same thing just because my cost of living right now is quite low. And so technically,
this whole influx of revenue from my icons and all of this superside work, it's giving
me a nice pillow in the sense where I can have the time to do whatever I want any day
of the week.
And I don't keep much of a schedule either. And so every day is different. I work on really
what interests me. And so money, if I'm breaking it down a little bit more fundamentally, obviously,
it's different for everyone. But for me, it really does three things. One, it allows me
to buy things that I think will have an impact on my life or really don't. It frees up my
time so I can focus on things that I want to do and not have to do. And lastly, it'll
relieve any stress that may have been caused by the lack of money beforehand.
Yeah. I think those last two are the big ones. And the first one is the thing that everybody
chases.
Exactly. And you've got to go through that.
Yeah. So one of my friends splurged and bought an Eames chair, E-A-M-E-S. And these are like
just super outrageously fancy expensive chairs. It's like a lounge chair and an ottoman and
it costs like $5,000 or something. He was super excited to get it. He just wanted to
I guess sit in his chair all day and read books and play video games. But these are
also kind of the kind of purchases that I think you just acclimate to it. Eventually,
this is just what a chair feels like to you. Whereas the freedom type of things like when
you're buying time and you're buying the ability to stop having to do things you don't want,
even if that means like a job you don't want to go to anymore. Now you have enough money
to quit. I think you just appreciate those types of purchases a lot more when you can
find them.
Exactly.
Let's get into the story behind these icons. You made $100,000 in six days. And that was
over a month ago now. So I presume you've made more than 100 grand total now.
Yeah, right now I'm sitting at $280,000.
Oh, Jesus. Wow.
That's absurd. That's from just over 10,000 orders sales.
That's crazy. That's way higher, honestly, than I thought you were going to say. And
you made all this in like, I mean, it's been like five or six weeks.
Yeah, about a month.
Okay, so about a month, about four weeks. And most of this is not even you doing work.
This is you collecting cash from the work you did early on to make the icons and promote
them. And you blogged about this in the early days. You wrote a blog post called Six Figures
in Six Days. And you talked about how this came to be. And it turns out this was really
more like seven years and a making. So what's the whole story here?
Yeah, so the story seven years ago began when it was the I think it was 2013. It was the
early or maybe late jailbreaking days of iOS. So for anyone who doesn't know jailbreaking
is just allowing your device to gain unauthorized access to inject certain applications into
your phone.
There was an app that everyone would inject called Cydia. And that would that was basically
an unofficial app store. And so people can upload their own versions of, you know, applications
and themes and add ons, which they can then sell and others can use those to customize
their device and their experience for their home screens.
So it's like a black market app store that allows apps that Apple normally wouldn't allow.
Exactly. That's the first time that I dabbled in sort of creating something, you know, at
the time I had no idea what I was doing. And so I basically just copied this guy's icon
set, I replaced all the images with my own icons and images and just reuploaded as my
own essentially. And I priced it at 99 cents. And I think I sold a total of like, you know,
maybe 15, 16, $17, something like that. But the interesting part about that is like that
was the first time I've experienced without knowing it at the time, digital content leverage,
you know, so creating something once with sufficient effort and then selling it repeatedly
with practically zero effort.
Yeah. And this is exactly what makes digital products the best because the marginal costs
of reproductions, I call it is zero, you are super scalable. It's not like a real world
business where you have to make a sandwich every time you want to sell a sandwich. You
just make the icons once you can sell to infinitely many people. And even if you're not making
a ton of money, you made like, I think $17 you said, it's got to open your eyes to what's
possible.
Exactly. That was over probably over the course of like a year, honestly, because nothing
happened, you know, the day after the week after I posted these things because I had
no audience, you know, I had nothing really. And the people, the only sort of demand generation
I was doing was just on social media, which is almost non-existent at the time for me
personally. And so, you know, fast forward seven years later, minus 30 days now. And
I started seeing people post their home screens on Twitter. And these were customized home
screens. And I was wondering, I was like, I was curious about it, you know, I was trying
to look into it was like, why all of a sudden now, is this going like starting to go viral?
And so I discovered it and with iOS 14, I actually think it was possible in the earlier
iOS versions as well. But it just sort of caught on during iOS 14, where Apple now allows
you to upload custom icons for app shortcuts. And so essentially, it would allow you to
theme your device in any way that you want it to. And because of how I've had all this
sort of experience in the past, I sort of decided to just try it out. I uploaded the
set of icons that I had laying around. And I decided to share a screenshot of it on Twitter.
And it very quickly started to explode. And I then noticed lots and lots of people asking
about the icons themselves. And when I posted this, I didn't realize that at the time, like,
I didn't even think to monetize this in any sort of way, I sort of just shared, you know,
screenshot, start to go viral, notice demand for the icons. And that's when I decided I
may as well publish them, release them and sell them and maybe make a buck or two. And
so that's when I decided to package the icons, publish them using Gumroad, and then basically
created a website using Notion and Super, and package them all nicely and then shared
them on Twitter in that same thread. And at that point, I just went to sleep basically,
it was late at night and went to bed. And the morning after I woke up to six grand in
sales.
Wow. What'd that feel like?
Felt surprising. I had no expectations at all. And so to see that when I woke up, you
know, all this took me about compiling all the icons, setting up the site in Notion and
using Super, like all this took me maybe two hours to do. And so seeing that result from
that little work was interesting to say the least.
Yeah, $3,000 an hour is not a bad rate to charge for some icon design. Did you think
at that time that there was a way to capitalize on this and like make even more money or were
you just kind of happy watching the numbers go up?
Yeah, immediately after the day after I was, the tweet had gone completely viral to this
point. And definitely I was thinking, what else can I do to sort of keep this going?
So I started to create a little bit more content, I started to add different pages to the site,
you know, a showcase page to give people some inspiration on how to set up their home screens,
how to and tutorial instruction page to basically showcase how to actually install the icons
using the Siri shortcuts app. And so doubling down a little bit in terms of putting some
more content together and also putting the icons in nicer mockups and decided sharing
those as well.
Why do you think that your tweet blew up compared to probably other people who are tweeting
similar things? Or was nobody else tweeting custom icon sets?
Yeah, there were definitely a few people. I can't say that I was first, obviously I discovered
that other people were sharing them. And then so that's what inspired me to share my own.
So I can't take credit for that. But I think probably two things. One, I had not a crazy
amount of followers. I think at that point, I had around 4k. So I had some sort of network
to begin with. But more than that, I think it was just the aesthetic. I think people
were like saw the aesthetic and saw the vibe that I created using, you know, a combination
of wallpapers, icons, widgets, things like that. And just people resonating. They saw
that and they're like, I want that from my home screen. You know, I want that now. And
so I think that's what got people sharing and eventually got people to buy. And always
going good and sales were increasing. And I don't know where I had a friend message
me and just told me that MKBHD had featured my icon set in one of his latest videos. That
was really surprising. I've been watching his videos for quite some time. And so to
see my icon set on his device in his video was something else.
Yeah, that's huge. And for people who don't know MKBHD, he's a YouTuber, that's a screen
name. His real name is Marques Brownlee. He's got something like 13 million followers. He's
adding a couple hundred thousand followers a month. And it's got a pretty cool story
behind it. But just to give people an example of how popular he is, the video he featured
you in got something like 6 million views. He's teaching people how to make their iPhones
look cool. And your icons are almost like a whole section of his video. Check out these
cool icons, look at my phone. You could not have paid for a better ad than what he gave
you.
Exactly. Exactly. And yeah, the day after that video is still the highest sales day
to date. I think the day after was 30 grand in sales.
Nuts.
Yeah.
So he features you. Now you're on a whole different trajectory where before you're making thousands
of dollars, now you're probably making tens of thousands of dollars. Were you surprised
by that? And did you capitalize on the fact that now you've got an even bigger following
and people who want your icons?
Yeah, I definitely capitalize on it. I knew that at that point, he also tweeted about
it. He saw this came a little bit later, but I had also written an article a few days later
when I passed the hundred grand sales mark in six days. And so I had written an article
about the whole story, about the process, about the background seven years ago and looking
forward today and the tools I use to create everything and all that. And that article
also went viral because I guess people love stories and people especially love stories
when it has to do with money or making money. And so that was shared a whole bunch. Also
posted in the indie hackers community and that was responded to well, although the title
was very clickbaity, but people tend to enjoy the actual content. And that created basically
the second wave, which to this day, those two points were the biggest, MKBHD's video.
And then my article, you see on gum road analytics, you see the two spikes like direct correlation.
And here we are four or five weeks later, $280,000 in revenue from two hours of work.
And I guess a bit more work putting in the effort into your website and your blog posts.
But there's a lot to dive into here. And I think the first big topic I want to talk about
is luck. Because if you're trying to be an indie hacker, it's obvious just from listening
to this podcast, listening to your story and others, luck plays some role in everybody's
story. I don't think I've ever had anyone on the podcast who wouldn't say like, in some
way they got lucky. And I think if you're trying to decide whether or not to be an indie
hacker, you probably want to know like, how much of this is luck? How much of this is
playing the lottery? So I'm curious what your thoughts are in this, James, how much of your
story is luck? And how much of this is you being able to spot and effectively capitalize
on a great opportunity?
Yeah, I think one wouldn't exist without the other. And so I think it was very lucky that
this happened at all in that I saw those few tweets. And so those were, you know, people
that was following. And if I didn't see those tweets, and I didn't see people sharing their
home screens, I may have never even shared my own. And obviously, that was the step one
in the process. But the other side of that is that because I had this whole experience
of continually building things and creating icons in the past and sharing my work and
publishing it, I wouldn't have been able to capitalize on something as quickly as I did.
And so I think one can't really exist without the other. That makes sense.
Yeah, I agree. And I think I've got my own like framework, I'm trying to work out here
because I think about luck a lot, right? And I think the best part about luck is that you
have some degree of control. You know, it's kind of a cliche at this point, but luck is
where preparation meets opportunity. I think it's like a third component of that too, it's,
you have to actually take action. And obviously, if you don't do anything, it doesn't matter
if you spotted a lucky opportunity, like nothing's gonna happen. But also matters how you take
action. If you react really poorly versus reacting really well, that's the difference
between having a cool tweet and a good story and having $300k in the bank, because you knew
exactly what action to take to actually make money from there. So there's a whole spectrum
of outcomes. And I want to go through each one of these three things, preparation, opportunity
and action to talk about the different ways that you can capitalize on luck or make your
own luck. So maybe we'll go backwards, we'll talk about action. What do you think was the
most important action that you took in response to the sort of lucky event of MKBHD tweeting
you and all these icons being released on iOS 14?
Right. Well, yeah, like I mentioned, I think without having that initial tweet that started
to go viral, I wouldn't have even released that icon set. And so really simply, it was
just taking a screenshot of my phone, uploading it to Twitter and sharing it. And I think
there's a whole lot that we can dig into that goes into that, I think, just because, you
know, partly of reasons that it worked, we mentioned, you know, aesthetic is one of them.
That's something that I've been, you know, I've been designing digital products for quite
some time now. And so I've been putting aesthetic home screens together for quite some time
now. I even have, you know, a DeviantArt profile to prove it that I created, you know, seven,
eight years ago, that I've been putting together home screens and desktop screens and all those
things together for quite some time. And so it's hard to say what one thing or what one
piece of action, you know, contributed to the sort of this, but most directly, it would
definitely be just like uploading the icons, taking a screenshot, uploading it to Twitter
and sharing it and letting the internet sort of do the rest.
And that's such a simple thing to do. Like, it's not that strategic. It's just kind of
it's just showing your work, right? I did this thing, check it out. How often do you
tweet? Was that an abnormal thing for you? Or just how you always use Twitter?
I'm more of a visual person. So I lately have been tweeting quite a few things, mostly within
the last like six to eight months, you know, as I have created super and I've been creating
more and more digital products, which we can dig into later. I've been sharing more and
more on Twitter. And so it felt a little bit natural to me, especially when something is
so aesthetic that I'm just like, you know, I know people are going to go crazy over this,
because I'm going crazy over it. Obviously, the people that follow you are like minded
in a sense. And so I knew it was going to work. I just had no idea how well it was going
to work.
And then, like, Cesar Kurayama, earlier this year, he's got this app called One Second
Every Day. I think the only other person I've talked to had like a really like well timed
tweet that really paid off, where in his situation, it had almost nothing to do with his work.
Like he wanted to talk to this director, Jon Favreau, and just like say something nice
to him that he thought other people weren't saying. And so he like typed out this tweet.
He's like, Oh, this is stupid. I don't need to send his tweets. It's like a famous directory.
He's not going to read this. And he like passed out, woke up to he was still there in draft
mode. And he clicked tweet. And then nothing happened. And then a year or something later,
he was working with this movie studio. And they're like, Yeah, I want to put your app
in our movie. And one of the guys on the set was telling him like, you know why we wanted
to put your app on our movie, right? And he's like, No, I have no idea. I just thought you
thought it was cool. And he's like, No, like you tweeted Jon Favreau a year ago. And he
thought it was a really nice tweet. And he checked out your profile. And he found your
app. And he's been using your app every single day since then. And he thought, I got to put
this in my movie. I think the movie is called Chef. But it's pretty cool just to see like
these simple actions you can take. And like it costs you almost nothing. And most of the
time, it's not going to work out. But if you have a habit, like you said, you've been doing
this for six to eight months, then that just massively increases your luck surface area.
And like that is kind of the initial action that made the luck possible for you.
Exactly. Yeah, luck favors those who are in motion in some way or another, you know, and
in the internet age, motion just means putting your work out there not being afraid to share
it not being afraid of oversharing in a sense. I think all those excuses are ways to just
prevent you from doing that. And so that's a great story.
I think there's another few factors that go into taking action that are super important.
So I wrote them down here, wrote down persistence, speed, time and strategy. So persistence in
your particular situation was pretty obvious. I mean, you didn't like just take one action,
you kept taking action, you made that initial tweet, you wrote a blog post, you were retweeting
the MKBHD, I think you even made to make like a special MKBHD icon set.
Yeah, so after I had written the article, I guess, I don't know how he found out about
that either probably on Twitter or something where, you know, there are a few people I
think that tagged him, or that posted it, you know, as comments in his video. And so
he discovered the blog post, he discovered that, you know, me a designer made 100 grand
in six days. And a lot of that was caused from his video. And so he decided to tweet
about it. And he tagged me and he linked the icons and everything. And so I knew that there
was a lot of people going to be visiting my Twitter profile from his tweet.
At this point, I saw a tweet from I think it was super staff who's who's another, you
know, YouTube influencer and tech YouTuber. And he posted something along the lines of
now all we need is an MKBHD food pack or MKBHD version, you know, I figured why not, you
know, it'll take me maybe another half an hour, you know, and so I created like, this
very notable MKBHD red, red and black icon set, I posted it on Twitter with a, you know,
quote, tweet for this guy's this guy's initial tweet. And that got another, I think 200,000
impressions from that, you know, I didn't end up actually selling very much of it, I
think I sold, you know, about two grand worth. But I think it's what people enjoyed was like
the actual process of me, you know, putting together an icon theme specific to MKBHD,
adding his logo in the social image, you know, it was fun for me. And it brought a whole
bunch of traffic to the actual original icon page as well.
It's a super smart strategy. And I think it's so easy when like, some event happens just
kind of react to it, but not realize that you can just continually react to it. And
this is obviously where some of the best founders shine, they don't just have one lucky event
happen and rest on their laurels, they just make consistently good decisions to capitalize
on that over and over again for months or years after the initial event. And even for
something as simple as like an icon set, which again, took you two hours, it turns out that
you can blog about it. And you can create a special icon set toward like a particular
person who's got a big channel and a big audience. And there's just a ton of stuff you can do
to keep going back. I mean, you're on this podcast right now. And like, I don't promise
someone to sell you as many icons as MKBHD did. But like, you never stopped capitalizing
on it. And I think this is why one of the factors here I listed for taking action is
also time. A lot of people just don't have time to do this. So they get the ingredients
to luck, they get the preparation, they get the opportunity, and those are together and
it's time for them to take action. They just don't have time. They haven't figured out
a way to clear enough time in their schedule to take advantage of things that pop up. What
did your schedule look like where you could just sit around, basically make an icons and
write blog posts all day and have the time to capitalize on your luck?
Yeah, that's a good question. For me, I'm always optimizing for freedom. And that includes
having a clear schedule. I think for me, inspiration is hugely effective in terms of I use it as
a productivity multiplier in a sense, but it's perishable, right? And so it doesn't
last forever. And so for me, taking advantage of that inspiration is hugely important. And
so I continually prioritize a clear calendar and freedom to be able to act on my ideas
as they come. Because I know, especially for me, I do so many things at once. And so it's
easy to hop from one idea to the next for me. Probably many indie hackers share this
belief as well. And so it's important to me that I have the leisure to be able to capitalize
on these things as they come up. And that's how I know that I'm putting together my best
work is when I'm within this state of productivity multiplication. And I'm just hyped up and
I'm excited. And I know that the work I'm putting out there is like, I'm working five
times faster. I'm putting out work that's five times better all during the state. And
so that's hugely important for me.
I love the phrase you use there that inspiration is perishable, you're not always going to
be the same level of inspired. And once you get that inspiration, it's not always going
to last. So that's your window of time to get a lot more work done and enjoy doing it
more than other windows of time. Like if I think about the things that inspire me, it's
usually other people's stories. When I listen to podcasts, I want to hear about other people
doing amazing things. A friend sent me a talk by Derek Sivers over the weekend. And it just
got me super jazzed. And I was super excited to work right after that. So if you could
find out what your inspirational hacks are, that's when you want to press the gas pedal
and you can probably get more work done in those time periods and you can do and all
the other times combined and feel much better about it.
Yeah. And so now, exactly. And now I sort of optimize for times like that, you know,
I know that they're going to hit. And I know based on what I'm working on, you know, at
what point they're going to come and sense. And so now I'm like, putting things out there
actually makes me more inspired to keep going, you know, and keep putting things out there
and keep fueling the fire. And it just continually builds up and builds up.
The other thing you had that I think is important for taking action in response to these lucky
situations is it's just speed. Because you don't have all day to take action. Like the
opportunities usually don't exist forever. And I think the turnaround time for you from
you like tweeting your icon set out to realizing like, Hey, this is something that like I could
actually make money doing and like putting it up online is pretty amazing. So how are
you able to get this website up and running so fast and start accepting payments?
Yeah, so I think there were three parts of it. So I used Gumroad to actually list the
product for sale. And honestly, I probably could have stopped there. It was probably
enough, you know, your product page, I could have had a description at the price, you know,
testimonials on that page if I wanted to things like that. But I knew that there was a lot
of question around the product here and say, how do I install them? What types of screens
or home screens can I deliver with this and can I create with this? And so I knew I wanted
to have some sort of website. And for me, it was natural just because you know, I spent
a lot of time creating websites for clients in the past and also for myself and my own
projects. But I figured this time was really of the essence. You know, I knew people the
tweet was getting more and more viral every every second. And so I really wanted to capitalize
on speed. And so after uploading my product to Gumroad, I had created basic website using
Notion and I used super which is also a tool that I built that adds publishing features
to Notion. So that allowed me to add custom domains, analytics, custom forms, and things
like that to my Notion doc. And all that for anyone who does or doesn't know Notion, you
know, you could put together a document within a matter of minutes, you know, and so creating
a full fledged website in a matter of minutes, publishing it to the web to your own custom
domain, doing all this so quickly is a huge advantage.
And for people who want to see this website, I hope I'm looking at the right one. It's
icons.tr.af. Is that right?
Yeah, yeah. I actually the only reason I use the sub domain is for that speed. You know,
probably I would put at probably tr.af slash icons and put it on my on my actual website.
But that would have taken more time because my actual website is done with HTML and CSS
and some JavaScript. And so I knew that would have taken a little bit more time. And so
I optimized for speed there and put it on the sub domain using super Notion.
So this is almost like an ad for the no code industry, because these are all no code tools,
like obviously Gumroad is no code, like you don't have to code anything on Gumroad, you
just have a digital product, in your case, icons, you upload it to Gumroad, and then
suddenly you can accept payments. And you've got Notion, which I use, I think of it as
like a sort of high tech, modern Google Docs, and use notion page, you can do that in like
a second, and you've got super, which we're going to talk about a little bit later, which
is your app, which again, it can turn I guess a notion page into a fully fledged public
website.
And your website looks great. Like there's no like, if I did not know this is a notion
page, you can hold me I would never have guessed, I would say this is just like a natural page
that somebody took the time to design really well. And it probably took you days or hours
to design this page. But this is like done in minutes, which is insane. And so like your
knowledge of all these no code tools helps you basically get something out there way
faster than you otherwise would have.
Yeah, and I think that's probably an under leveraged skill and utilizing tools, especially
no code tools that are available to all of us, you know, because it's such a low barrier
or entry. Like in a way, a good designer is sometimes just a good curator of products
and services that are available. And so I think being a good designer is just finding
cool resources from the web, around the web, you know, compiling them together, slap on
a name and a brand and push it out to the world.
Well, it looks great. And I think this is the last part of sort of acting on these lucky
situations is just like strategy execution, just like quality, right? Like you have to
actually have a good icon set. If you tweeted out a really ugly icon set, MKBHD probably
wasn't going to put that in his video. But also you did a bunch of other stuff, right?
You put together this notion page really well, you tweeted really well, you've been tweeting
for a while and like kind of have the knack for it. And you wrote this blog post, which
I want to dig into, which went viral, as you mentioned, pretty much everywhere. I think
it was at the top of Hacker News. It was the most popular post on Indie Hackers for a while.
How did you think about writing this blog post? And what do you think made it so successful?
I really just wanted to document the story up until this point, because a lot of people
look at overnight success and then get a little bit salty in a way, you know, it's like I
could have done that, you know, but I think there's a lot that goes into it. And so I
really wanted to outline the fact that this overnight success that other people are seeing
as an overnight success was actually, you know, more or less seven years in the making.
Just because, you know, I don't think I would have been able to capitalize on all this if
I didn't previously go through all that time and effort of building skills, building experience,
putting home screens together, sharing them. If I built and created these home screens
and these icons even and never shared them, I even think that would have probably stopped
me from sharing them at this point, because it wouldn't have been something that felt
natural to me. So I think every step of the process is something that's really important
to have because the end result wouldn't exist without any of that prior discovery.
And so in a way, people were seeing your tweets about how much money you're making from these
icons and kind of hating. And you know, this blog post as a way to explain yourself and
be like, No, no, no, it's not all luck. Like, look at all the stuff that I did to get here.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I can't blame people like I feel like, in some ways, I used to
feel the same way. Like when I used to see people that I knew make up a whole bunch of
money in a short period of time, I felt a little unsettling, you know, but now when
I see it, it's just like, it's just inspiring. And so I often say to those people, you know,
other people success isn't your failure, but it could be or could act as your motivation.
Yeah, it's such a good point. And it's like, it's one of those common feelings that a lot
of people won't admit to. But like, it's super common, a lot of people feel that other people's
success reflects on their own lack of success, selling a friend about another friend's business
success. And his immediate reaction was like, Oh, like, that sounds like a scam, just got
to put them down. You know, yeah. And I think in a way, it's like saying that it's so easy
to say, makes him feel it's super easy to say. And it's really just like a coping mechanism
to make him feel better about not doing anything. But the reality is that he'd be better off
if he just had more positive attitude about it and realized like, Hey, maybe I could have
done this. And maybe I should do this or at least be inspired by hearing stories of what
other people are doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the people who often say, you know, I
could have done that. They're the ones who don't do it, you know, and so it just feels
like this weird correlation. And to go back a little bit, I want to mention, you know,
there's a lot of things on the icons page that I feel is not up to par with my own work.
I still feel like a big part of it is unfinished. You know, I feel like the experience of using
the icons is still pretty horrible, like the drawbacks were pretty, pretty bad. They didn't
come with the most icons in the set, they aren't the nicest, you know, they're far from
being the least expensive, you know, as a matter of fact, I think they might be one
of the most expensive. And so I think there's a lot there that didn't go right. So I think
it's more about optimizing for the things that are good enough. And to me, that's something
that's hard to do, you know, as a designer, as a somewhat of a perfectionist, there's
a lot of things that could stop me from taking action or pursuing something. But I think
it's important to differentiate between what's something that's, you know, perfect and what's
something that's good enough and what will get you to the next stage.
Knowing like the 8020, like what's good enough is I think, an essential founder skill. And
most founders come from some type of individual contributor role, whether they're a software
engineer or a marketer, or a designer. And when you work that kind of role in a company
for a long time, you start, it kind of throws your sense of what's good enough out of whack.
Because the rest of the company around you is handling everything else. If you're a designer
working at some company, like you just design, and you can be as much of a perfectionist
as you possibly want to be. And it's fine. In fact, that's kind of encouraged. That's
your only role. But when you put on a founder hat, and you realize there's a bunch of things
that matter like, okay, how fast am I to the market? Like how am I gonna promote this?
What distribution channel am I gonna hit? Like who's my target audience? How much am
I gonna charge? Like you realize you don't have time to spend like every second of every
day tweaking the design, even if you are a perfectionist designer.
So the fact that you're able to get this out here and be a little bit embarrassed about
it, and yet realize that like, you know, it doesn't matter. You've like gone far enough
in that direction, you iterate on other things is super, I think it just speaks to your experience
as a founder. And we're gonna get into this a little bit later, because you started other
companies in the past, like, this isn't your first radio. But I've got a few more questions
about like, you making this this icon set blow up. It cost $28. $28 for icons that you
made in two hours. I've seen people work on SaaS apps for five months and then charge
at $5. Oh, how did you come to a price of 28 bucks?
By the way, I'm one of those people that also works on SaaS apps that charge $5. So I'm
both of those people on both ends. And so I think I just look at it differently with
some things. And so if you think about it, there was no sort of notion as what an iOS
icon set should be priced at. Because iOS icons were not ever really a thing outside
of the jailbreaking scene, which was not native at all. It was the furthest thing from native.
And so there was no notion at all. And so it's common on the city store for icons to
be priced at 99 cents, you know, $1.99, $4.99 maybe, if they come with thousands and thousands
of icons. But there was no notion previously as what an iOS icon set should be priced at.
And so I figured if I was the first to market, I could really price this thing at anything
I wanted to. Maybe I would have sold more if I would have priced them for less, but
we'll never know. But generally, I'm really happy with how I priced them. It was kind
of a whim. I had been selling Lightroom presets on Gumroad as well for 28 bucks. And I figured
may as well just be consistent, stick with 28 bucks and we'll see how it goes. And I
could always change pricing if I wanted to, but ended up working fine.
Yeah. I think you can't really complain about the results. And you're right. We'll never
know if there's like some other point on the pricing curve that was perfect, but it doesn't
really matter. Especially when you're dealing with these like once in a lifetime opportunities,
you just got to pick something. And I think airing on the side of charging more is usually
the right option because you can always lower your prices later. And also in your situation,
like people aren't buying these icons, like for some utility reason, because they want
to make money. People are buying these icons because they want to have them because MKBHD
is tweeting them because they look cool, because it's trendy. And I think your audience is
probably well off tech workers and tech fanboys and girls. So I think it was probably wise
to charge that much.
Yeah. And that's another good point too with MKBHD. For someone who's reviewing like generally
expensive tech products all day long, is a $28 icon set going to be more appealing to
him or is like a 99 set icon set going to be more appealing? And so it also depends
about who you want your audience to be in a sense or who you want to attract.
It's a great point. Price is not ancillary to your product. Price is part of your product.
And if you charge very little, it kind of makes your product seem cheap and crappy.
And if you charge $28, it's like this is a premium icon set that you can't get anywhere
else. This is from James. This is a James Trapp edition icon set. You're lucky to be
able to buy these.
Yeah. And actually, the MKBHD icon set was priced the same at the start and included
only half the amount of icons. So with my original icon set, there are like four color
ways that are included. But with the MKBHD one, it's red and black and they're priced
in the same. And so it's even more premium feeling because it's an MKBHD themed icon
set.
Exactly. And people are happy to pay for it.
Yeah, exactly.
We talked about action. Let's talk about opportunity a little bit. I think opportunity plays obviously
a huge role in luck. In fact, it's probably the most lucky part of any lucky situation
because the opportunity is not something that you really create, although you can kind of
influence it. But like you weren't at Apple saying, Hey, you guys should let people create
custom icons. Like you didn't know this is going to happen. It just suddenly happened,
but you caught on to it.
And so when I look at your story, I think there's a few parts of the opportunity that
you did really well. My breakdown here is that number one, you want to share a lot because
when you share, you create opportunity. So that kind of ties into your first tweet.
Number two, and this has always been hard for me because I don't like the news, but
I think you need to just read a lot. Like you need to be up to date with what's going
on, at least in your industry, in order to spot these opportunities. And if you weren't
on Twitter keeping your eye open, then you never would have seen people tweeting these
things. And it's the same for MKBHD. If he wasn't aware of what's going on, he never
would have caught on to your icon set and realized he could put that in his video. So
I think just being aware of what's going on, keeping your ear to the ground is really important
for opportunity. And I think you kind of nailed both of those.
Yeah. And opportunity in a sense that it feels, or at least following the news that you're
interested in, it feels super natural. Obviously you want to read and absorb the content surrounding
subjects that you're passionate about. And so people might hear, oh, I have to read the
news now. It might feel like work, but I think you could just follow the people that are
in the industries that you're interested in and you'll discover a whole bunch of things
that come up every day within their industries.
Exactly. And it's different depending on the channel as well. I rarely want to say, I'm
not going to read a newspaper. I'm not going to give you your time. But if I go to my industry,
then it's much easier. But then there's certain mediums that I care more about. I subscribe
to a ton of newsletters on my iPad and I'm kind of 50-50 with reading my iPad. Sometimes
I do it, sometimes I don't.
Podcasts, every time I go for a walk anywhere, I listen to podcasts. And I've just subtly
shifted my habits recently to listen to more podcasts that tell me new things that are
happening because it's just an easy, passive way for me to be up to date as to what's going
on. And then Twitter is obviously a huge place for news. If you're in the tech industry,
you care at all about technology because every software engineer, every designer, every startup
founder is on Twitter.
And so for me, I don't enjoy reading Twitter that much because it's so distracting. And
my timeline, no matter who I follow, just ends up being a bunch of non-tech stuff. So
I wrote a bot, kind of like a hack for myself because I know how important it is to be caught
up on the news. And my bot just goes and looks at every indie hacker's account on indiehackers.com,
gives their Twitter profile, and then looks at all the things they've tweeted in the last
24 hours. And it gives me three things, like which links were tweeted the most, which tweets
were liked the most, and which tweets were retweeted the most.
And then it just sends it to me in kind of a newsletter way. So I just click on that
every single day. And that's the easiest way for me to get my news and know what's going
on. That's how I found out about you. That's how I found out about a lot of my podcast
guests. And I think other people can be creative as well and try to figure out how to increase
this opportunity and figure out just how they can see opportunities come onto their radar.
Because we've got to just passively not in an environment or a mode where that happens
and you're just going to get lucky way less often.
Absolutely. I think that's great. I would probably use that bot to be honest. It seems
like a hyper focused, efficient version of a newsletter.
Yeah, it's cool. And it's like everyone's got their own audience. You mentioned earlier,
you knew your audience would care about your aesthetic design sense and the fact that these
icons look beautiful because they're your followers. I know that, okay, well, my audience
is indie hackers. If I just get all the people who are subscribed to indie hackers' Twitter
accounts, I'll probably have a pretty good signal on what's important to them because
it's going to be the same thing that's important to me.
So I think everyone out there can just kind of find somebody who's your audience or find
somebody else who's curating somebody who's your audience and figure out like what's news
to them.
Yeah. And I really want to emphasize that I think the other points that we've discussed
is opportunity would be nothing without them because I feel like in a sense people consume
– I mean, it's no surprise that people consume too much. But I even think that people
consume some of the good stuff too much in a sense because no matter how many books you
read or podcasts you listen to, I think action is only going to come from within. And if
you think about it, no one can really teach you anything. They can only inform you of
things. And so reading and watching and listening, they'll fill your mind with information,
whereas creating and building and publishing will actually make use of that information.
And I published a tweet a few weeks ago that makes it easy for me to remember this concept,
which is read to find new ideas, write or teach to better understand them and implement
to actually learn from them.
I love the idea of writing and teaching to better understand ideas because it's so counterintuitive
to anyone who hasn't written a lot or taught a lot. But you end up learning so much just
trying to explain something to somebody else and organizing your thoughts around it. And
very few people on Earth spend a lot of time writing and thinking. Comedians spend a lot
of time writing and thinking. No wonder they're so witty and they have interesting takes in
the world because they're spending their full-time job just thinking about stuff. I think about
this with my boss, Patrick. He doesn't have a lot of day-to-day individual contributor
activities and stuff to do. He's just thinking a lot. I got to write code and do all sorts
of stuff and do all sorts of forms.
So if you can take the time out of your day to just think and write or teach, then you're
going to have much, much higher quality thoughts and almost everybody else who just has no
time to think. And if you can leave space in your calendar to be empty, to be inspired,
then you also can take advantage of luck when it happens. So I feel like you're in a good
spot where you just have an empty calendar, a lot of thinking, a lot of teaching and writing
and that's just the perfect recipe for being able to take good action and know what you're
talking about.
Exactly. Yeah. I think that's a highly under-leveraged superpower in a sense. It's just setting out
time to think about things that you're thinking about and writing about them. I think it'll
internalize a lot of your beliefs so everything is not very surface level and you'll be able
to better understand yourself in a way because of that.
Yeah. So then the last part of luck, so we've gotten kind of in reverse, is preparation.
And we've spoken a lot about you obviously have been making icons for a long time and
you're working on super, which helps you turn a Notion page into a website so you obviously
knew about that. But you've also got this experience as a founder. You've started other
companies before. In fact, you went through Y Combinator. And I love talking to any hackers
who've gone through Y Combinator because it's not common that people go from the
Silicon Valley, sort of high-growth startup world, into NdHackerdom. In fact, it's more
often the other direction that people typically travel.
So give me the story behind you doing YC and why you decided to eventually become an NdHacker
instead of going the investor, raise a ton of money route.
Right. Well, a few years back, I think this was 2014. Me and a couple of guys got together.
I was actually hired by them initially as a designer to work on an app that they had
thought about, which was called Airborne. And over the weekend, I don't remember how
it came up, but someone from the team decided that it would be cool if you could just send
someone a gift anonymously and randomly. So you wouldn't know what the gift was. And you
wouldn't know who was actually sending you the gift. There would just be a package show
up on your doorstep with a personal note. And we thought it was a fun idea. And so we
launched the landing page over the weekend. It was 25 bucks to send somebody a gift and
a personal note. And we would do all of that manually for now. We had no expectations whatsoever.
It actually worked better than the previous six months of the previous app. And so at
that point was the applications for Y Combinator. And we had to make the decision. It was like,
are we going to apply with this app that we had spent six months building that had okay
traction, nothing crazy, or this weekend project that was still mostly a joke to us that saw
more traction than this other one saw in six months. And so we obviously were more passionate
about the weekend project because it was working better. And so we figured we would apply with
that. And I even think to this date, we're one of the youngest companies that have ever
gotten into Y Combinator. I think we were a week or two old by the time we actually applied.
It's pretty ballsy to decide that you're going to abandon this thing you've worked on for
a long time and go with this week-old project. How well was it doing compared to your previous
app that you decided to make that decision?
Yeah. Well, the previous app, it was like we weren't making money yet. And so we're
still building a lot of relationships and networking and things like that. And so it
felt as though anything we would have launched that would have put a dollar in our pocket
would have worked better. So I don't even think it was that much, maybe a couple hundred
bucks or a thousand bucks or something worth of orders. But the point is that it came from
complete strangers. No one that we knew personally, I think we had launched a very preliminary
page on Product Hunt, even as a pre-launch product. And we got some orders from there.
And so it was something that was working. And if you're working on something for a few
months, and you're not seeing any dollars come of it, it just feels as though anything
that you work on that does provide you with money, you just want to jump on it. You want
to capitalize it. You want to double down because it's way more exciting.
It's crazy how fast you're able to do it too. Because I think people have this idea
that if you're going to make money, it just takes a lot of time. You need to sit down
and it's going to take you 6 months, 9 months, 12 months to build something that works.
But I've fairly often run into people who've had these situations where you make something
and they're happy with your icon set. Within a single night, you made $6,000. And it happened
with your gifting app. Over a weekend, you created something that was making money. It
happened with Sawhill, the creator of Gumroad. He, I think, built Gumroad on a weekend and
launched it on Hacker News. And that's the business. It hasn't changed all that much
since when he first made it. Josh Pigford from Bear Metrics. He coded his app up in
a week and he had paying customers by the end of it.
And there's example after example of apps and things people can build that provide real
value right up front. And so I think this goes back to the whole speed point. If you've
convinced yourself that it's going to take you a year to build something, unless you've
just got a ton of money in the bank and you want to spend a year doing this, you probably
should go back to the drawing board and think, what can I do that's faster, that's easier,
that's simpler, because there's just so many untapped ideas out there that don't take a
whole lot of time to make a reality.
Yeah, exactly. And I think everyone should be trying a whole boatload of things, like
just to not only see what works, but see what they're interested in, what they're interested
in doubling down on if one of those projects do end up working.
Peter Level's had his famous 12 startups in 12 months project. And I see people copying
this all the time. And I'm glad they are because it's a really good idea. I'm going to set
an ending deadline for every single idea, one month per idea. If it takes longer than
I move on to the next one. And I think that constraint helps you build much faster, helps
you do what you're saying, figure out what you actually like, because you might think
you like something.
I never would have thought that I would want to start a podcast or a community. But it
turns out it's super fun for me. And I never would have gotten here if I didn't try a bunch
of other stuff first. So I like that idea of just starting lots of different stuff and
seeing what sticks.
And in your particular situation, obviously, this gifting idea stuck. You got into YC.
I love gifting apps because they're just so... Your idea is pretty fun in general. You get
to give people a random gift, I think it was, and it's $25 and they don't know what they're
going to get, which takes all the pressure off of the gift giver. And you can just give
your friend a gift for Christmas or their birthday or something and not have to worry
about them not liking it, which I think is a lot of the pressure of gift giving. I've
been asking friends and stuff like, what do you think about the holidays? And almost nobody
likes Christmas because of the pressure of like, I got someone the wrong gift or whatever.
And so you sort of solved that problem. How did it go from there?
Yeah. Well, we had pivoted quite a bit over the course of Fly Combinator. We had moved
out to Silicon Valley, set up an office, made it official. And then we just built out the
product and we just experimented like crazy with seeing what's sticking, what's working,
what's engaging. We had the opportunity to create a great brand from scratch. And so
that was really fun.
I think in total, we actually had probably close to eight or nine complete redesigns
in the sense of actual products, not just aesthetically, but actually what we're offering
as a product.
Like different gifting products?
Yeah. So we tried a whole bunch of things. We even took the B2B route at one point. And
so we were actually influenced a lot by the partners at Fly Combinator because they seem
to be more familiar with the business side of things and the B2B route in certain products
and categories. And so obviously, we wanted to listen and absorb with what all these people
had to say. They were really smart and we wanted to act on some of their ideas. And
the problem is that that kind of separated our vision with their vision. And I think
in the grand scheme of things, we actually lost a little bit of time focusing on those
because we knew that spoil should be a consumer app.
And so the B2B, although it was fun and generated some revenue, it took us a little bit away
from the vision of our product. And that was just one of the many examples. What we had
actually ended up with was I think our best version of it, which was mobile gifting app.
You would give things that are really easy to give and perishable in a sense. So like
cupcakes, flowers, balloons, things that you're able to re-gift if need be. Even healthy things
like smoothies. And we had different things. You can gift someone a pizza if you wanted
to. So we had events and categories of products. And we also kept our surprise mystery box
for the sake of life. That's what got us to the point where we were at. And we wanted
to just keep that as a sense of history.
And so we would leverage local suppliers for fulfillment. We would actually use the Postmates
API to leverage local delivery drivers to actually deliver the gifts within an hour
or two of actually placing the order.
So the good thing about stuff like this is you're doing something that's very transactional.
You're allowing people to buy things that they already are used to buying. And it's
much easier to do that than it is to sell people some sort of software they've never
seen before in a category they don't understand. You have to convince them of why they need
to buy it. People understand why they give each other gifts. People understand what it's
like to buy a pizza. Nobody box at the price of a pizza. It's just straightforward.
The downside is these are all very physical goods, which means the margins are pretty
low. If you are facilitating the purchase of a pizza and then you're also plugging in
the Postmates, so they take their cut to do the delivery, it's probably not that much
left over for you. How did you deal with those issues of selling real world goods for low
margins?
Yeah. Well, put simply, we didn't. We ended up running out of money in the end. And so
that was definitely a contributing factor. But that's the huge reason why. The huge contrast
between inventory-based products and digital products is so massive because it's like it
costs you nothing. You can launch it in a matter of minutes versus something like spoil.
And not only on a product level, but also on the company level, I feel like part of
the reasons why now I have a peculiar appreciation for small, profitable bootstrap businesses
or indie hacker type businesses is because of how independent I am now versus how dependent
we were earlier on.
And so when you have investors, you have employees, you have an entire team, you have your customers,
there's a lot going on and there's a lot of moving pieces. And it's really hard to execute
on your vision individually.
And so do you feel like it's easier or less stressful to be an indie hacker instead of
having this high growth startup pressure?
Yeah, yeah, I'm definitely happy with the direction I'm taking now. But don't get me
wrong, I'm super, super grateful that I went through that experience. I mean, I think working
on or even in a startup that can sort of act as a scale multiplier because you can either
hire for a job that you need, or you can figure out how to do it and save a bunch of time,
effort and money, which is why most people in that environment just choose to figure
it out.
Yeah.
That's what sort of led me to the path and direction of actually creating websites and
building mobile apps and actually designing at all in the first place. And so I'm definitely
grateful I did that. And I also am proud of the sense of what we built. At the end of
our lifecycle, we were more traditionally, when you think of gifting, you think it's
complicated, it's infrequent, it's expensive. But with Spoil, we sort of made it easy, frequent
and low cost. And so we actually started to engineer sort of a new way to give and receive.
And so in a way, it was sort of a new category of gifting, or I should say giving, because
many of our top spoilers, which is what we used to call them, we're giving a few times
per week rather than a few times per year. And so it was definitely rewarding.
So often when I talk to founders, you have some sort of business or app that's kind of
working, or that's working pretty well, they find it hard to just give it up. For example,
the founders of Homejoy, this is like an on demand cleaning app from five or six years
ago, they raised a ton of money, like $50, $60 million, they're going to be over for
home cleaning, you press a button, the cleaner shows up seemed like a great idea at the time.
They also ended up running out of money. But the founders like didn't quite want to give
it up. Like any one of the founders went and then started like another cleaning company
after that. And on one hand, you can say like, this is a horrible idea, you already tried
this, it failed, move on to something else. But you could also build an argument that
it's a really good idea, because you have all this domain expertise, and you're probably
one person on earth, having failed at this thing, who can go back and like, you know,
do around you and do it better this time. So why didn't you go back and do like an
Andy hacker version of your gifting startup? Yeah, it's a great question. And there's a
lot that goes into that. Like we had a we had spent probably a month just talking about
that just talking about, let's give up our investors, let's give up a lot of our customers
in a sense, let's give up a lot of the place where we're offering this, let's just start
from scratch, rebuild the product from the ground up with very little money in the bank.
But screw it, let's just go move back in with our parents and just build this up. You know,
so that was a real conversation. Like that was something that we had thought about, you
know, half of our team, we were for co founders. And so two of us actually had no wives and
families. And so they needed something a little bit more stable. And so they had to go and
actually get jobs. And me and one of the other guys were deciding whether we actually wanted
to do this ourselves. And so ultimately, I think it came down to the fact that neither
of us were truly intrinsically passionate about something like this. I think we both
saw really great opportunity. And we both believe that this could be something really
big. But what it would take to actually get there is not something that we were willing
to actually put in. And you know, some people are okay with that, you know, they see an
opportunity, they're just capitalists, you know, they see that something or just is working,
they go and sell that and figure out how to make it work. And that's totally fine. For
me personally, if I don't have like a direct connection with it, and if I don't experience
that problem myself, I won't be able to properly put together a product, I won't be able to
properly create a brand, I won't be able to effectively market to potential customers.
And so for me, I'm more on the side of like building products that work for myself that
solve my own problems. Because worst case scenario, I end up with one customer, which
is myself and I make my life 0.1% better.
Okay, so you were self aware enough to resist the sunk cost fallacy, took all the knowledge
and the effort and the time that you spent on your early idea, and you just threw it
all away, made a clean break, started something brand new from scratch. And that thing is
called super, it lets you convert a page and notion into its own standalone website. And
it's doing pretty well. It's making money. How'd you come up with the idea for super?
Yeah, it's great gateway, because this is a problem that I was experiencing myself.
I use and love notion. And I wanted to use it for something public facing. And I realized
that, you know, I could turn on sharing and just share the notion URL, but it doesn't
really feel on brand, you know, it's, it has their URL and their logo class are all over
it. And when you're building a creating a website that you're actually publishing, that's
rarely ever the case. And so I figured there must be a way to actually add your own custom
domain, you know, customize styles, things like that. And so there were some solutions
out there, but they were very hacky, they required knowledge of cloud flare workers
and things like that. And so I wanted to create simple solution that I could use myself and
then just go and find more people like me who are also publishing their notion pages
to the web. And so I had reached out to this guy that I used to know his name is Jason.
I actually found him originally in 2017, during the whole cryptocurrency crave, he had built
a mobile wallet cryptocurrency wallet, and I reached out to him and I want to say, you
know, let's build something I'm a designer, you're a developer, this is perfect, we can
build out anything. And we tried a few things, nothing that really came to fruition. But
then I pitched him this notion, this super idea. And he was a notion user himself and
he figured it was a good idea. So we just teamed up and within I think about a month
we pushed this out. So a month to build. How long have you been working on it since then
and what's your revenue at? Yeah, so we've been working on it since I think May. So about
five, almost six months, almost six months and we just passed 4,500 in monthly recurring
revenue. There you go again, pretty fast development time, pretty high amount of revenue. Some
people don't ever get to $4,500 a month in revenue. What do you think accounts for you
being able to hit that milestone so quickly? Yeah, I think we very deeply integrated with
the growing notion community. And so I think one of the most important pieces of building
a company is the market you're in. And that's going to determine a lot of your growth, a
lot of your success, a lot of how quickly your potential customers are finding you.
And so the notion community is great. It's engaging. Everyone within it is growing repeatedly.
And so it's definitely a great market to be in, especially a growing market. And we're
able to ride the wave pretty nicely. And we've also collaborated with a lot of no-code tools
and companies like Maker Path. And so we had created and collaborated with them on a very
deep dive. And they had actually created a whole set of content for us that includes
things like selling digital products with Gumroad and Notion and Super, embedding memberships
with memberspace. And so being deeply integrated with all these other great companies in a
growing no-code market, I think is what enabled us to quickly find product market fit.
And super smart the way you've done that. I think it's a recurring theme in almost all
the stuff that you've worked on recently. If you think about your icons, that was kind
of riding the trend and the popularity of iOS 14. Everybody's tweeting about this right
now. This is big news. People are talking about it. And then MKBHD, he's got a huge
following. It makes perfect sense for you to realize this is where all the people are.
And the market matters. I can make the most beautiful icons in the entire world. But if
I make them about some random topic nobody cares about, no one's going to share the icons.
But if I make it about this guy or this topic, people are going to care. You could have made
Android icons and gotten like five retweets and no one would have cared. And then with
super, it's like you're riding a few waves. You're riding any hackers in a way. You're
here. You're talking about your revenue. You're being transparent. This is a thing that people
care about. You are on the back of Notion, obviously, which is huge. I'm obsessed with
Notion. I don't think I've made a single Google Doc in the last two years since I started
using Notion. It's just completely replaced it. And there's a million people like me.
And Notion, you can rest assured. It has a bunch of people making sure that it's going
to be even more people like us in the future. And so that's a cool trend and community to
build off of. And then also like no code, as you said, also blowing up. And so you're
always kind of in the limelight, always connecting what you're working on to things that other
people care about and really being conscious of the market rather than just doing whatever
you want to do and thinking that it's all about your product and not the market that
your product is in.
Yeah, that's a great point. It's good to sort of talk about this because it helps me sort
of like internalize what's going on. And it's helped me probably better capitalize on things
like this in the future. Because these are things that may not be obvious to me while
I'm doing it, but in retrospect, you're absolutely right. To add to that, I think there's this
concept, I think it was Jack Butcher from Visualize Value who formalized this first.
But the idea of this permissionless apprenticeship and the idea that you don't really need permission
from Notion to build a super app. You don't need permission from Apple to build iOS icons.
In a sense, you need the opportunity there from them, but you don't need permission from
anyone or any company to actually build something to make something easier. And so I think there's
opportunities there. If you think about growing markets, there are opportunities everywhere.
In case anyone here would benefit from it, let this be it. This is permission for everyone
listening to this that everyone here has something that they do that they enjoy doing, whether
it be cooking or video games or playing chess. And there's a market for almost everything,
which means that there's almost always a way to make money doing what you enjoy. And so
if you love cooking, for example, you probably don't even realize that you create your own
versions of recipes. And so it's really simple nowadays just to be able to document them,
create some sort of visual recipe book, you know, upload it to Gumroad, publish it with
tools like Notion and Super. And so putting things you enjoy out there to the web has
never been easier and you don't need permission in order to do it.
I think it's so hard for people to understand what it is that they're uniquely good at.
And to see any value in it, this happens to developers all the time. They're like, Oh,
I made this thing, but I can't charge any money because someone else could just code
it. And it's like, nobody wants to code an app. They would much rather pay money for
your app. That's your talent, you should use it. And for you to list all these different
things, like if you're good at cooking, like guess what? Most people aren't good at cooking
and would love to benefit from your knowledge if you could find a way to get it out there.
Even if that means doing this permissionless marketing thing you're talking about. Like
it reminds me of one of the better strategies for growing your Twitter account. It's like
you want to put your tweets for people who are going to see them. And so instead of just
tweeting into the ether, you could find really popular accounts and just be like one of the
first people to reply to their tweets.
And you're going to get a ton of people who see your tweets and assuming they're any
good, like you're going to get some followers or some responses. And so it's this constant
sort of theme of like, you don't need somebody's permission to reply to their tweet. You can
do that whenever you want to and sort of ride their coattails until you've sort of made
it on your own. And the same is true of all these other apps and markets and things that
are growing. So hopefully this gives people some good ideas of how they can actually get
the word out about what they're doing and what kind of ideas are even worth working
on.
Yeah, exactly. And there are a lot of things now that you can act as a competitive advantage.
For me, it's like simplicity, ease of use, and things that just look nice. Regardless
of what exists in what market, I think there's always an opportunity to make something simpler,
nicer, easier to use, more rewarding, more fulfilling, more inclusive, whatever it may
be. And people will always be willing to pay for things that make their lives even 0.001
percent better.
And looking at your story, it's also a little soapbox I want to get on where when people
talk about content and sharing, there's kind of an obsession with evergreen. You need to
do something that's going to last forever, that's always relevant. And look at what you're
doing and it's like, no, you're writing the trends that are the most recent. You're seeing
like, hey, this iOS 14 news is only going to be news for a very small window of time.
That's not evergreen, an evergreen trend to ride. But that makes it almost better if you
think about it from a business perspective, because it means that there's a lot of demand.
Everybody's suddenly interested in this thing, but there's not a lot of competition because
no one has had time to prepare for the release of iOS 14, really.
And so if you're always at the margins doing things that are sort of new, that's how you
kind of stay top of mind. That's how you spread through word of mouth because you're kind
of in the places that people are talking about. And I think almost evergreen content, evergreen
approaches are almost the opposite, where people aren't ever really excited about it
because it's always true.
Like if you're writing about, here's how to rank on Google. It's basically the same strategies
that there were like 10 years ago. And you have infinite competitors because every year
more people are going to write more guides about that kind of thing. And so this is sort
of a tangent, but I just love the approach that you have of always kind of keeping your
ear to the ground and figuring out what's new, what people care about, and explicitly
not caring so much about, I need to do the evergreen thing that's always important.
Yeah. And the good news is with things that are fleeting in a sense is that if you properly
integrate some of the other things that you're working on into your digital profiles or your
website, short-term hype, no matter where it's coming from, will feed into long-term
revenue if the opportunity is there and if your products are properly linked within your
digital profiles.
And so one thing that I noticed that I learned from this whole icon craze is that it doesn't
matter what you're marketing if you need to market it. And so what I mean by that is short-term
hype is bleeding into long-term revenue from these icons to creating Super Notion pages
and then converting to customers on Super. And so in a way that inspires me to keep putting
things out there that I just enjoy. And even if they're completely irrelevant to the products
that I'm building, because no one in a way would think, okay, what's the correlation
between icons and a publishing layer for Notion? The separation there is there might not be
very much overlap. But now I've went through them and there are 30 or 40 sites being created
on Super using Notion that are all basically replicas of my icon page.
Super smart.
And that will give more and more people opportunities to create different websites and different
content using Notion and Super as well outside of just the icon ecosystem.
So what are your thoughts on Notion in general? We're both big Notion fans, but you're working
on a product that's built on top of Notion, so it seems a little more plugged in than
I am. It feels like there's this trend now where a lot of the old guard products like
the Google Docs of the world and Microsoft Word are just getting replaced by people who
are building products from the ground up that are made for the web, that are made for mobile,
that aren't based on these super old desktop paradigms.
And just curious to see where it's going to go. What are your predictions? What are your
thoughts? Obviously, you've placed your money where your mouth is, you're actually building
on top of Notion. But what do you think is actually going to happen in the future?
Well, yeah, I'm definitely all in on Notion. I'm all in on tools generally that replace
more than one tool. So if you have a tool available to you that replaces two, three
or four, five previous tools that you're using, that's just going to make the process simpler.
It's going to make it easier to get your ideas out on the web. It's going to make it easier
to document. And so in regards to actually publishing, I feel like Notion is just a dream
CMS. It's just like when you think about creating content on the web, even products as simple
as Webflow, the process of adding new content to your site, it's still a little bit, it
takes some time. But when you think about adding a thought to Notion and having that
automatically published to the web, it feels like magic. So we're really doubling down
on that whole idea outside of Notion itself, really just making the simplest website publishing
experience to date that I've ever experienced. So I'm trying to think a little bit beyond
Notion to that extent, because at first we were like plastering Notion everywhere on
our website, on our Twitter profiles, because obviously it's a product right now that's
dependent on Notion. But I want to make the idea for super a little bit bigger than that.
So that's what inspires me in a sense.
Reminds me a bit of AJ from Card, who's got like a website builder. And he's like one
person making a website builder. And it's like, can one person really make a website
building company? And he's like, I'm just focused on simplicity. And it's just like
one page websites, super easy. And we're entering this world where there are just so many creators,
just billions of people literally who want to make websites. And that number is only
going to go up. There's still billions of people who aren't even on the web. So the
number of people who want to publish things quickly, who don't need to like code something
from scratch or make the most fancy thing ever, it's just going to rapidly increase
the market is going to get bigger. And I think there's always going to be room for tools
like yours that help people do that in a really simple way. So I'm pretty bullish on it.
Yeah. And I was going to add that if I would have asked anybody what they thought about
this or asked permission to sort of build super, anyone logical would have just told
them that, you know, there's card, there's Webflow, there's even Squarespace and Wix
and WordPress and all these tools, you know, but like I mentioned previously, there's always
going to be an opportunity to make something simpler to make it easier to use to make it
more beautiful and more pleasant. And so if I have any advice, it's that just build your
vision, bring it to life.
Even if it's just like your own unique vision, even if it's like slower and weirder and harder
to use, but it's like, you know what, I really like orange. And I think like everyone should
like orange. Like there's some subset of people, if the market's big enough, they're
like, you know what, I like this, like this guy style, I'm going to make my thing orange.
That's a huge part of it as well. People are not only buying the product, but they're also
buying into your vehicle product. If you're the one selling, that's a huge part of it.
I think you could have a lot of fun with that too. Going back to 2017, I had built like
my own cryptocurrency token called the boring token. I based it off of Elon Musk's boring
company. It was a very simple page. I wish I still had it up, but I'll probably bring
it back up. But it was, it was actually fully functional. You could actually send Ethereum
and you would get boring tokens in exchange for that. And it was completely honest website.
It was saying, you know, are you going to make any money off this? And it was probably
just, I kept listing out, like, no, I'm probably going to be stealing all of your money, but
who knows maybe one day you'll be rich. And I had a few people that bought into that just
because I was the one selling it. And because of how honest it was in a sense.
Yeah, people like authenticity. People have like personalities are not robots. I think
this is a tragedy with people who are trying to figure out how to make their apps and their
websites a success. And their approach is just to copy everything they see everyone
else doing. And it's like, well, you want to do the exact opposite. Like you want to
not look like everybody else's product, not have the exact same features they have. Because
if you do that, then like how are you ever going to like, why would anyone ever use you?
Like when I was a kid, my brother and I used to sing a lot of Michael Jackson as kids.
We just like loved Michael Jackson. And my brother was a much better singer than I was.
And he would always show to impersonate Michael Jackson. And my dad would say like, look,
if you try to sing like Michael Jackson, you'll just always be a worse Michael Jackson. You're
never going to be that good. You got to find your own voice. And it's the same if you've
got an app, a website, or any sort of passion project. You got to figure out like what your
vision is for that and put that into that and not worry so much about what's working
for other people.
Couldn't have said it better.
Well, listen, James, I've taken up well over an hour of your time. I think you got a cool
story and hopefully I can have you back on the podcast and your icons have hit a million
dollars, which it seems like they're going to at this rate.
I'll write a next blog post titled 7 figures in 7 months and see how that goes.
Yeah, I'm sure that'll blow up. What do you think people who are listening to this who
haven't gotten started yet can take away from your story?
Yeah, I think the biggest thing is that you need less than you think to get started. You
don't need a business plan. You don't need a degree in software engineering. You don't
need to quit your job. You need two things I would say. One, a computer with internet
connection and some initiative. And with those, I think sky is the limit. I think what each
of us have stored in our brains is probably under leveraged to some extent. And so you
don't need anyone's permission to capitalize on it, but your own.
Any lesson you think? Can you let listeners know where they can go to find out what you're
up to at super or they can download your icons or they can find this crypto boring crypto
token and other things we're working on in the future?
Yeah, I'll actually republish the boring token website. It's boringtoken.com when it's back
up. Super's URL super.so icon website is icons.tr.af. My personal website is tr.af, pretty easy
to remember. And if you want to just learn more about what else I'm publishing, I got
a few projects in the works. The best place is on Twitter at Traff.
James Traff, thanks for coming on the show.
My pleasure, man. It's been great. Thanks, Kortland.
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