Hello and welcome to the stuff Engineering. Unlock Podcast Annuals, Dr McKellar. And today, after pleasure to talk to Cortland. Ellen Portland is the founder and driving force behind the indie hacker community. Indy Hackers is a community off bootstrapped entrepreneurs and makers. I'm hugely inspired by Courtland and many of the hackers that I have met online through his dreadful Cortland is also the host of the vital successful podcast in the hackers. So I'm super excited that corporate transfer today. Portland. Welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be on the show.

I'm also super excited. Cortland. I believe you've found it in the hackers around 16 4017 after you graduated from M i t. Is that right?

So, yeah, I was in 2016 July 5016 and technically, it's after I graduated, but a long time after I graduate because I graduated in 2009. And so I spent ah pretty long stint in my twenties, starting different startups and different projects with varying degrees of success. Before I eventually settled down and started. And the hackers

Oh, you look like 25,000

flattering thing anyone said about me.

Yeah. So? Well, so why do you think that in the hacker was different from the other startups that you try to, you know, get off the ground? Why did this one succeed?

Yeah, there's a lot I could say about that. I think Andy hackers out of all the different things that I've worked on, is the one where I put by far the most deliberate thought and planning and strategizing and two whether the ideas, the whole could work before I sat down and actually started creating it. And they think that's a direct result of having had those earlier failures and understanding who I am. You know what my strengths are? My weaknesses are why I failed in the past. Why succeeded in the past and really putting all of that toe work and to one idea and so probably the first realization that I think went into building and the actors and figuring out what it would be is just a difference and what I conceptualized to be a business idea. So if you had found me around 2009 when I graduated college and you asked me You know what my business idea was that I was working on at the time? I probably describe to you a product idea would have told you what I was building and how it works and what the features are, How many code it all like a product side of things. But I wouldn't be able to say very much about the other part of a business idea, which is like, How you gonna get it in customers hands. And how are you going to basically distributed and who are the target customers and how much you're gonna charge for and all those other parts of the business that are absolutely crucial? I wouldn't describe the product whereas with any hackers,

before I decided to write a single line of code before I decided to do anything I was very plugged into. You know, exactly how is this going to work? Um, in all aspects of it, not just the product. And I think putting that kind of thought into every aspect of the business helped me build something that wasn't going to run into some of the earlier problems that experienced where I wasn't able to find customers or it wasn't able to grow where I wasn't able to do all the other crucial things that help make a business succeed.

So two things that I mentioned in the introduction where I said the indie hacker community and I said the indie hack a podcast. So those are two very distinct things. I think somehow they're, you know, to gather black together. But somehow they're also very distinct Watts that your vision at the beginning was it? What's the idea to build a community? And if it waas, How have your ambitions to build that business? And what was your plan to monetize that community?

Yeah, so it definitely was not my plan. The beginning to have a podcast. That's something that, um, that I'm creating by popular demand. I have no interest in making a podcast in the beginning, but I didn't want to build a community, even though the very first version of Andy Accurate wasn't a community and didn't look anything like one, Um and so I had sort of, ah, playbook. When I started off with any actors, I kind of had three or four different phases that I knew I wanted any actors to go through to get to where I ultimately wanted it to be. So Phase one would be. It's basically a blogged to collection of information and resource is specifically these interviews I was doing on the website where people like me who wanted to be in the actors who wanted to earned some sort of financial or creative freedom by building their own revenue generating side projects where they could go and find a lot of information from others like them who were doing the same thing. And then I figured once people were reading those interviews and if they really like them,

they would subscribe to my newsletter, and I would send out my newsletter every week and sort of energized the community, tell people what's new, published new interviews and advertise those get people coming back to the site so the traffic wouldn't just die drop off like so many other things that I'd built in the past. The day after launch, on one side, people coming back to the newsletter, then I would actually build a community. So I built a community forum where other indie hackers could actually talk and contribute to the site instead of his reading interviews and help each other through all the sorts of problems and just like psychological issues and challenges and loneliness and that kind of stuff of being a founder of being an anti actor. So I had this kind of three step process, and I knew that each step would sort of make first step or the next step easier to get to you if I had interviews would be easier to build a mailing list, never had a mailing list. It would be easier to build a community because I got advertised community to the mailing list, etcetera, etcetera. So that was kind of a three step plan.

Uh, at some point there was a four step that got incident in there, which is a lot of people wanted there to be a podcast. A lot of people said they don't have time to read the interviews on the website, and so I begrudgingly about six months after I started and the hackers started recording episodes for a podcast. And in many ways, the podcast has become driving force of any hackers. It's justice, popular, if not more popular, than the online community and the website.

Yeah, I think the carcass is also what got me into that community. I started with listening to your podcast and you got me really excited for everything else and so actually took it to another person to tell me that besides that podcast, there's a you know, for over people. So I was like, Really? And so I went to the website and Oh, yeah, Actually, you know, there isn't only the podcast. There's also the whole community, which I really laughed.

I need to talk about this. Maybe in the introduction to each pockets episode like, Hey, if you're listening to this, there's a website

because it's much more interactive, right? I mean, I love the podcast. But then when I realized that when I really start something now I have a question. And with the Parkers, you cannot really ask the question, right? You can go and find episodes that maybe, you know, tackle some of the problems that you're facing. But now, with the community can actually ask the question people are responding, which I really loved exactly. So, yeah, so you have this three phase plan and how much time do you allocate for each off the faces.

How much? What do you think? What did you thought back then? That it will take for each of the faces, too, you know, start off well and go into the next

face. So even before the three phase plan, I had like a baby when we fell off a zero where it was like I wasn't even sure what I was going to work on. And so I knew from my previous experience is kind of the time constraints that I wanted. Um, so specifically, when I was sort of going to this process, I had quit my job and I was living off my savings at about a year of savings living in San Francisco. If I had moved to a cheaper city, maybe it would've been three years. Um, but I had basically wasted six months of this, just like working on ideas, impulsively, not really taking the time to send that synthesize all the knowledge that I had learned from my previous mistakes and companies and just doing whatever felt right. After wasting six months doing that, I sat down.

I was like, Okay, let me bring to bear all of my knowledge and sit down and actually create a business idea from scratch that I'm pretty sure is going to work. And we'll avoid a lot of these issues. And that took about three days or three days of just like nothing but brainstorming about reading, um, other stories from other founders and seeing a work from them and trying to incorporate their learnings of my learnings and to a business idea of my own. And that's how he came up with the idea for any actors. At which point, um, you only had, you know, still six months left in my bank account. So I knew that whatever was going to work on needed to be something I could launch in just a couple of weeks that I could start generating revenue from within a couple of months. And I could ideally get me to the point of profitability so I wouldn't have to go get a job, uh,

in six months or less. So what ended up happening is between the time that I came up with the idea for Andy hackers in the time that I actually launched, it was exactly three weeks between the time that I launched any hackers, and I got my first paying customer who actually ended up being a sponsor who advertised on the Web site was another three weeks and the time between then, Ah and me basically having enough people on the mailing list I felt comfortable to build a community forum was about a month. And then between the time that I built the community Forum and that started growing and the mailing list was growing and the website was growing and had enough traffic to really get a lot of sponsorship, revenue was another five months, and so does sort of put this on perspective. I launched any hackers on August 11th 2016. I was profitable and around February or March of the following year, where I was making enough money where I could pay my rent to pay my bills. And I knew that I could keep doing in the actor's indefinitely if I wanted to you because I wasn't gonna starve to death.

That's really fast. I mean, from my perspective, it's really first. It's something I mean, you can see already people wanting thio sponsor something that you are making within a few. Biggs, I think This is a very successful What do you think? Why? Why was that like that? I see several other communities. I mean, there are some other really successful communities, like the practical deaf. And but some of them are struggling and that I think they're mostly struggled with finding the right business model. So they struggle also to keep the people engaged on their backsides. Why do you think that happens? And what do you advise for somebody that wants to build a community?

Yeah. So I think, um, I've learned so much by just running in the hackers, and I was kind of a plan to get to talk to somebody. Founders read so many stories of some of the interviews that I will become a better founder myself. And having done that, I've really ended up believing heavily that almost all of this stuff you can kind of figure out beforehand you could examine the fundamentals of your business. What the different levers are that you can pool, why things will work. Why things won't work before you write a single line of code before you take any actions whatsoever. And I think it's worth doing that. Ah, and I think the reasons why Andy Hackers was able to sort of succeed so quickly weren't an accident. So very specifically, I think there's a few principles that come into play here. Number one.

If you're going to start a business and you want to generate revenue, you're much more likely to generate meaningful revenue quickly. If you're charging for something that has a lot of value to your customers and by value, what I mean is through willing to literally pay you a lot of money per customer. And so on the extreme end of the spectrum, you might have someone who's building something, and they're charging one or $2 a month, you know, or $15 a year, $5 a month, something super small where, in order to make that work, any thousands of customers, you're gonna charge $5 a month. Your product. You need 2000 people to pay you if you want to reach $10,000 a month,

which is kind of like the point of profitability for most developers starting companies. Um, let's say you're doing the opposite end of the spectrum. Let's say you're charging customers like ah $1000 a month or something, you know, significantly higher than $5 a month. Well, you only really need 10 customers. If you're charging that much, and it's way easier to find 10 customers, it is to find 2000 customers. And so I thought about this a lot when I was starting in the hackers and thinking about my business model and thinking about what works for other people. You know, if I only have six months of runway in my bank account, I can't afford to build something, or I can only charge $5 a month.

And with sponsorships and ad revenue, companies are used to paying many hundreds or thousands of dollars for these deals. When they're advertising on your website, they can see very directly how advertising is going to help them grow and sell their own products and services. And so they're willing to shell out that kind of money. And in fact, ah, lot of the people who ended up advertising on and the actors had giant advertising budgets, and I would email like their heads of marketing and people in the marketing department who's literally entire job it was to spend there advertising budget, and I think it's trips. A lot of people up. They think, Oh, you know, you're you're an anomaly if you could build a company that grows your revenue super fast, but I don't think that's necessarily the case.

I think it's just a choice. If you choose to do something where basically your revenues going to grow because of sales because of you reaching out and talking to people one on one and they're gonna pay you a high amount per user, then you're gonna grow your company pretty quickly. And if you choose to do something when you're charging very little and you're relying on marketing and not doing sales, and it's gonna take you a very long time to grow your revenue. And I think one of the things that goes into that is that it's very easy as a fledgling Andy hacker to believe that because you're new and because you're small, you're just one person or two people. You can't build something that you can charge a lot of money for. You think, Oh, you know, in order to charge a lot of money, you have to put in a lot of work and build something really substantial. But that's not actually how it works. It's little bit counterintuitive, but generally people pay a lot of money,

not because you put a lot of work into your product, but because you're solving a valuable problem. And so you could put, like, 10 years of work and to making the world's best pencil. And it could be like the best design Pencil looked the best field, the best have the best lad and all this stuff. But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how much work you put into that pencil. People really gonna pay you like you know, 5 $10 for a pencil cause it's a pencil. It's just not that valuable of a problem. Whereas you could put, I don't know, a month of work and to building a platform to help companies hire engineers. And that's a valuable problem.

And even though you haven't put that much work into it, maybe just a month, maybe two companies will pay you thousands of dollars for that that solution, because ultimately you're solving a more valuable problem. So again, I think it just comes down to a kind of a choice as to what you're building. Um, and that affects how quickly you're able to grow your revenue. Uh, as for the second party, very question, you know, why do some communities struggle while some communities takeoff? You mentioned Dev. Uh, they're one of my inspirations.

They built one of the most successful communities and one of the shortest period of time that I've ever seen online. And it's interesting how few people know about dad dot to you, but it's a really impressive community. Yeah, it's very impressive, but there's lots of other companies and lots of other communities that just struggle to get off the ground. And I think there are sort of a few tricks to building a successful community. First, I think you need to start with your marketing. You don't want to start with the community because the community is kind of one of these chicken and had problems where the whole value of a community is the people inside of it. You only go to a community because you think that's gonna be other people in the community who could help you out or talk to you or provide some sort of value to you. And so it's really hard to just start with nothing, because there's nobody in the community up front. So with any hackers, I started off by doing interviews and providing, like,

helpful content for people to read and that formed the cornerstone of the community. I have many thousands of people coming to the website before, I ever tried to build some sort of community where people were talking to each other and they made it way easier for me to get the community off the ground. Dev is another example, Um, been helping the founder of Debs spent years just growing a Twitter account, literally years is like tweeting funny jokes and helpful stuff for developers and a really huge community around this Twitter account. And so when he launched his online community, his website, he was able to advertise it through his Twitter account the same way I was ever in advertising in the Hacker's Forum through the mailing list. Um, the second thing I would say for building a community is that you need Thio, even if you have a big audience, need to start seating in with discussions. So with any hackers, I literally just made a bunch of fake accounts and I was behind each bank account.

Having these conversations with myself that I would send these conversations out to the community that I built through my newsletter are the audience I built in my newsletter. And I think Ben Halpern did someone of things. He mixes his friends and had them make the first post on Dev. And it wasn't, you know, an organically growing on community. At that point, he was sort of doing things that don't scale and brute forcing his community toe life so it would give the appearance of something that was living should get those first few users in the door. So I think you need to do some sort of push, some sort of kick starting the very beginning on. Then finally, I would say you need your community to be How do I say this? It's like there's certain dynamics that any group of people needs, like people aren't gonna form a community around. I don't know conversations about pizza, because how often do people really want to talk about pizza?

Give a few things to say about pizza? Then that's it. You said everything that needs to be said about pizza and you move on, um, where certain topics you could talk about forever. So Ben Halperin's community Dev. That's all about software engineering. You could talk about software engineering forever. It's the perfect topic for a community because so many people are learning and trying to learn from each other. And there's so many issues and topics and frameworks. There's just no end of the conversations. You can have their same with being a founder. For then, the actor is like trying to go off on your own to become financially independent. There's a 1,000,000 topics and some topics that people could discuss. They're never gonna get tired of discussing it,

and so is the perfect sort of topic to build a community around. So I think you need to choose wisely what your community is built around on some other things, too, about you know, the timing that community gets together and the space community takes up. So the analogy I like to use is it. If you have a party, let's say you throw a party and it's in a really small room that you only need 10 people for that party to feel like a success. But if the party's inside a football stadium, you need 40,000 people for that party to seem like a success. And so if you really want those successful party, you need to make sure that like the space that your party takes place and is constrained to the number of people you can invite, same with a community. A lot of people try to start. Ah, huge online four armor.

They just give the community way too much time and space to exist. But if they constrained it, they said, Hey, our community is really just one discussion thread and it happens every Sunday at three PM than even with 10 or 15 people. That community can feel like it's thriving because you've set these constraints and then later on in your community grows. You expand it. You add groups. You had more time for the community to be alive and participate. Right now, we're in the process of expanding Andy hackers or adding groups. We're adding a lot more surface area, but if we have started that way, if we tried to start big small, it would have been empty and would have felt empty even if we had 100 users or 200 users or something, which we didn't.

So I think I could talk about this for hours. How do you start a success? Okay, but there's a lot that goes into. And I think if you do your research and you really plan around some of these these things, you can start a successful community on an almost foolproof way. And if you, you know, sort of struggle with that and there's probably something that you're missing is some some crucial aspect that you just haven't really thought through.

Mmm Mmm, mmm. Mmm. So you mentioned a T beginning off that you mentioned. Actually, how you monetize to your community by advertisements and by sponsors and things like that. I know that right now. At least that's my impression. The main sponsor off in the hacker is striped, but I'm not really sure what the relationship there is it also on your profile. It's as you are the chief and the hacker at stripe or something like that. So it seems like you are actually an employee off stripe, or how does that work? And, you know, how does that influence your your your business and your business side. And is that the main monetization behind in the hackers right now?

So I am an employee of stripe because in April of 2017 about nine months after I launched anti hackers, stripe acquired it. So any hackers is no longer a standalone business, and it hasn't been for the last two and half years. It's actually just one product of many at stripe. Um, sort of tell the story behind that. Like my first sort of modernization efforts were just legitimate sponsors advertisers. So I would email people, uh, like I mentioned earlier, the heads of marketing at different companies, who I thought would materially gain from getting their product or their service in front of the anti hackers audience. So I would just have a lot of cold emails like, Hey, this is Cortland on the founder of a community quantity hackers, you know,

they're 40,000 developers who visit this website every week and talk about these issues, and I think they would love it if you could share your story of your product with them on the podcast or the newsletter, et cetera. So I did that for a few months of sort of building up my revenue and always at the top of my list. Like the number one company who I thought there was alignment with who I thought Andy hackers really love what they were selling and who might, you know, benefit from selling that the hackers with stripe. Uh and so I saved him for last because I wanted to perfect my sales skills, and I wanted to streamline the entire process before he reached out to the ideally, my number one partner in sponsor. But before that ever actually happened, I got an email from Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe in March of 2017 saying, Hey, I really been admiring what you're doing at any hackers. Would you ever be open to you stripe acquiring it and you know,

it's so like, Let's get brunch and talk about like what that might look like. And so I said Yes, and we did end up meeting and talking about it, and about a month later, we ended up signing a deal. So and the actors is no longer a standalone business. I immediately canceled all my partnership deals with other sponsors and advertisers. There's no ads on the podcast, for example, or the website anymore, and the actors is 100% owned, it stripe owned by stripe, and we're sort of run as almost not quite autonomous. We're like pretty independent team at strike. So I report to the CEO on We check in every few months,

and he sort of gives me some ideas and ask me what I'm up to. They sort of support, and the actors financially pay my salary, give us a budget to work with and the hopes and Andy hackers can grow and inspire more people to start companies and, you know, stripes, doing its job right and building a really great product than a lot of those people who start cos a lot of the hackers will end up using stripe. And so that's kind of our relationship. And I think it's really a win win win for everybody involved because, as in any actors user, you no longer have to listen to ads. You know, I don't have to read ads and you know that I'm spending hundreds of my time making the website better and more impactful. rather than trying to You basically sell you ads?

Yeah, that's wonderful that it's, ah, probably a nave question. But if you sell the company right or it's acquired, would you still hold parts of the company or you? You know, it's 100% with striped out.

I think, honestly, what I learned going to this acquisition process is an acquisition could look like pretty much anything. There are a 1,000,000 variables that you can tweak. There isn't just one way to get acquired, but typically, if you sell your company, um, the acquirer now owns all of it. And what you get in return for that, like you get some lump sum payment. Do you get payments over time in this human's, conditioned on hitting certain milestones? Do you get equity? Do you get cash? What your role will you report to you? How much do you have to work?

What your budget, et cetera. Those were all open questions that could be negotiated. But at this point in time, like strike Bones and the actors, it's now no longer his own independent business unit. And I am just as much an employee of stripes as any other employee it straight.

Okay, so, yeah, it's very interesting, I think. And do you right now, for example, you told me also, Dad, you have several employees, right? So there's folks out Baro see Sherry, That's really, you know, becoming now the hard off the community would say as well on there are other really fundamental people involved. Your brother is working at any hackers. So are they also employees off stripe Or how does

that work? Yeah, So our team, it's tripe consists of two people full time. That's me and my brother Channing, who joined a sort of a late cofounder for Andy hackers. So a couple weeks before Patrick reached out and asked if strike could buy any hackers actually email my brother, who's also a software engineer, and said, Hey, this any hacker thing is really working out. You want to help me a little bit on the side of your job, and he said Yes. And then when we joined Stripe, I asked is sort of one of my conditions were joining, you know, can we hire my brother to work alongside me?

So I'm not just working by myself, and Stripes said yes. So we are the only two full time employees at Stripe who are part of the team in the hackers. But we've used our budget to sort of build up our team regardless, and so we work with. But some contractors of Of which Rosie Sherry is one of our wonderful contractors. So she's our community manager. She is, as you said, becoming the heart and soul of the indie actress community. She is always online, and he's helping everybody out. She's doing our Twitter account as well, and making through the Forum is alive and well and that it's useful community for everybody, Um, and what's cool about Rosie?

She actually was an anti hacker I interviewed and the first few months of the website. She has her own community in the Ministry of Testing that she bootstrapped from zero to over a $1,000,000 in revenue well before joining the indie actress team. We also have James and Teela to other Andy actors who work with us and sort of contractual role, and they help us produce produce a series we call growth bites, which are just practical examples of how to grill your startup. We're still working on that we might make sort of a bigger launched with that later on this year. And then we have Holden Gerson, who is herself, ah, writer and editor, who helps to put out our techs interviews on the website. So in total, there are five of us working on any hackers, and then countless other people in service is and companies that we use. For example, Bradley Denham helps me at it. The indie actress podcast Chris DeArmond helps us right transcripts for the anti hackers podcasts and through his company expected transcripts. So there's a lot of different surfaces and people that we work with and other anti hackers whose companies we paid for.

Yeah, that's it. Because I can also imagine that now that you can really solely focus on that community on the podcast, and whatever you find, you know, brings value and don't worry about you know how to make money. That must be quite relieving. But on the other hand, now you're actually an employee, not a business owner or entrepreneur anymore, which also restrict a little bit. I think what you can do with the company, you probably have to get to buy in off the sea. Oh, off strike, I guess. If you would say, for example, I want to cancel the broadcast or now I want to start a YouTube channel or something. I guess that you have to negotiate with them if you can do that and if they're okay with it And if they think that's a good business strategy, I mean,

I think, uh, it's very true, like I'm now an employee for the first time in my life. Actually, I am a full time employee of a company and I have been for the last two and 1/2 years and a lot of ways. That's really weird. But if you look at my life like the actual day to day of what I'm doing, the decisions I'm making, it's pretty much identical to what it was before I joined strike. And this isn't the point that I've always kind of harped on, which is that pretty much every employee is a business and every business, every business owner is kind of an employee, and what I mean by that is that being an employee, you basically have the same exact concerns as a founder does. You were trying to provide a service to a customer who pays you money in return for that service. And the sky's the limit in terms of what you're allowed to negotiate.

To do so, if you're an employee, you have to do sales in the form of like pitching. Your service is to a customer. That's like your interview. Is your job interview, right? Why should this customer by your service, is why should I hire you? Well, you need to prove your worth During the sales, call your job interview. You have to do marketing that's putting out your resume finding potential customers in other words, companies to work for You can negotiate your prices. In other words, negotiating your salary with your employer and you're the way that you provide that that service.

How many vacation days do you get? Do you have to work from the office or not? Etcetera? Etcetera. Employees have an infinite range of what they're able to negotiate if they choose that option. And so my particular job in Striped doesn't look like ah more stereotypical employees position right? Like I don't really meet with that many people that striped very often. I don't go into the office very often. I don't really ask permission to do anything. So if I wanted to start a YouTube channel, I just what I wanted to shut down the podcast. I just what I love being in strike because it's full of really intelligent people who are well meaning who have a lot of skills that I myself don't possess and who are all working in the same direction that I'm working it and so I can go to the design team. It's tripe and say, Hey, what do you think about this design or you help me collaborate on this particular website? I can't go to Patrick and say,

Hey, what do you think about my strategy? Um, for what I'm doing in the direction I'm headed in. But generally they help us run the site and grow it, and we sort of maintain it autonomously. And even though I'm an employee in terms of like what that really means on my goals in the way that sort of work it strike, it has very little effect. I think one of the reasons why the acquisition has been so good is that in the hacker is his direction and Stripes direction were so aligned from the gecko. But even after joining stripe, I didn't really have to completely change what I'm doing. I'm doing literally the exact same thing with the exact same mission that I had before a joint strike.

I think that especially your situation also makes that marriage somehow really unique and very beneficial for us while also benefits for the other side but now beneficial for in the hackers. Because somehow you are the face off in the hackers, right? So it's not easy to, um, you know, put another person in in your shoes and say, Well, now he or she is the chief right? People would scream the whole, you know, forum with probably boycott or something, right? So and I also think that probably because you're doing it so well, right? They see. And they probably trust your instinct and direction that your goings,

I mean, I hope that at some point, um, it's not that I don't want to be the face of the actors, but I hope that with every passing week, every passing month that it becomes a more resilient community that's less focused on my particular and put, I think that's one of the cool things about having a community, especially community. That's growing. Is that ultimately 99% of the value that people get from any hackers, people learning lessons? People being inspired to start things aren't because of me. It's not because you know I'm Gary Vaynerchuk or Time Fares type figure who gets on and tells people lots of stuff they've never heard before. It's more like in the actors a stage, and we can bring on founders like UMA Kalen and basically say like, Hey, um,

why don't you share your story? And you're learning with community and people are learning from you and other people like you, and I'm just hopefully a facilitator and on increasingly invisible one. So besides the podcast, I'm really not that visible.

Yeah, I like that. I like that idea is, and I think it's It's really visible in the community that each member is somehow valued based on their contributions, and just that they're they're a swell. I also feel like newcomers, for example, a very welcome indeed, space, which in other communities it sometimes harder right. But when I started with any hackers, when I just joined and add, you know, only questions. I wasn't providing any answers because I didn't feel like I can talk about any of that, right. I always felt like people are,

you know, having an open year and just providing general answers. And I've held very, very welcome. Yeah,

yeah, I think it's Ah, it's nothing of my own doing it just, ah, intrinsic part of any founder community of founders, which is that everybody is new to this. Everybody's trying to figure it out. Even people who are experts, you know, another's eyes feel themselves to not be extras because they're sort of looking ahead and all the things they don't know, and they know how hard it was for them to get where they are. And so we found that people in the actors had to be really nice to each other and really understanding and compassionate because we're all sort of struggling through this together and building a company is hard. It's not an easy thing to do,

So I want to switch gears a little bit because one of the things that I'm also very interested in is the technical aspect off everything off the business, for example. So I would like to understand the early days. How did you How did you build in the hackers? He said. I noted from one of the interviews that you gave you said that you wanted to write as little as possible code right on not, you know, work on something that requires a ton of code for several months on end. But still you didn't use out of the box forum, for example, a website or community platform. You just build that from scratch as a single page application. So why did you choose to go down that road? And, yeah, how did it

go simultaneously? Wanted to write a little code is possible, but also wrote as much code as possible. So I think in the phase where I was deciding the idea that I was going to work on where I wasn't even sure that I would build in the hackers, I don't even conceived him in the hackers. One of my constraints was I know that in the past I spent months and months and months building projects and businesses without ever telling anybody that ever launching whatever marketing it and it's just a death spiral. It's such an easy way to get way behind and take way longer to build a successful business. And I know that I have a penchant for doing that because I am a developer and I just like writing code. And if you give me something that takes a long time to code like I'm gonna take a long time to coach because I love doing that part. So I said, Okay, if I'm gonna work on an idea that has to be in some area where the actual software product isn't that complex and like I just even if I spend all my time coding it can't take that much time. So that's kind of how it's summer on the idea for any hacker, because I knew it was just gonna be a blogged, at least to start. And then, at most of the community and a community,

at least the bare bones features of it wouldn't be that long. The code. Once I decided that's what I wanted to do. Ah, the gloves are off, and I was like, Okay, I conclude this as much as I possibly want Thio. So it was like, Do I make a medium blah there? Do I set up a community on discourse? No. I'm gonna create my own blogging software from scratch. I'm gonna write my own community software from scratch. And because I put that thought into it beforehand where I made sure that I wasn't entering any sort of arena where the code would take too long to write, it was okay for me to do it by myself from scratch.

So you really only took three weeks for me to write the blogging software and also, you know, reach out to hundreds of founders and get a bunch of interviews on the site and watch. Ellen took me eight days. I think from the day I sat down to code the forum to the day that I released the foreman started emailing people about it. Um, because I knew that these weren't things. It would take a long time to get a bare bones version out. And also, that would be important to do it sort of custom because I wanted. That's pretty ambitious with the plan for any hackers. I knew I didn't want it to just be a community, but I wanted to have a really strong brand, and it's hard to have a strong brand if the thing you're building looks like everything else. If any, actresses just a Facebook group are a discourse forum or a blonde on medium and people would come and they might get a lot of value out of the things they're reading and the people they're talking to you.

But they're not going to think of any hackers. It's its own distinct movement and brand s. So I put a lot of time into, like, how can I make it unique about a lot of time in tow? What name should I use for the community? And I decided to give it sort of a demon M, which means that the community is named after the people who were part of the community and the hackers themselves. Um, what should the website look like? I decided I wanted to make it dark blue, not because dark blue means anything but because there aren't any other dark blue websites that I know of. And so when people came to any hackers and read an interview, then they came back a second time. They remember Hey, I've been here before and it was great.

And what is it about this site that I like? Whereas if you go to a block on medium, they all kind of look the same. And it's really easy to not even pay attention to the author, our community or the organization that wrote what you're reading there because it just

looks the same. So

a lot of what I did was because I knew that I wanted to brand to be strong and have a strong brand. It needs to be distinct and have a personality of its own.

And now that any hacker actually grew into a large community, I think there are many, many features as well that you provide for the community. Is it still containable? It's It's still sustainable that you think while I myself and I don't know if your brother hops with this as well. We're the only ones that are actually developing the software, and that's okay, or do you feel sometimes that you need a team to maintain? Andi developed the features.

I think it all depends on how fast you want to move because we're owned by stripe because stripe is funding the project. We're not gonna die if we don't run at a certain speed and the flaps that's gonna collapse like that's not gonna happen. So we could go slowly as we want to. I could build one feature a year, and I'm sure any hacker should still be a valuable fun place. And so on one hand, I don't feel like, you know, we need a massive team and things are gonna break without that. We're not Facebook for not moving fast and breaking things and tryingto outpace the competition become a $1,000,000,000 company. But on the other end of the spectrum, it would be nice to have more people. I think it's in the It's in the cards like we're playing to hire another full time engineer for Andy hackers. And even my brother has sort of got the content machine from the hackers streamlined nowadays, So he's gonna start coding more, and they're just so many cool things we want to build that we think would be, um,

really cool for any hackers themselves. I think this is one of the advantages of having built custom software like there's some certain features on any hackers where if we had gone with some sort of existing platform, like we just couldn't have built the features that we have now in the features we have now are tailor made from the ground up to be something that helps and the actors, so good example would be we have a whole directory of products so you could make a page for this podcast and say that your product and you could share how much revenue generating you have a timeline. We could make post about different milestones that you hit and all those miles sentry posts go into a daily leaderboard, where the top milestones by up to accounts get featured in our newsletter on the show up at the top of the home page, and they sort of help you build in public and show the people what you're working on and get like kudos and celebration from the community. And that's a feature that was designed from the ground up, like nuts and bolts to appeal and the hackers. We had to have something custom to build that there's a lot of other custom features, and we want to build to that will make any hacker specifically really good as a website for Andy hackers, the people, um and so part of his impatient I wanna build all these things as fast as possible, but another part of me likes that were sort of slow and deliberate. We put a lot of thought into the things we add, and we spent the bulk of the last two years really experimenting with lots of things that we've tried and shut down, tried and abandoned or try it and stuck with because they ended up working

most of the time. People don't have not enough features. They have too many features, right, and before or somehow get caught up in that future. Held somehow. Um so I think a lot of discussions on in here are also about the features. You know, 11 person likes to feature. Think it's awesome. The other things. No, it's actually not. And I don't like it. And I hated, you know, maybe even right on.

People get very passionate about features, right? And so today I love it it or, you know, they hate it. Something like that. So how do you How do you balance that? How do you make decisions. Is it religious? You're the impression that you have the feedback that you got on. You run also some experiments and you have some data on how people are using the features and things like that. Yeah,

I think there's, um and this goes back to the whole thing we're talking about earlier. Like, what are the limits of your team? How do you build something that grows quickly? How do you grow when you only have a small number of people? I think you always have to realize what stage you're at. I want Resource is you're working with and just deal with those. So for us, it's like we have a very small team. I'm the only person writing code for any hackers right now. I can't really afford to spend a whole bunch of time beta testing everything and a B testing everything and making perfect decisions. I just don't have that much time. If I had a team of like 50 people, I could do that. I have a person who's dedicated job. It is.

Do nothing but talk to customers. Another person who's dedicated job it is to do nothing but run a B test. But since I don't have that, I just wanna prioritize and figure out what's the most important and what things have to slide. And so a lot of it is intuition. A lot of it is talking to people. I send out tons like thousands of surveys a month. Oh, and the actors of various, you know, part of the process of signing up on being members. I talked to people constantly and ask them for feedback on kind of the more don't say boring, but like straightforward parts of any hackers like What do you know, like about the site? And I get really basic feedback like Okay, which this was faster.

I wish this didn't have this loading page of which you had a feature for deeming people. I wish you had X Y Z right there pole. I can embed a YouTube video, and that's a lot of the nuts and bolts that I would sort of file under interruptive incremental improvements to the core polish of any hackers, as it is now. And I try to spend a lot of time on that because the product should be getting better. The things people are doing every day should be, Ah, improving on a regular basis of people know this is a living, breathing community and that is getting better and that we care about it. Then there's a whole different set of development and goals and features that we build, that people generally aren't gonna be able to tell you what to do. Um, these are the more imaginative things like, for example, the milestones leaderboard I was describing earlier where rebuilding those from the ground up based on problems that people have,

Ah, that we want to solve. So when we think about our mission, it's it's basically we have this vision for the world where there are, you know, 10 times more, 100 times more 1000 times more. Andy hackers out there building their own profitable side projects and becoming financially independent. And we think about what are the things holding people back from doing that? We're not inspired enough. They're not educated enough. They're having trouble coming up with ideas for having trouble meeting partners, having trouble taking time off work with finances and finding the time they're having trouble growing their products once they get started. And so he spent a lot of time just asking people what problems they have and then thinking about the resources that we have and how we can build new things from the ground up to try to help founders solve these problems. And that leads to ideas that, generally speaking,

no one's going to suggest for us ability on their own. We have to sort of come up with those ideas ourselves, trying them out, see what happens and continue to generate. So it's really just a balancing act between building the sort of obvious, incremental improvements that we know we should be building and building these bigger storm or experimental things that are not quite obvious and that we have to really put a lot of time and thought into you.

So what I really like from what you're saying? And you actually repeated it in several you know, variations all over this interview is you were talking about, you know, faces. And I think this is so fundamental faces because when you're so let's start, your you know is they wanted. You want to start your business and your reading up on all the different things that you should do and you know you can't get so hung up in the end. Stay that you actually want to reach right that you don't see the staff's that it will take to get you there on, for example, just from my example. But I started my business. My side projects I thought, Well, obviously I have to have a social media present, but I couldn't decide which one. So I started a Twitter account or revived mine.

I started also Pinterest account. And then I had an INSTAGRAM account and somehow I tried, you know, to do it all and read up on all the strategies for everything. And he was just dreadful. First of all, I didn't work right. But then I felt like, Well, but if I'm concentrating on just one, then that's so limiting and that's not say if you know things like that. But actually it's faces, right? So why not? As you said, the practical deaf,

why not start off with the Twitter account? It means that you're putting all your axe into one basket, and probably that's not a long term strategy. But if you're focusing here on that first stop right, you can put much more energy into it right and can get much further than if you're spreading yourself everything. And again with the hacker you had, like, this faces in this plan. And now when you're talking about the features I see again that you're thinking and faces and I like that I like very much, I think it's such a valuable lesson and especially for people. I think a lot of any hikers are probably like me, which are relentless and, you know, a very I'm very impatient. I would like to do everything today, right?

And I'm really stressed out if I haven't, you know, finished all my task forever, right? All the toss, whatever I have on my list, Why can't a finishes today? And so thinking about those faces, I think it's really, really valuable. But that's something that I learned within the last year off, you know, starting my side business just to think off. You know what's the long term goal here? And I'm thinking in five years right now and not in in one year, right and then have incremental steps how to

go there. I think that's so smart and you know, one of the biggest challenges is an indie actors. You're trying to get information for what you should do. But most of the examples out there are companies and people who are just much further ahead than you are. And I probably have more resources and money and time than you do right. You might be working a job, might not have any money savings. You might be by yourself. And so you're right, like you have to think in phases you have to think about. I might have this ultimate end goal that I want to get to you. You know, maybe I want to be on every social media channel, and maybe I want to be doing all these things and be this big. But like, I can't just magically start doing that from day one.

From day one, you need to, like, work your way there, step by step, one small step at a time, and each little foothold you take sort of each step you take up the staircase gives you that advantage that you need to reach. The next step a little bit easier is much easier for me to build mailing list. When I had interviews of people were reading and I would have been for me to build a mailing list if I had nothing to show for it much easier for me to build a community. If I had this mailing list, we could advertise to you, then it would have been if I'd tried to start a community from scratch. Even though that was my ultimate goal, I had to get their step by step. So that's been one of my biggest learnings from years of starting things that didn't work very well. And it's something,

you know, like talking other, any hackers and seeing the things that they're struggling with. I think so many people would be doing much better if they were okay with starting small. They're OK, which is focusing and saying, You know, there are all these other awesome things that I I could be doing that I want to do that I should be doing. But like I have to focus and focusing is hard because often times it feels like saying no to things that you should be doing. But you have to say it's a good thing so that you can have time to do the great things.

It's super on. So I spend, I think, 45 months. It's just trying out everything so that I don't feel like I'm missing out if I'm focusing and music down. And that's also I felt like I needed that I needed to just try crazy things that I didn't even want to, you know, make a business out of it, but just felt like, Okay, I have to try it once and, uh and I can say, Okay, I've done that right? And now Now I'm finishing down and I say, Well, that's actually And you know what happens if your niece down and you try to do the smallest that you can imagine and you started,

You find out that it's actually expands, and suddenly you can even do you do in a small thing. This small thing is, has so many facets and so many ways you could do it. And you you know that it's actually not small anymore, and it's not boring or, you know, limited. It's actually very, very rich in what you can do. That's at least what what I found out over the last.

I would call that says depth over breath. So you know my living example. There's a part of me that was sad when I decided that any hackers was what I wanted to work on because I thought I have all these skills as a developer and as a designer like you, so much more complex stuff. But then when I started building this blogged and I had nothing else to worry about except for just really simple blawg, I realize that there's a ton of death to a block, you know, like, what? Can I make it look like? How can I make it work? I could make this blogged s o much different and better than other blog's because I had nothing else to focus on. All my attention was pointed in one direction. And I think for a lot of people they underestimate, like, how good you could make something if you're really focused on that one thing rather than spreading herself, then over every single possible idea that comes to mind.

Yeah, Yeah, I think so, too. So, for example, at Microsoft, I worked with engineering teams on different things. I worked on build test coding and code reviews, right? And right now, I'm only working on contributes. And at the beginning, I was very scared off that I was like, Oh, my God, what happens to all the other things that I'm so passionate about?

But somehow, you know, the big world is in the small things. So even in code abuse, there, so many facets to it that I cannot stop thinking about different aspects of it, right? And I find that really fascinating. And that's really the difference, too. When you just look at it and you spend, you know, a week on it or if you spend months on it, then you just have a very different understanding of it. I think it's true for for most of the things that you can do, whatever it is,

what you choose. So I know that we're running a little bit out of time. So, Cortland, thank you so much for being on my show. Thank you so much for taking the time. I will link in the hackers and your Twitter account and every other place we're people can find you on breed out to you. Is there something that you want to add to? The interview s at the very

end. No, I think that's that's pretty much it if you're interested. And Andy hackers If you've ever thought that hey, maybe you could build something on the side and sort of, you know, make some side income and maybe even become your own Boston work for yourself. Check out and the hackers dot com two ways I recommend getting started. Well, the three ways are all basically in the top are so there's a link on any hackers that says, Start here. She really curious what this is about and how to get started In a practical way, Just click that and you can see everybody else has gotten started this year what they're talking about and some articles that are really helpful for helping you figure out what's going on. If you click interviews at the top of any actors, you'll see literally a giant list of 450 interviews that you consorting filter that show all sorts of other Andy hackers and how they've gotten started. And I just recommend reading through a few of their stories and that also have orient you with what's possible or if you prefer audio, just check out Andy hackers dot com slash podcasts.

There's a podcast Look at the top 140 episodes with different founders, every one of whom has had a completely different path. A completely different background, how they started their successful online business or side project. So, uh, whatever your preference is, there's lots of ways to get involved and sort of get your feet wet and learn how you can change your life by being an indie

actor. Yeah, sounds good. I can totally recommend it. I I'm also there in that community, so thank you, Cortland. Thank you for being on my share.

Thank you so much for having me.

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