It's pretty nerve wracking when you devote your entire life to something and not really finding success. It's very easy to tell yourself that you should quit and give up because I'm a developer. I could get a job. It's a software engineer. I could go work at Google or Facebook or Amazon or something and get a great salary, a little great life without working nearly as hard as I work during the bulk of my twenties, trying to start my own thing. And so by the time I was 27 28 I had spent six years doing this and didn't have very much to show for it. I was pretty. I don't want to upset with myself, but just questioning, you know, is this the path that I should have gone down? You know, if it's not, should I continue going down this path in the future to try to make something work? My name is Cortland Allen, and I'm the creator of Andy Hackers. This'll is code story, a podcast bring you interviews with tech visionaries who share in the critical moments of what it takes to change an industry and build, and

Lee, a team that has your back, I'm your host, Noel apart. And today, how Courtland Alan found a startup sweet spot by building the largest community of indie hackers around all this and more on Coats. Story. Courtland Allan grew up totally opposite of his twin brother, Chiang, but influenced by him nevertheless, his family was rooted in entrepreneurship, and as such, Courtland was heavily inspired to build and run his own thing. After going through Y Combinator and trying out different startups, he landed on the idea for indie hackers, and it checked all the boxes for what he wanted to work on. He spent three weeks and built a community for creators who want to find freedom in making a living for themselves. Online.

Any hackers is a community of mostly developers and creators who want to make a living for themselves online, and they're sort of primary driving factor is freedom. They want the freedom to work from wherever they want. They want a creative freedom to work on whatever they want. They want the financial independence to control their own destiny without having a boss or any particular working hours able to work with whoever they want. to hire and work alongside of you just want to run their own business because of the freedom that grants them in almost every aspect of their lives. And Indy actors is an online and in person community nowadays, where these founders can basically come together, swap ideas, give each other tips and advice and feedback and share each other stories. I started in the hackers because I wanted to be an Indian actor myself. I had for the better part of a decade, dreamed of building my own business after I got out of college, and I never quite found the success that I was looking forward. So after I graduated from college, I applied to y Combinator. I didn't get in.

I worked on my own, started for another year, applied the Y Combinator again, which is an accelerator that basically fund startups. And I did get in. And even then, you know, my startup that had funding had a co founder that was doing everything by the book, didn't never succeeded to the point where I felt happy doing it. I felt like, you know, this is what I really wanted to accomplish. He could never really pay for my lifestyle. It never was what you would call a success, and for years I worked on it and I worked on different companies and I worked on different side projects. I just never quite got to the point where I had built a business that I was proud of and that I could say that I really,

truly accomplished my goal. And it's pretty nerve wracking when you devote your entire life to something. This is what I was doing, like as a full time job, basically, and working weekends and nights as well and not really finding success. It's very easy to tell yourself that you should quit and give up because I'm a developer. I could get a job as a software engineer. I could go work at Google or Facebook or Amazon or something and get a great salary. Live a great life without working nearly as hard as I work during the bulk of my twenties, trying to start my own thing. And so by the time I was 27 28 I had spent six years doing this and didn't have very much to show for it. I was pretty. I don't want to upset with myself. But just questioning, you know,

is this the path that I should have gone down and, you know, if it's not so, they continue going down this path in the future to try to make something work. What it came down to for me was the fact that ultimately I'm an anti hacker at heart. I really value my freedom. I really value the ability to work on whatever I want to, and I just am constitutionally unemployable, like I just when I think about getting a job, I think that almost necessarily any job that I would have wouldn't take advantage of my full skill set wouldn't really utilize me to my fullest. I wouldn't really love it there and eventually would want to quit and do my own thing. And so I think having that sort of amount of clarity about who I am and what I wanted out of my life and my career made it easier for me to decide to just keep going and keep starting my own companies and whether they work out or not, it's just something that I have to do with something that I would need to do, and I don't think I would ever regret doing it, even if it didn't work out with that mindset, I decided to take on,

you know, another project in this case, which ended up being indie hackers, and I was very systematic about it. In the past, I have been a lot more into Dave. I'd basically worked on things because I was excited about them, or I thought that they might work. But I never really sat down and thought about all the different things that I learned over my entire career, being a founder and all the different mistakes that I had made and really tried to systematically put it on paper and tow a list and literally make sure that whatever idea I work done checked all the right boxes. And that's what I did different with Andy. Hackers just had things on there, like, I only want to work on something that I could build and a few weeks. But I don't wanna work on something that doesn't require a lot of code, because I know that I'm prone to coding for eight months or a year,

not big in my head and doing sales and marketing and all the other things that are important for a successful business. I only wanna work on something where I could describe it to you, my friends and family and plain English. And they understand what I'm working on so that they can support me and actually care about what I'm doing. Just like a list of 10 things. And it's been three days after that. Just brainstorming idea after idea, trying to figure out what I could work on and not settling for anything that seems good at first, but instead running it through my checklist and making sure checked all the right boxes. And at the end of that process, I had 45 different ideas that was really excited about it. Andy Hackers was by far the best one that scored the highest on that rubric, and so I started. It was about three and 1/2 years ago, in the summer of 2000 and 16.

Tell me about the M V. P. Thought

this was a big item on my checklist. I didn't want to work on anything that was going to take very long to create, and in part that's because at the time I had quit contracting at all. It's which is a contractor, sort of support myself, doing consulting on the side of starting these companies. But I'd quit and taken very much a year off. Not because I wanted to taken exactly your outfit because I had a year of runaway in my bank account before I was going to run out of money and I needed Do you essentially get another job? By the time I came up with the idea for Andy Hackers and picked that idea, I only had, like, six months of runway left in my bank account. This is Theis. End of July 2016. I was gonna be out of money around December or January of 2017. The initial idea was basically I was just gonna be a block was going to interview. Founders was going to ask them how they came up with the ideas,

how much money they're making, how they found their first customers. All the different challenges and hurdles that aspiring founders like myself faced was how to get the truth behind the scenes information out of a bunch of other founders who were actually doing it on a block doesn't take that long to built and so that, you know, check that box on my list. And I think it took three weeks from the time I came up with the idea from Andy hackers to the time that I actually launched it. I had my first had interviews. I built a blocking software from scratch using amber Js Just kind of a front end jobs, Good framework. Similar, similar, too angular R react and using fire base for the database and authentication, which is just, you know, a basic database That's kind of no sequel in real time. Three weeks to get to get from idea to launch.

And that was by far the fastest I've ever built and launched anything everything else I had ever worked on. It took months of working kind of in secrecy by myself, not talking anybody and just heads down coding just to get to, like the very prototypical bare minimum version. What

decisions and trade offs did you have to make while you were building that M. V p.

And had you cope with us? Of all the ideas? I mean, listen, I wanted to work on in the hackers was the one that required the least amount of code. Everything else I was excited about probably would have taken two or three months of code at minimum. And that's being optimistic. Realistically, I always underestimate how long that would take in this would take 6 to 12 months in reality. And so with any hackers, it was a blawg. I could have just built nothing at all and posted my interviews on medium or hosted WordPress site or anything else. That was just super easy. But instead I think the big trade off for me that I was making internally was, Well, if I'm going to build something that doesn't require any code, I will grant myself with one sort of indulgence that I will build my own blocking software from scratch just because I'm a developer and it's fun and I would like to have control over it.

And so that was a trade off I made. I would work on something that was super not code intensive, as long as I was allowed to build things from scratch and just scratch my own edge. Just just have fun doing something. I think If you start your own business, you're in company. You should actually enjoy what you're doing, so long as it doesn't get in the way of you actually succeeding

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Some more technical trade offs I made were that I wanted to use Amber Js, which was a front and framework for building specifically single page Web applications members very opinionated about that. It's got a router built and it's got the component later built in. It's got sort of a data layer for handling the objects that you get back from your database. It's got all wrapped into one. It's not a bunch of separate components like something like React would have you do. And I wanted to do that because they already knew Ember. I liked it. I like the philosophy, and I knew that I wanted any actors to be a single page website and the prevailing months. I think the website did so well and I got so much traffic that I wasn't quite prepared for it, and it also took a different direction where nowadays, any hackers is much more of a community, unless of just kind of a static blawg, and that means a lot of the user interface is updating on a regular basis. People are up voting things, leaving comments and things need to change,

which has led to me and some some instances regretting she's in the particular text act that I chose. But it's really hard to predict that stuff. When you first started a new project like you don't really know how big things are gonna be and premature optimization, you're predicting all this success and engineering for a future world which might not even come to pass is usually the wrong approach. So in hindsight, I wish I chasing something different, but probably at the time I was making the right decisions, at least for my perspective.

So how is the product progress since that point? How have you mature the product?

The initial version of many actors was literally just a blob. It didn't really look like a block. You would go to the website. It was All blue bloods are typically white because they're more readable. But I wanted it to be blue. So what? Stand out. Instead of having like these articles of titles, you just saw this grid of company names and revenue numbers so it didn't look like a block with it. It really was just a blob with kind of a unique design. And I had a page on there that said Forum, but it was completely empty because I wasn't sure I was going to build any sort of community former software, and I just wanted to see if people would use it. And so we clicked for him. I would say literally, A maniac is form is something I'm considering building if you're interested in using it. But your email address here and it turned out that after the first month or two of running any hackers aton of people entering the email address because they wanted to use the form and so eventually I got to work.

And this is another, you know, instance of me indulging and saying I'm not going to use any off the shelf form software not going to use discourse. I'm gonna build my own form software from scratch and just allow myself really the fun in the process of decoding my mind form suffer from scratch. So I did took me about eight days to build bare bones, working for him software where you can make a post and reply the comments and I threaded comments and upload each other and all sorts of things, and that was pretty empty for the first few months. It was made, especially just me making fake accounts, talking to myself to get a conversation started because obviously, if you build any sort of social form software in the beginning, nobody is there. And it's not valuable for anybody if nobody's there, but eventually other people would join, and after a few weeks it would be like one person there was talking to one of my accounts, and I remember the first time I saw two people talking to each other.

That was a big milestone, and I just kept at it for months, and eventually the foreign became a very thriving part of the indie actors community. And today it's the home page. It's no longer buried on some back Linc. If you go to Andy hackers dot com, you see right there a ton of people who are helping each other. Older websites, you're asking questions about how to get started, how to come up with ideas to get feedback on their wedding pages, etcetera and almost all the coding I do nowadays is meant to support, and the hacker is the community form. It's almost like a social network nowadays, where you create your own profile and you can follow other people and see what they're doing and even join groups. So it's it's evolved quite a lot from its early days is merely just a block.

How do you go about building your road map? How do you figure out what the next best thing to build in India? Hackers?

It really depends on the needs of any hackers of business in a community. So early on, when I was just doing block posts, one of the biggest issues was that 100% of this website depends on me and the effort that I'm putting it. If I stopped putting out block posts and the hackers his debt, it's no longer valuable. People have read all the interviews that I've already done, and that's a wrap. And so I felt a pretty strong need to build something that could be bigger than me that would power itself without my own direct input. And who better to help other Andy hackers, then the Andy hackers themselves, and so Essentially, the idea for a forum was a direct result of the fact that I knew I wanted to scale this beyond something that I could do myself. And I think that's kind of how the roadmap has progressed ever since then. You know, what is my number one problem? What is the next step that I would like to get to?

Okay, well, then, what's the best feature or solution that could help solve that particular problem? And this is something I think, a lot of founders and developers in general who were working on projects Underestimate, which is that you can get to, Ah, pretty remarkable place. You could build something bigger, expansive are interesting by taking one small step at a time rather than having to sort of the end. There's absolutely no way I could have ever built in the hackers into a big, vibrant community if I just from day one started by trying to make it community because no one had any reason to be there, but because I started with the block posts that drew in a lot of traffic, and then that traffic sign into my newsletter because they wanted to read more of these interviews, and that newsletter is crucial to me growing the forum because I could send out these foreign posts in the newsletter and get people trickling and eventually talking to each other.

But now that the forum is here, I can divided into groups because it's kind of people power and people helping each other. Now there's different interest groups, et cetera, et cetera. So it's kind of like one foot after the other. Every step gives me sort of the advantage that I need to be able to build something a little bit more ambitious, a little bit further along on the road map, and that's almost always determined by where I want to go next. And what is the biggest problem

that's that's facing me? Of

course, there's like an analyst list of problems. It's never gonna be perfect. Software's almost never done. Even if the indie actress groups all work out and it grows, I'm gonna be thinking about how to take any actor to the next level. How do we make it bigger? How do we make it reach more people who don't make it more impactful, and to some degree, like those answers air. It's hard to know where to focus, but one of the things I love doing, it's just surveying the community. It's very fun to build software, and you have thousands of people using it every day. And you know that whatever future you build, people are going to test drive it and try it out.

And so Aiken, try a little projects, little experiments and literally just e mail a few 100 people and say, Hey, what do you think about this or hey, what's your biggest problem to struggle as a founder? And they could tell me, and I consider around thinking for a few weeks about what kind of feature could best solve that problem. So it's a combination of whatever I need next. Plus, whatever I think the community is struggling with an and the intersection of how I could help with that. So how did you build your team? How did you go

about finding the winning horses to join you

in the hackers? At first it was just me by myself, and I have built companies with others before, but for whatever reason, that's just never worked out. I've had some good co founded, So I've really jived with some partners who I really worked well together with. But ultimately it's tough sometimes to partner up with other people because your differences and opinions and you have different goals and different objectives. And it's kind of like being a parent, you know, ideally, if you're a parent with somebody, you know them well and you share the same aspirations and dreams for your Children. Ideally, if you partner up to somebody to work on a project, our company, that project,

our company, is like your child, and you guys have to have the same vision for where it wants to go. And so with Andy hackers, I decided I was gonna do it by myself, which meant that I wouldn't really have Thio convince anybody else of what I wanted to deal would be entirely my brainchild, but obviously the downside is that I have to do all the work, which is why I think it helped to start small keep It is something that was very manageable, that one person could do just like a block at first and then incrementally build it up. But since then I've gradually expanded the team So the very first person that ever brought on to work with me on any hackers is my twin brother, Channing. About eight months after a launching the hackers, I saw that the revenue from the site was growing, and after the point where it could support me as an individual, I live in San Francisco. It's pretty expensive.

Their rent It's not cheap, but any actor just making something like $15,000 a month, and that was enough for rent and bills and utilities. And I was so excited. I immediately reached out to my brother, who had worked with together in the past on various projects and said, Hey, the sandy hackers thing is really working out. Do you want to help me with it? And the great thing about working with a sibling is that you have decades of conflict resolution behind you, like my brother and I have been in thousands of arguments. We've never stopped talking to each other. We've never not been able to get past something, and so I know this is a safe person to come and help me run my business because I just know that we can get through pretty much anything I've seen this time and time again. For example, of the co founders of Stripe,

Patrick and John are also brothers. I have interviewed by half a dozen sibling pairs on the indie actress podcast about how they started a company together. And so my brother, who's also a Web developer, is also a writer and a novelist is taking charge of a lot of the content production side of Andy hackers and help me run the business. Since then, we've also hired a few people to help and contractor rules. So we've got some people that we actually hired temporarily as contractors from up work who are excellent at what they did. And now they work with us in a more semi permanent roll. Rosie Sherry, our community manager. It was actually one of the first people that I interviewed for anti hackers, and she started her own community boot strapped it to over a $1,000,000 in revenue. It's it's called the Ministry of Testing, and it's a community of software testers. But she recently joined a team,

and she's helping us run the community as well, and our podcast editing is taken care of by a guy named Bradley Denham. And I believe you know him story behind how he joined us. Pretty funny. And he basically proved that he was the right person for the job. When I first started the injectors podcast in early 2017 I wanted to do everything myself. Was kind of a control freak, like I want to find the guests and interview them and edited and released it deployed do all that by myself, So I waas So Bradley reached out and said, Hey, are you looking for help to edit your podcasts? I said, You know what? I've got it. I'm editing it myself. I want to learn how to do this and thank you for the offer.

But I'm good another week and she passed and emailed me again. He said, Hey, I think I could really help you Save time. I could do a better job editing and I've got this much experience what you consider hiring me and I have basically the same response. Thanks so much for listening. Thanks for the offer. Hear what you're saying and I don't doubt it's true. But, you know, I really want to do this myself, and I think I'm just a little bit narrow minded, you know, I just wanted to do myself. I didn't want to go through the trouble of trying to hire someone and figure out how to do that. And then 1/3 week came and I got an email from Bradley and it was just two audio recordings.

And one of them was like your version and the other one said my version and I listen And he had edited the indie Akers podcast and done just so much better of a job. And I done that. It was impossible for me not to hire him and say, OK, this is your job. From now on, you're making a show some way better than I could. So ah, he's been adding the podcast for two and 1/2 years now, and that's Ah, kind of a good summary of the types of people who were working with me on any

hackers, but also sounds like you got a killer team.

It's really great to have people working alongside June. Something that I didn't quite realize when I first started was how much more efficient and impactful you can be when you have good people working with you, especially as a software engineer like I had, I never really hired anyone before. It always been kind of solo. It always worked in my own projects and a little bit scared of that whole process of working with others and outsourcing and trusting them to do things. But almost everybody who's done anything really impactful is significant, has had help. And even if they were the people who ended up getting all the credit and the glory, really, there's a team buying them of excellent people who are doing a great job. So it's something I've try to embrace more on Maura's. I've run any actors and, as I've interviewed other founders, who's come to the same realization and tried to both good teams for themselves as well. How did you factor in

scalability when you're building Indy hackers either in the beginning or as you progressed as you know, you started to get some major attraction. Where did Scalability come in for you?

It was not at all a factor. When I first spilled at the actors. I didn't think about it all. I assumed that it was going to grow pretty steadily and slowly over time and that I could just worry about it when it happened, which kind of ended up being the case except right out of the gate. It was like 100,000 people came to the Web site of the first week. After that. It grew slowly and steadily, but like right out of the gate, it was huge. Luckily, the website didn't fall over, didn't crash early on. But I've had to make some changes based on how the website has progressed since then. So to get in some of the more technical specifics, one of the biggest things they did early on was I added a cashing layer to the actors. So many actors was just a block.

There's a static content become. You read what people said. Maybe you signed up for the newsletter and that was it. And so I threw in the actors behind a CD in Everything was on AWS in those days. So I think I was using cloudfront, and it just basically meant that no matter where you were in the world, your Web browser connect to the closest server that was serving any hackers on Amazon Cdn, and it'll just give you the static response and you won't even hit my server. Which is great, because I didn't have to worry about things crashing. After that. I added the forum, which is far more dynamic. As I mentioned earlier, People are uploading things. People were leaving comments on that situation.

You don't really want a cast version of the form. You don't want to load the forearm and see what it looked like yesterday. You want to live the form and see what it looked like a minute ago or a second ago. So you want the most updated version. And that's something that I didn't really account for when I first built in the actors and was eventually gonna have such a dynamic website that needed to be updated. Often think it's particularly challenging to do when you have a single page Web that service I had rendered like I did. So I'm using Ember Fast food, which is just basically the service side rendering application for Amber. It runs on a nude Js app using express. Basically, when your request it's the server note will basically spend up an instance of the ember app on the server. Take a snapshot of what the generated HTML looks like, and then return that to your browser. That's kind of an expensive process, and so if you have thousands of people doing that, then it could easily overwhelm a server.

So the first thing I did was I put server on Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, which has auto scaling built in so you can figure a few parameters, and it'll detect when your servers experiencing lots of load and add more servers that could handle more of these requests in parallel. But even that wasn't really enough. Sometimes the auto scaling would take too long to kick into. The site would be down for a little bit. It was a little bit confusing to just have sight running on multiple servers deploys or a little bit more complex than if you had yourself a running on multiple servers. So I decorated with a bunch of different things. At one point, it made the sight completely static. Didn't do any server side rendering, and that situation. It's very easy to serve your site in the scale because everybody gets back the same HTML file. They can just catch that there that find the seating in. But the downside is, without service,

I'd rendering, but everybody gets. It's basically a blank page and that blank page. We'll just load for a while before the jobs kept at boots up on the machine. And I can tell you, if people click a link on social media on Google to an article they want to read, what they get is a blank loading screen. For a few seconds. They click away. That's not what they want to see. They want the article right now, and if they see loading screen, they're gonna be reminded that they're distracted from work or something. And just close the tap. So a sort of a stopgap measure. What I did was I took a page out of balsamic playbook.

Balsamic is an act by this guy penalty. It's been around forever, and in such a clever way of dealing with user complaints, Wallace Apolo did, which is that he should very relevant inspirational quote on his loading screen before the apple boot up. So I did the same thing for any accuracy. I would take a quote from one of my interviews. I would try to make it something useful on inspirational, and I would also show the interviewees named their business in the revenue numbers and the loading screen instantaneously. All the complaints I would get about the website speed would go from Hey, this is loading too slow. Can you make a load faster to you? Hey, this is actually loading too quickly. I don't have time to read the quote. You flow the website down.

So that was a good stopgap measure while I worked on a bunch of other things. But eventually I said, You know what? I really want to tackle this problem properly. I want any actor to look quickly and people to get straight to the content that they want. So what I ended up doing is creating a Krahn job that runs periodically on my server. I think it sets around like every 30 seconds. And what that KRON job does is it actually pings the service side rendering and generates the HTML for the home page of the form. And then it saves that HTML files on the server. And so that's constantly updating a the HTML for the home page. And if you request it. It's a user. What you get is that updated HTML file, which is just a static file. And so instead of getting a satisfied that it's a loading screen, you're getting a static file that has,

Ah, very recent snapshot of the home page. So, technically, the home page is always about 30 seconds out of date when you access Cindy hackers, but it allows you to go straight to the website, see what's going on, not be, you know, a day out of date. And then the act boots up and loads the most recent version rather than having to wait around to the loading screen. So that's what I'm doing right now. It's kind of one of the challenges of having a small development team. Right now. I'm the only developer working on any hackers, and so I've got a where different hats juggle between doing marketing stuff and going to meetings and proving the website and scaling things and producing the podcast. But I'm sure there is a lot more scalability, sort of low hanging fruit that I could tackle in the future, and a lot more I could do with cashing and cashing validation that could make the website faster and

other pages, not just the home page. That's awesome. It sounds like you've done a lot already, though, to make the pages faster. Cash interestingly, And it's fun to wear those multiple habits on a start up and fight the scalability

issues. You have to you have to. There's no choice. You're the you're the founder, the only person doing anything. So until you grow your team, it's all up to you to figure out how to prioritize what's urgent and

what's not. That's right. So as you step out on the balcony, look across Indy hackers and the team and the community that is there, the rich community of indie hackers. What do

you most proud of bread most proud of is how much people are able to help each other. When I started in the hackers, I had a very some might say selfish mission for it. As a project, I wanted to help myself. The entire point of any hackers is really I want some personal freedom. I don't want to have to go back to getting a job. I want to support my own lifestyle, but once you get that locked in is a founder. Your commissions and your priorities start to change. And for me, the biggest change came when I joined Stripe about nine months after I started in the Hackers. It was acquired by stripe, where I still work on it today. Financially, I wasn't worried anymore. You know,

I no longer had any sort of imperative to like cattle. I pay my rent and they became much more about well, how Dawei help Andy hackers do what it does best and help founders and inspire founders to get started. And the cool thing is that because it's a community and because it's a podcast, I'm interviewing people. It's it's never really me directly helping anybody like I'm not dispensing a bunch of advice. And some people have started companies. Rather, I'm just providing sort of a stage where other founders can come on and share their own story in their own advice in their own experiences. And they can help each other. It's the same thing with a community forum. I'm rarely posting on the community forum nowadays, but there's thousands of post every week from vendors were helping each other. It's almost beyond belief to see what can happen. I've started it. Have a lot of people in the podcast recently who themselves were just fledgling in the actors on the Forum,

asking how they could get started their podcast listeners a year ago or two years ago? And now they're running these businesses that are making $170,000 a month and revenue and living the dream that they're aspiring to because they heard another episode of the podcast that really lit a fire under them or they got, you know, just the right amount of help on the Forum. So I think the thing that I'm the most proud of it is just how cool and actually impactful it is to see people helping each other and and really learning that inspiration is not just a buzzword that people really do make life changing decisions that alter the entire course of their career in their life because they heard a story about what somebody

else did. That's amazing. I love that. Let's flip the script a little bit. Tell me about a mistake you made along the process and how did you respond

to it? I've made dozens of mistakes running any hackers. Probably the most unforgivable mistakes were related to code, specifically violating the principles that helped maniac has become a success in the first place. So I was very focused on building something that would be quick to build, testing things out, not committing too much into building a ton of software in the beginning before they launch any hackers. But since launching and since having things work out, a lot of that external pressures removed and you kind of feel like I know the website's working, I could do whatever I want And I've had a few of these slog projects from like, This will just take a couple months and it takes like five months of me coding, and the rest of the community is not getting better. Nobody sees any improvement because I've taken on this just absolute monster of a project that I really should have taken the time in the beginning to break down. Think about how it could break it into bite sized pieces, each one of which is useful and can contribute, and I can release instantly so people constantly see a steady stream of updates and so Aiken, I guess,

really tell if I'm going in the right direction before had committed two months of coding. A good example of that would be the directory of products on any hackers. If you run a product or business, you could go to any actors that calms less products and create a page for your product. You could share your revenue numbers if you want. You have a whole timeline error. You can post milestones and updates about what you've done. And I was so excited to build this guy. I just felt like it was necessary. And really everybody on the form had something they're working on. But I had no place to share it on any hackers. And so I just absent mindedly jumped into this. This is a couple years ago, and it just took for ever to build this. I over designed it. I made it look really good.

It's like it's very nice, but it was focused on the wrong things. And then after I was done within, people made these product pages. They had no real reason to use it because she would make all these posts on your timeline, and then nobody would ever come, and like those posts, they would never use them. And there's just no visibility into them. And I hadn't even thought about that. Part of the equation, luckily is ableto sort of rectify that, years later by building what we now call the milestones leaderboard. So any update that anybody posted the product timeline gets put in that day's leaderboard. The top milestones and these are almost always celebratory. Things like I made my first dollar and revenue are just came up with my idea or my company just got acquired or we just released this cool feature.

And here's what we learned. People love those milestones, and as a result they upload them and ask each other questions. But how'd you do that? Or how can I do the same thing? And finally, the product pages have been sort of brought into the fold of the rest of the website. But it took me a while of making mistakes of that kind for a really stuck to my guns and said, I'm never working at anything that's gonna take me longer than a few days or most a week to build. So tell me

what the future looks like for the product and for your team.

The future for any actors is, is mostly about growth. Any hackers as a community is in a great place. We survey people who use any actors, and a pretty decent percentage of people say, like, Hey, I would never have started my company If it wasn't for a story that I read on any hackers or a podcast episode that I heard on, any hackers have really convinced me that I can do this. I have what it takes. Some ideas are actually better than I thought they are. So I think that's great. And in terms of how helpful in the actors is, that's also great. People get a lot of help on the forum, and so the question now isn't so much. How do we make any hacker is better,

but it's that's how do we bring this to more people if we think this is truly inspiring and if it's really helpful to founders and you know they're not to feel lonely going to their journey like nobody understands them, but they have a whole community online, like how do we get more people in the community. I think that's a huge challenge because most websites that grow end up losing their initial appeal. You know, there's something about the initial group of people who helped them get where they are. That the turn a blind eye to really alienate their initial users. And so for me, the challenge is, how do we make any actress bigger and reach more people without alienating people of making them feel like we're getting away from our original goal? The answer that I have sort of arrived at? It's too early to say that it's it's the right answer, but it's what we're trying is to basically break up the community into smaller groups. And so I don't know if anyone listening is a fan of Reddit. But read it initially. It was just one forum,

and now today you read it is money. Tens or hundreds of thousands of sub read. It's the smaller communities at all feed in tow, one bigger community, and I'd like for any hackers to be the same. They're Tana founders, who have very specific interests. For example, there are founders of e commerce businesses, their founders who were selling courses their founders were making mobile app. So there's founders were making. Gang's founders were making SAS software and just hundreds of different things the founders were working on. And so we're creating groups within the community. So founders of particular interest in skill sets could actually meet. Other founders would have more in depth, specific conversations geared around these things,

and they could just sort of a general in the hacker's forum. And so it's early days. Each one of these groups we've created so far is it's like its own tiny community that we have to nurture and get off the ground. But hopefully, a year from now, we will have thousands of these communities, and many of them will be flourishing. I will be reaching more people who never would've discovered any hackers otherwise.

So who influences the way that you work? Name an architect or CTO CEO, tech person, Whoever it may be that you look up to and tell me why

most of the founders that I found on the podcast have had some impact on how I run any hackers. It's funny because you know, in a way because of the actors is all about interviewing founders and talking to them on the community forum. I learned a ton about how to run a company just by running any hackers. I've got kind of a unique viewpoint where I get to see examples of thousands of people in the different decisions they make and what works for them and what doesn't rather than just gotta having an example of just one, which is just myself. And so I could literally go down the list of any actors. Podcast guests. I talked Thio John Oh, Nolan Recently He's the founder of Ghost, and he's like one of the most solid mission driven founders that I've ever spoken with is very big on the fact that he's taking a slow, steady approach to guard his company. He's not trying to go too fast so that he can hold on to his ideals, and he's doing something he actually wants to do, So he's not gonna get bored of it a year to you. This is a lifestyle that he wants it. He's made sure to set up his lifestyle so that it's happy while he's running his business,

and I think that level of patients commitment to admission while also trying to focus on growing the company is something that I really admire, and I tryto make time for it in my daily life. Another podcast guest, Derek Anderson, had a quote while I was interviewing him, which is that it's a little bit cliche. But it said it's about the journey, not the destination. And that's something that, like I've thought about a lot when running, and the hackers that whatever I'm doing right now in this moment, that's really the whole point. When you asked if any hackers gets to some sort of pre defined goal of reaching this, many millions of people are having this many. You know, people create a product page or whatever,

like that will be great when I get there. But the entire path there needs to be fun and needs to be enjoyable, and that affects my decision. Making a lot. Another founder I've had on the podcast is Taylor Hartwell, creator of Level, which is an open source framework for PHP, And it's really an entire ecosystem at this point, like he's almost single handedly changed the ecosystem for PHP developers and been super impactful, simultaneously turning into a business for himself, and he has a very refreshing and take on motivation, which is something that a lot of founders trouble with. Hattaway stay motivated to finish a project that I'm working on. And for him, it's just about balance. You need to balance passion with discipline.

It's not about 100% passionate about 100% discipline. Sometimes you're gonna be working on things, and you're gonna have these, you know, days into pure drudgery, and you need some degree of discipline. You need some degree where you're gonna work on something, even if it isn't the most fun thing, and you're gonna push through it. And for that you need discipline. And there's lots of tricks and tools you can use a sort of increase your discipline. For example, having a cofounder, employees or partners can help you say discipline to commitments that you've made telling your audience and making promises and setting due dates for things could help you sort of increase your discipline with the podcast. I have a sudden release schedule. I can't really miss that release schedule,

so I have to be disciplined about that, and that helps me get through the days We don't necessarily have the passion to push myself forward, but there are plenty of days where I don't have to rely on discipline at all because I'm working something that I really like. And I have the passion and I think, Ah, lot of founders and developers work on things that they're not passing it about. And they don't get that side of the equation either. So I think it's important to have both. And that's something I think about largely in part because of Taylor out. Well, I could probably go down my entire list of the actors podcast guest. It's a different lesson that I learned from a different founder every single time. But I said, incorporating that how I run, how we run any hackers,

that's a really cool thing. I totally relate to it with the interviewing and people on the code story podcast, just little tidbits and hearing people's stories, it really it's really fun and it's really cool, but it also is super

educational. Yeah, it's hard to learn entirely from your own experiences because you're just one person, and this is why I encourage people to read some of the interviews we've done on the necklace website or to listen to the podcast. Because when you get this sort of broad perspective of talking thio, dozens of people are. Hundreds of people are listening to how they've done things. You just you just begin to realize that there's no one right way and you get to figure out which approach drives the most with your particular personality. In your situation, you could even steal bits and pieces of what others have done so to create a game plan for yourself. And I think that's that's hard to do If you're not talking lots of people and being a podcast, founders kind of hack because you literally have to talk to lots of people who don't have a choice. And so you end up getting that perspective. So if you could go back to the beginning, what would you do differently? I would avoid all the mistakes that I made the first time around. I mean,

I think it's funny. I've asked people the same question on a lot of people say I wouldn't do anything differently. I do it all the same, you know, and I think that answers kind of be ask because at the end of the day, like we've all made mistakes, none of us did things perfectly the first time around. And you know that there are features that I build for any hackers, that I would not have felt their e mails that I sent that I would not have sent. There are things that I stressed about. I just worried so much about them that didn't make any difference at all. I remember in November of 2016 of a few months after I'd launch of the actors, I was trying everything that I could to try to grow the website. I was posting on Cora and asking questions and answering questions and block posts and doing all sorts of stuff and just stressing about the numbers. I kind of get more visitors, more visitors and remember actually like burning out and really needing to take like,

a two week break because they just couldn't handle any more because I felt so much pressure to make the website bigger. And then in December, when I finally started reaching out to sponsors and selling, you know, slots on the podcast in the newsletter, it turned out the numbers barely even mattered, and I was so stressed out about this sort of precursor first Steptoe. What I saw is being necessary. Thio generate sponsorship revenue that I essentially didn't even need to do any of that. In the end, it was just a total waste of time, an emotional energy. And if you could go back, I would get that. Just go straight to the part where I pray to generate revenue for my site and see if that works. And if it worked great,

let's get the hard step. But if it didn't work, great. Now I know for sure, and I could go do that other hard stuff. So I think it's something that a lot of founders don't realize that you should probably charge money for what you're doing as early as possible, and you'll get the exact feedback you need. You try to charge a customer for something. If they don't buy, they'll tell you exactly why they won't buy and you could fix that rather than just sort of guessing and stressing atter over what you think they might need before they buy it. That's one thing that I think is was a big part of my story, and I think that is applicability. Most people serving revenue

generating projects as well You're getting on a plane and you're sitting next to one of your indie hackers. One of the users of your platform just built the next big thing. They're pumped to go get it at the world. I want to show you it, knowing all that you know, all the different past that you've walked in the road. The experience you have building any hackers, What advice would you give them?

First thing I would tell them is to be careful who you take advice from and how you interpret that advice. Everybody is different. The people giving you advice might have goals that are different than yours or skills that are different than yours or experiences that are different than yours. And so their advice might be good for a person who's not you. But it might be terrible advice for you. In fact, that's kind of the premise that Andy Akers was built on that if you're trying to build a business to change your life for the better and you know, Chief financial independence for yourself Ah, lot of the advice that you see for startup founders is not right for you because it's good towards people who are building is very high growth venture capitalist funded companies. We're trying to acquire board users at all costs and don't really care about having a sustainable business model or running the lifestyle business. So I think you should be careful up whose advice you take and really put thought to whether or not apply. See, And that includes me as well. You should consider whether my advice applies to you. A second thing, I would say it starts small. I mentioned this a little bit earlier in our conversation,

but most things that are big, most things that are impressive started almost embarrassingly small. They were very modest in the beginning, and it's very important to do this because if you bite off more than you can, she was found in the early days. If you start working on something that's going to take you 6 to 12 months to build, it's gonna take a ton of effort, take a ton of money. You have a lot of negative trade offs that come with that. If you're working on something, and it takes you forever to get it out the door. You're very likely to lose motivation and not finish it. If you're working on something and it's taking you forever to launch it, you're not going to have any customers. Should not going have anyone that you're accountable to except for yourself. You have to rely entirely on your own passion and willpower to get it out the door.

It's just it's just kind of the killer of dreams of people, by the way too much in the beginning. So I would say Take whatever your ideas, figure out how you can get it done in a week. Like the most bare bones version of what I've talked to so many founders, you've done this and eventually build something that was world changing. A good example would be Peter Levels from Nomad List. He has a giant community of digital nomads who travel the world and help each other basically figure out the best places to stay and what to do when they're they're. You know what places have the fastest Internet, what places of the cheapest cost of living the best food, et cetera. He's got probably a better database in the community built around that than any other place online. And he started it with the spreadsheet. He didn't build a website, didn't code anything. He literally just made a spreadsheet and tweeted it out.

People filled that out, and that was sort of his first version in the second version wasn't much more complex than that. And step by step, he got to where he wanted to go. So I would advise people to think about their business. In their journey is a set of set of steps, literally a staircase and every tiny step you take get you the height that you need to reach the next step a little bit easier. And that's a much better Seigner approach than trying to jump straight to the top of the staircase from the floor is probably not gonna reach it. Even if you do, it's gonna take a ton of work and you're not gonna get all those little dopamine hits. That would come if you instead took one small step at a time to get to where you're gonna get so start small. And if you're not embarrassed by the very first thing that you release. If it's not like embarrassingly simple, are almost too trivial, then you might be starting a little bit

too large. That's great advice. Well, Cortland, thank you for being on the podcast today. Thank you for telling the creation story of Andy hackers,

thank you know, for for having me on the show. And hopefully I can come back some time again in the future.

Absolutely. And this concludes another chapter of Coach story code story is hosted and produced by Noel Apart. Season two episodes or co produced and edited by Bradley Denham. Be sure to subscribe on Apple podcast Spotify or the Podcasting. Appy your choice. Support the show on patri and dot com slash coat story for just 5 to 10 bucks a month. And when you get a chance, leave us a review.