Welcome Thio. It's our show about the nuts and bolts, the meat and potatoes, the nitty gritty circles and squares. What you got, Kevin triangles and rhombus is and dodecahedron. Now you're showing off of community community building. I'm your host, Bailey Richardson, a partner at People in Company. I'm Kevin Win. I'm also partner of people in company. Each episode we interview everyday people who have built extraordinary communities about just how they did it. How did they do it? How did they get the first people show up? How did they grow to thousands more members today? We're talking to Courtland Allen's of Portland.

Yeah, Corlin, founder of indie Hackers. It's a primarily online community for independent entrepreneurs, and by independent I mean, these are people who are building businesses that make their money from customers. They're not backed by investors. What started as 100 and 50 personal emails Courtland sent to friends and strangers has grown to a community of more than 60,000 entrepreneurs.

It's almost like if you imagine a spring being pressed back, it was spring. It's like how many years people had to go without seeing the story's wanted and hoped would be there and then boom and the hackers came out and suddenly it's like, Yes, this is what I wanted.

Thes people come together on Indy hackers to share valuable stories and insights or tap each other for inspiration and advice. Sometimes they get together in person, too. Like last month, there were 55 Indy hacker meet ups all around the world. That's more than one meet up per day. That

is one of the one per day I did the math. What if all 55 run one day Super Indy

hacker Friday you know, Yeah, or maybe not? Well, it could have happened that it could have nobody knows, except on the Indian hacker upset Kevin. What stuck out to you about our conversation with Cortland,

who many things stuck out to me. I'll mention Thio. Uh, the first was Courtland hunch that people want to talk about the thing that isn't being talked about. Often times, I think, really extraordinary communities spring from a place of vulnerability, like what is something that you are growing through, whether it's because of your identity or your work or something you're pursuing that you know you're thinking about so much that, but it isn't normal quote unquote to talk about it, and in this instance it's idea of like being an entrepreneur, but really talking about what it takes to make money and how much money you are making. And Courtland, who's seem to be very literate. Ih very Let's try and see. It was clear that he got something right from the get go. And I think when you do get something right for a community,

when you do send out that signal when you do host that first event, there's something saying when people are really into it, they're really into it. And you know, when you tap into something

very special yeah, he's he described it, which is fun as a spring has been held tightly for too long and decider in tighter

force equals negative K. Times X

is that it is spring constantly. Show that you re engineer for cool Thea. Other thing

is just ah, this idea of when I get to run office hours coaching different community leaders This topic of building a business versus building a community always comes up. You start something special, you have people showing up and you think, man, it sure would be great if this just scaled up Maura like this could be my full time job. That would be great. And talking to Courtland, asking for advice for community leader's thinking about this. He just talks about acknowledging tradeoffs. It's not easy Thio start a giant community doesn't happen by magic is not easy to start. Ah, business. That doesn't happen by magic, either. And just to assume that one leads to another isn't always the case in Courtland just talks about. If you tell yourself you want this to be free and reached the most people possible should probably acknowledge it's gonna be hard to charge a membership fee. And then there are tradeoffs accepting sponsorship, which would allow you to keep certain elements of a community free. So I just really appreciated his practical approach and sort of hands on experience, navigating this question of what it means to start a community and what it means the start of business

before we dive into the interview. Also mention warmer thing. We first met Courtland at Stripe H Q in San Francisco because we're working with stripe there. Press Imprint is our publisher for a book that we're making get together, which is coming out this August. What is up straight press teams? Yeah, And for Courtland Stripe acquired Indy hackers about two years ago, which is an interesting story and something we'll talk about in this podcast. Let's get into it. All right, Cortland, before we dive in too much. I just wanted to ask you to, very simply in, like, one or two sentences. Tell us who the indie hackers community is and what you guys come together to. D'oh. So simply

as you can and D hackers is a community of people, mostly software engineers who want to make money online by selling the products that they create and we come together. Do you support each other

and doing this Great, Perfect. That's exactly what we needed. What are some of the things that you guys do when you come together like, really quickly? I know you guys have a forum, and you have articles were to sum of things you've built for these folks,

a lot of the things that we do sit around telling each other stories and seeing what we could learn from those stories. So there is no one right path to entrepreneurship. It looks as different as there are different people on earth. And so I think there's a lot to learn from different people telling even pretty similar stories. So in terms of the products that built to help people do this, we have a podcast interview. Entrepreneurs just like you guys student

at me right now. This is why Cortland is going to be so well spoken on. This podcast is look bad. Go ahead. Very professional microphone.

That's not the pro equipment for this. You also have tax space interviews that we publish to the website. They're pretty similar to the podcasts and actually predate the podcast, where I'll ask entrepreneurs a standard series of questions. And I think, really, the learning is in the different ways in which these people answered his questions and so last. How did you come up with the idea? Why did you start this? How did you find your first customer? Is how much money you're making and what have you learned, etcetera. We've done probably 400 of these interviews today.

I want to get into that little bit later in the interview, but before we d'oh! Get into the nuts and bolts of all those pieces of what you built and how they've gone. I just want to get to know you a little bit better as well. So you started this. How long ago? Now, When did you start Andy? Hackers? Within the last

two years. Almost three years now. I started in July 2016.

And what motivated you personally like, Can you tell us a little bit about your story up until the point of starting this site? And what motivated you emotionally, personally to say, like, you wanted to invest your time in this problem paint.

Paint the picture. I came to the Bay Area to sort of follow my passion for startups a year after I graduated college. And I was so excited when I first got here because it was everything that I'd ever read about online. It's everything that I had ever watched videos about. Within a few months of being here started meeting my heroes, whose blocks I've been reading for years. I thought I was just so cool to be a part of the startup scene. But then I noticed I started getting a little bit jaded. I didn't really jive with the culture of needing permission to build a business. It didn't like the idea that everybody, instead of figuring out what kinds of cool things they could create, more obsessed with how that he get in front of investors and how to pitch investors and how that convince investors to open up their wallets. And I understood the necessity of this to some degree. But I didn't think that it was a way that you should have to build a business, that there needed to be another way. And so I found myself more attracted to stories of people going sort of unconventional route, which is pretty crazy.

That's the way the business has always been done. You make something available to customers and you sell it for a price. But in Silicon Valley, that scripted sort of been turned on its head. And so it was really inspired by the Jason Freed's of the world

base camp. For all the listeners out there who may not know

him exactly, he was doing a lot of writing at the time, along with his co founder, David, about how, like the Silicon Valley model was a little bit distorted and how you could just literally create something of value, Put a price on it, and people would buy it and make a business for yourself That way. That really appealed to me, but I couldn't find very much sympathy in the Bay Area because I was going through y Combinator. I was doing all the sort of stereotypical startup accelerator ambassador type stuff, and everybody was in a bit of that world away. I find myself feeling a little bit alone. In that

sense. Can I ask you what year that was? Because I think you might have moved here from the East Coast or from further away. And I'm originally from the Bay Area and my dad and the people I grew up around exactly Like he said, they started businesses bootstrapped first. And then they're this point came where there was so much investment that it was actually creating businesses instead of businesses seeking investments. So what year was this like when you were coming here and kind of looking to start your own business, but not seeing space for the one you wanted to

make? I moved out here in late 2010 I got into y Combinator, which is

sort of the starlet. Yeah, congratulations. It's

a big deal. It was It was such a huge deal. And that was in 2011 you know, sort of working on my own startups the next four or five years after that, becoming progressively more disillusioned. What's the wind? And it's interesting you mention your dad trapping a business and his colleagues doing the same because I think this has always happened, like there have always been. People in Tech were bootstrapping their businesses and building the Metamor traditional way. They just at some point along the way, stop getting the attention, stop getting the focus. And when you have entire movies coming out about Facebook getting started in like the path that Mark Zuckerberg took, that starts to become the economical way to do things that started from the way that seeps into the mindset of many millions of people, of how it's done, how it has to be done so fast forward. A few years I have taken a break from startup scene,

but I'm ready to come back and I want an idea, and I know exactly what I don't want to do. I know that I don't want to raise money. I know that I want to build a business I can charge money for and make money on my own and sort of for lack of a better term. Improve my life, right? I want to be more free. I want the ability to choose the types of things I work on, who I work with, what hours I work, et cetera. And that's kind of the motivation I had for starting another start up. But I didn't know it was gonna be I didn't know it would be Andy hackers. And so I went online. I decided I'm gonna start researching. Well,

who else has actually done this? And this is where I ran into this problem of fact that the stories don't get publicized very often. There's not many places online that you can go to find stories of people building these small Andy hackers, as I call them now, but at the time, nameless. Right. Who are these people? They're not started founders. Some people call them lifestyle, business owners attack and the building scalable products like, who are they? There's not even a name for the map, as you possibly find that. So I just stepped out of the Internet. I spent a lot of time on different forums that are popular and tacking amongst offer.

Engineers try to find me stories like a little comment here, a question that somebody left their blood post there for. Somebody would have a story about the Bootstrap, something to $1000 a month and wrapped it. Have something to $10,000 a month, you know, And I was took his money notes as I could. What were these people working on? What was successful for them, what wasn't successful for them? How long did it take them? Because this is the path that I wanted to follow when I really wanted to see if there is any inspiration out there. Any Ted bits of advice that I could piece together to help myself A swell about three days into this process of just nonstop research and idea struck me. It was a very mad idea,

which is that it's like an inception idea. This'd idea for a business, but keep going. It's great

used by it a little bit because I wasn't sleeping very much. And so I was taking my dreaming is eyes just like literally, I would go to sleep just like imagine these Internet forums because I was reading like

Oh my God Wow.

But the idea was, Hey, there's other people like me doing the same thing I can tell because I can see them in the comments asking questions the same way that I'm asking questions and they really want to do the same thing that I'm trying to do. But we're all sort of just trying to piece it together. We're trying to put the pieces together all over the Internet. There isn't one central place you can go to find all this information. There's no place that really celebrates these types of stories and helps people build these types of businesses. Everything is about how to raise more money from investors out of grows fast. It's possible, et cetera, and that advice is pretty deadly for trying to achieve a different goal. And so I said, Okay, well, what if I built a site that did that? What if I contacted all these people whose stories I read and got them to share their stories and a more useful and streamlined way and created a centralized resource for other people like me. That's all the same problem that I'm trying to solve. So ironically, like my idea for a company was the exact solution to me having the problem of needing to come up with an idea for a company.

I want to ask you a question that gets at just simply why do you think that these stories were not available

anywhere? You know, a lot of theories out there, some conspiracy theories about it.

I have

my own opinions. I think it's a direct result of the incentives of a bunch of different, interconnected parties. If you think about being an investor, a venture capitalist, you make money. When your investments 100 x R 500 X, right, you make money. If you invest in Facebook because they're now with 5000 times what they were, you invested in them, and it doesn't matter that much to you. If you invest in 100 companies and 99 of them fail as long as one of them is Facebook, you get all of her money back and more where the media comes into this is that essentially, if you're writing any sort of tech blogger o R. Entrepreneurship Log, you want stories that are gonna get readers and what gets readers more than household brand recognizable names that are affecting millions of people?

But they're always going to write about the Facebooks in the Googles of the world before they write about the small and the hacker businesses. Oh, basically, the people who control the money and you control the attention are both incentivize. Tell the stories of these much figure businesses and not really focus on kind of the little guy who's building a business that might be impressive. That might be helping millions of people that might be having an impact on their life in the last of their employees and others. But, you know, they're not as big. So why tell that story? Yeah, I think that plays into it as well. I think there's also more of these businesses nowadays, and there were in the past. They're pretty hard to track down, out. Is it easier than ever for one person or a small team of people with no funding to build something significant and impactful that can actually be a successful business, and so there's more demand for these stories as well as where people try to follow this path.

The other thing that jumps out to me, too, about indie hackers, which is probably so obvious you at this point. But striking to me is how talking about revenue is a vulnerable thing, like you have people on your site saying exactly how much they make per month, including You have done that with Indy hackers and everywhere else. You see these numbers that are not revenue but are how much someone has said I am worth, which is in many ways an imaginary number, and you see that so much, and it's something that people can hide behind. But you're taking away that hiding and people are sharing in a very vulnerable way. And I guess I want to dig into How did you know from the very beginning that you needed to talk about the truth of revenue? And was that hard to convince people to do? Or why did you decide To do that like that? Seems like such an important piece.

It is an important piece. It's kind of embedded into the culture of Andy hackers. I'll talk for a second about the first thing you said, which is numbers you see people typically sharing on the tech bloggers and technique uses how much money they've raised, right? I've raised my first series, a around my seed round, et cetera, And that's kind of a proxy for how well the company is doing, because companies like to be guarded about all the actual numbers, revenue numbers, group numbers, et cetera. And, like psychologically, I get it. Being an entre is very difficult.

You don't get a lot of pats on the back, quite frankly, has been a lot of time by yourself working on very hard problems. Not sure you're going to succeed. And ultimately, if, like a group of intelligent, well respected people, decide to give you a big check and make it public, and that is gonna feel great and you don't want to share that with people, and it's kind of, ah, lights a fire under your ass and your team as well, so it's exciting, so I understand why people do it. But at the same time,

it's not really a measure of success rate. It doesn't mean you've created anything useful for anybody yet doesn't mean you've created anything of value. And so revenue numbers are really for people who are trying to figure out how things were going more accurate. And when I notice when I was reading these stories online is the questions people would ask. We're always trying to dig for the truth. People wanted to know how much money are you making If someone should a story about their bowling app that they put online and bullets become better pulling another, making a living from that people want to know what that living looks like. Is it $1000 a month and you living in her parents basement? Is it big enough for you to hire employees because that inspires that? And so I think, as a result of reading, all these stories became pretty clear to me early on from Day one that if I'm gonna do a good job getting people to share these stories, it's nonnegotiable that they share their revenue numbers. It's really hard to put these stories in the context if you don't know exactly how much money someone's making, but that doesn't mean we need Onley interview people who are killing it right? We interview people who are making $500 a month from a side project and,

like that's in my mind, is big successes people. I've interviewed her making $200 million a year. It really depends on your expectations and your goals, and everybody is different. So from the gecko when I started emailing, people are asking, Hey, I'm starting this new website. Would you like to appear? Let me interview? And by the way, you've got to share your revenue numbers. A lot of people said now why would I do that? Passed. But I'd say about 10% of people were like Yeah,

man, I'm right on board with you. This is what I always dreamed of existing. I would love to be sort of a pioneer interview and let's do this. So I launched the site with about 10 interviews after having emailed 150 people asking if they would do interviews because you're sort of an idea of the ratio, people who were OK sharing the revenue numbers. I think today is much higher. It's more common for people to be transparent. People realize that when you're in tightening business that you share your revenue numbers. Generally speaking, there are no consequences. You fired and they like what you're talking about. You're not gonna get robbed on the street. You're not gonna get a competitors stealing your lunch for you. Share your financial information not like your bank account numbers, but like how much money you have saved.

How much money you haven't certain accounts. How much money you are currently making in order to give the appropriate context toe have, like a productive, helpful conversation like, How do you expect people to help you or be able to, like find value in what you're figuring out, unless you provide them like the appropriate context and information to solve that problem? Yeah, that's exactly how I feel. I think the conversations there's just not as productive when there's not that base level of transparency. But it's also like a bunch of ancillary benefits, but I'm sure we'll get into you. But people really like reading stories that have revenue numbers, and if you were a founder working by yourself and things are harder than not going that well, but you read a story about someone who's sort of achieve durable. They put it in very real terms.

You can understand, like a dollar amount or a lifestyle change or things they could do before they can do now that they couldn't do before, like that resonates with you and it gives you sort of the motivation to keep going. Which is the number one reason why people visit auntie actors today because in one motivation they want inspiration. They want to not feel so

alone. So take me back to the launch of the site. How did you let interested people know? Who were those first readers? How did you go about kind of sending a signal out about what you were making?

Yeah, So I do remember the names of many of my. Most of them were strangers. They're people who decided to take a chance on me. And so it's been a lot of time going back and forth with them to get their stories out. Malcolm Ocean was a really good one. Christian was a really good one. Tyler trinkets. There's a lot back in the day. Hey,

guys, Thanks for doing what you did. Changing lives.

Appreciate you. So the story of the early growth was that day one. After I decided that I was gonna do this, I e mailed. Like I said, 100 and 50 people. This took probably two weeks of me just emailing people cause a handcrafted every single email said, Hey, I found your comment on this website or a solid block post here. I thought it was really great when you said this I would love to interview about these particular topics. This is what I'm working on.

Get back to me. Yeah, something that stands out to me about you saying that is that you also spent the time to find 150 people that you thought could be good kindle ing to get this thing started, which is not an insignificant amount of work. Yeah, sorry to interrupt, but that's

impressive. It was, like, really common startup advice called Do Things That Don't Scale. And it's very helpful for founders. You were just trying to get started with something new. You don't have any activation energy. You don't have any clout. You don't have any sort of momentum pushing you along. You're gonna have to make up for that by just working really hard. Not crazy hard. Not for super long, but just the beginning. Parts of your business. And so for me, it was like all right, going from like,

zero people know about the site 200 people know about this site is not that hard. It's not like I have to be clever. I want to be a genius. I want to be a marketing expert. I just have to do like the very basic work of e mailing 100 people about him, which is strange word. It's not fine. Takes a long time, but like you know, anybody can do it. But you don't get so rich man. Exactly. Personality just so underrated. You can't do it forever. You know what he wants to spend, like all day,

every day, sending hundreds of emails? I guess some people D'oh, that's not me. I gotta probably like 20 people agreed to do an interview, but I decided a long to site once I had 10 interviews complete. By that time it had been about three weeks. And another lesson that it was very near and dear to my heart as it started founder was that I don't want to work on anything that's gonna take months. If it takes months, I'm gonna lose motivation. I'm gonna get distracted by something else that's new and shiny. Er so three weeks and by and I was like, Okay, it's time to launch the sight. Luckily, because of my research earlier when I was searching for an idea, I knew exactly what channels to go to find people who would like the interviews about putting together. In fact, I tailored all the interviews to basically appeal to people who lived in those channels.

Can you give us an example of one of this place is And how did that?

So the biggest one by far is called hacker news. Hacker news is sort of a tech community.

Everyone in San Francisco knows it may be no other city like fully recognizes what it is.

It is what it is. And like everybody who's ever thought about moving to SF for tech.

Yeah, yes, very

heavily developer skewed. But it's all sorts of people. Summoning links to topics in your circles that are sort of related to tak are programming or politics, etcetera. And I'm like, pretty reliably once a month, somebody will make a discussion there saying, Hey, what's your small, profitable business? And people reply with another different comments, which is one of the primary sources that I found early on when I was brainstorming ideas. Also one of the places and I went Do you research people to interview? And so I figured, OK, I could submit the story here. People have reliably uploaded these previous discussions that much worse stories in the ones I'm telling my website they're missing all sorts of information that didn't have revenue numbers.

It didn't have the full story, etcetera, so I'll be very surprised they didn't like my stories. So Thursday, August 11th I submitted my website to you hacker niece. I e mailed all the people who had an interview previously and even some of the ones who said, Oh, and I want to do an interview with school and let them know that I submitted it so that they would help up boat. And they did so got to the front page. And from there the community of hacker News sort of authentically took it to the top, stayed at number one for over 24 hours. Oh, that's a long time. Yeah, it was a lot of traffic. A lot of

it's What do you think kept it up there? Because I think sometimes things that get a lot of attention, that's because of some kind of controversy or discussion. People are having what kept it at the

top. I think the controversy that was sort of built into it was like, This is fresh and people who love novelty in a the end of the day. There, out of stories on hacker news about how Dropbox raise their latest round of funding for very few stories about people like them. People like the readers who were just programmers are software engineers are medications. People who aren't software developers figure out a different way to get something online and make money and maybe their side projects. Maybe they're small. Maybe they're modest, But I think it's almost like if you imagine a spring being pressed back, because spring is like how many years people had to go without seeing the stories I wanted and hope to be there and then boom and the hackers came out and suddenly it's like, Yes, this is wanted, basically, just like just that. Yes. Finally,

like I'm rooting pretty interviews, I can't wait to see more. My favorite part was I got 25 people who e mailed me after that and said, Hey, can you interview me? Here's my revenue numbers, etcetera. So my days of cold, emailing people all day, every day or over

That's amazing. I makes me want to transition Thio also how the articles function today. So you have a bunch of things that you do with Indy hackers now, which will touch on a little later. You have a podcast that is beloved. You're using that amazing equipment right now, which is why your voice sounds so good. You have meet ups all around the world. Like I was saying, there's some happening, like in Vienna in, like, two days on your site, like they're very vibrant. And really, you haven't awesome sort of roll index on the site of all the different companies who are involved in the community. So you can see actually who makes this thing up.

But you still do articles, and one twist that you've had is that you very prominently encourage people to write their own or to sort of submit themselves to be interviewed. And I have worked in Tech and also worked in traditional media. And I felt like this was the type of thing that I would argue for going from tech into traditional media. And everyone's like, No, you know, we're so precious about who we interview and like, we get to hand choose them and like, the story is not gonna be good if we're not kind of packaging it up. And so I love that you do that. But at what point did you start? Sort of like switching. How quickly did you switch from you doing this manual outreach? As you were saying Thio. Inviting people who really cared Thio offer to write or offer to be interviewed? And was that an obvious thing? Was there an ah ha moment?

It was immediate. It was okay. So when I launched the site, I put a newsletter subscription form on the home page because I realized that like Okay, people might be excited about this for a day, but then they're gonna leave. I remember back, it's like an email them and say, Hey, there's new interviews on the website and so about a week after I launched, I sent my very first you know, about 1000 people and said, Hey, there's five new interviews I've done in the last week with many of you who saw the site and asked me if I could interview you. They're up. Check him out. I want to be e mailing you every Thursday.

So pretty quickly I was asking people to do more interviews. Even in that newsletter, I would say, Hey, by the way, if you have a story, doesn't matter how much money you make or how little I would love to interview because I didn't want to do all of that manual outreach. I think there is some truth to the fact that you need to package stories a little bit, so I wouldn't just interview people on, published the raw interview like I would edit it, and I would ask him questions, and I would also provide, like suggestions for how they could potentially answer these questions. It wasn't him. It was over Skype or anything I was doing in reserve email. Yeah,

how come I scale this up and do as many interviews as possible at as high a quality level as possible and as little time as possible. So I would ask a question and I would get back responses. Responses aren't quite what I was looking for, the kind of missing this crucial information. But I don't really want to have to send a bunch of back and forth e mails. So I would just change at my question template. Have a little bullet point under that question and saying, Hey, you might want to cover this and this answer or hey, make sure you don't leave out these details And then I would send out the updated Temple it to the next founder and they would do the same thing. You know, they'll be a little bit better, but worse. In some ways, I just kept updating my template and after about, like,

three months of doing this, my temple, it is like eight or nine questions. Each one of them had 10 or so bullet points under it for how to answer. And almost every interview I got back didn't need any follow up questions. They're all like pretty good contained, like really good information. As I was able to interview people much faster and move on to working on different parts of the site.

This is what happens when an engineer becomes an interviewer. Optimize the system, Make the machine good. First,

I was nervous because I was like, Hasn't it the hallmark of a good interview to really dive into the specifics of what's unique about that person's story and asked dynamic questions to make it fun and entertaining? But I think it really depends on your audience and why they're listening. Why are they reading and meet with the website? People were really because they wanted to learn there really curious about how to do these things themselves, and it actually was very helpful for them to have the exact same center questions across every interview goes, and they could compare. They could learn consistently. And so I learned this very early on because I tried to change it up. I tried to get fancy, and I got negative feedback, which is music to my ears, because it's much easier to have ah, sort of standard. I said a question. So I sort of lucked out on that

being the best way. Yeah, that's a really key distinction. I feel like it makes total sense. Once you describe the audience that, in fact, there's probably some desire for pattern recognition and toe look for trends that's consistent across types of people. Instead of me reading some profile in The New Yorker about one really exceptional person or this American life's like weird single person that lives in Ohio that did this crazy thing, you're In fact, people are trying to find things and insights that they can be confident might also apply to their life. Exactly, isn't transfer

It gets back to, like the purpose of your community, as you, you know, outlined in the 1st 2 sentences around like inspiration, motivation, clarity, confidence on how to build a business. And if you were to optimize articles for learning in service of that purpose like this is sort of the output you get. You get something where someone can really look at many of them to do see patterns among like strategies and tactics. It continues the ladder back up to why Andy hackers exists. Yeah, I'm also in the actors is not really having that strong of a voice itself, but rather being a stage for others to sort of project their voices. Many hackers isn't as a website telling you this is how you need to build your business, and this is the only business that matters. It's Saturday,

and the actors is more like a comedy club. You go to you and hear all these different styles and which everyone's make you laugh, make you laugh. Her stories that I interview people with that resident with you are the ones that restaurant, and I think having too heavy of a hand on how they edit the story. Please are doing a lot of content where it's just me, sort of telling you my opinions about what to deal would get boring. We're gonna hold. It wouldn't be a platform in the community that it is today, where almost anybody consider this story.

You just said almost anybody can share their story. I wanted to ask, Do you ever say no to anyone? And how do you decide what gets featured in what doesn't as much as you want to share

publicly? Yeah, we do have some guidelines. I mean, if you have no, you might as well be nothing. Just just anarchy.

Who do you say? Who's not family who do you say no

to? Um, so we're really like a business site. If you're working on something that doesn't generate any revenue, or your goal is not to make any money, then, like any hackers, is not the website for you. So, for example, there's an entire community of people who label themselves as makers have a lot of overlap with the indie hacker community. A lot of any actors are quote unquote makers. The difference is like to be a maker, you just have to enjoy making things. So my being anti hacker, you have to have a goal of actually making money from these things that you create. So we turned down people who just want to share a story about something that they made.

But there's really no business model behind it. No intention for that. We turned down people who are building Businesses that aren't necessarily technology enabled are scaleable. So if you are for example, let's say, designing websites for people and every single time you want to design a new website, you have to find a new client. That's kind of a cool business, but it's not that scaleable. Ultimately, you're sort of trading your time for money, which is great and works really well. But any hackers is really a site fueled by people who are excited to find some sort of freedom. They want to change their lives with their business. They want to get out of it and quit working for the man own business when they could have more freedom to spend their time, How they want,

where they want in the hours and what It's really hard to do that if your training your time for our for money, saying we know about trading our time for money, yeah, you're inspiring. May every job works in the post businesses work. But I think what's really special about the Internet is that you can code something watch. You can put up a website or a podcast episode and at the sky's the limit to how many people can hear it or buy it or be influenced by it. So there's really no need to sort of be constrained by that. It's not necessary. And I think what inspires him with people the most is stories where people have sort of broken free from the yoke of training hours for dollars and figured out a way to scale their efforts. Yeah, I got a question about prioritization when my favorite topics, but, you know, I was just talking Thio, advising someone who has a community of doctors.

Doctors train each other on communication skills. And, you know, we were just discussing about all the things that like he can do as a community leader. And I look at what any hackers is up to with as Bailey's Ari rattled off podcast articles, meet ups. And from what I understand your headquarters team is not. Let's call it the dozens of person operation. How do you think about priorities with regards to like what to invest Maur time and energy in as like, someone who's trying to organize and develop this community? Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned like R H Q size because the actress is just my brother and I were the only two full time on any hackers, and I think like the size of your team, the amount of time you have to spend really like the resource is at your disposal, always play a big role, and now you prioritize what you work.

Quite frankly, if you don't have the resources to do something like you just can't do it. You need to adjust your plan to account for that. And I see a lot of people starting companies or communities don't really account for. That was like, I'm short on manpower. I guess I'm just gonna take twice as long to do this thing. It's like, Now figure out something that's like twice is small so you can get it done on the right amount of time and then use that to stair step your way to the next level, which leads me to priorities. How do you know what to do? First? I'm a big fan of the stair step approach. The climate will approach. The idea is that if I put you in front of this wall, I'm just like,

hey, jump to the top of the wall and it's too tall. You can't do it right. It's too ambitious. It's really hard to give you a set of stairs. Every step you take afford you enough height to make reaching the next step easier. That way, you can basically achieve like really lofty, ambitious goals by taking it one step at a time. That was my plan for Andy hackers. And it's also what I've seen. A lot of people that I've interviewed do you to build really significant businesses, even though they started very small. So for me, the order is very important. Like I knew that I wanted any hackers to be a community when I first started it.

But I didn't start with the community. I started with a block. It's like, OK, the first easiest thing that I could do in three weeks is just interview people and get their stories out there and test my hypothesis that people actually like these stories because if they don't like these stories and the interest is it there, then why should I waste months of my life building a community for trying to start a podcast on burst meet up groups are gonna be fighting an uphill battle that I can't really win. The block is a very easy way to test people's excitement for a particular idea topic. In addition, like I mentioned earlier, like I knew that I needed to consistently reach out to these people if I wanted to build a community because otherwise if they come only one time and don't come back like that sort of community. Yeah, they're not. They keep showing up. Exactly. And so I lost the blogged. I made sure to collect e mails from the blogged.

I continually put out new interviews and use us as an excuse to basically reengage previous subscribers and, like, kind of measured my turn rates and retention rate to see outside of people, really, where I put up some fake landing pages on the Web site to gauge interest in additional features. Yeah, there's nothing on the foreign page. It was just a little email collection thing. That's a put your email in here if you'd like to be part of the indie actress form because I didn't want to build a form of people weren't excited about it, but they were. So I said, Okay, I'll build. It has sat down for like, I think took 10 days to build us like foreign from scratch. And of course,

there's nobody in it. So I started having these conversations with myself make a little conversation. Okay, now, how do you put up the landing page on the Internet, or how do you come with an idea, another bank account, and I would answer my own question and then in my weekly email, where I would send out the interviews. I would also send out a link to these form conversations and say, Hey, everybody, I built this new forum looking these conversations and you guys were having with each other. They're pretty cool. Jump in and every now then somebody would jump in and start engaging with, like,

me, basically not knowing. They're only talking to me. And then I remember the first time I saw two people talking to each other, and that was magic conversation. Yeah, but it started off really small, and I forum now is like 60,000 numbers strong. There's many hundreds of comments every day. It never would have gotten to that point if it didn't start small, and I never would have been able to start small with the Forum. If I wasn't able to get the e mails, I never would have gotten the e mails. I didn't start the Blawg, and so it's kind of a stair staff I've been sort of using to get to another place. I mean, they have I done things in a different order. Who's to say, if I ever would have made any hackers into a significant community?

So you just said You guys have 60,000 people in the Forum? Is that sort of the number of total folks that participate in the Indy hackers community? You're you have more than that. And how do you define what a member is like? Is it someone who creates an account on the website? What does that mean for you?

Yeah, so I use the term member loosely because there's so many different ways that people participate in any hackers and, like, I don't think any one of them is more or less important than the others. But members are easy to track because remember, for us is somebody who actually goes to the website, creates an account, gives us their email address, gets a password and can now make comments up boat comments, et cetera, and make their own posts great. They're in product page. So 60,000 members is a reference to the number of people who've done that very specific set of activities. But they're allowed people who just read the interviews or listen to the podcast There are many thousands of people, listen to the podcast every week like clockwork, and never even go to the website when I would consider them all to be in the actors. But they're not members,

but I still care about that. But I still work on the podcast is I really enjoy doing the podcast. I think it's impactful for a lot of people. Yeah, the Web site and read the interviews and never signed up for an account there. People go to the meet ups. Never come to the website as well, so it's difficult to sort of wrangle everybody into like one category and say they're all members. They're all something. But in the last two and 1/2 years, any hackers has been visited by about two and 1/2 1,000,000 different people, and, you know, some percentage of them have decided to sign up

and create an account. And one of them is named Patrick Collison, who is the founder of Stripe, which is where you now work. So a little while ago, I guess within probably a year and 1/2 or so, I read that you got an email from Patrick and basically he felt like your community was so valuable he wanted to help keep it around. So you now work at stripe, and I wanted to just ask you what's gotten easier being at stripe for you as the person running Indy hackers. And perhaps, why did you decide to go join stripe? And also, if you're willing to share what's gotten harder for you as an organizer, that's now sort of in house at a big company that maybe does trade time for money and a few of the things that you started out kind of saying that what wasn't the lifestyle that you wanted?

Yeah, So Patrick emailed me asking to be open to an acquisition, and I said yes, and we talked about it eventually went through. I think it really is was a kind of a win win win situation for everybody involved because number one, like Striped, gets to ensure this community is thriving and exists for many years to come. But also like a lines very well with stripes Mission as a company because Stripe wants to increase the GDP of the Internet, and the actress is a site that was created to help people like me want to start more companies. More people are starting companies like That's both of our goals and one just really important thing for any sort of merger, partnership or acquisition aren't even just like people working together. You have to have the same values and same goals. Otherwise, there's gonna be situations that are difficult to navigate because you just are aiming at a different target. For any hackers users. It was really good because by the time straight bought and the actors, I was fitting probably half a week every week talking to sponsors and advertisers to keep the side afloat on one hand,

kind of fun. It was a cool challenge. I feel like one of the people in the community, because I was very transparent about my revenue numbers as well when I was doing. But on the other hand, it was finding sponsors doesn't make your website better. You know, that was like, I just can't wait for that new sponsor to show up on the home page. People want a different features. It wanted more interviews, and so by joining Stripe, I was able to stop spending time on all that stuff and just focus on hundreds of my time on making and the actors better. It was the one for me, too, because again,

like I now have a guaranteed job. I actually get paid to do what I love, and I don't have to worry about paying the Bills every month. So it was definitely win win win situation. What's harder? What's easier? Virtually everything is easier. There's an entire pillar of stress that business owners have to face, which is like, How am I gonna pay the bills? And I just don't have to face that anymore. Yeah, that is such a relief it so it's like a cheat code.

Well, I'll prod you on some of the hardest stuff because I was a part of an acquisition. So I worked at Instagram when we were like 13 people and then a few months later, sitting at basically like a 10 year old company. The amount of data that we had Thio measure our community or community work was very different from what was expected at a much larger company. And just we grew up so fast basically, and I wonder, you're probably a very data driven person, a logical thinker, an engineer at heart. So perhaps, you know, you are already running your community in some ways in a quite analytical way. But do you feel like there's anything hard there of being a part of a company that is large and has quite significant revenue goals, I'm sure, and pressures does that show up in your life at all? And are you willing thio talk about that on the microphone?

There's one thing I was gonna say that was hard and you kind of touched on it. I don't feel like there's any sort of bureaucracy. Its stripe are any sort of, I don't know, like top down pressure that makes my job harder, more difficult or more knowing that it needs to be there very smart, totally handle the acquisition of the subsequent sort of operations. The very hands off you guys can see him in my apartment. I don't have anybody asked me what I'm working on every day or telling me what I need to do. I just sort of, you know, things that I think your best and people have tried trust that that's the best. And so that is pretty good. But I do think that because stripe is such a large, successful company and because, like for any hackers, to really have an impact on what stripers doing,

which I really want to be the case because I wanted to be a good acquisition for both parties, there is a lot of pressure I put on myself to basically grow and make any actors and more significant thing. And it's a type of pressure that I didn't feel when I was by myself. If he was a way in which of your business owner, like maybe you can fail your customers, you could definitely fail yourself. But you don't have a boss, you don't have investors. You don't have anyone else who's sort of a peer who's like you're failing. It's only yourself. And that, for me, is very comfortable having like another organization. Are another person who's like very much tied to see me succeed, and I'd like a level that's like extremely high. I think it really lights a fire under my butt and gets me working like much harder than it would otherwise,

and also it was like a stressor in the little ways because you don't want to let people down and you don't wantto fail to hit goals or not achieve what you think you're capable of achieving. And so I think there's a way in which that's definitely been, ah, harder thing. And so it's a trade off. I still think that overall, it's much better because, like worrying about paying the bills is much more stressful. Time. I got acquired. It's like five and have $6000 a month in revenue, which is enough to pay my bills. But I had just gotten there on every month before that had been lower, so it's definitely a worthy trade off. I got a question. Serve on behalf of a lot of the people starting like independent communities,

which he talked to you like. Some of them get to a point where smells beyond that, like one meet up that they have in their city and sort of like you. You mentioned that like when you launch, you could tell that people were sort of begging for this. It's like a bunch of water rushed in to fill the space. That's a quote from one of the sort of community organizers we interview in our book But they reached this point where they, like, start toe have that thought of, like, turning their community into a business or building a business with their community. On top of the community, though, they started the community from a different place that they just wanted to be around other people. And now, looking back at that original sort of like inspiration where he said,

Hey, this is the business I'm gonna build Indy hackers What's your opinion? Unlike in some ways like the business model that you were operating off of before the Stripe acquisition and now any words of advice to folks who are, you know, running a community that really has, like steam really has people. Commune members are interested in it, but they haven't figured out a business model yet. And, like want to maybe make this their full time thing and turn it into a business? Yeah, this is a deep topic. I think there are almost no it'll wrong answers, except for answers that are internally inconsistent with other decisions that So, for example, if your goal is to have a community that's his biggest possible,

you want everybody to be able to join you don't wanna be exclusive at all, then it's probably gonna be hard for you to charge membership piece. I'm not saying it's impossible, but like that's almost always gonna be a barrier that prevents some people from joining our checking out what you're up to. Which means if you go that route, need to basically generate revenue from some third party, which has its own set of consequences that you need to be aware of. In my case, that's the route that I went. I wanted any actress Mia's biggest possible. I didn't want anybody to have to pay for access to these interviews. I don't want to be like some sort of school, you know, that was like, sort of like a notice. You pay tuition,

you could get an otherwise you're left out in the dust. I want people in Third World countries to be able to get benefit from Andy actresses content. So for me, I never even considered charging the audience, which meant I had to go to third parties and luckily, people who come to Andy hackers are entrepreneurs, their engineers, the very intelligent, very driven. They spend a lot of money. It's not hard to find sponsors. You want to get in front of an audience like that. But even then there's like ups and downs of taking that approach. Back then, my sponsors were of the more generic kind. I would read a podcast at from somebody about their business.

I would put their banner on the home page or Lincoln, my email newsletter, and this is kind of sort of useful, because often they would sell Service's entrepreneur wanted. But quite frankly, it didn't a lion as well as I would like it to have a line. I think Lyman is very important. I talked about it with acquisitions. I think it's important with your business model is, Well, you want to do something that basically makes money in a way that provides more value to your actual audience, not less. Yeah, I think his sponsors didn't make people like the necklace podcast more. If I could do it all over again, my sponsors would have been more aligned with what people actually wanted,

which is they wanted to know the stories of how people started successful companies, so I probably would have blocked anybody from being a sponsor unless they were a sponsor in one way and one way only, which was Hey, come on and hear the story behind your company and how you started it and what made it great. So we're gonna read about it, which I think I'm also would have made things more better for the sponsors because then people would be engaging with their messages more. They actually would have probably click through more about whatever the sponsor was selling, et cetera. So I think there's a lot there. I've seen a lot of companies that have, like, similar models where you know, they have basically two different audiences. They're targeting like their sponsors and like their actual audience. And when they align those two things, they've had really outsized good results and everybody's spoken about it,

and they were sort of in the place that I was. I was frustrated. Doing the Signet wasn't making my community better. Well, yeah, I think about this trade us forever, like if you go the other out in charge of community their trade offs there as well. And I think there's no one right way, but usually to be internally consistent. Need to make sure you know that, like whatever you're doing is gonna have trade off. So you have to respect

those trade offs. Courtland. One of things that is like immediate to anyone who talks to you, is you have a wonderful mind. You're like a combination of a deep thinker and like a thorough, wide, comprehensive scanner of a topic of an issue of a concept. And so I was wondering what is something that is challenging for you right now? What is the question you're sitting with, like, what is something that you feel like? You have your circling? You haven't quite figured out within the hackers. And with the community

like could be blushing, I would be Right now there's a lot of stuff going out. I get lucky a lot. I get unlucky a lot. I've tried so many things, then the actors that I thought would work on Lee to be blindsided by all sorts of stuff that backfired. So let's tie fool anyone into thinking that I'm more competent than I am I making. You told me right now, my main focus as it has been since I joined stripers howto I grow indie actress while also keeping it equally as impactful, and it's very difficult because there are a lot of communities around business. There are a lot of very large impactful communities around business, like there aren't too many examples to really learn from, especially that are, like online and doing kind of the same things that the actress is doing. So I'm gonna have to chart my own course, which means a lot of experimentation, a lot of trial and error,

which could be frustratingly slow. Sometimes because of the errors. You spent three months working on something, and it doesn't have the effect that she wanted it to you. You have spent another couple months backtracking and try something else like That's a lot of time that's gone by. More specifically, some of the things I'm trying right now. We just added a new milestones feature to the website. I really love it when people in the community actually demonstrate the results of what they're working on when they show off like Hey, here's a good thing that I did and not having to sit in isolation and just sit with it are talking my co founder about it. I want to share with the community, and those are the kinds of discussions and almost always get the most up boats. Most questions and comments. Somebody says, Hey, I just hit $10,000 a month and revenue Here's how I did it. Everybody has questions about how they did it. Everybody says Kudos and congratulations. And so

it's almost like a mini interview, too. It's like an opportunity for someone to offer, like I've progressed. I don't need to talk about this at length, but signal if you need to talk to me, I have figured this out. That's cool.

And so we just started that a couple weeks ago, and it'll be interesting to see if it'll grow if it'll be sticky. And people will continually post these milestones about their businesses. And also like what we could do if we had just a huge depository of many thousands and thousands of little posts about how people hit these different milestones. 100 people have posted about how they got an article in The New York Times that we could publish the definitive guide to how the hackers get times, et cetera, and like a 1,000,000 other problems of people commonly, right, Auntie so I'm really excited about that. But the jury's out as to whether my little work there's a lot of different little steps. It has to hit a lot of hypotheses. I have to prove it to make sure that's gonna work and have kind of growing power that it needs to. And what's difficult is that there's so many things I can do that people love and they thoroughly enjoy it. But the bar is higher than that. Me right now it's It's no longer me trying to email 100 people and get them using it. It's like, How do I go from 100,000 people to 200,000 people?

If only 3000 will like something? Is that really enough? It feels like it was 3000 evils, a ton of people. But in terms of like the percentage chance like result differences I need, it's not as much. So that's one challenge. All sorts of challenges like that I could go into you. Another one is more personal, which is just to see I've been trying to find more work life balance or worklife integration, as they say, and that's been interesting because I'm sort of like immigration.

Yeah, that's a new That's a new version of that phrase.

I want a couple with my own phrase. Yeah, I like worklife integration. I was kind of a hater for a while. It's just a different way to say the same thing. But now I've been thinking about it. I think it's actually a fundamentally different thing, and I think really embracing it has a pretty good impact on both my work and my personal. Yeah, because Ugo maybe find it a community, perhaps, but well, I think I think, isn't around. Building a balance balance sort of implies that, like your work in your life are two completely separate things and you need to literally balance them and that, like you can't really enjoy your work on your life,

is not productive there, whereas with me, like I'm running a community that, like I created myself well before it was a job. I did it because I loved it and it solve my own problem. I like it. I'm really talking to people who are my people every day of the same interests that ideo I can talk to almost anybody. There's an anti hacker for hours, about nothing, And I often do. I get to fly around the world and got all these different meet ups. I mean, we had 55 meet ups last month all

over the world. How? Wow, you're at all of them. Integration looks like it's

telephoning around the world. So it's like, I don't know, free trips to cool places where I meet people doing the things that I enjoy doing. I get to code all the time. I love programming on my own website. It's significant as an impact on people's lives, and it's a sin impact on my life, like actually love my job. And so does it make any sense for me to, like, try to force myself to find some sort of weird, random hobby to shoehorn into my life? So I have some external life things like, Why don't I actually just, like, enjoy the conversations?

But I haven't worked. Why don't I do a lot of things that are sort of work related? But I'm not even doing them because they're the most efficient thing to do for work. I'm doing them because I generally enjoy them. I've been lucky enough to have a job, But let's be devious things that I enjoy. And so, for me, that's what worklife integration is about. What parts of my worker actually just a good way to live life in general. Maybe the answer is, you know, the indie hackers, like rock climbing, meet up or

other alternative activities for

the one rule is you can't talk about, you know, don't scale like outdoor and the hacker meet ups. I've been on any hacker hikes.

Oh, nice. I love that.

Wouldn't be the Indian camping.

So final question for you Corland. One of the fun things about working with people is that sometimes some of them absolutely blow your mind or become significant parts of your life. Or you hear amazing stories about what you've affected someone or someones business. Does anyone jump to mind when you think about the last three years of indie hackers that it just really means a lot to personally? They have any hackers as a community has affected them or their businesses.

Thing is a little bit cheating, but she's a good friend of mine. We've been good friends for 12 years, but her name's Len Ty. She has what's pretty quickly approaching, like the most popular episode in my pockets that I recorded and what's cool about it is she was there with me was like From Day one, when I started in the hackers, I was like taxing her ideas for the name like her and my brother and my mom. She was there when I was negotiating the Stripe acquisition, and her husband is also like we work out of her husband's office of the three of us work together, and he's also what kind of business at some point you just got so excited about, like everybody working on these businesses around her, and she never wanted to do started before. But she didn't want to raise money and have a ton of employees not to pitch investors. But she's like, Oh, this is cool,

New way to do and I think I could do and I'm passionate about something. So she started a company, and this was 2017 and March that she started. And then two years later she was at a point when she came on the indie actress podcast and her company of one person was making something like $400,000 a year. And she was doing what she loved Working our own hours worked 20 hours a week because she likes to travel and Wow. And I feel like being an anti hacker really changed her life for the better. And it was really cool to say that I was a part of that. I think, you know, sometimes you see numbers. We asked our community how many of you would not have started a company if not for any hackers and something like 14% of community members like I would definitely not have done this at all.

But I'm paying. That's an amazing stat

It is. And if you multiply it times the number of community members like that's many thousands of projects and businesses that just would not exist and like that number is cool intellectually. But emotionally, I don't really feel it. That's a number that's like zeros, but to actually have like a person close to me and see, like how her life has changed because she started something and it worked out has definitely been impactful to me.

I love that's a great story. Brad Cortland, Thank you so much for your time, as always, really enjoyed talking to you and hope we get to see you in person soon.

I hope so, too. Thanks so much for having me pleasure as always.

If you want to get involved with Indy hackers, whether it's sharing your own story, joining a meet up in your area or tuning into their dope podcasts, it is really good. Just go to Courtland. Beautiful Website. Indy hackers dot com No Space Indy hackers dot com They also have a rat Instagram account with a spotlight. Members of the community Indy hackers who are out there making good work in the world. You can check that out at Indy, underscore hackers at Indy, underscore hackers or follow the brilliant Korla now and on Twitter at CS Alan A l l

e N Bailey, have you ever thought about starting? I mean, we run a company, but have you thought about if you had to start a small business that sold a thing that was sort of scalable? What

that might be? Oh, I'm an American. So I think we all dream about our capitalist. Oh, yeah. Are capitalists like you know what? You think this was shark tank right? Now. Get together. Shark Tank. Yeah, I'm your host. Yeah, well, it's gonna be one of those. Like this ex that would do isn't so.

Espresso bar X podcast. Recording studio? Yes. So you can come in, bustle up against other people. Take your shot of a podcast. And just down the hall, there's someone in a bubble. Some cool person in New York City is recording a podcast. And as you're taking your espresso, it's played over the speakers. So, like, people can come in and kind of like Performative Lee record their podcast folks that are just cruising in and out on their espresso. That's my really weird idea. A number of reasons for both of those sides of the ex.

Yeah, it doesn't make sense. He already think it. That's that's wonderful. Okay,

what about you? What about me? Oh, you know, probably something casual. Like a new breed of scratch and sniff sticker that smells like delicious food items from your home growing up like you can

send a dish for me.

Oh, you know, Mom would make fun, like, grown up. It's old. I would tell them what food I really loved growing up, and I'll get this custom sticker and then the sticker. It never stops smelling. You can just re scratch it over and over

again. You go deep into some research on scratch into technology. No, Sounds great, you know. All right. I like that.

Anyways, you want to find out more about us, go to our website people and dot company, not

a dot com, but a company, that company

we're writing a book. We mentioned that earlier. It's a concise synthesis of what we've learned from conversations like this from Courtland about everyday people starting extraordinary communities. You can sign up to get notified about that on our Web site is gonna come out on August 20th. Pre order is going to start earlier than that. Go to people and got company. Sign up for that pre order that or, you know, just write a review for that on Amazon, and yeah, I'll be forever grateful. If you want to say hi to us,

you can send me an email anytime high at people and dot company. Oh, and one more thing. Only one more thing. Well, I think so. Yeah. If you like this podcast We'd love it if you would review us. Just like, you know, tap the star ratings or click. Subscribe because it helps more people find it in search.

Yes. Reviews school you'd reviews cool.