Software Misadventures - Michael Lynch - On quitting google for indie hacking, bootstrapping to $450K+ ARR in public, writing personal retrospectives and more - #17

Episode Date: January 14, 2022

Michael Lynch is the founder of TinyPilot. After doing software engineering at Microsoft and Google for 7 years, Michael decided in 2018 to quit and start working for himself by building small software businesses. From years of negative profit to now building a $450K+ ARR hardware business, Michael joins the show to chat about what made him quit his cushy job at Google, how he builds in public with monthly retrospectives, what he has learned over the 3 years indie hacking and much more.

And I was really into Patrick McKenzie's, oh, just go out and talk to businesses where people haven't, like software developers aren't willing to talk to them. And I had just read Rob Walling's Start Small, Stay Small, where he's really into this idea of going after niches where big companies won't compete. And I was like, I'm going to make software for Goshenstone quarries. And so I was like, I had no idea. Like I knew nothing about Goshenstone. And I was like, I'm just going to go show up to these quarries. And like, I don't know what a quarry looks like. I was just like, thought maybe there's like a quarry office. Welcome to the Software Misadventures podcast, where we sit down with software and DevOps experts to hear their stories from the trenches about how software breaks in production.

We are your hosts, Ronak, Austin, and Guang. We've seen firsthand how stressful it is when something breaks in production, but it's the best opportunity to learn about a system more deeply. When most of us started in this field, we didn't really know what to expect, and wish there were more resources on how veteran engineers overcame the daunting task of debugging complex systems. In these conversations, we discuss the principles and practical tips to build resilient software, as well as advice to grow as technical leaders. Awesome.

Thank you so much for being here, Michael. It's a pleasure to have you here. So, yeah, Michael, you studied computer science at Columbia University and you did software engineering for a few years at Microsoft and later Google. And in 2018, you wrote a blog post

called Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself, which blew up on Hacker News. I think you got, last time I checked, like 1.8 thousand upvotes. Yeah, something like that. In comparison, my last post on Hacker News had two upvotes,

and one of them was from Ronak. Thanks, Ronak. Since then, you've had quite a few other posts that topped Hacker News, so we'll definitely want to get into that later on. But anyways, since then, you've been working for yourself and, I guess, indie hacking, as the cool kids call it. And you do these monthly updates, sort of on how things are going. And for the first two years, I think you had negative profit.

But then since last year with your new product, Tiny Pilot, you've seen a ton of growth and now you're doing like 40K MRR, which I feel like it's like every indie hacker stream kind of thing. Yeah. The caveat to that is that's revenue. I'm not like SaaS businesses. It's much better to have 40K MRR if you're a SaaS business. I have 40K MRR and like $45,000 in expenses. So sometimes the last two months i've i've turned a profit so that's been good but it's you know investments right and tax right yeah yeah uh jumping straight into it um sort of more talking more about the why i quit google to work for myself post um i really love that story that you told.

It was sort of around like they refused to buy me a Christmas present. I thought that was like a very nice hook into the story. Can you tell us more about the holiday gift wake-up call and sort of the conversations between the two employees that kind of changed everything for you? Yeah, it's funny to think like if Google had just given me a holiday gift that year, maybe I would have still been working for Google now. But Google had this tradition

of giving their employees pretty lavish holiday gifts. So I think it used to be, like, $1,000 cash. And from what I heard, it used to be, like, actual cash. They'd hand you $1, dollars in bills at the company meeting and then it's been when i was there it had been slowly dwindling down to then it instead of a thousand dollars it was like the nice android phone and then it was the android watch which is worth like 150 dollars or something and then i guess it was 2017 they just decided they weren't going to give us gifts at all and they sent everybody a message saying like good news we use the money instead for

chromebooks for underprivileged children and we're all kind of like i don't that sounds like you're just advertising and this isn't like you like it it it feels very entitled to be like no i want that gift and not children but it yeah it caused this um like a big conversation within google and people were kind of frustrated that it felt like something that they expected as like a nicety of the job had been taken away and then then I saw these two people talking about the whole thing. And one of them was like, no, you effectively are still getting the gift because part of your compensation is Google stock. And this move increases the value of Google stock.

And the other person was like, well, what if I just told my wife, like I'm not giving her a Christmas present this year. And instead, she can use the money in our bank account to buy herself whatever she wants. Like, she'd be really upset. And the first person was like, well, that's a different relationship. Like, if you're expecting Google to, like, romance you the way that you get romantic gifts for your wife, you have a really misguided view of the relationship. And I think there's something like, both people, I think, have like a little bit of like extreme perspectives, but I think that's true. And like, I think it is a much healthier way of looking at it to think just like, I'm in a business relationship with Google. I'm not

friends with Google, the corporation. I'm not a family member of Google, the corporation. I'm in a business relationship with Google. I'm not friends with Google, the corporation. I'm not a family member of Google, the corporation. I'm, we're in a business relationship. I come here every day and I put in eight hours of my time because they are compensating me in money and food and skills that I'm learning. But if I'm, if I'm not benefiting from this business relationship, like I shouldn't be doing that. And I realized I had been doing all these things that, like, I had been going for promotion for like, a year, year and a half at that point. And I felt like I met the qualifications of the next level. I was, I don't remember what

I think it was SWE4. And the next level is senior software engineer, SWE5. And so like, my manager just kept telling me like, oh, you're definitely like, at the senior level, but you know, the promotion committee just hasn't realized it yet. So like, you just have to keep working and you'll get there. And I was like, oh, like, and so the problem is like, the promotion committee is very divorced from your actual team. It's like this separate anonymous committee that doesn't know you personally they just read things about you from what your teammates say and so it's skews the conversation about who should get promoted into kind of big flashy things and so like it's much easier to get a promotion if you're like i launched this thing that now generates two million dollars in revenue as opposed to like oh i helped my teammates and i like got rid of our alerts and I think I tend toward a lot of the like supporting teammates and, uh, like documenting

things well and getting rid of alerts and stuff. And so like, that's harder to make a case for promotion, even if, even if my manager believes the impact is there. And so I was like, I was always doing those things. So they felt like, well, I know this is the right thing. Like, I know this, these are the right things. These are like the things that my team needs. Like, they'll have a bigger impact than like,

if I just launch something that's going to fall over in six months, like I can pay down technical debts and get everything like well tested. And then I was like, after that whole holiday gift conversation, I was like, wait, why am I doing that? Like, who am I working for? Like, if I'm doing these things because I think it's better for Google, but like Google doesn't recognize those things and doesn't compensate me for them, then like, why am I doing that?

And so I changed my strategy to just be like, okay, I'm just going to optimize for promotion. I'm just going to do the things that a promotion committee cares about. And I still didn't get the promotion, but they said like it was it was the last six months i was there and they were like oh you did really great job like the the rank i got was superb which is like the top five percent and they were like if the past six months had been like the last year and a half we would have given you the promotion but like it was it's too small track records so like we're not going to do it and i i felt like i don't this is so silly like and and part of like i i also kind of had to restart because my team got disbanded due to a reorganization

and so i'd be like starting over and there were so many things like that where like to get a promotion all these stars kind of have to align in your favor like your the your project has to actually land like the teams that you're coordinating with have to align in your favor. Like your, the thing, your project has to actually land. Like the teams that you're coordinating with have to, um, deliver like the things that you need. Um, you're like manager has to support you and all these things have to align.

And I'm like, why am I doing this? Like I'm doing all this stuff where it's like, I'm absorbing all the risk of not getting promotion. Like Google still getting like quality work out of me. And then it's just like it's up to them to be like oh like well we'll give you a promotion when we feel like it and i felt like i cannot do that like there there are paths where i can do that another way like i i

think google is a really good company in a lot of ways but like just by by nature of the size of it there's there have to be situations where like employees incentives are out of alignment with the company's incentives. And I felt like I was kind of falling into a situation like that. I'm curious. I definitely had that too, obviously not at Google, smaller companies, but being at an inflection point to kind of ask myself, oh yeah, like why am I like, you know, trying so hard to do these things?

I am curious, like when you got on this path of promotion driven development pdd right yeah um did it make you like feel more jaded about oh definitely coding you know doing all these things like felt like fun but then after that it just felt like more like work where it's like okay it's a lot more transactional i guess um yeah i mean the thing that bothered me, it just felt like more like work where it's like, okay, it's a lot more transactional, I guess. Yeah. I mean, the thing that bothered me is it just like, I don't know where that mindset ends of like, because I don't want to think like that. I don't like, there were these interns on my team that the person that was managing the interns was like, oh, the project that I'm working on, like, isn't so good for like, they're interested in machine learning.

And like your project is related to machine learning. Can they work with you? And like for, for interns at their level, it wasn't going to help me. Like it was going to slow down the project. And like, I was on a tight deadline.

And so I was like, no, like I can't take on those interns, even though like maybe for the company overall, that would have been the better thing for us to retain that talent, be able to give those interns a good experience. But I felt like, well, if I'm looking out for my career,

that's obviously the wrong answer. But it's like a crappy way to go through life is just like, oh, I'm only going to think about how this benefits me. And anything that doesn't benefit me directly, I'm just going to say no. So I really hated that aspect of it. I was saying the things I like doing are the things that support my teammates. I love doing stuff where it's like, oh, now this is documented better. So everybody knows how to use it now.

And I didn't like that the incentives kind of drive me away from that kind of work. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Rana. You work at a very big company, and I think you've navigated the PDD pretty well. So what's your take on this? There is a fair bit of PDD in almost every place i think it changes i mean i know at linkedin recently we changed the process to essentially try to solve this problem where it's not a committee that doesn't know you at all it's actually a committee which is very familiar with your work and it's actually a continuous conversation instead of like hey come back when you're ready and we'll talk then and to

see if you're performing at the next level or not but one interesting thing about promotions in general which has been true for me and others as well is can you measure the impact of what you have done and for many things that you described like improving docs for instance or just getting rid of certain noisy alerts is in the moment what you're trying to do is improve the daily work life of your team and yourself you don't think about hey what number can i put to it in terms of engineering hours saved am i going to leave a paper trail for everything that i did to show eventually that hey i made this difference and now I should be promoted. And I've seen many engineers coming back and saying, but I did all the work and now I'm being asked for proof. I wasn't thinking two years back that, hey, this is something that I should care about to demonstrate what I did. So I do empathize with what you said.

And I've heard similar things from many people. I don't think I have a good answer for how to solve it. But I think promotions at big companies or intake in general is, it's not ideal or fair all the times. And I think you put it the best way, which is like all the stars have to be aligned. It's not just someone is really good, but a lot of things need to align for you to just get promoted. Right. Guang, do you find that at a smaller company as well the the promotion process do you feel like incentives line up a

little better uh as startups i feel like it's so random um it's a lot more variance not so much in that the stars have to line up but just the process is so different, right? Like, I've been at companies where my, you know, skip level was like, hey, the company's got this thing that it needs to get done in the next quarter. Like, can you do it? I was like, shouldn't we be talking about, like, you know, what are the responsibilities in the next level? And then, like, see how, you know, the projects, they stack up.

And then he was like, nah, you know, I i need someone to do this can you do it for me i was like okay um so you know i think those things happen but then on the other hand i've also had you know very good managers uh skip levels where it's like hey you know let's sit down like these are like the 10 things that you know i want you i want to see you doing and then you then how do we get you to do the things. So I think there's a huge variance, but I guess it's also kind of a, yeah, it depends a lot on the management. Yeah.

So doing kind of a hard pivot to talking about indie hacking. Sure. The first thing. Wait, wait, before we jump into it, I know Guang is a huge indie hacking fan. I heard this term from him, and that's when I Googled it. It's like, oh, it's actually a thing. I knew people do indie hacking. I didn't know it was called indie hacking. So

for many of our listeners who might not know what it means, would you mind describing briefly what indie hacking is? Yeah. So I think the term is now popular from Cortland Allen's website and podcast called Indie Hackers. But the idea is it's an alternative to, it's a startup path that's an alternative to the traditional venture capital funded route. So it's forming a business, like most indie hackers are forming online businesses, especially software as a service, just like a web application where it's their bootstrapping it typically at very small companies but the the ones that succeed are like um generally are doing it through um funding just from revenue rather than raising money um there's there's some like debates about like the the boundaries between like a startup and an indie hacker and a maker um but that that's how i would describe indie hacking.

Because to your point, I guess, sometimes there are people that started out kind of bootstrapping, but then once maybe they hit a certain scale or it's pivoted enough such that, hey, maybe there's a huge market opportunity and they actually want to raise capital for it. Right. But on the topic,

one thing I really appreciate about indie hacking, at least in theory, was when I was trying to work on a VC startup idea, I think market size was kind of everything. There has to be a path for you to be a billion-dollar company. Otherwise, you're just not going to get funded. Versus for indie hacking, it's almost like an advantage, right? Where there won't be as much competition. It's like if you're just focusing on something very niche.

So you have this amazing blog, again, I think for anyone who's like aspiring to like, you know, give this a try. And my favorite part is the retros tab where you literally, you know, do a monthly update. And you've been doing this since 2017, which to me is insane because

I'm just imagining I'm trying to write a monthly update and it's the last day of the month. It's like 2 a.m. and I just finished the last episode of I don't know what I was watching, but then it's like, oh shit, I have to write this update. And I think I'll definitely give up after two months. what I was watching but then it's like oh shit I have to you know like write this update and um

I think oh yeah like definitely give up like after two months like how were you able to even like keep it up for for so long it's hard to start getting in the habit and I think it was a big part of it is kind of finding the rhythm of it I used to post them on the indie hackers forum and that wasn't like I realized like that wasn't so motivating because it's like it wasn't i couldn't like format things the way that i wanted i'm i'm writing on their forum software which like i i felt more comfortable writing on my own blog and then i i was sort of nervous to bring it to my blog because i felt like it's not that interesting to people like i felt like blog posts have to be more like polished, like, here's how I solve this problem. And like, I have all the answers as opposed to

my retrospectives, which are like deliberately just kind of like, here's what I'm thinking about in this moment. Like, I don't have a lot of the answers sometimes, but just like, here's me thinking it through. And I think once I started doing it on my own blog, I, I also like separated it into a separate channel on my blog so like people can sign up for not retrospectives they can sign up for like just blog posts it's kind of like a stupid mental thing because almost like 98% of people who subscribe to my blog subscribe to everything and don't care about like just want the blog and some people even subscribe just to the retrospectives which i never expected but i i find it extremely valuable just being forced to take a step back and

think about what i'm doing and there have been a lot of situations where i'm kind of on a path that's irrational and i don't realize it until my monthly retrospective rolls around. And I sort of like, I don't expect a lot of people to read it, but I know like some people have to read it. So I have to rationalize, I have to justify what I'm doing to somebody. And so if I'm like, oh, I'm like working on this thing, it's losing money right now. It is going to lose money for the foreseeable future.

Then like, if I'm writing that, I'm like, wait, why am I doing that? I have to like explain to my audience why I'm doing that. And then I'm like, oh, if I can't explain it to just like a hypothetical reader, then something's wrong. And like, there's been so many times where I just in the process of writing my blog, I'll realize I'm doing something wrong or like, I'll realize some missed opportunity, something I should like dig into more. missed opportunity um something i'm i should like dig into more like i'll try to explain for example like oh i mean like one example was i remember um for earlier this year i created my first course it was a course about blogging called hit the front page of hacker news and i was getting really stressed out because i had written an outline initially and as I started making the

course, I realized that like, it was, there was a lot more I had, it was like, I don't know, I think I had like 10 topics or something. And I was realizing, when I wrote those topics, I was like, each of these is gonna be like a 20 minute video for like a two, three hour course. And then as I got into it, I was realizing like all those topics, I had like 40 minutes of stuff to say about them. And it was taking so much longer. And like, I really wanted to change the scope. But I was like, I already promised everybody this outline. And then I'm like, writing the retrospective. And I'm like, wait, who cares? It's like, nobody's paid me yet. And even if they had, like, it's, it's like, it doesn't really matter. And so like, I realized it's certain things. I just kind of like, I have this mindset and because it hasn't been challenged, I, I just

stick with it and like go on those assumptions. But then when I have to actually break down the assumptions and explain what I'm doing, it forces me to say like, oh wait, that was, that was a silly thing that I'm doing. Like I can change course and. And writing the monthly retrospectives is really valuable for me in forcing me to do that. Yeah, it definitely adds a lot more objectivity into it, right? It's no longer your, I guess, less feelings attached. It's very surprising that you thought

that the blog posts have to be really polished because I really enjoy the aspect of sort of uncertainty where right like you're like oh these are the bets I'm making or you know these are my goals for the next month and then sometimes in your like you know top line or whatever it's like oh yeah actually just kidding you know like I was wrong or like yeah it was like a big change sometimes for the better sometimes you know for the worst but that felt like super relatable right because you know you think about these things like you know i tried to do it myself and then it's like oh just kidding like you know it's like a very different so so i really love that aspect oh cool that's something i kind of borrowed from another blogger

slash indie hacker cory zoo um and it's funny, I think we both think that we stole each other's blog styles, but I think we're sort of, there's elements of each other's blogs that we both like and kind of adopt. But the grades is definitely something I picked up from him. Nice, nice. And my work, we have this side channel

called a Mutual Admiration Society, and I think that perfectly describes. Oh, yeah yeah i actually love that name uh by the way on retros i think this is something that would be useful for anyone not just for folks who are indie hacking but folks with full-time jobs like or anywhere honestly when did you when you started doing this or when you thought about doing this, what kind of structure do you put to this? Because when you sit down, I mean, for me, and Guam can attest to it, so can my wife. I have a memory of a goldfish. I forget things. I have a very selective memory,

which I have been told and I realize that's true. So when you sit down for the monthly retro, how do you structure it so that you can think about all the things you did and you can actually catch the important ones and actually go back and think about the things you maybe should stop doing or at least rationalize? So how do you structure it? Yeah, so I've developed a structure over time so the the basic structure is like i have the the key metrics that i'm paying attention to with my main project and then some of the projects that i have in the background that i'm not paying attention to um i always start by reviewing the goals i set for the previous month so like at the end of each month i say what i'm going to do for the next month and i say how it went i give myself a grade and then i kind of comment on like, if I gave it an A, I like explain a little bit like, oh, like, I think this, I executed on this really well, this, this went exactly how I planned. And if it's like a C or something, it'll be like, oh, like I'm thinking about changing about my strategy or reflections on how things went.

So in my last one, I talked about, what did I, I just published it yesterday, so I should know. I have it pulled up right here. Okay. So the highlights were announced a new product and discovered it was a mistake, simplified the TinyPilot website to focus on a single device, and first vacation from the TinyPilot. Oh, right. Yeah, so part of it is all review. separate, I guess it's a failed business called What Got Done that was based on a thing that they had at Google called Snippets, where it was like a sort of like a mini version of retrospectives every week, you just write in Markdown, like a note form of what you did that week. And so I, I made my own open source version of that. And so I'll, I'll do that every week. And then

when I write my monthly retrospectives, I scan through my weekly updates and then I pick out like, oh yeah, what were the things that I focused on a lot this, this past month? And yeah, one of the big changes I made this past month was, uh, getting rid of, I, I used to have four separate products that I sold on the tiny pilot website and then I realized it should just be one. And so I got rid of kind of the accessories and the DIY version and just focused on my flagship product. And I talked about, you know, like why I made that change and what it's doing so far. So a lot of things like that. And then so that's like backward looking. And then sometimes it'll be like forward looking where I'm saying like, okay, here are the things

that like I'm hoping to achieve in the next few months. Like I'm realizing that my my business has this weakness or something or this is what i think we're not doing enough of and so i'll talk about like how i want to solve that problem how do you time your retros in general so and this might sound that i'm thinking about logistics uh but again, I'm also very lazy. So as the end of the week rolls around, all I have to, all I want to do is either go outside, eat some food or sit on my couch and watch some TV. And if I think about, hey, I should write a snippet of what I should be doing and like, ah, no, it doesn't sound exciting. How do you do that? I think it varies by person, but I find it really motivating because there are certain weeks where I feel like I got nothing done. Like if you're debugging something for a long time and like maybe that's your whole week. And this happened to me all the time at

Google where I'm like, oh, I got nothing done this week. I was just focused on this one bug and then nothing happened. And then I look at my emails and I look at my calendar and I look at my code check-ins. And even if I was just focused on one bug all week, well, first of all, usually I'm not. Usually what I perceive as all week started on Wednesday and it just feels like it was all week. And then there were things that I did on Monday and Tuesday that I completely forgot about. But looking at my code check-ins reminds me of that. And then it makes me feel like, oh, okay, I got some good stuff done this this week and then even if it is a full week of just debugging something there are artifacts of my investigation so like if i'm investigating a bug like usually

that involves like refactoring some code to to try to get better diagnostic information or like updating our documentation to to show what I found from investigating. So it's stuff still is happening. It just, it's like very easy to get into that mindset of like, oh, I got nothing done. Cause I was just like banging my head against the wall. And so I, I found that once I started doing it, I, it was just sort of like a, a self-sustaining practice because it just, it, it is like a, I, I do it every week at the end of the week. So I'm like, right after we, we wrap this up, I'm going to write up my weekly snippets. And it's just reminding me like, oh, cool. Like I got a lot of stuff done this week.

And then it's, it's also kind of a check because if I like look at some of the stuff and I'm like, this is not relevant enough to put into my snippets, then I'm kind of like, well, why did I do that? And then kind of the same thing in the monthly retrospective where I'm like, I wrote that in my weekly snippets, but it's not big enough to talk about. And then I'm like, okay, so why did I do that? There's like, as like a small business, it should be pretty focused. Like you shouldn't be doing lots of tiny little things that aren't like serving your main goal. Like to add on to that and michael tell me if i'm bullshitting here like i i just i didn't feel like when i was uh working at a company like the

default was like you know i've i was doing stuff versus when i was working on my startup idea the default was nothing happens so then to me i feel like it flips from like it's almost a chore when you're working at a like you're working for like, it's almost a chore when you're working for someone else. It's like a chore, you have to say like, oh, yeah, you know, I did this, this, the other thing. And then it's like, okay. But then when I was working for myself, it's like, oh, shit, I actually did stuff this week. It felt a lot more motivating, I think. It kind of also helps to justify that, like, I guess, at least maybe when I was just like starting. So there's a lot more motivating, I think, to, it kind of also helps to justify that, like, I guess, at least maybe when I was just, like, starting, so there's a lot more anxiety, but was that the

case for you at all? I don't know. I don't think I felt much of a difference between, that was actually, like, what I thought was kind of interesting is that, like, I found it just as interesting to write them by myself, because before I made What Got Done, I was just writing them in a Google Doc, and, like, nobody nobody else could read them and I still found that pretty motivating but I find it more motivating when other people can read them especially teammates like if it's teammates seeing like there's sometimes where you like especially for something like a bug investigation where it's like you're not closely following your teammate doing a investigation and then you see at the end of the week like like, Oh, there,

there's a summary of what they've done so far. Like it's, it's like not worth sending out an email sometimes, but like, you're just kind of like passively following what they're doing. It's a good way of, of kind of like, um,

broadcasting that information and, uh, like a low stakes way. Um, so I don't, what, what I do now, it's like, so I don't, what I do now, it's like so,

I don't really have like peers because I'm running TinyPilot. So it's not so much like people can see what I'm doing in the same way. And I do miss that. But I do like, there are people that are sort of peers in the sense that they're running their own business.

So there's like a few people who also use What Got Done and read the updates and they're like, oh, okay, cool this is what michael's doing this week yeah for for folks who are working at companies i would say i know some people who do it and they use it in their when they're writing their annual performance reviews because now they don't have to go back uh so this is some people are very disciplined about it and actually works pretty well for them.

How much time do you allocate to these, by the way? And we'll move past the retros because there is a bunch more to talk about. No, I mean, I love retros. I talk about them all day. For the weekly snippets, I usually, it takes me like hour, hour and a half to write them up. And then for the retrospectives, usually like about eight hours.

I try to time it. So I'm doing, i like do half in one day and half the next um the last few it's been kind of scattered because there's a lot going on but usually i end up spending about eight hours writing the retrospectives so you mentioned one thing about missing certain aspects of working with the team for instance and this part is non-linear in in our timeline but when going going back to the conversation of like google not giving you a christmas gift and you were thinking what why are you doing this what went into the decision making to do indie hacking and not say join a different company or a startup where the process to get promoted or something else wasn't this involved

or where you had more ownership on something which had direct impact to the business and wasn't this big corporation? I might have joined if there was an opportunity to join a smaller company that I was excited about, I might have done that. But I was listening to so many episodes of the Indie Hackers podcast and hearing interviews with all these founders. And it just sounded so fun. And I've always had a pretty independent streak and really like doing things my own way. And I also have a lot of really strong opinions on software development. And I often find myself, join a team and feel like okay we're like i think we should be investing more into the design process or i think we should be investing more into like continuous integration or code reviews and it's always kind of a battle like i

think i'm i believe in that much more than the average developer. And it's sort of an opportunity for me to test my theory of whether I'm right about like whether it's, it's worthwhile to invest in all those things. So I really like being able to have that freedom and yeah, just like the thing I found so fun in a lot of these interviews was just, there's so many different paths you can take like you can you can go all in on engineering and like try to make something that you think people are gonna be so excited about they just tell everybody or you can just create like a minimal product and then invest a lot into marketing and you can come up with like a clever way to market your your software you can make a viral video and that gets everybody excited or you like have a good

like one thing that's worked for me is learning to write blog posts in a way that gets people interested in both the story and then the product that you're working on and so that that was how i launched tiny pilot was by like writing a blog post about like here's how i learned to make this like the the prototype of this and then that was popular on hacker news and that led to the first few sales blog post is something that we definitely want to get into and also learn about like your process of writing but before we go there like when you made that decision to say hey i'm going to leave google and start indie hacking basically work for yourself yeah what were some of the initial days like when you had to instill some of the self-discipline like maybe you are very disciplined uh yourself i know i am not and when you're working in a company you have certain timelines and there are external

motivating factors that keep you on track whereas when you're just working alone it's very easy to get distracted or rather not necessarily align yourself to the it's yeah distracted is probably the right word so what did that feel like how did you instill that structure and discipline where you could do things in a way and i'm sure retrospectives would help, but what else went into it? The big things for me was finding times to stop working because it felt like, okay, like I'm like, while I was at Google, I had like not side business, but I would have like little side projects to teach myself new programming skills. And so it felt like, okay, this is cool. Like now the things that I was doing

on the weekends anyway, like I can do all the time. And so it didn't really feel like there was any need to ever stop doing those things. And so I was just like seven days a week, like all my waking hours, except when I was like with friends, um, I would just be like working on my, my programming projects. And so then I eventually started feeling burned out and was like, okay, I think I should go back to like pretending this is the job and like having certain things I do during my work hours and certain things I do on the weekends. And it could still be like, I could program on the weekends, but it has to be a different thing. I just have to have that feeling of like, okay, I'm disconnecting from this problem and I'm going to do something else. The other big problem I had was feeling like, and I've done this before,

I quit Microsoft in, um, in not quite the same way, but I like quit to travel and do like projects that I didn't really sell. But I was like, I'm going to have so much time. I'm going to like make a million applications while I'm, I'm doing this on my own. And then I realized like, Oh, it's actually really hard to complete projects. And so like after I, I quit Google and like the funny thing about writing a blog post saying like, I'm quitting Google. I don't want to work for anybody. I only want to work for myself.

I got like a hundred job offers from that. And it was like, yeah, I totally understand. So you should come work for me. And so like most of those I said no to but there were a few that were in um there was a sort of a niche cryptocurrency that I followed and people were were offering me jobs around that and I was like maybe I could do something there and I

was kind of like not taking the jobs but doing projects that I thought would kind of impress those people into giving me like a good offer. And then I don't even remember like which projects I think I was also working on my like, I had a keto recipe search engine and like a keto kind of like introductory site. And it was just so stressful because I felt like I wasn't making progress on any of those I was just doing like moving from project to project and not really having anything impressive to show for it. And so that was a big change I had to make. I was just realizing like, okay, just let's just get it down to one project. And I'm going to focus on that. I can do it like 35 to 40 hours a week, but after I eat dinner, I'm going to stop working on it. I'm going

to like go back to personal life or hobbies and stuff. So those are the big changes for me. Did you give initially like a goal to yourself where you said, okay, if you hit this goal, you will continue on this path or you would consider going back? Like, was that any, ever a thought, like a litmus test of sort, that is this even working?

Yeah. Yeah, but I gave myself a really long runway. So I figured, I think one of the common mistakes people make is expecting too much too soon. And hearing about these overnight successes and thinking like, oh, cool, I'm going to start my SaaS app and it's going to be making $40,000 a month in a few months. And one of the things I really liked about reading a lot of these stories about founders and listening to interviews is so many of them, the story is like, yeah, I'm successful now, but I had like four or five years of failure or like grinding it out, making very little money.

And I was like, they're smarter than me. So I don't think I'm going to do it any faster. So my timeline was like four years. I had savings to last me about four years. And I was like, yeah. And so if, if at the end of four years,

it doesn't seem like it's going anywhere, then maybe I'll go back and get a job. But I, I wanted to give myself like a lot of, of runway because I expected a lot of the things I do would, would fail. And we're coming up on four years. That's so true. I was, yes. Some of the things i do would would fail and we're coming up on four years that's so true i as um yes some of the i think the same probably podcast episodes that i listen to on indie hackers it's

like oh you know when you're like reading hacker news you see like this splashy oh someone like launched this new product maybe teaches like people coding like via games and then it's like making like the pre-sale. It's like half a million. But then what you don't see is five, six years of that person building up that audience over time with blogs, all these sort of things. So that's definitely very true. So before getting into the retros,

I was reading your yearly reviews. What I loved about those was at the end you know especially for the first two years right like where you didn't make any money you're like yeah so you know i lost this much money but like this is great like i will want to do this like keep on doing this forever i was like yeah that's that's really awesome like i feel like that's when you know you found something that you actually enjoy. It's like, you know, regardless of the, um, but yeah. Yeah. It's sort of like how I, how I think back about being in high school where like, you

know, everybody goes through it. And so it's, it seems normal at the time, but now if you were like, would you want to sit and like have people lecture you for eight hours and like you don't really interact that much you like mostly just taking notes and you do that every day for like four years you're like no like i did that that's so crazy and like the idea that i like went into an office for eight hours a day and like had to be on somebody's schedule and had to do what my employer wanted me to do like um it would be so hard for me to go back to that like i really just like i mean definitely there there are like different challenges of running your own business but

like i i really value the independence of it and so i i still really love being able to do this since you're coming up to that four-year mark now uh what are your thoughts at this point yeah it went like actually pretty close to how i expected like the the first two years i wasn't you know i wasn't making money but i felt like when i started out i was like i think everything's gonna like but i'm likely gonna fail a lot but i think every time i fail it's gonna increase my odds for the next thing. And I think that's what happened. Like I kept on doing things and I kept realizing ways of like figuring out faster if an idea is viable and figuring out how to pick my ideas a little bit better so that they play to my strengths. And so when it got to the point of tiny pilot, it, it played to my strengths in a lot of ways. And I was able, like, it took off because I didn't spend months and months.

Like I probably would have at the start. Um, like the first version was just like something that seems like it shouldn't have been a real product. It was just like, I was selling a kit of commodity parts. Like I was selling and it was like very open about it. It was just like, these are things I bought on Amazon. You can buy them from me for twice as much like as a way of showing support for what I'm doing. Um, but I'll use that money to like invest in the business and that's what happened. And so like, as time has gone on, I've like gotten more, um, like made more custom things and hire developers that can add features. But in terms of like just expectations, yeah, it is. I mean, I definitely didn't expect myself to be running

like what is essentially a hardware business because I'm not really a hardware guy. But there are a lot of other things that kind of play to my strengths with TinyPilot. But yeah, overall, like pretty close to how I expected it, like not really making very much money for the first two years and then slowly like making more and more of a profit in the third and fourth year um it was super funny going uh like reading the retros of the month where you were like like sort of in in between when you were just starting tiny pilot it's like the first one is

like oh yeah you know doing this thing like write a blog post and see what happens. And then the second one is like, oh, shit, like, people are like, oh, this might be actually useful. And the third one is like, oh, shit, how many people ordered this? It's like, oh, man, I should have, like, you know, banked up on inventory. That was super fun to kind of go through that. So, actually, going back to the retros you know like one of the things I loved about it that kind of surprised me a little bit was the

especially when you're posting it on IndieHackers you would get these comments of also listed in the feedback some people I think some of the feedback I was like a little questionable but some were like really good they were like oh have you thought of this idea or it's like

kind of sanity check some things I thought they were like oh you know have you thought this idea or it's like you know like kind of sanity check some things and then just i thought like they were super great feedback and you know i was like oh shit this is like a really good advantage of um you know doing something like this um and then i think even to quote like one of your um reports you were like oh yeah you know to do more like or like goals was like to do more status reports just like the act of you know to do more like or like goals was like to do more status reports just like the act of you know writing other choices future strategy is incredibly um helpful um but like are you worried about someone like kind of stealing or like ninja-ing your ideas like as you you know are just doing this sort of in real time yeah not really i think it's I think people worry about that a lot more than could actually happen

and especially with TinyPilot there's such a big moat at this point for somebody to try to do the same thing I'm doing like I have like it's hard to like set up a lot of the things that I've set up so like you have to set up I mean you don't necessarily have to do this

but like what I've done is like I have an office I have two local staffers who work there and like, we have a whole system for fulfillment and everything. And it's pretty hard to just set that up and figure out like how to do packaging and everything. Like maybe if you have e-commerce experience, you can do that. But like to, to like try, like now that the brand name of tiny pilot means something to people that are like kind of in this space. And so to try to adopt that is pretty hard just by seeing the,

the ideas that I have. The thing that I may be like a little bit concerned about is tipping my hand to competitors of just like, if they're not really revealing what their plans are, but they can see what my plans are. Maybe they, that lets them like get a few steps ahead of me or like do something that's going to respond to what I'm doing.

But I don't think my competitors even really like, they don't, I don't think they really read my blog or care that much about trying to, to get ahead of me. So I So I'm, I feel like it's irrational, like a lot of things like that, like when people are like, Oh, no, I can't do this, because somebody's gonna steal, like, my attitude is kind of like, we'll just do it until it becomes a problem. And then like, if it starts to become a problem, then you can, you can tamp down and like, be a little bit more tight lipped. But I think there's so much value in getting to like share your thoughts openly.

And like you do occasionally get some really good advice that you wouldn't have thought of yourself. So I think it's valuable for that reason. One thing I think a lot of people don't really appreciate and like I didn't appreciate for a long time is it just gives you, I think I get a good response when I cold email people. And I don't have evidence for this, but I suspect that it's because they look at my blog and they're like, okay, like this person's

like writing a lot about their experience. And so like, I know a lot about this person as opposed to somebody else who cold emails me and just tries to explain what they're doing. It's just like, okay, this person's like put a lot into the world. And so I have a good sense of who they are. Interesting. Before this, I was purely thinking about in terms of, you know, a lot of what determines success is execution, right? It's not just the idea itself. But to your point though, I guess, you know,

having your idea out in the open brings actually quite a bit of benefits too. So that's something interesting to think about. So speaking of competition, actually, actually, sorry, the format of this was a little bit weird. But can you just give the listeners like a quick TLDR on what TinyPilot is? Oh, sure. So TinyPilot is a kind of device, it's called a KVM over IP device. And basically, it lets you control a computer remotely without having to install any software on it.

So you plug it into a computer, and to the computer, it just looks like, it sees just like a generic keyboard and mouse have been plugged in, and then it's seeing a monitor attached. But the TinyPi user has like a little web dashboard where they can see what's displaying on the monitor, and they can type keyboard input or move the mouse and it moves it on the target machine. And so it's popular with like IT professionals and people that have servers in their home and like small businesses and things like that. Which I thought was super fascinating because right, like where you started was like, you know, making, tell us about how you actually got there from.

Yeah. So I started doing development a few years ago on a home server. Cause I sort of got tired of like, I do, my main desktop is a windows machine and I got tired of like crashes or windows updates, like removing, like killing all of my state. And so I like being able to just have everything in different vms and i didn't like the idea of just like having everything run on the cloud and run up bills every month even if it like i probably would have saved money that way but i just liked having like paying a one-time fee and having my home server and then i've kind of like there's a whole little subculture of um like it's called home lab of people like using enterprise equipment

in their homes and trying to do little experiments with like home IT equipment. And one of the issues I always ran into with this home server is like it was I didn't have a monitor and keyboard attached to it because it's like it's just a server. But if I ever like screwed up the SSH configuration or like I ever messed up the network card, then I have to drag it over to my desk and like unplug everything, plug it into my main desktop and then like move it back. And it made it, it didn't seem like such a big deal, but I realized I never really wanted to like

change anything about the base configuration because I was so nervous that I'd have to do, like spend an hour having to fix everything. And I think I had seen an article about like having a Raspberry Pi emulate keyboard input. And I, I think I had seen an article about like having a Raspberry Pi emulate keyboard input. And I was like, Oh, I wonder like how much you can do with that. And I'd seen like that you could capture HDMI input with USB devices. And I was like, I bet you could like use FFmpeg or something and get that to display in a window and then like maybe have

like a little web dashboard where you can type in and like that would solve this problem and i i looked into other to like alternatives and there's like motherboard uh supported services like uh hp has ilo and dale has idrac which is kind of the same idea but it's built into the motherboard but those are really expensive and you need like a separate license for that so that felt kind of crappy to me that like it's tied to the, it's tied to a license. And so I just started like experimenting with the Raspberry Pi. And the first version was just like something that was like a web interface and you could type into it and it would echo the commands on the target

computer. And I was like, I thought that was so cool. Like I, I was in like this weekly meetup group with other founders and I was just sending them videos every week. Like, Oh my, like I should like go back and find some of those videos. It's like a video of me recording my laptop. And then like, I've got a little Raspberry Pi plugged into another machine. I'm like, look at this. I'm pushing a button on this computer. It's showing up on this computer. They're all like, okay. And then, um, I, I wrote a blog post about kind of the halfway point, like hey look look i got

this because other people had done that like other people had gotten the raspberry pi to do that but they didn't it like the raspberry pi it tends to be a lot of people that are like electrical engineering heavy and not so much uh like comfortable software so people had done it but they hadn't figured out like easy ways or they hadn't bothered to like make it easy to install it. And so like my, my contribution was just like, I can make it so it's really easy for you to, to do this keyboard thing and like make your Raspberry Pi into a, an emulated keyboard. And then I wrote a blog post about that. And then from that people started like sharing information with me and saying like, Oh, look, like you can do it with this thing. Or like, there's this hardware that can do what you want.

And from there, I was able to like add in video capture as well. And so like the first version that I actually sold was just video capture and keyboards, there wasn't any support for mouse at that point. But like, that was enough for me to install a new os and like i built a new homelab server just using my own like prototype tiny pilot device and i thought that was just so cool and so like i felt like yeah they're probably people that are that kind of want this for themselves and they they don't want to spend twelve hundred dollars on like the enterprise offering and they don't want to like be tied to their motherboard license. And so it seemed like there could be a market.

And so I was interested enough that like I wanted it for me. And then I felt like it would be pretty obvious soon enough whether like anybody else actually wanted to buy this. That's actually a much better narrative than the one because in my head, like reading your retrospectives, right? You literally kind of went from like the Ezekiel like you know and then it's like uh okay how do i find if a recipe you know has um or has like keto ingredients to like oh you know what's like a database with all that stuff or it's like oh it's like what's a parser that can parse out the ingredients to all the way to now it's like oh you have a server and then you want to see what's going on, which I thought was pretty cool.

I was going to ask, when you started selling it, how do you decide what the price point should be? How did you do that math in general? Oh, I made it up. I had three different offerings. One was, I forget what the pricing was. I think I was like, okay, I want, yeah, actually, no, that's not true. So I had like a really bad understanding of how e-commerce worked to begin with. And so like, I thought in order for me to sell these,

and like even when I first started selling them, I thought like, it probably is going to be like just a side business. And maybe I'll like get, get it working enough that it works. And then I'll sell maybe like one or two a week. And so I was like, okay, like what's, how much money would I have to make for it to be worth my while to like pack up, spend an hour each week, packing up a box and like bringing it to the post office. And I was like, I would do that for like, I don't know, 80 to $120 per order. Like that would get me to the post office. And so I sort of priced it like that. I had like a few different offerings

that was basically like, there was like the essentials package which nobody ever bought because it was like deliberately priced so that you shouldn't, like the next best thing was only like $20 more for much better stuff. And then there was like the hacker kit, which was like,

had like way more expansion, like more storage and more memory and stuff, which you didn't technically need, but I was just like, if people want to pay more for this, then fine. But yeah, that was the idea that like,

okay, I would, it would be worth me. Like if I sell one or two of these week, I would do that for 80 to a hundred dollars. Cause like at the time, I wasn't really making much money from anything else. And so like, if I can make like three or $400 a month, like that's cool. That's like a good start. Um, little did I know, like it's,

you don't have to go all the way to the post office just to ship a package. They'll come to you even like for free. It's, I thought you had to like reach some kind of big scale for that but like they'll pick up packages anytime you want or not anytime you want once a day yeah so i think at least right now with we see this especially during and after the pandemic where a lot of people realized what's important in life and many people made the switch and with like the content creator economy or creators economy is how it's called many people are trying to build stuff but what model could one use when they are thinking about hey now i am at a point where i want to sell it when i made something that seems valuable and I have some feedback, how do I put a price to it?

I think pricing is difficult and it's not an easy task. So in this case, your motivation was that, hey, how much do I need to make per month so that I could do this thing? Like go to the post office, for instance. What's a way to generalize this model for someone to think about? I'm probably really bad at pricing. And the general trend with TinyPilot is like, somebody tells me to charge more and I'm like, nobody would ever pay that much.

And I try it and I'm like, oh, people do. But like every time I do that, I'm like, I can't raise it anymore. It's already so crazy high. And so I'm still like, I'm at 350 now and I'm still kind of feeling that way. I don't know. I think a lot about like Patio 11.

Patrick McKenzie is one of my favorite like writers in the indie hacking space. And like his basic catchphrase is charge more. And I think that's a general problem that like developers especially think that what they do, like because they know a lot of developers and they like probably know developers who think that what they do like because they know a lot of developers and they like probably know developers who are better than they are they feel like what they're doing isn't very valuable but like for a lot of things like if you can replace some service or you can like save somebody an hour like if a service could save me an hour a week like it might not seem like a lot but i would pay like if a service could save me an hour a week like it might not seem like a lot but i would pay like if a service could save me an hour a week i'd pay like 50 100 a month for that and there are people

whose time is worth more than mine that would pay a lot more and so um i think like err on the side of too high and then bring it down if you're wrong but i i think people typically err too low um because it feels worse to like go from a low price to a high price because people kind of feel ripped off um but if you go from like a high price to a low price it's just like okay here's it's it's cheaper now and here's a discount yeah if you like didn't think it was affordable before like now here's the price now but yeah i'm definitely i i don't think i'm good at pricing but i i think um i i'm good enough to recognize like that my bias is to to charge too little and i try to um account for that is it is it possible to measure uh maybe not term but like uh like as

you raise up the prices right are there any signals in terms of like that you get from users or such that it's like, Hey, this is getting too expensive. Like, uh, can you give me a discount or, you know, that sort of things. Is that like one way of measuring if you're like pushing to, yeah, I can't tell. I sometimes it's, it's more a function of the channel. I think like certain, if people discover tiny pilot through certain channels um some of those channels like have an audience that's more price sensitive and so they'll ask

for discounts but i don't know it doesn't feel so related like i don't get like good information back and then even though like tiny pot is doing pretty well, like pretty well for me is selling like maybe like three or four a day. And so the numbers are still pretty low that it's hard for me to, to say like any particular change, like what effect any particular change had, because there's also like people like new YouTube videos are coming out. Like people there's different, there's like, I wish I could AB test it a little better,

but the numbers are too small for me to get much meaningful information. That's fair. there's like, I wish I could AB test it a little better, but the numbers are too small for me to get much meaningful information. That's fair. That's fair. So, and you know, you alluded to this a little bit earlier about kind of content marketing, right? Because a lot of basically how this kind of got started and reading your posts, one of the things I think that was really insightful, you were like, yeah, what makes this difficult is like, you know, especially when you're doing the keto stuff, right? It's like the audience from your blog aren't necessarily the same as the audience from, you know, the business that you want to actually sell to. And, you know, I love the quote that I have here, which is like, nobody says, I really like Michael's opinions on code reviews. Now I'm going to visit his keto websites

and purchase a lot of food through his affiliation links. So I guess maybe TinyPilot was a way of aligning that. But even before that, do you have any advice? Or how do you think about aligning these differences? Yeah, it's funny because I feel like I sort of, I don't know if I'd say crack the code, but I feel like I had a much better idea of how to align my blog with business right before TinyPot took off and I didn't have any time to take advantage of it. But the closest thing I had was the course about blogging.

So the course is called Hit the Front Page of Hacker News. And a lot of the people who bought it were people that either followed me on Twitter or read my blog. And I think like my audience isn't so much blogging, but it's like the course was a course about blogging for software developers and blogging like in the particular style that I do it and so I

think I think that was like an insight that I hadn't really thought about before of just like um like what's a way that like what's a product even just like an info product because I wasn't really that interested in like educational products before but I was like if I can make uh an educational product that like if somebody's just like casual reading my blog and then like if they're interested in the thing i'm blogging about just like the thing i normally blog about like testing or code review they would be interested in this paid product that's like maybe uh like a more in-depth version of that or something so if i had to do it again like i I wish I had done more educational products earlier on,

just because like, looking at how, like, I think hit the front page of Hacker News made more money in the first two months than I made the first two years of indie hacking. And I mean, I don't think I could have written that course at the time, because it was based on a lot of things I learned post Google. But I think there were things that I could have written about. And I had a small audience at the time that I left Google and there were things that I could have written about. And so I think if I find like I unfortunately haven't had as much time as I wished I did for blogging in the past year. But one of the things I'm,

I'm working on is a book about writing like just general, like how developers can improve their writing. Cause I think it's one of those things that people are kind of interested in, but there's not a lot of good books or courses about that. And so I think that would kind of align with my audience of just like okay like i like the way that he writes through things and like thinks through his things in writing like maybe i'd if he has a book for i don't know ten dollars or something or i don't know what again i'm 20 let's let's go higher 20 uh i'd buy that book uh it's it's

interesting that you mentioned writing. And of course, we'll link in our show notes, a link to the course you have about Get In Front of the Hacker News. And also when your book comes out. But writing has come up a few times on the podcast with many different guests at different companies. Like we spoke with Cody Watson last, and he also talked about how writing

is an important skill spoons has said the same thing and so has lauren and they all had different things which helped them get better at it like for many of them it was well i went through a phd program and it helped me a lot for others it was like well that's one way i express things and process information can you share some aspects of what made you a better writer? And of course, I wouldn't be asking you to share the entire book, but some aspects that people can go and readily apply right now. Yeah, there's one resource I find really underrated. It's, I think it's an MIT, no, no, it's a Stanford open course. It's called Writing in the Sciences by Kristen Sainani. And the first, it's an eight

part course. The first four parts are just about writing for technical subjects. The second four parts are like kind of about manuscript publishing. It's like not as relevant, but I found a lot of really good resources. Like I sort of stumbled on it accidentally. And it's just so many good tips for just like, how to how to structure your writing, like what little things make your writing clearer or more difficult to parse. And the other thing I did that a lot of people don't do, which I think is a good tip is I hired an editor to review my blog posts. So I found this editor named Samantha Mason on Upwork. She, unfortunately, I would love to refer people to her.

She doesn't, she coincidentally, a company found her through my blog post and then hired her full time. And now she unfortunately doesn't have time for for uh freelance clients but i i was just like i i know there's probably mistakes i'm making that somebody more experienced like everybody has blind spots in their writing and so i just put a job listing on upwork and uh got like you know four or five candidates and she was the most expensive, but she had the best pitch. And she was giving me good tips just in the her her introductory letter. And I had a review, like my first four or five blog posts, and she talked about the patterns of mistakes that I was

making. And the biggest tip she had was, I wrote this article about how I used TaskRabbit to hire a private chef, just somebody to make keto meals for me because I'm bad at cooking. And she was like, well, if you just want to explain what the details are, you've done that, but what's the story? What's the emotion here? And I was like, it's not a story. It's just how I did it. And then I was like, wait, blog poster stories.

And so, well, not all blog posts are stories, but like a lot of blog posts can be stories and they have a bigger impact that way. And they stick with people better because humans are just good at capturing stories. And so that was a big change for me, just realizing like, oh, like how can i frame this as a story like how can i give this a beginning middle and end and you can kind of see like my blog

articles around that time maybe like around 2017 2018 i'm like sometimes like making things stories that shouldn't be stories like my code a story shoehorned into it that like didn't maybe make sense um but and the other i think the other big thing is just uh practicing and like writing more and then seeing like what kind of things get traction and what don't and you you learn that way about that uh talking about um upwork and you know this sort of bill versus spy um i think it's come up quite a bit in our conversations, but it's usually in the context of, oh, you know, VC money, right? Or like, you know, we have budget, right? Like we're going to use it to do stuff.

I feel like it's super different when it comes to like, oh, you're the person that has to like actually spend, you know, the money to do stuff. And I feel like the traditional wisdom of like only bill was core you know to the business like it does change a bit and i love that you weren't shy about hiring contractors like even from the start right like you had designers front-end consulting freelance like writers um like when you starting when you're just starting out on a new project, how do you make the determination? And how do you budget? Yeah, it's tricky. I think I've tended toward less hiring.

When I first started, part of my thinking was I was living in New York and I was spending $7,000 a month on living expenses between my apartment and healthcare and everything. And so my time felt so expensive. So it's like, Oh, if I'm going to spend a week on that, that's like, I don't know, it's like $2,000. So if I can hire somebody to save me a week, uh, like that, that's worth $2,000 to me. Now that my, I live in Western Massachusetts, my cost of living is like extremely low. That's, that's less a factor. And I, uh, I like that like that i think i i hired too aggressively at the beginning um i think in general people are too conservative about hiring but i think um i would i have no

problem hiring for things like i can't do it myself so like uh i love hiring graphic designers to make like a a logo even just like a first pass logo like i think you can get a decent logo for like two to six hundred dollars um like especially if it's good for for things like that that are like one-off things um same thing with like an editor where i feel like i'm gonna get it's gonna pay dividends over time so like i don't mind i think it cost 650 to get a few hours of review with the editor but that was something i was happy to do um the thing i think i screwed up was hiring developers to help me early on um because early in a business there's like you you want that agility and you want to be able to like make

changes as you learn new things but if you hire another developer you kind of have to like keep them occupied and like have a plan like you don't want to be like micromanaging them and telling them what to do every day and like changing their course over a few hours um so i when i got to tiny pilot i i was i waited a few months like five or six months until i realized like okay code velocity is really slowing down because i'm spending so much time on customer service that I don't have time for development anymore. Because like, I think the time to hire with something recurring is when you're, you have like a very good idea of how it works yourself. Like you've done it a lot yourself and you're confident in the business that the business

is making enough money that like it's the cost is justified. Because that was another thing I did with like with my my company. Is it keto? Like I would hire writers to write for the site, but like it didn't make any sense because the site wasn't making money or it was making a small amount of money. And so like I would pay three hundred dollars thinking that like over time I would make the money back but like i thought about it and i was like okay like each article is making like even like a popular article gets like five or six dollars a month in ad revenue so like if it costs me three hundred dollars to get this article done because i want them to be high quality like it's going to take a long time to

get a return on investment there so i I think I was too aggressive there. And so like tiny pilot, like once money's coming in, you have a lot more freedom to say like, okay, like this, I've got a system that's working and I just need to like cut, cut out the bottlenecks and then I can hire people for that.

But yeah, definitely things where it's like, if I can't do it myself, like I remember like setting up my first website, like things where it's like, if I can't do it myself, um, like I remember like setting up my first website, like back like 10 years ago, I like didn't know how to set up a WordPress site. And like, I spent like months, maybe not months, but like weeks doing that, uh, to set up like a really bad looking WordPress site.

And I was like, I should have just hired somebody. Like somebody would have done this for me for like $150. Um, but like, if it's something for me for like 150 dollars um but like if it's something that you're like not interested in doing you're you're bad at and you're like not interested in getting better at um so like that that was the other thing i was like hiring front end developers because i was bad at front end development but i eventually stopped because i was like okay i eventually have to get good at front end development like if if i'm going to be like a bootstrap developer i can't be like waiting on a front-end developer all the time i have to learn this myself so yeah like it's it's

my my view on contractors has evolved over time but um like more aggressive about hiring than the average person but like definitely be aware of the pitfalls of just like you don't want to just throw a bunch of money at something before you're sure it's working interesting like you made a post earlier this year about like sort of having guidelines for freelancers that work with you yeah and it do you see i guess the ability to figure out the right person to sort of have that you know relationship and maybe having a pool of contacts to sort of, um, to be able to work. Like, do you see that also as a skillset that you're like, you know, um, like purposely building, I guess? Yeah, definitely. And like, that's one of the things that I think has gone pretty well

with tiny pilot is just like being familiar with dev teams and understanding like what makes dev work pleasant and unpleasant and so like remembering back to like when i was on a team at google or microsoft like what things like i know it's unpleasant to just be like forced to take on technical debt and like never invest in refactoring and i know it's unpleasant to like spend so much time on like refactoring where you don't get to do new features and like i know it's unpleasant to like be context switched all the time. And so I tried to design the, the workflows for the developers that work with me to be like,

what would be my ideal workflows? Like if I was working for somebody as a freelancer and I think, I think, well, assuming that I'm right about those things it, it makes the job more attractive and it, it means that I can, um, get developers that like some other businesses can't. Cause I think a lot of the developers that work for me, like don't really want to work for a full-time, uh, like work a full-time job. So like being able to work just 10 or 15 hours a week is, is ideal.

And then it's also like seeing that somebody's going to like seeing that you're working with for another developer that like respects the craft um attracts people that like don't really want to work for somebody who doesn't know how code works and it's just like well i just want it tomorrow like i it's not that simple i just want you to add a button here and but you're like no but the button's really hard um so yeah like it's and and that's like i i try to refine that over time like i look for okay what are the things that cause conflicts what are the things that cause bottlenecks and then try to like update um like what our workflows are and it evolves like as we get more because it started with just i had

one developer working with me and now there's three freelance developers that um like all it used to be just like they would submit work directly to me but now they submit work to each other and review each other's code and stuff um so those those flows have evolved is it like not weird but like i feel like a lot of indie hackers have the tendency to kind of avoid adding more people because they want to kind of do things solo. How do you navigate through that? I mean, clearly that's not a problem for you, but yeah, curious to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah, it is hard. I think the nature of Tiny Palette, just because there are so many moving parts,

it does require a lot of people. Like if I tried to do it by myself, I'd just be spending all day like packing orders and stuff or like taking customer support requests. And so like, but it's, it's sort of like the more people you add, then the more time you're spending on just coordination.

And so then you have less time. It's like, I really like programming, but I get to do very little of it with tiny pilot. And so it's, it's sort of out of necessity. Like I, I realized like,

okay, certain things aren't moving as fast as they need to. So like that was the first thing I, well, the first thing I hired was help with fulfillment just cause I was like, okay, it definitely doesn't make any sense for me to take time away from development to like pack boxes. And then once we, we had that worked out,

it was like getting help from with software development because I was spending a lot of time on customer support. Yeah. So I try to be pretty conservative about hiring, but I think just because it's like a business where there's electrical engineer, like there's electrical engineering work that I need to hire out. Cause I don't, I'm not an electrical engineer.

There's 3d printing work that I need to work with a vendor closely on because like, I don't know how to do 3d printing. And then like, because there, there like is enough coordination with these jobs that I have to hire for. Um, it means that like, I also don't really have time for development.

So like, it means I bring on freelance developers. Um, so it's worked well, but it's, uh, it's, it's definitely like a hard part of the business that there's so much coordination and um it it does make me like a little bit yearn for like when it was so simple and it was just me so i think hiring is a skill set and hiring the right people is hard so as you're doing this hiring freelancers whether they're developers or like you said you're working with a vendor for 3D printing. Of course, you get better at reading people and identifying the right set of people you're going to work with over time. What are some of the things that you look for? And how did you get better at hiring overall? Yeah, that's a good question. I hire in a weird way. I don't have that

much faith in interviews or like coding tests. And partially it's because I think that the best people don't have time to jump through hoops. So like the, the more difficult you make the interview process, the, the smaller your pool or, or even just like the worst your pool is going to be. I think the people that are, that you most want to work with are the people that have the least time to put up with BS. And so my, my hiring process is generally like, I just start paying you immediately. Like if you, if your resume looks good and you have a, uh, like cover letter to me, not even a cover

letter, but just like, if you're, if your background looks good and like, you seem interested in the project, I'll hire you immediately. And then, but it's like on a trial basis. Um, but it's still like, I'm paying them for their work, even if it doesn't work out. And that's tricky because like it means that somebody who's like kind of good at presenting as a strong developer can cost you a lot of money because if they're like, I can be twice as fast as your current developers

and yeah, like pay me $150 an hour. And I'm like, okay. And then they start and I'm like, this 150 an hour and like okay and then they start and like this doesn't seem good but there's like always a learning curve to like joining a project so it takes a while to like confirm that they're not that good um so that costs money but it's it's typically like i can i think i got more confident in telling early on because if there are communication issues like even if they're a really good programmer, communication issues are so important.

Just being able to communicate in writing, because if you get into a situation where you ask them to do one thing and they like misunderstand and do something else, then like even if they did it with like amazing programming skills, it's still a really expensive mistake. And so you want people that like both

communicate well and communicate like are good at communicating with you personally because you know like it's there's two parties to the communication so like not everybody communicates with everybody really well and so like that's always a big red flag for me if during the like getting ramped up process they're like asking me questions they're like asking me things that i've already explained or they're like missing things or they're they're not doing the things that i feel like i explained clearly um so that's like probably the most common mistake um another thing that will cause me to stop working with somebody is um i think there's like i wouldn't say like two kinds of programmers

but there's there's the types of programmers that like develop solutions where they're like it's as if they they like expect to maintain it for the next five years like they put a lot of thought into it um they've like spent a lot of time like thinking about it and refactoring it so that when it gets to you it's pretty clean and then i think they're programmers that like don't really think in those terms they like get it to the point where it works and then they don't care that much about readability or like maintainability and they're just like okay it's working here you go and like they're not that concerned with like whether it makes sense or whether you can understand it. And so like, usually like the first piece of code they send me,

like I, I'm like 90% sure. Sometimes they like, I'm like, maybe they just didn't understand or like they're, they're new to this code base. But I think more and more I've like gotten better at, at cutting it short faster. So it's, it's a pain to hire people. Like it's, it's hard to find really good

programmers. Um, cause, and especially like if, if you're like, you can't, I mean, it's just like, it's hard for everybody to find good programmers. And so like just finding a good pool, pool of programmers and the, the pool of programmers looking for jobs is disproportionately filled with bad programmers cause they keep not getting jobs um but yeah i was sort of lucky that was one of the the times where like having a network helped because i i asked people um one of the developers that works with me is just somebody whose blog i liked a year ago and like sent him a note being like he was kind of doing a similar thing to me he like had stopped he had quit his job and was just doing uh freelance projects and then a

year and i was like oh hey like would you want to work on tiny pilot and so that worked out really well that's pretty neat uh do you do this with vendors too like you mentioned the when you work with for 3d printing like do you work with or would you follow a similar process where you do like a trial of sorts and see if it works out and then continue if it if it's good 3d printers is different like some of the more specialized things like electrical engineers and 3d printers it's not like i can just go out and like find like 50 3d printers like i i have an amazing deal with a 3d printer in the state of massachusetts they um they subsidize 3d printing for like with i'm working with the university of massachusetts and they subsidize at 75 so it's like yeah it's a great deal like i'm getting cases that would normally cost like

50 and um so it's there's pretty much like one game in town for that but like the the vendor i work with is like on top of that really like great to work with so that was like probably the easiest uh vendor to choose of anybody um but probably the the other one where it's close to that is um the the fulfillment staff the the staff that like manage the office and manage inventory and everything um but for that it like i i think i just got really lucky and the the first two people that i hired worked out i i did it kind of in the same way with them i actually did do uh interviews but it was like can't really test how good somebody is at fulfillment by interviewing them but it was just like you seem like a reasonable person um it seems like we'd probably get along well and so yeah the first two people i hired um i just i i

did it sort of the same way like it's higher on a contract basis. And then if it works out, I promoted them to like an actual like part-time employee. But yeah, it worked out. And talking about kind of since TinyPilot is, like you mentioned, a hardware product, and pretty much everything else you've done before were like software uh i assume you know like you've already mentioned like a ton of skills to um to kind of new skills to learn or to outsource um how did you go about like doing that was there like a process you were able to develop that kind of uh helps you kind of pick up new skills faster um the best thing i've learned for learning new skills is to try to minimize how much load I put on the skills that I don't know very well.

So when I'm doing new hardware development or, for example, like when we design new cases, at first, the electrical engineers that I was working with were like, oh, you can actually do something like much more elaborate. Like you can get rid of the Raspberry pi entirely like build a custom board and i was like no i want to just do it like i want to take baby steps because if i if i go too big like it's it could blow up like i'm just really unfamiliar with the space and i feel like that worked out well and i've tried to apply that to a lot of things where like i don't make if it's if it's a domain where i don't feel confident i don't i try not to make really big moves so with the um the hardware and with like doing the the cases like i try to make the make like very incremental changes because i i i know anytime we make a change and like that's one of the things that's that's really different between like hardware and software is there's like, so it's a lot slower.

Like you to just print a circuit board, like it takes like a month at least to, to get it from China over to the U S. Um, so like, there's a really long, it'd be like if you ran a unit test and you had to wait a month to find out if it passed. Um, so just like learning to do things that are like start out very low risk and so like the the first voyager it was like very few custom parts it's just like one circuit board uh it's like very simple um the second one i like went a little bit more complicated it adds power of ethernet and so like we're still working on that but like it was it was really difficult to get

chipped especially like among this this um supply chain shortage and, like, chip shortage. And I'm only now with the third one, like, that I'm just in the design phase now, like, taking a bigger swing now that I feel, like, more comfortable with the process of getting hardware manufactured and getting, like, cases designed for it. So, yeah, like, for learning new skills, skills i think i've for areas where i'm not comfortable i try to do it in like really small steps as i learn that's uh that's really good advice yeah yeah because you're like minimizing the risks right um because you're less it's harder to predict you know the the impact of the risk in those areas that That's really good advice. So we have been talking about TinyPilot and you described how you came up with the idea. It's kind of an itch you wanted to scratch for yourself

and you realized, hey, this is something that others could use too. In the initial days, like the first two years where you mentioned you didn't make much money or when you started, how did you come up with or what process did you establish to come up with new ideas because i can just share something personally i think i suck at it so my wife and i would go on evening walks and talk about hey let's just come up with new ideas

and not necessarily for like a startup but things that would be good ideas in general mostly for a product of sorts she comes up with me more ideas than i can i don't like well it's getting so difficult for me to think of think of a new idea because i'm just so involved into the thing that i do that i'm just in that specific vertical and not branching out so how did you develop the skill set to just come up with new ideas and test them out of course yeah i think i'm i'm actually similar to you and that like i'm pretty bad at coming up with new ideas and my my friend david toth he he's been successfully running um a software business for a long time and he talks about like the way he comes up with ideas is like i i think it's a it's

really good advice but it's like something that kind of works if you're good at coming up with ideas, which is like, if people are like too quick to, to rush into ideas, like even building an MVP is usually like a few months of work. And you can save a lot of time just by filtering at the idea stage. So like, if you have a lot of ideas, just like thinking about which is the which has the most promise like just keep coming up with more and more ideas until you're like okay like of of the 30 that i've come up with like these two or three are the best um but yeah like i'm pretty similar to you i'm like it's so i come up with like two good ideas a year so like when i come up with them i just want to do that um so yeah like i think it's it's often like things things that i'm doing like in especially

like now with tiny pad i have like a ton of ideas for things where i'm like oh there's just so many like gaps in what i what tools i wish existed to to run this business like i would run i would love to like create tools to help people like me. I don't know if those are like great ideas. Cause I don't know if I'd find people that are like in, in exactly the same niche. But I think, yeah,

like I don't think I'm great at coming up with ideas, but I think tiny pot worked for me because it's like a scratch my own itch. And one of the things I've come to appreciate more is this idea of what is it called founder, founder market fit, where you have to, it's not just like, are you going to come up with a product that's going to be successful? But like, are you going to enjoy making and selling that product? Because like a big, a really important thing for me is having work-life balance like i want to be able to disconnect at the end of the work day and i don't want to like carry a pager

and i don't want to like worry on the weekend that my service is down and like i'm losing money or my customers are upset and for tiny pilot that works because it's like there's no central service like at worst my sales site can go down which would be, but, um, it's not like my existing customers aren't like, it's not like they can't access their devices. Um, and so like for the, that was something I, I think I wrote about in my last update where I'm like, kind of felt ashamed that like, Oh, maybe the reason I'm not succeeding is because I'm not willing to do these things that require 24 seven monitoring and like being available all the time. And I think, I don't think that I like I've come to, I mean, like I think tiny pod is evidence that you can find ideas that like match the lifestyle you want to have. And I think there are a lot of businesses where, um, like they don't need to be real time

businesses that like, if it's down for the weekend, like your customers, like, it's not going to be the end of the world for them. Like you can't launch an email service that's like has outages for, for a day or two. But if it's like, you know, like accounting software or something like that can be down for a weekend and customers would probably be forgiving. Yeah. This came up quite a bit when I was doing the startup accelerator of like, you know, how do you come up with ideas? Adding to exactly what you said about founder market fit, but also scratching your own itch. I feel like like one of the ideas I've heard is kind of like writing down, you know, what are the sort of the audiences or like the like, what are the things that you do? Right? And then how do you sort of what would be, you know, something that you would actually want to help fix your own problems? Because then you get a much easier sort of feedback than trying to go find customers. And also you have because it's like sort of the things that you do. So then you also have your first customers or potential users that you can go talk to.

One interesting thing I've noticed about that is, like, the hardest part is getting started. Because once you get started, you become more involved in different communities, right? It's kind of like in your case, it's like, oh, you're starting with the, you know, is it keto? And then you jump to, like, oh, building the database. And then you jump to, oh, like, let me do a parser to get things out because it's, like, really painful. So I think it's probably, like, just hard to get started. But once you do, like, if you can keep it up, like, things will just come up. because it's really painful. So I think it's probably just hard to get started. But once you do, if you can keep it up, things will just come up.

Yeah, but it's funny you mentioned the ingredient parser, because that was an offshoot of the recipe search tool. But yeah, that was like, oh, I was kind of following that advice. And I think that was a mistake following the special image, because I wasn't making money. I think it would have made money following because I wasn't making money. Like, I think it would have made money if my original business was making money. And then I'm like, okay, like a way, like as like a business that's making money and like has limited resources to do development, like I would invest money. I would like pay for this service that exists.

But then I was like, oh, I'm not making money. Like, so I don't know how to find other businesses that like are making money doing a similar thing. And that was the big problem. Like I couldn't find customers that like, where I could offer them an ingredient parser. And they're like, Oh, great. Like I pay for that. Cause everybody that needed it, like it was either like, yeah, we don't need it bad enough that we pay for it. Or like we needed it and we rolled our own that like works. Okay. So it's not worth switching to yours um so i think like scratching your own ish is definitely like a good idea like a good way of coming up with ideas but i think you do have to like see it through and and be like still kind of cautious of like okay are there can i find other people

like me and are they willing to pay yeah uh, right. Yeah. Very relatable, because one of the first ideas I worked on was, like, monitoring for edge ML. So, like, machine learning, but, like, on edge devices. So when I did it, I was like, oh, yeah, you know, edge AI, that's going to be a thing. And then, you know, monitoring, pretty important. But I, you know, what I didn't realize was, like, you know, edge AI is already a very tiny market.

And then monitoring is, like, pretty secondary to, you know, getting didn't realize was like, you know, edge AI is already a very tiny market and then monitoring is like pretty secondary to, you know, getting your product out. So it was, yep, yep, exactly what you said. Yeah. Cool. So yeah, talking about like financial independence, right? Like one of the things you said was like, you basically had a four-year buffer to be like,

okay, you know, I want to, you know, really want to try this out. For those of us peasants who do not have, you know, want to you know really want to try this out um for those of us peasants who do not have you know four years of runways um like would you have done this if you didn't have as much savings um i i wouldn't know i i would have had have had to do it in a different way like i would have maybe worked for an employer or like maybe done freelance work or something um part of the time yeah like i it's definitely like a huge luxury of uh like working for like a fang company for like most of my career is just like the the comp is sort of insane so you like it it's so easy to save up enough to um take a lot of time off. If I didn't have the money. Yeah.

I think I would have either like tried to do it as like, Google is like super aggressive about side projects. Like I think a lot of the big companies are so like, if I was like, Hey, I invented tiny pilot on the side, they're like, Nope, we own that now and shut it down. So I couldn't have done that at Google, but I like maybe would have found a job that is like friendly to to side project or like found a job that was okay with part-time

and then tried to do it that way until I I was making enough to to take the leap to full-time and I guess related do you have any sort of tips for someone who's like thinking about maybe they're more thinking about just like okay how much money to save like because you you made that move as well right like from new york to massachusetts like how should they think about like budgeting and you know saving up money for something like this yeah well one of the things that it was like a big it's pretty surprising like it was just a reader to my blog sent me a link to this article by mr money mustache and i'd seen like a little bit of Mr. Money Mustache before but I didn't follow it that closely but the the blog post is about the four percent rule and so like when I

thought about retirement I was always thinking about like okay I need to save like if I want to retire at like 40 and I plan to live until maybe like 90, then I need 50 years saving. So I need 50 times like, I don't know, what's my yearly burn? Let's say like my burn rate is like $80,000 a year in New York. I'm like, okay, so that's a lot of money. And then, yeah, I'm like thinking, okay, like I have to save a lot to make that happen. And the 4% rule is that like if you can live off of four percent of your savings like if you can create a lifestyle that is sustainable on four

percent of your savings then if you just invest it in like pretty conservative investments like the like index funds and not well bitcoin the past few years would have worked out. But yeah, like if you have it in conservative investments, like you can pretty safely withdraw 4% per year and rely on having that for the rest of your life. And being able to live on 4% of your income changes a lot if your cost of living is very low and so the cost of living in manhattan is much higher than my cost of living in western massachusetts so thinking about it in those terms was really interesting for me just like okay like

how can i lower my cost of living so that like my personal burn rate is very low so like right now like i own a house, like I probably could live cheaper if I like rented a small apartment or shared something. But yeah, my monthly expenses are probably like 1500 to $2,000 a month. So it doesn't take a ton of money to I don't know what's I don't know what the 4% rule for is for that. But like, it's not a ton of money., I don't know what's, I don't know what the 4% rule for is for that, but like, it's not a ton of money. Like it's not like billionaire status that you would need to get to that point where like your, your savings are kind of keeping you afloat. Or even if you're like slightly negative, you can maybe make it up for a small amount you're making from your,

your startup. Um, but I, I would recommend that like, if you have the flexibility of, of, uh, living in a different place, like looking at areas where the cost of living is very low. So there's not as much financial pressure on you and like looking at ways where you can like cut out recurring costs for yourself. Nice. Nice. Cool. Yeah.

And I guess maybe slightly related, but you, but I saw this article from a little while back because I feel like, again, we were talking about this earlier, like indie hacking is kind of getting more in style, and this person talking about it's a very click-baity title, but it's like how I failed five side projects in six years, earning zero dollars. Have you gotten a chance to look at i'm like curious to get your um yeah i saw that when it popped up on hecker news a few weeks ago

i thought it was a little silly like i my main complaint is that i felt like the the author wasn't really being as introspective as i i was hoping they would be like i think there are interesting mistakes that they made and and they kind of like cover them at the surface level. They're like, oh, you know, like I didn't validate this enough. But I think like if their goal was really to achieve financial independence

and create an independent business that lets them make money, like their fundamental flaw is just like not thinking deliberately about what they were doing because like, it seemed like they could just kept making the same mistake over and over again and not really realizing it until like five years in when they were like, Oh, Hey, there's like this pattern where like I'm building this thing that like it's

no better than the existing tools. And like, I don't have an advantage. Like I'm not going after a different niche than the existing tools and I don't have an advantage. I'm not going after a different niche than the existing tools. So why am I doing this? Yeah, so I don't think there's anything wrong. If his goal is just... He said that he also enjoyed learning

about new technologies and stuff. And so I definitely don't think there's anything wrong with just building things for the sake of building things. But yeah, if you're building for the sake of building things but yeah if you're if you're building for the sake of making money in over five years you're making zero dollars like you should think more fundamentally about what you're doing and like figure out what your mistakes are and how you can like fix the patterns of error yeah i think it's very easy to kind of think in sort of a vacuum like oh yeah you know i'm to build a website or create, you know, this tool and then people will love it and then they'll pay me money for it. But I feel like, yeah, in reality, a lot of like the more, you know, business development stuff that I think is a lot of people with our background that don't really think about too much until um yeah kind of going into it with like uh

not quite right the expectations awesome so we're doing this new stock question now you know trying to be on brand with the brand um yeah what's your favorite uh story of software misadventures probably like the silliest project i pursued in like indie hacking career was a few months after I moved to Western Massachusetts. And there's a town near me called Goshen, Massachusetts. And there's a certain kind of stone called Goshen stone that's used a lot in landscaping. It's sort of like a slate that looks nicer than slate. So it's only made in this one area. So there's like three quarries total and i was really into like patrick mckenzie's like oh just like go out and like talk to

businesses where people haven't like software developers aren't willing to talk to them and like i just read rob walling start small stay small where he's like really into this idea of going after niches where like big companies won't compete and i was like i'm gonna make software for goshen stone quarries and so i was like i had no idea like i knew nothing about goshen stone and i was like i'm just gonna go show up to these quarries and like i don't know what a quarry looks like i was just like thought maybe there's like a quarry office and i i also like i i did a brief stint in sales and one of the things I learned from there is to just like show up with some kind of gift and like people aren't gonna be like no

like if you give them a gift people are gonna be like okay cool and so there's this thing yeah there's like a local chocolate store that was kind of near that area that I like and so I picked up which like looking back is kind of I picked up like chocolate gift boxes for them

which like in retrospect, seems, like, weirdly romantic. I don't know if they took it that way. But I just, like, showed up, and I was, like, kind of, like, in a button-down and khakis, and I just, like, show up at this, like, muddy quarry, and it's just, like, workmen walking around. And there's just a shed, and I'm, like, uh, like, and I was just, like, I got there, and I'm, like, oh, I realize I don't even realized i don't even know like who the owner is and like they don't even know who to ask for and so it's just like oh can i like talk to the owner like yeah like they're in there and they're like oh they're not there but you can leave a note so i just like run back to my car and like take out a notepad paper and like stick it in this this like gift box that i've left for them like i don't i don't know if this is going to work.

And so I just did that with like the three quarries and like some of them, like I, I, the owners were never there or like never available, uh, the day that I went around. And then, um, when I, I'd gotten the, the chocolates, I got back, uh, to my house and my girlfriend and I were like, I bought an extra box of chocolates for me and my girlfriend and we're eating them. And she eats one of them. And she's like, yeah, it's like, I bought an extra box of chocolates for me and my girlfriend and we're eating them and she eats one of them. And she's like, yeah, it's like, this one is like weird on the inside. And then like, it's like a different color on the inside. And I was like, no, I think it's just like, it's like a different texture of the chocolate. And she's like, no, I think it's bad.

And then we look at it and realize that it's mold. And we're like, I didn't even realize that could happen. And I was just like oh my god like did i just like go around giving everybody moldy chocolate and i was just like oh my god like this is like the worst it's just like so ridiculous that like this random software developer showed up and gave you moldy chocolate and then like asked for you to tell them about their business um fortunately i figured out that, I actually bought a different gift box that didn't have any of the truffles that had gotten moldy. But I did like, I kept going around to these quarries

for a few weeks, like just trying to be like, surely there's something you're doing. Like nobody's ever come and pitched you software before. So like, talk to me about what your tasks are and I can like develop software for you that would be like worth your while. And they're all. So like, talk to me about what your, your tasks are. And I can like develop software for you. That would be like worth your while. And they're all kind of like, no.

And then finally one of them called me and they were like, cause one of the big problems is like, they just weren't like, they're not familiar with software. If they don't even know like what it could do for them. Like they're not conscious of like things that could be automated. And so they're just like, I don't know what you're talking about.

Like, I don't know what kind of software you want to write for me like we use quickbooks like we don't need other software and i'm like no but like there has to be other things um and then finally like the one of the um it was like a husband and wife couple owned one of the quarries and the the wife used to do it for a hospital and she's like i'm very familiar with it i've thought about this a lot they're like i really want to work with software developer like i would love to have that but there's like really nothing like we like we don't get cell reception at the quarry like we don't even use ipads or anything because like people drop stuff all the time we would like be

replacing ipads every week um there's just nothing and so i'm like that was but it was like a it was probably a solid month or two where I was just calling and calling and going around just to Goshen's Stone Quarry, trying to get them to let me write software for them. So I think that's my biggest indie hacker misadventure. I love that. My favorite quote is, most in life is like either a good time or a good story and um i love like how much courage i mean you had to have in order to even have that that's really awesome yeah because then like after that right like you have to do like you know co-email yeah co-emails feels like nothing you know i've gone through that i love that yeah i mean i also don't know i think like there's a generation of people who met in person then there's a generation of

people who call each other and these days i mean i spend time with like uh people in their teenage or early 20s last weekend and many of them are like call who calls people these days it's snapchat and like the message only needs to exist like for a few hours or minutes and that's it i don't want this history it's commendable the amount of courage uh it would take to actually go and meet people in person in this generation yeah for that like it's it's one of those things where like you kind of stand out by doing like going one step above but it's also like you run the risk of the person's like, Oh, that's, that's so weird.

They're communicating in such a weird way that I don't want to talk to them at all. But that's such a, you know, that's such a minimal like risk. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I love that. Awesome. So that's a, wow. You set the bar really high for our first stock question. Oh yeah. Awesome. Michael, yeah. Awesome. Michael, where can people find you?

I'm on Twitter at Deliberate Coder, and my blog is mtlynch.io, and my website is tinypilotkvm.com, or you can just Google Tiny Pilot. Yeah, those are the main ways to find me. Awesome. Anything else you would like to plug or, you know? Uh, so if you, if you want to sign up for my upcoming book, refactoring English,

or maybe it's going to be a course, let's see how it comes out. Um, that's, uh, it's a, the book about, uh, it's a developer's guide to effective writing. Um, so that's at refactoringenglish.com. Oh, and my and my blogging course is hit the front page of Hacker News. If you want to write blog posts that appeal to like Reddit or Hacker News, I talk about what I've learned over the past few years

of getting traction there. Awesome. Thank you so much, Michael. This has been super awesome. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Yeah, thanks for joining us. Hey, thank you so much for listening to the show. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

and learn more about us at softwaremisadventures.com. You can also write to us at hello at softwaremisadventures.com. We would love to hear from you. Until next time, take care.