See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Speaker 1

00:00

But yeah, why did you decide to start doing a podcast after the site was going?

Speaker 2

00:03

People were asking for it. It seemed like a good idea. I mean, the number of people who asked me to do a podcast was so much higher than people who asked for any other feature.

Speaker 2

00:13

And also, I think, a part of the text interviews was that you have to share your revenue. So everyone is completely transparent. And the number of people that I reached out to who I thought would have really good stories for the site that people can learn from, who were willing to share everything but their revenue, was pretty high. And so I kept getting tired of people saying, you know, I'm not going to come on.

Speaker 2

00:31

If I have to share my revenue, you need some other way where I can come on and share my story. So the podcast kind of helped me kill that bird. And also, you know, it appeased people who wanted me to do a podcast. But I was terrified of it because, like I said earlier, like I don't, I'd never done a podcast.

Speaker 1

00:47

Was it, were there people you admired at the time? You're like, oh, I want to make a podcast like X,

Speaker 2

00:51

Y, or Z. No, not at all. I barely listened to podcasts.

Speaker 2

00:53

You weren't

Speaker 1

00:54

even in.

Speaker 2

00:54

Yeah, I mean, I was just like, you know what, I'll try this. I had a very lazy approach to it. I'm not going to do a ton of research.

Speaker 2

01:02

I'm not going to. I'm just going to try talking to people and see how it comes out and have my own style. I think it's worked out. I've gotten better over time.

Speaker 1

01:08

Yeah. Well, what are the skills you've developed, do you think?

Speaker 2

01:12

I think I've gotten a lot better at preparing efficiently.

Speaker 1

01:16

I mean, like reading their...

Speaker 2

01:18

Yeah, like knowing what to read and what to listen to, what kinds of questions to ask that'll be engaging and that they'll give good answers to, and how to follow up on a question if you get an unexpected answer. So I'm kind of a control freak. I'm like, okay, here's exactly, at least in the beginning, I'm going to ask question ABCDEF, and this is how it's going to go.

Speaker 2

01:33

And like, you know, you ask a question, they start giving you answers all over the map and suddenly your perfect plan is thrown into disarray. So I think just like having the composure and the ability to calm down and be like, okay, it's okay. Just listen to what they're saying and have a normal conversation was difficult at first. Other things, like I don't know if you'd call this a skill but just being comfortable like in my own skin, like not not cringing at the sound of my own voice.

Speaker 2

01:58

Yeah I had my own podcast but I mean I would go back and listen and it's like, I don't know, like if you hate the sound of your voice, but I hated the sound of my voice at first. Now I'm fine with it, but at first I was like, man, I sound awful. Like, he's going to listen to me. Now it's not a problem.

Speaker 1

02:09

Yeah. You can only spend so much of your time cringing at yourself after you're like, oh God, I mean, like the amount of hours I've seen myself on video and listen to myself on a podcast or whatever. It's fine. Like, yeah, that is 1 of the things that I thought the fear would remain and it completely goes away.

Speaker 1

02:28

Maybe to a fault. But yeah, the video element has thrown a few people. What was your favorite episode? I haven't listened to all of

Speaker 2

02:38

them yet. It's hard to say a favorite episode because I'm always like, I'm going to hurt somebody's feelings. And then I forget too, you know, what happened in that episode?

Speaker 2

02:46

But some of the coolest ones, I did 1 with my friend Julian Shapiro, who's got a growth consultancy called Bellcurve. And he just deep-dived into a bunch of different stories of him working with different clients. And he was not afraid to share times where he just messed up, So I thought that was really cool. I really liked the episode I did last week with Wes Boss.

Speaker 2

03:05

That was

Speaker 1

03:06

a good 1.

Speaker 2

03:06

Yeah, he's a great guy. He gets an enormous amount of work done to be just a 1 person. He's got an email list of 170,000 developers on it that he's built by himself in like 5 or 6 years.

Speaker 2

03:18

Twitter following of like 100,000 people and he's just trucking along. He works 9 to 5, puts his laptop down and then goes to hang out with his wife and his kids. So he's got it together. That's really.

Speaker 1

03:28

And so I wondered about that. Like is there a list of people that you admire like man that that person has it figured out like I want to do Do exactly what they're doing.

Speaker 2

03:37

Yeah, there's a lot of people and it's it's like I always forget I'm like man that person's got it figured out in the next week. I've totally forgotten about it I've moved on to other things. Oh, yeah, what's boss guy?

Speaker 2

03:45

Your life's pretty good. Yeah, it's okay.

Speaker 1

03:48

I've seen a handful of like roundups of indie hacker pro tips from every episode. Are you continuously integrating their great ideas into your daily life or do you kind of just go your own way?

Speaker 2

04:03

Yeah I think it's funny it's 1 of the things I was telling a friend a couple days ago I think generally speaking like all of us tend to overweight like novel advice like things that are new or flashy or we haven't heard before. And it's so easy to ignore the things that we hear all the time. Like, oh, make something people want.

Speaker 2

04:23

Talk to your customers. Exercise, take some time off. Oh, I've heard that before, I get it. But I try to have the discipline to when I see that kind of repeated advice to take it to heart and not look at it as something that, okay, you know, have I heard this before?

Speaker 2

04:38

Yes, it doesn't matter, but more, you know, as a reminder to myself, like, am I actually living by this? You know, I've internalized this or I like to think I have, but like, am I actually talking to my customers? Am I actually taking time off? Am I actually exercising?

Speaker 2

04:48

And the answer a lot of the time is no. So I think when people do these roundups and people analyze things and I see this advice repeated, I take the time to ask myself if I'm doing it. And I think I've gotten better at it, just repeated reminders to myself.

Speaker 1

05:04

Yeah, I think you've become conscious of it, but I agree. I don't need 12 new morning routines

Speaker 2

05:08

in my life.

Speaker 1

05:11

So we posted a bunch of questions, or other people posted questions to Twitter for you. You have a lot of fans online. Ryan Hoover, Product Hunt, asked, what do you believe that most others do not?

Speaker 2

05:25

I'm glad I got this question on Twitter rather than just being asked randomly because it's hard to answer unless you've thought about it. Kind of a funny story. So I think this question originally comes from Peter Thiel, who would ask the founders of companies that he was interested in investing in, just as a way to find out if what they're doing is truly unique and whether they'd be able to have a monopoly and very few competitors.

Speaker 2

05:45

That's why he liked it. I liked it when I heard it because it's kind of a sneaky way to get somebody to say something controversial. So when I was in YC 5 years ago, I asked Paul Graham. It was like, I think, 2011.

Speaker 2

05:56

I was like, hey, PG, what do you believe? The guy asked, what do you believe that other smart people don't? And it took him a long time to answer. He was just like, I don't know, my thoughts, they're not indexed that way.

Speaker 2

06:06

But then he ended up coming up with an answer and it worked. It was controversial. I don't think anybody would, very many people would agree. I can't say what it was, out of respect for him, I don't mean to be a tease.

Speaker 2

06:15

But luckily I've had some time to think about it. Probably the most obvious 1 is I think that it's probably a bad bet to start a VC funded company for the vast majority of people. You should not go that route. But there's other things I believe too.

Speaker 2

06:30

I think that and the value of kind of this culture of always talking about like, you know, what mission drives you and we kind of are not honest about the fact that a lot of us are motivated by money and financial things. I think it's probably better for the world if people can just be upfront and honest about that. I think I Got a few others, but like let's start with those 2.

Speaker 1

06:49

Yeah. No, I completely agree and I think I'm your Everyone's ability to rationalize is unbelievably powerful Yeah, and you can be into anything and if you're good at it Like just being good at the game is often enough to drive people. So you see like folks criticizing, you know, anyone who works in anything and they're like, Oh, why do they care about this? Why do they do that?

Speaker 1

07:10

And I'm like, it's because they're really good at it. Yeah. And to

Speaker 2

07:13

it, it's fun to do things that you're good at it. You know, it stimulates your brain.

Speaker 1

07:16

Yeah, absolutely. Was there a point at which that you kind of turned on the interest in VC-backed companies? Did something happen?

Speaker 2

07:26

It was before I even got into YC, funnily enough. I went to startup school in 2009, and Jason Fried was there from 37signals, they called it at the time. And he was like, he stood out like a sore thumb.

Speaker 2

07:37

He was completely different than everybody else who talked. Everybody else is kind of a VC or they were a founder of a VC backed company. And he got on stage and basically said, everybody else is lying to you. Don't believe a word they say.

Speaker 2

07:48

Credit to YC for inviting the opposite opinion there. But I was very taken by what he had to say because no 1 else was saying it at the time. It didn't really change my approach at that time, but then I got into YC and we had the weekly Tuesday dinners where founders would come in. The same thing happened.

Speaker 2

08:04

We had a lot of VCs come in, we had a lot of founders of well-funded companies come in. Then Kevin Hale came in from Wufoo. He was the only person, he was kind of an Andy Hacker at the time. He was just like, yeah, I packed up my company, we moved to Florida, investors call us every day, we just, you know, politely say no and we're just happy making money, you know, they're making millions of dollars a year and I was intrigued by that, like, huh?

Speaker 2

08:24

You know, but it wasn't until like recently, like basically last year, I really decided that's what I wanted to do for myself. Yeah. I wasn't really, you know, in the mood or really inclined to do the whole fundraising thing and I'd rather just make money from an idea online that I enjoyed doing.

Speaker 1

08:41

Dave And that idea, was that Indie Hackers? Brian Yeah.

Speaker 2

08:45

So I mean, the company that I did YC with, Task Force, still exists. It's still out there. It still actually makes money, passively.

Speaker 2

08:52

I kind of worked on that for a little bit, but I didn't think it was really going to go anywhere. I wasn't enthused about the idea. And so I sat around for a couple days thinking, okay, what am I going to work on? And PG wrote about this.

Speaker 2

09:04

Brian Feroldi It must have been

Speaker 1

09:04

2 days. Yeah.

Speaker 2

09:06

It was like 3 solid days. PG wrote about this like 12 years ago or something but a lot of people when they come to the idea phase they think that it's something that you naturally have to be good at. You just get a good idea or you don't, right?

Speaker 2

09:18

Whereas, the reality is, it's like any other creative endeavor. If you practice for long enough, you'll create a good idea. You don't try to paint the Mona Lisa in 15 minutes, and if you don't get it, you give up. So I was like, all right, I'm going to push through this.

Speaker 2

09:29

I'm going to spend 2 days coming up with ideas. Most of them are absolutely horrible. I just deleted them immediately. But by the end of 2 days, I realized I was consistently coming up with much better ideas than I had before.

Speaker 2

09:39

I was just reading through Hacker News threads. People would ask every month, ask HN, what's your profitable side project? Or ask HN, how much money are you making from your business? And people would share all the details.

Speaker 2

09:49

I figured, okay, there's hundreds of stories here. If I read through enough of them, maybe I'll glean some insights, I'll see some patterns that I can apply and it'll help me come up

Speaker 1

09:57

with an idea.

Speaker 2

09:57

And that's literally exactly what happened. I mean, the idea for Andy Hackers was based off of the realization that, hey, I'm not the only person who's researching all this stuff. The reason these threads are so popular is because everybody else is really interested.

Speaker 2

10:08

I could probably do a better version of these threads and that's what IndieHackers is.

Speaker 1

10:12

And I was wondering, is it Because there's been a rise in the popularity of indie hackers, right? But I think there's also a rise in just the number of those threads all over the internet. Is that because more people are now thinking about small businesses or just non-VC backed businesses?

Speaker 1

10:29

Or there's more people in the software development space right now?

Speaker 2

10:33

I think probably a combination. So I read the book Sapiens earlier this year and my takeaway from, it's kind of a history of all of humanity from the beginning of evolution. And my takeaway from Sapiens was that human societies tell stories.

Speaker 2

10:47

And it's tricky because it's difficult to determine whether or not something you believe is just like an arbitrary story that your society happens to tell, or if it's like some immutable fact of the universe. And for the longest time, like the story around tech companies has been that like, if you start a tech company, you have to raise a lot of money and prioritize growth over funding. That's the story. It's amazing how much everyone just believes that and doesn't even consider the possibility that you can start a profitable company that doesn't have to be that big and you don't need any sort of investors or gatekeepers to tell you what to do.

Speaker 2

11:18

I think the story started to change a lot. And once people hear this alternative version of the story, and once they see examples of it, people kind of wake up out of this zombie-like state, and they're like, oh, I guess I can do that. They've sort of been given permission. But there are other practical factors and reasons why the story has changed.

Speaker 2

11:35

A good 1 is, if I look at the IndieHackers traffic stats, something like 60% of the traffic is from not in the United States, let alone Silicon Valley. People are all over the world starting these companies. And just from a practical standpoint, it's hard to raise money if you live in Bucharest. It's difficult, you don't live in Silicon Valley, you don't have access to investors.

Speaker 2

11:53

And so your options are, either you suck it up and try to raise money locally, you move to a tech hub and raise money there, or you just prioritize profitability, which is kind of the easiest of those 3 options. And so I think there's a lot of just natural pressure as more people over the world get interested in tech to start profitable businesses and to care less about growth overall else.

Speaker 1

12:14

Paul Matzkoff And have you seen that there's a common trend in folks just getting started, like starting similar kinds of software businesses? Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2

12:23

I mean, the other thing is, if you look at the companies that VCs tend to invest in, they're generally in winner-take-all markets. Yeah. Because venture capitalists want some massive return.

Speaker 2

12:32

You really want to be number 1. You want to destroy the competition. So it's social things like Facebook or search applications like Google versus things that are profitable. You don't want to be in a winner take all market.

Speaker 2

12:43

You don't want to be fighting for your life every second of the day. You don't want to be in a zero-sum game where everyone else has to lose for you to win. And so people end up starting businesses that are very related. How many profitable analytics companies do you know?

Speaker 2

12:54

Like email marketing companies. There's a ton. You know, how many different ways are there to teach somebody something? I tell people all the time, if you want to start a business, just teach people.

Speaker 2

13:03

People like learning in like a thousand different ways. Some people want to go to college, some people want to like classroom settings, some people want to read, some people want video courses, some people want to email newsletters, some people want to learn through games. There's no reason why you have to completely differentiate from everyone else in the market. You can do something that's similar and people will like your own unique style So people for sure start related businesses, and I think it's a good thing because in it It kind of fosters a sense of camaraderie.

Speaker 2

13:28

You don't have to compete with everybody. You don't have to be mistrustful of everybody. And you can get advice from people who are similar in doing things that kind of tread that path before you.

Speaker 1

13:37

Well, I've been wondering that with all of the guests you get, you know, because they're divulging most of their information, right? Like usually like how much money they're making, all of these kinds of metrics. Are they worried about copycats or is this something that now that you have some traction they kind of like know the deal and it's easier to get people?

Speaker 2

13:54

Yeah, I mean people that I've talked to are generally not that worried. I've had some people who refuse to come on because They say, what's the benefit of me revealing my secrets? You know, someone's going to copy me.

Speaker 2

14:03

And then I've had people who've revealed their secrets that have actually been copied, and it's always hilarious because if you think about the kind of person out there who's going to like just listen to your podcast and read your interview and is just waiting for someone to reveal all the details, and then they clone everything that you've done and make some crappy version of your website but that's different in no way at all except that it's 2 years later. That's not the most competent person that you should be afraid of. I think generally it's a non-issue, especially if you're not in some sort of winner-take-all market.

Speaker 1

14:34

Okay, even more questions from Twitter. David Adamu asked this question to both you and Ryan, which is part of the YC application. It is, tell us about a time you successfully hacked a non-computer system to your advantage.

Speaker 1

14:49

Brian Feroldi.

Speaker 2

14:49

Yeah, I do remember doing this on the YC application. My answer now I think would be more interesting if I related it to ndhackers. But early on in ndhackers history, I was kind of running myself ragged.

Speaker 2

15:01

I thought that, I mean I really wanted to put out a lot of content. I wanted to do 3 or 4 or 5 early on interviews per week and these are not small interviews. So like sometimes a thousand, 2000 words. Sometimes they're very poorly written.

Speaker 2

15:13

I had to edit and I had to follow up with the person. So they took hours and hours. And

Speaker 1

15:16

you did this solo?

Speaker 2

15:17

Yeah, I did it solo. And then I was sending a newsletter and then I was trying to grow the business as well and so my trick early on was like, I'm just going to work 80 hours a week. It was not much of a trick.

Speaker 2

15:27

Yeah, but eventually I realized like, okay, this is not going to work. It's okay to do things that don't scale, but you can't do that forever. You need to figure out a way to make it work. And so what I wanted to do was increase, or at least maintain the level, the quantity of content that I was putting out without having a drop in quality.

Speaker 2

15:42

And so I wanted to, the ultimate would be to have some sort of interview system that worked for everyone, it was generally applicable, and yet still got interesting answers, and didn't take me very long to do. And the answer that I hit on, I kind of stumbled into it. I just started doing it naturally, and it ended up working out. Every time I would do a text-based interview, And I did these interviews over email.

Speaker 2

16:01

I would ask pretty much the same questions, and then I would look at the responses and ask follow-up questions. And then I would take a note, okay, why did I have to ask that follow-up question? What did they leave out? They probably should have included, how could their answer have been better?

Speaker 2

16:14

Like, why did I go with them and give me a better answer? And after a few months of interviewing companies from all sorts of different industries and verticals, I had a gigantic list of ways that people commonly gave uninteresting interviews. And so I just factored that into my interview questions. So I would have a question followed by 10 or 11 bullet points for like, here's how you should answer it, or here's what you should avoid in your answer.

Speaker 2

16:32

Here are things that people like listening to. And so I started sending that to people, and instantly, the interviews that I got back were much more entertaining, and they required less effort, because I could send the same packet of questions to everybody. So it's kind of a, I guess it qualifies as a hack, where I no longer have to do as much work.

Speaker 1

16:48

But they're handwriting, well, they're typing these answers?

Speaker 2

16:50

Yeah, they're typing the answers to me over email. Every now and then I'll send a follow-up question, but it was optimized to be as little work as possible on my part so that I could do other things like start the podcast. I was selling ads at the time.

Speaker 2

17:02

I took up like half of my time. Yeah. Etc.

Speaker 1

17:05

Yeah. Cause I found that the, the best hack for me, we did a bunch of interviews with the first employees at a tech companies and the thing that worked was just doing audio interviews, transcribing them and then doing like insane amounts of editing. Because I found that there were just issues that you have trouble going back and forth to get deeper and deeper and deeper. Maybe you figured this out through repetition, but giving someone 1 chance at an answer, and then they painstakingly write the perfect answer, oftentimes it comes out kind of flat.

Speaker 2

17:38

Yeah, it doesn't work very well.

Speaker 1

17:39

No. It didn't work

Speaker 2

17:40

for me early on, which is why I had to do crazy amounts of follow-up emails. Yeah. And I was just resistant to doing the call.

Speaker 2

17:46

I didn't want to get on the phone with people. That's why I was so scared to do a podcast. I was like, I want to talk to people. I just like the whole programmer behind the computer, type on my keyboard and that's it.

Speaker 2

17:55

But it worked out. When we launched Indie Hackers last August, it was like 10 interviews. It took me 3 weeks, I sent hundreds of emails to get 10 people to agree to do an interview. And 1 of them was me, so it was really only 9 people.

Speaker 2

18:09

And now we've got like 200, I think we just hit 200 this week, interviews, 30 podcast episodes, and I'm working on that part of the business less than I ever have.

Speaker 1

18:19

So what are the other parts you're working on?

Speaker 2

18:21

I'm working on the community right now. So IndieHackers really, it started off as a content site, really a showcase for these types of profitable internet businesses. But today I would describe it more as a community of founders and aspiring entrepreneurs who are sharing knowledge with each other and helping each other to build successful businesses.

Speaker 2

18:38

So the real core of the site is the community forum. It's just a bunch of people asking each other practical questions. How do I market my site? What do you think about my landing page?

Speaker 2

18:47

Did I change this? What do you think about my landing page? Did I change this? What do you think about my idea?

Speaker 2

18:49

How do you people find time to work on your projects when you have a family or a full-time job, et cetera, and just helping each other out? That takes a lot of time to grow. I'm thinking about building, kind of harnessing the power of the community to build tools that help these makers and these indie hackers to actually do better. What can they all work together on to make their lives easier?

Speaker 2

19:10

So it could be something as simple as maybe a crowd source list of the best podcast episodes for this month. Just because I don't want to dig through all the podcast episodes to find out what's worth listening to. I want these other people to tell me. All sorts of tools like that I think would be interesting for this community.

Speaker 2

19:27

I'm spending almost all my time coding and talking to people and trying to figure out what to do there. Whereas my brother, who was brought on as part of the Stripe acquisition, is handling almost all of the editing for the interviews and collaborating with interviewees and handling the articles and finding people to write for indie hackers.

Speaker 1

19:43

So that now is just growth tactics, right? To get people into the forum.

Speaker 2

19:47

Brian Feroldi Yep, exactly. And it's kind of automatic. I mean, I'm not doing very many tactical things.

Speaker 2

19:52

Things get submitted to Hacker News. I think that's probably our number 1 growth channel. People on Hacker News read the interviews, which is how the site got launched. So it's not particularly, nothing has changed very much in the last year.

Speaker 2

20:03

It's more about like product, like what's the right decision, what's worth building and what's not. It's a tricky decision because obviously as a 1 or 2 person team, building something is a humongous investment and You don't want to spend 3 months building the wrong thing.

Speaker 1

20:17

We have a handful of people coming up. 1 guy runs a site called Bigger Pockets,

Speaker 2

20:23

which I

Speaker 1

20:23

don't know, have you seen this before? It's basically like a giant real estate forum. And they've created tons of educational content.

Speaker 1

20:31

And I think they also have a bunch of, I might be mistaking this, but a bunch of calculators and stuff. So basically these tools that folks who are interested in real estate investing need. And they've figured it out. After someone asks the same question 400 times in the forum, you're like, oh, maybe there's some amount of interest here.

Speaker 2

20:47

Brian D. Wu Exactly. I think that's a cool model, too.

Speaker 2

20:50

When I was scouring Hacker News trying to come up with an idea, the company that I saw that inspired me the most, and actually the first person that I reached out to for an interview afterwards, was a company called Nomad List. Started by this guy, Peter Levels, who's always on HN, he's a crazy personality on Twitter as well. But what he did was basically built a resource for digital nomads, basically a list of all the different cities in the world that you might want to travel to, and then just common stats that you would like to research, like how fast is the internet, how safe is it, how expensive is it? And so people who are digital nomads are like, of course they want to do this research, they're going to go to this site rather than scouring the web.

Speaker 2

21:24

And once he got them all in 1 place, he built a community and he started building tools for that community that are just for digital nomads like himself. I think that's a pretty cool model. It sounds like this real estate site's the same. IndieHackers is very similar.

Speaker 2

21:34

Paul Matzkoff

Speaker 1

21:34

Yeah, and so because that was a handful of people on Twitter asked this question. So Tom, for instance, and Pratik, I'm getting their name wrong. Basically, how do you grow a forum is the question.

Speaker 1

21:48

Had you built a forum before? You had no idea? Brian D.

Speaker 2

21:50

Williams I had no idea. I just kind of winged it. I knew I wanted to have a forum.

Speaker 2

21:55

So the day that I launched Indie Hackers, I had a link on the site that said forum, but the forum wasn't built yet. And it just had a signup list. So

Speaker 1

22:03

it would just go to a MailChimp list

Speaker 2

22:05

or something? Brian D. Williams Yeah, it would just go to my MailChimp list.

Speaker 2

22:06

And I wanted to see, okay, how many people sign up for the mailing list on this page it's some sort of rough indicator whether or not people want there to be a forum or a community which I wasn't sure of you know you could people are already talking on reddit they're already talking in hacker news like maybe

Speaker 1

22:17

This is a big question for a lot of people. They're like, why would I build a forum when I could get discussion, even with my own Facebook group? What motivated you to do it?

Speaker 2

22:27

Geoffrey Yeah. I did a lot of things early on that I think were, a lot of people found unintuitive. They're like, why would you do that?

Speaker 2

22:33

Why are you building your own website rather than using WordPress? Or why don't you just use a medium blog? Why is Indie Hacker this dark blue website that looks ridiculous? Why are you building your own forum?

Speaker 2

22:44

Why don't you use Discourse and why don't you just use Facebook? My thinking from the very beginning was, your product, whatever you do, if you're going to be invested in it for a number of years, you should take the time to make it stand out and be different and be yours. I knew going into it also that I'm a computer programmer. The other ideas on my list before I chose Indie Hackers were all kind of SaaS businesses that involved a lot more development.

Speaker 2

23:06

And I begrudgingly chose the idea that was a blog. Indie Hackers is a blog. So I was like, okay, if I'm a programmer and I really want to do these other things, but I'm going to do a blog, I'm going to allow myself to do some fun stuff and make some stuff to keep myself interested. I also thought about what I didn't like about blogs.

Speaker 2

23:20

The worst thing about blogs is when you go to a blog and you read something good on it, and then you come back a month later and you don't even remember that you were there. There's no way you're going to go to Indie Hackers and not remember that you've already been there because it's a quirky dark blue website that looks like nothing else on the internet. You might as well stand out. So I decided early on that I didn't want to do the standard thing that other people were doing.

Speaker 2

23:40

I didn't want to use Facebook for my community groups. I wanted to do it all in-house and do it myself.

Speaker 1

23:46

And so if someone were to start a community, like what would be your advice on getting a forum going?

Speaker 2

23:54

Okay, so number 1, I think you need to organize your forum around a topic that people can actually talk about and they actually enjoy talking about. It seems obvious but people do it all the time where they start a community I think around something that people don't really like talking about and then they wonder why it's empty.

Speaker 1

24:09

Like what?

Speaker 2

24:11

Like just like one-off things like okay let's start a community about I don't know like something super specific like how do I incorporate? Okay well you can't really have a community around how to incorporate because people will ask that question, it's answered, and then they're out. So not only do people need to enjoy talking about it, but they need to be substantive enough that they can come back and continue talking about it.

Speaker 2

24:29

Starting a business obviously qualifies because there's endless challenges. Number 2, I think you need to have some sort of strategy to continually drive traffic to it. It can't be you launch your community on Product Hunt and then after that you've got no strategy. And this applies to any product, not just a form.

Speaker 2

24:45

With ndhackers, if you were to think about the form as the core product of ND hackers and the interviews as content marketing, I think that'd be a good model for how it works. So I'm constantly doing these interviews every week. The interviews themselves are really entertaining. It proved early on that people on Hacker News and Reddit and other websites, Twitter, enjoyed sharing them.

Speaker 2

25:04

So I could do the interviews, get people on my mailing list and then send out links to the community on my mailing list and continually drive traffic and kick start it over and over and over and over again for weeks. So if you're starting a community from scratch and you don't have any way to consistently drive traffic to it, you're at a tremendous disadvantage and you're going to be sort of just having to pedal faster every single time you want to get more traffic. I didn't have to do that. It was easier because I started with my content marketing strategy first.

Speaker 2

25:30

And I think finally, you've got to ensure that there's good content and discussions going on early on. I, the first week, created a bunch of fake accounts, which I'd heard other people doing. I was like, all right, this seems cheesy, but I'll try it. And I would have conversations with myself.

Speaker 2

25:45

I would have conversations with other people. I never let anyone make a thread that I didn't respond to and try to give them a valuable response because otherwise they're not going to come back. No 1 wants to see an empty forum. It helps to think of interesting discussion topics, etc.

Speaker 2

25:57

So as long as people like talking about what you're doing, as long as you have a way to drive traffic there consistently and as long as you ensure that the conversations there are interesting, I think over time the forum that you start will grow.

Speaker 1

26:09

Paul Matzkoff So to kind of boil it down, there were no crazy growth hack type things. It's just you figured out a market where people are interested in reading a bunch of content about and made a bunch of content. And then they just ended up on your site and following you.

Speaker 1

26:25

Brian. Exactly.

Speaker 2

26:26

And the idea of the crazy growth hack is so overrated. Even when I sometimes do an indie hackers interview, people who read it on Hacker News will say, oh, just boil it down to this 1 trick that this person did. That's never the case.

Speaker 2

26:40

I think we all want it to always be like, oh, it was this 1 thing that they did that's responsible. It's almost always just like they got the basics right. They made something that people actually wanted, which is deceptively simple advice. It sounds simple, but people always subtly do other things that aren't making something that people want, and wonder why no 1 uses their product.

Speaker 2

26:57

So the tricks, I think, are overrated. Make sure that you build something that people want that's good. And then make sure that you're actually thinking about how to get people in the door. You're not obsessed with the product itself.

Speaker 1

27:07

Right, yeah, I mean, it's the, I mean, people call it like leaky bucket, all this stuff. It's continually a piece of advice when we're talking about like content or content marketing with any YC startup. Make something that you're going to want to read.

Speaker 1

27:20

Doing these listicles that no 1 really cares about and your site looks like Medium, so no 1 remembers what it is, it's kind of just wasting time.

Speaker 2

27:28

I know, I did the same thing too with my YC company. We just slapped a blog on our website. It was so boring.

Speaker 2

27:33

We would announce new features every now and then and it would be empty for 6 months. Whereas I think some of the most interesting content online is it's treated as if it is the product. The ND hackers, the content was the only thing on the site for months. I think you need to put that level of detail and thought into it.

Speaker 2

27:51

Like we were just talking about, be creative too. Content doesn't even have to necessarily look like content. The content on Nomad List was like a database of cities with information about them. That's not like traditional content, but it's interesting.

Speaker 1

28:03

Yeah. How many interviews do you cut? Text interviews or podcast? Ah, oof.

Speaker 2

28:11

I mean, the answer is 0, actually.

Speaker 1

28:13

Oh, 0? They all go? Yeah.

Speaker 1

28:14

They all go to print or publish or whatever?

Speaker 2

28:16

I don't think I've ever conducted a text interview that I didn't end up putting up. You know, there might have been like 1 or 2 or someone was just complete jokester and I gave like 1 sentence responses and I was like send it back to them and they just never responded. But I mean that wasn't me cutting it, that was them never responding.

Speaker 1

28:30

I think

Speaker 2

28:33

a good interview, you could really coax it out of anybody if you're willing to like put in the time and the effort.

Speaker 1

28:37

Well, so that's the text thing is what kind of strikes me because in person you just like you get the vibe and you're like, okay, they're going to be a little bit difficult, but you kind of like warm up the room and they're good. When someone's not responsive over email or not, I don't know, not as specific or not as interesting as you think they could be, how do you get better answers out of them?

Speaker 2

29:00

Follow up endlessly until they either quit or they give you a good answer. I mean, what we also do sometimes is we'll put their interview on the site as a draft, which is end line comments like, oh, this is a really interesting answer. Like, care to give us some details besides what you gave us?

Speaker 2

29:15

So like, it would be awesome if you added a chart or a graph here in your interview. So I think from the outside looking in, maybe it looks like people are magically just giving good answers, but sometimes you just have to coax them. And like you said, in person you do that by filling out the room, and just vibing off the other person. Over text, you just take the tedious time to point out what's wrong and how it can be better.