Show notes

01:25 - Introduce yourself! Give us a quick overview of your career trajectory up to this point 04:05 - What is Indie Hacking? 05:15 - What skills should one develop in order to become an Indie Hacker? 07:39 - Are there any technologies you’d recommend learning? 12:29 - What are some of your favorite Indie Hacker projects? 15:04 - What are the most difficult parts of being an Indie Hacker? failures 17:36 - The best parts? 23:32 - Can indie hacking scale? What does that look like? 31:42 - What advice would you give to someone who wants to become an indie hacker 33:36 - What advice would you give to someone working to leave their day job to do indie hacking full time? 36:25 - How can someone get involved in the Indie hacker community? 40:14 - Where can we find you on the internet?

Resources

Transcript

We provide transcripts for all of our episodes. You can find them here!

Ali 0:00
This week we have a super exciting episode we’re chatting with Courtland Allen , the founder of indie hackers, we’re going to talk about what in the hacking is how to get started with it, and his advice for gaining traction with indie products. Let’s get started.

Kelly 0:18
Welcome to the ladybug podcast. I’m Kelly. I’m Allie. And I’m Emma. And we’re debugging the tech industry. Hey, Kelly, have you heard about this cool tool called AWS amplify? Tell me about it. It’s a suite of tools and services that enables developers to build full stack serverless and cloud based web and mobile apps. You get to use whichever framework or technology you want on the front end. That sounds cool. Well help me get up and running with things like hosting. Yeah, authentication. You betcha. Managed graph QL. Totally. How about serverless functions API is machine learning chatbots file storage yes to everything amplifiers, built specially in a way to enable traditionally front end developers like yourself Kelly to be successful because you can use your existing skill set to build a real world full stack apps that in the past would require deep knowledge around back end DevOps and scalable infrastructure. The amplify console also allows you to use a GitHub repository to deploy to a globally available CDN with ci NCD built in. It’s super cool. Where can I learn more? If you want to learn more about AWS amplify, visit AWS? amplify.github.io.

Ali 1:25
Okay, Courtland. Introduce yourself. Can you give us a quick overview of your career trajectory up to this point?

Courtland Allen 1:33
Hi, Allie. Hi, Kelly. So I am Courtland Allen, my career trajectory. I don’t know if we could call it a career. I think it was mostly based on my absolute refusal to try to work for anybody else for as long as I possibly could. But I am a software engineer. I got a degree in Computer Science from MIT in 2009. And ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to code. I always wanted to make websites and sort of work for myself and make a living that way just because I think The ability to create stuff, basically for free without any overhead without really needing to rely on anybody else. It’s just super fun. And so I’ve always loved tinkering, tinkering around online and building things. And I’ve always liked having the creative freedom to build whatever I want without, you know, necessarily having someone else tell me what to build. Of course, that’s hard to do, because you need to get paid. And so the only path for me coming out of college was basically to start my own companies. And so, since 2009, when I graduated, I started about five different companies, most of which no one’s ever heard of did not do well. don’t exist anymore, but all of which are able to support me for at least a little bit. And then in 2016, I started a website called indie hackers, which is a community of people basically like me, people who wanted to be independent people who were hackers or developers who wanted to basically use our coding skills to create things. And I was just interviewing people and asking them, you know, hey, you’ve done this. How did you do it? How much money are you making? How did you With your idea, how did you get to where you are today? And I will publish these interviews and other people like me who had the same goals would flock to the site and read these interviews and ask each other questions. And so since then, since then it’s kind of blossomed into a very large community of startup founders and indie developers who were trying to make a living for themselves. And luckily, I was able to myself make a living from the site, get to the point where I could pay my rent and all my bills and not have to get a job. And then literally a month. Yeah, the best feeling is so great to actually hit that point, because the money in my bank account was rapidly declining. But after I got to the point of stability or is able to take care of myself, and the hackers was acquired by stripe. So stripe is an online payments company. It’s beloved by many developers, including myself. So if you want to accept customers credit cards online for something that you’re building, you’re probably going to end up using stripe. And they were kind of a natural fit for indie hackers. So I’ve been at stripe for the last two and a half years. That is the first full time job that I’ve ever had. I’m now 32 and ironically, it was sort of born out of my desire, not To have a job. But that’s I think the best description I can give of my career trajectory up to this point.

Kelly 4:05
That’s amazing. So I’m going to touch on your your past failures, because I think that’s a really important conversation for us to have. And also just the acquisition experience, and definitely interested in learning more about that. But before we get into that, can you define what indie hacking is?

Courtland Allen 4:20
Yeah. So to being any hacker is basically to be somebody who wants to be independent, and make a living online through your own basic creative faculties. So it’s hard to like pin down exactly. You know, who’s an indie hacker who’s not drawn line in the sand. But like, the vast majority of indie hackers are doing this because they want some sort of freedom. They want the freedom to spend their time however, they want the creative freedom to work on whatever they want the freedom to work from whatever location they want, the financial freedom to be their own boss and make their own rules. The vast majority of indie hackers are developers, but there are many people who don’t code as well and have learned to sell things online and make things and pretty much Everybody who’s an indie hacker runs some sort of business, it doesn’t really matter what size it is. Some of them are huge. I’ve talked to people who’ve made millions of dollars in their projects, some of them are tiny, a lot of indie hackers are just making a few hundred dollars a month to sort of supplement their income. So I think that’s the best description, I can give them an affinity hacker.

Ali 5:15
That’s awesome. It’s really cool to be on the air with two different entrepreneurs and kind of very different areas right now. So I work for a company so I have a very different career trajectory than either of you. But I think someday the idea of being an entrepreneur is really interesting idea of indie hacking is especially interesting because of the independence and the self sustaining kind of nature of it. If somebody is interested in becoming an indie hacker, what skills would you advise developing in order to to get on that path?

Courtland Allen 5:52
I think the first I don’t know if you could call it a skill, but it’s, I think, a mindset. I think, in society at large, we sort of look at Being a founder and running your own business is a completely different thing than working for somebody else or being an employee. But the way I see it is that they’re very similar things. So Allie, you say you’re an employee, you have a boss, you have a paycheck. But at the same, you know, same time, like you’re kind of an entrepreneur, you’re doing a lot of the same things that entrepreneur does. So an entrepreneur would say that, you know, we do a lot of marketing, we need to tell people about our skills. But as an employee, like you had that phase two, where you had to deal with through basically a job application process and you create a resume that advertise your skills and send it to people and tell them, you know, who you are, why they should hire you. It’s not really any different than what a founder does. And founders do a lot of sales. But you know, as an employee, you do a lot of interviews, you talk to people and you have to convince them why they should hire you. You get paid a salary as a founder, you get paid revenue by your employees, or by your customers. You spend your time working, you know, creating a product of value like founders do the same thing. So I think the most important thing is to realize that no matter where you are, you pretty much are already using all the skills that you need to be a founder and You’re like already halfway there. Beyond that, I think it really helps to have some ability to make things. So I think being an indie hacker is especially good for software engineers, because you can sit down at your computer and from scratch, create something of value. And it doesn’t have to be that complex. It doesn’t have to be something you spend a year working on, it can be just a single one page website. It can be I’ve seen people get started just by creating spreadsheets. And the hackers at the beginning was literally just a blog, like, it doesn’t have to be that complex. But you need to be able to bring something to life that can essentially help other people in the world and convince them they’re like, Hey, you know, this is worth paying some money for.

Kelly 7:39
Awesome. And you know, you were talking about, it could kind of present itself in many different ways. But have you come across any, like specific technologies you found that been really beneficial for indie hacking?

Courtland Allen 7:50
You know, there are I think, some playbooks I’ve seen people use and that I myself have used that or maybe it’s better to describe them as like patterns that have been super useful. So for example, let’s say you wanted to start a business, but you’re not sure what you want to do, but you have a few passions. A great example would be Peter Peter levels, the founder of a company called Nomad list. So his passion was traveling. And what he wanted to do is basically travel the world to different countries and just work remotely. And it turned out that when he was doing this a few years ago, there just weren’t that many resources online for what country should you go to? Where is the internet speed? The fastest? Where is the safest? Where can you talk to other nomads are doing the same thing, etc. And so we just tweeted, like, Hey, I’m making a list and a spreadsheet, if you’re interested in doing the same thing, just contribute to the spreadsheet. This tweet didn’t really do all that well. But the spreadsheet itself was on fire, because everybody was sharing the spreadsheet to other people. And there are hundreds of people contributing. And he could tell from the get go like this was something really special. And so he didn’t really need to code at all. He didn’t really need to use any particular tools except for Google Spreadsheets to get this ball rolling. But then he took baby step after baby step to get it to the next level. So he took all the data from the spreadsheet, and he made a single page website. That was beautiful. useful and had all sorts of filters to make it a little bit less intimidating to consume that information and easier for people to find. And then he created a community. So he added a forum where all these different digital nomads are looking for this information to basically come and help each other. And so the kind of pattern that I’ve seen, a lot of people do is take something that they’re passionate about, create a shared resource where other people who are passionate about it can go to learn about it all in one place and make it very easy for them. And then add a community or sponsorships on top of that to basically, you know, provide something of value and absolutely, you know, be able to pay yourself, for all the people who are coming to visit your thing. And I’ve countless examples, and the hackers arguably is the same thing. A lot of people were like me, they wanted to find out how they could be an indie hacker, but there wasn’t a great resource online for doing that. And so by collecting a lot of high quality interviews in one place, I was able to basically create that resource for people that they found valuable, and then add a community on top of it and engage sponsors who basically wanted to reach this audience and sell whatever they’re selling. And that’s how I supported myself for quite a while. I was just in South Africa, talking to Alexandria Proctor who started a company called digs Connect. And she helps students find housing in South Africa. And she started the exact same way she had a spreadsheet. She was like, hey, if your student come here to find housing, hey, if you have, you know, an apartment for rent, put it in here and start with a spreadsheet, then she turned it into a website. And so it’s kind of the same playbook I’ve seen for many, many people. But even though that’s particularly common, there’s 1000 other ways to start, start your company or start your profitable project.

Kelly 10:30
I think that’s a, you made a really good point of size. As far as something you’re you’re passionate about. I think a lot of these things you become passionate about generally come from some source of like, a gap in knowledge or a gap in a service or user experience like you couldn’t find like the resources for for indie hackers or finding student housing or just housing in general. I mean, all of these things. I recently came across a project that somebody tweeted I think yesterday where they built a service To let people post when they have like a loved one who’s missing. It’s just these all these things come from like a some kind of idea you have because you realize there’s a gap at a service. And I think that’s a really good way to find, find like that topic you want to talk about Really?

Courtland Allen 11:15
Yeah, totally. I mean, if you think about the way we go through our lives, we’re constantly trying to fill these gaps. As you mentioned, we’re constantly trying to solve problems, like I just ran to a meeting earlier today. And I was a little bit late, and I was at Starbucks. And then in San Francisco, we have these lime scooters all over the place. And I was like, Oh, thank God for the scooter. I can, it’s like a powerup. It’s like, I’m playing like a video game. And I could just suddenly go faster. And like, that’s the problem. Now, I’m like, you’re not going to be late to this meeting. But somebody had to think about that someone had to think you know, it’s annoying to get around on foot here a little bit slow to call an Uber or buy a car or something. And the world is just full of all these little problems, all these things that either don’t have a good solution, or they have a solution, but it’s not. It’s not the preferred way that we would like to do things and so we invent our own way. And there’s enough people on earth that if you want something, it’s probably The case that a lot of other people want it the way that you do too, for sure, I love that I love that it’s such a perfect way to build something is build something for yourself first because you know that you are the target audience and that there is an audience for it. So I think that that’s awesome advice. You’ve brought up some examples of indie hacker projects that you really like and have seen the scale. I’m on your site as well on a community member and notice so many incredible projects on there. Do you have any other examples of indie hacker projects that are some of your favorites? My recent favorite is an app called One second every day. From Cesar Koyama lives in Brooklyn. I just had him on the podcast, but sort of in preparation for interviewing him, I started using his app. And the whole idea behind the app is you record one second video every single day. And then at the end of the year, you’ve got like a six minute video of your life. And one second doesn’t sound like a lot, but it actually is enough to capture a good moment and sort of allow you to like re experience what you’re up to that day. And so I started using this in December, which is right before I went on this huge trip to Cape Town into New York. And so the first month of like, my one second everyday video is super eventful, it’s gonna be a little bit more boring. Now that I’m back at home. But the cool thing about it is I think it, it sort of inspires and motivates you to live a more interesting life. Because you realize that if you’re just sitting at your computer all day are going through the same routine, that you’re not going to have a good, you know, one second video for that day. And so it literally changes the way that you live. And Caesar story himself is super inspiring, because he was sort of stuck in a job that wasn’t that fulfilling. He was working 100 hour work weeks, and he really wanted the kind of freedom that most indie hackers crave. We wanted to figure out a way out of the system, a way to be his own boss and work on the things that he liked. And he just sort of stumbled upon this idea. Like he went on a vacation, and basically was doing this one second everyday video for himself. And he realized that it just resonated with lots of people, other people really wanted it. And so we ended up basically posting this video on YouTube, auditioning to give a TED talk. He won that audition. An actual TED talk on the TED mainstage that has millions of views. He ended up finding some software engineers who were like, Look, man, I know you don’t have any money, but like, we’d love to help you build an app for this. And just working on it, launching a super successful Kickstarter for it, and just having a really wild ride, where he’s eventually been able to build his own company and work for himself on this app that he loves, and build a team of 30 people I believe, who are also working on it. And they are almost always like number one, or number two in the App Store around the year so he’s been having a pretty crazy couple of weeks. Carnival, he’s one of many, it’s hard to choose a favorite. I’m like a proud mom. Like I don’t know which.

Kelly 14:35
Okay, speaking of proud moms, though, one second every day super popular with moms. Here’s my kids second year of life. Wait a second every day. I see it all the time on Facebook.

Courtland Allen 14:46
Yeah, so for me, I don’t I don’t video myself. I also don’t have kids. So you’re not gonna see like, how I transformed but I think it’s a crazy, crazy cool app. And it’s, it’s just cool to me that he was able to build something that’s so fun and impactful himself. make a living off of it.

Unknown Speaker 15:01
Yeah, that’s so different. Very cool.

Kelly 15:04
So let’s let’s get into some of the difficult parts of being an indie hacker. And in this is the time that I also want to talk about your previous businesses, because part of the difficulties is experiencing failure. So both your experience and then also just some additional difficult parts that are worth mentioning.

Courtland Allen 15:21
One of the reasons that I created indie hackers, and one of the reasons that I think it resonates with so many people is that it’s difficult to go out on your own and try to start something. One of the more comforting parts of getting a job and having sort of a more normal career path is that you’ve got other people doing the same thing. You’ve got coworkers, you come down and sit down at work, and you’ve got people you can talk to you’ve got colleagues, as an indie hacker, pretty much alone, you’re starting your own company, it’s your own thing. There usually isn’t a super well defined playbook for exactly how it’s going to go. And so there’s a little bit of anxiety that comes from like, is this gonna work? You know, is this am I gonna be wasting my time? It’s financially difficult and I think when you’re in a situation Like that, it really helps that people around you who can talk to you who understand the things that you’re going through, because they’re going through the same things. And so the reason why I didn’t just leave any hackers, as you know, an interview site, but also added a community where people could talk to each other and even meet each other in real life, is because I think people need that connection. And people spend way too much time sort of locked in their basement by themselves, trying to build something freaking out when it’s not working, and not having that support network. And in fact, that’s kind of what I went through for years, building my own projects before I built and the hackers I worked on, I think I mentioned like five different things. Were done an app to help you use sort of filter your email better and app to help you convert your emails into tasks, an app to help businesses sort of communicate among their employees and assign responsibilities, like lots of different stuff. And being sort of a full stack developer, I would just do all of it. I would do the design, I would do the back end coding, I would do the front end coding, which on one hand was an advantage because it’s like I don’t have to raise money and try to hire someone to fill in these gaps. But on the other hand, it was a really good excuse not to talk to anyone Really good excuse to not really be social and share the hard times and share sort of the failures, which I think are really important. So, um, you know, my advice to a lot of indie hackers out there is if you’re doing this by yourself, find a friend, find a support group go on indie hackers calm and just start, literally, to start a meetup. Just say, Hey, I’m in, you know, whatever particular town, I’m gonna be working from this coffee shop, come join me and I guarantee you a few people will show up and say let’s work together. And I think just having people to bounce your ideas off of and having people to tell you, hey, it’s totally normal to feel anxious about this thing or scared about this thing can really boost your confidence and convince you to keep going rather than giving up early.

Ali 17:36
I love that. That’s awesome advice. I think even just as a remote worker, it’s something that I noticed a lot that it’s harder to, to work independently and have that same friendships that you have normally with your co workers. I think that that’s awesome advice. flipping it on its tail. What are some of the best parts of being an indie hacker?

Courtland Allen 17:56
I mean, just the freedom like it’s so great to be able to Pretty much everything about your life. And I think, you know, one thing people really underestimate is the power of business can have to basically allow you to do things that you never would be able to do. Otherwise, like the way I look at businesses, it’s basically any sort of project that’s capable of sustaining itself. And that’s it. Those are the only two requirements. It’s a project, and it generates enough revenue to keep it going. But pretty much anything you want in life, I think you can build a business to help you get that thing. So for example, let’s say you’re a huge fan of just celebrities in general, or musicians, and you want to talk to more celebrities and musicians, you think that’d be a cool lifestyle to live, you can start a company to help you do that. There actually is a company called cameo which you may have heard of, and the founders who started this company, are able to live a life where they get to talk to all these interesting, famous people because those are their customers. They decided those would be their customers. Now they have an excuse to spend their entire day talking to these people and onboarding them and hanging out with them. They didn’t need to like get famous, they didn’t need to become amazing singers or something else. They just started a business and that gave them the ability to do that. all right with indie hackers and even with you like having an interview based podcast gives you the ability to meet all sorts of interesting people and talk to them and be friends after the show ends. And just like build up a network of people that you actually look like, you know, or inspired by and look up to, like, I feel super privileged to be able to come on this podcast and talk to you. And hopefully, we’ll be friends after this. But like, that’s a direct result of starting a business. That would be much harder if I hadn’t started a business that enabled me to do this. There’s all sorts of zany examples too. There’s a guy named Ben who’s got a huge like, sort of obsession with Japanese candy, and he just wants to share his love for Japanese candy with the world. It doesn’t sound like a thing you could really do as a business, but it is, in fact, he just buys up Japanese candy butts in little boxes and ships it all around the world and like that’s how he makes his living doing the thing that he loves, and getting to watch other people experience this thing that he loves Peter level. So I mentioned earlier, he can literally travel the world and wherever he goes, he has people who know him or her friends are fans in a different city and so he’s never going to be alone. You can travel anywhere and he never Ever has to sort of figure out who am I going to talk to here, etc. And so I think people really underestimate the degree to which if you want something in your life, you can start a business to basically enable that. And I think that’s a decision you shouldn’t really make. In the very beginning, I think before you try to come up with an idea, before we sit down to figure out anything, you should just make a list of questions for yourself and ask me, What do I want out of my life? What would my ideal life look like? What kinds of things have I done in the past that made me feel really good? What kinds of things that people said about me that made me feel great, etc. and just get a really firm understanding of like, what would make you happy and fulfilled as a person, and then start thinking about business ideas that can sort of align with that and give you the life that you want to live?

Kelly 20:37
I think that’s a really good point. Because a lot of people will try to start businesses with the intention of making money. And if you’re not passionate about what it is that you’re basing your life around at that point, especially when you go all in, you’re less likely you’re going to you know, you’re going to burn out or you know, if things don’t go well, all you’re aiming for was to make money and it’s just the passion is not there. And I see a lot from the the e commerce side of things and breaks my heart,

Courtland Allen 21:07
you need the passion, because ultimately, it’s pretty easy for people to copy your business, if you’re just building something that like you don’t care that much about, and then someone else sees it, and they’re like, wow, this is my passion, I want to do the same thing, like they’re gonna beat the pants off of you because they care about it. actly and you’re not gonna even be happy. You know, I think a huge reason to start a business is to make your own life better, to basically allow you to live the life you want to live. And that’s a totally fine reason to start a business. And if you’re the person in control of it, you control what you work on what you’re selling, who you’re selling, to who you spend your time around all day. Why would you start a business that you don’t even like? Exactly, and I think a lot of it comes down to like, kind of having a scarcity mindset. It’s it’s intimidating, I think at first to to try to come up with an idea when you’ve never done it before. I just actually tweeted a poll yesterday. Now if you haven’t started a company yet, but you want to what’s stopping you? And the number one answer was I just don’t have an idea. It’s really hard sometimes people to come up with an idea The people come up with ideas, but they don’t think they’re good enough. And you get into the scarcity mindset where if you, you know, finally landed an idea that you think can actually turn into a business, you think, oh, I’ve got to do this, and I might not be passionate about it, and it might not be my thing, but it seems like it’ll work financially and I haven’t had any other ideas. So I just have to do it. And I would encourage people to be a little bit more patient. And instead of thinking about, okay, what can make money and then you know, hopefully I’ll grow to like it, think about what do I actually like, and then think about the intersection of the things that you like, with the things that people are sort of accustomed to paying for. And then you know, make sure you sort of businesses that’s actually enjoyable for you to run.

Kelly 22:35
Exactly, especially since running a business is not easy. So you’re going to have you know, you’re going to have your high points when you you know, get your first sale or your first subscriber, whatever it might be, you’re gonna have your really low points when it’s dry, you’re just not really into it and you need to have that passion to push through.

Courtland Allen 22:52
Exactly. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows. You’re doing something you don’t like yeah, I wish it was your, I think your appointed spot on if you’re doing something that you Don’t like it’s gonna be much harder to get through those those low points. But if you’re doing something that you love, you know, if you’re literally just selling Japanese candy, and you have a low month of sales like Alicia got your candy,

Kelly 23:09
what is the name of that company?

Courtland Allen 23:11
It’s called candy Japan. Very straightforward name. It’s

Kelly 23:14
great, very identifiable name and also pretty good for SEO too.

Courtland Allen 23:19
Maybe not so good for your your health.

Kelly 23:21
That Yes, but I guess if you’re passionate about it, then you know other people also, actually one of my best friends is super into everything in Japan. So she would probably love it.

Courtland Allen 23:30
Get around the boxes, the candy boxes.

Kelly 23:32
I’m a really big fan of everything subscription base, because I do a lot of subscription based models through my own company. So I always get excited when I see another one on the market. So let’s talk about scaling. So indie hackers was acquired by stripe. But let’s back up can indie hacking scale in your experience? I mean, you talked to a lot of other entrepreneurs and a lot of people starting these companies. So what does it look like when when somebody decides to scale their business?

Courtland Allen 23:57
Totally. I think most businesses can scale that And finally, not every business can be the next Google. But every business can get like, to a sizable point. And I think you know, something that’s lost on a lot of people is that your business looks different depending on the scale that it’s at. So one of the things that I tell a lot of brand new founders is don’t spend too much time looking at all of these huge companies and copying what they’re doing. Because the way they look today is nothing like the way they looked when they first got started. When you’re first getting started, you’re doing a lot of scrappy stuff, a lot of stuff that doesn’t make sense in the long run. But it just helps you get off the ground. And so maybe a good illustrated example would be my own story with indie hackers. When I started indie hackers, as I mentioned, it was just a blog. I mean, I was interviewing people over email, they would send me their answers, I would post them on my website. And that was it. You could come read the blog, and sign up for my mailing list. And that was it. And I knew in the beginning that I wanted it to be a thriving community that I wanted it to be something a little bit bigger and more impactful, where people could connect to each other. But I didn’t start there because quite frankly, it’s very hard to just start with the community. If you try to create a community from day one, nobody’s gonna be there, which means Nobody’s gonna join. So it’s sort of pointless. And so I had sort of like a four step plan, a little bit of which I outlined earlier, where it’s like, Okay, well, let me interview people and generate excitement and see if it’s something people want even excited to do, like, Are people excited to be indie hackers in the way that I am? And in the beginning, that just looked like me sending hundreds of emails to people who are doing this and saying, Hey, will you come on my website? And let me interview you and also share your revenue numbers? And most people said, No, but a few people said, Yes, a few early adopters who are really passionate about it. I think that’s sort of a common theme early on in businesses, you’ve got to gotta do things that don’t scale. Like it was never my plan to send hundreds of emails a week forever. But I knew that I needed to do something kind of crazy like that, just to get the ball rolling at first. And I think it’s kind of although some people it’s kind of a turn off. That sounds like a lot of work sounds really boring. It’s actually good news. As a founder that you can do these things that don’t scale that just require effort because they don’t require you to be super clever or super experienced upfront. If you’re a huge company. Trying to go from like a million users to 10 million users, like you’ve got to be super smart, super knowledgeable, you’ve got to find some tricks that others haven’t found. But if you’re just like a fledgling founder, you’re an indie hacker, you’re just getting started, you’re trying to go from zero customers to like one customer, you don’t need to be super clever at all, you just need to like talk to 10 people, that’s pretty much it. And the same thing for like, your first hundred customers, your first thousand customers, like you can just brute force it, and just talk to people send emails to go to coffee shops. So I think a lot of companies look like that. And the early days, it looks like one person, just being scrappy, and talking to lots of people. Beyond that, I think it’s important to try to figure out a way to get to the next level. So for me with any hackers, I knew that people would come read these interviews, but then when you read things online, you know, it’s kind of one and done, you read it and maybe share it, you say that was great. And then you don’t necessarily bookmark that website and come back. And so I was collecting people’s email addresses and saying, Hey, I’m gonna publish interviews like this every week. And if you want to get notified, sign up for my mailing list, and I’ll basically send you the next interview when it comes out next week. And so just a few weeks I had thousands of people who were subscribed. And that gave me the opportunity to basically reach out to the people whenever I wanted. And then I said, Okay, well, now I’ve got like an actual growing pool of people now I could basically create a community. So I coded some, like an online forum from scratch. And about a week and a half, just very bare bones form that allows you to make posts. And I would start these discussions on the forum, and then email them out alongside the interviews to my mailing list. And at first, it was like very few people would participate. It was actually just me with like, some fake accounts talking to myself, and within these conversations to the email list and say, hey, look at this cool discussion I want to join. That’s true. I mean, it was a little it was a little lonely there for a minute. But, you know, I’ll never forget the first time that someone was talking to one of the fake me’s and then another person joining those two people talk to each other. And I’m like, that’s a real conversation. And I think, you know, bootstrapping it off the back of the mailing list. Being able to send up these conversations to the man last week after week for months, really was what enabled the community sort of grown together. on a life of its own, to the point where it doesn’t need me, you know, I could not make a post on the forum for months. And it doesn’t matter because there’s 10s of thousands of other people who are talking to each other, and helping each other out. And I don’t have to do anything. And so, you know, this has been sort of a long winded answer to your question. But like Canada hacking scale, of course, lots of people wait companies that end up growing really big. And it’s really fun, in my opinion, to watch how people’s ambitions and goals and activities change. A lot of times people start off by saying, you know, I want to make something that’ll pay my rent. And then once they get there, they’re like, Oh, you know what, like, I want to make something that will be able to, you know, to allow me to hire a bunch of a team and build like a really cool team. And they have a team, like, you know, I want to make something that’s gonna, like, help this part of the world or change how these people do this thing or make this to make this thing better. And I think just a constant evolution, companies evolve just like people grow and change over time. And it’s kind of up to you as a founder, decide how big you want your company to be and how much you want it to scale.

Kelly 28:52
I completely agree. And I think it’s definitely important to note that it will it will change over time, your you know, especially when you’re Doing something where you’re building a community. As soon as the people start showing up, they define what your community is, you don’t really get that, that opportunity to do that definition. So it’s definitely important to, you know, when you’re a smaller company at that point as well, you’re a lot more flexible, like you can choose to pivot the next day. And that’s totally fine. As opposed to Google, if Google decided to, you know, start selling meals online or whatever. Totally different concept. It’s a huge change for their company. So you know, take take advantage of that time when you’re small, and you get to enjoy every single facet of your business.

Courtland Allen 29:35
Exactly. And this also goes back to what I was saying earlier that like, you should start by making a list of like, who you are as a person and what you want, because you don’t have to scale your business. I’ve met a lot of indie hackers, you’re like, you know what, I never want to hire anybody. I never want to have a team and I get bored by working on one project all the time. So there’s this guy I’ve interviewed Masaryk ball. He’s like the most prolific maker I’ve ever seen. He’s a software engineer. He releases like three or four side projects a month. Some of them make money. Some of them don’t. He puts it out into the world and moves on to the next thing, like that’s what he does. So I interviewed Daniel Baskin, she started like 23 different companies. She’s never said any of them down, and they’re all just like, weird zany things. So she made an app called you need a boss, where you can basically call in and it calls a random person and that person just pretends to be your boss and tells you to get to work. That’s you know, she’s got like a sort of tricycle pop up thing or she like built this bicycle that can turn into like a sort of a pop up shop, you can drive around the city and like sell goods from anywhere. She’s got another company where it’s called branded fruit, where if you have a conference or something, she will order like 1000 avocados for your conference and like, have a team of people yeah, put your logo on the on the thing. So it’s more of like a sustainable conference swag thing where people actually eat your logo off of all sorts of fruit. We’ve got 23 these things and she loves doing it and she never really wants to scale one up to be some massive thing. So the options are pretty much limitless. And I think again, like you should try to figure out what it is that resonates with you and The kind of life you want to live, rather than locking yourself into having to start some type of business because you think every business is the same. Every business is different, and I think should be a reflection of the founders personality,

Kelly 31:09
for sure. I need to plug a book real fast because we’re talking about not having to scale your team company of one by Paul Jarvis. Right? Well, really good book. And it really opens your eyes to the fact that oh, you know, you might get team NBC, you’re like, I get team envy from other people in the office. They’re like, Oh, I have a team of 10. I’m like, Well, I have two employees. And I’m pretty proud of that. I don’t need like anything huge. Oh, and company one really opened my eyes to that.

Courtland Allen 31:34
I know a lot of people with really big teams, the people who are also miserable. So it’s definitely not about just like counting the team size. That’s not that’s not what it’s about

Ali 31:42
giving a little bit. What advice would you give to somebody who wants to become an indie hacker?

Courtland Allen 31:48
I would say like, first of all, be careful taking advice from strangers like me on the internet. Because you’re your own person you don’t necessarily fit into a bucket and most advice is not one size fits all. A lot of times I tell I give people advice for like, books they should read or things they should do. But the person I’m talking to actually turns out that they’ve read a ton of stuff. And their biggest issues is just like, can’t pull the trigger, they just can’t get started. And I’m just like, basically giving them giving them advice, you know, allowing them to procrastinate. So I think, first of all, you need to sit down and ask, you know, what do you want? What are your problems? What are you stuck with? What are you inspired by? and really take that into account before you listen to someone’s advice. And also, if you’re asking for advice for someone, like tell them what you want, tell them what your goals are, and make sure they can tailor their advice to you. Because there’s so much out there. There’s so many books written and blog posts written about how to start a company or how to start a side project or how to become a developer. And you really need to consume information that’s targeted to people like you rather than people who are doing other things. So that’s my first bit of advice, which is take advice with a grain of salt. Second, I think, don’t be afraid to start small. It can be very daunting to have like these grand ambitions and these grand goals and thinking you know, I’ve got to build this amazing thing and tell all your friends about Family gonna do this amazing thing. And then it’s really hard to start. And it’s really easy to feel like a failure. I think what you should do instead is basically just create like these little toy projects, create a spreadsheet for people to share things like do something that you think is fun, that’s super easy. That only takes you a few days or a few hours to get off the ground, and then just iterate on it. And don’t need to have grand ambitions, just allow yourself to sort of follow a sort of winding path that feels good in the beginning. And then it’s much easier to start. It’s much easier to feel good about what you’ve done. And I think honestly, in the end, most things that are successful start that way anyway, rather than trying to be super ambitious from the start. So don’t be afraid to start small.

Kelly 33:36
I’ve have one additional point of advice that I’d love to, you know, get your take on. It’s a big step to leave your day job and go full time in the hacking. Do you have any advice around that?

Courtland Allen 33:49
This is another thing that’s like totally personal. So it is a time where I basically gotten burned out on starting different companies and not really having them succeed and I was just doing sort of contract work over the internet where I’d work from home and then Tinker on my side projects on the side. And when I was in that state, it was just very comfortable. For me, it was very hard for me to take my side project seriously and work on them to the level where I could actually turn them into something, standalone and go full time on them. And then at some point, my contracts ended and I decided, you know, I can live off my savings for probably a year, let me go full time on my side projects and try to turn them into something great. And like that was the only time I got really serious. And so for me, I kind of needed that external pressure. That motivation of watching my savings declined month after month paying rent and expensive San Francisco, for me to really get serious and to do something. And I know that I could have just sort of wallowed in procrastination and lack of motivation forever if I hadn’t quit my job. For others. It’s the exact opposite. And it depends on your circumstances. If you’ve got a family at home, if you’ve got kids, if you’ve got a mortgage, maybe it’s a little risky to just up and quit your job based on a dream. And in that situation, I think your main challenge is going to be that you’ve got your time and your attention really divided, you’ve got a job that takes up a lot of your time, you’ve got relationships with your family, that also take up a lot of your time. And you’ve got, you know, probably not that much free time to start a company. And a lot of people find it hard to start there. But my advice for you is, once again, like shrink the scope of what you’re working on, almost, regardless of how much free time you have, there’s something you can do that’s useful that can fit into that time. And what I see a lot of people doing and saying, like, oh, it takes like, you know, three to six months to build a fully featured application that’s going to be useful. And I only have a few hours a week. So it’s going to take me like two years to do this. I think well, you know, you don’t need to build a fully featured, you know, web application that you could build something really simple in just a few hours. It’s not only about making more time in your day, but it’s also I think, changing the scope of what your ambition is and what your idea is to fit into a smaller time window that you can actually do and the time you have allotted. And so I’ve met a lot of people who’ve had full time jobs, who released apps and projects and companies that literally it only took them like a few hours to get off the ground. You know, like I’m gonna start Instagram account, right? Take photos of this thing and then build a community around it using discourse. And that takes them like an hour to get set up. And yeah, it’s not their ultimate vision for what they ultimately want to do five years down the road, but it’s a good way for them to get started, and hopefully go from there. So I would encourage people to be a little bit more creative, a little bit more willing to, to work on very small, unambitious, not time consuming things when your time is limited, and you’ve got a full time job that you don’t want to quit.

Ali 36:25
Love that. Another place that I’ve gotten advice in the past is the indie hacker Five, four, we asked for advice on Ladybug when we started and got some great stuff on there. So what advice and how could somebody also go ahead and get started on that in the hacker community?

Courtland Allen 36:45
So yeah, any hackers, the online community is basically a forum full of people who are starting things who want to get advice from each other and want to share each other’s stories. I think it’s really fascinating because one of the things you have to do as a founder is usually communicate with your customers. them, you know, here’s what we’re offering and get them interested and then learning how to communicate with people. And it’s no different from being on an online forum. And so if you come on any hackers or you want help with something, or you want to share a story, I would say put a little bit of thought into what would make that story resonate with other people. For example, if you need help with something, instead of just saying, you know, how do I do this thing? Ask yourself, what do other people need help with this, too? How can I phrase my question in a way where people see it? And they say, Oh, you know, I need help with this, too. Let me click in and read it. And I wouldn’t say like, you know, you know, how can I make the colors better on my website and the hackers calm? I might make a post that says, you know, what are the best color schemes for a website? And then lots of people will say, Oh, yeah, I’ve got that problem, or I’m interested in the answer, and comment and chime in and contribute. So I would say, put a little thought into the post that you create an ND hackers. Don’t be afraid to post a lot of people have posting anxiety, but I promise no one’s gonna bite. It’s a community full of very empathetic people who’ve been through the whole gamut of emotions and trials and tribulations trying to start their companies and so whatever you do, people will have been there and they They know what it’s like. So you don’t have to be embarrassed about posting, you’re not to be worried that people are gonna trash your idea or get mad at you. Just take the plunge and make a post and see what people say. And also, finally, don’t be afraid to help out other people. Generally speaking, if you browse the forum for a little bit, you’re gonna find someone who has an issue, or problem or who just wants to share a story that like you can provide some feedback for. And it just feels great to be able to help someone else out there who’s trying to accomplish their dream and know that just by typing a few sentences, and clicking submit that, like you helped someone and made their day, so feel free to contribute as well.

Kelly 38:32
I love that. And especially on that last point. Really important to note that you don’t have to be an expert to be able to give advice.

Courtland Allen 38:39
You know, one of the big things that people do to start businesses that work, one of the best things you can do, I think is teach. Because generally speaking, people love to learn things like people don’t love to learn how to become a developer, how to become an indie hacker, how to learn how to knit or do anything. And a lot of people have anxiety around teaching and helping they think, Well, I’m not a world class expert, and there’s so many people who are way better than me like how can I afford to teach. And at the end of the day, like people don’t necessarily want to learn from World Class experts, I want to learn from somebody who’s just a little bit better than that. So if you’re a beginner, you can teach people who haven’t yet become beginners who are just getting started. Or if you’re intermediate something, you can teach people who are beginners. And so I love your point there that essentially you don’t have to be, you know, super knowledgeable, unable to help in order to help somebody, you can generally help lots of people with whatever level of knowledge you have right now.

Kelly 39:24
But Ellie has all kinds of thoughts on that one.

Ali 39:26
Definitely, definitely. That’s so true. And I was so nervous when I started teaching full time that my students are gonna be better coders than me or whatever, but definitely a lot to gain from everybody. And no matter what level they’re at, very true.

Courtland Allen 39:43
And sometimes, like just sharing your story, like, people come on indie hackers, the same way you’re interviewing me, I’ll just interview them, like, Hey, what did you do? You know, how did you get to where you are? And they’ll just literally talk about what they did. And that’s super educational to thousands of people, even though they’re not trying to be teachers. So I can’t emphasize enough like, how much All of us have the potential to be teachers and how valuable it is for other people to be taught something that that’s inspiring for them

Kelly 40:05
for sure. I have one final question for you. Probably the easiest one, where can we find you on the internet, your Twitter websites, whatever.

Courtland Allen 40:14
So first of all, indie hackers calm. It’s the community we’ve been talking about. I’m CS Allen on there. So if you make a post, feel free to tag me at CS a Ll en, and I’m also CS Allen, on Twitter. So if you follow me on Twitter, I generally tweet out you know, random advice that I have or thoughts that occur or new podcast episodes that get released and polls and questions for the community.

Kelly 40:35
Awesome. I just interview was amazing. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. So I’m going to go ahead and close this out. So if you like this episode tweet about it. We’ll be selecting one tweet or two and a Smashing Magazine book each week. We also started a book club. This month’s book is atomic habits by James clear. If you’re interested in learning more you can head over to Ladybug Dev slash books. We have a little Goodreads community where we’re, you know, discussing the book or attempting to discuss the book anyway, we will be recording a podcast episode on it as well. And we post new podcast podcasts episodes every Monday. So make sure you’re subscribed to be notified and leave us a review on Apple podcasts. And finally, once again, thank you courtland for joining us today.

Unknown Speaker 41:20
Thanks so much.

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