What's up, everybody?
This is Court1n from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense
of what it's like to be in their shoes.
How did they get to where they are today?
How did they make decisions, both in their companies and in their personal lives, and
what exactly makes their businesses tick?
And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and
go on to build our own profitable internet businesses.
This is a quick chat episode, which I've been doing once a week for a while now, where I
bring on an IndieHacker from the website, who's been posting milestones about their
project or their business, and we just talk about it for half an hour.
So today, I'm sitting down with Stefan Endres.
Stefan, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you.
You are the co-founder of an agency called International Magic, where you build products
and websites for your clients.
But recently, you started working on an internal product for yourself called Dex.
So tell us about Dex.
What is it and who's it for?
Yeah, so Dex is a presentation app that we sort of kicked off three years ago for ourselves,
really, because we struggled with the same things.
We had the same issues like every other creative office or design office or designer freelancer
has.
We wanted to build a new sort of like system that would allow us to create these presentations
in a much faster way, because sometimes we spend like two, three days on just a simple
presentation or on a pitch.
We just wanted to reduce the time and like make things available, like still today is
like super hard to have your own font and a video working and you just can send it off.
It just doesn't work.
It's super complicated.
I mean, you can use Keynote.
It's super nice.
It works quite nice.
But then you send it off to the client.
The client doesn't have the font and then the whole thing looks like crap.
And that's just one use case, really.
So Dex is really a replacement for or a competitor to PowerPoint on Windows or Keynote on Mac,
these kind of older desktop tools for presentations.
Yeah, they are still relevant, right?
I mean, Ben, our producer just researched how many hours are wasted each year for producing
PowerPoints.
And if we could put that number down, that would be an amazing goal.
So we're going to, it's not only about like how you create them, but also how you store
ideas into your system, because we want to build decks in a way where you can recycle
ideas, but bring them into a new format very quickly.
So almost like you have a new client and he needs something and then you go back and you
think like, oh, we've done something that could work like two years ago on that one
or a half year on this one.
And then you combine all of these old ideas into a new format.
And it's not about showing old ideas or recycling them.
It's like some things just are not used and they fit for the new thing much better than
for the old one.
Yeah.
So you sent a milestone to your ND hackers timeline in June of this year, and you said
that you kicked off working on decks.
So even though you had conceptualized it much earlier, you just kind of started working
on it recently.
Yeah.
And your product page also says that you're making $500 a month from decks already.
Yeah.
What do you think has been the hardest challenge in growing to that point?
I mean, we, so the idea has been in our head, like with my business partner, Adam and I,
for like the last three years since we started International Magic, but you know, from a
day-to-day basis, you just have all these client jobs and with the deadline and you
never really kick off.
And beginning of this year, I said like, man, we got to do this, you know, I'm done talking
about it.
I want to make it.
And then in June, we sort of like had team together with like two super dope developers,
our producer, who could manage the team as well and take care of timelines, et cetera,
because we are bootstrapped.
So we have no funding, nothing.
So we need to split our studio time in half parts, basically.
So one group can work on the client side and one group can work on the decks project.
And yeah, it's been a challenge, but in June, we finally kicked it off and I have almost
done nothing but decks and it's a massive relief from like, you know, when you only
work on client projects, you always have like this made-up timeline, this made-up deadline.
But now when you work on your own kind of thing, you sort of like, you can accelerate
actually like to the fullest amount and sometimes things take a little bit longer, but it's
worth putting in the extra energy.
You know why you're going the extra mile basically.
Totally.
And a lot of people have consultancies or agencies where they're doing work for clients.
And yet they never do this.
They never transitioned to doing their own project.
Part of that's because, you know, when you're getting these regular paychecks from clients,
when you have an actual headcount of people working in your agency, it's hard to give
that up.
It's hard to transition away from that.
And part of it I think is just confidence.
It takes a lot of confidence to believe that you've got a good idea for a product and
that you can make it work and grow it to your profitability.
What gives you that confidence with decks?
I mean, I guess, you know, as I told you before the chat that I've been listening to indie
hackers and figured out that there's a whole community around bootstrapping and indie startups
and all that.
It gave me like sort of the confidence because obviously when you never done anything like
it and you never worked in a massive sort of startup view, maybe you're not confident
enough to kick off.
But you know, when you listen to all these podcasts and then people tell about their
own things, what they worried about, and then they still made it, that gives you confidence
to actually just dive in, surround yourself with everything you can find, like read all
the books, like listen to everything you can, and then educate yourself and then just do
it.
And like, you know, you need to find a great team that you trust.
But then once you made that call, it's just amazing.
Everyone can do it.
Tell me about finding that team, because one of the things you mentioned when you posted
about kicking off decks in June of this year is that you finally have the right people,
you finally have the right team together to really bootstrap this product.
Yeah.
So with International Magic, we've, you know, we are an experienced design, UI design company,
building cutting edge things.
And we often work on projects where we don't have a solution ourselves in the beginning,
but we take on the risk and then we execute by researching how it could work.
And we have such a tight core team of developers who that we've worked since like five or six
years together on a daily basis.
And they, you know, they're around the world, basically, you know, Sweden, I'm here in Munich
with Christophe, and then in London, we have James.
And this year, another developer who's like super strong on backend development work joined
the team and that sort of like gave me the confidence to build something like this.
And I knew that we are now with two developers can execute something as big as this, because
I think when, you know, obviously, in the bootstrapping, you can also execute small
ideas really nicely and really quickly.
Dex is a little bit more advanced in terms of like coding, and you need a proper backend
dude who knows his shit, basically, like you can't if you work with someone else's fires,
you shouldn't mess up.
So you can support this kind of team because you have client work coming in from your agency.
But I wonder what your long term goals are, do you want Dex to replace your client work
or you just always wanted to supplement it?
Yeah, like, I don't want to move out of client work, because that's where always new ideas
come from the outside into your company, you know, when they when when a client comes with
a pitch, or when they ask to do something that inspires you, you know, and that that
keeps like the creative flow going.
And I think we never we never want to quit the client work.
It's just something, Dex is just something that we can build ongoing and iterate ongoing
and make it better.
And that's what I always been been missing.
You know, we've done so much work for, I don't know, like FK twigs, and like, oh, 32 C, and
like quite high caliber, like people, but then there's always like this deadline, and
then there's launch, and then there's like bug fixes, hot fixing, a week of stress, and
then there's silence.
And then that beautiful platform goes slowly into the dark corners of the internet, where
it starts to sort of like, slowly melt away until we flag something and talk to the client
or like, hey, can we work on this again, like we really, you know, there's there's a certain
amount of like, love, and like ideas that, you know, as a creative, you put into these
and you shape you massage them to the very end, you know, and then you don't want to
see them going away and Dex is something where we can, there's no, you know, a software development
and it's never done. And that's something what I'm looking forward to is like building
something that we can constantly iterate, you know, yeah, I've done work for clients
in the past building websites and stuff. And it's tough to have to give up your baby to
put so much work into something to do a great job at it. But then once you're done, it's
theirs and they just take it and they can neglect it or take it down. But on the flip
side, you get to work with pretty cool clients, you're working with twigs, which is awesome.
Yeah, I was just at a twigs concert in Oakland last week.
She is she is absolutely wicked. I mean, so funny story aside, like we the last website
she had is down now, but we did the last website for her and she, you know, obviously she has
a team who takes care of her. But then on the final day, when we finished development,
we met up in London and then we showed her it. And the team sort of gave us the impression
that she's always aware of what we're doing and she loves it and like amazing. And then
she sits down, you know, and I'm like totally shaking behind her like, holy shit, like what
is she going to say? And then she just gets up and gives Adam and myself like a big hug.
And she's like, I totally love this. This is amazing. And I was like, and she said like
I haven't seen this yet. I was like, I was just looking to her team like, okay, he played
that one nicely. But yeah, that was amazing. I mean, she's, she's such a great artist.
I mean, she's, she's like her voice is amazing. She's a performer. She's an athlete. We've
been with her on like a real time internet documentary where we sort of like, she was
rehearsing in Manchester and we sort of like did a real time kind of like installation
on the internet showing her work online. And you know, you hang out with her and you just
see that she's a proper athlete. I mean, she gets up five o'clock in the morning and has
gym sessions everywhere. Like she's a proper, like, yeah, she's amazing.
So Twigs is an example of a client who you do work for for your agency. What kind of
customers do you have for decks? And also what are some of the differences between finding
clients for your agency work and finding customers for your product?
That's a good question. I mean, the finding customer thing for us as a creative studio,
we've been super lucky. We never sort of like try to find people. They, we've been lucky
enough that they find us now, but that, that comes from Adam and I put a lot of like work
before we started out with like international magic in our portfolio. We worked a lot like
on, you know, things for like low budget and put all our energy and like, you know, thing
into it and then you build up your reputation and now international magic is here. And then,
you know, it's like once you, once you have someone like Twigs or O32C, then it's easier
that new people will, will come to you and talk to you. And I mean, last year we joined
management artists. They like sort of like representing us worldwide. And then, you know,
you work for like even bigger clients under the radar a lot of times, but yeah. So that's
one thing, how it works with international magic with decks is the total opposite. And
that's what I'm learning right now as well. Like I'm trying to, to sort of like find all
these spots where I could like place it and not placing it, but where I could find the
spot for decks. So I'm really trying, I put a lot of like thinking into what is, what
is our core audience? And first when I thought about it, oh, it could be everyone needs presentation.
So my audience is like pretty much everyone. And it's like, no, let's, let's start off
with the people that I know best and like the problem that I have myself, like, okay,
let's do this for creatives and like innovators who working, who understand the proposition
of this product. So one and a half weeks ago or almost two weeks ago now, and when we launched
decks, I put it up on site inspire, you can submit a website and it got featured. And
then that hit that sweet spot of people, which is actually our audience, UI designers, creatives,
creative agencies, people who are creatives and are looking for collaborators. So, and
that basically hit our inbox, like crazy. So the first three days is like 900 signups
or something. And like from like quality dudes and, you know, that which helps, you know,
because if you put it first day on a product page, if you put it on Hacker News, everyone
signs up and you're like, okay, now I got, I don't know, maybe when it hits in kicks
in, you have like 5,000 subscriptions. But who is this? That's how I'm trying to find
the people. And you know, we got a little bit time because Dex is still under development.
I mean, we have the enterprise version, which is like a custom installation in it. And we're
going to do all the templating from scratch by hand. But now still, we have like, probably
around three months till the product launches. And that's the amount of time that I have
to find more people getting excited.
I think that's so smart to decide that, yeah, your product can be used by everybody, but
that's not who you want your early target audience to be. You want to hone in on a more
specific group of people, ideally a group of people that you like working with and that
you understand. So that way you can tailor your product's feature set and its design
and its messaging to that group of people and make it something that's truly amazing
for them just to get started. And you can also identify where these people hang out
online. So you posted Dex to site inspire, or you could find other creatives and designers
to use it. And that's better than posting in some general place, we're going to get
all sorts of people who don't really, who your message doesn't really resonate with.
One of the posts that you made to your ND hackers timeline is you posted about putting
up a mailing list so people could join and follow along with Dex. And you referenced
being inspired by this post by Kevin Kelly called 1000 true fans. And I've heard a lot
of people reference this post. So what does it mean to find 1000 true fans? And why did
you find that inspiring?
When you start off like thinking about your own idea and how you could build it, and then
you get overwhelmed because you read so much stuff on the internet, there's so much noise
around it. But then there's, it's kind of a relief post because you read it and it's
like, okay, 1000, this is a tangible number. This is a number I can get, you know, my head
around it. And come on, like 1000 people should be doable for everyone, you know, and like,
that was the inspiration really. And we had a talk in Antwerp for a design festival called
us by night. And I was like, okay, cool, shit. We don't have a product page. Christophe,
we need a subscription page, like a simple signup on the domain, just looking kind of
cool. And we need it now because we have the talk basically in two days. And then we sort
of like introduced it on stage. And we had instant, you know, people signing up like
on that night, like I think it was like 250 people or something. I don't remember exactly
how many, but it you know, it spread out during a couple of days.
Well, you eventually got to 1000 because you posted another milestone to your Andy hackers
timeline about reaching 1000 early adopters for decks. And these are people who had all
given you their email addresses. And he would take in a survey as well. Because you asked
everybody who signed up to fill out a survey, I believe.
Yeah. So basically, once you subscribe on the homepage of decks.app, then you put in
your email and then you get an email back with the double opt in basically confirm your
email. So we can put you on the list. And then you get a welcome message one just more
just transactional email really, where, you know, I'm not gonna like bullshit or something
where it's like, hey, we just need your help. Would you mind like taking that survey? And
to become an early adopter? Because then I know, okay, these guys are real. These are
the people that I really want to show the product the beta as soon as it's ready, they
can contact them, you know. And the funny thing is, if you ask people really will do
it like they will help you people are by default, nice. And they they are like super helpful
and supportive. Like I haven't gotten any email where it says like, Oh, you guys suck.
It's like no, like, it's been it's been amazing so far. And I'm really like, I appreciate
that it gives like so much energy back.
What have you learned from people giving you feedback through this survey?
What I learned about is that usually as like creatives, we assume a lot of times, you know,
it's like when I talk with Adam about a design job is like, hey, this could be a really cool
feature or even decks, you know, hey, let's make this this is like amazing. I want this
feature in, then it's more like it's like emotion driven by emotions, right? Because
it's just a train of thought you have right now and then becomes so big. But if you have
actual data from a survey that 1000 people did, then your sort of like MVP feature list
reorders because people don't care if you have video integration just now. And they just
need import PDF function or something, you know, I'm just making something up. But you
know, we have that MVP sort of like feature list. And that is informed by by the survey
at the end of the day. So yeah, it's good.
Yeah, even if you're building something for yourself, you're not going to guess perfectly
what all of your customers are going to need and their top priorities and feature requests,
you're gonna have blind spots, which is why it makes so much sense to do a survey like
this to talk to your customers. Because no matter how confident you are in your idea
out of the gate, like you're always going to have some things wrong.
Exactly. And they come up with like stuff. I mean, to be honest, we have thought about
a lot of stuff. But sometimes, like it hits you like, yeah, of course, like how could
I miss that feature is like so crucial, so important. Let's put this on the feature list,
let's give it two heads up actually instead of one. So yeah, I mean, that that feedback
is like so valuable, really.
One of the things that differentiates you from a lot of the founders that I've talked
to you is obviously that you've got this agency. So you've been doing a lot of design work
and products for clients for a while now. Do you think that gives you an advantage when
it comes to working on your own product? Dex?
Yes and no. So once you get into this indie bootstrapping thing, right? Everything you
read is like, execute fast, don't care about the design, do it quickly. And coming from
a design perspective, and we create like, you know, we pride ourselves with like nice
experience designs, and we really like polish our things till the very end. So coming from
that side, and building a design tool, a presentation engine that needs to kick ass is quite a big
ask to not care about the design and just do a really quick website. So I thought like,
okay, what do we do? Then we're like, okay, we need to sort of like build that UI framework
that we can roll out. And that saves us time in the end. So what we did is like we did
no Dex, sort of like app development, we sat down for a whole month, and came up with our
UI component framework, sort of, you know, that we use for view, the whole thing is built
in view. And I mean, we even had discussions, hey, let's just use material design from Google,
or Viewtify, you know, which is like the Google material design version for view. And I'm
like, no, like we can't do it because we only, you know, this is the only thing you can really
own like ideas are, you know, everyone has ideas and presentation tool idea is not I
don't own that idea, you know, ideas are free. And a lot of people have the same idea probably.
But what you can own is like the style and your brand. So we wanted to sort of like really
focus on that UI framework. And now, you know, we just made a list, what is what are the
most basic things we need button sliders, drop downs, inputs, like all this stuff and
just spend a whole month doing nothing but this. And then, to be honest, the product
page that is out now, took us from beginning to end, less than two weeks, because I could
support Kristoff and James with with coding because it's more like Lego, you just plug
in the thing from your framework and you just plug it in and then you style it. You know,
you don't have to do any styling anymore. It just just works out of the box, basically.
So this is the most the biggest mission because you don't see a lot of like progress in that
month, you know, you're building this encapsulated in your little bubble. But then once you use
it, you, you save so much time really. And now, even if the product has issues with functionality,
that framework never changes. It's still the same design.
I love your point that you can't own an idea. Anybody can come along with the same idea
as you and you can't really stop them. It's not your property. What you can do is differentiate
on things like branding and your design and like your unique relationship. Yeah, the customer
you're targeting and what you know about them. And those are all the things that you guys
are focused on. So instead of throwing away the advantage that you have as a designer,
so you can move faster, just have crappy design, you're really doubling down on that in order
to turn it into an even bigger advantage. And it's risky to do that. I mean, if I talk
to a developer on here, they're probably going to focus way too much on code to the exclusion
of other things. And if I talk to a marketer, they're going to focus too much on the marketing.
And if I talk to a designer, you know, they're probably going to focus too much on the design.
But at the same time, you know, if you can make that a strength, then it's not a bad
thing. And your website looks amazing. I mean, I'm looking at it right now and it looks
better than the websites of a lot of VC funded companies. And this is just kind of a scrappy
bootstrapped project you guys have started. That's the goal.
Do it, do it, do it without the angels, basically.
You can do it yourself. Like, honestly, I'm a designer, but I also love to code. I do
a lot of front end, like all the polishing, you know, the pixel pushing till it like feels
right. You just have to make it feel right. And you know when it's right, because it feels
amazing. When you scroll down, it just like has the right amount of like, you know, white
space or whatever. This is a big learning curve. I mean, regarding the idea that you
can't own idea, I actually need to give a big shout out to Peter levels that who talked
about his book make that I read, obviously, because it's like hands on is there's no there's
no yoga thoughts and dreaming about the next Tesla, the next SpaceX is more like, no, just
go do it and do it nicely. And like, well, but do it fast. And he said that an idea is
like, I don't know, worth 10 bucks. But it's about the execution, how good you make it.
So even if you have like a not so great idea, if you do it amazingly great, then you can
still make a good living or a fortune probably out of it.
Stefan, you've been working as a designer and now developer for many years, you've been
working for clients and working on your own product. What are some of the things you've
learned during this time that you think other fledgling indie hackers would benefit from
knowing?
So the first one is like, if you don't start off with yourself, and be a solar founder,
really concentrate on the team, keep the energy levels up on the team, surround yourself,
read everything you can, listen to every podcast, I mean, YouTube, you know, it's free, like
it's free education, you can, I mean, it's not free, they get your data and all that
analytics. But you know what I mean, like, you can just educate yourself. And I do that,
you know, I'm married, I have a daughter, so my time is also that I have like nine hours
a day, my wife giving me extra an hour every day, but I have nine hours a day to work.
But once they are in bed, like I go back and just read and like, do the extra amount of
work that's necessary. Otherwise, you're not gonna get anywhere, I guess. So you have to
put in the hours. There's no shortcut. And I would say in general, learn how to code
because that informs your thinking and your design as well, because you're solving problems
and yeah, you're just thinking about functions.
All right, Stefan Andres, thank you so much for coming on the show. Can you tell listeners
where they can go to learn more about what you're up to with Dex?
Yeah, just either you follow us on Indie Hackers, or you just go to Dex.app, Dex with a double
K.
All right, thanks so much, Stefan.
Thanks for having me, Cortland. Thanks.
Listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, I would appreciate it if you gave it some love
on Twitter. Just find me. I'm twitter.com slash CS Allen. And I will tweet it about
this episode. So feel free to like it or share it. Also, if you're interested in coming on
the podcast yourself for a quick chat with me about what you're working on, go to Indie
Hackers.com slash milestones. You can post a milestone about any sort of accomplishment
or achievement or feature you're working on for your app. And what I do is at the end
of the week, I go through and look at the top upvoted milestones and invite those posters
onto the podcast. So once again, that's Indie Hackers.com slash milestones. Thanks for listening
and I will see you next time.