This Week in Startups - E1143: Indie Hackers Founder Courtland Allen is creating a community for the next generation of builders to chase the “new American Dream”

Episode Date: November 23, 2020

Check out Indie Hackers: https://www.indiehackers.com FOLLOW Courtland: https://twitter.com/csallen FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

This week in startups is brought to you by Clavio is the e-commerce marketing platform that helps brands build relationships with memorable email and SMS messages. Today, more than 50,000 brands like Living Proof, hint, and chubbies choose Clavio to help them grow. Get started with a free trial at clavio.com slash twist. That's KLAV-I-W-W-W-W-W-W-W.

Y.com slash twist. LinkedIn jobs. A business is only as strong as its people. And every hire matters. Get $50 off your first job post at LinkedIn.com slash twist. And Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business.

Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. Hey, everybody, welcome to this week and startups. I'm your host, Jason Calcanus. We do this podcast two or three times a week and have done so for over 10 years and over a thousand episodes. How crazy is that?

Really excited about our next guest. His name is Cortland Allen, and he runs a website called IndieHackers.com. And it's kind of a blast to the past, a throwback of a site. when I came into the industry, hackers, hacking, was a new term in the 90s, and in the 80s, actually, into the 90s.

There was even movies like hackers, and there was hacking culture. Hacking culture, phone-freaking culture, basically meant, you know, you had a computer, and you had some device, and you wanted to see

if you could just make it do something. And sometimes you wanted to see if you could build something, sometimes you wanted to break something down. And hacking just meant solving a problem essentially. And the industry that I'm in now, the technology industry, is driven by that spirit. But something weird along the way happened, money. And money changes everything, whether it's music and the music industry, the movie industry. If you look at any industry,

once money gets inserted, all of a sudden, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones and that era turns into pop and then, and disco in the 70s or in the movies, Martin Scorsese, and, And the directors from the 70s, the Easy Rider era turned into the 80s big movie era, Rain Man, which then, of course, turns into the CIA era, which then turns into the Marvel era, right? And money changes everything. It just accelerates everything. It perverts everything. And you get a little bit of distance between the art and the creation moment and that consumption moment, right?

And this is something that I've been watching and even filled up a big point. portion of my career. For some people who don't know, I started a zine. A zine was another version of this. We didn't have blogs. We didn't have the internet back in the day. So if you wanted to get your ideas out, you created what was called a zine. It meant a magazine that was photocopied. It means you didn't have glossy paper. Well, I think some young people are starting to realize that it's kind of cool when you strip away the producers and the managers and the agents and the money. And you just think about the moment. And you just think about the hack, when you think about the product, when the synapse is burned, when the problem is solved, or you can kind of see the new land, the promised land,

you know, from the deck of the boat, like we're going to make it. There's a possibility this could work and this could create something amazing. And I long for those days because so much of what I do as an angel investor is just big companies now, not little companies doing hacks. And so of the last couple years, I started saying, where are all the hackers hanging out? And there's hacker news. Everybody knows about that. Product Hunt. And I came across Pioneer Labs.

And I came across indie hackers, just talking to people who are making projects. And I just started hanging out in those communities and reading the comments. And I just thought it would be a great moment to have Cortland on to talk about how he, because he's a little younger than I am, I think a lot younger. He's just another one of these MIT kids, one of these fancy MIT kids. but welcome to the program, Cortland, founder of indie hackers. You heard my little introduction there of the moment. Tell me, what was your moment of inspiration for indie hackers?

Why did you create it? And then maybe you could expand on what you see in this sort of moment of creation and money changing things and how that relates to the hacking movement in 2020. Yeah. Really, I think the moment of inspiration for me was, probably in 2011 when I moved to San Francisco and got into Wycombinator. And if I am being honest about my motivations, like I wanted to start a company. I wanted to get rich. And I wanted to do it basically having a lot of fun, which for me meant writing a lot

of code, being creative, not having a boss, not having to report to anybody. I would much rather make a lot of money doing it that way than, you know, working a desk job or going to Wall Street, like a lot of other people that I knew. But when I showed up at YC, it was a little bit of different than I thought. There was, there's almost this weird, like, I don't know how to explain it, like this culture of like hero worshiping. It was a little bit off putting to me. I remember a day where Mark Andreessen came into YC and, you know, he's this very tall, like six foot two, like, you know, egghead looking guy. He's very striking figure. And they're like, hundreds of founders just like huddled around him trying to ask him a question and people asking

for his autograph. And I was like, well, what about like the part where we build stuff? And we're not just sort of sucking up to these different figures. And the people who I really looked up to NYC were the people that nobody else mobbed. I remember Kevin Hale came and gave a talk and he was running this company, Woofoo. And he talked about how they packed their bags, left Silicon Valley, moved to Florida and they were making millions of dollars a year. They're turning down all their investor phone calls and they're like sharing their profits with the team and just chilling out, living a great life. And I was like, that sounds like the company that I want to build. That sounds like the perfect combination of not only achieving financial independence, but also

building a company that gives you basically the perfect lifestyle where you can choose who you want to work with, what you want to work on, and all that great stuff. So that was 2011. Fast forward, maybe six, seven years of a lot of startup pain,

a lot of start failures. And I decided to start indie hackers not only as a way for other people to learn how to build these sort of self-funded, profitable businesses, but also as a way to do that for myself. And when you watched, how did you come to think that the route

was coming to Silicon Valley, Y Combinator, was this just something you were just exposed to at MIT or on the East Coast? You just said, that's the way it's done, right? You almost had, I assume, just from the press, from blogs, from podcasts, just assume that's the way.

That's the status game. That is the path. And in a way, it is a really viable path. The industry is super open. And that way, they accept whatever, four or five hundred people into four or five hundred startups into a Y Combinator. And if there's two or three startups, founders at each, a thousand people get to go

into the industry through that way. And tech stars is probably similar numbers. So how did you think about how open our industry is to new people, new ideas? Because it is easy to be cynical in one way. Oh my God. Everybody's surrounding Mark. You know, somebody who, the last thing he created was Netscape in 95. Or no, he did opswear after that, I guess, whatever.

But anyway, you know, he's a long distance from that. and there is this like hero worship. Right. Yeah. Well, people were surrounding him because they wanted his money. And he's a cool guy. He's a very historic figure. I think that's an astute observation, by the way, Cortland.

It's a very astute observation. But it was off, I mean, it was off putting to me in other ways too. I remember there was a guy in my YC batch who had raised from A16Z and like the first week of Y Combinator. And the way people were talking about them. They're like, oh, have you talked to so-and-so? It feels like talking to Mark Zuckerberg before he made it big. Yeah. And like, eventually his company sort of like flamed out.

and it didn't go anywhere, but like everybody was celebrating the fact that he had raised so much money. Nobody was celebrating how successful his business was, how much it changed his life in other people's lives. But I think you hit the nail on the head when you talked about the press. You mentioned, you know, Corlin, how did you come to this? Well, if you have at all followed startups in the last 15, 20 years, you get your news from like podcasts like this one, from tech crunch, from the other tech press, from Twitter. And while there isn't any sort of secret cabal meeting in a dark room to try to, you know, push the sort of VC funding narrative, I think just, the nature of the tech media is going to do that already. So there's kind of like three different

ways this happens. Number one, the press is going to write about what people want to read about and people want to read about these giant consumer facing, you know, B2C startups, the Ubers, your Facebooks, your Twitter's, Airbnbs, exactly. And these are always going to be well-funded companies. So that's going to be like one situation where you figure out, you know, what story do they have, and it almost always is going through YC or raising a ton of money. The press is also going to want to talk to people like you who are very well connected, who have broad knowledge, who have deep access. Generally, you're going to be investors. And then finally, a large number of stories in the press are going to come from the comms departments of well-funded

startups or from PR companies. And so if you read any of the tech press, basically you're just going to, like, if I go to tech crunch.com right now, I guarantee you like four to the top five stories is going to be this company raised this much money, XYZ. And so, like, you just don't really get exposed to another path if you're reading about this kind of stuff. And when I was in college reading about all this stuff, it was basically TechCrunch and Paul Graham's blog and every single source said, the way to do this is you raise money. And what I think is insidious about it is that when you consume this much information that doesn't really give you a full picture of the world, it turns out like human beings, we aren't that creative. We don't

tend to create new things from scratch. Instead, we're more like remixers. We take the knowledge and the experiences we have from our past and we remix them into other things. And so if all of your knowledge comes from this sort of biased source which says the only way to start a company is to go through YC or beg Angels for money, then you're going to think that's the way to do it. And so that's what I did. But I think the reality is, and you know this just as well as I do,

that you don't need permission to build a business on the internet. No one's going to stop you from going online and putting up a website charging customers. I mean, you had Dave Weiner on your podcast a week or two ago. Yeah. And I didn't know anything about him. Great guest.

Super inspiring guy, brilliant, played like this great role in sort of pioneering and spreading RSS and a bunch of other technologies. But he had this other thread running through his story. where he just seemed so bitter and upset at investors for never taking a shot on him. And he's this brilliant guy. And I was thinking the entire time listening to it, like, you don't need investors to take it.

You don't need anybody's permission. Like, you clearly were able to do things on your own. It's such a great observation. And it's kind of the anti-Marcindreason in that he doesn't have a billion dollars sitting there to invest. But he did his best work, I believe, when he was just writing code and putting ideas into the world, that if you take RSS out of the world, podcasting doesn't exist and blogs don't exist.

So you just think about that sort of like threat of his life. Now, did he properly get compensated for it? He feels he did with the first company. But yeah, I think it's easy to look at that situation and both take two messages from it. One, it's possible to make massive contribution and have a great life. But it's also possible that this VC machine is sending you a false narrative that this is the only way it can be done when we get back. I want to talk about the indie hacker way.

and how you built and constructed the site, which I think is super interesting. And you're really learning a lot about community. I can see your iteration as you go with groups and threads and how you're using gamification on the website, Indiehackers.com, which you can take a look at when we get back on this week in startups. If you're an e-commerce-based business or you have a direct-to-consumer product, then I know you've got Black Friday and Cyber Monday on your mind. thinking about this because these are the critical days. Well, don't sweat it because Clavio is here to help you do great on Black Friday and do even better on Cyber Monday. Clavio is the ultimate e-commerce marketing platform for online brands of all kinds and sizes. With email automation, SMS marketing, which is working really well, we do it, growth tools and analytics. You'll get

everything you need to build strong relationships that keep your customers coming back. And with the holiday season right around the corner, there is no time like the present for you to do this work and get Clavio dialed in and ready to go with those custom messages. You want to get up and running quickly with Clavio's flexible automations, powerful insights, and super precise personalization. And that's really what it's about. So whether you're a billion dollar business or you're just starting out, Clavio is the e-commerce marketing platform for growth during the holidays and into 2021 and 2022. We know people are buying online and you have to be sophisticated and this is the tool you need.

I'm going to spell the name for you. K-L-A-V-I-O dot com slash twist, clavio.com slash twist, and you will get a free trial. And you'll see just how effective it is. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, welcome back to the pod. Cortland Allen from Indy Akers is here. And yeah, he came to Slal, Slal, Silicon Valley did the VAC thing,

Ycomitare checked the boxes, MIT, check the boxes, and then decided he wanted to do indie hackers. Tell me about how the site works, because I think that's the most interesting thing for me, because I was looking to get closer to the people who are builders.

I look back in my portfolio, you know, you take stock of your investments, and almost universally the people had the biggest success with were product, people, developers, just people obsessed with products. So I was like, okay, where are they hanging out? Because I just, I'm getting too many people who are hitting me with slick presentations and pitches that are derived from the training I put out in the world on how to pitch.

Gaming your system. It's kind of like gaming the system that like I put out there in the world. So it's an inception point for me. So I've been trying to strip that away and just say, you know, play the, can you play the song acoustically for me? Like, where's the acoustic version of the song? Like, here's a guitar. No microphone.

No post-production. just let me hear the lyrics and the song and let me take a look at it. And so I've been trolling indie hackers as well as Pioneer Labs, which I think is super cool. And I had the founder also on the pod. But tell everybody how the site works. Yeah. Maybe it's best to start with like a little bit of a history of like what indie hackers is. So it's a community.

The people on indie hackers, as we've been discussing, are people who I think prioritize freedom above everything else. So they are in it for the glory. They're not trying to blitz scale their way to a unicorn valuation. In fact, they don't really even want to have investors or any sort of boss telling them what to do. What they want is to gain their financial independence usually on their own terms. And that means they want to have creative freedom to do what they want. They want to work on their own schedule, whatever hours, whatever months of the year they want to work from whatever location, with whatever people they choose to be around.

So it's all about freedom. And these people were all hanging out on Hacker News four or five years ago. And kind of like these little discussions that would pop up every few months. You know, what's your one person SaaS company? How are you making money online? And there wasn't really any other place on the web where you could go to find out these stories. And so I was one of these people.

This is what I wanted to do as well. And I would go there religiously. And I would just devour every story of the Peter levels of the world or the Josh Pickfords who had these bootstrap businesses to try to figure out how they were doing it. And eventually I realized like, hey, this is an unsolved problem. There are clearly many thousands of people just like me who are trying to figure out this information. And there's just no place for them to go because the tech press is basically,

got a monopoly on all startup stories, and they only care about the giant, let's see, B2C, well-funded startups. And so, Andy Hackers got it start actually as a tiny little blog. Like, V1 of Indy Hackers was a blog with 10 posts on it, and every one of them was an interview with a different bootstrapped founder, usually developers, and they would all share, here's how much money I'm making. Here is how I came up with my idea. Here's how I wrote the first lines of code, got my first customers, just completely transparent, giving back to the community because, you know, someone in their history had helped them get started. And I think that was really the backbone of Andy Hackers, but it was only a blog for maybe a month. Within a month or two,

I built kind of a community forum. There's also a mailing list. And now there's a podcast as well. And today, the community forum is front and center. So if you go to Andyhackers.com, you've got a giant thriving forum. There's 140,000 members. And these aren't like the peanut gallery. These are people who are actually building businesses. Right. And they're asking each other questions or helping each other out. And there's a bunch of ancillary sort of supplemental resources where people can kind of share their stories. So there's groups in these communities where people who have similar interests can help each other. So, for example, we have the largest no code group on the internet. 17,000 indie hackers are part of that group.

And they share their stories and tips about no code tools and no code startups. We've got a giant directory of about 12,000 products where indie hackers can say, this is what I'm working on. Here's my timeline. So you can go read anybody's history of all the steps they took to build their company. And most of the products on there are transparent. So they'll either plug into Stripe and share their revenue numbers, or they'll just type in their of new numbers. Yeah, and I want to pause on that because I think that's kind of the most interesting part

for me. There's a lot of forums. And like you said, there's hacker news, there's Reddit, there's Quora, plenty of places people have to discuss tech news. Product hunt, you know, takes the products, you know, sort of vision of it first, as opposed to the building piece. But like you're saying, those things quickly devolve. They become sort of, as you said, on your Twitter haters as a service.

Hacker news is basically like a way to post something and get. demolished because like all communities, it gets too big and collapses on itself. But you've really been- Well, people don't have skin in the game. Like you post on Hacker News and you get a bunch of haters who have never built anything who are just going to talk down about what you're doing. But if you post on indie hackers, guess what? Everybody commenting is another founder who's probably failed a bunch of times. They have a lot of empathy. They have a lot of understanding. And they can put themselves in your shoes and they can say, okay, even if I make this mistake in the future, like, I don't want to get hated on. So I'm not going to hate on this person.

Yeah. If you've been in the kitchen and you've cooked and you're talking to another show, about what you're making, you're going to have a different conversation than talking to the reviewers who review the restaurants for a living, who are completely cynical, who have eaten at the best places for the best years. And they're not thinking about, you know, the heat of the oven and you know, the spice or whatever you're going to use and the cooking technique. And the fact that you broke it apart, I thought is really super interesting. And connecting your Stripe, I know Stripe bought the website. We'll get into that in the next segment or bought the business. But they kind of leave you alone, which was kind of interesting. But you had that idea before that. There's somebody else who

does that. Their metrics, I think. Um, allows people to just share their metrics publicly. There's just like weird group of people who are building transparent companies. It's another sort of movement. Would you know what the name of that movement is? It kind of fizzled. Open startups. Open startups. Yeah. Like maybe 10 years ago, five, 10 years ago, open startups were a thing where I would just talk about everything I was doing. It's almost like put your slack public and just talk about what you're building. It never really worked. I don't know if there's a big example of it.

But there was a company called Buffer that became famous because they made $10 million in revenue and they just published it on barometrics. But you broke down into the component steps how to do this. And you really put a mission statement at the website. I think it's worth pausing on for a second. And when you click the start here button at Indie Hacker's. When you first come to the website, you see all the discussions. So that's great. But when you click the start here, which is where a new person would go, you know,

it defines what an Indie Hacker is as somebody who's building an online project that can generate revenue. That's very intentional because you see this as, you know, a business proposition here. And a person seeking financial independence, creative freedom and the ability to work on their own schedule. So again, back to that personal freedom. I think that's super cool. And whether it's 500 a month on the side or 10,000 a month so you can quit your job,

it's never easy to draw an income from your own project. projects, follow the steps below to get started. It's really intentional to be capitalistic and to be about freedom, which, by the way, is kind of what America is about. Tell me about that sort of intentionality of telling people like, you're here because you're going to make yourself independent and free of work, of financial freedom, basically the American dream. Why have you chosen to fight and make your life's work to show people how to build the American dream in the 21st century? I mean, I think it's just a natural thing for people to want. This is not something where I'm having to convince people that this is a good dream to have

and like people are sort of resistant. A lot of people are almost constitutionally unable to work for a boss. Are they feel really down about having a nine to five job? Or they feel like they could do something bigger and better with their lives. And there just isn't, like there haven't been traditionally great avenues for doing that. And the internet is this great democratizing tool. Anybody can get on the internet, and again, there are no gatekeepers. Just because there are investors who have money, doesn't mean you need to take their money. Anybody can just get on the internet and build a transformative business. And I think it's naturally inspirational to lots of people. When I was reading those threads on Hacker News, I was inspired by the thought of what I could do. And when I

looked around kind of my tribe, for example, when I was in Wycombinator, someone in my batch sold their company for like, I think, $2 million, like a few months after starting it, which I thought was amazing. Like, holy crap, you could start a company and make millions of dollars. And a few months, that's like changing. Doesn't happen anywhere else. And everybody else around me was kind of like, oh, they sold out way too early. I can't believe they didn't have right ambition. And that was bizarre to me.

And I didn't want my values to become like their values. I think your values can easily come in from whatever tribe you're a part of. And that's kind of like the high gross startup mindset. You know, you go big or you go home. When I like introspected about my life and the people who I respected and the people who I wanted to respect me, and I thought about, well, I'm a software engineer. I could sit down and code something that, you know, there's no reason it can't make 10 or 20 grand a month.

And then I can pay all my bills, pay my rent, and do literally anything I want with my life. And that would make me happy. I'm pretty sure everyone that I know would be like, that's cool as shit. I would love to do that too. And then I can decide if I want to go bigger or I want to go to your career or new profession. And a lot of other people have the same mission. Like they want the freedom. They want the financial independence to have the optionality to choose what they want to do with their lives later on.

And so it wasn't, you know, this flash of insight, like, oh, aha, I know what people want. It's just kind of obvious that people have this desire and they want to build their own business. Really interesting to me because on paper, you look like the overachieving checkbox, like stereotypical like overachiever, you know, MIT, Y Combinator, Software Engineer, starting their own company multiple times. But actually, you got red-pilled in the original sense of the red pill, not red pill like becoming a Republican Trump bullshit, but you got red-pilled. but you got red-pilt into realizing you can actually control your own destiny and define success

for yourself as opposed to having it put on you by a bunch of sycophants at Ycombinator who have now decided that the only way to define success is if you beat whatever the previous high score was. It's literally like looking at the Donkey Kong machine and going, okay, this person hit this high score. anything less than that high score equals failure. When we get back, I want to talk about the six steps to being an indie hacker as defined on your website, with the first one being, I think super informative and empowering, which is committing and defining. I'm adding in the word defining, but I think committing and defining are kind of similar. Committing and defining to a goal as step one when we get back on this week in startups.

The colorful days of fall are upon us. maybe you're having a hot cocoa or some warm cider. But are your small businesses needs evolving? I bet they are. Things are very different. And having the right people on your team is like having that warm blanket, wrapping you up by the fire with that hot cocoa. And when your business is ready to make that next hire,

LinkedIn jobs can help you by matching your role with a qualified candidate so you can find the right person quickly. LinkedIn has over 706 million members worldwide. and getting started is easier than ever with new features to help you find qualified candidates quickly. Manage job posts and contact candidates from a single view on that familiar LinkedIn.com interface.

You know all the functions. It's all streamlined. Aaron Mason is the founder of MAI, and he uses AI to optimize travel time on work schedules. And he gave us this great testimonial. He wanted to get a machine learning engineer, and it's really hard to find those. He received 110 relevant hours.

applications and only one, two, three, four days. They're so confident you're going to love it. They're going to give you 50 bucks right now. 50. The 50 is coming to you. Go to LinkedIn.com slash twist. Again, that's LinkedIn.com slash TWIST to get $50 off your first job post. Terms and conditions, of course, apply because they are giving you 50 bucks. Thanks to LinkedIn for supporting the show in 2020 and into 2021. Cortland Allen from Indie Hackers is on the pod. What a great guest and we were just talking a little bit. You're a podcaster as well. What's the name of your podcast? The Andy Hackers podcast. Okay. So very creative branding there. You literally added the word podcast to the domain name. Very smart, by the way. Very smart. People name their podcasts

too creatively. They're like, instead of calling this like what our company name is, like we'll name it something else. And how many pods have you done so far? Think about 180 episodes. Oh, wow. For the branding, I mean, I specifically wanted to call, like, Andy Hackers is a made-up term. Four years ago, there was no word indie hackers. But now a lot of people are describing themselves as indie hackers rather than startup founders, et cetera. So I try to use that term everywhere possible to talk about kind of this new breed of founder. Yeah. And let's go through the steps here.

Okay. Number one is commit to a goal. Why did you choose this as step one? It's pretty simple. I think if you look at what inspires people, at least in the indie hackers sort of startup space, what I found is it's almost always achievement. So what we do with indie hackers,

we put out a lot of stories that sort of counter like the mainstream tech press stories of people raising money. And we'll say, oh, look at Tara Reid. She's got her business. She bootstrapped it to $5 million a year in revenue. Look how great her life is. Look at Mike Carson.

He's got his business. He's a one-person company. He bootstrapped to $1.5 million in revenue. Now he's just like, chill and doing whatever he wants. And that resonates with people when they see like these numbers and they see the lifestyle that they can achieve. And I think you need some sort of motivating kind of goal that you're searching for

because it's really freaking hard to start a company. And it's really easy to quit. And so I think when people start and they don't have a number in mind they want to hit or they don't have a lifestyle in mind that they want to work towards, when things get tough, they don't have anything to remind themselves of why you should keep going. And so I think the very first thing you should do is have some sort of goal, some sort of timeline, so you know when to call it quits or you know why you're going to keep going

when things are tough. you know, when you're on a flight and you're flying to Australia or something, they have the little monitor that shows your flight path and how many miles to go. And I always wish they put the percentage on instead of miles because I don't know if you're like me where your mind automatically calculates the percentage. And I'm dividing the number, two numbers and the denominator. And I'm like, okay, 72% of the way to Sydney. And it's very important because if you don't define what success is to you, then that means

your brain is going to fill it in. And where does your brain fill it in from? It's going to fill it in from the press. I mean, the mind is a wonderful way to make yourself go mad because your mind just spews ideas constantly. And your mind is just my friend Sam Harris, name drop of another podcaster. But, you know, Sam told me at one point, like, don't listen to what's in your head too much. You know, sit back and look at your thoughts as a river.

And look at yourself as sitting on the bank of the river, watching your thoughts. go by. And you can really pay attention to one of those thoughts, or you can just let them go down the river. It is your choice, because your mind is going to flow all of those ideas constantly. You're a genius. You're a failure. You're

average. Whatever it is. Or the goals. I have to make a billion dollars. I've got to make a million dollars. I mean, one of the things that's happened, and I'm curious how the pandemic has must have had a creative effect to IndyHackers.com, because people have now realized, way to

second. I set the goal at making $150,000 a year because I wanted to buy a house in San Francisco and I needed to pay $7,000 for a mortgage and they worked backwards from some crazy, you know, household goal living in the Bay Area. Now that's cracked and people are like, wait a second. I can be, I saw one of my previous employees and collaborators took the Barbados deal. We can go to Barbados for a year on a visa. And I was like, and you don't pay any tax. You just two grand or something and you get to get a visa there. So how has how has this committing to a goal and the cost of a lifestyle that suddenly again, people got red pilled? I'm not saying red pilled in the Trump sense. I'm saying red pilled in the matrix sense of like understanding the truth.

The truth of the world is we coming to San Francisco will pervert what you think you need to make for a living. Totally. I think you're hitting on something really important, which is you'd never want like you don't want to live a very indeliberate life. You don't want your goals to be these unquestioned things that come into you from your tribe or from society where you just suddenly want all these things that you don't, like you didn't choose to want. And a place like Silicon Valley or the tech industry where you have all of these very strong, driven, ambitious personalities, and you have these crazy inspirational stories of people making billions of dollars and changing the world. It's really easy to have unconsidered goals. So I think, you know, I'm right there

with you. Like the Sam Harris, like, Transcendental Meditation reference to, you want to be considered. You want to watch your thoughts and make sure you know that your goals are ones that you set because that's what you actually want to accomplish. You can also change them, correct? And so when people start hitting their goals, how does one decide to move the goalposts? Do you have a process for that? Or have you thought about it? I've thought about it a lot, but it's really very personal because everybody's

goals are different. So there's kind of like, you know, one language that almost everybody can speak. Everybody can speak the language of money. So if I say, I started a business and now I live on a beach, well, that'll resonate with some people, but other people are like, I don't want to live on a beach. But if I say I started a business and now I'm making a million dollars a year, well, money's fungible. everybody can imagine what they would use a million dollars a year to do in their life. Some people

would live on a beach. Some people would buy a bunch of houses. Some people would hire a big team and build a bigger business. So for example, there's a group of indie hackers, two brothers actually who host the platform that I used to record podcast on. It's called Riverside.fm. They started their company, I think they launched in March of this year, right before the pandemic got big. And their revenue blew up so quickly, it's a life-changing amount of revenue, just these two brothers that they had quickly to decide, like, you know, what do we want with this business? You know, do we want to just, like, sit on a pile of money? Do we want to go big? And what are we talking about? Like, quarter million dollars a year, a million dollars a year in revenue? They're public out on the site.

I talked to them about it. I mean, they're not. So they're in the Indyackish product directory, but like the revenue is way, way less there than it is in real life. I can say it's a life-changing amount of money. But they decided what they wanted to do was raise money. So they raised a seed round two and a half million. And now they've had like all sorts of, like, Hillary Clinton did a podcast in their platform and they've got like a ton of people using it. But like, they decided to go big. Another example would be Tara Reid, when I mentioned earlier, she's got a business called Apps Without Code, where she's basically teaching people how to build online businesses

without using any code. And she's putting up crazy numbers. I mean, she's enrolling, I think, 300 or so new students a month. And if you compare that to Lambda School, like the last I heard, they're enrolling like four or 500 students a month. But the difference is, like, Lambda Schools raised like $100 million. Tara bootstrapped her business. She's charging like a couple thousand dollars ahead. She's doing five or six million dollars a year in revenue. it's growing rapidly, and she's at a point where she has to also decide, you know, what do I want to do as an indie hacker? Do I want to like just live off this money? Do I want to go big? And like, that's a decision that's very personal. But like, as you said, the goal

is something that changes and you have to realize that like once you hit certain milestones, your goals are going to change. And what I think separates indie hackers from a lot of other people is that they understand that in order to build something ambitious, you don't necessarily have to start with something ambitious. You can start somewhere small and leverage that to get to sort of jump to the next pond and then, you know, you can build up advantages there. And if that goes well, you can jump to an even bigger pond or you can just stay there and relax and do what you want to do or go back and start a totally new business from scratch. The whole point is it's freedom. The whole point is you can choose what you want to do. I've always had a very simple philosophy

of these goals. Like I never even thought about being an angel investor. I just wanted to be rich and buy the next and bring a championship to New York. I also wanted to be a millionaire at one point and just be financially independent because it was financially insecure as a kid. But once you start doing something like, say, investing in startups, it's very easy when you hit two unicorns to say, you know what, I wonder if I could hit five or I've hit five, can I hit 10? And I've already set the lifetime goal now. I just said, well, you know what, at the pace I'm going, and the number I hit, it's conceivable I could hit 25 unicorns if I work for 10 more years. I'll be 50, I think, in a week or two, November 28th, we're taping this on the 18th, I think.

So in 10 days from the table, this I'll be 50 years old. And I could obviously very clearly retire. And I was like, I kind of love what I do. I'm trolling indie hacker to try to find new products and services to invest in. Like, I wake up and I don't want to retire. So I was like, okay, so what's a goal here? And I just posted it to my Twitter feed and I pinned it. And I kind of did that in a way to be aspirational. Like you're saying, literally my pin tweet right now is explaining what I'm trying to do with the last, you know, 10 years of my professional life,

which is make enough money to buy the Knicks or at least have a chance at it. it because as a young adult, that was a dream. So why not try for it? But also to just be the best investor of all time. Why not set a goal? And people are so, I don't know, what's the word? It's not woke, but it's the sort of anti-capitalists. It's not socialist, but whatever it is on Twitter, we need to discuss this because there

is an anti-capitalism, anti-success that you're actually not part of. No. But you're also not part of the venture machine. So you have the venture machine all the way on the right, which is like, go big, go home, blitz, gal. Then on the left, you have the, I call it the hysterical left, where nobody should have any choice. Everything should be provided by the state, socialism, communism for the wind, break up big tech. I wonder what your thoughts are in terms of living between those two extremes when we get back on this week in startups. Why is SOC2 compliance so critically important?

Well, if you don't have your SOC2 buttoned up, you can't close major customers. It's really that simple. And guess what? VANT A-N-T-A is going to give you $1,000 off right now. VANTIS compliant software makes it easier to get and renew your SOC2. So if SOC2 is part of your 2021 plan, sign up with Vanta right now so you can get the prep work done and start your new years really quickly. You go to vanta.com slash twist and twist listeners, I kid you not, will get $1,000 off.

On average, you know, Vanta customers will get their SOC2 compliance in just two to four weeks, which is compared to like three to five months without Vanta. We recently had a twist listener email us about how much they love Vanta. John, I'll just leave it at that. It's a CEO of a drone startup called Kitty Hawk. We know well. And he told us Vanta was essentially helping them get Soctoo compliant. quickly and easily, and he was so thankful of that discount and getting that $1,000.

And he loves the tie-ins with Google, Slack, GitHub, and AWS, which are all essential apps to run Kiti Hawks business. The software continuously tests against technical and non-technical SOC2 requirements, and they partner with over two dozen auto firms who have been trained to support SOC2 reports directly with Vanta. On average, as I said, Vanta customers get compliant within two to four weeks compared to three to five months. That's all you need to know.

They make it easy. They make it fast, easy, breezy, and $1,000. Vanta.com slash twist. Portland Allen is here from IndieHackers. Go check out the IndieHackers podcast and visit Indiehackers.com. You can join my group, which is Ask an Angel, which is right now defunct because I haven't been in the community as often as I should be. I'm going to set a calendar just to look at it every Sunday morning when I'm having my coffee.

I love the website. And I love the fact that you intentionally tell people these steps, find a partner, that's obvious. Partners good because. I mean, ultimately, it's a huge motivator. There's a number of reasons why you want to have a partner. Social accountability is one of the strongest factors to get you to do stuff. And I think one of the things that a lot of new founders find when they quit their job

and start working for themselves is that, hey, a reason why you got a lot of the work done that used to get done is because you had a boss, because somebody would hold you. you accountable. And if you're a software engineer or not, and you suddenly left with all this free time to build your own business, it's very easy to just do the things that you want to do all the time. And it's very hard to get kind of off the ground and force yourself to do these other tasks that your business needs to survive. So I like the accountability aspect. People can complement your skill set as well. So if you don't, you know, like I'm sort of a jack of all trades, designer, full stack engineer. But most indie hackers are not. In fact, a lot of any hackers don't even

know how to code. And so if you can partner up with somebody who knows, you kind of fill in these gaps that you don't have, it's just much easier to build a successful business. You're also a front man. You're like a lead singer. I wouldn't leave that part out. Like, you know, every band needs the front man, like to a front woman. I don't know what the non-gender specific word is, but, you know, the lead singer to get out there and be there at the front of the band and say, hey, listen to our music. So the first two, commit to a goal and find a partner. They're both about accountability, right? And sort of framing what we're going to try to achieve. Or brainstorming an idea, this is one where we could talk for hours.

And we'll get to that in a second. But, you are now sitting between this and maybe it's just a function of being on Twitter too much but there seems to be in addition to what we've already unpacked, but we don't need to unpack it again, the venture industrial complex, I'll call it. You got the VC, I see, venture capital industrial complex on one side. You have to do it this way. You have to blitzkelet scale. Even though they don't say that, it is implied. And the scorecard is how much money you raise and your evaluation, not your customer delight and, you know, personal goals. But then on that, we haven't really talked about what I'll call the historical left party, the HLP, historical socialist

party. Okay. H.S. And then you're not saying that I am. So when they come to cancel anybody, cancel me, but you have the Bernie Bros. Elizabeth Warren, AOC, you know, just anti-tech, but they also seem to be anti-opportunity at their worst, where they don't believe that people can achieve. And I will, I'll once in a while tweet, and I just, I literally do it on purpose. I'm just like, I'm going to just crack open a red pill here and just put it on the counterint and just tweet something insane. I like to just troll. I mean, at this point, I'm going to just admit it.

I'm just trolling with half these tweets, just to my own entertainment. But I'll say something like, I believe people can learn any skill if they work hard enough. And that will make the hysterical socialist party go bonkers. No, nobody can achieve their goals. Nobody can learn anything. And I mean, the truth is, you went to MIT. How much of that gatekeeping did. determined getting into YC, starting indie hackers, or being part of this in all.

I mean, it certainly helped. I'm not saying it didn't, but. Totally. Yeah. How much has it helped the indie hackers? How much does it help Tara Reid or other folks who are building stuff? I mean, the indie hackers who I look up to, almost none of them went to like elite schools.

And we talked about this earlier, like, you don't need permission. I think the idea that you're going to go to an elite school or that you're going to join a prestigious company and work your way up the ladder, a lot of that is based on this desire to always get recognition from other people. And capitalism, especially creating companies, is based on the idea that it doesn't matter if somebody gives you a job or somebody patch you on the back or gives you a degree or a title or anything. What matters is that you build something of actual value for another person, such that, like, they're willing to give you money for that thing. And ideally, it's like a win-win situation. It's not this evil, terrible thing where you're just

extracting money from the poor people of society. You're providing goods for them and they like it and everybody's happy. So I don't think anybody... And they'd be a choice to consume that product. I mean, that's the other thing left out of this, like, historical left. They're like... And listen, I'm a libertarian. I'm on the left.

I voted for Hillary. I would never vote for Trump. I hate him. Like, they literally believe that people are not able to learn a new skill. I mean, that's where we've gotten to in the narrative, that people can't open up YouTube or brilliant.org or con academy or Lambda or, you know, apps without code, whatever. it is. I mean, how do you feel about the...

I don't know if I agree. Okay, well, let's get into that. I don't know if you could, you would go on Twitter and say, like, if you were to ask AOC, like, do you believe people can learn any skills? You would say no. And I don't, I don't think it's like, I think it's a little bit disingenuous to say that somebody believes something that they almost certainly wouldn't agree with. But I get, like, I get your point. And I think where a lot of the discourse dies... I'm just talking about the reaction I get on mass, which is, right. The system is rigged. People can't, I don't know AOC, so I can't specifically pin the quote to her, but that, that whole,

left side says, listen, we, we, people are not, people are being held back from learning new skills. So if we think first principles, do you think people can learn most skills online? I think there's an explosion and the number of skills that people are learning online. Obviously, you see like a lot of these creator economy platforms where people who aren't even part of the tech industry are learning how to like make amazing videos on YouTube or TikTok or become great streamers or open up Shopify stores and are making lots of money, providing lots of value for people because these platforms exist to make them sort of amplified versions of themselves. I also think that a lot of this discourse gets confused because we end up just taking

the most extreme version of every single statement instead of just like meeting in the reasonable middle. And perhaps it's Twitter's fault. It's very hard to have a nuanced conversation on Twitter. But like it is. It's possible to say that like you like capitalism, but also that capitalism has some problems that need to be fixed. And like there are ways in which the system is sort of rigged. And for whatever reason, everybody feels like they need to be on one extreme or the other where something is perfect or something is not or if something is not perfect, then we might as well get rid of it. And you see this in politics all the time nowadays where it's the media is rig down with the media. And it's like, well, like, yeah, there are

issues with the media. We would all agree. But like what's the second best alternative? Like conspiracy theories and on YouTube and like the blogosphere. Yeah. Like, like, we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We want to actually like look at these systems and figure out, okay, what are the issues and let's make them better. And a lot of what I want to think I'm doing it in hackers is teaching people that like, hey, this is actually a very democratic system. You don't need to go to a top tier college. You don't need to, you know, email Jason and follow his playbook and beg him for money. Like, you can basically follow these steps, put in some work and build a company that changes your life in other people's lives. And like, there's no sort of gatekeeping anywhere in that

process. So I, when people say to you, well, I, you know, I have to work a job and I, you know, I work 40 hours a week, 50 hours a week. I can't do this. And I don't know how. of code and I don't have any skills. What is the advice you give those people? Because I get this a lot to, I get this all the time. Like, what about this person? Like there's some, there's some ideal customer profile that people put in their head of somebody who is unable to learn a new skill and to create a company.

Yeah. I mean, does that idea customer profile of the person who can't do it exist and how do you think about that? I mean, the playing field is obviously not level. There are obviously people who are born like with a lot more hardships or a lot fewer advantages than others. Like, if I look at my own childhood, I was born in the United States of America. I had two loving parents who were very invested in my brother and I's childhood. And I grew up in a nice community where I didn't have to worry about like drugs or violence.

Like, there's a bunch of different stuff where it's like, these are the sort of hidden advantages that like I have and lots of other people have. That being said, I think when you get to this bar of like people can't learn, I don't think that's true. I think people just have to overcome more challenges. And I love the internet because it makes it easier to overcome a lot of these challenges. So, for example, let's say you are working a full-time job. Perhaps you have a spouse, perhaps you have kids. Well, you know, 10 or 20 years ago would have been unheard of for you to like on the side build a tech startup. Like you didn't have the money to even buy servers. It's a non-starter. Yeah. But today, like we have like the level to which

technology has progressed. It's almost like this runaway reaction. Like in physics, there's this idea of the self-sustaining reaction or an AI. There's this idea of like the, what do you call it, like the singularity where like the AI can build another AI and It's better. If you build a fire and you have hot coals, when you put the next log on, it burns quicker. The same thing is happening with tech startups. Like in almost like three or four different ways where there's so much going on to make it easier to start a company, it's hard to even catalog. But like, you mentioned open startups and transparency. It's so easy nowadays to go online and find like a million stories of founders who've told you exactly how they've overcome all these challenges, exactly how much money they're making. And you can learn way easier than ever. You can learn how to code for literally free at Lambda School. You can learn how to build apps without code using, um, Territus company. Free code camp. There's a ton of resources that just make it easier, and therefore more people get started, and those people build more resources, and it's like a self-sustaining reaction. Plus, there's also tools that make it easier to code podcasts.

Like, no code tools, low-code tools. Like, I just interviewed David Chu from Retool, and, like, they're allowing basically programmers to build interfaces like drag and drop style. So suddenly, if you, like, you know, couldn't have worked nights and weekends to build your company in the past, now you can build an app way faster, even as a software engineer than you could in the past. And I talked to Indie hackers every day who've built businesses that are generating 10, 20, 30 grand a month in revenue working nights and weekends. I mean, there's this guy Jordan O'Connor who's got this app closet tools. And it's like he had kids. He had a spouse. He had a full-time job. He would get up and just work two or three hours a day on his app. And now I think it's making 20 grand a month and he's

quit his job. So I think there's a pat- And I bet he might have had debt. Could have had a mortgage, right? He's got like real responsibilities. But like it's just like the world is just making it easier for people like this. Like our community manager at Indie Hackers, Rosie Sherry. She was one of the very first people that I interviewed. She has this community of software testers that she bootstrapped to like a million in revenue. She has five kids. She homeschools her kids. She's doing this before the pandemic. She does a spouse. She has a bunch of stuff. Now she has her own paid newsletter. Like she's a machine. But like she's not like some superhuman machine. She's taking advantage of the latest tools and technology and resources out there to allow her to get more done

in the limited amount of time that she has. And so like when I look at, Toward the future, I think a lot more people are going to figure out, like, oh, hey, this is way easier than it sounds. It's not easy, but it's easier than it sounds. You're optimistic. You believe anybody can do it in a way that, at least in America, let's say, let's keep it here in America as a conversation because we can't control what's happening in North Korea as an example of Afghanistan. But in America, anybody who's in America who hears our voice, it's never, the opportunity has never been more open. Correct. The knowledge has never been. more freely available. The tools have never been cheaper and are more often than not free.

And it's going to keep going in that direction. Directionally, it's only going to get easier to build, make a living for yourself online. Yet people feel it's unfair. Yet people feel it's rigged. I think you can have both of these ideas at the same time. Why is it? Why do you? I just don't understand why you can't have both of these. Like, they're both true. You can say a system is unfair and you can also say things are getting better. Those aren't contradictory statements. They're both true. And I think one of the issues is for some reason we love, look at them as being mutually exclusive. Like, you can say, okay, racism in America exists, but you can also say that, like,

America's probably less racist than it's ever bit. There's no year in the past that I would want to... It's probably two very correct statements. Right. I mean, there are two truths, right? I would not go back to the past. Maybe it's an obvious one, right? It's almost like...

It seems obvious. And if you talk to people in person, like, you and I can resolve this and find agreement. On Twitter, it's really difficult to find agreement. So maybe we just seem to spend less time on Twitter. I think there's a Twitter piece, but I do think that there is definitely a victim mentality for a group of people who want to create this ideal profile of somebody. I'm using the ideal customer profile because it's kind of paradoxical. We do that in building startups. We try to find this customer profile. They're trying to find this person who can't do it. And I always, when I meet

these folks who are having a hard time, I just say, well, tell me your skills. And they're like, I have ideas. I'm like, okay, that's not a skill. That's, you know, like a, we all have like 50 ideas when we're asleep every night. Like, it's the ideas is not it. So do you have a skill yet? and if not, what skill do you think you could acquire quickly? Like growth marketing, no code, writing, social media. There's so many of those available. You know, add one of those skills. And then the next sort of card I turn over is, I asked them, did you watch Breaking Bad?

Have you watched The Sopranos or did you watch Game of Thrones? Did you watch any of those shows? I've watched all. You watched all three of them. Okay. So I don't know the number of hours, but I'm literally going to calculate the hours for how many hours those each are because I think if you watched Game of Thrones Breaking Bad,

the Sopranos or any, you know, pick five popular series, which were well worth watching incredible TV, it would be a thousand hours, wouldn't it? Yeah. Or 500? It's a ton of house. If you just said,

I'm going to miss those three amazing, amazing shows, the next three of those amazing shows, and I'm not going to let myself watch them until I know how to do a paid newsletter, until I know no code, or I'm going to do half and half, right? And I try to explain that discipline to be. What I love about what you're doing is you're kind of telling people, build in public accountability, find a partner accountability, and commit to a goal, accountability.

Well, if you're going to be accountable to this goal, then some other discretionary time has got to go away, whether it's with your kids, whether it's with, you know, playing poker with your friends like I do every, or used to do every week, you know, or watching TV. I mean, that's basically what has to happen is people have to want it, right? I was at one of the Stripe Q&A sessions with the founders. So every Friday, Stripe will do Q&A with Patrick and John. And this must have been two or three years ago when, like, Game of Thrones was still on. But Patrick was describing how his strategy is to go to Wikipedia, read the episode

summaries in like five minutes so he could pretend like he's seen the show. And get back to 65 minutes. And then get back to the, yeah, get back to 65 minutes and do the things he's more passionate about doing. So, I mean, I'm not like, I've watched all the shows that you've named. I live like a rich and enjoyable life. I have lots of friends. And I think that's like what's cool about technology today is you can do a lot of fun stuff and still have time to build your company. You can work a full-time job and still have time to build your company. But I think one of the

most important ingredients that you need to have is you need to have optimism. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe that you can do something, then you're going to try harder to do it. And when you fail, you're going to keep trying. And like that leads to more success because you just get more shots on goal. And when you succeed, you're going to be more optimistic about it in the future. So it's just like a self-fulfilling prophecy and the people I see who it's a flywheel. You're making the, you're making the fly-wheel image for people who are, who are listening instead of watching. And so what I worry about is this message that you can't do it, that like the deck is stacked against you, that you might as well not even try. Because that's like a negative flywheel.

And it gets people to not try and then not succeed and then believe they can't do it. And so I think to be a founder, like you need to have optimism and you need to ideally not quit. Because, like, we talk about the reasons why companies fail. You could say, market wasn't big enough. For the competition out executed you or you had a co-founder dispute, but like really all this comes down to is quitting. Okay, the market wasn't big enough and then what? You pivoted? No, you quit. That's why you failed. So ultimately, I think optimism and that flywheel powers you to not quit what you're working on and not quitting is why you can eventually succeed. It's really interesting. I've never really thought of the flywheel in reverse,

but the flywheel dragging you down into this. Oh, yeah, it's terrible. It really is terrible. It really is If you think about addiction is one of those parts of the flywheel, people get depressed. They lost their job. They start drinking. Drinking leads to popping pills or whatever it is. Well, this is why I've a lot of sympathy for people who say capitalism is broken and there is an equal opportunity. And like there are people trapped in negative flywheels.

There are really no fault of their own. And like those are systems that need to be fixed. Yeah. There definitely are. And then I think the problem is the two sides blame each other. So it's like capitalism is in fact. the flywheel that can pull you out of the negative flywheel of, you know,

injustice, racism, drugs, depression, whatever it happens to be, right? My favorite things is see somebody from like a, the underdog succeed, somebody from like an underrepresented background or all the

disadvantages stacked against him and then they build a successful company. That's how I always felt about myself. And then people told me, Jason, you're a white kid for Brooklyn. I was like, yeah, but I feel like I went to like school at night.

I didn't go to MIT. Everybody's the hero of their own story. I do think that. For people who are, you know, listening, not watching, you're an African American. I'm a white guy. How do you feel about racism and tech about the industry in general? And I'm not like forcing you like, you're a black guy. You've got to like address this for the entire black community.

But we are here at this crossroads of opportunity. and let's face it, it's not even a black and white issue right now. A lot of the people who voting for Trump now feel are the middle class or people who are the lower middle class who feel that they're disenfranchised, which was very weird that 70 million people

voted for him when it's kind of voting against your own interest. Hard to understand, except maybe under the guys of burn the whole system down, but I don't know. Sort of how you feel about waste in the tech industry and what we saw on the 11th. to the extent you care about these things. Yeah, I wish we could have more nuanced conversations about it.

And again, I think Twitter is just a horrible platform for having these conversations. And yet it's where everybody is. And so that's where the conversations end up happening. We can do fleets, though. We can do fleets now. I haven't sent a fleet yet. But maybe I'll get a few on this. Is it bad?

It's horrible and it's going to be so addicting. I mean, I'm getting like 5, 6,000. I'm getting like 1% of my following or 2% or maybe seeing them now. And the number of DMs I'm getting back because I have open DMs is, bonkers, like hundreds of them. It's bonkers. I think they might have ruined the platform or just totally unlocked it. We'll see what happens.

At least they're changing something. So when you think about the nuance and we just got through the election, we're going to be going into a new world, it's been, listen, race has been a major issue. Race and tech has been a major issue. I don't know. You have any thoughts on it. Yeah, I can't comment too much on like the politics of the election. But I think when it comes to race, I wish we talked a little bit more about culture.

I think we get obsessed with race and racism and how people look. But I think the cultural norms that different ethnic and social and racial groups have can sometimes act as barriers. And America in a lot of ways, if you look at other big, rich Western countries, like, we're an experiment in having a very high degree of multiculturalism. And I think it's just difficult when people from different tribes or cultures come together, sort of interact. Like, I have a good friend from East Palo Alto. He's Mexican. He looks white. But he grew up in a very different culture than like right up the road in Silicon Valley. And now he's worked at tech companies and he's had trouble sort of blending in and finding people who like dress the same

way he does. I listen to the same music that he does. And it's not about race, really. It's about a shared understanding and like sort of these cultural norms that we don't align on. And so what I like to see are initiatives that bridge people together, almost like the opposite of cultural appropriation. I like cultural integration where people can like listen to the same music and like basically come to understand each other a lot better and break down a lot of the barriers that allow people to work together and understand a nuanced point. It's like such a nuanced point. It's like such a nuanced point. I think, East Palo Alto, for people who don't know, is, you know, it's, it's, it's, it would be the equivalent of like Bedstai or something in the Brooklyn analogy. So in the same, in the same

tapestry where Brooklyn could have, you know, the heights, you could also have Fort Green or Bedstai or Red Hook, which are a completely different experience to have been raised in, right? Right. But they're so close proximity to each other that it does lead to this weird, um, uh, disjointed this way. You feel like maybe we should be closer because we're both from Palo Alto,

but you're from Palo Alto and I'm from the one that has east in it. So I'm kind of ghettoized in this little, you know, east part of it where Facebook has now gentrified, which is super weird as well. Um, but I wonder when you went to school, did they talk about America being the melted about you're a millennial.

I'm a gen Xer. We were like, they kind of indoctrinated us to exactly what you're saying, which is, America is great. It must be that somewhere 100 years ago, people really started to see this, like, we need to resolve this race issue or we need to work on it. So let's just call it a stew. And everybody brings something. And it's the melting pot. And they said, I mean, they made us draw the melting pot. I think the melting pot will get me canceled if I say there should be a

melting pot right now. I like the idea of a melting pot. Like I don't think that's what we have. Like we have like what did you say stew or these very distinct ingredients and everyone's sort of segregating and keeping themselves separate. And like to a large degree, I mean, that's not necessarily by choice. A lot of that is like financial disparities between different groups, you know, but I think things that tend to erase borders and melt people together, I think shared cultural norms, shared communities breed understanding. And we need a lot more understanding in America. You know, if there's any silver lining to the pandemic, I like the idea that like lots of people from SF have just left and are dispersing all out over the world. I like the idea

that cities like Nashville and Atlanta are having a burgeoning tech industry and people who don't come from like, you know, sort of the elite liberal West and East Coast cultures can take part in like the tech boom and take part in like these shared cultures. And I think the extent to which America segregates is the extent to which we can't understand each other. Like I don't think there exists as such a thing is separate but equal. And I think any form of segregation is really just bad. And the shared cultural experience is a thing that is getting lost. I was talking to a friend of mine who's like, I'll go with you on this trip, but I can't be in Gen Pop. And I just, you know, like, you know, like, Like, I got to fly private. I, you know, and I was like, well, I'm not flying private. You know, I can't afford to do that. Like, you know, I'm going to fly. It's pre-pandemic. And the idea of waiting online, everybody had to wait online to get through the TSA.

Everybody had to go to the DMV to get their license. So there was this possibility that if you were waiting in line at Starbucks or, you know, and getting a cup of coffee or taking the subway in New York, you might be next to the mayor. You might be next to the mailman. You might be next to the mom. you might be next to the grandpa, whatever it was. We had this forced shared experience.

And now everybody's trying to rip those apart. They're like, here's how you can hack, not having to wait in line, which I can appreciate taking our friction, but it always seems to be a long, like you don't want to go through the regular terminal. We have surf error and JetSuite X.

You specifically don't need to be with that group of people. You know, like you don't have to take the bar. And I remember when I moved to Sarah Francisco, and I've only been in San Francisco like six years, people think I've been here forever. You've been here, I think longer than me. I was in L.A. And I wanted to go to the Warriors game, and I just looked at the traffic. And I'm like, I'm not sitting in that traffic. And I just looked at the BART times. I took the BART. And people were like, you took the BART? I was like, yeah,

I'm going to take the BART home, too. My car's parked in the city. I'm just going to drive back on the BART. And they're like, what's it like? What's it like? You've been in here for 20 years. You're like, I haven't been on the Bart in 20 years. I'm like, a Bart to the old Oracle Arena was pretty delightful and fast. It took 25 minutes compared to 90 minutes to get to a playoff game. I would never actually do that. Create your own MVP. Obviously, that's the part of the process number four in this, you know, indie hacker process, creating an MVP.

Kind of the lean startup process. You kind of just plug that in right there. Start small. Some of my favorite stories are people who created these really small things that eventually became big. So, like, one of the guys who inspired me, Peter Levels, he runs this online community of digital nomads called Nomadlist. And he was just a digital nomad. It started off like just deceptively small. It was a Google sheet where all these digital nomads would get in and put in information about, you know, which city has the fastest Wi-Fi speed or which cities are the safest, et cetera.

And I think most people would create that Google sheet and be like, oh, this is great, you know, and just stop there. But then he took that information, he put it on a website, he improved the website, he made it sort of the destination of choice for anyone who wanted to be a digital nomad to do the research you need to do. He leveraged that to create a community for digital nomad so people could talk to each other and ask each other questions and meet up in these areas. He launched a bunch of ancillary tools, a job board for remote workers, and now he's making, like, he's made millions of dollars from this, bootstrapped all of it, and he didn't,

like, he didn't need to start big, he didn't need to ask anybody for permission, he didn't need to raise money. He started with like a Google sheet. And I kind of follow the same playbook with indie hackers where it's like, okay, Andy Hackers was a blog for about a month and a half. And then it was a newsletter. And then it was a community. And now it's, you know, I think when I joined Stripe in 2017, our community had like

100 conversations a month. Now it's got like 40,000 conversations a month. And it's like, well, how did this start? Like, it started off as like a tiny little blog. And so that's another thing I love about like, you know, the MVP mindset. It's not merely start with a minimum viable product. But it's also like, think consciously about how when you take one small step, You can leverage that to get to the next step.

For my story in particular, it was like, okay, I'm putting out these interviews. People love these interviews with transparent, you know, stories from founders. Let me make sure I get all of these people on a mailing list. Okay, people are on the mailing list. Now I can start a community. A community is very hard to start, but I can email the people on this mailing list every single week with different discussions and threads on the community. And it's kind of like an unfair advantage that I would never have had if I just tried

to start with the community. Which is your fifth point of the six steps, find your first customers, which you just explained beautifully, which, Neval and Nivey used to have something called Venture Hacks. And it turned into Angel List. Before they had any code, they would just send out a list. And then before I had the syndicate or did Sequoia Scouts, I used to do something called Open Angel Forum, which was just six company. Yeah, six companies presenting to 15 people.

And then build in public. Why is this important? This one is not in the normal startup player. Build in public. Build in public is a little bit of a selfish one. I like the people build in public because it's very helpful to me running any hackers. it's also helpful to, I think, other people starting businesses, and I think it can be helpful to you

because there's just so much information out there. And people, like, let's face it, are not like natural-born marketers. A lot of people start and are like, well, what am I going to write that's going to get anyone to even take notice of what I'm doing? And a substantial number of the founders that I talked to ended up building things that blew up

because they were willing to be transparent about what they were doing. So I just talked to this guy named Traff the other day. He made something like 300 grand in a month releasing a set of icons. And it happened because, Because he was, iOS came out with a new version.

They allow you to sort of rescan your home screen with your own custom icon set. He had some icons laying around. He could sort of tweeted them out. They got popular. And he didn't stop there. He's like, wrote about how we made the icons. And he wrote about how much money he was making.

And then like, because he shared his revenue numbers, MKBHD, this huge YouTuber was like, oh, this is a really inspiring story. He put them in his YouTube video. The revenue numbers blew up.

Then Traff went on like my podcast and a bunch of other shows. And like, he's just like building and public. and not hiding his numbers and hiding what's going on. And it's a very inspirational story. Other people also want to make hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so I think by being transparent with what he did, he was able to sort of magnify his own success. It's sort of to me the equivalent of like looking at the box scores after a basketball game and studying them, which I would do after every next game. And I'd be like, wow, who's this person getting nine assists, 10 assists,

11 assists? Oh, and who's this person taking down 14 rebounds? It's like, oh, that's Charles Oakley. Yeah, that's what he does. He scores no points and gets 14 rebounds. And he's like, you know, the Knicks, Dennis Rodman or whatever. And when you build in public like that, it does draw people to it. Hey, why is there the statistical anomaly or why I was looking at one today, which was just fascinating. They were saying who has the most, I don't know, do you follow basketball much or a little bit? NBA. So there's a concept of isolation plays, which is basically James Harden, Cameroa, Anthony, Chris Paul, Westbrook. You dribble the ball a whole bunch yourself and then you shoot. you take 20 of the 24 seconds. Isoplay means you isolate the one player, boom. You know the term for people who don't. And they were just like, two of the four players in the last like three years with the most ISO plays, it was like James Harden obviously number two. And then Westbrook was number two or three.

And you're like, okay, maybe these two players don't need, they're talking about them being traded out of Houston. Maybe they don't need to be traded. Maybe they need to play basketball differently. Like maybe shoot a two. pointer once a while or maybe not dribble the ball for 22 seconds. It's just really interesting, this growing stuff in public. It does, it shows people demonstrable growth.

I know when my magazine went from black and white photocopy to color photocopy to newspaper color to glossy. Everybody talked about it differently. And they treated me differently based on the paper stock. Now, I think about that, the paper stock, and I can remember it. I was meeting with the printer. And I was like, okay, show me this paper stock. Show me this paper stock.

And I'm like looking for the new printer. And I said, this is not heavy enough. And he's like, you know, you can't really mail this stuff. Like you already have a 60 pound stock cover, which is the weight of the paper, you know, whatever. And I said, well, what's the next level up? He's like, you don't want the next level up. I was like, tell me out the next level.

I was like, that's 80 pound stock. And I was like, who does that? And they're like, art form is the only magazine that's ever done it. I was like, okay, what's the level above that? He's like, it doesn't exist. Nobody, you know, I was like, okay, I'll do the everything. And so I just traded the stock of the paper. And when you felt the cover, you know, like, you couldn't rip it.

It was like that heavy. You ever get like an art magazine? And it's like so heavy. It felt substantial. It felt substantial. And then I upgraded the paper on the inside to what my competitors were doing as their cover. In other words, the paper sock inside was like, became like 60. So this made it feel on a tactical basis,

tactical basis that it was transforming into something really important. And it's almost the difference between hard cover, soft cover books, or when people do, I just ordered some books. I don't know if it was Stripe or somebody has their own publishing arm. And they had the Prince of Persia book. Yeah, straight press. Okay. So I didn't mean to give you a plug.

But I bought all, I just saw Stripe had Stripe Press and I literally just bought all the books. They're all great. And I was like, look at these books is really interesting. I don't know what they're up to it, Stripe. but whenever they do something, I pay attention. So I bought all the books, and I started reading the story of the Prince of Persia, and it was on its own, like, different type of stock paper. And I was like, oh, somebody's paying attention to detail.

So you sold the company to the Stripe. And three years ago, four years ago? Yeah, three years ago, April of 2017, so about nine months after I started Andy Hackers, a joint Stripe. You joined Stripe. Stripe's valuation has gone 20X since then. So you're timing 1020X in that time period. So I hope you got equity.

I'm assuming you did. 4.5X. So you did amazing. If you took equity, I'm assuming you did. Why did Stripe want to buy it and why did you just sell it? Because it seems to me that if you were independent right now, it could be making millions of dollars in advertising and memberships. Like, you know, absolutely. Without code making five or Lambda.

I could see easily making $5 to $10 million a year and being worth 20 times that. And you could be, you know, your own boss. What were you saying earlier about like the scorecard? Money being a scorecard and it's always easy to not be happy and think about who's making more money than you. And I think that's kind of like there is no ancient religious or philosophical or modern self-help book that says that you could, you know, be happy by comparing yourself to others. And so I don't think like a ton like what if I didn't sell stuff. How much, you know, there's really no point. Like I'm doing fine.

And I think it's kind of a match made in heaven. Like I never thought of selling indie hackers. Indie Hackers was my own indie hacker business. I think in nine months, I grew the revenue to about $8,000 a month, which in San Francisco was enough to pay my rent, my bills, and kind of get to that point where I could do whatever I wanted. And I flew down to Mexico for a buddy's sort of bachelor party, and I was checking my email after I got off the plane.

And there was one, like at the top of my inbox that was from Patrick Collison at Stripe, you know, acquire indie hackers. And I thought it was fake, to be honest. I was like, this doesn't make sense. Somebody's punking me. Yeah, why would anyone be doing by my friends? That makes no sense. So I opened all my other emails first, and then I went back to read that one.

And it was Patrick saying, like, yeah, we've been admiring what you're doing at indie hackers. We think it's cool. We could work together. Would you ever kind of sort of maybe be open to Stripe acquiring it? So we ended up meeting and getting brunch and kind of feeling each other out. And I think what was important to me was that our goals and our incentives is really aligned. I think a lot of people enter into these partnerships or deals or acquisitions where it's like, oh, you know, they want this and I want that. And it's only slightly off.

But even like a small degree of difference over time widens into a huge gap. and like you have these very unhappy founders where the company gets trashed by the acquirer and there was no gap with Stripe and Indie hackers. Or the acquirer or the acquired company trashes the parent company, as is the case with Instagram and the WhatsApp founders. Exactly.

Who both became worth billions and billions of dollars and publicly derided the person who made them a billionaire. That's like so weird when you think about it. Yeah. Like talk about misalignment. I don't know what Zucks doing. What's that? I don't know what Zucks doing to get people to say the stuff about him.

Well, I mean, it's actually a discussion I've had, you know, with like insiders. And he does have friends. I think, you know, maybe some of the product decisions, like move, fast, break things and, you know, maybe not caring about the outcomes. If you think about applying that to your personal life, if you did, if one did that, what would that look like? What would be the outcome? If you didn't nurture relationships with friends, if you didn't maintain relationships. Yeah, they would drift and the person might feel. like maybe our country fields or other country field

or both political parties feel, which is that Facebook doesn't care about them. And that maybe Facebook is just not thoughtful. If you were to apply that to personal relationships, and I really don't want to be mean to an individual person, but it is very interesting on a business level that almost universally, if you took the top 20 people who made money from Facebook,

15 of them are probably public massive critics of Zucks and not his friends anymore. Very weird. Super weird. He's a singular personality, and I think I don't know anything about him, so I'm not going to say anything. Yeah, I know. That's the thing is, you know, like I literally met him the first week. He was in Silicon Valley. It was like very weird.

Yeah. But I think like I was tweeting about this earlier. It's easy when you start a business to get wrapped up in this mission. And like, I think often like the more correlated to that mission is with making lots of money. you're starting this huge unicorn, the easier it is to just become all consumed by it and start sacrificing your personal relationships. And one of the things that I've seen with a lot of indie hackers, yeah, all that stuff can easily go out the window. There's a dollar amount where people are pretty much a man in anything. And one of the things that I've seen with lots of

indie hacker businesses, including my own, is all these other intangible ways that like your business can actually make your life better. So if you think about starting a company, it's like you're paying with a lot of time. You're working on your business for like five years. That's five years of your life you're never going to get back. Like ideally, the time you've been working on it is rewarding not just a cost that you pay. So, like, you can start a business to make yourself financially independent, but you can also start a business that, like, forces you to do a bunch of other things that you probably want in your life anyway. So if with, like, you and this podcast, for example, you can spend

your time talking to a lot of, like, really creative, smart, successful people. Literally, the joy of my life is getting to meet people like you and just, like, we're now friends. Like, we had like a real conversation. I feel like if we saw each other or we wanted to go out and have lunch, we talk for another two hours, right? Yeah. And you can do that because of your business, right? Like, you didn't have this podcast. You probably wouldn't do. this, right? You can, with Andy hackers, we started these meetups, uh, which are now dead, thanks to the pandemic. But for a while there, we had like, like 70 meetups a month and cities all

across the world. I went to Cape Town. They're like 60 indie hackers there. They're all super smart, cool, driven, high energy people. Everybody wants to take a selfie with you. They all wanted to go out drinking and take a little bit of restaurants. Yeah, like, oh, this is cool. You created the world you want to live in. Yeah, I can travel anywhere I want. And now, like, I have friends in any city and go figure any other, any hacker could do the same thing. They could start a business that allows them to do, learn whatever they want to learn, or hang out with, or hang out with, or visit whatever country. Or, like, you can start a business that gets you in better health.

You know, maybe you want to be in good shape. Start a business that, like, literally forces you, but I don't know, review health food products or, like, do a podcast interview show on YouTube where you have to, like, run while doing these interviews with, like, I just, you could just, like, do something creative to force yourself to do live a lifestyle that you want. As opposed to, if you decided, like, I don't know, I want to be an options trader because I read that's the way to make the most money is to be a quant or something. something. Now, if you love that work, you know, and you're a tailor from billions and like

solving quant problems makes you stay up for 24 hours straight. Great, Mazel Tov. But if you're doing it just to make money and 20 years of your life go by, well, what you missed out on was the alignment of going to work every day and having making money align with enjoyment. Totally. And this was me when I moved to Silicon Valley. I mean, I spent a good two years in my life in my 20s doing nothing but writing code for an idea I didn't really give a shit about. And I made like very few memories that year. I turned down a lot of like hangouts with friends. I was trying to do this sort of deferred life plan like, you know, work super hard for a few years. And then like it all makes sense later on because now you're rich and you can go live your life. And it's like, well,

why do you need the journey of building your startup to be this miserable process? Like it doesn't have to be. Like it can actually be a fun process where you're making friends, learning new things, visiting cool places, a million other things while you're building your business. 100% correct. You got to enjoy the journey. Listen, oh, and by the way, when Shripe bought it, was that when they launched Atlas? The Atlas before Andy Hackers. See, I think that was like the motivation.

Like I mean, in addition to it being brilliant and you being obviously brilliant, they have a really cool product, Atlas. I'll give it a free plug, but you can basically do company formation through it. And so if people want to, you know, charge people and, you know, and they want to start a business, Like, that's exactly Stripes will house. So go to Indie Hackers. A good example of capitalism gone right, where it's in Stripe's best interest to make it as easy as possible for other people to start businesses, to educate them, to help them, to inspire them.

That's a win for everybody. Yeah, everybody wins. And, you know, I think that's a, I just had a company on the pod yesterday that was, you know, doing a dish cleaning robot. And the founder was talking about, yeah, I was just talking about, it'd be great to eliminate the job of dishwasher. having done that job, it is so miserable to spend 12 hours washing dishes. Like your hands are raw.

It just sucks. And I was like, and we always create more jobs. We always create more jobs. And India hackers, you know, Patreon. I listen to podcasts now and then I go look at it. They, you know, talk about building in public. The women who do Red Scare or some of the other podcasts on Patreon, they show how much money they make. And I'm like, they're making $20,000 a month.

they're making a quarter million dollars a year. They're making $125,000 each talking to a microphone for two hours a week. One they do public, one they do private. I'm like, literally I could have lived in New York and made $125,000 a year doing two hours of talking a week. And then what would I do for the rest of the week is a lot of trouble I could have gotten to? I think it's like this whole idea of these platforms is fascinating because if you look at kind of like V1 of social networks, they're all about connection.

You know, Facebook, connect with their friends, connect with their family. And then V2 is all about like status. So there's connection on Twitter and Instagram, but there's also the status component where it's like, look how many subscribers and followers. Follow account. Likes. Or I got like the only, I'm the only person who's got the handle Jason, right? Like, that's cool for you. Like, that's hard for you to walk away from.

But now I think a lot of these platforms are like not just connection, not just status, but it's also like make a living. Earn revenue on YouTube. I think, you know, if you look at substack and medium and a lot of these other platforms, are pulling people away from Twitter who work in the tech industry, you're giving all this information away for free via tweets. And they're saying, no, I actually want to get paid to share a lot of my wisdom instead of just tweeting it for free.

So I love this idea of like, yeah, let's get rid of the old jobs. Let's replace them with newer jobs that are just more pleasant that are easier than a more productive and valuable to society. And I think the platforms at when are going to be the ones that not only provide connection and status, but also provide a way for people to make money. And then also, as you're saying, broadcast the stories of people who are making the most money on those platforms. That's why on indie hackers, I'm always saying, what's your revenue number, how much money are you making? And I always try to share these stories far and why, because it's super inspirational to hear somebody succeeding. There's websites you can go to and see the top creators on Patreon and see exactly how much money they're making. and like that can light a fire under your ass to actually get started to do something to yourself.

I literally have had this happen to me where people have said, you know, you've been my great inspiration. I saw you do this and I realized, chasing Calacanus can do it. I can do it. And I was like, thanks. I think that's sort of a compliment. It's like if that dip shit can make it work, I can make it work. But that's great. That's what we need more of. We need more of that. This idiot figured it out. You can too. Listen, Cortland, you have been an amazing guest. We've got to do this again. Anytime. Congratulations on the success.

Great, great, great guest on a pod. Wow. Everybody go, and just, it's nice to have some optimism and in the world, too. I mean, I think we need it right now because people, it's been a rough year for people, right? It's been rough. And the opportunity, I think 2021 forward is going to be amazing. Like the lift of getting Trump out of office and getting these vaccines and everybody learning how to work remote and all these tools being adopted, it's going to be sick. I call people up, I have people as guests on the pod.

I would only have people in person for five years. If you didn't want to come in person, you couldn't be on the pod. So people would make trips to San Francisco to be on the pod, do meetings, have dinners of people. It's just, you know, I tell people, when you're in town, then you can be on the pod. We took that out. Now I get podcast guests that I never thought I would get. Like I just had the chairwoman, one of the chairmen or women of the SEC on the pod.

She's like, yeah, I'll come on the pod, sure. Yeah. And then you call them and it's like, they already have a podcast set up. It's like, of course I've got a podcast set up. Yeah, who do you think I am? It's 2020. It's the year of remote. It's the year of remote. Of course I've, yes, of course I've got a professional microphone and headsets and an HD camera, digital SLR. All right. Everybody follow Cortland Allen, C.S. Allen, A-L-L-L-E-N. He does not have at Cortland yet. Go buy it. Who's got at Cortland, man? Come on. I should. I don't know. I'm committed to CSL, I don't care. I don't tweet that much, but I try to make a good one I do.

Oh, are you in the Naval Camp? Do less is more? I mean, I'm on Indie Hackers. I've got like, like, 95,000 followers on Indie hackers. We make a post there. Everybody gets an email. I've got like 30,000 on Twitter. It's not as high value. I think it's hard to have deep conversations there. But it used to be cool. It used to be cool. Yeah. It's the way things go. I think you're right though. I think it's going to be like this segue into, you know, private communities and vertical communities because the big ones are just becoming, they all just collapsed at a certain point. And I think Twitter's at that like collapse point, like Facebook hit and MySpace hit where you're just like, oh, I just, it's, it's,

it's oppressive to be on Twitter. Like, you feel the weight of it. It's like bricks. I feel like having a Twitter handle for me is like 20 of the 100 bricks I've been carrying in my backpack the past year. You know, like when the pandemic's over, that'll be like 30 bricks. Trump's out of office, another 30 bricks. If I could just shut this goddamn Twitter account off and it didn't have, it's hard. It's hard.

It's hard. I'm so addicted and it's so important for my business to be there. But I can rethink it. I'm going to rethink it. Maybe somebody just buy at Jason for a million dollars. from me. Jason Statham, you can have it. Get me off this platform. All right. Listen, Cortland, hopefully we'll get to meet in person someday when the pandemic's over and continue. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. You play PLO. You play, uh, no limit. I play with, uh, some of your portfolio companies,

Jeff from underground seller. Oh, yeah. Jeff's great. Play for Stanley from DoorDash. Oh, you know what we got to do is we got to get a, uh, a poker or, do you play the poker app? Yeah, I've been there during the pandemic. To, yeah. I've been, I mean, I went into the pandemic up significantly in my game and coming out of the pandemic, I will be down. Because my friends are like, let's play PLO. I was like, sure. I mean, PLO is the devil's game. I mean, talk about variance.

Oh, you can lose so fast in PLO. It's like, oh, I've got the best hand. And everybody else was like, I think I could have the best hand. Yeah, I'm drawing to the nuts. Yeah, I'm drawing to the nuts. Yeah, I'm drawing to the second nuts. And all of a sudden you have four people in a pot and you're up against. And then people are running it twice.

And all of a sudden, it's like, the cards come out so fast. I don't even know what happened. I have to replay the hand to just see how did I lose that hand when I had top set? And it's like, oh, you had top set? You're totally going to lose. But you don't lose in no limit hold them. It's like, yeah, because you don't have the other two cards. I want a hand the other day.

We had a royal flush, which obviously isn't happening. Oh, you got your first royal? I got my first royal. And of course it was in PLO and someone else had like something like I think they had a boat. Of course, yeah. Of course they went hard, piloted all in. And I was very happy about that hand. I've had hands now.

where I flopped like the nuts, the other person turned the nuts, and then I rivered the nuts. Like the nuts to the nuts to the nuts. So you flop top set, the next person flops the top straight, and then you flop top flush, you know, or something. Or you pair of the board pairs and you get your boat.

And just the back and the fourth, and then if you have a three-way hand, and do you guys set run it twice on yours? Yeah, we do. So that takes the variance down a little bit. So you take the variance on. you got three people in a pot, and then you run it twice. And then, like, it's like, oh, yeah, the board paired twice on the river.

And so, like, this person boated up after you had the nutflash. And you're just like, what is going on? This game is crazy. Such a crazy game. And, you know, it hasn't been solved. That's what all the poker people tell me is that it largely hasn't been solved to the level no limit has. So it's just, it's still got a lot of, like, the best players are still trying to figure out

how to level each other in it, you know? Which is a lot of fun. which is a lot of fun. Like, I know somebody who literally in a very large game will go all in, like three or four times without even knowing what their cards are. And somehow they get out of the box every time because they're just doing the Merrigal strategy, whatever this, be a double your bets. So they're just, they're basic.

Maniacs. Yeah, you play with maniacs. But the flat size is probably a lot bigger than I play with. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so as we say in our home game, win a Prius, lose a Prius. Pretty brutal. I'm not trying to gamble at Prius,

so maybe we won't play, but we'll talk about it. Lose an Uber black, win an Uber black. That's probably a little bit better. All right, talk to you soon. Thanks for coming on the pod. Cheers, bye.

Yeah, anytime.