Short, bite-sized conversations with indie hackers that have started small, profitable and bootstrapped businesses. You'll learn how they come up with ideas, what they do to validate, find those first customers and make a sustainable income.
What it takes to build a community - Rosie Sherry, Indie Hackers
Rosie Sherry is a community builder, indie hacker and founder. She currently runs the Indie Hackers community and also a weekly newsletter where she talks about building communities. Previously, Rosie founded Ministry of Testing.In this episode we talked about: Rosie's background as an indie hacker Going full time on Ministry of Testing, growing that into a £1m+ business What it's like running the Indie Hackers community What makes a good Indie Hackers post How to make the most out of the platform Why Rosie started Rosieland, her paid newsletter What goes into building a community How we can be a more inclusive community Recommendations Book: Anything from Derek Sivers Podcast: Indie Hackers Indie Hacker: Monica Lent Follow Rosie Twitter Rosieland Follow Me Twitter Indie Bites Twitter Personal Website Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites.‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’‘Absolutely love this community.’These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.
Leaving a full-time head of growth role to be a full-time indie hacker - Corey Haines, Swipe Files and more
Corey Haines is the founder of Swipe Files, he also runs refactoring growth, mental models for marketing, hey marketers and he was previously the head of growth at Baremetrics. I've been a follower of Corey for a while and impressed by the level and consistency of everything he produces.In this episode we talked about: What projects Corey is currently working on Why he left Baremetrics What it's like leaving a stable, full-time job to be an indie hacker How he manages his time between projects How much revenue he makes How to build things quickly Deciding on what ideas to focus on Advice for indie hackers wanting to live the dream Recommendations Book: Atomic Habits Podcast: Akimbo Indie Hacker: David Perrell Follow Corey Twitter Swipe Files Mental Models for Marketing Refactoring Growth Hey Marketers Follow Me Twitter Indie Bites Twitter Personal Website Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites.‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’‘Absolutely love this community.’These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.Full TranscriptJames: You've got a lot going on. Tell me a little bit more about your various side projects, where your main focus is right now.Corey: Yeah. So I don't know, maybe I just caught the entrepreneurial bug or have an itch to create stuff. But, about two years ago I started just making stuff on the side. I started with a newsletter actually that ended up shutting down later, but it was called the TLDR on SaaS marketing. And that was like my first entry point into creating something and sharing it online and it's actually the reason why I created my Twitter account in the first place. and then, yeah, it's just been through a little bit of. serendipity and connection between projects.um, you know, I was talking with a Baremetrics customer, actually. And he's like, Hey, where do I find someone like you? where would you post a job if you were hiring yourself? And I was like, actually, I don't know. There isn't really like a job board for marketers. So I went out and built it. Later on I was talking about different mental models and frameworks that I've found really helpful for my work at Baremetrics.Other people were asking for the Notion doc and you know where to learn more about it. So I figured out why don't I just package this up into a course, same thing with B2B SaaS marketing, with what we've done at Baremetrics is figuring out how to create this new course too. Now Swipe Files, I would swipe something and I would write some notes, some bullet points about here's, what I think is great about it and then I noticed this is actually pretty useful because there's a few sites out there, like swipefile.com and Swipe Worthy, or I think it's swiped.co, which are fantastic sources of inspiration, but you still have to do the work to figure out what you want to glean from it.So Swipe Files is my attempt to build a library of content where I will tell you and show you what it is you can take away from it instead of having to deduce it for yourself. And now I've got a bunch of other things I'll do in the future, but, yesterday went full time as a creator on my own stuff.James: Yeah. Tell me a little bit more about that. So previously you head of growth at Baremetrics. How long were you there for and, what went into making decision that now is the right time to leave?Corey: I was there for almost two years and had a fantastic time, experimented with a ton. We grew about 30% which was great for a bootstrapped company. I really changed a lot and I was all over the place with, trying to find different channels and breakthroughs, and really what we came to was that company wasn't at the right spot to really support a growth role with the budget and the engineering time that was needed to really push the ball forward and so just decided to part ways. And I was already the place that I wanted to go full time and my own stuff anyways I think coincidentally, a little bit serendipitously was perfectly the timing for me to start working on my own stuff full time and, head on to this new chapter of my life.James: So with your various side projects, or they're not side projects now that you're full time projects, How do they each look in terms of revenue what's making the most for you? Corey: Yeah right now the breadwinner are the courses, refactoring growth and mental models for marketing and I've done about 36,000 in the last 10 months. I couldn't do what I'm doing today without that revenue on the side, to be able to, fund myself into going full time as a creator. The other one, now that I'm trying to build into becoming the breadwinner is Swipe Files. And to date I actually, I couldn't tell you the revenue that has done, I think it's probably done a couple thousand in revenue because it's split between monthly annual in lifetimes.It's a little bit more difficult for me to... I didn't go through Stripe and do the math beforehand. but, um, it does about like the MRR today is about a thousand dollars. and then, Hey Marketers, to be honest, I've started to neglected for the last year. I launched it and then I spent a good four or five months working really hard on it. And then figured I would outsource it to my nephew, who is a poor college student and, and needs some cheap, manual labor.It still does $100 to $300 a month, maybe. And it's a pay what you want model too. So sometimes I'll get a job posting for one dollar and sometimes I'll get a job posting for a hundred bucks. But it depends. James: so you've got all of these projects so much going on now. How do you squeeze it all in? And how did you manage your time before? I guess this week?Corey: The answer is I didn't, and I'm going to figure it out now. When I was with Baremetrics full time, I was very much working in these sprints. With Hey Marketers; I created the job for within three weekends and then I would just work here and there nights and weekends, especially, it wasn't very much work, to be honest. With the courses I created Mental Models for Marketing within the span of a month, about a week of that was spent on vacation with a Thanksgiving break. Same thing with Refactoring Growth; it took me about 45 days to create that course. About two weeks of that was spent on vacation, just heads down, creating a lot of the content. With Swipe Files now that's really been kinda my nights and weekends project, where Monday nights is like my night or I'll sit down and I'll write the tear down schedule the email, schedule the tweet thread. Now, what I'm wanting to do is, really go all in on Swipe Files, and trying to get into a cadence.I heard some advice from, from my friend, Michael Taylor, but I'd also been thinking this beforehand, but getting into a cadence where Mondays are going to be my podcasting day. Tuesday are going to be my tear down's day. Wednesday is going to be my meetings day, maybe with friends and or consulting or whatever. Thursday is going to be my, articles and guides day.And then Friday, it's going to be my newsletter, something like that, Where I kind of time blocks specific parts of that I can really get into deep work and focus. James: How do you decide which ideas to pursue, and then how do you stay focused on it and not get distracted by new ideas or, or pursuing something until it gets to a point where it's growing nicely?Corey: Yeah, I probably skew towards spending too much time on something. So that's something I'm trying to work against. Like for example, when I was doing the newsletter, my very first project, I did it a full year and only got 200 subscribers and just didn't feel like it was going anywhere, I think that what's helped with the courses and it Swipe Files is that they're very much, you get the content work done once and then you can just market it afterwards.And so that's really helped me and my own weaknesses and my own personality. Just being able to jump between projects. I was like, alright, great, I've created one course now let's create another course. Now let's create a membership site. Like they all just, allowed me to be all over the place.But what's helped me cause I have a bazillion other ideas that I could pursue. And all of these came from that same kind of idea bucket. And what I found helps is just writing every single thing down. I used to use Evernote, then I used Notion now use Roam and I've ported everything over there and had been using that for several months now.But literally every single thought that enters my brain gets put somewhere, especially business ideas and I'll flush it out. All right. Type up all the things that I have that way I can just get it out of my mind, not thinking about it again. And usually what I like to do is if I think about it again over and over again, and it keeps coming up and I keep revisiting and I keep writing more ideas, then I know that there's something here . James: Yeah, I think what you're able to do as well is build things quite quickly. Corey: Yeah, I think speed is vastly underrated and underappreciated for aspiring entrepreneurs, indie hackers, anyone who's building something.The point is to create something quickly and fast and to get it out and get it in front of people. Each of the courses I did under 45 days, Swipe Files took me about 60 days, about two months to get from first breaking ground in Webflow to launching and feeling done with it. And that's really allowed me to 1/ be able to do it and finish it cause the longer something goes on, the less likely you are to finish it. but 2/ be able to grow and see significant progress.James: yeah. What, what what's been your biggest struggle with building your various projects?Corey: Time, I think just lack of time. Not wanting any of the time to bleed into time at Baremetrics, I'm working full time at a job where I have an obligation. And so that was, so many nights and weekends where I was just like half falling asleep, writing, creating something, trying to plan something. And so that's been the biggest struggle for me has just been; feeling a little bit like, kinda caged up, like I'm wanting to get out. I working in a straight jacket. Like I can't do all the things that I want to do because I don't have the physical time.James: And I'd ask you what your advice is. For indie hackers who are sort of in the position you're in before working a full time job, got various different projects on the go and they want the dream of leaving their job and working full time on their projects.What advice would you give to them?Corey: I would say just make a lot of stuff and get it out of your system, and test things out because there's no safer time to do that when you have a paycheck. I think the mistake that. This isn't a knock on them, but I was just listening to the Dru Riley podcast with Courtland and on the indie hackers podcast.And, he was talking about how he had an amazing job saved up 250 grand and then quit. And then basically has just been burning through savings for the last three years because he was comfortable. and I was like"that's amazing, that's great, I'm glad he found something that worked for him "but you don't have to do it that way. If he hadn't been experimenting while he was still at his job. And then he found something, that worked or that was viable, or that was promising and then left his job, he would have had the savings to work on that thing full time, instead of doing the opposite of, let me burn through my savings to find something that works and then race against the clock to replace that income.So I would say experiment, get yourself in a good financial position. The more savings, the better, but also the more traction initially, the better as well. You need the cushion traction. So try to find as much of both of those as you can while you're still working full time.James: Corey, I wanted to talk just quickly, very quickly about Twitter because you're super active on Twitter. What's your strategy or goal with Twitter?Corey: I didn't have a Twitter strategy I think up until I started with Swipe Files, to be honest. Because, one, it was just me sharing, interesting, relevant things, working at Baremetrics, sharing about marketing, commenting with people . I shared basically nothing about my personal life on Twitter. It's all business, marketing, SaaS, entrepreneurship. So that gives people a reason to follow me. yeah, I think the main three things are. Being an interesting person with interesting things to say, making a lot of friends who can amplify you and then having a consistent schedule of, I mean, I think threads are a fantastic way of delivering content.they're more interesting. People are more likely to retweet it just cause it's more valuable than a single tweet. and I keep it very focused on again, SaaS, marketing, entrepreneurship, and business in general.James: Yeah, without a doubt, that's a really cool way to do it. we'll sort of round off with a final question about. the tools you use, because we haven't really discussed that at all,what are the marketing tools and growth tools would you recommend for indie hackers?Corey: Yeah. So I build most of my sites in Webflow. I have one site, on Carrd, I'm a huge fan of Webflow and I love the flexibility. I still don't really don't know how to use Carrd that much, to be honest. So I might eventually move off of it. It's just crazy cheap and it's amazing deal and AJ is a great creator so I like supporting him. I use right message for all my kind of email capture and that connects with Convert Kit, which is what I use for all email marketing newsletter related things. I use Member Stack on top of Webflow to create the membership site for Swipe Files.I've also been using Sparkloop for my newsletter, a referral program, which needs some tweaking and some massaging, but has also worked really, I've gotten a couple of big wins from it, which has already justified the cost for where, the vast majority of people do not refer anyone, but a couple people do and they bring in 50 subscribers each and I'm like, all right.Wow. This is, you know, glad we had that in place James: All right then final, quick fire questions. What's your favorite book, Corey?Corey: Oh man. I'm looking at my book sack back here. You know, I don't know if I have a favorite book. how about this? I'll give you my favorite books from the last three years. So I've like a favorite book of the year. 2018 for me was Atomic Habits. 2019 for me was Ultra Learning. 2020 for me has been a book called the Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by a guy named John Mark Homer and, it's just about essentially the way you're supposed to live life as a Christian, you know, religious, but I think there's a lot of really practical implications for kind of this culture of Busy-ness in America that we've gotten ourselves into and try to reverse that a bit.James: and you say you're a podcast binger, what's your favorite? Corey: Akimbo - Seth Godin. James: Which indie hacker do you admire slash who should people Follow?Corey: Oh man. You know what? David Perrel is... dude, the guy's just, I don't think people even understand what he's done, with his Twitter following where he's come from his podcasts, his course. the guy is just a machine he's super smart, but also his success already is amazing, you just look at the success of them and you can, you can't ignore, the guy does a million plus course sales a year.He has the podcast, he does the angel investing. Many other things we probably don't even know about yet that he has his hands in, and it's just, sky's the limit for that guy.James: Very impressive. And then finally, what are you most excited for the future? Both personally and business or both?Corey: I'm really stoked to start working on a SaaS business, to be honest. It's a long journey. It's a long road, but that's my end goal. James: Absolutely Corey, you've been an immense guest we've recorded for 50 minutes and it's going to go all into a 15 minute podcast. Corey: Cool. Amazing, man. Yeah. Thanks for having me.Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Indy bites. I hope you feel inspired by listening to this conversation between me and Corey. if you did enjoy this episode, I'd love you to share the episode with just one in the hacker that will find it useful. It does help the podcast grow. As always you'll find links for everything discussed in the episode, in the show notes. That's all from me enjoy the rest of your day
How VEED grew to $1.7m ARR in less than 2 years - Sabba Keynejad, Veed.io
Sabba Keynejad is the co-founder and CEO of VEED - an online video editing platform. VEED is a fully-fledged collaborative video editing product used by many influencers, coaches and businesses for adding subtitles, captions, text, merging videos, making meme videos, turning podcasts to videos and much more.What we covered in this episode:On Veed What is Veed? Where did you come up with the idea? What is your current revenue? Had you started and failed with anything before? What made Veed work out? Many indie hackers are solo. You have a co-founder split 50/50 on the business, do you think it's worth indie hackers going out to find a co-founder? There are many online video editing tools out there. Wavve, Headliner, Kapwing. What makes Veed different and how has that fed into your growth? On growth and marketing Veed has grown super quickly, but how did you get your first 100 users? Then how did you convert them to paying customers? Your marketing strategy. What did you do at the start for your growth? When you started generating revenue, you hired content creators. Why? What are your tips for marketing without budget? Biggest mistakes / advice you'd give to founders Recommendations Favourite indie hacker is Josh Pigford. Best book for indie hackers; Traction. Favourite podcast; How I Built This. Follow SabbaTwitterFollow Me Twitter Indie Bites Twitter Personal Website Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites.‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’‘Absolutely love this community.’These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.Full transcript coming soon.
What's important for indie hackers in 2020 - Courtland Allen, Indie Hackers
Courtland Allen founded Indie Hackers in 2016, grew the business $8k MRR with sponsors, and then sold to Stripe 9 months later. An inspirational story that doesn't end there. Courtland has now been working from within Stripe for the past 4 years, where he continues to build on the platform and produce the excellent Indie Hackers podcast. He's a fountain of knowledge and I think you'll love this episode.What we covered in this episode:On Indie Hackers: Why did Courtland start IH? What is an 'indie hacker'? What are the pros and cons of building within Stripe? Does he have goals for IH set by Stripe? Does he have any other side projects, aside from IH? On indie hacking: Where should new indie hackers start? How do you stay motivated as a one-person team? The growth of communities The growth of paid newsletters The current state of bootstrapping Quick fire Favourite indie hackers are; Lynne Tye, Rosie Sherry, Amy Hoy, Natalie Nagele. Best book for indie hackers; Thinking, Fast and Slow, Sapiens, Hooked. Favourite podcast; Conversations with Tyler. Follow CourtlandTwitterFollow Me Twitter Indie Bites Twitter Personal Website Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites.‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’‘Absolutely love this community.’These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.Full TranscriptJames: Courtland has inspired so many of us to build our profitable internet businesses. Let's talk to him to find out what's important as an indie hacker in 2020. Courtland, welcome to the podcast. How are you?Courtland: Excellent James. Thanks for having me.James: To set the scene and for those that might not know, tell me a little bit more about what Indie Hackers is and why you started the website?Courtland: Yeah. So I moved to the Bay Area when I was like 23. I wanted to start a very stereotypical high growth tech startup. I wanted to be a unicorn company. I wanted to make billions and be world famous. After seven or so years of that struggle, I was just tired of it. I got tired of the VC funded software world.And so I took time off work. I was doing a lot of contract development and I just started searching for other examples of people who've done the same thing. And it turns out there wasn't really a good way to learn how to do this. Everybody online was doing the same thing I was doing; just like looking for comments left by Pieter Levels or like tweets where some people would share some tidbit of their story, but like we couldn't find anything great. And so I kind of just solved my own problem and said, you know, I should build the thing that helps people do this. I was surprised it didn't exist. And here we are 4 years later, somewhat ironically, I decided that I wanted to be a bootstrapper. I decided that I wanted to get out of the high growth startup game.And within a year, starting Indie Hackers, it was acquired by Stripe and fulfilled one of the goals of a lot of people in the high growth startup game want to. So that's how we got to where we are today.James: What is your definition of an indie hacker?Courtland: I think Tyler Tringas actually put it well recently. He said that "the new American dream is to build a profitable, sustainable, remote software business that you can run from home ". You can run from wherever you want work with wherever you want, that scales nicely, and that prints money for you. And I think an indie hacker is somebody who's trying to achieve that. Someone who doesn't like the status quo, someone who doesn't want to work for the man for the rest of their life.There's no problem with doing that. I think jobs provide a lot of stability for people, a lot of predictability, but if you're like me, you just don't want to have a boss. You don't want there to be a cap on your salary. You don't want somebody else telling you what to work on. You want to control your own life and you're an indie hacker.James: What are the challenges and benefits of building Indie Hackers from within Stripe?Courtland: I don't have to get on the phone with advertisers anymore. Indie Hackers makes $0. It's a hundred percent just me focusing on making the community good and helping it grow. I think probably the one challenge is that I'm someone who puts a lot of pressure on my shoulders to, I think, perform well for others. And at Stripe, Patrick Collison is my boss. He went out on a limb and acquired Indie Hackers, and I feel a lot of pressure to make sure that any hackers, is a success.And at Stripe, like I'm extremely autonomous. I talk to Patrick and the team there once every three months, once every six months, sometimes, and it's almost always just check-ins; how are you doing? Do you need anything? What can we help with et cetera? It's like the ideal working situation. I can't imagine having a job under any other kind of framework.James: Are you tied to any goals within Stripe? Do they set any targets for you that you have to reach, such as traffic numbers or engagement? Courtland: There isn't any sort of like you have to reach X number or the axe will fall. I think what's cool about the fact that I joined Stripe is that my goals are very much aligned with theirs. And I think if you ever work with any sort of partner or you acquire anyone or you get acquired, you should always try to make sure your goals are aligned because if there's even a one degree difference between where you want to go and where they go, at first that's very small, but after a number of years, that gap has widened into something that's like very hard to fix. And so I just want Indie Hackers to be like as big and as meaningful and useful as possible. I think about that religiously every single day. And that's what Stripe wants to ultimately they want more people starting companies. They want those companies to succeed and make a whole bunch of money because then Stripe makes money. So there's really like perfect alignment. There's no need for Stripe to tell me what to do, or force me to do things that I don't want and vice versa. I'm not really pushing against the Stripe mothership in any way.James: Do you have any sort of side projects you want to work on or the urge to do indie hacking outside of working on Indie Hackers and for Stripe?Courtland: Every day I wake up, it's like, well, what am I going to work on today? Am I going to build out a network of podcasts? Am I going to create like a milestones leaderboard that's similar to Product Hunt, but for indie hackers. Am I going to create like a groups interface so indie hackers can create their own communities? And so I already feel like I have a ton of side projects.James: Let's move on a little bit to indie hacking in general and what advice you can give to current indie hackers. How about those that are at the start of their journey with indie hacking. where should they start?Courtland: Those are the best indie hackers. In fact, that's most indie hackers. Most people don't know what to work on and they're not sure what to start. And I think the first thing you should do is probably ask yourself what it is you want in the first place.Like, why do you want to be an indie hacker? Who inspired you? What do you want to accomplish?Usually, the answer is some form of freedom, but there's lots of different forms of freedom. Do you want the creative freedom to work on whatever you want? Do you want to work from wherever you want? Like how much money do you need to make?These are all really important questions because I think if you set out to do something without knowing what your goals are and knowing what would help you feel accomplished, then when you eventually hit that goal, it doesn't feel that great because you don't even realize that you hit it and you don't know if you should keep going, you should change directions, et cetera.So, I always advise people to start off by just like spending an hour or two, just asking yourself what you want, who you are, what kinds of things make you happy in life? I just think it's really important to know who you are and what's gonna make you happy. Second. I think you've gotta avoid the common pitfalls of idea generation. For example, we all think that starting a company is like having an invention, right?A real business idea, I think should start. Always from the problem, not from the solution. People are driven to take actions in the world because they're trying to fulfil their desires because they're trying to solve problems. And if you want people to take action in the direction of the thing that you built, you need to understand their desires and their problems and make sure that the thing that you build solves that.But if you're trying to come up with an idea, I would say, just get obsessed with the problem and don't fall into the trap of thinking that it needs to be some problem that no one's ever solved before. James: Yeah, I think it was absolutely sound advice. A lot of indie hackers are solo founders and sometimes it can be isolating when you're a one person team working away in your business. What's your advice about getting stuff done and staying motivated as a one person team?Courtland: Even though, like I started Indie Hackers as a one person team. Right before I joined Stripe, I brought in my brother to work with me and we talked to each other on the phone every day. I'm a huge fan of social accountability. We're social creatures. We care a lot about what other people think about us. We don't want to let down our coworkers. We don't want to let down our colleagues. So I think as a founder when you've gone from probably working a job your whole life to suddenly being on your own, and you don't have a boss, you don't have coworkers, you don't have anybody who expects anything and no one even knows what's on your to do list, it can be a bit jarring. And you might think, oh, what I need to do is figure out all these different productivity hacks to really push myself to work harder, but I think, the ultimate productivity hack is just have someone that you're accountable to.Have a mentor, a partner, a co-founder. It could be your customers. Early on with Indie Hackers I just resolved that every week I was going to send an email to my mailing list and it was going to have a section right at the top where I said; this is what I did this week and here's what I'm going to get done next week.I can't skip out on it. I can't let this other person down.James: Yeah, that's something that I've personally found really useful. We're seeing a lot more communities pop up, especially paid communities. And there was a post on Indie Hackers about trends that are coming up, and got a great answer or some thoughts about communities and why they're becoming more and more popular now. Why is it you think that?Courtland: I think communities are the future. Being social is one of the main things that we do as human beings, we care about being parts of communities. We care about relating to others. If you look at the 2010s, we always had these huge social networks. We had Twitter, we have Facebook and those are great in their own way, but there's a lot of problems with them that I'm sure everybody can enumerate. And so we're starting to see communities unbundle these huge social networks. We're starting to see people create more niche, interest based or personality based communities around certain topics. Besides that, I think there's just a flywheel effect that's accelerating things. You have more and more people joining these communities who are realizing that they want some sort of social connection with people online, especially with COVID-19 and everybody stuck at home.I think that gives people creating communities more incentive to create them. Because now, "Hey, my community is going to grow". There's so many people who want online community, like maybe I should start this. Maybe it's a good business model for me. Maybe it's like a fun way for me to connect or learn from other people.And then once people start creating more communities and you have other companies that create tools that make it easier to create communities. Cause it's kinda like selling shovels to people during a gold rush, right? Whenever people were doing something you want to make tools for those people and help them do it better.So there's been an absolute explosion in the past year of people creating community building websites, community building tools, community building blog posts, community building podcasts. And all of that in turn makes it way easier to build a community. So now the whole flywheel repeats, more people build communities, more people join communities, more people build tools for communities, et cetera. James: We've also seen a growth in newsletters and paid newsletters. Why have we seen that?Courtland: I think when it comes to newsletters and writing and especially podcasting, I put them all in one bucket. A lot of them are cults of personality. A lot of them are people realizing that they don't necessarily want to read the mainstream news. And I think this has been true on the internet for quite some time, but I think that the growth of social media has really allowed people who have been writing on their own blogs and writing on their own newsletters to distribute what they've been doing to a wider audience. And then the growth of tools like Stripe and Patreon and just the acceptance of people making online payments has led these creators to realize; "okay, I can charge money for this". I think we're at an inflection point where people are tremendously inspired by seeing some of the numbers that a few individuals have been putting up. You start to think;" Hey, maybe I should have a blog where I write about tech topics three or four days a week and see what I can do."It's just this formula of inspiration, which I think about a lot at indie hackers, which is, you show a story of someone doing something just amazing and making a ton of money, something that people can relate to you, they can imagine how it would change their lives. Then you break down how they're doing it and you make it approachable, and you talk about the person's background and you show how they're approachable too.In other words, you relay the message. Hey, you could do this too. And that's like the trifecta formula for inspiring people to do things. James: Why is it that indie hackers are so open with sharing numbers? What's the benefit of that? Courtland: I think it's just a, consequence of the infinite distribution provided by the internet. Anyone can put up any sort of website, whether it's true, whether it's fake news, whether it's credible or whether it's good, whether it's bad. If you write something that engages people and you figure it out, how to distribute it, then you can get the eyeballs.It means that there's just more information out there for people to learn from, if you go to indiehackers.com/interviews, there's like 500 stories there where people say:Here's how I came up with my idea. Here's exactly how much money I'm making today. Here's what I was thinking I wrote the first few lines of code. It's an immensely useful resource for learning how to do things cause everybody's so transparent. And then when you go out there, you want to pay it forward because you learn from all these transparent people and so you're more likely to be transparent yourself.James: Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned that you've got over 500 interviews on the site you're 173 episodes of the podcast - you speak to a lot of indie hackers. What is your view on the current state of bootstrapping, where there are so many people now starting businesses and seeing this as an opportunity where they've got a little bit extra time?Courtland: Yeah, I think Indie Hackers is bigger than ever. You mentioned bootstrapping in particular, it's funny, I've seen the erosion of the line between bootstrapping and fundraising in the last four or five years. People, when I started Indie Hackers were so religious and dogmatic about bootstrapping, and I kind of was too. But now we're seeing more investors who are figuring out models that allow them to fund these smaller indie hacker type projects and still make a return on their investment. If you're an indie hacker and now there are options where you don't even have to quit your job or take a leap or, work on the side of your job and you can actually just get some funding. That's just another force that's gonna spur people to start more and more businesses.James: Definitely. Courtland, we'll end on a few quick fire questions. First of all, who's an indie hacker you admire or who should people follow?Courtland: Lynne Tye. One of my best friends is just absolutely crushing it with her website, Key Values. Rosie Sherry, obviously. She's one of the first people that I interviewed for Indie Hackers. But it's hard to pick like a favorite indie hacker.James: What about your favorite book for indie hackers to read?Courtland: uh, the books that have helped me the most are books, like Thinking Fast and Slow. Sapiens. And then maybe particularly for indie hackers, there's a book called Hooked, which talks all about habit formation and what goes into the products and devices and apps and websites that allow us to form habits that we have positive associations within our life.So I think that's a really good book and it's really influenced my thinking and how I build Indie Hackers.James: A great list of books. What about podcasts? Courtland: My favorite podcast is. Conversations with Tyler, which has nothing to do with indie hackers. But again, I think it's good to listen broadly. I've recently become a big fan of the Indie Bites podcast with James McKinven. But there's just such a growing and vibrant ecosystem of podcasts out there. It's hard to pick a favorite.James: Some more great options. And then finally, what are you most excited about for the future? Both in personal life and business. I know you're on a trip away from San Francisco at the moment.Courtland: Yeah, I'm really excited about just getting older. A lot of people hate getting older, but I've recently become more at peace with it. My friend said:"Getting older as a privileged, denied to many" and looking at it through that lens. I think I've really just appreciated getting older and wiser and calmer.James: Awesome. Courtland again, thank you so much for coming on fantastic as ever. Courtland: Thanks, James. James: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Indie Bites. I hope you feel as inspired as I do after listening to this conversation with Courtland. If you'd like to hear more, there's actually a 45 minute extended version of this episode available to my mailing list subscribers. So if you'd like to listen head over to indiebites.co pop your email into the subscribe field, and I'll send you the extended conversation. If you find this episode useful what i'd love you to share it with just one other indie hacker that will also find it useful. It really does help the podcast grow.As always you'll find links to everything we discussed in the show notes. That's all from me. Enjoy the rest of your day.
$3k MRR with 600 paying members writing about mindful productivity - Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Ness Labs
Anne-Laure Le Cunff is the founder of Ness Labs, a learning platform dedicated to mindful productivity while also studying neuroscience part-time at King's College with her masters. Previously Anne-Laure worked at Google leaving that job in 2017. As part of Ness Labs, she creates some truly exceptional content that I've had shared with me time and time again, which is evidenced by her 19,000 strong email lists for her newsletter, Maker Mind.Here's what we covered in this episode:On Ness Labs Tell me a little about your back story and why you started Ness Labs? What is Ness Labs? When did you start generating revenue? What have you done to grow the membership & newsletter subscribers? Neuroscience at King's College on the side! How does that help you research and write articles? You're a proponent of building in public, what are the benefits of this for indie hackers? You have a sizeable audience, how do you cut through the noise / deal with the inbound? What advice would you give to aspiring female indie hackers navigating a male-dominated sector? On mindful productivity What is mindful productivity? You're a prolific writer, how do you get so much done?! Time management article It can be long and hard to grow a side-project / business, how do you stay motivated? As indie hackers, what are the best ways to stay on top of everything and not get overwhelmed? Taking care of yourself. Sleep, taking breaks, journaling. Why is it important and why do so many people neglect it? Quick fire Favourite book is 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology Anne-Laure doesn't listen to podcasts 😱 Follow Marie Denis, Steph Smith and Rosie Sherry Follow Anne-Laure Twitter Ness Labs Follow Me Twitter Indie Bites Twitter Personal Website Full TranscriptJames: Anne-Laure, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing? Anne-Laure: Great. Thanks for having me.James: Good to have you. Tell me a little bit more about Ness Labs for people who don't know? What's it all about?Anne-Laure: Ness Labs is a platform for ambitious makers, knowledge workers, creators who want to be their most productive and creative without sacrificing or mental health, and so it offers content, a community, and also coaching for people to achieve these goals. James: Yeah. And where did you come up with the idea? Anne-Laure: I both at Google and while working at startups, I went through burnout and I think lots of ambitious people have this experience at some point in their work life. And when I was looking for resources to help me go through this, there's actually wasn't much out there. So it started with this goal of helping people really taking care of their mental health at work.I've always been fascinated with how the mind works, how the brain works, how do we think, or where do ideas come from? How do we make decisions? So that's always been an area that I've been really curious about.James: Yeah, absolutely. Where are you at now in terms of subscribers and revenue with Ness Labs? And was it always generating revenue?Anne-Laure: So in the first six months of Ness Labs, most of the revenue was coming from sponsors. And I didn't really like this model because it meant having to chase them, a lot of back and forth. Also quite irregular revenue where some weeks, I have three sponsors reaching out and saying, "hey, can I start with the newsletter?"and some weeks there was no one. I figured that really wanted to have some recurring revenue that I could, even if it was growing slowly, sell something that is a bit more stable. And at this point I have about 600 members and the Ness Labs community generating about $3,000 a month.And that doesn't include all of the, one time revenue that nest labs leaking through books and other products that I'm selling.James: It's amazing how you've grown it and I think that there'll be a lot of indie hackers who are at that level where they're trying to build something up and deciding on a monetization model. Why at the start did you go for the sponsorship route and also, how did you start to build your newsletter list, which made it appealing for sponsors?Anne-Laure: At the very beginning, with the sponsors, I didn't really have any outbound process. I just grew the newsletter and I made it clear with the little inserts and signed it, that there was a spot here. So if any reader was also either an entrepreneur or working at a company that was relevant to the audience, I was reaching that they could just reply back and claim that spot for the next newsletter. There was no outbound work, but I think that making it very clear that this spot existed and also having a very niche topic made it appealing to sponsors because they could in one go reach a certain amount of people.The audience; I can really think Twitter, I think, for most of my subscribers. James: How beneficial has that Twitter following been for you? Cause you have about 30,000 Twitter followers. And over how long was that built? Was there a specific time where you just started growing or was it quite linear?Anne-Laure: It was very linear and slow for years and I think up to two years ago, I only have 3000 followers. It took off pretty recently. And I think it's because I really changed the way I used it. I used to just post whatever articles I was reading, not really contributing value.Whereas now I'm really trying to help people and I really use Twitter to work public. So I really show people my process. I show unfinished articles. Sometimes I ask questions.I do polls where I really ask the community, what do you think about this? Should I write about this or that? And I think the fact that I switched from just broadcasting content on Twitter, to working in public with the garage door open, has been one of the main reasons why my following has grown so fast in the past year. I think lots of entrepreneurs make the mistake of falling prey to the planning fallacy. Where you spend so much time trying to figure out how am I going to go about this? What's the best framework to build this? And which library should I use? And how am I going to do this and that? And I think for me, building in public is a way to fight the planning fallacy, where instead of waiting until they have something absolutely perfect that I can put in the world, I just share little nuggets of my progress and I can get feedback much quicker.So it shortens the feedback loop too, which is especially I think for indie hackers that don't have a lot of resources, is a great thing to do because instead of wasting a lot of time and money potentially going in the wrong direction, you can very quickly adjust. And so that's, for me, that's one of the main benefits of working in public.James: You talk about mindful productivity a lot. What is mindful productivity?Anne-Laure: So a lot of the productivity strategies and content that is out there are really about getting things done. It's about productivity for the sake of productivity and it's about getting as much stuff done as possible. Mindful productivity is about taking a step back and asking yourself, do I really need to do this thing?Am I the right person to do it? Is it the best way to go about it? And it's really about being mindful of the way you work, the way you think, the way you feel. So you can be your most productive while also taking care of your mental health. So you can work on something and being there for the long run. And I think it's particularly relevant for indie hackers, where very often you're a solo entrepreneur.You're the only person having to wear all of these hats and do all of these things. And as we mentioned, there's just so many hours in a day.James: Sometimes they might feel overwhelmed with the amount of stuff they've got going on, all the different hats they've got to wear, prioritization and maybe some even struggle with loneliness. What are the best ways to stay on top of everything and not get overwhelmed?Anne-Laure: The most important thing is to create space for self-reflection. A big mistake that we make, especially when we're passionate about our business is to keep on pushing through. And when we do this, we very often miss some early signs of potential burnout and burnout can actually be quite easy to manage if you catch it early.So making sure that however busy things get, creating that space and that time for self reflection and for really thinking about how do I feel right now? Am I feeling rested? Am I feeling tired? Am I feeling anxious? Am I feeling excited? Do I have enough time for thinking about what I'm doing right now versus just going through my to do list, without any reflection.So that's, for me, the number one most important thing when it comes to mindful productivity is taking that time, and it can take different forms. In my case, I block one hour every Sunday evening where I just write and journal. I look at what went well, what didn't and what I want to focus on for the next week.Other people find that having a thinking buddy is also helpful, where you have one person and every week you block an hour and you literally ask yourself, how are you doing? How is your week? And what do you expect from the coming week? So there's lots of different ways to go about it, but creating that space and blocking time for it is the most helpful thing.James: Why do you think a lot of solo founders and indie hackers tend to neglect that? Anne-Laure: There is a lot of toxic productivity advice out there where some successful entrepreneurs talk about how the wake up at 5:00 AM and then they go for another run and they work until then 10:00 PM. And they also miraculously have time to see their friends and family.This is toxic. I'm not saying they're lying. If this is really the life you're living every day, this is really their routine, good for them. That works for you, but projecting what works for you onto other people and creating this insecurity for other entrepreneurs, we're thinking, "Oh, I'm not as productive as I should be, because look at this person." So I think definitely one reason is all of the productivity porn that is out there and that's giving a false image of what productivity to read looks like and what can you achieve.And the second thing is, geuinely people being passionate about their work. When it's your own business, very often, you care a lot more than if you're working for another company and that's a good thing, but that also needs to be managed. So managing your passion is also a very important thing.James: Yeah, I'm from the outside Anne-Laure, you're a prolific writer. How do you get so much done?Anne-Laure: I block time for the things that matter. And I don't mean blocking time by filling my whole... if you look at my calendar right now, it's almost empty. And I block time for the things that I really want to achieve each week. So for example, I have an hour and a half blocked every morning to write. Every Monday I look at my calendar and I'm like, okay, what are the top three things that I really need to do this week? And I make sure they happen. If the rest doesn't happen, that's completely fine. So I don't actually think I get more done than other people, but I really focus my efforts on the few things that I really think matter. James: I'll leave a link to your time management article, where you actually have a screenshot of your calendar with some of those recurring events in the show notes. I'd like to sort of round off on a topic which is women indie hackers in this community that is male dominated, both indie hackers and tech. What advice would you give to both, women in the hackers and us guys on what we can do to help include female indie hackers?Anne-Laure: I'm very lucky that very early on in my indie hacker hacker journey I found a group called Women Make . It's led by a woman called Marie who's amazing and has fostered this great, inclusive community where women can come and talk about their business and their challenges and ask questions and work together.So my advice for women who are looking to connect with other women who are also solo entrepreneurs would be to join that group.James: What about the guys? What should we do be more inclusive? Anne-Laure: There are a few things that I think would be helpful. First, if you're on Twitter and you ever do these threads where you're listing other entrepreneurs or resources that are helpful to other people, just check the list very quickly and see if there are women in it. And that seems like a simple thing, but the number of times I see those lists of saying, here are the best entrepreneurs in that field and there's no women in it. And the second thing in your interaction with women also online, don't assume they don't know what they're talking about. So many interactions where I post something and obviously Twitter only has 280 characters and so I just post a short version, the number of mansplaining that I get sometimes where I have men jumping in my replies and saying, Oh, actually also this and this. And I know. I actually study those things. It's a tweet. You would not be doing this to another man, but you're doing this to me.James: Yeah, I think that's sound advice. And thanks for being open about it. On that thing we'll round up on a few quick fire questions. The first one being who are some good female in the hackers that we can all follow?Anne-Laure: Yeah, so I'll have so many. Marie Denis, who's the founder of Woman Make, first. She's amazing. Steph Smith. who works at The Hustle now, and who's an amazing content expers, SEO experts. There's also 'Clo', who, is a UX researcher and she's doing amazing work, understanding how to create websites that actually convert . There's Rosie, you mentioned who's amazing. And she needs community at Indie Hackers and she also creating her own newsletter and I think right now, 75% of her content is behind a pay wall. And she's spoken about it and experimenting with it . I have so many but that's going to be my like three ones for now.James: And then final few questions. Best book for indie hackers? I've heard, you mentioned How to Change Your Mind before, so a different book to that.Anne-Laure: I would recommend 50 great myth of popular psychology. James: and favorite podcast to listen to, youAnne-Laure: I don't listen to podcasts.James: Refreshing to hear. and then finally, what are you most excited about for the future either personally or in business?Anne-Laure: I think in the future, I'm going to keep on working on the same mission, which is helping people be as creative and productive as possible. I don't know exactly how that's going to look like, but this is also why my company is called Ness Labs. It's really a lab where I can experiment and try new things and see if they work or they don't. So I'm currently working on creating an online course, for example, and if this is something that works, I might create more in the future and if it doesn't, I may take Ness Labs in a different direction.James: Amazing. Anne-Laure, thank you so much for joining the podcast. I've thoroughly enjoyed this. Anne-Laure: Thank you.
Starting over 40 side-projects in 10 years - Helen Ryles
Helen Ryles is a prolific indie hacker, having launched over 40 projects in the last 10 years, selling a few of them along the way. Helen is a proponent of the no code movement, advocating for the tools that allow non-technical folks, like me, create amazing projects. To tie in with this, she also runs the community at Makerpad, the no-code education and community platform.Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites.‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’‘Absolutely love this community.’These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.Here's what we covered in this episodeOn side projects How did you start indie hacking? What are you currently working on? Where do you come up with ideas? How do you define a side-project? Having launched so many, what is your process for getting an idea up and running, validated and then deciding how long you run with it before it gets sold / canned? You wrote a great thread on selling side projects. How do you know when it's time to sell? How do you sell a side project?! On no-code You joined Makerpad last month to help run their community. Tell me a little bit more about what Makerpad is and what your role will be there. What is no-code and why do you think it's important? What are some of the most exciting things you've seen people do with no-code? What are the non-obvious benefits of no-code? What are the best no-code tools? Recommendations Book: Authority Podcast: Side Hustle School Indie Hacker: Michael Gill Follow HelenTwitterFollow Me Twitter Indie Bites Twitter Personal Website [Full transcription coming soon]
Building Marketing Examples to 30k email subscribers - Harry Dry, Marketing Examples
I've been thoroughly impressed with Harry's perseverance and consistency growing Marketing Examples to the size he has done. With now $3k monthly revenue, he's starting to see the fruits of his labour.Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites.‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’‘Absolutely love this community.’These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.Here's what we covered in this episode:On Marketing Examples I've given a little summary of Marketing Examples, how would you describe it? Where did you come up with the idea? How is your revenue shaping up with the audience you have? If you could choose one case study as your favourite, which one would it be? On Audience Building When you first started Marketing Examples, how did you get your first 100 subscribers? You're an expert on Twitter, now with 50k followers. What did it take to grow a Twitter audience so large, so quickly? What's been the biggest struggle building Marketing Examples? What advice would you give to other indie hackers trying to build an audience? Talk me through your decision to add a new personal touch to Marketing Examples? Tell me the Kanye Story in 30 seconds Recommendations Book: Man's Search for Meaning Podcast: IFL TV Indie Hacker: Pat Walls Links Follow Harry on Twitter Marketing Examples Marketing Examples Twitter Follow Me Twitter Indie Bites Twitter Personal Website Full TranscriptJames: Hello, and welcome to the Indie Bites podcast. The show where I bring you short bite size conversations in under 15 minutes with fellow indie hackers. Before we get into the episode, I'd like to thank Weekend Club for sponsoring the show. I had the founder, Charlie, on for the first episode of this very podcast, it's a community I'm personally a part of, and I'm going to use this opportunity to tell you why I love it. It is genuinely been the most helpful community of people for me as an indie hacker. Every Saturday we have deep working sessions, sometimes joined up to 30 bootstrappers. The Slack is one of the most active and enjoyable ones I've been in. And to top it all off, being a member gets you over a hundred software discounts. Stuff like Stripe, AWS, and so much more. If you've ever struggled, meeting in other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you. Even better, I've got a limited promo code for you for 50% off your first month. Go to weekendclub.co and enter 'Indie bites' as your code. I'd love you to join and i'll see you there next Saturday. Harry Dry is that founder of Marketing Examples a fast growing showcase of successful startup marketing stories.When I first spoke to Harry on the Marketing Mashup, probably over a year ago now, he was on about 5,000 subscribers - that's email subscribers, and about $1,000 in revenue. Now he's times out by six with 30,000 email subscribers and. 50,000 Twitter followers, which is an amazing growth story and I've been thoroughly impressed with the work you've been doing Harry over the past year. So Harry, I've given a little summary of Marketing Examples. How would you describe it?Harry: Good to be here, man. Marketing Examples is examples of real world marketing. It does what it says on the tin. It's short, sweet and practical. I think the differentiator of just other regular kind of marketing blogs is that they write for search engines. They're trying to rank on Google that, you know, they'll write a thousand words on a topic and I think that often that can just be compressed into to one image into one sentence. So I try and make it as easy to consume as possible to the point as possible. That's Marketing Examples.James: Give me a few examples of the case studies that you've written on Marketing Examples. What was some of your favourites that you can think of off the top of your head?Harry: I wrote one in the early days about how Nike sold its first shoes, which was my first like breakthrough case study. This one took off a bit. I gave me, it gave me a big boost.That's I guess the lesson there is that everyone focuses a lot on new channels to sell things like Instagram, Twitter, and yeah, definitely works and has lots of relevance, but Nike sold thier first thousand shoes just by going athletic track meets and talking to the runners and selling to them face to face.And I think that in marketing now that's really underappreciated to just basically just making friends with people and then people buy from their friends. So if you're a runner and you get to the people who sell Nike shoes, you buy Nike shoes. So I think that's something people don't do so much in marketing.I guess another one, which did really well was this copywriting tips piece , I think copywriting articles are just long and there's no real examples and I was just proud of it cause I took a course in copywriting and read about four books in copywriting and I turned all of that into 17 images. Which is why I like it cause it was just the ultimate... I think Arsene Wenger has got this line:'the golden life should be to do something so it becomes an art form' and a sounds pretentious to say it but with that one article it was the closest I'll get to being like Arsene Wenger, I think, in marketing.James: I you said that quite nonchalantly, but I think that sums up very much what Marketing Examples is. You said you read four books, you did copywriting courses just to write this one case study or marketing examples issue. That just shows the level of quality you hold yourself to for each of them. Now tell me when you first started Marketing Examples, where did you come up with the idea? How did it originate?Harry: I was working for a web development company in London and grinding away, you know what it's like, and, I want to start up something. I never really wanted to be working for a business. I feel like every sort of indie hacker has got the perfect product for them to start. It's based around their 'equation'. So you've got all these little things go into your equation that spits out the product for you. So in my equation, it was like, I don't really want to make a lot of money. Because if you're trying to make a lot of money, that means that you're probably going to end up failing.So I want us to just do something which was probably going to work - so safe. Another thing in my equation is I really love marketing. So that's in my equation. Another thing in my equation is, I can code a little bit, but I'm not too good at coding. So probably not best is try and start up a really complex SaaS - I'm just not good enough to do that. And then another thing in my equation is that like I'm working for this company. So I can't really put that much time in right now. I didn't have enough money to leave. So you can combine all these different little factors you've got going for you.And for me, it was just like, all right, I'm good enough at marketing can't do much in other time. Let's write marketing articles and then I could write them on the weekends, promote them , but there's a lot of people writing marketing articles, but marketing websites tend to suck really.So I thoughts that with my coding and and my design - I was good at designs. I could make this website, which was like more than a marketing blog. That's where the idea came from. I didn't think many people were doing it and it went from there.James: Now. You've got the audience of 50,000 Twitter followers and 30,000 email subscribers. What is the revenue like for something like that?Harry: So at the minute I just make money from sponsors. So there's no kind of monetization of the audience. Which has been really good in a way because I think that most people in my in my shoes would have cashed out by now. They'd be like "right, I've got this audience, let's sell something" But it only gets easier the longer you go. Actually I've given it a really long answer, the revenue is $3,000 right now paid from Ahrefs, which I'm grateful for. James: I'd probably say you could get more for the audience you have and the price you're charging them, but fantastic you're making $3k a month for it.And if we're talking about that big audience you have, not many people will have an audience that size. How did you get your first 100 subscribers?Harry: Wow. I had seven articles or something like that when I launched. And then I started just promoting them one by one and I would try and write a new one every couple of days. So I remember the first kind of little breakthrough I had was I wrote one about Nomad List and their long tail SEO strategy. I think I might have shared in a Telegram group or something like that and on Twitter, but I think he saw it in a Telegram group, the founder of Nomad List, Pieter Levels, like indie hackers will know him in an indie hacker podcast. And he shared it on his social media and I had about maybe 50 subscribers from that.And then also I did a bunch of stuff before Marketing Examples, which probably got me another 50. I don't really want to go down this route, but I wrote like a long story about dating site for Kanye West fans. And I've just been on the indie hackers for ages in the, Indie Hackers is the best way to get... it depends what product you got, but if your product's got a cross-over, Indie Hackers is the best place to get the users.So combination of those things really James: That's great. And I will make sure I put a link to the Kanye story in the description because you've made a nice site for that, which explains the story really nicely. So with those first 100 subscribers, you're getting a little bit of momentum. How and when did you get first revenue and your first sponsor?Because it's not like usual SaaS products where you can get revenue start building on it, you have to have an audience to be able to pitch to a sponsor.Harry: Yeah, I think my lesson in the whole indie hackers journey and wherever it is, it just make a lot of friends is the thing I would say. And not networks. Networks is the wrong way to look at it. So make friends. So I did a talk about this Kanye West thing we're alluding to and in the audience, there was the Head of Marketing at Email Octopus or CMO, something like that. We just walked back home that night together and chatted about like cricket and just English stuff. Then from the back of that I started using Email Octopus an email provider . I think Tom believed in me a bit . So when I had, I think, 1,000 email subscribers, I emailed Tom and said "I've got 1,000 subscribers now, but take a chance on this and in three months, time, it be like 4,000". Tom did. And then the day Email Octopus paid, they were my first sponsor. And the day they paid, I left my job on the same day. It was 800.. I think it was maybe £600 actually for a month at the start not much, but I just believe that 600 would turn into more overtime.James: You've built up an audience of 1,000 people before you've got that. And I don't think a lot of people realize that there's a lot of work that's gone into that. Just quickly going back to you saying you launched seven articles. Did you write the seven articles before you launched? You wanted to make it a thing where if people landed on Marketing Examples, they would have the seven to choose from rather than a normal blog where someone starts and they do one article. Is that how you wanted it to play out?Harry: Yeah, but you know what? I don't actually know it mattered because in hindsight I might have just started with one. Basically you write the article, you promote the article, you write the article, you promote the article. So I started with seven. I started with seven for the idea being that like I could tweet about it, but that initial thing we overvalue and our heads. You want to build up a base before you actually launched properly.James: Yeah. And I'd consider you an expert on Twitter, Harry. When we had our conversation about Marketing Examples back on the previous podcast, we could have literally spoken for hours about Twitter. You've now got 50,000 followers. What did it take to grow a Twitter audience so large over the year and a bit you've been doing it.Harry: Gee, you know what? There's lots of different ways of answering this question. That's like going into super detail, which we did last time, I suppose. But, really what it is that I make really good digestible tips, which are so easy to consume, and people like them. I had no real advantages when I started Twitter.No one was retweeting my content, nothing like that. it was just great content. I condensed stuff, which is normally in articles into something you could consume in 20 seconds scrolling through Twitter. I took a format, which was longer form and made it digestible. James: If you could give me three bits of advice of growing a Twitter audience, what would they be?Harry: The advice I would actually say is write useful DMs to people. Don't be one of those dicks who just like replies on their own thing and @'s people just to get people to share your stuff. Engage with people on direct message, like off Twitter, and make friends is the most important thing. Second thing is, pick a niche. If you're writing about marketing, no one wants to know about your cricket match, . You've got to stick to your lane, unfortunately on Twitter. Get known for something, that's number two. Number three is, fit your content onto Twitter and not the other way around. So like I'm writing articles these days, I write them for a newsletter, but I know in the back of my mind, these things are going on to Twitter. You can't shove something, you can't force it on. That's what I see people do it all the time. They're trying to force something on. It's gotta be built for the platform.James: What's been your biggest struggle, would you say? Or biggest challenge building Marketing Examples?Harry: I think that for me, my biggest struggle has been nothing to do with Marketing Examples. It's just been working for yourself. It's tricky. Like I'd go to the cafe every day and they're like my best friends it's something which is hard for all of indie hackers cause I think, especially if you work for yourself and it's something which doesn't probably get enough airtime. but like the site runs itself. It's just that the hard thing is, real life people you miss, that's the struggle.James: Yeah, I think that's a really common thing with indie hackers, especially those that have started to get success with their projects and they leave their full time job. How do they stay committed to working on it? What have you found you've done that has helped you with that?Harry: Honestly, just think I haven't worked out at all. If I had the answers, I have no answers for that and it's still something 'm trying to figure out, I think that, it's the thing probably the at most forefront of my mind. How do you work it out? I don't know.James: I think that's a sensible answer. No one has the answers to all of this. You in the last few weeks, have added a personal touch to, Marketing Examples. It's now called Harry's Marketing Examples. Talk me through why you made that decision.Harry: People buy from people. Let's say 'Growth Hackers' launches a product. No one cares. No one supports them. Let's say Wes Bos launches a product. Everyone cares. Everyone supports them.It's that simple people support people. People don't care about brands just.James: Great answer. And I said I'd put this in the show notes, but Harry , talk me through the Kanye story in 30 seconds or less, your time starts now.Harry: All right. So I'm lying in bed and no idea what I'm doing with my life. I see a Donald Trump dating app online, and I think ah damn, I love Kanye West, so let's do that. Signed up Yeezy Dating domain. Made a dating site for Kanye West fans and it went viral. I'm losing my mind. My dad comes in. I'm like, get out dad, the site's crashed and put it up again, three days later from help from Indie Hackers people. Get loads of users, go on to real life date later from it. Site's doing great site and then starts not doing so great cause I've no idea what I'm doing from a marketing perspective. I realized that all I had to do was getting contact with Kanye West cause it was the only way out of this mess. I took up some billboards around the world to try to get Kanye to phone me and back the idea. He doesn't back me, but it's a cool story with the same.And that's it.James: Great. All right, and you can read the in depth story at, was it, thekanyestory.com?Harry: Yeah thekanyestory.com.James: I think that was a fantastic effort. Harry, you've been a fantastic guest as always, really insightful. We're going to end on some quick fire questions I ask every single guest.First of all, what's your favorite book?Harry: A man's search for meaning by Viktor Frankl.James: Perfect. And your favorite podcast?Harry: I would say IFL TV is my favorite source of audio. It's a boxing channel.James: What indie hacker do you admire? Who people follow?Harry: So many actually. I'll go with Pat Walls because I think that he's not false in any way. That's why I like Pat Walls James: Final question. What are you most excited about for the future, Harry?Harry: Marriage and relationships, most exciting thing in the world, biggest decision we'll all make in our lives. And it's like the partner you end up with, that's the most exciting thing in the world. Right?James: Superb answer. Harry, you've been a fantastic guest mate. Thank you so much for joining I'll leave links to everything we discussed in this episode, in the show notes. Have a good evening.Harry: Pleasure. James: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Indie Bites, I've got some more fantastic episodes lined up for you, including the founder of Indie Hackers himself, Courtland Allen. To make sure you don't miss out on that episode, head over to indiebites.co and subscribe to the mailing list. If you've enjoyed this episode with Harry, I'd love you to leave a review on iTunes, it really does help the podcast grow. Finally a huge thanks to Charlie and Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites. You'll find a link along with the code to sign up in the show notes. That's all from me. Enjoy the rest of your day.
Growing a paid community to $800 MRR - Charlie Ward, Weekend Club
In this episode we discuss:On Weekend Club How would you describe Weekend Club? Where did you come up with the idea for WC & IndieBeers? What was your initial plan for making revenue with WC? What's your revenue now? What have you done specifically to grow those first few users? On Community Building You've cultivated quite the community in London, why did you choose to build the community here? What does it take to build an active community? Is it as simple as just setting up a Slack and a Stripe account and away you go? What's been the biggest struggle building the community? What advice would you give to other indie hackers trying to build a community? Recommendations Book: Influence Podcast: The Knowledge Project Indie Hacker: Wilhelm Klopp Links Follow Charlie on Twitter Weekend Club Indie London Indie Beers Follow Me Twitter Indie Bites Twitter Personal Website Full TranscriptJames: Hello and welcome to Indie Bites, the podcast where I bring you stories from fellow indie hackers in 15 minutes or less. In this episode, we have Charlie Ward of Weekend Club. Charlie is the founder of Weekend Club, an online community of indie hackers, all working with each other to reach their side project goals and stay accountable. Weekend Club was born out of the London indie hacker meetup Charlie also founded called Indie Beers. Since then Charlie has become a prominent figure in the London indie hacker scene, also running the Indie London community.Charlie, welcome to the podcast. How are you?Charlie: Very well, James, how are you? James: Yeah. Fantastic. Good to have you on Indie Bites. I gave a little summary there of Weekend Club, but how would you describe it?Charlie: I describe it as were a remote support network and accountability community for bootstrappers. So we're mainly on Slack and Zoom. So it's built around Saturday deep working sessions with up to 20 or 30 other, boostrapped entrepreneurs, and those people vary from some people building SaaS to productised services and everything else you could imagine in between.And we charge a monthly subscription of £29 a month, that's about $36 or something like that . So we just try and cultivate a community where you can really build relationships with other entrepreneurs, get feedback, advice, support, see what other people are working on.Being in the community of other people, building things, shipping things, seeing other people's habits influences your habits as well. So that's how we can help with accountability. The Saturday sessions is set up like a one day sprint. So we do a stand up at the beginning at 10:00 AM. We have lunch where we have a Q&A, or a chat half way through. and then we do a kind of demo and reflection on how you did against your goals at the end of the day.James: That's amazing. Where did you come up with the idea for Weekend Club and also Indie Beers?Charlie: So Indie Beers, this is pre COVID mainly, but, it was a monthly meetup with indie hackers, at a pub in London, basically. I saw that regular meetups at the pub works in other kinds of communities I used to work in ad agencies. There was a community called Group Think, that did something called planet pints. I thought that would work really well for bootstrappes and indie hackers. Weekend Club came from conversations I had with Indie Beers members. So a bunch of people, were saying they wanted to not just meet people at the pub but actually work on stuff with other people.And that's where Weekend Club was born. It was originally at a coworking space, as you were there in early days as well. so it was a little bit different back then and so, yeah, that's where it originally came from.James: Tell me about those first few Weekend Club sessions in Whitechapel? If it's just the idea of indie hackers working together, how did you start to look into it and then start to execute, find the coworking space and also do it while generating revenue?Charlie: Yeah. the process was like , tell a few people, throw up a landing page and see if you get any signups. So I've got, enough signups to think, okay, maybe there's something in this. And from some conversations I had, so I was like, okay, let's do it. So then it was just finding a coworking space. One in particular, shout out Ben Davies from Ministry of Startups - he called me back within 60 seconds of me sending the email and he was like; "sounds cool, let's do it" I was like, great. So I went to see it and I was like, I was like, yeah, this is had the right feel to it Then just following up with people just to make sure everyone turned up and then it was just figuring out the format. We came up with a kind of make it like a one day sprint sort of thing, which seemed to work. So that one was free and it was like the MVP version.And from that I was like, okay, set up a Stripe account and let's do this, let's do this more regularly. So it was wishing twice a month that we do it, up a monthly subscription. Yeah. After that session, got about 15 odd subscribers.James: Did you start charging right from the very beginning and how did you decide on what to charge people?Charlie: Yeah. I always had in my head, I wanted to do a subscription business and I thought, coworking is subscription anyway. So just, this is a subset of coworking, cause it's just like on a weekend, but it's plus the community as well. So this is at the time it was slightly different at the time.Cause it was just meet up in a coworking space. The Slack was actually a bit of an afterthought originally and but now it's the main thing. But in terms of pricing, I'm not saying I'd recommend this exact approach, but I did a survey after the first session and, to get gauge how much people would pay for this, if they did twice a month.And basically picked somewhere, not bang in the middle, but not at the top or the bottom of the range, based on what I think that could actually support me doing it. But, yeah, I'm not saying that's the best way doing it, but it was an amount that does work well for me and for the members I think. So I think it balances out nicely.James: Indeed. And how much did you charge at the start? You said you put the landing page up to get some interest, but how about actually getting those first users to pay and also attend in person?Charlie: For the first one we ever did, no one had to pay. First of all, I didn't know if anyone was going to show up and luckily they did, it was full. And then I didn't know if people would enjoy it enough to pay. And so yeah, after that first session I use Checkout Page which is like a no code tool where you can accept payments, . And then I just sent an email out to everyone that came, and luckily, I think probably 15 out of 20 people actually became paying customers after that.James: Now we're about, how long are we, about a year in to Weekend Club?Charlie: Yeah. I think at the start of October it will have been one year, which feels crazy that it's gone by quite fast.James: And what was your revenue right now?Charlie: So I might as might be flicking between pounds and dollars , but we're on about $800, in monthly recurring revenue now, which is roughly £600 as of the day we're recording this. Which is it's not like a giant amount. but considering I still work full time, I'm pleased with where it is, especially as our churn is very low. So we haven't had anyone churn for about three or four months now. So yeah, very happy about that.James: That's amazing. Before we go on to talking a little bit about community building, obviously with coronavirus, you had an in person product or service that you had to completely rethink. Tell me through quickly how you approach that and what you changed?Charlie: The first thing was like, am I actually going to continue this or not? Because I was worried, around in March time, I was like, there's going to be a lockdown soon. And even if there isn't, I'm not sure it doesn't seem safe.So the first thing was having to rethink the format remotely rather than in person. So doing the whole thing over Slack and Zoom, and it took a bit of iteration to rethink it. I realised that if I'm just going to be at home anyway, I can probably do it weekly. So we made it a weekly thing. And to help that obviously, got you involved, shout out James hosting the sessions when I'm not there, extremely well. We added accountability buddies, to help people meet other people a little bit more, because when you're in person, it's easy to meet people at lunch, you just start chatting to someone or get a coffee. But when you're all at home, remote, you need to put more effort into , helping those interactions happen. Those are some of the main things we did, and adding other services to it as well. Like adding software discounts, we've got over a hundred software discounts like Stripe, Typeform, Airtable, that kind of thing. James: What does it take to build a community and keep it active? Is it just as simple as setting up a Slack and setting up your checkout page and away you go - you've got a community?Charlie: Yeah, that's a good question. First and foremost needs to make sure you understand your audience really well. If you don't, it is really going to struggle. That's true in building any kind of product or business or a community. You really need to understand your audience, but I would say the first... the basics you need, and this is recommended in a great book called 'Get Together' on building communities. You just have to have a really clear idea about who your community is for. Like what kind of people are you actually getting together and what its purpose i s? Like why does it exist? and if you don't have a clear idea of those two things and they don't align, then you're really not going to go any further. Before you even get started, you should try to have some inkling of that in place and it can evolve, but you should have a good idea of that.Then after that you need to be able to actually get people to start showing up in the first place. So it's probably an underrated thing, but you need to be able to market it in some way and you don't have to do anything really complicated, just make sure it's very clear what it is, you're promoting it where your kind of would be members are at the beginning and take it from there.And if you can build a brand that always helps. But once you have all that in place, you need to be good at building relationships and building communities is not the same as necessarily building an audience. It's not just about you and your relationship is about. You and your relationship with others is it's about other people's relationships with each other. You need to make sure everyone else is having fun with each other or like chatting to each other, not just chatting to you thing.So you need to get pretty good at whether it's offline or online, being able to introduce people or like seeing Oh, you should chat to, You know this person because they know about this and they've had a similar experience. You just start getting quite good at that. And I think an interesting misconception about community building is that you have to be an extrovert to be good at it.Some of the best community builders have ever seen, not naturally that extroverted. They'd probably describe themselves as introverts and sometimes being an introvert actually can be an advantage in community building. Cause I think some introverts notice certain more subtle cues or like think a bit more, a little bit more deeply about certain things, which, holds them in good stead. James: Yeah. And what would you say your biggest struggle or the hardest thing about building a community is?Charlie: For me personally, because I, I still, work full time. it's the time it takes to build a community, not just like, it's like compound interest. It takes time to become really good at, but it just takes, you need to show up every day basically.Making the time available and being disciplined to show up every day. I love doing it. So that obviously helps a lot, it's difficult to do over a long period of time. I think that's been, a little bit of a challenge for me because I've got this, there's like vague rule where you should never let a comment or a post, go unanswered wherever that's by you or by tagging someone else or whatever it is like.If people post say three times and no one answers, they're probably not going to go back again. So you need to be quite on top of that. And it just takes quite long diligence to stay on top of that. I think.James: Yeah, I think that's very clear, a great bit of advice to close on there. Never leave any question unanswered .Charlie, it's been fantastic chatting to you. I'm going to end on a few quick fire questions. If you don't mind.Charlie: Sure. James: Let's do it.First of all, what is your favorite book?Charlie: A great book is one called Dark Matter. So it's like a sci-fi thriller, a bit lof quantam physics in there as well. I'm not saying I greatly understand all of it, but it's super interesting, but maybe more actionable because it's the Indie Bites podcast is 'Influenced' by Robert Cialdini.It's a very interesting book on, persuasion and it's actually more useful than most business books and it's not even really about business. So I would recommend reading that to understand the human mind a little bit more.James: Two for the price of one there with recommendations, how about your favorite podcast?Charlie: I really like the Farnam Street podcast. It's about thinking and decision making but they talk to quite a wide range of interesting people and particularly I really like the one with Rory Sutherland. What I like is that he talks a lot about the kind of, how sometimes the impactful things, whether it's in business or anything else, is not logical. He talks about really strong creativity is not something you can figure out with an algorithm. And I think that thinking is sometimes a bit missing in today's landscape. Everything's like very quantitative, which has it's place, obviously, but I think you need to think about both sides sometimes. James: What Indie Hacker do you admire, who should people follow?Charlie: Yeah, it's a difficult one. There's so many to mention. I will shout Willhelm Klopp. Weekend Club member, what he's doing with Simple Poll, Simple Decisions and some other stuff he's got coming. He's like the Slack apps guy, I think of him like that, but yeah, he's great. Shares a lot of knowledge in there.James: And then finally, Charlie, what are you most excited about for the future?Charlie: Yeah, a few things. so for indie London, we started doing Indie London remote events with speakers. We've got a good one with Sabba Keynejad of Veed coming up. So that should be good. We've got also a bunch of stuff in the pipeline for Weekend Club. So we've got some interesting ideas around gamifying certain parts of the experiencePost-COVID I'd like to also start doing in real life sessions, again, some people are like really happy with remote as some people also really enjoyed the in real life. So I think be interesting to bring that back when we can, it wouldn't replace remote, but as a, as an option as well,James: Amazing. All right. Charlie, thank you so much for joining the Indie Bites podcast. I'll make sure I put links to yourself and Weekend Club in the show notes along with everything discussed in this episode.Charlie: Awesome. Thanks very much, James.James: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Indie Bites. I've got some more fantastic episodes coming up for you, including Harry Dry of Marketing Examples, Rosie Sherry who runs the Indie Hackers community and Corey Haines, who is the Head of Growth at Baremetrics running various projects alongside that. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd love for you to leave a review on iTunes or subscribe to the podcast that indiebites.co so you don't miss an episode. If you've got any feedback on how I can improve the format, I'm all ears. Tweet me @jmckinven and i'll be sure to make improvements. That's all from me! Enjoy the rest of your day
Indie Bites Trailer - what's it all about?
I'm your host James McKinven, I'm the founder of a podcasting company called Striqo and passionate indie hacker.Now I love long podcasts and what Courtland Allen has done with the Indie Hackers show, but this podcast will just supplement that. With less commuting, we now have less time to listen to podcasts and those long, albeit interesting, backstories. I'll aim to cut to the chase and find out what it really takes to build a sustainable, profitable business on the side.I'm James, I run a podcast company called Striqo and I love hearing about the ups and downs of what it takes to be an indie hacker.I'm a fellow indie hacker and side-project-starter and I love hearing the stories of other makers who have started their businesses while working a full-time job.Whether that's a small little earner on the side or something that has grown into tens of thousands of ££ income that means you could quit your job.Having started many of my own side-projects I know how hard it is to get it off the ground and generate revenue. I wouldn't have been able to make progress on any of my projects if it wasn't for the kindness and support I've received from everyone in the Indie Hackers community.Everyone has a story to tell, advice they can give and lessons to teach - I want to share them with as many people as I can.I hope you can join me for this podcast talking to our favourite indie hackers.If you like the sound of this, please subscribe to the podcast and tweet me which indie hacker you'd like me to feature.