What's up, everybody? This is Courtland from Andy hackers dot com, and you're listening to the Indy Hackers podcast on this show. I talked to the founders of profitable Internet businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they get to where they are today? How do they make decisions? But the companies and in their personal lives and what exactly, makes their businesses tick? And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from the examples and go on to build our own profitable Internet businesses. And today's episode I sat down with Rand Fishkin, the CEO of Spark Toro, who is perhaps best known as the founder of Moss, and he's one of the world's foremost experts at searches and optimization.

Ryan and I are also good friends in real life, so we decided to sit down for a casual chat, just talk about what's going on in each other's lives, how we're dealing with this cove in 19 pandemic and making business decisions as a result of it, and also how he's grown his company spark Toro in the last two years since he was on the podcast. I hope you enjoyed FC. How's life? Otherwise? How're you

personal like everyone else? Some days are good. Some days are really emotionally hard and personally relatively unaffected. We, Geraldine and I both worked from home, as you know, and we have, you know, relatively sizable house. So I could be out here in the shed and she's in the house and, like, we're not sort of stepping all over each other like my friends in New York apartments right now. Er, kind of nightmare situations. Bay Area, too, I'm sure.

And we're very social, you know, we have a lot of friends, but, you know, So I think we're missing out on a lot of, like going out and seeing people and having people over. We don't have kids, so we don't You know, we aren't impacted in the way that a ton of parents are right now, right? Yeah, and we both have careers that are, I don't want to say unaffected but lighter have a lighter effect from the broader kind of secondary tertiary impacts of the economic market, rather than directly impacted by health care things or physical things even, You know,

I do a ton of conferences and events, right? So I cancelled a tremendous amount of travel. Yep. Thankfully, with, like, one exception, everything was refundable. You know, that Net net of that is basically spark Taro, saving a bunch of money on me, probably reaching more people through a lot of online events because I think I've been asked to d'oh two or three video events every week for the next six weeks. Wow s. So that's been kind of nice, but I think Gerald and I are both three empathetic people.

We have a lot of friends all over the world, and so we kind of experience the wave of I should read the news, and I should pay attention. My social. Ever since when my friends were up to Oh, my God, everything so horrible and so overwhelming. And somebody people being hurt by this How can I help what? You know, Let me do a 1,000,000 things and donate to charities and, you know, support this person's efforts and go and buy this and reach out to this person into a call with them. And then Oh, my God. I feel overwhelmed by all of that. And I just need to crawl under a rock and play video games, much TV you for a day. And then even the cycle begins again, right?

It's pretty stunning out. Such a global crisis can affect all of us so differently. And I've had kind of the same experience where personally, I'm just not nearly as affected as so many other people. I mean, I've got an online job. I already worked from home. I'm not worried about my job security. I'm not worried about it. Just a lot of things were, You know, I'm mostly worried about, like my family and keeping them safe, but business wise and personally, it's just not affected me that much. And so a lot of my energy has spent hourly on other people. But then there's still this weird psychological effect. We're just knowing what's going on in the world still can tire you out and exhaust to you and affect you psychologically. Emotionally,

I don't think there's any way that a rational, sort of kind, empathetic person can read the news or, you know, follow there. Even their friends and family stories and be unaffected. Does matter how resilient you are. You will understand the depth and breath of both the crisis itself and, you know, the economic challenges. But yesterday I was watching the video of the you know, the trenches, the mass graves that they're digging in New York. You know, seeing coffin after coffin loaded into these hits, that air dug out of the earth and just it's unreal iron up. That is an overwhelming experience, right? It's like a reliving a plague from hundreds of years ago.

It's unreal. And so it's almost unimaginable in its It's crazy because it's like this happened so fast. I mean, four months ago, this was not on anybody's radar. And now, like the entirety of society has shifted. It's the only basically the only thing that matters

anymore. Yeah, yeah, well, I'm in the, um I think in the United States in particular, right? That the tragedy is is just how preventable it waas, right? It compared to a lot of place. I mean, you know, we have a lot of friends and family in Italy, and I think for Italians it hit them so early and so hard, and it was so poorly understood. You know there was bad information. Various people can debate whether some of that was intentionally misleading or just ignorance,

right? You know, Italy. I don't think they had much of a choice and probably a lot of a lot of Europe as well. But the United Kingdom, the United States can, uh, you know, a lot of other places didn't have that option of taking it seriously. Responding softly.

We have time. We have data. We had information. We ignored a lot of it. There's a lot of this Wieder denial going on. You know, We see things on the news, and it's not happening here, so it can't happen here. You know, I also cancel a time travel. Obviously, we're gonna be in Italy. I did go to Mexico like, a week before everything shut down. And it was just so interesting talking to people there about what's going on, because I have this huge concert.

This is right after he canceled south by Southwest and their quotes from the people of the concert or insane like, Oh, this is a serious situation and we need to be careful. But at the same time, you gotta have fun

and I was just thinking, This

is the one time and probably your entire life span where, like that is not true. You don't have to go to this joint concert right now is literally every other year. It's fine. This is not the right time. But there's just this resistance, I think, changing. You know, I talked to some friends as well, who were saying, I don't think it's gonna be an issue in United States. We have common sense. You know? We know not to go around sick people. What are you talking about? And then in Mexico,

I heard the same thing in Mexico, you know, we have a lot of river hygienic people. We know how to stay clean, and it's like the number of excuses and rationalizations for not taking this thing seriously. It's almost exactly like a monster movie or a horror movie or disaster movie where you know what's coming, because that's what the movie is about. But all the characters are oblivious and just doing all the wrong things, and apparently that's realistic. That's what happens in real life, too.

Oh, God, I hate those movies. I hate watching that. We're just, uh granted, there's something that could kill us at any time you have the gun. But why don't you go without

sets up the plot? But it always seems so unrealistic until it happens in real life. And you're like, Oh, I guess this is exactly what people do.

Yeah, pretty wild. I don't know how close the numbers you are, but yeah, yeah. I mean, part of my curiosity around strike more broadly is like the whether the sectors that are experiencing increased demand right now are making up for some of the sectors that are experiencing loss demand, especially online. Right, cause my senses, so much of what's happened in person commerce has kind of gone away entirely, right? We just don't We don't really have the option other than maybe take out or grocery and pharmacy. Everything else has to be done via the web. And so, you know, I have this curiosity around whether Oh,

yeah, you know, stripes may be seen some sectors that have suffered, but there's so much more online activity that overall business is up. And this this is what I heard from some of the analysis from It's like Hub Spot and similar Web. Remember who else? Oh, the New York Times was looking at it for looking at the shift online that activity. And, yeah, I have a lot of curiosity around that, right, cause it seems very plausible to me that even if the economy overall takes a 25% hit, 30% hit, which is which is just massive, right,

that's great depression levels or worse, that so much activity will shift online. Right? Folks who is who have been in our online providers will actually see similar levels of business or or increasing, depending on

your offer. Yeah, we know the answers to this, and we know it. Even on a country by country level, I will find out what I'm allowed to share and get back to you on. Hopefully, maybe there's some stuff in public because I think it's fascinating.

I would love to see that, you know, and I think that folks were aggregating data and sharing that out right now that is hugely usually valuable. And I, you know, I know the team from profit well, which analyzes writing is connected to a lot of stripe accounts, and so they aggregate data from you folks. I'm not sure if they do other payment providers as well, but, you know, they've been sharing some of their stuff. I got their email newsletter last week, and that looked really interesting. So we'd love to hear what you're seeing. If you share that on Indy hackers or Twitter account that

the awesome. This is actually what I really want to talk to you about today, which is communicating sort of while we're in this time of crisis, about the crisis itself. You've been doing something that I think a lot of people are afraid to do. Which is your blogging very directly about the proud of Iris on your company. Blawg. I think a lot of people are afraid to do it because, quite frankly, it's hard to do it right. Whereas you are prolific. Like I said earlier, you've been blogging every single week. Previous this I saw, like a new spark Tora block post every month or two. You. But you've been going at it. So tell me about that. Why are you blocking so much about it

and how you're approaching it? Yeah. I mean, I think Geraldine, my wife says that keeping busy right now is like a coping mechanism for me, and I think that's that's probably true. I think there's also an aspect of feeling overwhelmed by the pain and hardship that there are other people experiencing and getting, you know, ask questions via by social channels, the email, you know, on calls, all that kind of stuff and wanting to spread whatever knowledge I have or whatever opinions I got in ways that could be helpful, right? So there's people in me. I have something that can help it. It's marketing advice,

which is admittedly not quite the same as going the hospital and saving lives. But if it can help anybody, I feel an obligation to do that. And I think I think that's the right thing for businesses, organizations, individuals of all kinds. Speaker. I was on a webinar type thing yesterday, a big like group zoom hangout for start ups, and I was asked the question, Should I feel ashamed or embarrassed to do marketing right now? Because now the right time to just kind of cut it off and, you know, bring it back later when the world is in crisis, because it feels really odd to be like, Oh,

you know, Are you or your business struggling right now? My law firm can help, right? Right, And that I get it like that feels awkward. It feels I think people are right to have some hesitancy around that. And I think the only way to do it correctly is to have empathy both for your customers, an audience and also an ability to read the broader situation and then apply that thoughtfully with your words and wording and positioning. And I think there's probably people who don't know how to do it right who just feel like I don't trust myself to be able to do that. So I'm gonna pull back entirely. Honestly, that's okay, right? I think maybe maybe that's fine. And you can leave it up to other people on your team or consultants or an agency,

or folks who can help you with that. You can run it by people before you publish. You couldn't. If your business can sustain it right, you could hit pause on a lot of this stuff. But for me, I think I am reasonably good at being able to read a room and be thoughtful to folks, and so far what I put out there has been received. Vory, thankfully and non promotional e. And so that's the way I want to lead. I think that's I think that's one great way to avoid the problem of being seen as exploitative or overly. Promotional is to position whatever you're doing, as I am not going to personally or directly benefit from this. But here is this work that I believe will help someone,

and you've done such a good job blending what you do as a market analyst book tour offers with the messaging that you put out because you're not just like okay, here's a helpful thing for Corona virus. Here's how you can get tested. Here is how you can protect your family, your sort of specifying, Here's how you as a business can take part in this conversation effectively,

right? Like I don't think now is the time to everyone. Become professional epidemiologist or amateur epidemiologist, righted and go give advice about whatever your numbers, and I can't remember the tweets I saw a few weeks ago that were like, Okay, if I see you tweeting about Corona virus numbers and you're a tacky. I know not to listen to you. Yeah, And so my sense is, if you have expertise and authority and experience in an area and that area can be helpful to people, that's where to lean in, Uh, not trying to become something that you're not.

Wonder how much of a sort of principles you put into this have changed from now are from earlier before this pandemic to now, Because some of the things we're talking about are, you know, being aware of what your audience wants and reading the room and basically being helpful is that something that you're thinking about on Lee Now, is that something that you're always thinking about when you're blogging and marketing? Are you sort of shift the ratio?

I would see that I personally have almost always been in that in that bucket. But my advice has not always been that way, right, because I think historically, I recognize that you can be Maur sales focused more directly selling and promoting in positioning your products, and that can do very well. So even though that's not the way I like to do marketing, that doesn't mean it doesn't work or didn't work. I think what's interesting about this prices were going through is that it has taken a lot of that sort of, You know, if this is help people and then rely on the branding that you build with them to mean the health in the future, think highly of you and check you out and wanna work with you. And on this side it is this other side. It's go direct, sell the thing that you're offering to people you know. It's paid your your shameless about it, right?

And both approaches have worked in most sectors. Both approaches can and have worked for different people, right? They resonate with this, bring audiences differently. But both work. Now this sale side is working a lot. Last well,

It's like the window sort of shifted over from one side to the other. One is kind of cut off, the very sales decided. Now that just seems super taboo tone deaf,

uh, and and And I think less effective also because right now people are so budget conscious that you can see this in especially. There was really good data from hub spots on email marketing, So don't mention tweeted about it. I saw it maybe yesterday, the day before, but basically Hub Spot was analyzing their 70,000 customers, looking at the e mails that were effective for them and the ones that are basically direct sales outreach, which, you know lots of people send those types of emails through upstarts system. Those were down a considerable

amount of news of

their effectiveness. People were sending more of them and they were working less and less effectively over the last six weeks. Conversely, marketing, education, free content, you know, essentially what you might want to call content marketing types of emails. Those have higher open rates. Then they did six weeks ago and were consistently trending up. And we're driving more actions. You know, you can see it in the numbers as well as kind of feel it in the

room. Talk to me about your reading routine because I'm reading your block post. You're constantly quoting these different reports from Hub Spot and from similar Web, and you just seemed to be on it. You know, all the numbers, you know, the stats, and you're putting a lot of information and to what you're putting out there How often are you reading? What are you reading? How do you stay informed and learn what to share?

Yeah, s o. I have to admit I am unhelpfully addicted to reading content on the web. There's no doubt about it. You know, there's that Star Trek a card mean that comes up. Sometimes we see every morning you wake up damage report, look around the ship. And I think that's I'm very much in that world. I would say I probably consume, you know, no less than 40 or 50 articles today. Wow, sometimes more than that, even on weekends. I'm the kind of person who it's refresh on the new hacker news submissions.

Yeah,

they're one of the sparked are trending, which is like a little free tool that we built that tracks everything that Web marketers talk about. I visit that six times a day. I'm subscribed to a bunch email digests. I read pocket all the

time, and this is always This isn't just like since the

pandemic became only thing, I would say volume since the pandemic started is probably up three or four X for me. So maybe it was 5 to 10 articles a day that I'd read, and now it's 30 or 40.

Which kind of alliance of some of the numbers you've been sharing about how many more hours people are spending on the Internet, how much more traffic media and these websites are getting. Everybody can't stop

reading. I mean, I'm not alone, right for sure. A different kind of world. The New York Times piece I found fascinating in there. I think other people had identified this before. I had thought of it. But desktop is way up for the first time in like, 10 years, and Mobile is down for the first time in

10 years because we're not

going anywhere because you're not going anywhere. You have to be on video all the time. So we're on our laptops and desktops, not our mobile.

I'm trying to get my mom to use her laptop more. She apparently has some huge, bulky laptop, and every time I talked to her, she's on her phone like Mom, just call me on your laptop. It'll be faster if I want to move it. So there's a few holdouts, but the rest of us are on our desktops. Another thing I've noticed in the way that you're writing in communicating, and I don't know if this is different now than it was before, but you're very personal. I think there's always gonna divide between who you are as a founder and the message that your business puts out. And for you it seems like there is no divide like you've taken that blurry line and just erased it, even like your sparked. A Twitter account has no tweets. It all just comes from you personally. Rand Fishkin. How do you think about communicating through your business and then the line between that and who you are as a

person? I think that for a certain kind of audience, that very human, very personal touch resonates nicely. That is not began, not true for everyone. And there are certain sectors and certain kinds of companies where I don't think it's worked well. But for me, for the audience that I want to build for the business that I want to build, it works extraordinarily well, and I think it creates far more engagement of the right Kai. I think that a business tweeting hosting, sharing, putting out content when it is disconnected from an author. It feels corporate, which could mean professional and polished but can also mean inauthentic, difficult to empathize with inhuman and now in particular,

you know, like we talked about earlier with the sort of empathy. Read the room stuff. You know, the tone is shifted worldwide, and so that stuff looks like a very smart, strategic and tactical move. Not necessarily that it always has been, or that it's the only way to go. But I don't know how intentionally done with any hackers, right? The voice has always been one of sort of like, Yeah, this is just us. There's no, like big corporate umbrella organization,

right? It's sort of It's like you and your brother, right? And there you go. That's That's what you get

even after we got acquired by, uh, yeah, Corporate. Yeah, I think it's particularly useful in any sort of business endeavor where you need a connection with your audience, and especially where there's some education going on, because people just feel a lot more comfortable learning from a human who is flawed, and he struggles with things and his reasoning things out and can identify with them when they're stuck and you do a lot of education on the spark. Tora Blawg. You're educating people how to be better marketers, how to be better humans. It makes a lot of sense. And I've seen this with other educators that brought on the platform to the people we talked most about

audience. How was it? So I've been a part of right have been the acquirer. In several scenarios, I acquired three companies. Why was CEO Ma's? Um, they acquired a couple more after I stepped down one after I left and have also observed, had a ton of friends whose companies were acquired and brought into businesses, and I got 99% of the time. The tone, the leadership, like everything changes. I don't know that there's like that big piece just this past week out Instagrams acquisition by Facebook. And, like how Zuckerberg sort of drove away. The founders know how completely accurate it was.

But, you know, there was definitely a tone of truth that rang true for me. You know, when I have, I've messed up plenty on this front, like, how is it that strike was so and continues to be so hands off. So smart about stay, you know, keeping away from ruining this wonderful thing.

I've got a lot of emails from people who have been going through acquisitions on the founder side, asking me for advice based on what happened with me, and I have found that I'm unable to give advice because every situation so different so much depends on the exact interplay between the two companies. I think in striping any hackers case, the fact that Andy hackers exist it's such a smaller scale than stripe is actually really advantageous that there isn't as much of an incentive four stripe to need to come in and medal of things and change things because it's going to move the numbers that stripe significantly, if only in the hackers were do X sort of a less of a temptation to like put your hand in the cookie jar and change things. So I think you know some of these, like underlying the lack of incentives can really help you make wiser decisions. I think for a Facebook, for example, and Seagram is was a potential existential threat. It was a massively successful company making acquisition like that for a $1,000,000,000 however, much it was. You want to start doing things, you want to start mucking around, and you could sort of justify doing it because you can tell a story about how it will make your business better. If you do,

Where's the stripe? I think Andy Hackers is more aspirational. Andy Hackers could grow to become a thing that really helps strike, but it's not quite there yet in terms of just size and material numbers based impact. And so there's less without incentive. And the second thing I'll say is that Patrick Collison and the Strike leadership team are just very smart people. They're very thoughtful people. They've read all the same stories that you and I have read about horror stories, acquisitions. And I think they also have had the sort of discipline to avoid making those mistakes, even when it feels like you might want to you. So

one of the superpowers I think of running a company is being able Thio learn from other people's mistakes instead of just your own super hard. I don't know why that is so difficult, why we all have to stumble through it right? You think that we would be able to internalized the mistakes that other people have made the way we do in sort of other situations.

We're not touching hot stoves.

We're not. Yeah, right. Like I don't have to screw up every recipe in orderto learn to follow recipes. I don't have to do a terrible job of whatever building furniture before I read the ikey instructions. I don't have Thio, you know that. It's gonna be difficult for me to rewire my own electricity and thus hire a professional expert. And yet, somehow, when you know, once mom's got to a few $1,000,000 in revenue, I was like, how? Yeah, I'm gonna buy this company. I'm gonna do this with it and I'm gonna buy that company and you do this with it because I'm a genius.

Maybe there's something to do with being in charge and just like you must be a genius. I'm with the head of this ship. Look at how great it's done so far on, that sort of blinds us to it. Maybe you know, one thing I've seen with Andy hackers and honestly, just trying to look ended like a CEO for Andy hackers and noticing that outside of a really specific things. Founders actually don't do a lot of searching for sort of how high level, How do I do this type stuff? What they do is they kind of ask around specific people or they just try and fail. And I think from what I've seen on the form and how people behave, I think people all kind of believe that their company is special in some way that the variables that apply to their company, I think it's hard for them to see commonalities. They say, Well, I have this specific situation. Well,

I'm bootstrapping or I'm located in this country or I'm in this industry and they're just so many variables or if you're making a recipe, you the same stove, it's of everybody else. You have the same utensils, everybody else. And so you're just like, yeah, copy paste mapped it onto this. Maybe that's something that some of that going on well, just don't believe others experiences apply to them.

I think you must be right. I think the other challenge certainly some of the time and in my early years for sure was like the lack of examples, right? Like now, Now I feel like, Oh, there's so many people sharing so many stories You know, if you're not paying attention, it's your loss right and leave. I don't know if you've done a perfect child of that, but I definitely tried to listen to a lot of folks. I think one of the best things we've gotten this far far Oh, for sure has been to hire consultants in agencies right and not assume like Oh, yeah, let's hire and do that in house. No, I want someone who deals with people like us all the time and is seen a 1,000,000 things go wrong and right and have them tell us what to do right? That feels so much smarter than tryingto reinvent the wheel.

That does sound smart. So that's one of the things I tried to do with any hackers is put a lot of stories out for people to learn from, so that they can, you know, not have to stumble through these mistakes because even just a few years ago,

the whole thing of India hackers is basically like here is a database right, a massive list of people who are like you experiencing your same problems and a community where you can go. And you know, if anecdotes are the way that you learn and internalize, it's

magical. Yeah, that's what I thought when starting it. Now I'm more convinced that the purpose of any hackers is you're gonna go out and make all those mistakes without reading anything. And then, once you've made those mistakes show, show up at Indy hackers and be like, I need to read some of this stuff because I messed up not reading

it earlier. You can still save you a lot of future pain, right? Because you only have to have that one moment of realization to come over.

Let's talk about your story with support Toro and sort of added to the ah added to the database. The last time you were on the show was two years ago, April 2018. Back then, you were kind of just getting started. Remind us what sparked Toro is and why you started it.

Sure, yes, so it's a market research, an audience intelligence tool. It's software as a service so very familiar to your audience and the other half in the hacker crew. It is like most in the hacker businesses. It is not institutionally funded. We did raise money, but in a very unique way. Just a couple months, actually, after you and I chatted. So in June of 2018 we closed around 1.3 million. We hope it will be our first and only ever round. It's from Angel investors who put money into an LLC that pays them back through profits. Crazy if you're listening to what guest? That was me opening my mouth wide and surprised.

I know profits. Madness sounds crazy in the start up world. But, you know, for us, we knew we wanted to build a proper a long term, profitable business that could essentially get to profitability as quickly as possible and then exist for a very long time and pay out dividends on not be forced into a growth at all costs. Or if we only grow 10 or 50 acts, that's not nearly enough. It has to be 100 or 500 or 1000 in order to make our investors money. So I think even though after leaving MAS, I certainly could have gone the venture past again. You know, I raised about $30 million with that business and Bill Tub a reasonably successful company there, you know, maybe when a venture capitalist might consider a base hit to use their terminology.

But with Spark Tara, we did not want to do that. I'm not a big fan of the venture ecosystem for turn of reasons, and I won't get a ton into the that but basic story After you and I last chatted. So we raised that round. We spent the next about year building our product. We kept the team just Casey and myself. We used a few contractors for a couple of things, mostly on the visual design. Are you? I you outside, we launched a sort of Alfie version for just a small number of people, including our investors in probably about a year ago. Around April of me, 19 worked on improving that did two rounds of beta over the summer, and then in December,

we basically kind of did one more big redesign of the whole system after we've gotten a lot of data feedback. We didn't beat us with 500 people total of maybe 400 and then we've been doing early access launch in February and March, we were just about to launch one Corona virus. Now we've been kind of like pulling back and China read the room, figure out whether weather and when we should go forward. But right now, as of right now, the plan is to launch in a couple

weeks Here. It's funny how often it's said that to be a founder, you need to be nimble. You need to be able to react. But I found it's actually pretty rare that something happens that makes you have to change all your plans. That there's a global pandemic are competitive releases. Ah, crazy product. It's possible to go five or six years without ever having that happen hasn't been easy for you to sort of like the late things or change up your plans. How much thinking has gone into?

Yeah, I would say it has actually been very, very easy. 11 of the things that's wonderful about having a very small organization, right, just two of us. And yes, we have. I would say we have sort of overarching pressure from investors and customers and sort of, ah, large community of marketers that pays attention to me and what I d'oh, uh, that has not sort of seeped into our day to day operations, Right? Casey and I are very independent. We, you know,

even in normal times, we'd get together, maybe once every two or three weeks in person go through our sort of task lists. And it was often the case that we could go two weeks without even having a single conversation, maybe a few emails back and forth. But you know where we are, extremely independent operators. We sort of put our heads down and go do with our work that we know is gonna contribute. And that's right, right? It's like Rand build up our email list for really access. Talked all the beta testers get all the feedback put all the dot bubble of Casey. Oh, build all this. Okay, Great.

Super independent. A lot of people don't know this, but you work from a shed in your backyard. So you're

how does what you're looking at right now?

You know, this is the shed.

This is a shining

eyes is incredibly

fancy. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Well,

it's got, like, a bookshelf behind them, and then a nice seat, and it looks like you're inside of a house.

So it's it's rough in the summer because the shed gets very hot. But in the winter, I have this nice space heater. So we've been, like I said, largely unaffected by this, But we did recognize that tryingto launch in the midst of the conversation being about anything but market research tools. Yeah, right now was not gonna go well for us. And we could actually see that in our early access data. So that Courtland we basically I think we did one early access invite to a couple 1000 people in late February. And that cohort performed extraordinarily well for us. Like that number's coming out of that word nuts. I sent an investor update email that was like, Oh, I think you have made a very, very good choice putting money into Sparta,

Tara, because, you know, we are, as of pre launch one year ahead of our projections, right? And so that was pretty exciting. The next early access e mail we sent, which was two weeks later, you know, now, middle of March know that performed about 1/4 as well. Wow. And, uh, Yeah,

that's been the trend with our last few cohorts. So we've been giving people early access anyway. But seeing that cancellation rates are much higher, conversion rates are much lower, which is OK, right? We're gonna be fine. Our goal is Hey, we know we need to get this thing out there in the market and give people access to tools and eventually when they need us to come to us. So let's be a little more generous with free access. Let's be a little more generous with our content and how we're helping. And let's worry a little bit less about our revenue we have. We still have about almost half of our investment dollars still less weaken, you know, power through the next 12 18 months. No problem.

I have, like, a 1,000,000 questions. I wanna ask you the first being, you know, it's it's hard to lunch. Obviously, in any sort of environment where there isn't room for excitement, it's hard to be excited now with any hackers. We did a thing at the beginning of the year. We started counting how many Andy hackers have gotten started this year, and we like tweeting about it and being excited like it's 5000 6000. I don't want to say anything like, you know, makes me seem super excited when all the other news, every other tweeted my timeline is negative. So what's your plan for? How you're gonna go through with this launch of the mood out there is still so somber.

Yeah, I think the right way to play that is to express the appropriate level of excitement, as in my excitement is still high around the product that we have built and the launch of it. But it is totally damper to recognize this really challenging environment that we're in. And so I think the way to play that for us is to have lowered expectations around how much amplification and sharing we will get to be less, I want to say, sort of less demanding of our audiences of the people that we asked help promoted of people who might do case studies, right? I think it's still find, asked like Hey, Portland, did you wanna check out an account with Spark Taro? If you have some bandwidth to write about it, Awesome. If not, no worries. Hope you're staying safe and well,

as opposed to like, Hey, man, I really need your help. We're doing our long I speak right and it's not It's not too different messages, but it's two different styles. Someone who commented on linked in and they were like, I feel like we're at a funeral like we are all attending someone's funeral because, well, literally, so many hundreds of thousands of people have died. And I like that analogy a lot. Not just because I thought it appropriately captured the sobriety of tone that we're seeking, but also because a funeral is a place where if we go when we go, we don't exclusively talk about the person who's passed right. The death itself is not the only topic of conversation.

We asked how each other are doing. We talk about food, We talk about our hobbies. We talk about our work. We talk about our friends. We talk about our loved ones and Emily's. We talk about adorable things that kids are doing right. We might talk about a museum we went to, and that's all fine. It's just that the tone is a little different. It's not as gleeful. It's not as bright, meaning in the in the light source sight and away. And I think that's right. And that's exactly how I would say we're planning to approach the launch, right? We know we're having the conversation during a funeral, so we're gonna we're gonna take the temperature in the tone, but we're not gonna not have the conversation

at all in such an insightful analogy. And I love your point about lowering your expectations, having less demand that you put on other people, which I think is crucial because if you kind of go into this with the same expectation you always had. That's the kind of mind that I think that drives you to make gas and mistakes and to feel bad. And I think you just have to understand that if we're going into recession, you'll probably make less money than you would have otherwise. And that's okay if we're dealing with the global crisis. You can't be as excited and expect as many shares as you otherwise could get, and that's fine. Just lower expectations. It's still okay. Make sure the financials work out, but other than that, you're probably make bad decisions if you think everything is going to be the same as

it was before. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that there's really good ways to do marketing right now that still helpful to other people. So I I have agreed to a ludicrous number off, you know, webinars and interviews and all these 10 things and one of the things that I've talked to, a lot of the webinars that have invited me a lot of the immense that turned into Webinars. I just say, like, hey, instead of travel costs or offering me an honorarium or anything like Don't just donate, can you send that money to give directly? And it's kind of cool. I think, you know, already tallied up like,

1500 bucks so far and have another 500 or start coming from this thing that I'm gonna do with with, well, Reynolds in a few weeks and more after that. So that's another sort of way. Hey, we're going to do this announcement. We're going to do this launch and also with some of our whatever revenue, some of the attention that we get some community we're building. We will help people who are in me.

So another thing I really want to talk about is the super cool fund raising mechanism you had, where you only really wanted to raise money once and so far you only have and you're sort of directly incentivized to turn a profit so you can pay back your investors. You're not incentivize, so just grow as fast as possible and bring on more investors. Which is exactly what all my sort of high growth startup friends we're talking about right now. The fund raising environment and how hard it's gonna be raised. More money, etcetera. But that's not your concern. How does that work so far? It's been two years. Do you feel like you have any regrets? And he changes you would make if you could go back in time. Any comments about other founders might be considering doing the same thing.

I think it is still, unfortunately, a little early for me to be insolent. Able to answer that fully. As of right now, I have absolutely loved the pressure to stay low cost with a high potential margin business as opposed to a high potential growth business and Corona virus makes us look like geniuses in this design of our business. aspect, right, because we sort of set up a system whereby we would be one of the startups most likely to not need any future funding to get through it, be able to survive the crisis, effectively have a business that was long term, built for a recession or even a depression. So, yes, I'm thrilled about that. I would say our investors have generally been not even generally you know what to a person, they have been somewhere between quiet and extraordinarily supportive.

I couldn't ask for anything better than that. I also love the fact that the group that we assembled tended to be people who could be very helpful to the business. And so that means that at any time I can reach out to them. And I have several times. About a month ago when Cove it was kind of overtaking every conversation, we had a conversation. Uh, Casey and I e mailed Ben Giessen and Carl Blanks, who run conversion rate experts out of the UK and their investors in Spark TRO were like hip in and Carl like, would you guys be willing to jump on the phone with us for like an hour 90 minutes and just talk through all the scenarios of launch and conversion rate, opposition and positioning and all this kind of stuff that we're thinking through because it is very, very different, right? We recognize once we hit that second cohort that performs so much more poorly than the 1st 1 did, we knew that we were gonna hit headwind. And that was great,

right? Essentially, I don't what that conversation would have cost thousands of dollars if we weren't, You know, if they were in our investors, but awesome. We get their help for free, right, and they're they're incentivized help us. And that's been true with a ton of folks across the Web market world. So I think one of the other unintentionally smart things that we did was to raise money from people who were in our world and our customers is world, because that gave them both empathy for us as entrepreneurs and also the ability to help us reach our market and better target our mark. All that kind of stuff right then And Carl on the call, right? Carla's describing to be Hey, yeah,

you know, we've been users with sparked a row over here, a TSE ari and our ah ha moment came when we did this thing for this client. And as soon as we did that and we sent them the results, you know, we did a ton more for them, but we were able to charge them this much, and that was the thing that stood out in their mind. So if you can get other customers like us to have that ah ha moment with your product, this thing's gonna be huge. That's what you should focus Home was great.

One of the best things about having investors at the very least, mentors or advisors or colleagues. You can hit them up and they run companies to, and they can tell you about what's going on and give you the customer's perspective. And also, I think they're pretty motivating. It's not easy to run off nothing but intrinsic motivation All day, every day your mood changes, you're energy changes. But I wonder, do you feel a sense of obligation? Do you feel like you're more efficient that you care more because you have other people that you're trying to make hole?

I am someone who cares deeply about other people and that, you know that applies sort of in the broader world but also applies internally for me and South. I know that if there's people who care about my performance in progress and they're they're watching that, that's a wonderful motivator for me in a healthy way. You know, where it got really painful with. Maws was realizing, you know, maybe about a year, two years after I stepped down from the CEO role that, you know, two things became true. One I could see that that business was never going to. I don't want to say never, probably never going to hit the you know, 10 to 30 x returns mark on the $30 million that we did raised right. It just wasn't likely to sell for a $1,000,000,000 sometime before the event horizon right the horizon when it needed to return money to the funds and secondarily,

that I no longer had the power to influence. Right? So there's the there is obligation and expectation and commitment without power to influence. I think it's the same way. I don't know if you've ever or recently, you know, worked with the boss who sort of said like, Courtland, I need you to do acts and you and your like. Fine. I'm happy to do X, but you have to give me the power and authority to do X. No, I'm sorry. I can't do that. Sounds frustrating. Yeah, just a little bit. A

little bit, huh? So you feel like, because you are obligated to other people and you maybe not obligated. But you care about other people. You care about what they think. You're maybe working a little bit harder

on the obligation. The obligation is there. But so, too is the power. And there's no my investors do not have the power to remove me, right? Or to change the direction, right? They can't all get together and say, we want you to charge a lot more for spark. Tara, they can't do it. I mean, they could they could say, and I'd be like, All right, input noted,

Thanks for the feedback. Right. And it's my call, and that is a great thing, right? And so I would encourage a lot more entrepreneurs to structure their rounds in these types of ways, right? To get creative around it, you don't just because of inter capitals marketed to 99% of it. US does not mean it's right for 99% of us. It's wrong for most of us. Even venture capitalists will say,

Let's talk about you're sort of approach to growing spark Caro. Specifically, he said. It is a market research and audience intelligence tool that's like almost a new category. In a way, it's it's a lot of stuff you're doing that no one's done before. It's kind of hard, I think, to when you're doing that, explain what you're doing and find out what's gonna resonate with customers. How have you gone about solving that problem? Because I know so many Andy hackers are trying to figure out how to explain what I do in a way that customers understand because they know it's good for them. But, like, how do I get them to understand that? That

is a great question, because that has actually been one of our biggest challenge is 11 of the frustrations I had even back in April of 2018 when you and I first chatted about Spark Taro and then over the next nine months was I interviewed so many people who are our target customers. People who were doing the manual version of the work that you need to do to get Arturo's type of results right are the thing that we're trying to help people in a programmatically and ask them. Okay, you know how you go and try and figure out what your customers in your audience pays attention to, Like you try and figure out. Hey, what are the podcast they listen to so that we can get on this podcast? Never. What are the events that people go to? What are the YouTube channels they subscribed to? Who do they follow on social and what are they on Social? What did they read and listen to on the Web? All that all those questions that marketers have about their audience. So we talked to tons of people who did that work and ask them, What do you call that? And the most common response,

by far like 95 out of 100 said, I have no word for that. That stuff right? It's almost maddening to realize that there's this, you know, huge practice in the marketing world and in in product development and entrepreneurship as well, right? Cause it crosses over and all of those. And yet we don't have a name for it. And so it's not easy for us to position ourselves as we solved that problem. We call it audience intelligence, but most of time you say audience intelligence people like Okay, what's that? I don't know what that means. You were so much together. Okay,

right. Big freakin category could mean a 1,000,000 things. On the other hand, if you say I help with S e o, everybody knows what you do work, email, marketing or content marketing or but our video hosting If videoconferencing like everybody knows, but for us, a little more challenging. And so essentially, we've had to take this approach of much more individual marketing as opposed to weaken, do broadcast amplification and having lots of people get the idea of which problem we help them with. We understand that we have to draw them in through something else that they care about, educate them and inform them, and then rely on them to come back after having learned. And so that's meant a lot more things like broader content,

right? So from last couple years, I've been talking about problems like Google zero click searches, the shift in Internet used toward the Internet giants and monopolies and sort of control of that ecosystem. Talking about imbalances in online advertising, talking about broad marketing tactics and strategy, talking about helping people through, you know, cove in and marketing through that, right? So these very broad types of things that we hope will be useful and helpful to our our potential audience. And then they will come and learn more about us. So a very second order, effect, content, marketing,

type of thing rather than like, come to zoo, we do better. Videoconference come to spark Toro. We do better hang on. This is gonna be a long sentence.

So what does your father look like? I used one of these tools that you Bill, which is super useful, by the way I read one of your block post which are also super useful. At what point do I learn Maur about spark? Toro are enough so that I convert into a customer.

Yeah, most the time. We get that through one of three channels, they end up following usually me personally because I do most of sharing on a social channel, and then they see messages around Spark Taro and go check that out. Or they visit a piece of content from us and go directly to the blogger outside to the product page and see our stuff there or they learn about it. This was especially true the last 18 months. I conferences and events when I get up on stage and sort of give a like, Hey, here's where I am and what I'm doing And now here's the presentation or the other way around, Right, Here's the presentation and then buried somewhere in there is Oh, and there's this hard. You're hard to solve. Problem around marketing. That's what I'm working on or have anything to sell you. But eventually I hope to and move on through that.

So those all tended to leave people to the Spark Taro product pager home page, which Ben has a like getting email when we launch or get more sign up for early access. That's how we built our beta list we've had. Gosh, I want to say maybe a total of thirtyish 1000 people come through and put their email address is in there. You know, about 400 of those were part of the beta so basically selected from the around 15 20,000 who were in there when we started doing the beta lot summer and then took that. And most those people have now been sent an email for early access, and then that would be part of our launch list as well.

30,000 people is a remarkable number. What do you attribute most of that, too? I think most people who are trying to get people on their list will be happy to get 1/10 of that number.

And honestly, you're probably most businesses review would be fine with it, right? I think sparked our Oh, this is This is one of our huge strengths is the fact that we have a big audience who kind of cares about Let's see what Randall's after Mas, and I think that is a big driver that's probably a driver of almost half of it. And then I think the other half is through content, marketing and presentations and descriptions of the product and and having a long lead time, right, we got basically two years from funding tow launch almost two years from funding tow launch to build up our community, build up our marketing channels, you almost never get that and start up wrote right. Once you ready is money, it's like, all right, you better get to launch like nine months, maybe

as crazy. How much patience your fundraising model is allowed youto have, because even if you're going this sort of pure bootstrapping, Andy, hack around where you don't raise any money, there's still some time pressure. There's only so much time you can work without having a job where you need to be employed are your spouse goes crazy cause it's supporting you or something like that. But you've taken a sort of middle road where you get the best of both worlds. You don't have to answer to anybody, but you also don't need to have some sort of rocket ship growth out of the gate. You can take two years, get your product right, figure out your messaging, etcetera. So it seems like your Children your shed.

That was an intentional move, right? Casey and I knew, like, okay, we could fund this ourselves for maybe six months, but we don't think we convey, validate the market and the product and build the actual product in that one time. It's just gonna take longer. And we also knew we have a strength, which is this huge list. But we also have a weakness, which is everyone on that list. And thousands more people who are core customers and audience are going to check this thing out sometime in week one of law, right? As soon as we go live, many,

many marketers, and especially a lot of the most influential people in the marketing world, will go and check out the tool in product and whatever they think about it, that first time they use it. That is what will stick in their mind for a decade to come. I saw this with Mama's right. I know people who today when they think of Ma's, they think of the product they tried once in 2008 right? That's their only sort of benchmark for what his ma's make. I know people who think Ma's still does s yo consulting a business. We shut down Mom's shut down 13 years ago, right? That's how long brand impressions last, So I know that on Day one Spark Taro has to be very polished. And so we wanted this patient approach where he could have a long period to build to beta test early access test, to get feedback to improve and then finally get to this launch point that was gonna be well received.

You have until founders that you know there are billions and billions of websites, and the fact that somebody is on your website instead of any of the other billions of websites is always a minor miracle means you've done something right if they come back twice more major miracles. So you're right. I think you can take for granted the fact that people's first impressions matter. You're not necessarily going to get a chance to change that. One of the other things that you've done that a lot of founder struggle with is you built a very general purpose tool. There's lots of different ways that you could use parked or oh, there's lots of different customers who could use park toro, which is great because I think the potential upside is huge. You could be used for so many different things, but it also makes getting traction harder because you don't necessarily have one specific customer. Usually this is for you. And here's the perfect use case, and it's not that easy to get off the ground. What's your advice for people in that situation? And how are you handling that? It's parked over when there's so many different ways to use what you're building.

I actually think that unless you have the sort of unfair advantage of a huge community of people who are going to play with it and then experiment, learn, apply, adapt and then and then broadcast, which we we kind of do. I would say, You know, we have a lot of that. Not all of it, but a lot of it. If you don't have those advantages, I would go market by market, right? So if I did not have the kind of brand presence, an audience size and ability to promote that I d'oh, I were starting out fresh with spark. Carl,

I absolutely would be starting with probably something like small to midsize PR firms in the United States. Like that would be my one beginning market or would be content marketing firms, maybe right, like like one of those, too, because those air the most directly applicable. That's where we've seen a lot of customers success, you know, And then maybe I later go to B to C lifestyle companies that do a lot of content promotion and PR in house themselves. Right? And I would be like my second market and then I go to entrepreneurs and founders of early stage businesses were trying to get their marketing strategy right And then I go to you, you know, CEOs. And then I go to email marketers and event marketers on and on and on, right,

because you have an audience, you don't have to do that.

I have to do it less. We definitely started with essentially four customer primary customer targets that we were going after that. So I did most of my in person interviews with a lot of that was like visiting people's offices all around the country. When I go to speak at conferences, events and jumping on the phone with them, that kind of thing and those four customers targets ended up being the ones that we primarily built the product force and when we got feedback from those kinds of customers we took it, I would say Maur seriously than we took the feedback from other folks. Ah, lot of the suggestions that change the product came from those kinds of people. And then we found during early access well, even during beta testing and then into early access that another three or four groups of customers were having equal or even greater success with the product

as they were trying to learning as you

go along. Yeah, learning as we went along and being ableto you know, being able to simultaneously hit four of those markets instead of starting very exclusively with one other thing we probably would have done if, if I didn't have a big audience is we would have charged a lot more and sold a lot less right. So, you know, we probably would have started pricing Maur Enterprise grade and Done Sales Maur 1 to 1 like, Hey, here's this secret sauce for your agency. It's a few $1000 a year subscription as opposed to like yeah, you know, 150 bucks a month. Anyone consign

charge more is advice that I rarely hear people not get. It usually works really well.

I'm usually does for us. You know, I think it could work fine. But I, Casey and I, neither of us are interested in or willing to build a business that's too reliant on on 1 to 1 sales. And this choice,

right? I mean, marketing is your skill set. You're the best in the world of reaching lots of people with a message. So I

feel like I have built a self service software as a service business. Previously. I know that world might well have an audience for it. So I think we're one of the rare cases where charge more sell fewer, but I wr value too higher revenue companies is wrong.

But your long term goal with spark Toro. And this is something that, ah, small businesses. There's very few of you working on it. You don't necessarily have to answer to your investors. Why are you doing this? And what do you hope the eventual outcome will be?

I would say there are three things that I'm trying to do. So one I mean, you know me a little bit personally, right? And I have this chip on my shoulder. Yeah, about my previous position with mas and sort of disagreements there. So I definitely have something to prove, I think probably more to myself than to my old board of directors, like that's almost definitely the case. But I wouldn't totally mind getting on a MAS board call and being like, Oh, yeah, no, we're We're doing amazing that that would not bother me. So that is one thing I would love to build a business that is essentially looks like a lifestyle business from the outside. But with the growth and revenue numbers of adventure act business,

and I think Spark Taro has potential to do that. And if it lands somewhere between that spot, it'll be what it'll be were really comfortable with that. Casey and I work. I would say very responsible hours. We are smart workers. We are not kill ourselves workers. I think there's rarely been a week where one or both of us have worked 50 or 60 hours. I guess

you could say you want the best of both worlds. You want the lifestyle of a lifestyle business. You want the rewards and the bragging rights and the results of a venture funded

business, and we want to be an example to other, not just to other startups but to other investors. I am hopeful that we can start to shift a conversation, change the conversation from Venture and the venture path is the only way to make money as an angel investor to Oh, no, wait. If I put money into a business that survives for a long time and is profitable and pays out dividends at the end of every year, I could make a lot more right. And especially because angel investors, if they get lucky or if they're able to put money into 1000 or 2000 companies, right, in which case to get lucky through law of large numbers, they don't tend to benefit most. The angel investors that I know in Seattle in the Bay Area, they've essentially are like cash. I'm not.

I thought I'd be better at picking good companies, but I guess I'm not, and I can only invest in, like 30 or 40 companies. And so my portfolio is just not big enough to capture the one winner that accounts for the 500 losers, right? What if you picked 30 or 40 companies that were like spark for Oh, where essentially the model was survived long enough to become profitable and start paying dividends. Then it's kind of like, Oh, every year, every company that survives, I'm making a little bit of money. This is amazing. It also helps change the macro economically and politically. I despise the rich,

get richer, you know, income inequality, distribution problem that start up world reinforces by basically having, you know, 99 out of 100 companies fail. This is another model where it says, like, Hey, maybe we could to survive more like small businesses. You know, the rest of small businesses which have like a 50% 5 year survival rate, you know, instead of start up world's 15% or 17% of whatever it is. If we acted more like that, we could create a lot more businesses that employ more people to create more diversity in the economy. That sounds off some money to those air. My really big goals around sparked are right for myself in KC and our employees in the future. Build a business with lifestyle like employment but venture quality metrics and serve as an example to other start ups and investors.

Listen, man, I hope you hit that goal is that I can have you back on the podcast and broadcast it to as many people as possible. It's my my goal as well to see a world

like that. Yeah. I mean, this is I love what you're doing within the hackers so much. You know this, right? But it is. I want the worlds of funding and the worlds of company structure to match the community of indie hacker. Right? I want that whole journey to be possible for all those businesses. I think that would be that would be a worthy contribution of my time in the economic. Whatever in the free market,

I think we're getting there, and I think we can get there, and it's not gonna be a rapid overnight change. But 10 years from now, the world will look very different world online businesses and I think would be pretty cool toe Look back and say that you played a part, that sort of clothes out here, You know, I'm curious. I'm always hesitant to ask, able to predict the future on the air because, you know, it's this is gonna be recording that safe forever, and we might just make a fool of you. But you've done some predicting the future in your recent block post about what the conversation around this pandemic and the recession might look like. And I think it's a founder. You kinda have to to some degree make educated guesses about what's gonna happen so you can sort of react before does. What do you think the future has in store for us is founders. And how do you think we should be making decisions now so that we can get through this recession and so that we can continue to sort of communicate during this time of monotone conversation online, where everything is about the Corona virus?

Yeah, so I think we only have a few more weeks left with that. My suspicion is that, you know, while the Corona virus has has dominated and we'll keep dominating, Ah, lot of what I call like knowledge, worker and online worker conversation for the next 2 to 6 weeks. I think after that it just becomes a habit. It just becomes kind of like we look at the charts and graphs around the virus. We might look at the news, but it won't be quite obsessive. Right will be coming out from under that bubble, especially because in most major metropolitan areas of the United States the, you know, sort of peek hospitalization and death rates are coming in the next few weeks. I think after that wave passes,

okay, we're all getting used to life online at home, and we're figuring out our setups, and we've had a few weeks of this already is we have some practice, so we're familiar with that. We know what the economic picture looks like, right? Most of the jobs that are gonna be lost are gonna be lost, either. Have already been lost last three weeks for will be lost in the next 3 to 6. So a lot of that picture gets clearer. And then the uncertainty of like, Okay, when does the vaccine come or when do we have a solution to this problem? I think that could last up to another 12 or 18 months, and that means a lot more quarantining.

So what All of that macro picture means for us, as founders in my mind is how do we find ways to be effective and efficient with whatever work days were given. Whether that's, you know, with kids or partners or alone at home, how do we find our are sort of new groove? And for some people that will be much harder than others. I think we will all get there right, because that's how people are. They they find a way to survive and thrive in new environments after a while. The other thing that I think we'll have to do is recognize that as founders, we had better be strategically considering how to change our products, our customers and our marketing right now for that second wave, so meaning I know that my audience is going to move from, however, they were doing things to a new way of doing things.

Maybe that's just video meetings and calls, but it might mean a lot more different things, right? Whatever hair stylists are gonna become video consultants, dentists are going to become. Here's how you know. Here's a device that you attach to your phone to your phone's camera and you stick it in your mouth and you take these pictures and then you send it to me and like lovable a military style, right? Who makes those new markets? That it How does it work? And what about cavities? Little A minister's right. So you and your business have to recognize how you conserve that new world and make changes to your product strategy, your marketing strategy and your positioning. Like which customers might gonna serve because there'll be demanded. That is huge in a bunch of areas and depressed in a bunch of other areas.

And so you you'll have to go to these ones that are surging. That's my prediction for the short term. I don't think that's particularly controversial or surprising. I would be somewhat surprised if that aged badly right, knowing what will happen in Wave three after the vaccine is developed and how things change. That's something I'm not really ready to predict. Anything got so so hard to

know. Yeah, we're on the same, but we have no idea. Honestly, I was worried about the counter virus in January. I've chats with friends, asking, you know, what should we should be getting out of big cities? What should we do on? I couldn't even predict something as simple is like What is the appropriate response to this oncoming pandemic. So now it's it's much harder. And, you know, I appreciate you coming on the show ran

in and tell something tells me if you were President Courtland, you wouldn't have fired and ignored all your human ologists in January Fun. You know, maybe I'm wrong.

That's probably the last thing I would have done, but, uh, unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for many people, I'm not president of Rand. Thank you so much for coming on the show on sharing your story with sparked a ronin. Tell us little about how we can communicate better in these difficult times. Can you let us know where we can go to find out more about

what you're up to and s o spark toro dot com is our is our website, and I am most active on Twitter, where I'm at Rand Fish and Courtland. I think I owe you an indie hackers profile with Cem Cem numbers.

Oh, yeah. You should make a product page.

Yeah, I gotta make a product. Paige, I'm gonna put that on my to do list,

okay? I'll send you a reminder. Thanks so much.

Rant. Great to see you, man.

Listeners If you enjoyed this episode, you should subscribe to the anti Hackers podcast newsletter. Every episode I try to send out an email with my thoughts, my analysis in my advice based on each episode, and you could find that at Indy actors dot com slash podcast. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next time.