What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process.
And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and
the strategies they're taking advantage of, so the rest of us can do the same.
Perfect call.
Welcome back to the show.
Thanks so much.
It's an absolute pleasure to be on a second time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You were here in, I think, December 2019, just before the pandemic, and we were talking
about your business, Feedback Panda, which you had bootstrapped to something like $60,000
a month in revenue pretty fast.
You and your girlfriend had done it together, and then you ended up selling it.
And then since then, I don't know, people can go in one of two directions once they
sell their company, they can just disappear and fall off the face of the earth, which
sometimes happens, and I have no idea what happens to them.
Or they can be like you, or I've seen you literally everywhere, all over Twitter, all
over IndieHackers, all over your blog, and my inbox, and just doing all sorts of stuff
since then.
Yeah.
It's been a wild two years.
And I got to say, the moment we sold the company, I fell into this whole void of not knowing
what to do.
I had the choice of not doing anything, and doing something, or doing whatever, essentially.
Because we sold the company to be financially secure, to de-risk our wealth, essentially,
and then that really helped.
So we didn't have to do anything.
But I immediately went and tried to play World of Warcraft.
That was my go-to at that point.
Because many, many years before, I'd started playing, and I kind of stopped even going
to university for that game.
I dropped out of university because of World of Warcraft twice.
That's my dedication to end-game raid content right there.
So I thought, hey, I mean, now I've made it.
That was kind of the thought that I had at that point.
And now I could just do whatever I want.
And what do I want?
Well, just continue doing what I did before.
And I started playing World of Warcraft.
I downloaded the game.
I started playing.
And it kind of got boring within a couple days.
Oh, wow.
It got so crushingly boring within a couple days.
And here I was thinking that I could just go back to what gave me joy before.
I had the community in World of Warcraft, this is kind of where I started learning how
to speak English in a conversational setting because I'm German.
And we don't have that much opportunity to speak English in a setting with other people
where stuff really happens.
Like, when you have to kill that dragon, you better communicate clearly.
So that was really nice.
But I didn't find a community that was good enough.
I didn't find content that was good enough because I noticed that I had no passion for
the game.
All the passion that I had before, before I started bootstrapping businesses or doing
stuff like that, all that passion was gone and was replaced by another passion that I
only realized in retrospect, and that was helping people, that was serving people.
Because with feedback Panda, we had these thousands of online English teachers that
we supplied with the tool that made a difference in their day, like every single day made a
big difference for them.
And I was able to talk to them through intercom, customer service chats, and build relationships
with those people.
And I didn't even know that that was the source of my passion.
But the moment we sold the company, the moment we handed everything over, our customers,
our jobs, you know, and everything, that was gone.
And that's when I jumped into writing, that's when I started my blog and started writing
about one topic that is SaaS or bootstrapping related every week.
And I'm still doing this.
I think I'm at week 87 at this point, uninterrupted, just well, you know what it means to do uninterrupted
content for many, many years, right?
There's this kind of threshold, and once you're over it, you just continue doing it automatically.
It's like the runner's high or something, you know, like you run for like the first
mile or two, and it's awful.
And then after that, you just like hit some sort of cliff where you just don't care anymore.
And you could just go from mile after mile.
Absolutely.
It's kind of, I started newsletter and a podcast myself because I wanted to have an accountability
system because by nature, I'm kind of lazy.
When I look at stuff, like, you know, I'm one of those people that just gets up super
late and tries to avoid work until it's too late to do work, you know?
And then, yeah, I needed a system because I knew, hey, I'm starting this blog.
I want to commit to releasing information to people who might need it on their own journeys
who may want to build a business, who may want to sell a business, you know, all these
little things.
And I knew that within a couple of weeks, if I didn't have a system in place, I just
stop and play another online game or something, or try to go back to World of Warcraft.
I don't know.
And that's why I set up the newsletter.
That's why I set up the podcast.
And the moment I had one subscriber, I knew I had to deliver.
Every week from now on, as long as I have at least one subscriber, somebody expects
something of me.
And that really helped.
It's fascinating that, like, this process of starting a business that actually helped
people and also, like, made you money and also gave you, like, this purpose in the world
because you're, like, helping people solve a problem kind of ruined the things I used
to give you enjoyment.
Yeah.
And you could play games for hours and hours, but then you suddenly realize, like, that
spark is missing.
And this game that hasn't changed at all is suddenly boring.
And I talk a lot about, you know, the kind of things that motivate people.
A lot of research has pretty much confirmed that, like, when it comes to work and the
things that you do, it's having, like, mastery and being able to be, like, really good at
what you do, which you could do with both the business and video games.
It's having autonomy, which is basically nobody telling you what to do, which, again, you
can have with business and video games.
But then the last part of it is purpose.
And, like, it's really hard to have purpose if you're playing video games all the time.
You know, it's like, what's the point?
You know, you're earning, like, this virtual currency or virtual points or whatever, but
it doesn't really matter.
And when you actually start a company or you're doing something, you can see how that's providing,
like, help for people in the world.
And that last sort of puzzle piece fits in.
It's like, oh, shit.
Like, I've been missing this and I didn't even realize I was missing it.
And so every time somebody says something that, like, to, like, I don't know, a younger
version of Cortland would have sounded like cliche or cheesy, like, I just like helping
people.
Yeah, because it feels so good and it feels, like, so much better than doing something
that might be fulfilling otherwise, but that doesn't necessarily give you that purpose.
And I feel like the culmination of all this stuff you've been doing, all this blogging
and podcasting and tweeting you've been doing is kind of this latest book you've written.
It's called The Embedded Entrepreneur, How to Build an Audience-Driven Business.
Why do you think people need to read this book?
And who needs to read this book?
Well, there are way too many founders out there that go product first.
They have an idea.
They go idea first, right?
They want to build something really cool.
And then they build it and then they look at it and they try to find the market, try
to find people who want to buy it, but they've actually built a solution looking for a problem.
And you see this every single day on Product Hunt.
There's a couple of products that do really, really well.
And then there's the long tail of products that have three or four upvotes at the end
of the day.
It's heartbreaking.
And it's really heartbreaking.
And I suffer for each of those founders who put in weeks or months of work into that product
just to see it flop because nobody cares.
And I wrote a book because I want to show to people that product first or idea first
can be reversed.
And you can actually start with who do I want to serve?
Where are they?
How can I find out what they actually suffer from?
What problems do they have?
What are the critical problems that allow me to build something that they actually have
a budget for?
And then how can I become a source of reputation in their community so that they actually trust
me and don't just shove me away like all those other people who market in their communities?
That's what the book is about.
Yeah.
And there's such a huge need for this because I also run into a ton of people, not just
entrepreneurs but anyone who wants to create something for other people, anyone who wants
to generate passive income, people starting newsletters or podcasts or YouTube channels
or blogs or who want to be creators on Twitch or OnlyFans or Patreon.
And they'll get started.
They'll do exactly what you're saying.
They'll just have an idea.
They'll say, I'm going to create this.
And they'll put it out into the world.
And then it's just crickets.
And no one's buying it.
No one's reading it.
No one's watching it.
And it just seems so frustrating for them to figure out, OK, why aren't the numbers
going up?
And it feels impossible.
And then they look at the people who are succeeding.
And they look at why and read their stories.
And half the time, it feels like they cheated.
It's like, oh, they had a really big audience already.
I talked to Ayla, who's one of the top 0.08% creators on OnlyFans, and I was like, how
did you get so successful?
She's making $50,000 and $100,000 a month.
And she's like, oh, my first month, I made $13,000.
But that's because they already had an audience on Reddit.
She already knew the people she wanted to serve and the problems that they had.
And she had a direct connection with these people.
And so by the time she joined OnlyFans, she was already set up for success.
And I think the average person who doesn't have that foundation, that seems impossible
for me.
It seems like cheating.
And they just give up.
And I guess maybe the reason they need a book like yours is because it teaches them how
to do that for themselves.
Yeah.
I completely agree that it looks like cheating, but it's not.
And I think Product Hunt is a similar example.
So I launched a book a week ago on Product Hunt.
And it went to number one immediately because I just posted on Twitter, hey, people, it's
on Product Hunt.
And I have an audience there on Twitter, 20-some thousand people.
And I have a global audience, too, because currently I'm in Berlin.
So I'm kind of in between India and the United States, which are two gigantic startup communities
in many ways.
So my Indian friends helped me in the morning.
And throughout the day, more people from Europe.
And then the Americas came in and uploaded my product there, which was a book, which
is not often launched in Product Hunt.
Usually you have a lot of interesting SaaS projects or just interesting stuff on Product
Hunt that is not necessarily an info product.
But I stayed at number one for the whole day because I had people all over the world who
wanted to help me and help me succeed.
You know, and then look at somebody who doesn't have this audience and they maybe put in more
effort than I into their product.
And now it's ranked four or five because they don't have the people.
It feels like cheating.
But the whole point is Product Hunt is an audience amplification tool.
It's not a product quality tool.
That's what a review page would be.
But Product Hunt really is if you have the people that will amplify your product, you're
going to rank high.
And the same is for Noah who launched his potion.so just two days prior to me.
He's also Noah Bragg is a big player in the startup community because he's very actively
building in public and he's sharing everything.
Like obviously that creates an audience and that creates an audience of people who actually
want to help you when you need them to help you.
So I've written this for people who told me what they needed to know.
I've shared my manuscript for the book with hundreds of indie hackers and they helped
me collaboratively to make it better.
And everything about the book is audience driven, like even the cover was essentially
picked by the audience.
So I wanted to show people with the product itself how products like this can succeed.
And I guess a launch date that was way beyond my expectations and the number one Product
Hunt ranking kind of show that this might be a good way to do it.
It's interesting you mentioned that people like us, like engineers, people who code things,
we tend to be a little bit product obsessed.
We start a company, we just think about all the code that's going to go into it.
But literally everybody I talked to starting a company for the first time has the same
sort of affliction.
They think about the thing they have to create, the thing they have to build.
You talk about a book, they immediately start thinking about the cover for the book and
the title for the book and all the words that are going to go into the book.
But they don't think about all the sort of the invisible part of that iceberg beneath
the surface that nobody really sees, which is like all the research that goes into figuring
out like who this book is for, who this product is for, et cetera.
And I think it's just like there's this principle in psychology called availability bias, where
essentially we're just biased towards things that are easy to see and easy to remember.
And whenever we're looking at other stories of people succeeding, like what do we see?
We see their app, we see their book, we see their Twitter account, but we don't see the
research, we don't see the very first step they took, we don't see how they got started.
And so when we go to start those own endeavors ourselves, like we just don't plan for that
kind of stuff.
And it's the biggest trap in entrepreneurship, I think.
I think the best thing that anyone can do, let's try to figure out how to peel behind
the curtain of the people they're inspired by and try to figure out like, what did they
do to succeed that they're not talking about?
What are like the less flashy, less visible parts of success and like, how do people get
started in the early days, these first steps they took that nobody sees?
And hopefully this podcast is doing some good work to help people uncover these steps.
And then there's another thing, and I'm so happy to see this becoming less of a problem
and more people actually looking into this.
And that is the stereotype that engineering people or people from a technical background
are not good people people, you know, like everybody told me when I was studying computer
science at the university, ah, you're a geek, you're a nerd, just try not to talk to people
too much.
Or even when I was actually employed as a software engineer in companies, they would
try to get every visitor to the office as far away from the engineers so that we better
not get the opportunity to talk to them, scare them away.
And if as long as this notion still exists in our minds, that as a technical person,
we shouldn't be talking to people, we're gonna have a really hard time talking to people
before we start our technical work, we will never be able to go to our potential customers,
go to our prospective audience members of the future and ask them, hey, I'm just really
interested in what you're doing.
Can you explain to me how they looks like in your life?
Or this seems to be a problem that you have encountered in the past, how are you currently
solving this?
We are not asking these questions, because we're afraid that they're gonna think, ah,
the nerd is talking to us, let's not talk to them anymore.
It's kind of funny, but it makes me super sad because I see all these super talented
engineers limiting themselves, because they think that this is actually true.
And I used to think I'm an introvert, just trying to make this clear here.
I used to think that I'm introverted, because I didn't like parties.
And I don't like hanging out with people to talk about stuff that I don't really relate
to.
Yeah, put me in front of people that actually care about the same things that I care about.
I'm extremely extroverted, because there's a resonance between those people and me.
If you care about what problems people have, don't they don't have to be software engineers
like you, there can be any particular audience out there.
If you want to solve their problem, you will have this resonance with those people.
So don't limit yourself to thinking that you shouldn't talk to people, you should just
code.
But coding is like the fourth step in building a business.
The first one is figuring out who to serve, then what you need to serve them with, then
how you can actually serve them in a way that fits into their lives, and then what can you
serve them with?
And then you start coding.
But that's like weeks or months into this whole process.
I would love to see more people doing this.
Michelle Hansen, you had her on the podcast too, she's currently writing a book called
Deploy Empathy, and she's working on this whole idea of being able to talk to customers
and how to do it right.
And she's been recently very active and sharing sources on Twitter about how this whole notion
of engineers not knowing how to talk to people is actually crap.
It's not right, it's wrong.
It's actually the worst of that.
Engineers are usually so problem minded that if you let them talk to people with the right
guidelines and frameworks, they're going to be much more effective at actually sourcing
information from them.
Well, I have a million questions to ask you about that, and about your book in general.
Why write a book?
How much money can a book make?
What is the right approach to launching a book?
And also, how do you choose what goes in your book?
The very beginning of your book, actually, the very first couple pages, you start off
with a dedication, you say, for my grandmother, Brigitte, thank you for teaching me empathy
and how to listen.
And then right after that, you've got a quote from Naval Ravikant, which says, most of life
is a search for who and what needs you the most.
Why did you put these two things in the beginning of your book?
And what did you learn from your grandmother about empathy and listening that most people
don't understand?
The initial name of the book was Audience First.
That was the project name that I had in mind when I started the whole thing.
And I changed the name later because people were kind of confused by what that meant because
they had the notion of Audience First that I didn't have, and I kind of battled it out
on Twitter, and I didn't want to say I wanted my audience to determine what the book should
be about and everything about the book.
So when they said, hey, this title doesn't resonate with what you're actually writing
about, I have a different understanding of that, then I changed the title, obviously,
it's an Audience First book.
And if my audience tells me Audience First is not the right title for this, well, I'm
going to change it.
It was a very clear moment for me where I thought, okay, I'm not going to fight the
people who are going to buy my book, I'm going to read my book, I'm going to go with them.
And that was something that was a big and strong thing in my family, always.
My grandma and my grandpa, they were entrepreneurs as well, they had been working in official
functions all their life, and then they were in East Germany.
So East Germany kind of collapsed and a whole new system came up.
So they retired earlier, a little earlier than they should have or would have needed
to.
And they started a little business selling crystal vases and crystal glass and all these
kinds of things to people at Christmas markets.
That was when I was really young, and they took me to those markets and put me in the
booth.
And I was the only person, I think at age eight or nine, that spoke a little bit of
English.
I'd read tiny phrases back then.
And I was a really small kid, maybe 10-ish, 11-ish or something.
So I was in the booth and I was trying to communicate to these Japanese tourists that
this vase is like $10 or something.
It was pretty hilarious.
They just had me involved in the business.
And they taught me to listen to people and to interact with people in a graceful way,
trying to put myself in their shoes when they talk to me, when they get upset about something,
and try to figure out how you can make this a win-win situation for each other.
And then there's countless other examples in my personal life on how my grandma was
always there for everybody in the family, listening, observing what they needed, and
only then acting later.
And that's the impetus behind the book.
And then while the quote goes into the same direction, there are people out there who
are uniquely suited for your intersection of skills and experiences.
You have something in your life that is so uniquely yours that is perfect for them if
you go to them and help them with something.
And I believe that it's much better to find the people first and figure out how you can
match their needs than to build something and try to find somebody who you could stuff
it into.
And maybe to answer the question, why write a book?
Because I like it, honestly.
Writing a book is the most liberating and enjoyable thing that I've ever done.
Also, there's no deadlines because I'm self-publishing and I'm writing for an audience that is appreciative
no matter when I release, I wanted to have freedom in my life.
We've sold the company to get to financial security and to scheduling security.
I didn't want to have anybody tell me what to put in my calendar anymore.
I wanted to be the only person that has control over my calendar.
And I have that by writing.
I write when I write.
I write when I feel like it.
I write when I find inspiration.
And when I don't find inspiration, well, then I don't write.
I'm my own boss in that regard.
And that's why I wanted to continue doing this.
And I saw people really enjoyed my first book.
And I thought, if they enjoyed that, it seems to be good enough to continue using this particular
medium as the medium of expression for what I had to say.
Yeah.
I was talking to Rob Fitzpatrick, who wrote The Mom Test, which is such a useful sort
of guide and handbook for learning how to interview customers.
Because it's so easy when you're asking people, like, what do you think about my idea to ask
the wrong question?
And everyone's like, yeah, I think it's great.
And then you spend a bunch of time building it and they don't use it.
And his book is done super well because you know that if you have that particular problem,
you need to interview customers about your idea, that's the right handbook to go to.
It's going to tell you exactly what to do.
It's nice.
It's compact.
And he's done really well.
I was talking to him the other day.
I think he sold 100,000 copies and made $500,000 in royalties.
People underestimate how successful you can be with the book.
And I think your book, the way you structured it, is kind of the same.
You basically say in your book, this is not something to necessarily convince you that
you need to build an audience.
Rather, it's something to serve as like the guidebook, the handbook, to tell you exactly
how to go about doing it depending on what step you're on.
And you've kind of even broken your book down into like, I think five sections where you
say, okay, hey, are you on this step?
Read this section.
If you're further along than this, skip ahead to this section.
So you don't even need to read the book linearly from beginning to end.
You can kind of like match to where you are.
And so I think the five sections are, number one, you are a brand new entrepreneur.
You have no idea what you want to do, and you're looking for a starting point.
You've got a section called the audience-driven moment, which we've kind of talked about,
which is just kind of like explaining to people that like you kind of have to start by finding
people to serve.
And like, that should be your starting point, not just by building something.
And then step two is kind of discovering the right audience to serve.
So you know that you want to be an entrepreneur.
You know that like you want to start with the audience, but like, how do you figure
out which group of people you want to create something for?
Step three is, if you already know who you're going to serve, you need to do audience expiration
and figure out, okay, what are you going to build for them, et cetera, like step four
is like problem discovery.
Okay.
You already know that you are like into, like you're embedded in this audience and you're
a part of that community.
How do you know what problems to solve for them?
Like how do you know what solutions to provide?
And then step five is, okay, you're already working on a problem that you've already validated
this audience needs.
How do you build up a following and how do you like build up, you know, that mailing
list or the Twitter account or the blog or whatever it is, they'll help you communicate
with this audience and like sell to them and deliver to them.
I think that's from my memory, like seems to be kind of what the organization of the
book is.
I'm blown away by how succinctly you could just like summarize this.
Thanks so much.
That's awesome.
Well, it's super well organized.
And it's like the steps all make sense because they kind of align with like what I think
an entrepreneur should do.
So it's like a perfect organization and way to organize your book.
And I love books that don't necessarily need to be read cover to cover.
I love manuals where I can just flip to it and open it and be like, okay, here's my checklist.
So I don't have to go from memory.
I can read exactly like what I need to do because I'm at the step in my business.
Yeah.
And that was that was not really my idea.
That's I think the magic of this book is that all of this was extremely driven by the people
that actually wanted to read it.
So I involved people on Twitter from the first day when I tweeted about the fact I want to
write a book about this particular topic.
What do you want me to write about?
Because here are the couple of things that I think are interesting.
And now you are the people are going to read it.
So why just as well tell me what you associate with this whole audience first audience building
term.
And then I put a little landing page up and put my outline on there, put a comment field
beneath it and said, hey, is something missing?
Send me something.
Send me whatever question or topic you want me to put in the book and I'll put it in the
outline.
And people just stick.
I got bombarded with questions and new things that I didn't even think of ever the specific
questions that I had maybe encountered somewhere but never thought about putting into the book.
So within days and weeks, the outline just grew and grew and grew.
At the same time, I had a little convert kid capture their email capture there telling
people, hey, the moment I'm writing the manuscript, I'm going to involve you and people sign up.
I think I had 550 people signed up to my alpha reader list and I involved every single one
of them because I started writing the book on January 1st, 2021.
I finished writing the first manuscript on January 31st, 2021.
So I took a whole month every single day writing as much as I could because I wanted to get
it done.
I wanted to get the first manuscript out there so people could actually change it and make
it better.
And it had a couple sections that are now not in the book anymore.
And it had a couple of sections that were much longer than they should have been.
And it certainly didn't have skippable chapters.
It was different.
So once I was done with the manuscript, I went to a product.
And it's great that you mentioned Rob because Rob also is the co-founder behind HelpThisBook.com
because that's the thing.
If you write a really good book like Rob and then you write another really good book like
Rob and Devon, they wrote the Workshop Survival Guide together.
And that is also a successful, very recommendable book.
Then you consider, well, maybe we can build the tools for ourselves and others that want
to have books with large beta reader audiences because that's what Rob was doing while he
wrote The Mom Test.
He had people read through the drafts and make them better.
That's what Rob and Devon did for the Workshop Survival Guide.
And that's what they're currently doing for a book called Write Useful Books, which is
in itself the guide to writing books like The Mom Test or The Workshop Survival Guide.
There's a lot of meta and a lot of recursion whenever it comes to, I guess, serial entrepreneurs
like Rob who do a thing and they notice something and then they build something for that.
And then they notice something and they build something for that.
It's not surprising that he's now writing about writing good books when all he's been
doing in the past is writing good books.
But they also built HelpThisBook.
And that's a platform where you put your manuscript and then you can invite people to it and they
can highlight sections, they can put comments in there and all that.
And that's what I did.
I went to HelpThisBook.
I put my manuscript on there, imported it from a Google Doc and then it was right there.
People could go through it and highlight it.
And I have a couple of screenshots on my Twitter where there's just red lines and blue lines
and green lines all over the manuscript.
There's not a single piece of text that is not highlighted and commented on in some way
because I invited batches of people and there was like 20 people one day, 15 people the
next day and everybody had something to say.
It's such a smart way to write a book and like the internet age where it's like it can
be collaborative and like you probably want a lot of people in to like the behind the
scenes process because like not only is that going to make them sort of build more trust
and affinity for you and want to get the book when it comes out because they are a part
of that, but you're also just going to have like a much, much better book at the end of
the day because they're going to point things out that you might have forgotten.
And unlike a blog or even like a podcast episode where you can kind of like retroactively come
back and fix it if you want to, like a book, once it's out, it's out.
You kind of got to get it right the first time.
So you might as well engage and involve everybody that you can in that process.
I'm talking to a couple of other authors on another podcast.
I'm sorry with my buddy Julian next week.
We're talking to James Clear who wrote Atomic Habits and Mark Manson who wrote The Subtle
Art of Not Giving a Fuck, which combined I think like have made multiple hundreds of
millions of dollars in sales.
Like they're like the biggest of the biggest books.
They're just like on the shelf at every store you could find.
I'm curious like in your estimation as someone who's written a book, you mentioned like some
books are very recommendable.
What do you think makes books super successful?
What do you think differentiates a book like The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, which
is like top shelf and like a book that never goes anywhere, nobody reads it, barely makes
you know $1,000 in sales.
There was an interesting conversation on Twitter a couple of days ago.
It was between timely books and timeless books.
And it was pretty interesting just to see like these two different concepts.
A timeless book is like Atomic Habits.
It's something that is always true.
No matter if we're coding with PHP or Ruby or you know, it doesn't like technology or
whatever just the current big thing du jour doesn't matter.
Like this book will always be true because humans are always humans.
But it's also timely because it also gives you actionable advice.
And there are books out there that are timely yet not timeless because they are super actionable
but only within the context of some particular technology or fad or something that has a
beginning and an end date.
And there are lots of books that are specific to a certain topic because the people who
wrote them are experts in that specific topic.
And people like James Clear are one in a million experts because he is an expert on many levels.
Like he is a generalist, a specialist in many, many fields as well.
He's T-shaped but multiple T's.
He's like T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T shaped or something like that.
He's just a really prolific thinker.
You know, that is what makes him special.
And that's why he produces these kinds of books.
And other people are just T-shaped or just I-shaped.
They're really, really good at one thing.
And then it's hard to find an audience of equally I-shaped or T-shaped people that
are fitting this.
So I would say, yeah, timeless books are books that are both actionable and mind-blowing
because they introduce new paradigms.
They introduce new concepts that actually shift public opinion.
Seth Godin always says change culture.
Those books change culture.
A book on Ruby 3.4 and how to implement – I don't want to diss Ruby books, obviously.
They need to be written too.
But the scope of impact that these books have is just not as high and that is reflected
in sales numbers, in rankings, in how they're appreciated by whom they are appreciated.
Every founder I know has James Clear's book in their shelf, almost every founder.
But then there are books that only one of them has.
And I have books that nobody else owns.
You don't need to appeal to everybody, which would also be something that Seth Godin is
always talking about, right?
You want to have your minimum viable audience.
It just turns out that if you talk about habits and you are James Clear or near et al., you
get a lot of people that are interested in this topic because they're so fundamental
to everything we do.
Right.
Because those books do appeal to everybody.
Everybody thinks about habits and it doesn't matter if you're a founder or if you are,
I don't know, like stay at home dad, right?
You still think about habits.
They still affect your life in some way and you're going to want to read like what the
foremost expert on habits has to say about that.
Or Mark Manson's book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck.
Everybody to some degree wishes they could give less of a fuck about things, you know,
wishes they could care a little bit less.
But it's so hard to write a book that has that mass broad appeal and also have the clout
to support it.
Like if I tried to write a giant book on habits, like nobody would read it because like who
am I?
Like why do they care what I have to say about habits?
So what I want to do is make this episode as actionable as possible.
I don't want to give away everything in your book, but if you don't mind, we can go through
these five sections.
I think we've covered the first one a lot.
So maybe we'll go through the other four sections and try to extract something actionable.
So somebody who's trying to build a business can, I don't know, take away something they
can do today and get to the next step.
So maybe we'll start with the audience discovery section of your book.
You've got a good quote at the top of it.
So there are many fish in the sea, but never let a good one swim away.
So this section is all about, okay, there's lots of different audiences that you could
potentially serve.
There's lots of different groups of people out there that you might want to work with
that you might want to make your audience.
How do you choose the right one?
What tribe should you go after?
It's really fairly straightforward.
First you become aware of the people you could potentially help.
You go through your life, you consider what am I good at professionally?
What kind of audiences am I already serving in my job?
What audiences am I in contact with in my job?
For me, it was like I'm a software engineer, I'm a writer, I'm a bootstrap founder, I am
an indie hacker, interested in computers and IT, I'm also a podcaster, and I'm a newsletter
author, I'm a newsletter sponsorship interests person, you know, like there's all these little
groups of people that I'm already part of professionally.
So put them in a list and then you look into your personal life.
What hobbies do you have?
How do you do?
Are you a coffee aficionado?
Do you like certain kinds of beverages more than others?
Do you know a lot about that?
Are you a sports fan for a particular sport or for a particular team?
Do you care about those people?
Do you interact with them?
Do you have certain pets or do you have certain interests and you go into your family?
What are the other people in my family doing?
Are they like butchers or is there a plumber in there or a nurse, you know, all these things
and you put them in a list.
And you have all these things that you could potentially serve in the list.
And the whole idea behind this is it's supposed to be a data-driven approach.
We want to make smart choices as entrepreneurs that are based on actual data.
Well, now let's do this because once you have this list of, I don't know, 30, 50 different
audiences, you can start ranking them.
And you can look into four different rankings, one to five each, and then you just add them
up and you get a final ranking.
And the first one is affinity.
How much do I like those people?
Because I noticed one thing when I did my list.
On my list were tax advisors and lawyers and notaries.
And as much as I know that they have a lot of money to spend on stuff, bureaucracy is
just not my thing, you know?
And I don't want to spend time with people who are so holed up in bureaucracy for the
next five to ten years because that's how long businesses usually take to be successful.
I don't want to spend my time with lawyers for ten years.
And I'm sorry to every single lawyer that's listening right now.
I love you.
But I just don't want to build something for you.
And there are people out there who do want to build for lawyers, who love the bureaucracy
and the laws and the regulations, but like, you should not start that business if that's
not your thing.
And like you said, like, you're going to be working on this business probably for five
or ten years if it goes well.
And in my experience, the thing that controls your happiness the most as a founder is exactly
what you're saying.
Affinity.
Do you actually like the people that are your customers?
Because if you don't, you're going to build a business that you really don't like running.
And if you do, you're going to build a business that's an absolute joy to run, even if you're
not making that much money.
Yeah, exactly.
But you will make a lot of interesting connections.
You will find a lot of friends along the way and make partnerships that will last you way
beyond this actual business experience.
So that's what affinity does.
And what affinity does once you rank is it obviously cuts out a couple of these audiences
already.
Like there's some that have just like a zero out of five or one out of five.
And you know, okay, no matter how much opportunity is in there, no matter how much budget and
how big that market is, I'm not going to build anything for that.
So they're always going to rank low.
So I either cut them off or you just continue ranking it.
It's a game of just trying to feel how you resonate with this audience.
And once you've done that, you go into opportunity, which is really looking into each of these
particular audiences, these potential industries, and just see what's going on there.
Are there interesting problems?
Are there a lot of SaaS businesses, if you want to build the SaaS businesses?
Or are there a lot of info products in there already, where you can see that there's a
certain demand, a certain pull from that market for solutions.
And you rank from one to five as well.
You just go into each of these communities for like 10, 15 minutes, look at the things
that are already there, the big competitors, the big players, and into these communities,
check out what are people talking about?
Are there recommendations or stuff that people talk about when it comes to the kind of business
that you want to build?
And you rank.
And then you do the same thing for appreciation, which is essentially, do people have a budget?
Because if you are a fan of craft beer, you will probably spend a lot of your money on
craft beer.
It's unlikely that you're going to spend a lot of your money on a craft beer SaaS, or
something like that, right?
So the appreciation for your product in that market, unless you're brewing a beer, is probably
not going to be a five out of five.
And you go through each of your audiences and you look for appreciation for the existence
of budget in the existing audiences.
And then the last step, once you've ranked those, is really look at market size.
Is the market big enough to support a business like mine and a couple others?
And is it small enough not to immediately invite gigantic competitors?
Craft beer?
You don't want to go against AB InBev.
You don't want to go against Anheuser-Busch, the people behind Bud Light.
They are going to branch out and they have been branching out into craft beer with like
subsidiaries already.
So if you want to create a beer, you really want to be probably be very local or a beer
related product, you want to make it very specific so that you don't fall into competition
with these companies immediately.
Let's recap this audience discovery session because it's a super actionable tip.
And it sounds like a lot, but again, if you're going to spend months or years on a business,
like this exercise doesn't need to take that long.
Maybe it's even just like a few hours of just doing a little bit of planning so that you
don't waste like years of your life doing the wrong thing.
And so step one is awareness.
You just look at your personal life, your professional life, your hobbies, your interests,
your friends' hobbies and interests in social groups, and you just like list all of the
different audiences and communities and interests that you have that other people also share
with you.
And then step two is you just rank these things.
So you rank them by affinity.
How much do you like these people?
You rank them by opportunity.
You know, are these people actually spending money on interesting problems?
You rank them by appreciation.
You know, do these people care about these problems enough to actually have a budget
and spend, you know, a decent amount of money on them and then by market size?
How many people are actually in this audience?
And at the end of this process, you'll be able to see, okay, these are the audiences
that not only am I already a part of or that I really like, but that score high in like
all these categories.
And these are the people that I should probably serve with my business.
And so then now that you've got this audience, you're like, okay, this one scored higher
than everybody else.
I'm super jazzed about this audience.
Of course, most people with this step, most people will have skipped this first step.
They will have just started creating or building something.
But let's say they did this.
Now a lot of people are going to have, they're just going to be itching to start building
like, okay, I know who my audience is.
I'm just going to start creating something.
But for you, like that's still too early to do that.
You have this extra step that's called audience expiration, where you need to actually explore
this audience that you've chosen.
What does that process look like?
And why is it important?
So the idea is you go into the communities where your audience is already hanging out
right now, and then you shut up.
That is what I would like people to do, because many people go into these communities and
immediately start advertising stuff.
And that is the worst thing you could do if you just joined a community somewhere where
people are trying to help each other and support each other is to become a marketer.
Like, I coined the phrase, dwell, don't sell.
Just go in there and be there and stop promoting.
Because what you want to do is actually observe people, understand them.
You want to look into this particular group of people in this community and see first
of what are they doing?
What do they care about?
How do they communicate about this?
What are the things that are problematic to them?
What are the problems that they talk about?
What are the solutions that they talk about?
What tools are they using?
What language are they using?
And it's not going to be a thing of a couple of days.
Maybe that's one of the most important things to talk about here.
This is a long-term project.
You're trying to build a business that leads to your financial stability or financial security.
You're not going to get there by spending two days in a community, and you're going
to have this lightbulb moment, and you're going to be a billionaire in a couple of weeks.
It's not going to happen.
And so much of this is just, again, it's just patience.
If you have the patience to just chill out for at least a few weeks and just learn, you'll
go in a much better direction than if you're impatient.
You're like, I've read this forum a bunch of times.
I figured out everything I need to know.
I just need to start advertising or I need to start building.
And if you can just take the time to sort of aim where you're going to go, you're going
to just basically build a much better business.
What if you already are part of a community, though?
Let's say you did this whole audience identification step and you pick, I don't know, comic book
nerds or the audience that you're going to serve.
And it turns out that you've already been a part of the comic book forums and discussion
groups and conventions.
And you've been part of that for years and years, and you already feel like you know
the community.
Do you still need to do this whole audience exploration step?
Well, you're kind of already doing it.
That's the great thing about it.
Once you're in the community, you're listening to what people have to say.
If you have been a comic book nerd for the last, I don't know, 20-some years of your
life, then you know what the term near-mint condition means or stuff like that.
You don't need to understand the lingo because you already know it.
And what the only thing you need to do now is to consciously act on stuff that you wouldn't
have consciously thought about before, because now you're trying to build a business for
these people.
Now, you're not just in there to be part of the community, but you're now actually in
there to meaningfully empower this community with or through a business.
Before that, you might have already empowered people or engaged with people.
In some ways, you might have commented and celebrated with them when they found a rare
edition of a comic book somewhere, or you might have organized with them to go to Comic-Con
back when we could still go to things.
This whole already existing interaction that you have, and that is obviously the best situation
to start embedded exploration in because you already have more than halfway done.
If you join a new community that you've never been part of, you have to go through all these
hoops, jump through all these hoops again.
You have to figure out who are the important people in here that people follow?
Who are the influences in this community?
Where are they?
How can I find more of them?
Where else are people?
If you're in the comic book community, you know the forums that people go to.
You know the WhatsApp groups that already exist, the Telegram groups that exist, the
Twitter hashtags that people use, the Facebook groups that exist.
You already know that.
You have this graph of communities in your mind because you've been in all of them.
And that is what you have to imagine doing if you are not part of this community.
You find a person that you want to help, you ask them, hey, where do you guys hang out?
They tell you, oh yeah, that's this forum over there.
You go to the forum, you look into the forum, you see links to other forums, you see links
to a Facebook group, and you just recursively try to unravel the graph of community in this
particular space.
Cool.
So now you've identified the right audience, you've ranked them, you've picked one that
you like, you've embedded yourself and explored that audience.
You've discovered the right communities, the right lingo, the right influencers, you've
just listened or as you put it, you started dwelling, not selling.
And now it's time for problem discovery, which is kind of like a pretty important step in
a business because ideally whatever product you're going to build solves a problem that's
a really good problem, a really interesting problem.
So how do you discover what makes for an interesting problem for this audience that you've picked?
Again, you listen, you observe because people talk about problems without talking about
problems.
It's an interesting thing.
Obviously, you'll have people complaining about stuff and many of these complaints can
actually be traced back to an underlying problem that they either are not aware of or they're
not explicitly stating.
You can look at Eugene Schwartz's that the scale, the awareness scale, it's a marketing
term, right?
The whole idea is like how aware are people of the product that I have or about the problems
in the space?
And you can kind of rank things along those scales.
There's a completely unaware people don't even know they have a problem, they're just
confused by why stuff takes so long.
And then there's a problem aware where people know that there's a problem, they don't know
that there's a solution yet, solution aware where people know the problem and that there
are solutions, they just don't know which is good.
And then finally, you have product aware where people know all the solutions in the field
and you now only have to get them to most aware where your product is the best product
out of the existing products in a field to solve their problem.
That's kind of the scale.
And along each of these steps of the scale, I found this kind of message that you can
find in communities.
If people are problem aware, they will ask for help.
And that is a very clear sign that there is a problem there that people don't even know
that there's a solution for.
And then if you go up that ladder and you look at the solution aware people, they're
asking for recommendations.
What tool do I need to use to solve my problem?
So they know that there are tools out there and they just ask like, oh, I need a customer
service tool.
What's the best little chat bubble?
And then you go up the next ladder and that's the product aware, that's where people ask
for alternatives.
I've been using intercom.
It's getting too expensive.
What's the cheaper version that does everything that I need to do for my customer service?
So what's the underlying problem?
Apparently, the existing incumbent providers are too expensive.
So maybe you can build something that is cheaper, has similar functionality, but needs to target
a completely different segment of the market that doesn't make as much money.
So all of a sudden, new problem.
And one thing I think people overlook often is that just because people have a problem
doesn't necessarily mean they are complaining about it.
Sometimes you can just look at what people are doing.
Look at the way that they're spending their time or you look at the way that they're spending
their money.
And if you sort of work backwards from there, people generally spend time and money on solutions
to problems.
And so a good example would be I had Evan Britton on my podcast a while back.
He is the creator of a website called famousbirthdays.com, which gets untold hundreds of millions of
page views every single month.
And the problem he's solving is that Gen Zers really want to know information about their
favorite influencers on TikTok and Instagram.
And they weren't sitting around on forums complaining like, I want to know more information
about my favorite influencer.
They were just Googling it.
They were just searching it.
They were taking action and spending a lot of their time to look up this information,
which he could work backwards from and say, oh, this must be a problem that people can't
find this information.
I guess it's not on Wikipedia.
What if I made a website that had all of this information?
And so his number one signal is now that he's made this website is he just looks at all
the data from his search bar and people go to his website and they'll type in information
on this star, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then he knows what to build, not because anybody's
complaining about something, but because they're trying to solve a problem and he knows he
can build a better website for it.
So the final step, we've gone through three steps already.
The final step is audience building.
This is you found a problem and you know it belongs to a particular community that you've
explored and embedded yourself inside of and you feel very confident about this problem.
Okay, well now how do you actually build an audience for yourself?
What are the steps that you take?
What's the most actionable thing people could walk away from this conversation knowing about
this final step of audience building?
So this will be a crash course in Twitter because that's where I've been doing this
and that's what I can share right now.
But the three main things are engagement, empowerment, and valuable content.
Just like the three pillars that I have to any kind of audience growth, because what
you want to do is you want to build a personal reputation as somebody who is really, really
helpful in a community.
At the same time, you want to build a professional reputation as having built a product that
is extremely useful to people who need their problem solved.
So this happens through building an audience around yourself as a founder and around your
professional whatever you're building, be it an info product or a SaaS or an e-commerce
platform, whatever.
That thing is the professional brand and you have a personal brand.
They intermingle and it's, I think, the best for us indie hackers to have a lot of connection
between the two because if we solopreneur a product, we are the product and our brand
and the product brand are really intertwined and that's a good thing because if you build
in public, for example, that creates a certain kind of leverage, a certain level of trust
that one brand, your personal founder brand, kind of colors the brand of the product as
well.
If it's too reliable, so will the product be, right?
If the founder is smart, probably going to get a good product.
So there's a lot of back and forth between those two.
So now, how do you build a brand?
Well, like I said, engagement, empowerment and valuable content.
In this order, I find a lot of people who are on Twitter and they start posting stuff.
They write articles, they tweet and nobody listens to them.
It's not surprising.
They don't have an audience.
Nobody sees it.
Nobody gets to see it.
So content is the third most important thing when it comes to Twitter.
The most important thing is to actually go where people already are.
And that's one thing that I've been doing when I started out with not many followers.
That's what I see the most successful people who are building an audience and a community
on Twitter doing.
They go to where people are already having a conversation.
They follow influencers in the field.
They go, they turn on notifications or something and figure out, influencer posts something.
There's probably going to be something happening there.
Let me go there too and see how I can contribute meaningful to this conversation.
And if you do that enough, you're essentially doing what I call the audience audition.
You go to somebody else's audience and you audition for their attention by being helpful,
by asking interesting questions, by giving your first-hand account of certain experiences
or by sharing something that you know.
You don't need to write an article in something.
You can just be on Twitter and ask somebody, have you thought about this?
That is content enough.
And that's where it starts.
I like to think of sometimes like the online landscape as analogous to like a real world
location.
Because sometimes when you're online, it's like it's easy to just tweet into the void
and be like, why is nobody responding or listening to me?
But like it's kind of like going to a party and then like finding a corner where nobody's
listening and nobody is and then just like talking and be like, why is no one listening
to me?
Well, it's like you just went to like the empty part of the room, right?
But if you imagine Twitter as this party, we'll go to like Paul Graham's Twitter account
where there's like a hundred thousand people all gathered around him talking about different
things.
They're responding, it was tweets are making, you know, thoughtful comments there.
Like a lot more people are going to see and engage with them.
And those are the people that you want to actually talk to, right?
Because you know, particularly if we look at people following other indie hackers that
are actively building products, like those are very likely the same people that if you
build a product for indie hackers or for software developers or something that would like to
follow you because you're on a similar journey and you have something meaningful to contribute
that might be similar to what other people are saying, but uniquely colored by your own
experiences.
So if we go to those people and audition for their audiences, the likelihood of them converting
and I don't really like to use marketing e-turns here because it's really about building relationships
with people, but about them wanting to have a relationship with you is so much higher
than if you just yell into the void or even worse, like pay money for this thing to distribute
it to the other people.
Right.
You don't do paid ads when you want to build an audience.
This comes through organic interaction between real human beings talking about real things.
And again, like I've said this three or four times now, but like this is all kind of patience,
right?
All the things you're talking about right now, you're going to be able to do these things
well on Twitter or any other social network because you are patient enough to do the beginning
steps.
If you want to go to where people already are, that means you have to know where people
already are, which means you have to know like who's an influencer in the space and
what they have to say, which means you have to have done like the earlier steps.
And I've seen like so many things, you know, if you want to do the empowerment thing, for
example, if you want to help people and actually just sort of give before you get, you have
to know how to help people, which means you have to have done a bunch of research about
what the audience wants.
So again, you had to have started at the earlier steps.
And I've seen so many people on Twitter who are doing exactly what you're saying.
Like they're just helpful.
So some of the things I've seen that work really well are recommended follow lists where
somebody will make a tweet and they'll be like, here are 10 people I really recommend
that you follow on Twitter.
And for every single tweet and that thread will be a person and a really, you know, warm
description of why that person's awesome and maybe a link to one of the person's great
tweets.
And it'll be like a thread of like 10 or 15 people they recommend that you follow.
And then every one of those people will be like, they'll feel so like great that, you
know, you made this thread recommending that people follow them and they'll probably follow
you back or maybe even retweet it, etc.
And you're helping your audience because you're like telling them who to follow and where
to get good content on Twitter.
And like that's just giving, you know, and getting in return or what you're saying like
retweeting, like especially if you retweet something, somebody's tweet sort of a quote
at the top with your own thoughts.
Well, everybody I know who tweets anything, no matter how big their account is, they look
at all the retweets and everything that people said about their tweet.
And they're going to notice it if you're consistently saying good things about their tweets.
Or one thing I did in the early days of indie hackers is if somebody said something smart,
like if Amy Hoey had a really good quote in a blog post or something, I would make a tweet
and I would just kind of Photoshop her quote.
And then I would tweet it from the indie hackers account and just talk about it.
And then like her whoever had the quote would always engage with that and feel so flattered
that we're talking about their ideas, etc.
And so like there's just so much you can do to connect with people who have bigger audiences
than you and show them that you're engaged and then like help your followers and the
same breath.
Yeah, it all boils down to supporting other people.
That's really the main thing here.
And if you want to build an audience, you just help people help themselves or help people
succeed or help people find whatever they need.
It doesn't really matter.
Just help them support them, be there for them and be a voice for them.
This is a lot of stuff.
You know, we barely scratched the surface of your book.
You've gone and you go into so much detail about each of these steps and there's a ton
of like actionable sub steps and I think for a lot of people who want to get started, they
can feel overwhelmed.
Like, oh God, this is like so much to work on.
My advice for people who feel that way is that's why the first step is the most important.
Pick an audience, a group of people that you really, really like where it doesn't feel
like work to be part of that community and to engage with the influencers.
We feel like lucky and kind of privileged to be able to do it and it makes you feel
good about yourself.
And then none of this feels like work.
Like it doesn't feel like work to me to like talk to people like you or talk to other founders
or go to events with founders and like tweak this kind of stuff because it's like it's
just fun.
It's the people like I naturally want to be around.
So if you get that step right, all these other steps are actually kind of just like playing.
But if you get that step wrong, all these other steps feel like work and it feels like
too much stuff to do and you wonder how other people have the energy to do it and it's because
they're actually interacting with people that they love and they want to be around.
That's why I put affinity as the first step and then the guide initially because if that's
not right, everything else will not be right as well.
Once you've found those people and I'm lucky that I have not just one but multiple audiences
that I feel so strongly connected with, writers, entrepreneurs, software engineers, I have
this connection with a lot of people and it's great because at the intersection of that
are ex-engineers who write books and also have businesses and there is a couple of those
and that's even cooler.
It's like people like me and I get to talk to them like you.
It's just such an enjoyable thing.
Like I said earlier, I want a life completely devoid of things on my calendar.
Today is an exception because I get to talk to you.
This is something that I want on my calendar and I get it.
I love it.
Well, listen, Arvid, this is also the only thing on my calendar for today so I could
easily talk to you for like three hours but then we would give away every single thing
in your book.
You've been through a lot.
You've built a bunch of different products and companies.
You built Feedback Panda which is a huge success.
You built a huge audience for yourself.
You're spending your years helping people.
You've read multiple books.
What do you think is a lesson that new indie hackers or even experienced indie hackers
can take away from your journey overall?
I think one of the core lessons that I didn't understand until recently is this concept
of involuntary reciprocity.
The fact that if you give enough for free to people, if you just spend enough of your
time to help them and to make their lives easier, to solve their problems for and with
them, without asking for anything in return, they cannot help but helping you back at some
later point.
The human psychology is we need to get even in the best and the worst ways.
If you help, help, help, help, they want to get even by helping, helping, helping you
back.
And if you do this at scale in a community, in building an audience or just in the community
where you're already at, people will eventually come back to you.
And if you do this over time, the cumulative effects of that are staggering.
And you have to trust that by giving without asking, you're inviting these opportunities
in the future because it will always look bleak when you start.
Nobody's listening to me.
Nobody cares.
I don't know what I'm doing.
Nobody knows what I'm doing.
That's right.
That's actually true.
And that's fine.
So just continue because you're going to do more the next day and you're going to do more
the day after.
And over time, your advantages, the possibilities and the opportunities will accumulate into
something meaningful that will have life changing effects for you.
And you have to trust that.
And I think if you understand this involuntary reciprocity as a basic concept of human nature,
you'll be fine.
Just give and help and support.
I love it, involuntary reciprocity.
Keep giving.
Trust that it'll come back to you.
And honestly, you don't have to be that much of an expert to give.
You spend an hour a week learning something, guarantee there's millions of people out there
who have not spent that hour who would love to know what you learned.
So Arvid, thanks a ton for coming on the show, dispensing a ton of wisdom.
I know this is one of those episodes where people are going to listen and pause and go
back and take notes and write down stuff.
But instead, they could just buy your book, The Embedded Entrepreneur.
Where can people go to find more about your book and about you and your writings and everything
you're working on online?
If you want to learn more about the book, just go to embeddedentrepreneur.com, wherever
a cute little landing page set up.
And honestly, if you just want to check out what I'm doing, go to my Twitter, Arvid Kahl,
A-R-V-I-D-K-A-H-L.
That's where I'm every single day, every minute of every single day interacting with people
because that's where my people are.
So I want to be there too.
And I have a blog and a newsletter and a podcast called The Bootstrapped Founder.
It's on TheBootstrappedFounder.com, so you can check that out too.
I write something about bootstrapping SaaS or selling businesses or audience building
every single week.
So you'll find something cool there as well.
But yeah, come to my Twitter, DMs are open, so come at me.
I can take it.
But no, if you have a question or if you have anything that you want to share with me, I'll
be there and I'll respond to it.
So I love to hear from founders and people who are in this field and want to make something
meaningful happen.
That's where I am.
All right, thanks again, however, for coming back on the show for a second time.
Thanks so much, Cortland.
Awesome.