What's up, everybody? This is Court One from Indy hackers dot com, and you're listening to the Indy Hackers podcast. This is a quick chat up sort of the podcast where bring on a founder who's been posting milestones about their progress to the Andy Hackers website. I get to see what it's like to actually be in the trenches, trying to build something from scratch as an anti hacker. Today, I'm talking to William Candle in the founder of Start React native, where he sells courses and starter kits are programmers who were trying to learn, react native and, in the latest milestone that he's posted to his timeline, explains how he reached 20,000 subscribers on his YouTube channels. I'm sure we'll talk about that, William. Welcome to the chef head. Oh,

Coughlin. Thank you for having me. Thanks for coming on your product page on any hackers says you're making about $6000 a month. Is that accurate? That's correct. Yes, And are you full time on this and just working for yourself? Or are you still

working another job? I do still do some consulting at the moment. I concert for Shopify recently should be five made an announcement that they're baiting on React native as a technology for them or by UPS and I concert for them on the team, off just shells and animations and making shell that things are there filming okay and runs smooth as butter. That's a cool

role. Shopify is a great company, and since it consulting, it's almost like that. Your side hustle now and making the courses and YouTube videos that you make is now your real job.

That's a great way to put it. My side. Oh, sorry is my minus Earl and vice versa.

Well, you're basically living there. The nd hacker dream. I think most people really want to get to this point where they're making enough money from their business that they could go full time on it are they are full time on it, and anything else they do is really just unnecessary. And on the side. How does it feel to have made it here? I know you've been working on your D two videos in your courses for almost three years.

I'm really feeling very fulfilled, and I'm really just very happy in general. And I'm so happy and I'm indeed, like you just said living my life in my own terms and really enjoying it in this city that I love beautiful sex with the island. And it's interesting because I'm feeling so happy. But also I'm like, But you should still, you know, Fry ve trying to go for, like, you know, ambitious goals and trying toe push it and you know, to be ambitious, kind off. And it's almost hard to do because I'm feeling so happy, you know, I'm having a great time. That's

where I was with any hackers almost three years ago. I just got to the point where it was like a man. This is paying my rent and it's paying all my bills. I made it. And then that was the exact month that Andy hackers got acquired and joined stripe, and it was like, all right, back to the grind, I got hit. These goals I gotta get to this place had sort of an external influence. But for you, that all has to be internal. What do you striving to do? How are you pushing yourself now that you're already at the point where you don't

really need to? So I'm doing these videos on YouTube and in terms of technical content and the things I'm demoing in presenting. I am so passionate about these demos and ideas that I get tau research. These programming posers and I get paid to do it almost so. On the technical side, I'm very excited. I'm very proud of the level of details. I'm putting in some of these examples, and I put a lot off details and precision in the technical example. Now I would really like to explore more like the content production and trying to improve the production off my video qualities of some quality. Whole things are a GTR together, using some tracks and so on. And so I feel like these coding screen casts. They have, like some particular challenges toe be really entertain, eating and engaging, and I really wish,

but I can grow my channel and grow the business that goes with it. So I could really explore on obtaining Kenzaburo engaging. They can be, and I'm seeing some YouTube whales like much bigger content creators that are pushing the envelope in terms off, making these programming videos entertaining. And it seems like you are you can actually, like, go pretty far in terms off entertainment value. With this programming videos,

there's something about I think this is the human condition where we're always kind of looking up to the people who are ahead of us. And so when you're first getting started, you like God dang, I really wish I could just get started like who else has gotten started? But then, once you kind of quote unquote made it, you're still looking at people who are getting more views on YouTube, where these companies are making more money, more uses for more customers like What are they doing that I'm not doing? And it's a double edged sword or, you know, the cliche is like owed some point. You need to learn to be happy with what you have, but also, I think it's really motivational inspiring to have something that you care about and something that you're driven towards. And I think having these inspirational figures in your case, these bigger YouTube channels are these bigger,

more popular course creators and saying, Oh, how much room there is for you to improve will always give you a goal, so you're never really bored you never just satisfied, and that's kind of the beauty of having your own business.

I agree it's all about finding a balance and being satisfied with what you're doing, but also striving for for more.

So let's talk about how you got you got started in the very beginning. Do start down this journey thinking I want to be in any hacker and b you financially independent.

Absolutely not. At least I don't remember. But I advise girls, so I cannot say for sure. No, but I don't remember. What I really remember is that I started to do these coding videos and even without any long term goals, I was loving. But I was getting value out of it on the short term, and he was, And the value I was getting is that I was using my laptop, just a microphone from my laptop. No gear, nothing. And I was doing, basically is a programming I needed to do anyway. And for me was such a focused on government because when you're recording,

you cannot check Facebook. You have to explain your faults outlawed, and actually, that's the best way to unlock some problems. I mean, your program. Actually, I'm sure you've experienced it that sometimes to explain a technical problem to someone just to explain it, you started dating your head. Yeah,

a lot of, ah, like writing to myself. I have, like, notebook after notebook on my computer, right? Just, like write things down because it's kind of like a short term memory aid where it's hard to keep these things in memory, but you put it on a page. Now you can reference it, and I just helps me code and work for the tricky problems, but it's pretty similar to explaining it to somebody else.

I got started to do the simple screen casts in end of 2017 and summer of 2018. I did this contracting job for a start up in Zurich and that this really ambitious mobile up project and because the project was so ambitious suddenly I started to look at the apps on my phone very differently because I was I was using uber o r. You sport. If I I was like I was not using it anymore, was thinking, How do they do it? How do they provide such a user experience and I got so excited toe surgeries examples that I started to share them on Facebook in the series card. Can it be only react native where I take examples from ups? But people know in love and I show how it can be done. Your cognitive using the primitives off the reactor, native technology. And this is where things Suddenly I was not doing my work and putting it live on YouTube. I was really making, like YouTube videos as like to toy ores. Essentially,

I mentioned earlier that you posted a milestone to Andy hackers about how you grew to 20,000 YouTube subscribers and under milestone you broke down. Your growth in the face is so Phase one was when you've had a few 1000 subscribers, and that was you just recording yourself doing a bunch of work. And Phase two is what you're talking about now, where you actually transitioned to making videos for other people to actually watch, entertain and teach them. And I want to zoom in on Phase one because that's what you've got started. Why were you just recording videos for yourself? Was it on Lee because you knew that recording screen cast would allow you to work without being distracted. Or are there other reasons to

buff I really on droids? Ah, destruction free environment. But I also remember talking with friends and also in Jack, your friends. But we were talking about transparency and the benefit off being transparent. And we were talking about this cos for instance, which are like, or their revenue numbers open and or their analitico completely out of the open. And I remember what I was thinking. Hall, Can I apply these values to myself? And at the time, what I could do was I was not yet in jacket. What I could do was to simply do my work online and share it with people out of the open in the Open.

I think so many people see this culture of transparency and building in public, and I say, You know, that sounds great, but it's not for me. It's gonna be so much work already have enough work to do on my own. I'm not sure I'm comfortable sharing. You know what I'm working on in public, and I think they're missing out. It's so advantageous to do what you did because you were just doing work that you were going to do anyway. And then you were recording videos a shared in public. But also just to hold yourself accountable. So major, more productive at your job. And then, you know, of course,

if you're trying to learn something and you're trying to accomplish something, there's probably other people in the world who were trying to do the same thing. And if they see you putting out great videos or writing great block post about that, of course they're gonna follow along, because why not? Then they're gonna ask you questions and they're gonna, you know, ask you to make certain videos, right Certain posts. And before you know it, you're building this audience and you're learning about what their problems are on about what they need automatically on the side of you, just doing your normal work. It seems like it's such an advantageous thing to do.

I completely agree. Today, I really I'm in a position where because I'm doing these videos, people are pushing the information to me and I don't have toe pull anymore. And my specialty in this YouTube channel, our gestures and animations. And now, instead of me trying to find out what is the latest Novartis injections and animations. People in the command section are pushing the information to me, sending me examples of people walking on exciting innovations in this area. Contact me toe, show me what they're walking on and so on. And it's such a great place to be. And when you learn in the open and one thing which I really love as well is when you're wrong people you know the check what you're doing. And if you're wrong, who's telling you which is amazing? Because if you're not being transparent, you're not gonna get any inputs?

No clue. Yes. So that early videos of yours I confined where you were just saying the wrong stuff and coating the wrong stuff, and you just put it out there anyway

above So they are because the space off, you know, this programming videos is everything so fast? There is content that I'm doing that become obsolete very quickly, and that's fine and all. So that's why I'm trying to strike a good balance between the time I'm spending doing these videos and the quality of production, you need to find a good balance because if you spend too much time and you're trying to do the perfect video, But in six months this particular topic is kind of obsolete, or the way we do things has completely changed. It can get too expensive, too. Dewey's videos. But I have to say. But recently I was researching some examples and I had to go back to order videos because you always think I don't know if you have this feeling, but your West Wing. That's the stuff you've been doing in the past. It's silly.

And now you know everything. Yeah, of course. And I was looking at these old videos and all that. Whoa, whoa, That was actually, like pretty good eso buff. I would say, Let's

talk about some of the just logistics of being kind of an early stage anti hacker. I guess at that face you weren't even any hacker. You weren't making any money. You're just putting these videos out. How did you find the time and how did you find the money to do this and work it into your schedule?

So that's interesting, because it's a bit of similar story, I think, than yours because you've mentioned it a couple of times in your podcasts, and every time you mention it, I'm like, Oh, that's exactly what happened with me. So I've quit my job and I had a little bit off runway toe. Think about what's next. I was not thinking about becoming a hijacker, but I was thinking more. Take some time to see on the technical side what's going on, what is interesting. And maybe we'll find a job in this area. And at the beginning, I didn't have so much run where.

But at the beginning I was just like and I think you mentioned it so many times. I was just your going on. And and it's only when the bank account started to go down that I studied to think. Okay, I you know, can I, you know, generate revenue and and I got really excited about this party. Could have technology react native.

So when did you start to generate revenue? You mentioned that you started making this new series of videos and in your milestone on indie hack, if you said that those really took off, people really like them. How did you turn that interest in tow? money.

I started to build these templates for react native. So again, here I waas the same way I was doing videos, and even if the one watches a video, I'm still getting value out of it. I was building react native templates, which I was using to capture or the latest big practice is AP Eisenreich native, which I was using for myself in my own projects. So I needed to do this work off, having a minority HQ reports to read that captures the template off what is reactive up and how it should be structured and always putting it up to date. And I started to service as a template. So in every videos I would promote the templates and these videos. I was read also doing it to challenge myself. I really enjoyed working on these hard animations and Jess Chels, and because I was really changing myself. People were having a hard time to follow because they didn't necessarily know The Phantom enters that I was using behind the scene and in the comment section that started to ask me more and more after each video or we're not finding you on you. D my where is your online course? And that's when I decided to be denying man calls.

That's such a great lesson toe learn there, which is that you're kind of starting to distribution channel. First, you're building an audience for putting out these videos, and as a result, you get all these people who are following you want to know more information, they start asking specific questions and telling you what their problems are, and that gives you the idea for a product that you can build and sell the people that's gonna be valuable, like they're telling you in the comments. Hey, well, you know, I don't understand this. I need you know, something till I need something to teach me the fundamentals and like, Oh, maybe I should create a starter kit and suddenly you have a business on your hands.

And on top of that, not only do you have a good business idea, but you already have a distribution channel with people. You can sell it to you that all of your early customers come from YouTube channel. Did you find other places to bring in customers?

So far, 100% off my customers come from the YouTube channel. Wow. And if you want my website, there is not a lot of context provided about what's online cost is who's teaching it even about the pricing model and so on. And so I know that people who have enough context toe sign up to my costs come from my YouTube channel and one unexpected benefit off building. This coughs because I was doing these videos, and in these videos I was just tryingto get things to walk. And so I thought I had developed some sort off. Good expect is on this topic but wide buildings. Of course, I realized I learned everything because then when you try to teach the fundament oars, you realize that actually you don't. I didn't add such a strong grape on this topic, and actually I learned so much. Trying to teach her from them in terms of just shells and animations

goes back to what you were saying earlier about you making these videos and screen cast in the first place that when you try to explain something to someone, you end up learning a lot, and I've heard this consistently from people who are teaching. Others online are making courses in writing books are educating that. You end up learning a ridiculous amount when you're trying to teach, which I think is an encouraging fact because it tells other people who maybe want to teach that you don't need to be an expert when you first start. The process of going through this and trying to create a course is when you become an expert.

Absolutely. Right now, I'm, uh so I live in. So I'm French Originally, I live in Zurich Wells. Ah, so they speak Swiss, German and the main language in this part of Switzerland, and I'm learning German and regular German and it's a bit of the struggle, and I wish I could apply these values off learning in the Open and because I feel like my German would certainly improve like crazy. But it's hard to find the opportunities toe do it.

Yeah, I just gotta find a bunch of French people who want to learn German and start trying to teach them exactly. So how did you How did you get started selling courses? Because even if you know that people want this stuff is probably a lot to learn. It's probably out of uncertainty in the beginning, like one of the first steps you should take. What was your approach back then,

on the content of the course, I really went back towards the videos I've made and for video I wrote down, which are the fundamental recipes which are used to build these complex examples. So I had leased off all these foundation neural elements, and then I started toe put them in a sequence that makes sense in terms off, telling the story and approaching things in order that makes sense. And then the content I felt I knew I could use a cell is to put the content online. I think it looks like there are great services like podia teach a ball where you can put and sell online courses. But because I'm a programmer as a guilty pleasure, I decided tow be in my own Web site, something very simple. This is why you know right now is not a lot off. I mentioned context on the website, and it was not intentional, is just I was trying to be the name VPs fast as possible, right? And so what does the minimum elements I need to bring on the website,

you need to sign up. You need a checkout page, you need some video hosting. And I used fire bays, stripe vista, glue it or together And and then I went back. Once I went live, I went back to the comments on YouTube and says, Okay, here it is because people were asking the comments. When will you release your online costs? And then I said, Here it is and wrote a couple off. I don't know, maybe 50 comments or something.

How long did it take you to get this very first version of your course up

between 2 to 4 weeks? Something in between superfast thank

you were consistently good at doing this. M V P thing. I think it's one of like the most oft repeated lessons and all the Indian actors, podcast episodes and any sort of until you read online, build the minimum buyable product. Don't spend six months or 12 months building some complex thing and then finally launching it. Everybody reads this, but they still end up doing these like extremely complex things and takes them six months before they figure out that it's not working and in your case, your M V. P was really You're just making videos for yourself on YouTube and you didn't have any grander aspirations. It was just like, Oh, this is cool and useful for me to do myself. And that's really your M V P. And most people start way further down the line than that. They might start where you are today, where they have a whole website devoted to courses and material.

But for you you started way back earlier. And then even when you did your course, you didn't spend like five months, you know, recording like the world's best course ever. You did like 2 to 3 weeks. What did you get out quickly to sort of test your idea and give to use prescribers? What do they think about that first version? Of course.

So this is one of the great advantage to sell to develop ALS because they love. We love serving puzzles. So even if your costs is not perfect, they're actually really on drawing researching things by themselves. And I had an example with one particular lesson which was at the beginning, very baggy and was overall very problematic. And first of all. So people mentioned it immediately. They were having questions, and things were not walking out like while trying to the example. And first I I did like, try to do some quick fixes. But I realized it didn't work. And then I fixed the overall lesson. I solved most fundamental problems with it, so it took a while. And so people where messaging me about this particular video and so on.

What was amazing is that people were spending a tremendous amount of time to research she trying to fix it by themselves. Some people which I message ones. The lesson was fixed on me. Oh, I learned so much trying to fix this broken lesson essentially. And what kind of other, uh, target segment would you have the same kind of response to imagine if you put your car into the auto repair and then it's still broken? Then you say, Oh, thank you. Because I don't

people overestimate how polish and how perfect everything needs to be. And I think you're completely right. If we choose the right customer segment to sell to especially developers, uh, got developers just love Googling things, love researching things, love fixing things are totally right there. So you get a lot more leeway. And I think more broadly, you almost always want to target these super enthusiastic, tech savvy early adopter people in your first building something because they're just more forgiving and they're willing to take a chance on you. You've been, you know, super transparent kind of the entire time. You've been doing this. I'm looking at your indie hackers product timeline right now and you've got a little note from August 27th 2019 republished her first online course. And you said your pricing model was inspired by brilliant dot warg. What's your pricing model for your courses and why were you inspired by this other website?

The pricing Modern is 20 free USD per month. If you are building a new elites $9 per month, so roughly one time payment off 100 a $8 and you have the lifetime subscription for $600. There are two things which I really loved about this pricing. More than that, there is a big gap between the billed annually and the monthly payment, which I see some other pricing mothers and the gap between the monthly price. If you are bid annually, monthly is not that big. And you know, I really liked that. The gap between the two values is $9.23 dollars. It's It's a fairly big gap. So this I it really appeared to me. And then I used the second thing, which I really liked, which I learned actually from alecks from Creative Team.

And I applied toe before to selling the starter kids. So I knew this was walking. Is toe have a big upset like the lifetime member Gene, because you always have. People want to support you want to get Z Upsell and so they're always value ableto ever. So this pricing. But I really like tonight I went with

it. I talked to a lot of people who spend a considerable amount of time learning from others, running from predecessors and their leaders in their industry and taking back as many lessons as they can before they get started. And I talked a lot of people who were just wing it. They just start like I'm gonna do everything based on my intuition from scratch. Whatever works for you works. Where did you say you fall on that spectrum,

Toby. Completely honest, Exactly Like you said, It's a spectrum, and I feel like I'm on the side of the spectrum, which should be a little bit more coachable. I'm a little bit more wing, it kind of guy. I I see it also. So I'm in India care. I'm also a big fitness into just, and it's the same with fitness. You can spend a lot of time learning about everything about nutrition, but not to me, about the body, about the science behind the spots and so on. Oh,

you can only spend your time being a gym rat quote unquote just, you know, not trying to understand the fury behind, but just putting the work in the gym. And obviously, when you any, as in the gym or when you're in India care, you need to strike the right balance between the two. And I feel like I'm a little bit on the side off more like putting the raps in. But maybe I should also spend more time studying the game kind off, and I feel like in the Indy Acker community, I'm not sure where you think. But people are so maybe on the other side of the spectrum, a little bit more like spending a lot of time learning. But not maybe putting the raps in. I don't know where you think

It's a huge mix. There are so many people I talk to. You just haven't gotten started like I've been reading about this for years. I read this book about that block posting for them. They're like, way too far in the spectrum of spending time learning from others. And it's like, Just do something. If you only do one thing, it's better to act, not read anything than it is to read and not act because you can't succeed if you haven't actually acted. But then there are plenty of people I talked to on the four minute meet ups who have been working on things for years, and they're just trotting territory that's already been trodden. Making mistakes have been written about, and if they just knew one or two things and they would not have wasted six months, you know, building something that was way bigger than an M.

V. P are building a solution in search of a problem because they never really understood what problem they were solving with their product, et cetera. So I think it's a balance. And that's the That's the tricky part. We have to identify what camp you fall into and ignore advice that's not good for you. If somebody comes on the podcast in Like A and M best advice is just get started and you're someone who already has been starting on. That advice is probably not good for you because you're already there. But if someone comes in and then came my best advice is, read these books, et cetera, and you're someone who literally never reads anything and you've been struggling. But maybe that advice is good for

you. At the end of the day against there are there are no secret. It's all about finding good balance. Who would have thought you would at that? But inclusion. So what? You think

the hardest part of growing a YouTube following the 20,000 followers is and also what's the hardest part of starting? Of course,

one of the big challenge is, and I think we touched on. It already is. You have to embrace vulnerability because when you get started, it's very easy to look City. Sometimes I find. So for instance, I bought a new MacBook Pro recently. And so I started to watch tech reviews on YouTube and said that you two would suggest me with all these big tech review you two bells. And one thing that I did is that for at least two of his big you two bells, I went on the page and watch the first videos I've ever made. And it's a great reminder that this bigger Joanie they start with a single simple step, and I find it to be very inspiring. And, yeah, one of the big, biggest challenge is really too toe embraced vulnerability because it's so easy to look city and you know,

to be afraid of what people will think when you know you get started with these videos, where the quality of production is not necessarily very good because you have to go incrementally. You don't necessarily have, like the best gear to record and and so on. But I think that Ah, if you can go over this Ah, this elder, you can go very far, I believe

What about with your courses? Is that the same sort of issue there that you're embarrassed about what you might be putting out. It might be wrong. It might not be up to snuff. Or is there a different challenge with getting started as an educator

for me? I love. And that's why the content on YouTube is free. I love challenging myself, so these make me very excited. I may have a bit less excitement to change the fundamentals. I guess it's like, You know, if you were a lawyer on Doctor, you want to walk on. The big cases are you know that? Yeah, and it's a bit like this, also with his own line costs. For me, it's a bit less fun to really teach fundamental errors. This is why it's behind the pay world.

You gonna do something that's not your favorite? You better charge for it. Yes, let's talk about growth a little bit because I know people struggle a lot with growing their subscriber accounts, growing their revenue. I survey lots of any hackers, and this is by far the number one concern of people who've already gotten started. I just can't seem to grow. No one's using it. What are your biggest tips for growing Ah, YouTube channel of someone who's grown into 20,000 subscribers.

I would have only very simple advice. Follow the voice of the community. So when I started to do Visa can, even in reality videos, it was very clear, like the way. So I didn't add this huge growth jump? No. But the way people were interacting with my content was as a ton was immediately very different. And I knew I knew I was onto something just because the shift off tone that happened with my allegiance and, yeah, do things incrementally, I would say,

What do you think your first the U. S. Came from because I've been considering getting into YouTube a little bit with Andy hackers and part of me was afraid, because I think it's gonna be a huge time investment. These channels always look like they're gonna be super simple from afar, but then you get into it. You're like, Oh, this is the whole ecosystem with lots of professionals. We're putting in tons of work, and if I want to compete here, I've gotta put in tons of work. How do you get those very first YouTube viewers are they finding into the search engine? Are you promoting your videos on Twitter like how do you get a foothold to start

growing? So originally I started to promote my videos through Twitter Ready and I was blocking on. Major would also downsized videos on medium and then So that was the only way it was baptizing the videos. And then at some point, I realized that some videos we're getting way more views than other. And if I were to rank my videos in other off, what's my favorite one? What? What? The one I'm the most proud off. This was not matching the rank off my views right. And by investigating I realized that it's videos which had like, s your value in the title that we're getting way more views. When all the videos for example, I did a video where I show how people can implement Ah Spotify player So the video is tight. Third Spotify player Can it be done negative. These as essentially zero s you value If people want to find out how how to do what I'm doing in the videos it was type so the u i component is card bottom action sheet using this particular library in react native And when I realized that I started to do smaller videos which have tight Er's,

which can be formed for search and join. And so today I have two types of videos. Can it be the indirect native Siri's, which is really like Taylor for the community that people share on social media and so on? And then I have the smaller videos, which can be found through search engine. So it should to see reasons essentially, and you are almost completely different channel of distribution.

There's so much I can say about that. There's like a ton of lessons to extract. One of them is consistency. The fact of the matter is, you just kept putting tons and tons of videos out there on a regular basis for years, and I think if you're not consistent, if you quit, you know, a week into something or a month, and it's something you're not gonna ever get the opportunity to discover what works? Number two, you're experimenting. So you weren't only doing one type of video and hoping that would work. You were trying to do lots of different kinds of videos, and that gave you the ability to see what the different responses where and like you said the best videos that resonated the most with people and they were found the most weren't the ones that you were the most proud of. I think it's very common that we, as founder is,

are confident that we know what people want. But the reality is that we don't understand what people want, and we have to learn by putting stuff out there and experimenting. So I think it's pretty cool to see that you've done that. I've done that with the indie hackers podcast to some degree, like in the beginning, it was on Lee normal interviews, and since then I've been doing different types of interviews and seeing the same thing. Oh, these episodes get way more downloads and other types of episodes, and I wouldn't be able to learn now without experimentation. So I think that's a great take away from what you've done. And then the third thing is that once you experiment and you see what's working, you double down on that. Charlie Munger is Warren Buffett's business partner, and he was one of my favorite pieces of advice of all time,

which is what he calls the fundamental algorithm of life. Repeat what works and it's so easy to see that things are going well and say, Oh, this is going well, this is fine. Let me work on this other thing that's not going well. You should do the opposite. You should say, Hey, these videos are crushing it. Let me do more of these videos that are doing really well because that's how you learn. And that's how you improve. So it's It's cool to see that there's so many lessons to be gleaned from how you're able to grow your YouTube channel.

You mentioned that maybe, for instance, you were thinking about starting a YouTube channel. Do you feel like, because you already have such a big following? But it's more pressure on youse are more expectations or not at all. Your you feel free to experiment with different ideas different.

I think if you had asked me six months ago, I would have felt like there's a lot of pressure like Oh, I've I've already got a certain standard I'm gonna go to YouTube needs to match the same standard. I have elsewhere, whereas I've been doing more experimentation on the podcast, and that was a little bit scary. I didn't want to mess up a formula that worked. But now that I've done that and you know nobody died, I'm still here. I feel more confident about experimenting in other places. I think the bigger concern is one of whether or not it's worth the time. So, you know, if you already have 40 50,000 listeners on a podcast, do you really want to go to something completely new channel and start from scratch? Or you have zero people and go through the slog of building up your numbers from zero to something that matters? And you know that quite frankly,

it's just a drop in the bucket, and it's gonna take maybe months or years to build something that really matters. So that's kind of my main concern. You know, I don't want to invest a ton of time into something that's not really gonna pay off, but I think you need that consistency and you need that investment. And perhaps I'm wrong. Maybe I could just sit down record like a 10 minute video of me talking and giving advice and talking about the things that I'm learning and thinking about. And it's no skin off my back. And it's a super small investment and people like it, and I just do that once or twice a week and a gris. So I think it's something that I'll have to try, but it's tough. I mean, I think as a founder, you always have to focus,

and they're always gonna be sort of opportunities pulling at you. There's always gonna be, you know, what about linked? And what about Pinterest? What about Instagram? You know what about Facebook and YouTube and don't have time to do all of those things. And so you gotta prioritize and figure out what's worth investing the time.

And did you have, ah, particle affinity with broadcasting? Because, I mean, you're not the podcast post originally, and the first time I listened to you, I was only listening to a few podcasts. Tin Fairy's Dragan and not tow have a fine Fanboy moments, but I was really blown away by all talented you wearing as a podcast host. But I imagine that there is a lot off work that goes into it It's not like you're automatically turn anteed and doing an amazing

job. First of all, thank you. I don't think that talent in the beginning or even now, but no, I really didn't listen very many podcasts, and I didn't even want to start a podcast. Only started it kind of reasons to similar why you started your course. You didn't really want to teach the fundamentals that people wanted you to. You saw that as an avenue. I didn't really want to have a podcast, but because I was putting out all this content on the web site, I was having a lot of people respond to and give me their feedback and the number one requested Start a podcast. I want to listen to this. An audio form I don't want to just read all the time. So I think it's a good example of you know, this principle once again that affected both me and you.

Which is, if you put stuff out online and you're building in public and sharing what you know, you're gonna get feedback, and that's gonna give you good ideas for what you should do in the future. I want to ask you one last question about growth, which is related to the kind of your revenue growth with your courses, because you've got to 20,000 YouTube subscribers over the past three years. But it seems like your courses have grown significantly faster. Has it been the case that you've gone from $0 a month to $6000 a month in just the last six months or so?

When I first started the course, obviously they were. It was a big bump, right, because suddenly you're announcing something. It's exciting, people your early customers are getting. So I generated $7000 in 30 days, which was great. Wow! And yes, and then the growth model is very simple, and I've experimented with it. Tomorrow I spent time doing content on YouTube, so more revenues I get. It's simple as that. And you can look Matt at my striped graph on India Cooperate Page and my videos privilege dates on YouTube. It's 1 to 1 very easy. So I know that as long as I'm you know, building a great course and I'm putting great content on YouTube, everything is gonna go well,

putting out more free content on YouTube. You're driving sales of the paidContent and your course. How much do you update your course? Is this something that you just kind of record once? And it's fine. Are you constantly going back to try to fix it and improve it and add lessons or add new horses?

I add two videos a month. So, generally speaking, when I set my objectives once a month, I tried to do for videos on YouTube and two videos for my online course. And some of the new videos are often sometimes not often, actually, but sometimes army improving on an existing video. But I have a plan for more videos, but right now it's just an online course. But the vision I have fight is really a paid membership in the sense that I plan to have so many more resource is related to react native, You know, under this membership, I plan to have the starter kids and maybe all the online courses and so on. So right nights a pain membership for these particular online coughs. But in the near future, it will be If you're subscriber off my channel, you can be a paid subscriber, and I have access to are these exciting convent into space off react native.

It's so smart to have these ad on packages like becoming part of a community because it gets people recurring value over time, and it kind of justifies your ability to charge a subscription fee. Adam Wagon just released you I component library called Tailwind. You, I, Adams and guests we've had on the show in the past, and he's made something crazy like $500,000 in the first few days. But he released a community membership. It's part of the plans. So the other 150 bucks or 250 bucks depending which plan you get. But both of them include access to this discord server. You could chat with other people. You could talk to Adam and make suggestions, et cetera, and I know Peter Levels to the same thing with Nomad List. He had first had just a list of locations for digital nomads to visit. But then he added, a community charges a subscription fee for membership, and that's why people keep coming back to the side over and

over the fact. So I saw this tweet from Adam and the fact that he's sharing these numbers openly is not. Thanks. Tow the walk you're doing within jacker and promoting this openness. And he didn't choose to be like this, isn't it that people would share so open need? But you know, the amount of monies are making, and now we don't even think about it. We just talk about it and we get so many numbers. I remember one time where the culture was completely different around this. No,

there's always some people who've been sharing transparently, and a lot of them inspired me. So there's Patrick McKenzie, better known as Patio 11. He works with meat stripe. He's been on this podcast before on one of the early episodes, but way back in the day, he had this app bingo card creator, and he was one of the first to just share all those revenue numbers and blogged about what he was doing. He just didn't care. It was super inspirational. There's Pel, the eagle is Oniy has been doing this for 10 years. He's also been in this podcast was a company called Balsamic. There's Peter Levels, who I just mentioned. He was super inspirational for me when I just started,

and so I can't claim to start any of this. It's It's more like Andy. Hackers is riding a wave, and nowadays I try to focus on growing that way as much as I can and keeping it going. But it's just listening to people share their revenue numbers. It puts so much in context, you suddenly understand where they're coming from, and they're telling you their story. Their advice makes more sense. You can put it into perspective, and it's inspirational because you can map their revenue numbers onto your life and just imagine, you know, OK, what would it look like if I had a side project was making 5000 to $10,000 a month, so I encourage anyone who wants to share the revenue numbers to do it. It's super helpful for the community.

It's inspiring to others. And even if it doesn't always seem like the right decision as an individual, especially for early stages, usually positive consequences, not negative ones. And I'm really grateful for people like Adam, who's super advanced. He's making millions of dollars, and yet he still shares with all of us. Just let us know what's possible.

It's incredible. Yeah, exactly. We see it and we are like, Oh, this is a really thank you for showing us that this is really I have on my inject your product page. I have the striped verified revenue, which I really loved, because it's really Gamification around something that is very Raylan, which is the money I'm making, and I just find it so great, and I understand. But it can make people may be uncomfortable because it's at the end of the day, it's something very intimate as well. So topic that is very dedicated.

Yeah, it's sharing revenues funny because it's not actually all that nearly every public company, for example, you know the revenue. But when you're in Andy Hacker, it's super personal because it's like a one or two person business, and suddenly your company's revenue is like equivalent to your income. So you just gonna tell everybody what you make. But like you said, I think it's super inspirational to see all these revenue numbers. And I'm glad that we live in a world where that's more common and people are more okay with being transparent because it's not only helpful for everybody who's trying to build. But it's also helpful for people like you who are the ones doing the sharing, your posting, these milestones and Andy hackers. And I can see in the comments people giving you tips and suggestions for, like, how to improve your YouTube set up and had a record high quality video,

et cetera. So it's pretty crazy to live in this world where entrepreneurs are helping each other out. It's almost like open source entrepreneurship spending thing with developers forever. We share a code. We share all our secrets. But in the business world, it's always been like more normal toe, have secrets and not to share what's going on. And I love that it's becoming normal just to share everything

behind the scenes. You mentioned something interesting about Adam buildings. Ah, community around this product, the way I set it up for my own line coughs is that I I am thinking Aggie tub, private repositories and all repositories. We've the the stripe subscription, so people, so it's not wide like a slack or discard shot. But people can post issue. They contribute, turns off stuff to the costs, the material of the coughs, a Z can help each other out. I can supercool. It's ah, this model off synchronizing membership.

We've like, private, get a brick row stories. I really like it because you have a community. You interact with your communities, interact with each other. It's not too wild because, you know, the getup is very good. It's very structure. I mean, they are doing it already for huge open source projects. So it's, um I'm really enjoying this mother.

Yeah, Seems like it would work really well. And you've kind of empowered people to interact with each other and help each other out. And I think you know how difficult talk about luck and entrepreneurship and what helps you to get lucky. And I think the more your interactive in people, the more that you can sort of build an audience or a community or share in public. Then the more opportunities you have to meet, that one right person is gonna give you the best idea or contribute the best pool request to depository or do something that really helps you. And I found that Help me within the actors a lot like I was interviewing people in the early days and I don't even think about hacker news is like a distribution channel for posting interviews, and one of the people that I interviewed did that on her own. And that kind of like was how I discovered my grocery oddity for Andy hackers. And so I think with you, you know, the fact that you're interacting with so many people in talking to them and letting them contribute is also gonna, like, kind of increase your luck surface area. And it's it's yet another reason. I think it was probably 10 so far in this episode why you should build in public and whites and interactive people.

This is crazy because I have found out about India, aka for account use, and it sounds like it was almost a happy coincidence that it happened.

Could have never happened if I if I didn't get lucky and have somebody who was working with me, you know, have that idea. But anyway, we could probably talk all day. This is gonna be a quick shot officer that's longer than any other quick, Jennifer said. But I would love to have you on the podcast again at some point. The future to check up on how you're doing before we close out here. Are there any words of advice that you think beginning and the hackers should take away from your story and what you've learned so far?

Two things really embraced vulnerability because I really think when you get started, then you have no momentum. Maybe no customers, no revenue. It's so easy, you know, toe feel like what you're doing is is kind of silly, and you really have toe. Try to bid some confidence off some fillets. Ease with the fact that you're making yourself very narrow board. I think it's one of the biggest elder, especially if you know society. You know, people who have, like corporate jobs might look down on you for trying to do something different, living your life in your own terms. And at the beginning,

I think it's there easy toe to feel like you're doing something wrong because you're not, you know, following the same path than everyone else. And the second advice he's. I can really say that like I mentioned at the beginning of the piece that I'm like, so happy living this in Jack your lifestyle and I can honestly say that I wouldn't be here today if he was not for India, aka and the community you are building. So I can only encourage people to use it because it's really finding out about these interviews originally, which were Sheldon, I can use. So you would say that Sudden Levi's these gars to leave your life in your own terms and doing what you want joy doing and making a living out of it. Well, not like dreams to pursue, but really concrete Gore's that you could achieve following, like also actionable items and really specific steps. And that was just so inspiring for me. And also I learned so much like practical things out of it. So I can only encourage people to use the community because it has really meant a lot for me. So

be vulnerable and use, and you have exactly pieces of device that I can get behind. Thank you so much will, for the kind words and for sharing everything that you've learned with us. Keitel listeners where they can go to find your YouTube videos and your courses and anything else you're working on online.

Yeah, so hopefully my YouTube channel would be linked in the show notes and so subscribed and smash. But like button like this in the community. And you can also find me on Twitter to have more like, granular updates on what I'm doing, what I plan in terms off like next leaders and so on. All right, thanks again. Well, thank you so much for having me

listeners. Thes quick chat episodes are open to anyone who is running an early stage company. So if you're interested in coming on and telling your story, go to Andy. Hackers dot com create a product page and post some milestones, and every so often I pick the ones that are the most helpful, the most inspirational, and I invite the founders onto the podcast. Once again, that's nd hackers dot com. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next time.