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Hosted by courtland allen
5 episodes with courtland allen
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2 episodes with courtland allen
2 episodes with courtland allen
4 episodes with courtland allen
2 episodes with courtland allen
4 episodes with courtland allen
In episode 659, Rob Walling speaks with Courtland Allen and Channing Allen, the co-founders of Indie Hackers, to talk about their newfound independence since they are no longer owned by Stripe.For the first half of the episode, they turn the tables and interview Rob about his new book, The SaaS Playbook.They also share a bunch of theories about entrepreneurship and investing. Topics we cover: 4:46 - About Rob's new book - The SaaS Playbook 6:47 - Why did Rob hire a writing coach? 12:35 - Rob's decision to launch a Kickstarter for his book 20:39- Rob's thought process for what to include in his book 28:31 - Startup positioning 31:07 - Founder mindset 35:51 - Is it possible to find a business idea that both makes money and aligns with the things you enjoy doing? 42:38 - What motivates Rob these days? 48:18 - Courtland and Channing's approach to going indie again with Indie Hackers 53:46 - Did Courtland and Channing have hesitations about going...Read more... »Click the icon below to listen.
Ben & Derrick chat with Courtland Allen from Indie Hackers. They discuss the challenges of building a community and finding fulfillment in work, among a variety of other topics. Resources: Indie Hackers (https://www.indiehackers.com/) SavvyCal (https://savvycal.com) Tuple (https://tuple.app)
In Episode 588, Rob Walling chats with Courtland Allen about a wide range of bootstrapper and indie hacker topics including the struggles with motivation/depression, bootstrapping today, fighting the urge to quit, and frameworks for getting your first dollar. The topics we cover [3:43] Hiring a podcast producer [6:21] Letting go in business [7:09] Invite-only experiment […]Click the icon below to listen.
On the show today is Amanda Natividad. Amanda is the Marketing Architect at SparkToro and previously the Head of Marketing at Growth Machine.I wanted to bring her on because Amanda is a prolific marketer with experience in content marketing across B2C brands like FitBit and Liftopia as well as B2B with Growth Machine and their client base. She's amassed a Twitter following of over 36k. And she's an expert in all things digital PR and content strategy.You'll hear about the idea of permissionless co-marketing, product-led content, and how SparkToro is leveraging live Office Hours to move the needle on product adoption and retention.More on Amanda: @amandanat on Twitter amandanat.com The Menu newsletter SparkToro Office Hours Audience research newsletter Mentions: Wealthfront's career building companies Demand Curve Sponsored by Riverside — It's what I use to record both my podcasts, Everything Is Marketing and Default Alive, but I was using Riverside long before they became a sponsor. I used to use Zoom until someone interviewed me using Riverside and I knew I had to switch. I love it because they take local recordings on each side, which gives you a reliable connection and the highest quality audio and video tracks. Separate HD recordings, an iOS app, automatic transcription… It's made specifically for podcasters. Folks like Guy Raz from How I Built This, Courtland Allen from Indie Hackers, and even Hillary Clinton uses it if you can believe it. Check them out and all the other features they have at riverside.fm
On the show today is Guillaume Moubeche. Guillaume is the founder of Lemlist, an email automation tool for sales.I wanted to bring him on because Lemlist has managed to scale past $10M ARR in just a few years in a very competitive category. How? Exceptional marketing. Guillaume and the Lemlist team have built an impressive marketing engine by thinking like a media company. LinkedIn, YouTube, masterclasses, social media... they've found winning formulas for multiple channels.You'll hear about how they've evolved their content with the LinkedIn algorithm, how they use paid masterclasses to acquire customers, and why they're investing in a video docuseries.More on Guillaume: @GuillaumeMbh on Twitter Lemlist Sponsored by Riverside — It's what I use to record both my podcasts, Everything Is Marketing and Default Alive, but I was using Riverside long before they became a sponsor. I used to use Zoom until someone interviewed me using Riverside and I knew I had to switch. I love it because they take local recordings on each side, which gives you a reliable connection and the highest quality audio and video tracks. Separate HD recordings, an iOS app, automatic transcription… It's made specifically for podcasters. Folks like Guy Raz from How I Built This, Courtland Allen from Indie Hackers, and even Hillary Clinton uses it if you can believe it. Check them out and all the other features they have at riverside.fm
On the show today is Bryan Wish. Bryan is the founder of BW Missions, which works with creators and authors to scale their content and products.I wanted to bring him on because Bryan has worked with high-profile authors like Nir Eyal and Allen Gannett. Successful book launches are great case studies for what successful marketing looks like. Bryan also has a lot of thoughts on the future of creators, content, and personal brands.You'll hear about modern PR tactics, community building as a part of your marketing strategy, and how to make a book a best-seller.More on Bryan: @bryanwish_ on Twitter BW Missions Sponsored by Riverside — It's what I use to record both my podcasts, Everything Is Marketing and Default Alive, but I was using Riverside long before they became a sponsor. I used to use Zoom until someone interviewed me using Riverside and I knew I had to switch. I love it because they take local recordings on each side, which gives you a reliable connection and the highest quality audio and video tracks. Separate HD recordings, an iOS app, automatic transcription… It's made specifically for podcasters. Folks like Guy Raz from How I Built This, Courtland Allen from Indie Hackers, and even Hillary Clinton uses it if you can believe it. Check them out and all the other features they have at riverside.fm
On the show today is Ran Segall. Ran is the founder of Flux Academy, which offers courses on web design, freelancing, and Webflow.I wanted to bring him on because Ran is one of the most successful course creators I know. Flux Academy does over $2M/yr in sales with a very small, lean team. And it all started with Ran's YouTube channel and running workshops at local tech meetups.You'll hear about how Ran creates so much video content, how they've diversified channels across search, video, and social media, and his approach to course production.More on Ran: @ransegall on Twitter Flux Academy Mentions:George Mac tweetSponsored by Riverside — It's what I use to record both my podcasts, Everything Is Marketing and Default Alive, but I was using Riverside long before they became a sponsor. I used to use Zoom until someone interviewed me using Riverside and I knew I had to switch. I love it because they take local recordings on each side, which gives you a reliable connection and the highest quality audio and video tracks. Separate HD recordings, an iOS app, automatic transcription… It's made specifically for podcasters. Folks like Guy Raz from How I Built This, Courtland Allen from Indie Hackers, and even Hillary Clinton uses it if you can believe it. Check them out and all the other features they have at riverside.fm
On the show today is Juliette Kopecky. Juliette is the CMO at LinkSquares and previously the VP of Marketing at Talla.I wanted to bring her on because LinkSquares is growing rapidly in the legal tech space and making a name for itself. They've been investing heavily into video content and taking a drastically different approach than their competitors and incumbents.You'll hear about Juliette's career path and rise to CMO, how they pivoted and adjusted their marketing through the pandemic, and how to have fun with marketing in a boring industry.More on Juliette: @julietteko on Twitter https://linksquares.com/careers/ Sponsored by Riverside — It's what I use to record both my podcasts, Everything Is Marketing and Default Alive, but I was using Riverside long before they became a sponsor. I used to use Zoom until someone interviewed me using Riverside and I knew I had to switch. I love it because they take local recordings on each side, which gives you a reliable connection and the highest quality audio and video tracks. Separate HD recordings, an iOS app, automatic transcription… It's made specifically for podcasters. Folks like Guy Raz from How I Built This, Courtland Allen from Indie Hackers, and even Hillary Clinton uses it if you can believe it. Check them out and all the other features they have at riverside.fm
On the show today is Laura Lopuch. Laura is a sales email consultant, AKA the “Queen of Cold Emails.”I wanted to bring her on because she's one of the few cold email experts who actually show their work and provide tangible examples of what works. She's written for Copyhackers and Unbounce as well as spoken at conferences like MicroConf and Shine Bootcamp.You'll hear about email outreach common mistakes and how to fix them, tangible examples of how to use cold email for marketing, and Laura's frameworks so you can craft your own high converting emails.More on Laura: @waitingtoberead on Twitter lauralopuch.com/everythingismarketing Mentions: Crystal Knows Magic Sales Bot Sponsored by Riverside — It's what I use to record both my podcasts, Everything Is Marketing and Default Alive, but I was using Riverside long before they became a sponsor. I used to use Zoom until someone interviewed me using Riverside and I knew I had to switch. I love it because they take local recordings on each side, which gives you a reliable connection and the highest quality audio and video tracks. Separate HD recordings, an iOS app, automatic transcription… It's made specifically for podcasters. Folks like Guy Raz from How I Built This, Courtland Allen from Indie Hackers, and even Hillary Clinton uses it if you can believe it. Check them out and all the other features they have at riverside.fm
On the show today is Conor Lewis. Conor is the founder of FORT, which creates magnetic pillow forts for kids.I wanted to bring him on because Conor launched one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns out there. Not only was the campaign a massive success, but it was also a ground-breaking case study on community-driven product development. Conor has also been sharing everything he's learning about getting FORT off the ground on Twitter.You'll hear about how he built an audience before Kickstarter, how he leveraged niche online communities during the pandemic, and what key factors made the campaign so successful.More on Conor: @conorblewis on Twitter FORT Mentions:PR email templateSponsored by Riverside — It's what I use to record both my podcasts, Everything Is Marketing and Default Alive, but I was using Riverside long before they became a sponsor. I used to use Zoom until someone interviewed me using Riverside and I knew I had to switch. I love it because they take local recordings on each side, which gives you a reliable connection and the highest quality audio and video tracks. Separate HD recordings, an iOS app, automatic transcription… It's made specifically for podcasters. Folks like Guy Raz from How I Built This, Courtland Allen from Indie Hackers, and even Hillary Clinton uses it if you can believe it. Check them out and all the other features they have at riverside.fm
On the show today is Jake Thomas. Jake is the creator of Golden Hearts and Creator Hooks.I wanted to bring him on because he went from having absolutely no experience in SEO to generating $5k per month in affiliate revenue from hundreds of thousands of visitors. He also studies YouTubers to dissect their thumbnails, titles, content, and what makes their videos great. You'll hear about how to quickly get up to speed with SEO in 2021, how to pick profitable niches, and what YouTubers do better than anyone else.More on Jake: @jthomas__ on Twitter Golden Hearts Creator Hooks Sponsored by Riverside — It's what I use to record both my podcasts, Everything Is Marketing and Default Alive, but I was using Riverside long before they became a sponsor. I used to use Zoom until someone interviewed me using Riverside and I knew I had to switch. I love it because they take local recordings on each side, which gives you a reliable connection and the highest quality audio and video tracks. Separate HD recordings, an iOS app, automatic transcription… It's made specifically for podcasters. Folks like Guy Raz from How I Built This, Courtland Allen from Indie Hackers, and even Hillary Clinton uses it if you can believe it. Check them out and all the other features they have at riverside.fm
This special episode is a crosspost from the Indie Hackers Podcast with Courtland Allen. Sam and Shaan were interviewed by Courtland a few months ago and they gave a behind-the-scenes look at how they think about building out different income streams as a solo creator. --------- * Follow Indie Hackers: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcasts * Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ * Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: https://refer.fm/million * Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas. --------- Show notes: * (1:05) On Courtland selling to Stripe * (4:30) What makes My First Million special * (12:05) How a founder can succeed after being acquired * (17:49) Shaan's path to solopreneur * (26:19) How you make money with a rolling fund * (32:52) Ideas around astrology and horoscopes * (41:14) The tools in the solo creator toolbox * (43:14) Who is having the most fun doing what they do * (53:35) What are Sam & Shaan's end game? * (1:01:41) How to have it all
Audio source: https://share.transistor.fm/s/63fb35d1Notes Interviewing People Good Writing = Engine + Drag + Lift Engine: The core idea. "Why am I here in the first place?" Drag: Writing problems, eg jargon, run-on sentences Lift: Stylistic points — jokes, fun tone, deep insight "Trying to make a writer do something that they don't want to do is like not going to really work" "Write pieces that put their finger on things that people have been thinking a lot, but don't have the words for"hit on timely topics, but have something to say that is new and interesting "you almost need to have your finger on the pulse of what people are publishing... but once you start doing that, once you start like looking at what everyone else is doing, like you, you lose whatever that is that can get people interested in what you're doing, because you're no longer original." Reading things that other people aren't necessarily reading TranscriptDan Shipper: I think especially when you're starting out, the thing to do is just make good stuff, especially in media, because that's, the idea is if you write something really good, it's going to spread. So another thing that we've done.[00:00:09] Over time is the model that I started with super organizers, which is interviewing people. So when you do an interview with someone and you write it up and you do a good job and they like it, they share it with their audience. So if you can write really good interviews and get people who have successfully more and more followers, every time you publish.[00:00:25] You, you get exposed to their audience and you can recruit their audience to be your audience. And then that means you can get someone even more famous next time. It doesn't fully work exactly like that all the time. Like sometimes the fans, people don't share it. Honestly, you have to mix in people who are not famous.[00:00:38] Cause sometimes famous people are just, aren't very good interviews. Have these bits that they just give you, but they given it to a hundred people before. So it's feels like raw other things that we've done right now. Something that we're experimenting with is just like during cross-promote with other newsletters, we have someone who's doing growth with us and he's just setting up different cost promos with newsletters that, that we're a fan of.[00:00:59]And that has been actually fairly successful so far. But yeah, I think we're just at the very earliest stages of figuring out like how to grow beyond. Yeah. Just writing stuff that, that people really like. [00:01:10] Nathan Baschez: Yeah. And I think all the other stuff depends on that first core layer of just the writing being really good.[00:01:17] So it's like we focus way more time on editing pieces and like figuring out what makes a good piece on that kind of stuff. Then we do. Doing cross promo or whatever else, we're just now starting to do some cross promo, but it's like the cross promo wouldn't work. If the pieces weren't that good.[00:01:30] And if the pieces are good, you don't need cross promo that bad. Cause people just share it on Twitter. So it's like really the higher order bit is just editorial focus, basically. [00:01:39] Courtland Allen: Yeah. There's nothing more shareable than basically articles online. We've got a URL. Every single social network is formatted to allow you to share links and blow it up into the cool little expanded version with a picture and stuff.[00:01:48]If you write good content, people will share it. What have you learned? [00:01:52] Nathan Baschez: Writing good content. We're developing some like frameworks around this one is engine drag and lift. So three interesting things. Lift is a new one that Rachel Jepson, our executive editor came up with that. I love, but so the engine of the piece is like the core idea of like, why am I here in the first place?[00:02:08]It's just oh you're going to if you're here, it's oh, you're going to learn how to start a new media company. Or at least how these people did it. And. Whatever, like you're going to learn a bunch of like random other bits about this kind of world along the way. Like maybe co-founder relationships, whatever.[00:02:20] That's like the engine of this podcast interview that we're doing drag is like, Okay. Maybe you have a really strong engine, but just the way you wrote it, like the sentences don't make sense. They're not they don't logically flow from each other. You start to feel lost, and so I think about it like a car.[00:02:35] This is funny. This is before I got into formula, now that I'm into formula one, I'm like way into this analogy. But it's if you have a car that has really terrible aerodynamics, no matter how strong the engine is, people are going to fall off, but. It's really hard as an editor to fix an engine.[00:02:48] That's just not there. Like sometimes the engine is just weak or oh, it only appeals to a really tiny subset of people. And it's this is very specific. Like maybe you might want to make it a little bit more broad or something like that, but you know, the engine is like the core reason why you're there.[00:03:01] The drag is like anything in the way that it's written, that gets in the way of accessing the power of that engine. And then Lyft is just funny little things like. Or jokes or tone that kind of keep you sticking around. It's like when someone makes you chuckle in the middle of writing or someone just points out something that's really insightful.[00:03:17] Even if it's besides the point of the engine, you're just re-upped for another, like two minutes, at least of reading, cause like something good may be around the corner. And so that little lift, those little nice those kinds of help too. But yeah, I don't know that's like our overall framework.[00:03:30]Dan. You've got a lot of other stuff on this too though. Yeah. I mean, I [00:03:33] Dan Shipper: think that there's a lot of things within that. What makes a good engine and also like, how do you get the best out of writers? So like one, one lesson that we keep learning over and over again is like writers.[00:03:42] The best pieces are written by writers who care about those pieces and wanna write. Yeah. And trying to make a writer do something that they don't want to do is like not going to really work. So it's like a lot of the best pieces come from writers digging into their own with soul on what they're interested in.[00:03:56] If they're interested in it, then it would probably do well for people who are like them. And so, or interested in the same things as they are. And so that's reflected in our model like Nathan and I don't go to writers and be like, Hey, you should write about this week. Like we're like each publication inside of.[00:04:13] Yeah. Each newsletter is its own publication with its own writer who has the voice and vision of the newsletter. And is the one who has the finger on the pulse of the audience and gets to say this is what I'm into. And this is where I want to lead the audience, within certain bounds obviously.[00:04:26] And our job is to help them do that better, to bring that out and bring more of them out into their pieces rather than being the ones who like assign stories and say here's what you got to cover. And that's one of the reasons why we think this can be bigger than just like productivity strategy.[00:04:39] Tech focused articles is like the vision for each publication that lives in the writer. And so it's a little bit more decentralized than like a typical media company. So that's one thing. And it's really hard to remember that because I think we typically like, are like, you should do.[00:04:54] Get excited about it. And it's just almost, [00:04:56] Nathan Baschez: yeah, it feels oh we have a media company, we should be able to be excited about ideas and get people to do our ideas, but it's not if we want it done. Well, it's just our idea, the visions in our head. Yeah. So I've got some stuff that I write.[00:05:08] Dan has some stuff that he writes. We have things that we're excited about, but help it's like the purpose of the company ultimately is to be like a jet pack for writers to get what they want faster and in a parachute. [00:05:20] Dan Shipper: Yeah. It's yeah, that fallacy is like the media equivalent of I just need a technical co-founder to make this idea where I just need to hire [00:05:26] Courtland Allen: Slater to build this app.[00:05:27] And then I'll [00:05:29] Dan Shipper: all get rich. Yeah. It's actually, no, you got, they have to want it too, and so yeah, for me, it's oh, I have this idea. You should write it. It's actually, no, I should just write it because you don't have that idea or whatever, so that's one big thing that we've learned.[00:05:39] I think like in terms of different engines, like pieces that put their finger on things that people have been thinking a lot, but haven't, don't have the words for usually do really well pieces that hit on timely topics, but have something to say that is like new and interesting do really well.[00:05:55] And that's hard actually. It's really hard to chase that. W we just recorded a podcast yesterday. Where we were talking about this feeling that you almost need to have your finger on the pulse of what people are publishing so that you can do it too. And it's actually, but once you start doing that, once you start like looking at what everyone else is doing, like you, you lose whatever that is that can get people interested in what you're doing, because you're no longer original.[00:06:17] And you're just like recycling. Ideas. So I think both of us probably read few newsletters. Honestly, we probably just read a lot of books and do a lot of thinking and talking to people that we think are smart and that's a really good way to generate some of these ideas. [00:06:31] Courtland Allen: yeah, it's like a tricky line to walk because people really like to share and talk about things that like, they already know about, like people are all talking about a particular thing, then it's just like during the election season, for example, everybody wants to share articles about the election.[00:06:43] Cause all their friends are reading about it and talking about it, but it is true. Follow what everybody else is doing, what everybody else is doing too closely that you do lose what makes you unique and what makes you special? And so I like your strategy of reading books and reading things that other people aren't necessarily reading, because then you can react to that.[00:06:57]You'll come with fresh ideas that people haven't heard before, and you can, if you want to apply it to topics that people are excited to share and talk.
Audio source: https://www.brainspodcast.com/episode/internet-creators-2 Julian Research top ranked posts of all time (HN Algolia, Twitter like filters, Indiehackers top posts) and find the patterns Threads are useful because they show "meat" - "proves that you can sustain how interesting you are across multiple messages" Julian's post on Content Marketing: Novelty and Usefulness Categories of novelty: Counterintuitive — "I had no idea" or "I would have never thought that's how the world worked". Elegant sentence — "It's where you capture something, people know, but you say it so beautifully. They think I couldn't have said that better. Or you took the words right out of my head." Shock and awe — "holy crap. I cannot believe that just happened. Thanks for sharing that news." Actionable: "Hey, now that you know this novel piece of information, here's what you can do". "Here are the steps, here's how this would now affect how you navigate the world going forward." "Actionable and novel in like a thread form tends to perform exceptionally well." Aella "Aella has all these polls on Twitter and they're almost always asking people like these super controversial things." "What I did is I went through all of the polls. I've been doing polls for like pretty steadily for about three years. I have around 1500 and I put them all on a spreadsheet. And then I sorted them all by like the amounts of likes and retweets. And like, I weighted them differently. And then I sorted it by ones that are most divisive. So like the answers tend to be like roughly 50, 50. And then I selected from there in different categories. And I had people like vote on them. So Twitter is a proving grounds." https://www.askhole.io/ Sam "I know how to use the written word to get people to do what I want them to do." Copywork "the best way to get good is I found people who I admired and who were best in their field. And then I would write their workout by hand." "So for example, there was a handful of long-form copywriters that are considered the best. And I spent six months writing it out by hand copying each of their ads." "Then I wanted to learn a little bit about writing, uh, like books. So I took JD Salinger's book and I wrote that up by hand." "if you want to learn how to become a good script writer for like comedy, for movies, you to go and find a Judd Apatow script or Woody Allen script and write it up by hand" "I see the commonalities between all these cause I've been copying them. Now I know how to put my texture on this because I've learned the combination of what the people I like do. And I'm gonna make a little bit of my own, add my own flair to that." "You actually have to feel the rhythm like a great writer. You can have one short sentence and then a really long sentence and you can feel these rhythms by writing it up by hand. And it's because when you write it out by hand, it forces you to acknowledge every single syllable, every single comma, every single period." Three step process: Copy, Internalize, and Make It Your Own. Transcriptswyx: Usually the topics are a little bit unpredictable on the show. So I'm going to try something a little different this week. This week, we're going to focus on writing how to write better, how to write more engaging, uh, and get more readers. So the first feature today is Julian Shapiro. Julian, very interesting system as a creator from writing Twitter threads that convert into his blog posts and from his blog posts converting into email subscribers.[00:00:28] Julian Shapiro: So this gets us to the topic of how do you optimize for growing as quickly as possible on these channels? The way I start is I think, how do I get my hands on all of the top ranked posts of all time? And then if I can see what those are, can I then find the patterns?[00:00:43] So they're really, the only trick here is find a tool that lets you measure or lets you identify. All of those top ranked posts. So for hacker news, you can use, Algolia like the search feature. And then for Twitter, you can actually use tweet, deck tweet, deck dot, twitter.com. And you can rank things essentially, but you can filter the middle east by how many likes do they have?[00:01:03] So if I filter by 10,000 likes or more, I start looking for the patterns among these high-performing pieces. Content. [00:01:09] Courtland Allen: Do you, nobody does this because like on hack, like on any hackers on like, I literally on the homepage, I'm like, here are the best posts of all time. Here are the best posts every month.[00:01:17] You're the best post every week. And I'm hoping people will go back and look at the best posts and make more posts like that because I want them to, and they never do. They just make kind of crappy posts and they complain like, why is nobody liking my posts? I'm like, the answers are literally right in front of you.[00:01:31] Like, it could not make it easy, easier to find what works. Right. Right. Okay. So we were talking about Twitter earlier. What are you seeing that works well? [00:01:39] Julian Shapiro: So you want to tweet threads for the most part, if you're trying to get retweets and retweets are what bring followers. And so the reason threads are useful is because it shows so much meat.[00:01:50] It's like, here's all this content. It's not just a single tweet. It's a bunch of glued together, which proves that you can sustain how interesting you are across multiple messages. So you're a de-risked person to follow. You can keep giving people the goods and when you're tweeting threads or tweeting single tweets, usually you want to think.[00:02:09] A two-part framework that I write about on my website, which is novelty and actionable. So novelty means you're sharing something new that wouldn't have been easy to figure out on your own and it makes you think, wow. So there's a few categories of novelty. One is counterintuitive like, oh, I had no idea or I would have never thought that's how the world worked.[00:02:29] Another category of novelty would be elegant sentence. It's where you capture something, people know, but you say it so beautifully. They think I couldn't have said that better. Or you took the words right out of my head. Right. And the last category is shock and awe it's like, holy crap. I cannot believe that just happened.[00:02:47] Thanks for sharing that news. And then actionable is this thing you tack on at the end, where it's like, Hey, now that you know this novel piece of information, here's what you can do, right. Here, like the steps, here's how this would now affect how you navigate the world going forward. So actionable and novel in like a thread form tends to perform exceptionally well.[00:03:08] Courtland Allen: have you seen Aella's account? Like as far as I can tell, you're just asking like the most controversial, provocative questions and polls you possibly can that no one else would do because we're all afraid of getting canceled. [00:03:18] Sam Parr: Right? I [00:03:20] Aella: guess. So I'm a little unclear about like exactly where my Twitter followers come.[00:03:25] Sam Parr: Aella_girl, she's got one with an underscore and [00:03:28] Courtland Allen: look at the one that has an underscore, Aella_girl. The underscores has the safe for work one, like I'll give you the skinny on Aella, Sam. So Aella has all these polls on Twitter and they're almost always asking people like these super controversial things.[00:03:41] She also has this card game that I bought. It's like, kinda like icebreakers. [00:03:45] Aella: What I did is I went through all of the polls. I've been doing polls for like pretty steadily for about three years. I have around 1500 and I put them all on a spreadsheet. And then I sorted them all by like the amounts of likes and retweets.[00:03:56] And like, I weighted them differently. And then I sorted it by ones that are most divisive. So like the answers tend to be like roughly 50, 50. And then I selected from there in different categories. And I had people like vote on them. Um, and that, that's how we got, so most of those came from Twitter polls or versions of Twitter [00:04:12] Julian Shapiro: polls.[00:04:12] So Twitter is a proving grounds for what's actually. Yeah, that's super cool. [00:04:16] swyx: I actually had the good fortune of meeting Aella not long after this interview. And I can confirm that her questions make everyone uncomfortable, but also make the meeting with her memorable and her card, her trading cards with all these questions is available.[00:04:32] That https://www.askhole.io/, and I'm going to get one of them. And just to see what questions do you come up with? The next feature we're going to have is Sam Parr. He's talked about his process. Several times, but he's super confident about it. And I think it's worth studying because he clearly gets results. It may be a bit dishonest, but if you're willing to trade in some hustle, his, which is his company for results, you can get phenomenal results and he's clearly got objectively very good at it.[00:05:03] Sam Parr: And what do you know that these people don't. I know how to use the written word to get people, to do what I want them to do. And how do you do that? [00:05:12] Courtland Allen: It does seem mama. I mean, Sam, the face you're making right now, you look. [00:05:16] Sam Parr: You look devious? No, it's just like, you know, when we're, we're always selling something, whether I want to like entertain someone with an article, like I'm not asking for money, I'm trying to sell you to give me your attention and, and read my story, whether I'm actually trying to get you to buy stuff, but I'm trying to get you to share something.[00:05:32] Whether I'm getting you to believe something. I'm trying to tell you whether I'm trying to get you to work at my company. Uh, I'm very good at particularly the written word, getting you to do what I want you to do. Um, the best way to get good is I found people who I admired and who were best in their field.[00:05:47] And then I would write their workout by hand. So for example, there was a handful of long-form copywriters that are considered the best. And I spent six months writing it out by hand copying each of their ads. Then I wanted to learn a little bit about writing, uh, like books. So I took JD Salinger's, um, what's his book.[00:06:04] Yeah. Catherine there, I guess you're in the rye. And I wrote that up by hand. Um, if you want to learn how to become a good script writer for like comedy, for movies, you to go and find a Judd Apatow script or Woody Allen script and write it up by hand, it's the same way that you like. The way that we learn music is really great.[00:06:20] Like if you gave someone six months, they can get really good at guitar. And what they do is they go and play jingle bells a bunch of times, and then they go and play a green day song and then they go and play. ACD song and they figured out blues and rock and they go, oh wow. I see the commonalities between all these.[00:06:34] Cause I've been copying them. Now I know how to put my texture on this because I've learned the combination of what the people I like do. And I'm gonna make a little bit of my own, add my own flair to that. And so it's called the copy work. So you just copy other people's work for a long period of time until you see the similarities and you start acting like them and behaving and thinking like them.[00:06:53] And then after a while you get really good at it. And then you. Do your own thing. So you're basically [00:06:57] Julian Shapiro: pattern matching while you're writing. Like you're trying to lean into what is it recurring? [00:07:01] Sam Parr: Exactly. That's exactly it, but it's like, do you not play an instrument? Play? The, uh, the sacks are used to. Okay.[00:07:08] Great. When you learned how to play, did you write your own songs on day one or did you copy other people for a little while? Yeah, a hundred percent copying [00:07:15] Courtland Allen: playing other people's music. Wait, I, [00:07:16] Aella: I, is this, I I'm down with this as like a thing, but I feel a little bit confused still about it. So when you say copied out, are you telling like physically writing it with your hand?[00:07:25] Sam Parr: Yeah. I wonder if I have my notebooks here. Like I literally have stacks of notebooks. And I have found the best selling, like there's famous ads, like long formats that sold encyclopedias. And I literally write them by hand. [00:07:39] Aella: I'm not, I'm not saying this doesn't work for you. I'm totally down with this. I'm just like confused.[00:07:42] Like I can call a copy. I can do a lot of things like, and replicate it. And I still don't learn how to do it. Like when we copy things by hand, we're learning how to physically like get our hand to move in that way. Um, whereas I don't know how, like, like if I just like write out a brilliant novel I'm I don't think that would actually help me cause like, [00:08:00] Sam Parr: oh, it will. If you do it a bunch, because you're reading it as you're writing it. [00:08:06] Aella: Do it [00:08:06] Sam Parr: though. Wouldn't just reading music, teach you how to play music [00:08:11] Aella: categories of things like with like music. I have the music and how to translate that to my hands. Moving it. [00:08:17] Sam Parr: Good writing is rhythmic and you, and you actually have to feel the rhythm.[00:08:21] You got to know, um, you know, like a great writer. You can have one short sentence and then a really long sentence, like, like, you know what I mean? Like it's a rhythm and you, and you can feel these rhythms by running it up by hand. And it's because when you write it out by hand, it forces you to acknowledge every single syllable, every single comma, every single period.[00:08:39] And it's really important.[00:08:39] Julian Shapiro: I think it resonates more if you break into three steps as opposed to two, so Sam, maybe you're. I see this thing and I'm going to write it down. I think the intermediary step is I'm now deliberately internalizing everything I'm writing down. So the writing down is just a forcing function to actually think through the patterns.[00:08:56] I think that's what you're capturing. And I think that might sort of satisfy. ALA's a good point, which is like, well, when I'm playing instrument, I can just do it without actually thinking. And then I'm not actually getting a true internalizing. [00:09:08] swyx: So that's it from today's feature on writing. We have tips from Julianne Shapiro on writing Twitter threads and then Sam Parr on just writing persuasive ad and marketing copy and, and learning that through copy work.[00:09:20] I think these things are one of those simple, but not easy concepts. There's no secret here. You just put in the work.
5 tips to improve your writing: Novelty Intrigue Stories Analogies Examples Audio source: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/196-david-perell (35 mins)
Courtland Allen is the creator of Indie Hackers, the largest online community of startup founders. He created the site in August 2016 and it was acquired by Stripe in April 2017. He is an MIT graduate, Y Combinator alum, full-stack web developer, and professional designer. Today, Courtland continues to run the Indie Hackers team at Stripe and hosts the Indie Hackers podcast. In this episode we talk about how Courtland learned web design, why he doesn’t recommend quitting your job, selling Indie Hackers to Stripe, trends he’s seeing in indie hacking, and why he’s Optimistic about the future of online business. Visit Indie Hackers Follow Courtland Allen on Twitter Subscribe to the Indie Hackers podcast Full transcript and show notes *** LISTENER SUPPORT Join our community on Facebook Support this show through Buy Me A Coffee. *** SPONSORS Try Podia and save 15% for life as a Creative Elements listener Start your free trial of SavvyCal and get your first month free using promo code ELEMENTS Get a free month of Blinkist Premium Try Grammarly for free and save 20% on Grammarly Premium *** PODGLOMERATE NETWORK This show is a part of the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. We encourage you to visit the website and sign up for our newsletter for more information about our shows, launches, and events. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you're listening to Creative Elements, we'd like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows surrounding entrepreneurship, business, and careers like Rocketship.fm and Freelance to Founder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this bonus episode, I'm talking with Courtland Allen, the founder of Indie Hackers. As I’ve shared a couple times over the last few months, my accelerator and community Unreal Collective was acquired by Smart Passive Income in January of this year. I wrote an article about the acquisition, and it got quite a bit of attention. One of the places it got shared was on Indie Hackers, a massive online community of nearly 30,000 people trying to build profitable side projects. It was originally shared by Rosie Sherry, the then-community manager for Indie Hackers. And the founder of Indie Hackers, Courtland Allen, left a really thoughtful comment on the piece too. Indie Hackers itself was once acquired by Stripe, and now Courtland works for Stripe while building the community full time. So we had a lot of common ground. In this episode, Cortland and I talk about the acquisition, earning a living as a creator, why I don’t really like Clubhouse, and how to build a community online. Courtland is an incredibly smart creator himself, and I’m excited to interview HIM on Creative Elements here soon. Try Podia and save 15% for life as a Creative Elements listener Join our community on Facebook Want to support this show? Click here to buy me a coffee. Brought to you by The Podglomerate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The post “Early-stage startups we love right now” with Indie Hackers’ Courtland Allen & Pioneer’s Daniel Gross | E1162 appeared first on This Week In Startups.
The post “Early-stage startups we love right now” with Indie Hackers’ Courtland Allen & Pioneer’s Daniel Gross | E1162 appeared first on This Week In Startups.
https://twitter.com/csallen (Courtland Allen) and I discuss the what it means to optimize your life for freedom, how the internet is enabling people to design their lifestyles around what they care about, and the value of forcing functions. Courtland is a MIT graduate, Y Combinator alum, full-stack web developer, and professional designer. He is the founder of https://www.indiehackers.com/start (Indie Hackers), an online community of people seeking financial and creative freedom. Listen on https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rajits-show/id1547154924 (Apple) | https://open.spotify.com/show/0XUMlzxwTxjY2PjrJgdwLU (Spotify) | https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5jYXB0aXZhdGUuZm0vcmFqaXQv (Google) | https://overcast.fm/itunes1547154924 (Overcast) | https://pca.st/6mlec7xf (PocketCasts)
I hopped on the Run With It podcast with Chris and Eathan to share 3 business ideas for indie hackers to run with in 2021. Two are brand new, and one was inspired by my recent episode on bundling with Tyler King. Subscribe to Run With It: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/run-with-it-business-ideas-from-successful-entrepreneurs/id1477133536
YC Alum and Founder of Indie Hackers, Courtland Allen maintains one of the best pulses on business trends and opportunities. Listen to Courtland share three business ideas that are ready to launch in 2021.
Courtland founded Indie Hackers, one of the leading entrepreneurship communities on the internet. Indie Hackers was acquired by Stripe in 2017. He's a Y Combinator alum & graduated from MIT. This conversation is broken up into two parts. In part one, we discuss: the indiehacker philosophy optimizing for freedom + becoming a time billionaire capitalism + the american dream diversity, race + culture equality of opportunity vs outcome Part Two - Business Idea Framework (starts at 1hr mark): a four-step framework for brainstorming business ideas difference between product ideas + business ideas how to think about distribution from day one finding a door before making a key how to create an innovative solution Timestamps: 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:52 Who is Courtland + what is Indie Hackers 00:04:24 Background + Getting Acquired By Stripe 00:09:51 Differentiating 00:12:47 Unbundling Platforms + Creating Alternatives 00:16:03 Experience at Y Combinator 00:21:49 The Indiehacker Philosophy 00:25:02 "The Time Billionaire" 00:27:20 Skin In The Game 00:31:11 The Evolution of Capitalism 00:36:04 Equality of Outcome vs Equality of Opportunity 00:39:28 Objective Thinking + Confirmation Bias 00:41:40 Going Beyond Performative Diversity 00:44:32 The Nuance of Culture vs Race 00:51:10 The Value of Examples 00:54:48 Getting To The Root Of The Problem 00:59:13 Does The American Dream Exist? Part Two: Business Idea Framework: 01:03:44 4 Part Framework: Problem, Distribution, Monetization, Solution 01:04:58 Product Idea vs Business Idea 01:06:38 What Makes A Good Problem? 01:08:53 Tribes, Channels + Distribution 01:14:17 Courtland's Checklist To Evaluate Problem 01:18:18 Where to Look for Problems 01:20:29 Sources To Find Rising Trends 01:25:23 Distribution From Day One 01:27:12 How To Share On Indie Hackers 01:32:55 Doing It Well vs Perfectionism 01:34:48 Wrap-Up
We're nominated for the SaaS Podcast Awards (https://microconf.com/latest/saas-podcast-award-nominees/) - go vote! The guys muse about the clever marketing behind the awards and their fellow nominee Courtland Allen's unfair charm & good looks. Ben talks through a shared clipboard feature he is shaping for Tuple. Derrick shipped a bunch of marketing projects this past week.
I've been procrastinating sharing my own story on the Indie Hackers podcast for years now. But when Ben and David (the co-hosts of the Acquired podcast) asked if they could interview me, it was impossible to put it off any longer. They're among the best podcast storytellers I know, so before you do anything, search for "Acquired" in your podcast player and subscribe to their excellent show! In this episode, Ben and David walk through my entire startup history, including my early childhood and college years. We talk about the creation of Indie Hackers, how I got it off the ground, and deep dive on the Stripe acquisition. I hope you enjoy it!
As regular listeners know, we typically cover some of the biggest companies who often receive the most media attention (see Airbnb and DoorDash). But today's episode is a little different. In our conversation with Courtland Allen of Indie Hackers, the largest community of startup founders, we dive into the stories of underdogs. What happens when there are millions of people doing small business entrepreneurship? How does anyone having access to the globally addressable market of 3 billion internet users open the door for the niche-est of products? We tell the story of Courtland’s own “Indie Hacker” journey, how he came to found Indie Hackers itself, and the lessons learned along the way. If you want more more Acquired and the tools + resources to become the best founder, operator or investor you can be, join our LP Program for access to our LP Show, the LP community on Slack and Zoom, and our live Book Club discussions with top authors. Join here at: https://acquired.fm/lp/ Sponsors: This episode is supported by Teamistry, a great new podcast from Atlassian that tells the stories of teams who work together in new and unexpected ways to achieve remarkable things. It's one of our best new podcast discoveries in 2020 and we think Acquired listeners are going to love it. Our thanks to Teamistry for their support, and you can listen here: https://link.chtbl.com/teamistry?sid=podcast.acquired Thank you as well to Kevel and to Capchase. You can learn more about them at: https://www.kevel.co https://www.capchase.com Playbook Themes from this Episode: (also available on our website at https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/special-acquired-x-indie-hackers ) 1. As long as you don't quit your journey, you're still in the act of succeeding. Indie Hackers was Courtland's seventh company. Before it, Courtland had started six other companies, each with a few thousand dollars in revenue but never as big as he wanted it to be. Looking back, Courtland has realized that everyone has a certain number of companies they need to start before they succeed: for some, that number may be one, for others, 36. For him, that number was 7. So his advice? All you have to do is not quit before you get to that number. 2. The journey is as important as the destination. While Courtland was working on some of his earlier companies, he was miserable. A few of those working years felt like a complete blur. But sometime before he started Indie Hackers, he realized that in order to keep going until you succeed (see playbook #1), you must structure your life so that it's easy for you to not quit. In other words, you have to make the journey fun — almost like the emotional counterpart to Paul Graham’s famous “default alive” concept. With this reframe, Courtland began to enjoy the journey — enjoying the new people he met and the new things he learned. This mindset helped him level up as a person. Instead of worrying and asking "am I there yet?" he was able to enjoy the building journey. 3. Stories are always paramount. As we discuss so often on Acquired, stories can be an incredibly powerful force, and their value is one of the core theses/value propositions of Indie Hackers. One insight Courtland came to from Hacker News was that people didn't want to just read comments about people who didn't succeed. They wanted high quality, verified stories that were trustable in some way. Indie Hackers sends a survey out to users 6 months after they join the community. One of the questions the survey asks is, "would you have started your company if not for Indie Hackers?" 15-20% say they would not have started without some story or interaction on Indie Hackers! 4. Don't try to create budgets — sell to people that already have them. Courtland originally tried to monetize Indie Hackers via advertising, and shared advertisement opportunities with the Indie Hacker community. But he soon realized that these smaller businesses weren't exactly the best customers to sell to. Eventually, he transitioned to selling to enterprises, and was pleasantly surprised by how much easier it was to sell. The sales process simplified is: educate, then win. If you're selling to someone with a budget, you essentially bypass the education step. 5. Utilizing platforms, like everything in business, has tradeoffs. There are no hard or fast rules in business. Everything has tradeoffs. Platforms may help with distribution but make it harder to build a brand and also create risks and dependencies. For Courtland, it was important for Indie Hackers to have its own brand. Additionally, he already had a distribution strategy (Hacker News). Hence, it made sense for Indie Hackers to be its own site, as there were many risks but few benefits to using some other platform like Medium. 6. Trust and mission alignment are critical in acquisitions. Acquisition terms are about much more than just the purchase price. Sometimes, other considerations are more advantageous than cash (e.g. equity), and there are creative ways to align their incentives. For Courtland, it was crucial that he retain freedom over his time and control over the direction of Indie Hackers. Hence, it was — and still remains — key that Patrick and Courtland's relationship have a high degree of trust. 7. Acquisitions can enable established brands to take bigger risks. “Intra-preneurship” can be difficult because the initiative is constrained by internal processes and standards as well as external expectations. Hence, you can often take bigger risks through an acquisition. Google video versus YouTube is a great example of this. 8. There is an infinite number of "indie hacker" opportunities. There is no end to the number of niche problems that can be identified and served. Big businesses and platforms create massive opportunities to go for the long tail. New businesses can build on top of these platforms or build for these platforms, creating tools to help people use them. For example, there are thriving tools business ecosystems today for Stripe, Shopify, WordPress, and still many more use cases yet to be addressed. Links: Indie Hackers: https://www.indiehackers.com
In today’s episode, Rob is joined by Courtland Allen as they answer listener questions. They talk about equity splits, the best cities for bootstrappers, splitting brands, and where to look for business ideas. The topics we cover [2:03] Splitting brands between agency and SaaS [10:55] What percent equity split when co-founding an app [18:52] Where […]
The post E1143: Indie Hackers Founder Courtland Allen is creating a community for the next generation of builders to chase the “new American Dream” appeared first on This Week In Startups.
In this episode, Li & Nathan chat with Courtland Allen, founder of Indie Hackers. Indie Hackers is an online community that focuses on entrepreneurs who build profitable internet businesses. They describe themselves as individuals seeking financial independence, creative freedom, and the ability to work on their own schedule.
The post E1143: Indie Hackers Founder Courtland Allen is creating a community for the next generation of builders to chase the “new American Dream” appeared first on This Week In Startups.
This podcast was originally recorded on September 12th, 2019 as part of a live meetup with the founder of Indie Hackers, Courtland Allen. Parts of this podcast may no longer be up to date. The original meetup included references to a screen share which you can find here: https://youtu.be/om9O4ylCBKM?t=2544Indie Worldwide hosts multiple live meetups and live-streamed interviews with indie founders every month. You can find links to our next meetup at https://indieworldwide.co/
A Solo Rob Adventure! During this episode, we are answering listener questions live from our MicroConf Connect members. Rob answers questions about: - Early Stage Validation- Competitive Markets- Youth Entrepreneurship- Key Insights Around the TinySeed Portfolio - Retirement Planning MicroConf Connect ➡️ http://microconfconnect.comTwitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/MicroConfE-mail ➡️ support@microconf.com MicroConf 2020 Headline Partners Stripehttps://stripe.comTwitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/Stripe Heyhttps://hey.com@heyhey MicroConf On Air Question and Answer Episode Rob Walling: [00:00:00] Welcome to today's episode of MicroConf On Air. I'm your host, Rob walling live streaming direct from my bunker library here in Minneapolis, Minnesota. So every Wednesday at 1:00 PM Eastern and producers, Andrew and I stream for 30 minutes and we cover topics related to building and growing ambitious SaaS startups that bring us freedom and purpose and allow us to value and maintain healthy relationships. We believe that showing up every day and shipping that next feature, that next piece of marketing copy closing that next sale is the way to build a sustainable company. Thanks so much for, for joining me today. Today is an all ask Rob episode. We're going to be doing a live Q and a, we have some good questions coming in on Twitter and in the MicroConf on air channel in MicroConf connect. If you're not part of MicroConf connect already should into Microsoft connect.com. We have more than I believe it's over 1600. Founders of bootstrappers and mostly bootstrapped founders in there hanging out and having conversations like this every day. And what I love is when I get into connect and there's a solid thread where I see a question and I go to, I know the answer to this, or I have a thought on this and I go in and there's already five amazing answers from other experienced founders who have done. Exactly this and I don't even need to weigh in, because the answers are, are good and they're all, and they're all legit. So I am checking out some questions. So today, yeah, I normally intro my guest here, but you'll know me as the co founder of drip and MicroConf and tiny seed. Startups for the rest of us host and author starts small, stay small. So I'm going to be answering a bunch of questions today. what are the, Oh, what are those books behind me? Yes. So it is definitely, a, a really nice book case here. I'll just show you a poll one book off the shelf, just so you can see. So here we are with the, this tome of no title, that actually, holds some silver age comic books for those who, are in the now missing Spider-Man number two there from 19, 63. I think so. Yes. All questions today can be startup related, silver age comic book collecting related, and of course, Dungeons and dragons related. we really do, in all seriousness have some really good questions coming in and, It's nice that we have a producer, Sandra says so smooth. It's nice that we have such a, it's a really good audience. It's a really great group creators that are here in microcuff connect and participating on Twitter. And just in this MicroConf averse. and I did an interview last week. If you haven't checked this out on indie hackers, Courtland Allen and I had a conversation for, yeah, it was about an hour and 10 minutes, really solid stuff. Good questions from Port
A Solo Rob Adventure! During this episode, we are answering listener questions live from our MicroConf Connect members. Rob answers questions about: - Early Stage Validation- Competitive Markets- Youth Entrepreneurship- Key Insights Around the TinySeed Portfolio - Retirement Planning MicroConf Connect ➡️ http://microconfconnect.comTwitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/MicroConfE-mail ➡️ support@microconf.com MicroConf 2020 Headline Partners Stripehttps://stripe.comTwitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/Stripe Heyhttps://hey.com@heyhey MicroConf On Air Question and Answer Episode Rob Walling: [00:00:00] Welcome to today's episode of MicroConf On Air. I'm your host, Rob walling live streaming direct from my bunker library here in Minneapolis, Minnesota. So every Wednesday at 1:00 PM Eastern and producers, Andrew and I stream for 30 minutes and we cover topics related to building and growing ambitious SaaS startups that bring us freedom and purpose and allow us to value and maintain healthy relationships. We believe that showing up every day and shipping that next feature, that next piece of marketing copy closing that next sale is the way to build a sustainable company. Thanks so much for, for joining me today. Today is an all ask Rob episode. We're going to be doing a live Q and a, we have some good questions coming in on Twitter and in the MicroConf on air channel in MicroConf connect. If you're not part of MicroConf connect already should into Microsoft connect.com. We have more than I believe it's over 1600. Founders of bootstrappers and mostly bootstrapped founders in there hanging out and having conversations like this every day. And what I love is when I get into connect and there's a solid thread where I see a question and I go to, I know the answer to this, or I have a thought on this and I go in and there's already five amazing answers from other experienced founders who have done. Exactly this and I don't even need to weigh in, because the answers are, are good and they're all, and they're all legit. So I am checking out some questions. So today, yeah, I normally intro my guest here, but you'll know me as the co founder of drip and MicroConf and tiny seed. Startups for the rest of us host and author starts small, stay small. So I'm going to be answering a bunch of questions today. what are the, Oh, what are those books behind me? Yes. So it is definitely, a, a really nice book case here. I'll just show you a poll one book off the shelf, just so you can see. So here we are with the, this tome of no title, that actually, holds some silver age comic books for those who, are in the now missing Spider-Man number two there from 19, 63. I think so. Yes. All questions today can be startup related, silver age comic book collecting related, and of course, Dungeons and dragons related. we really do, in all seriousness have some really good questions coming in and, It's nice that we have a producer, Sandra says so smooth. It's nice that we have such a, it's a really good audience. It's a really great group creators that are here in microcuff connect and participating on Twitter. And just in this MicroConf averse. and I did an interview last week. If you haven't checked this out on indie hackers, Courtland Allen and I had a conversation for, yeah, it was about an hour and 10 minutes, really solid stuff. Good questions from Port
Courtland Allen is the founder of Indie Hackers. He started the community that has inspired so many of us to start our bootstrapped businesses and changed our lives for the better. In this conversation, we speak about why Courtland started Indie Hackers, what it's like working on a business within Stripe, how you should stay motivated as a one-person team and what trends are important in 2020.
Looking at the influence of Courtland Allen's thriving 18,000 member Indie Hackers community and wildly popular podcast, you might think success was inevitable. However, back when Courtland founded Indie Hackers, the concept of building a "lifestyle" business in tech carried a stigma. As a graduate of MIT and Y Combinator, Courtland spent 6 years trying to build the stereotypical high growth Silicon Valley startup before he realized something... He just wanted to build something that he could put online, charge money for, and make enough money to pay his bills. Courtland had a hunch that there were other tech misfits like himself, who could use a space to share their stories and learn from one another. It was out of that shift in perspective that Indie Hackers was born. Today, the podcast he started for other Silicon Valley outcasts has reached 6 million downloads, proving that Courtland wasn't the only one opting out of the startup grind. Courtland joined Podcast Ally to talk about The Indie Hackers Podcast, which grew out the written interviews he was already creating for IndieHackers.com. In this podcast episode, Courtland shares: Why he initially resisted starting a podcast and how he feels about it now What it's like to reach out to successful founders and famous guests The evolution of Courtland's research and pre-interview process The Indie Hackers Podcast's current stats and big moments of growth Courtland's approach for deciding show content, guests, and growing the podcast Why acquisition and retention are important parts of your growth strategy How Courtland's goals have changed and what he wants for The Indie Hackers Podcast The power of inspiration and sharing your story—especially on podcasts Advice for podcasters: Do something that you love and don't give up! Please check out The Indie Hackers Podcast.
Looking at the influence of Courtland Allen's thriving 18,000 member Indie Hackers community and wildly popular podcast, you might think success was inevitable. However, back when Courtland founded Indie Hackers, the concept of building a "lifestyle" business in tech carried a stigma. As a graduate of MIT and Y Combinator, Courtland spent 6 years trying to build the stereotypical high growth Silicon Valley startup before he realized something... He just wanted to build something that he could put online, charge money for, and make enough money to pay his bills. Courtland had a hunch that there were other tech misfits like himself, who could use a space to share their stories and learn from one another. It was out of that shift in perspective that Indie Hackers was born. Today, the podcast he started for other Silicon Valley outcasts has reached 6 million downloads, proving that Courtland wasn't the only one opting out of the startup grind. Courtland joined Podcast Ally to talk about The Indie Hackers Podcast, which grew out the written interviews he was already creating for IndieHackers.com. In this podcast episode, Courtland shares: Why he initially resisted starting a podcast and how he feels about it now What it’s like to reach out to successful founders and famous guests The evolution of Courtland’s research and pre-interview process The Indie Hackers Podcast’s current stats and big moments of growth Courtland’s approach for deciding show content, guests, and growing the podcast Why acquisition and retention are important parts of your growth strategy How Courtland’s goals have changed and what he wants for The Indie Hackers Podcast The power of inspiration and sharing your story—especially on podcasts Advice for podcasters: Do something that you love and don’t give up! Please check out The Indie Hackers Podcast.
We are all living in social isolation due to the quarantine from COVID-19. Isolation is changing our habits and our moods, ravaging the economy, and changing how we work. One positive change is that more people have been reconnecting with their friends and family over frequent calls and video chats. Isolation is not a normal The post Isolation with Courtland Allen and Anurag Goel appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
We are all living in social isolation due to the quarantine from COVID-19. Isolation is changing our habits and our moods, ravaging the economy, and changing how we work. One positive change is that more people have been reconnecting with their friends and family over frequent calls and video chats. Isolation is not a normal The post Isolation with Courtland Allen and Anurag Goel appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
We are all living in social isolation due to the quarantine from COVID-19. Isolation is changing our habits and our moods, ravaging the economy, and changing how we work. One positive change is that more people have been reconnecting with their friends and family over frequent calls and video chats.Isolation is not a normal way for humans to live. We are social animals, and we need social interaction. We've changed how we use Internet products. There has been an evolution of trends in online shopping, social networking, and video communication software.Courtland Allen is the founder of Indie Hackers and Anurag Goel is the founder of Render, a new cloud provider. Both Courtland and Anurag are friends of mine, and join this episode to talk about how their lives are changing as a result of social isolation.
We are all living in social isolation due to the quarantine from COVID-19. Isolation is changing our habits and our moods, ravaging the economy, and changing how we work. One positive change is that more people have been reconnecting with their friends and family over frequent calls and video chats. Isolation is not a normal The post Isolation with Courtland Allen and Anurag Goel appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Courtland Allen talks about the technical details of building Indie Hackers
This bonus episode of Startup For The Rest Of Us is from a MicroConf On Air live stream in which Rob interviews Courtland Allen, founder of Indie Hackers, about interviewing 155 startup founders and what he learned from building a community from scratch. It was such a great conversation, I wanted to put it in […]
Why do some online communities thrive, and the others fizzle out? What is the secret sauce? Our guest today is the awesome Courtland Allen, the founder of Indie Hackers. You'll learn how to start a community from scratch, choose the right format, handle the mechanics, make it safe, and much more.Podcast feed: subscribe to https://feeds.simplecast.com/4MvgQ73R in your favorite podcast app, and follow us on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play Music.Show NotesIndie Hackers — the famous online community we're talking aboutThe 37 signals Manifesto — Basecamp's original site from 1999Acquired by Stripe! — a blog post from 2017 about IH acquired by StripeSlack, Telegram, WhatsApp — good platforms for starting a community as a chatroomDiscourse — popular forum softwareNomad List, Hacker News, DEV — popular communities that inspired IHThe Slow, Deliberate Process of Making a SaaS Business Work with Jane Portman of Userlist — Jane's interview on Indie HackersThe Indie Hackers PodcastStart Here — a guide for new users at Indie HackersFollow Courtland on Twitter: @csallenToday's SponsorThis episode is brought to you by Nusii — proposal software made easy for creatives. Do you get stressed every time a new lead hits your inbox? Nusii was built to help you create, send, track and manage your proposals in one easy-to-use app. Forget about searching for your best content, and following up with clients to sign on the dotted line. Visit nusii.com/uibreakfast for a 30% discount on your first 3 months.Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more here. Leave a ReviewReviews are hugely important because they help new people discover this podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, please leave a review on iTunes. Here's how.
This week we have a super exciting episode, we’re chatting with Courtland Allen, the founder of Indie Hackers. We’re going to talk about what indie hacking is, how to get started with it, and his advice for gaining traction with indie products. Let’s get started!
Chris Ferdinandi on Greater Than Code, Ben Orenstein on Maintainable, Susan Rice on Coaching For Leaders, Courtland Allen on Software Engineering Unlocked, and Matt Stratton on Hired Thought. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting March 16, 2020. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. CHRIS FERDINANDI ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Chris Ferdinandi with hosts Rein Henrichs and Jacob Stoebel. Chris is a proponent of plain vanilla JavaScript. He says that modern web development has grown so much in scope and complexity that it makes it difficult for beginners to get started and it can negatively impact the performance of the web for users in ways that developers with fast machines don’t always feel. One of the reasons things are the way they are today, Chris says, is because a lot of backend developers migrated to the front end because that was where the exciting stuff was happening and they brought with them their approaches and best practices. The front end, however, is a very different medium. In the back end, you have control over how fast the server is, when things run, the operating system, etc. On the front end, you have none of this. People are accessing what we build on a variety of devices that may or may not be able to handle the data we’re sending and may have unpredictable internet connections. If a file fails to download or the user goes through a train tunnel and we’ve built things in a modern JavaScript-heavy way, the whole house of cards falls apart on these users. Chris would like people not to abandon JavaScript altogether, but to be a little more thoughtful about how we use it. Modern web development involves a few things: frameworks, package managers, and doing more and more things (such as CSS) in JavaScript. All of this JavaScript has the effect of slowing down performance because 100KB of JavaScript is not the same as 100KB of CSS, a JPEG, or HTML because the browser needs to parse and interpret it. Because of these performance problems, single page apps have become more popular. But now you’re recreating in JavaScript all the things the browser gave you out of the box like routing, shifting focus, and handling forward and back buttons. You’re solving performance problems created by JavaScript with even more JavaScript, which is the most fragile part of the stack because it doesn’t fail gracefully. If a browser encounters an HTML element it doesn’t recognize, it just treats it as a div and moves on. If you have a CSS property you mis-typed, the browser ignores it. But if you mistype a variable in JavaScript, the whole thing falls apart and anything that comes after that never happens. For Chris, a better approach to web development is one that is more lean and more narrowly-focused on just the things you need. His first principle is to embrace the platform. For example, a lot of people don’t realize that DOM manipulation that used to be really hard years ago is really easy these days in vanilla JavaScript. Also, many of the things that JavaScript was required for in the past can be done more efficiently today with HTML and CSS. He also says that we need to remember that the web is for everyone. Because we are often using high-end computers, the latest mobile devices, and fast internet connections, we forget that this is not the experience for a majority of web users. We build things that work fine on our machines but are painfully slow for the people who actually use the things we build. They ended their discussion with reflections. Chris’s reflection was about learning JavaScript and web development for the first time. He says that people learning shouldn’t be made to feel like they need to dive in to the latest trends, but should instead find a way to learn the fundamentals. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/170-the-case-for-vanilla-javascript-with-chris-ferdinandi/id1163023878?i=1000466076138 Website link: https://www.greaterthancode.com/the-case-for-vanilla-javascript BEN ORENSTEIN ON MAINTAINABLE The Maintainable podcast featured Ben Orenstein with host Robby Russell. Ben believes that, in a maintainable codebase, the code should match how you think about the world. When speaking about the domain with your teammates, do you use the same terminology that the code uses? Do you use the term “user” but the code uses the term “customer”? Getting your terms consistent is a specific case of a more general principle of implicit and explicit knowledge. Maintainable systems have as much knowledge put into them as possible so that they become sources of truth. Ben’s definition of technical debt is a technical shortcut you took intentionally after weighing it against alternatives and deciding it was worth it in the short team with the eventual intention of eliminating it. He says it is hard to get time on a schedule dedicated to cleaning up technical debt, so it is your professional responsibility to clean it up as you go. Ben says that asking permission to clean up technical debt as you deliver a feature is like asking permission to do your job well. He says that the idea of “We’ll go fix this later” never happens and, if you don’t believe him, grep your codebase for the string “TODO”. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ben-orenstein-someday-well-go-clean-that-up-doesnt-work/id1459893010?i=1000466511242 Website link: https://maintainable.fm/episodes/ben-orenstein-someday-well-go-clean-that-up-doesnt-work-_fGCpf6F SUSAN RICE ON COACHING FOR LEADERS The Coaching For Leaders podcast featured Susan Rice with host Dave Stachowiak. From the time she was seven, Susan would hear her parents fighting loudly and violently when she was trying to sleep at night. When the fighting got scary and out of control, Susan would step in. Sometimes that meant talking them down and sometimes that meant separating them. The mediation she did with her parents taught her how to interact with parties who were intractably opposed. This developed in her a lack of discomfort with conflict, disagreement, and argument. She said that this helped her to be willing to stand up and not be conflict-averse. This reminded me of the Buster Benson episode of Lead From The Heart I summarized in my last article. Dave asked Susan about a section of her book Tough Love in which she described some feedback she received from former congressman Howard Wolpe when she was Assistant Secretary of State. He warned her bluntly that she would fail as Assistant Secretary if she did not correct course and she came to agree with that. She was only thirty-two at the time and had never held a position like this before. In 1998, six months into her tenure, a series of crises hit. Africa’s “first world war” broke out and, then in August of 1998, Al Qaida attacked the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing twelve Americans and over two hundred Kenyans and Tanzanians. This was both a horrific loss and a policy blow for those who were working on Africa at the time. Rather than addressing the pain they were all feeling head on, her approach to dealing with it was to charge through it as she did her parent’s divorce. This wasn’t a leadership style that would work in that context and Howard Wolpe gave her the tough love she needed at the time. Over the Christmas holiday, she reflected on what he had told her and realized that he was right. She had to be more patient. She had to be more respectful and solicitous of other people’s views and perspectives. Dave asked what she did first to make this change in her leadership style. Susan says she started by being more humble. She brought people into decision-making even if their recommendations were not ones that she ultimately accepted. She says, ”You can get a long way leading a team, even if many members of the team don’t actually agree with the direction you’re steering towards, if they feel that their advice, perspective, recommendations have truly been heard and appreciated.” Dave asked how she ensures in meetings between high ranking officials that everyone is genuinely heard even when she doesn’t agree with everything they are saying. She says it is not just what happens when you’re sitting around the meeting table. It comes down to the preparations going into the discussion: the quality of the paper that lays out the issues and the actions and the coherence of the agenda. Managing the meeting, though, is the hardest part. You have to make sure the options are given due consideration and everybody gets a chance to express their judgment. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/456-how-to-be-diplomatic-with-susan-rice/id458827716?i=1000466472793 Website link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/be-diplomatic-susan-rice/ COURTLAND ALLEN ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING UNLOCKED The Software Engineering Unlocked podcast featured Courtland Allen, founder of the Indie Hackers podcast and community with host Dr. Michaela Greiler. Michaela asked Courtland what was different about Indie Hackers compared to the earlier startups he had founded that made for its success. He said that for Indie Hackers, his notion of a business idea changed. Back in 2009, if you asked him about a business idea, he would have described a product idea and wouldn’t have been able to say much about how to get the product in customer’s hands, how much to charge for it, or even who the customer was. With Indie Hackers, he was thinking about all aspects of the business. She asked whether the original Indie Hackers idea was to build a community. Courtland said that while there was no desire to do a podcast at first, he always had a plan to build a community. He had multiple phases for Indie Hackers to go through to get to where he wanted it to be. Phase one was a blog where people who wanted to earn financial and creative freedom though revenue-generating side projects could go to find interviews Courtland had done with people like themselves. He figured these blog readers would subscribe to his newsletter and from there he would build a community forum where people could help each other. Somewhere along the line, the podcast was added based on community demand. Michaela asked how Courtland managed to keep Indie Hackers successful as a business when similar communities are struggling. Courtland believes that there are a few principles behind the success of Indie Hackers. The first is that you are much more likely to generate meaningful revenue quickly if you are charging for something that each customer is willing to pay a lot of money for. Regarding building a successful community, you have to start with your marketing. A community is a chicken-and-egg problem where the whole value of a community is the people inside it, making it really hard to start from nothing. With Indie Hackers, he started with content that brought in the people who could form the community. Courtland had thousands of people coming to the website before he turned it into a community. Another example is dev.to. Its founder, Ben Halpern, spent years just growing his Twitter account, tweeting funny jokes and helpful tips for developers. When he launched his community, he was able to advertise it from his Twitter account. A second thing you need to build a community is to seed it with discussions. As Courtland also described in an episode of Software Engineering Daily that I summarized in “Lighting Up The Brain and Joining A Gym”, he started his community by having conversations with fake accounts that were secretly also himself. Ben Halpern kickstarted the dev.to community with discussions with his friends. Choice of topic is critical too. You want a topic that you can talk about forever. The dev.to community’s topic is software engineering. It is the perfect topic because lots of people are learning and trying to learn from each other and there are countless issues and frameworks to talk about. Similarly, there are countless topics and subtopics around founding companies. As Courtland also said on Software Engineering Daily, you also need to think about the timing for when people get together and the space your community takes up. If you throw a party in a small room, you only need ten people to make that party feel like a success, but if you throw it in a football stadium, you need forty thousand people for it to feel like a success. It is the same with an online community. If you constrain it by saying something like, “Our community is just one discussion thread every Sunday at 3:00pm,” then even with ten people, that community can feel like it’s thriving. He talked about how he got advertisers interested in Indie Hackers and how he eventually got Indie Hackers acquired by Stripe and now no longer spends time selling ads. Not much has changed, he says, now that he is an employee of Stripe because Indie Hackers and Stripe were aligned from the beginning. Michaela asked why he decided, despite his desire to write as little code as possible, to create custom software for the Indie Hackers forum when he could have chosen third-party forum software. Courtland said he wanted Indie Hackers to have a strong brand and it is hard to have a strong brand if the thing you’re building looks like everything else. So he put a lot of time making the community unique. He spent a lot of time on the name of the community and the design of the website, all in support of having a strong brand. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/starting-profitable-business-in-six-weeks-courtland/id1477527378?i=1000465925620 Website link: https://www.software-engineering-unlocked.com/episode-12-profitable-business-courtland-allen/ MATT STRATTON ON HIRED THOUGHT The Hired Thought podcast featured Matt Stratton with host Ben Mosior. Since his move from Chef to PagerDuty, Matt’s focus has shifted from software delivery and infrastructure code to incidents and outages. Ben brought up Matt’s talk “Fight, Flight, or Freeze — Releasing Organizational Trauma.” Matt’s motivation for creating this talk was his own treatment for PTSD and a discussion with J. Paul Reed where they kept seeing similarities between Matt’s experiences and what companies go through when they experience an incident. Trauma occurs when our response to something is ineffective. Two people can have a similar experience and it can be traumatic to one person and just a bad day for the other. We respond to perceived trauma physiologically the same way as actual trauma. Events that are reminiscent of trauma that occurred to Matt as a child trigger him to have the same physiological response today. Organizations do the same thing. An organization that has an outage that is similar to an event that happened before and, say, cost them a million dollars a minute, will react the same way. Just as an adult re-experiencing a childhood trauma because of a triggering event shouldn’t necessarily respond the same way, an organization needs to learn how to respond differently to these similar stimuli. Matt talked about the window of tolerance beyond which you become activated and have an unhealthy response. He says that it can get spiky or you can get stuck-on or stuck-off. If you are stuck-on, you have anxiety and other symptoms. If you are stuck-off, there is lethargy. In an organization, we can get into a hyper-aroused state fearing any type of change, getting into analysis paralysis, or becoming over-vigilant. None of these states are healthy and they trickle down into the emotional health of employees. The good news is there are things we can do to help the organization be better. Ben added that a lot of therapy is about building up the language to describe what is happening so that when it happens or when you are reflecting back later, you can share the experience and develop skills to lengthen your window of tolerance. Matt talked about how in cognitive behavioral therapy we try to identify when a distortion occurs, knowing that the feeling we experience is not something we can change, but our response to it can be changed. In an organization, we can do the same thing. Matt is striving to excise the word “prevention” from his vocabulary and instead become more resilient when something bad happens. For a person, this can mean that you can have something happen and then you can get back inside your window of tolerance quickly. For an organization, this means that an incident can happen and we can restore service and get on with business. We need to normalize incident response. It is not an anomaly to have an incident. The irony is that we’ve gotten worse at responding to incidents as we’ve gotten better at distributing on call. Back in his days as a sysadmin, Matt was on call constantly and incident response was business as usual. Today, if you are doing a healthy on call rotation with developers on call in their own domain, you can be on call for a year and experience just two incidents. Then, when you have an incident, you freak out. You don’t want to be trying to remember how to do incident response and you don’t want to think of the response process as an exceptional thing that we only sometimes do. Ben connected this to the book The Fifth Discipline. He says we always feel like we have to do something in response to something bad happening. The other thing the book points out is that whenever you are doing an intervention, yes, you may have short term actions that buy you time, but at all times, you need to be building capabilities. When you normalize incident response and you regularly show people what it looks like to work together in a high-pressure situation, you learn to respond to incidents in healthy ways. Matt says we need to run our failure injection exercises and game days like real incidents. This is also an opportunity to train your incident commanders. In these scenarios, we know what’s wrong and we can bail out at any time. Then, when a real incident occurs at 2:00am some morning, the people who did the exercise associate the real incident with the calm exercise they did in the office on an afternoon. Sometimes there are people who want run an exercise and not tell the incident response team what’s wrong. Matt has to explain to these people that it is not an exercise in troubleshooting or to stress test your people. You don’t need to inject stress into the people who work for you. You want to do the opposite. When we are doing incident response all the time as part of the regular cadence of work, when a real incident occurs, we will associate it with the positive physiology of our response during the exercise. That means we should treat every incident the same, even false alarms. If you get a few minutes into responding to an incident and realize it is a false alarm, finish it out as an incident. Get on the bridge and do as you would in a real incident. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/6-organizational-resilience/id1479303584?i=1000466488009 Website link: https://hiredthought.com/2020/02/24/6-organizational-resilience/ LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:
"Indie Hacker" - An entrepreneur that is working to gain some form of independence.Courtland Allen is the founder of indiehackers.com. He didn't take the venture capital approach. He just wanted to make enough money to support what he was trying to do. Courtland was trying to build a community of indie hackers who would share their stories, help each other, and support one another.You can't force community growth. It takes good content, time, and consistency. At first, Courtland would make good content and share it with his mailing list, and he'd also make fake accounts and have discussions with himself on the indie hackers forum to try and spark real interactions. The efforts paid off. Over a year, a real community blossomed.It's tempting to rely on your intuition when you are first starting as an indie hacker. But, Courtland encourages you to take a more thoughtful approach by relying more on the experiences of others. Over time you'll develop wisdom.You can go too far, though. If you spend too much time preparing and learning, you'll realize how much you don't know, and it can be crippling. In Courtland's interviews with indie hackers, the most common advice people have is to go for it! Be okay with experiencing failures and starting over.Transcript"How Courtland Allen Found Freedom with Content, Consistency, and Community" TranscriptResourcesIndie HackersHacker NewsNomad ListstratecheryOwn goalsDiscourseCourtland AllenTwitterLinkedInJoel HooksTwitterWebsite
Subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Google, Deezer, or via RSS. Links:Courtland on TwitterIndiehackersIndie Hackers PodcastRosie SherryShow notes:In the beginning, I talk with Courtland about his journey to create the indie hacker community. I actually thought he created it right after graduating from college. But that's far from what happened. For many years, Courtland started all kinds of businesses with varying degrees of success. In 2016 he then quit his day job and had a runway of one year for building a profitable business (giving the cost of living in San Francisco). Courtland tells me that the first six months of this new journey to building a successful business weren't really productive. But as he realized that he runs out of time and money, he made a plan.He wanted to start something that he knew will be successful and brings in revenue within a short amount of time. So, he thought about all he had learned from his previous attempts and came up with a multi-phase action plan. Yes, this time around, Courtland had learned that he should start small, and incrementally make his way towards the successful business he had in mind.He explained that he started with the interviews on the website because when there is content on a website, people come to that site. Then, he started the mailing list, because it's easier to start a mailing list when you have content. Then, he contacted sponsors that would be a great fit for the website. It took Courtland only a few weeks from the initial idea to having the first sponsorship deal locked in.He never intended to start the podcast. But after several requests from the community, he gave it a shot. Now, it's one of the most successful parts of the business.Well, I talked about so much more with Courtland, like why he build the website and community functionality from scratch or whether or not he still is a founder. So, have a listen to the podcast or read through the whole interview in the transcript notes. Let me know how you liked in on Twitter.Cheers,McKayla
Courtland Allen grew up totally opposite of his twin brother, Channing, but influenced by him nevertheless. His family was rooted in entrepreneurship, and as such, Courtland was heavily inspired to build and run his own thing. After going through Y Combinator and trying out different startups, he landed on the idea for Indie Hackers - and it checked all the boxes for what he wanted to work on. He spent three weeks, and built a community for creators who want to find freedom in making a living for themselves online.
This week's theme is community! Why it's important for your business, how & where you should build one, and a few tips to help grow your influence within your unique group. Hear the full episodes in the links below E7 – Should you use Facebook groups or Slack for community building? E8 – How to immediately get outed as a WPN00b E19 - Sauron on bootstrapping a startup community (Channing Allen, Indie Hackers) E76 – Fingolfin on building a startup social network that actually makes people productive (Courtland Allen, Indie Hackers)
Coming from the land of north-westren Middle Earth called Beleriand, the strong and valiant Second King of the Nolder is here to chat with us. In this episode we talk about Indie Hackers and the benefits of creating a community for coders, life as a twin, and what it's like being acquired. Hackers, are you in? If not, listen in! Episode Resources: Indie Hackers Website Courtland Twitter
Originally published November 4, 2016 Indie Hackers is a website that profiles independent developers who have made profitable software projects, usually without raising any money. These projects make anywhere from a few hundred dollars a month to more than $100,000 as in the case with park.io, one of the services profiled by Indie Hackers. Courtland The post Indie Hackers with Courtland Allen Holiday Repeat appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Brandi Olson on Agile Uprising, Judy Rees on Engineering Culture by InfoQ, J. J. Sutherland on Agile FM, Angie Jones on Developing Up, and Eric Ries on Unlearn. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting November 11, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. BRANDI OLSON ON AGILE UPRISING The Agile Uprising podcast featured Brandi Olson with host Andy Cleff. Andy asked Brandi about what she means by multitasking. At the individual level, she says we use the word multitasking to describe what is happening when we are trying to do more than one thing at the same time. It is a misnomer though because our brains do not actually do more than one thing at the same time. Her bigger interest is in what happens when you have groups of people trying to multitask all day long. She calls this “organizational multitasking.” Say you have a team and they have a backlog. Organizational multitasking happens when somebody tells that team, “You need to get all ten of these things done this week and you need to start them all and I want to see the progress you are making each day.” The opposite of that, organizational focus, happens when you say, “Work on this thing first before you work on the next thing.” At the team level, she says, there are a number of illusions about how to be more productive and effective. One illusion is that getting started on everything is the way to get it done and if everything is important we have to do it all at the same time. This breaks down because of the reality of how our brains work. Research shows that when a person has to juggle two projects throughout a day, they will spend 40% of their brain capacity and energy on context-switching. For three projects, energy devoted to context-switching jumps to 60%. Not only does this take time away from more productive work, but we don’t even notice the time we lost. A further cost of having entire teams of people running around at 40% brain capacity is that they are less likely to identify the real problems to work on and it feels like they cannot slow down to figure out what the real problems are. Andy asked whether the solution should come up at the individual level where someone starts to say, “No,” or is it something that starts at a leadership layer. Brandi says it is not a problem that can be solved individually. It needs to start with our leaders. Some of the problems that start to show up in these contexts are a failure to solve the right problems, a reduction in quality, an increase in employee turnover, a reduction in equity and diversity, and burnout. These problems typically get addressed by solving the symptoms. Andy asked what she does to help organizations separate the symptoms from the cause. Brandi says she does this by making the costs of multitasking visible. She told the story of a company that surveyed 600 companies and their HR leaders about the biggest threats to their workforce. Over 80% of those leaders said that employee turnover was the biggest threat. The company then surveyed the employees at those same companies and the employees overwhelming named having too much overtime and unrealistic work expectations. Going back to the same HR leaders, a fifth of them wouldn’t be doing anything about their turnover problem in the next year because the leaders had too many competing priorities. The overwhelming illusion that too many leaders buy into is that, while turnover and burnout are problems, we cannot do anything about it because there is too much important work to do. A further illusion is that we can capacity plan by cutting everybody’s time up; we can break up your time among projects and it will all add back up to 100%. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-cost-of-organizational-multi-tasking-with-brandi-olson/id1163230424?i=1000453339079 Website link: http://agileuprising.libsyn.com/the-cost-of-organizational-multi-tasking-with-brandi-olson JUDY REES ON ENGINEERING CULTURE BY INFOQ The Engineering Culture by InfoQ podcast featured Judy Rees with host Shane Hastie. Shane asked Judy if it is possible to have an effective remote meeting. She says absolutely and backed it up with an example of one of her own students telling her recently that participants in her remote meeting said that her remote meeting was better than an in-person meeting. Shane asked about the secret sauce of a good remote meeting. Judy says it is probably planning. She also said that when remote, each person brings part of the meeting room with them. She says people don’t realize how important the environment is to conversations. When you put people in a small space, they pay attention to small details and administrative kinds of things. For “blue sky thinking,” take people outside or to a room with a big view. In real world spaces, we already know where to find small rooms and rooms with big views, but online, we need to create equivalent spaces. You need not only to ensure that all participants turn up with a decent headset, cameras turned on, and light on their faces, but also to figure out the activities so that you have enough social time at the beginning, during, or end of the meeting. The beginning and end of the meeting are critical parts of a meeting. Online, we often miss out on these beginnings and endings and it affects the quality of the conversations. She also says that most people find it easier to engage and participate when the meeting is small. This connects with what Courtland Allen said on Software Engineering Daily about communities in the previous fortnight’s review. She says that if you can’t limit the space, you can limit presentation time to 5 to 7 minutes and get then people doing something. She also says to use breakout rooms and use liberating structures like 1-2-4-All (http://www.liberatingstructures.com/1-1-2-4-all/). Knowing Judy’s expertise in Clean Language, Shane asked how might Clean Language be used to enhance remote meetings. Judy says that teaching people on remote teams to ask more non-judgmental questions about what somebody means by what they say can have a profound effect. Because of the missing socialization in remote meetings mentioned earlier and the fact that remote teams often have more cultural differences than co-located teams, misunderstandings are more likely. Therefore, learning to ask questions to clarify in a way that doesn’t sound like an interrogation but helps both parties to get clearer more quickly becomes particularly valuable. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/judy-rees-on-effective-remote-meetings/id1161431874?i=1000450875620 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/infoq-engineering-culture/judy-rees-on-effective-remote-meetings J. J. SUTHERLAND ON AGILE FM The Agile FM podcast featured J. J. Sutherland with host Joe Krebs. J. J. Sutherland is the CEO of Scrum Inc. and the son of Jeff Sutherland, the co-creator of Scrum. J. J.’s new book is called “The Scrum Fieldbook.” Joe asked what made him pick such a title. J. J. said he wanted to write a book about all the places Scrum Inc. has been all over the world and the many different domains far beyond software. He also wanted to show how Scrum Inc. thinks about Scrum and what are the patterns and anti-patterns. He says that Scrum is a universal framework for accelerating human effort with applications in aerospace, banking, and even beer-making. No one does Scrum just to do Scrum. Scrum is designed to produce value, which requires knowing more than just the Scrum guide. It involves understanding why Scrum works the way it does, understanding complex adaptive systems theory, knowing that you need to empower your teams and ensuring your teams are the right size. Scrum is about running experiments and getting feedback from the customer and adapting to that feedback. He sees people spending six months to a year planning how to do Scrum before they even start. Instead, he says to just do something. That is where you’ll get the information to iterate towards the right thing. Joe expressed his appreciation as a Scrum coach for the chapter in the book on the difference between busy and done. When J. J. worked in radio, producers used to talk about how much effort they put into the radio programs and he would have to point out to them that no listener cares how hard you worked on it; they care about what comes out of the box. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/jj-sutherland-agile-fm/id1263932838?i=1000453430262 Website link: https://agile.fm/agilefm/jjsutherland ANGIE JONES ON DEVELOPING UP The Developing Up podcast featured Angie Jones with host Mike Miles. Mike asked Angie what she considers the ultimate goal of code review. Angie says the goal is to ensure everyone is aware of and content with what is being contributed to the code base; it is not a nitpicking session or an opportunity to bash your least favorite developer. Code review is also a good way to catch missed requirements. Angie encourages code reviewers to review the unit tests just as closely as the implementation. Angie says the best code reviews are those you block out time for and make part of your routine. They aren’t something you skim while you drink a cup of coffee. When she reviews code, she always pulls up the requirement in the spec, doc, or ticket to see that the code under review fulfilled it. She looks for whether the implementation is efficient and at the right level of abstraction. She says that code reviewers have the opportunity to think at a broader level and see opportunities for code reuse. Angie sees code review as a form of mentoring without having an official mentorship relationship. Official forms of mentoring can feel like an obligation for the mentor because they have to set up meetings, learn the mentee’s career goals. Angie says that code review is a more subtle form of mentorship that is just as powerful. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/code-reviews/id1156687172?i=1000452808997 Website link: https://www.developingup.com/episodes/46-dflXzZ1V ERIC RIES ON UNLEARN The Unlearn podcast featured Eric Ries with host Barry O’Reilly. Eric described how he started his company IMVU and how, when wanted to do practices like split testing, he got pushback. People thought of it as a direct marketing technique, not a product development technique. He would argue, “Shouldn’t we use the scientific method to test our hypotheses?” He wanted customers involved from day one, he wanted to ship more frequently than was considered normal at the time. Looking back, he sees how extreme his ideas were at the time and is glad his cofounders didn’t fire him. As the company got more successful, his techniques got more controversial because the company now had more to lose. He said, “When you do things in an unconventional way, every problem the company has gets blamed on the unconventional method.” Barry pointed out that having to constantly explain the value of these unconventional methods likely made his thinking more resilient and could have been the seed for his next step. At one board meeting, he felt like he was going to be fired. He was tempted to apologize and compromise, but made the conscious choice to advocate for what he actually believed despite the potential negative consequences. He rationalized it like this: this is a small business and a small business is like a small town. In a small town, everybody knows everybody and he wanted people to know what he stood for. If people don’t like it this time and they fire him, okay. A day will come, he reasoned, when they are going to be in a situation where they need to get something done fast and will remember him because they know what he stands for. He radically misjudged the situation: the more he stood for those values and explained them, the more they resonated with people. If he hadn’t had the courage to put his career and reputation at risk, he never would have found out who the ideas resonated with. Eric says it wasn’t until later that he understood the importance of iteration happening within the context of a long term vision. Today, people understand Lean Startup as scientific hypotheses, a testing philosophy, small batches, and pivoting or changing strategy without changing vision. They know it is logically incoherent to have a pivot if you have no vision. Companies who were early disciples of Lean Startup, unfortunately, did not understand this and thought they could A/B test their way to success without any kind of vision. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-lean-startup-pivot-with-eric-ries/id1460270044?i=1000451993479 LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:
Esther Derby on Drunken PM, Justin Searls on Maintainable, Lena Ross and Dr. Jen Frahm on Agile Uprising, Dr. Nicole Forsgren on Screaming In The Cloud, and Courtland Allen on Software Engineering Daily. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting October 28, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. ESTHER DERBY ON DRUNKEN PM The Drunken PM podcast featured Esther Derby with host Dave Prior. Dave asked about Esther’s new book, “7 Rules for Positive, Productive Change: Micro Shifts, Macro Results” (https://www.amazon.com/Rules-Positive-Productive-Change-Results/dp/1523085797). She says it is a guide for people who need to bring change to their organizations, whether or not they have “change management” in their title. Esther told the story about getting a call from a company that had sent everyone to three days of Agile training, but then mandated that the company-wide process would now be “Agile” and any changes would need to be approved by the software engineering process group. They solidified things when they knew, if not the least, very little. She thinks these kinds of stories keep happening because we are suffering from a hangover of mechanistic thinking where we view our organizations as machines and we can just install a change like swapping out a part. Esther says that often when people try to create change, they don’t think enough about what they want to retain. This reminded me of something Tom DeMarco wrote in his book Slack when talking about vision: “Successful change can only come in the context of a clear understanding of what may never change, what the organization stands for. This is what Peter Drucker calls the organization’s culture. Culture, as he uses the term, is that which cannot, will not, and must not change.” She also says that people forget that they are not working on a blank slate. Whatever they do, they are putting it on top of existing traditions, reward structures, policies, and patterns of relationship, and the new thing is going to interact with that in unpredictable ways. They talked about cognitive empathy and being able to explain something like the Agile Manifesto to somebody who hasn’t experienced traditional project management. Esther talked about a client in the Dominican Republic that mostly hires people straight out of school and is particularly adept at collaboration because they haven’t had years of being rewarded for individual accomplishments take away their natural desire to work collaboratively. She likened this to the traits that are often associated with Millennials and how these are actually good traits to have. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/7-rules-for-positive-productive-change-w-esther-derby/id1121124593?i=1000449914205 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/drunkenpmradio/7-rules-for-positive-productive-change-w-esther-derby JUSTIN SEARLS ON MAINTAINABLE The Maintainable podcast featured Justin Searls with host Robby Russell. Robbie started by asking Justin what he thinks makes for a well-maintained codebase. Justin evaluates codebases as his job, so he has a process he follows. He starts outside-in. He looks at common things like the readme or other documentation and evaluates how easily he can get up-and-running. This is important because it says something about how often they on-board new people and whether they improve this aspect of their process. The second thing he looks at is what dependencies the codebase is using. He checks that dependencies are up-to-date and whether there are many or few dependencies. He tries to identify whether the team tends to rely on third-party libraries frequently or build their own. Next, he evaluates application-specific aspects of the codebase. If it is a web application, for example, he will evaluate the complexity of the routes. He’s checking that things are named clearly and kept small and whether the team prioritizes organization or not. After he feels that he has his bearings, he looks at statistics like churn to identify hotspots like god objects. That’s just what he gets from looking at the code. He says you can learn a lot from how the team communicates too. High-performing teams, he says, describe what their system does in humble, plain language, whereas the more technical and convoluted a team makes their applications sound, the more likely the team is attempting to imbue their application with unearned significance and this ends up creating barriers to understanding. Justin says that, as he has gotten further removed from the details of software delivery, he has begun to empathize with product managers and business managers for whom words like refactoring and technical debt have become four-letter words because all they’ve ever heard these words used for is excuses for why work isn’t getting done. Justin says that many programmers are often thrust into roles of professional responsibility well in advance of their ability to cogently and calmly understand and describe exactly what a system is doing. The combination of a high-pressure environment with a shaky understanding of the fundamentals of the software the engineer just built limits their ability to explain why things are taking longer than expected without resorting to language like technical debt. He calls this “obfuscating the conversation up a layer.” He talked about the challenges he faced when the industry transitioned around 2011 from largely co-located teams to asynchronous GitHub-based workflows and eventually to using tools like Slack for communication. He said that he didn’t realize at first just how much textual communication is read differently from being in a room with somebody. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/justin-searls-learn-to-understand-the-runtime/id1459893010?i=1000453441400 Website link: https://maintainable.fm/episodes/justin-searls-learn-to-understand-the-runtime-C6e05XWb LENA ROSS AND DR. JEN FRAHM ON AGILE UPRISING The Agile Uprising podcast featuring Lena Ross and Dr. Jen Frahm with host Andy Cleff. They started the conversation by talking about John Cutler’s blog post, “The Patient Change Agent” (https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-patient-change-agent-fd8548f04777) that caused Jen to rethink change resilience. Jen was running resilience workshops at a client at the time and was using Lois Kelly’s work on “change muscles” (http://foghound.com/blog/2016/3/29/build-the-change-musclesbuild-the-change-muscles). A particularly fearless change agent in the workshop told her she had it all wrong: she was using resilience from the perspective of “bracing for change” but needed to be working with resilience in the sense of “renewal”. Jen talked about the distinction between the Agile coach and the organizational change agent. The Agile coach is product development team-focused while the organizational change manager works beyond that. She sees many Agile coaches that do not address the impacts of releasing whatever the team is producing to operations. Andy asked his guests how they bring executives on board in supporting Agile transformations. Jen says she sees executives trying to do full Agile transformations company-wide and they are struggling to understand how much involvement they should have. These leaders need to find someone they trust who has the technology domain expertise to help them. Lena added that, in the last two years, she has seen that leaders are starting to understand enterprise agility. The old practices that served them well in the past aren’t cutting it anymore. They are realizing that they need to reach out and ask for help. Andy pointed out that asking for help and admitting they don’t know something requires a great deal of vulnerability from executives and asked Lena and Jen how they, as consultants, bring this about. Jen says you need to start by meeting with executives one-on-one and you need to be able to role model vulnerability in front of them. You use strength-based language to make them feel safe and you bring in threads from the conversations you’ve had with others so that they know they are not alone. She has also found a lot of success by running breakfasts with the executive team after she has already established trust. These breakfasts serve as safe environments where she role models and facilitates conflict and constructive conversations. Andy said it sounds like Jen is building empathy at the leadership layer. Jen agreed that it is empathy, but added that it is invitation-based. She doesn’t tell people that they must have the conversation; she invites them to consider the concepts. She then spoke about recently rethinking the notion of empathy as a result of mindful self-compassion training. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/empathy-and-resilience-in-leadership/id1163230424?i=1000451652567 Website link: http://agileuprising.libsyn.com/empathy-and-resilience-in-leadership DR. NICOLE FORSGREN ON SCREAMING IN THE CLOUD The Screaming In The Cloud podcast featured Dr. Nicole Forsgren with host Corey Quinn. This was the second part of a conversation with Dr. Forsgren. In the first part, they discussed the latest State of DevOps report. This episode focused more on the new cloud-specific section of the State of DevOps report. She quickly summarized what the overall report found about high and low performers and listed several things low performers can do to become high performers: invest in continuous delivery and automation, work in small batches, invest in observability and monitoring, develop a generative culture, and finally, make use of cloud computing. The big problem with cloud computing, she says, is that so many people keep redefining “cloud” in a million ways. Without a precise definition of what it means to use “the cloud”, there is no way to be able to give a statistically significant answer about whether and by how much it improves an organization’s performance. So she chose to use the NIST definition for cloud computing and its five characteristics. Measured this way, elite performers are twenty-four times more likely to be executing on all five characteristics. Compared to the total number of organizations that say they are using cloud computing, only 29% of them are meeting all five characteristics. Nicole started describing the five characteristics. The first is on demand self-service. You have to be able to automatically provision your compute resources without human interaction. You can’t be putting them behind a “service down” ticket that you wait for someone to approve. The second is broad network access - can you access it from multiple devices? The third is resource pooling - are the provider resources pooled in a multi-tenant model where resources are dynamically assigned on demand? The fourth is rapid elasticity - can you handle a Black Friday situation? The fifth is measured services - systems can automatically control, optimize, and report resource use and that’s all you’re paying for. She notes that these are all architectural outcomes, design outcomes, and automation outcomes. Regardless of whether you are on public cloud, private cloud, or even a mainframe environment, you can still improve your software delivery performance by architecting your infrastructure with these outcomes in mind. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/five-characteristics-that-define-cloud-nicole-forsgren/id1361244178?i=1000452015823 Website link: https://share.transistor.fm/s/3e21ecc7 COURTLAND ALLEN ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING DAILY The Software Engineering Daily podcast featured Courtland Allen with host Jeff Meyerson. They talked about the changes to Courtland’s Indie Hackers business that occurred over the past three years. The first was that three years ago, there was no Indie Hackers podcast. There was just the website. Today, the podcast is bigger than the website. Also back then, Indie Hackers was its own business and today it is part of Stripe. Courtland talked about how Indie Hackers went from a media company to a platform and community. The core of any community, he says, is people who are empowered and able to help each other out. Indie Hackers is all about people starting internet businesses and helping each other overcome the challenges of doing so. To start Indie Hackers, Courtland followed the Reddit playbook. He created a forum, made a bunch of fake threads, made a bunch of fake accounts, talked to himself a lot, occasionally trapped a real person into a conversation with three Courtlands, and before long there were two, then three people talking to a bunch of Courtlands. Eventually, it becomes self-sustaining. His recommendation is to shrink time and space around the community so that it feels active and lively. You want to restrict space around your community online for the same reason that if you’re having a party for only ten people, you don’t hold it in an auditorium. Offline communities are usually easy to restrict in both time and space; you have a meeting time and a place. If you’re going to have a poker game on Wednesday night at six, even if nobody is participating in this poker community any other time, if everyone is at the game on Wednesday, it feels like a lively community. To achieve the same feel online, instead of creating a forum or a message board, do something like posing a question every Friday that community members answer. People will observe a thriving community even if it has only fifteen or twenty people. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/indie-hackers-3-years-later-with-courtland-allen/id1019576853?i=1000452268869 Website link: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/10/04/indie-hackers-3-years-later-with-courtland-allen/ LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:
Indie Hackers is a platform for independent software businesses to discuss strategy and find inspiration. Courtland Allen founded Indie Hackers with the goal of sharing the stories of these businesses, and the company has become a thriving community of entrepreneurs, engineers, and creators. Business is a creative medium. The definition of a successful business is The post Indie Hackers (3 Years Later) with Courtland Allen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Courtland and I talk about how we first started working together, what outsourcing production has done to help him build his business & community, and why consistency is the key to growing your podcast (and not just in the way you’d expect) Links: Indie Hackers Podcast Courtland’s AMA Get the FREE Podcast Production Blueprint
On this episode Abadesi talks to Courtland Allen. He is a super talented designer and developer. In 2016 he founded Indie Hackers, an awesome community of bootstrappers and makers sharing their stories. Nine months later Stripe acquired the company. Courtland is also a Y Combinator alumnus and an MIT graduate with a degree in Computer Science. In this episode they talk about how to avoid making the most common maker mistakes. They discuss... How and why Courtland became an Indie Hacker “I spent a while following the traditional startup route. I started a startup, I got into Y Combinator, we raised money, but we never really had a business model. Eventually we did charge money for our product, and a couple hundred people signed up right off the bat. I was enchanted by this idea that I don't have to raise money from investors, I don't have to hope that there's some sort of exit opportunity in the future, I could build something and put a price tag on it and sell it to people directly and feasibly pay my rent.” Courtland explains his path to becoming a self-sufficient bootstrapper. He got his start in the very early days of indie hacking, even before Stripe had launched. He says that it was the Stripe beta that allowed him to go independent. How to figure out whether you have a good idea on your hands “A lot of people think a business is an invention. But an invention needs to be this entirely novel thing. A business is more of a process. It doesn’t need to be completely unique. A lot of people get frustrated and blocked by their inability to come up with something that’s completely novel. The number one thing you should do is not put that constraint on yourself.” He explains how to “sanity check” your idea and runs through the common mistakes he sees people making when they are validating their ideas. Finding beta testers for your product and what to avoid when bootstrapping “You’re trying to from no one using your app to five or ten people. You can easily do that. Talk to five relatives or five friends or coworkers. Go online and find people who you think would be good users of your product and send them a heartfelt personalized email. A lot of founders I have talked to have done this non-scalable approach at the beginning.” Courtland explains why, as a one-person operation, you shouldn’t be copying what big, successful companies are doing. He says that a landing page is not a good way to test your product and instead recommends that you go the old-fashioned route and talk to people about it. “These companies are doing things that you can’t do, and that you probably shouldn’t do. You’re much smaller. You wouldn’t go to the gym and try to bench press five hundred pounds because the biggest guy in the gym is doing that. One of the most troubling things for early Indie Hackers is the most obvious examples to copy are these big companies who are the worst people to copy.” How to know whether to go full-time on your idea once demand picks up “The barometer I use is: Do I like the customers I’m serving? Are the people who are paying for what I’m building people I would want to talk to and be friends with and hang out with? Because that’s what you’re probably going to be doing for the next few years, so you probably don’t want to quit your job and go full-time into something you don’t like working on.” He provides some excellent advice on launching, dealing with the ups-and-downs of being a maker, and once you’ve made it to a place where you’re getting some traction, how to figure out whether to quit your day job and go full-steam ahead on your side project. He says that he saved up a year’s rent before going full-time on his idea and points out that even when you are full-time on your project, there will always be more to do than you can manage. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Companies and Products Mentioned In This Episode Flippa — The #1 place to buy and sell websites, domains and apps. Notion — The all-in-one workspace - notes, tasks, wikis, & databases.
Today we're talking to Courtland Allen, the founder of Indie Hackers, a primarily online community for independent entrepreneurs. By “independent” I mean these are people who are building businesses that make their money from customers. (They're not backed by investors.) What started as 150 personal emails to Courtland's friends and some strangers has grown today to a community of more than 60,000 entrepreneurs. These people come together on Indie Hackers to share valuable stories and insights, or tap each others inspiration and advice. Sometimes, they get together in person too. Last month there were 55 Indie Hacker meetups all around the world. We sat down to talk to Courtland about getting his community off the ground, why they are open and explicit about revenue numbers with one another, and how he's approached building a business with Indie Hackers.
First episode! Andy sits down with Courtland Allen of Indie Hackers to discuss what it takes to start an independent software business and why anyone can do it. We cover a ton of ground, including: What kind of business should you start? Should you launch a product quickly and get feedback, or spend extra time to make a killer first impression? If things aren't going well, when should you quit? Episode Resources Indie Hackers Podcast Become an Indie Hacker Lynne’s story (Key Values) Mike’s story (Sidekiq) Follow Andy on Twitter!
In this episode of Syntax, Scott and Wes talk all about side hustles with special guest Courtland Allen, from Indie Hackers! They talk about the story behind Indie Hackers, how to start your own side hustle, where to find ideas, listener questions, and more. LogRocket - Sponsor LogRocket lets you replay what users do on your site, helping you reproduce bugs and fix issues faster. It’s an exception tracker, a session re-player and a performance monitor. Get 14 days free at LogRocket. Freshbooks - Sponsor Get a 30 day free trial of Freshbooks at Freshbooks and put SYNTAX in the “How did you hear about us?” section. Show Notes 1:05 - What’s the back story behind Indie Hackers? 5:30 - What is a side hustle? 11:21 - How do you validate your idea? 13:15 - What are some different types of side hustles? 31:55 - What about people who don’t like marketing? 33:57 - What are some important pieces of side hustles? 39:04 - How do you sell a business? 42:40 - Listener Questions: Q: How do you stop the side hustle from affecting your main job in regards to things like overtime, sleep and commitment? Q: Should you frame yourself as a one-man-band or as a company? Q: Have you heard stories of people living in cheap places, making bank? Are there any white whales you have been chasing to interview? Links Carrd Balsamiq Mockups Flickity Nomad List Evan You Evan You Patreon Park.io Making $125,000 a Month as a Solo Founder with Mike Carson of Park.io Patreon Drift Stripe ××× SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ××× Courtland: Post-it Notes and Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger Scott: Akimbo Wes: Elastic Wallet Shameless Plugs Courtland: IndieHackers Podcast Scott: Animating React Wes: CSS Grid Course Tweet us your tasty treats! Scott’s Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes’ Instagram Wes’ Twitter Wes’ Facebook Scott’s Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets
Today I'm visiting Stripe's office in San Francisco to chat with Patrick Collison and Courtland Allen, shortly after they announced their latest round of funding, valuing the company at a whopping $20B. Patrick Collison is the CEO and co-founder of Stripe, an ambitious company aiming to increase the GDP of the internet. The now 1,300 person company was started in 2010 by Patrick and his brother, John Collison, at the age of 23 and 21, respectively. While young, this isn't their first startup. Prior to founding Stripe, Patrick and his brother started and sold Auctomatic for $5M in 2008. Courtland Allen is a super talented designer and developer. In 2016 he founded Indie Hackers, an awesome community of bootstrappers and makers sharing their stories. Nine months later Stripe acquired the company. Courtland is also a Y Combinator alumnus and an MIT graduate with a degree in Computer Science. In this episode we talk about: Who Patrick and Courtland's role models were when they were building their businesses, and how the right role models today can help build a more inclusive tech ecosystem. The influence of Indie Hackers on Stripe and why even with the great tech for online communication today, some of the best interactions between its community members happen at meetups. If there's too much or too little funding in tech and how the investor-founder dynamic changes when you move outside of Silicon Valley. Why Stripe started a book publishing business (in 2018) and the reading habits of Patrick, Courtland, and others at Stripe. We of course also talk about some of their favorite products including a product to tell you how you sleep, helpful tools for building your next app, and some “oldies-but-goodies” that you might have forgotten about. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to our sponsors, Airtable, GE Ventures, Intercom and Stripe for their support.
Courtland Allen has built up a community of Indie Hackers, people who want to make money by selling products they build themselves. But how do you become an Indie Hacker? And how good of a coder do you need to be to become an Indie Hacker full time? Courtland shares lessons he's gathered over the years on what it takes to live off of your own product and how you can do it too. He also gives us his take on some popular tech business topics. Show Links Digital Ocean (sponsor) MongoDB (sponsor) Heroku (sponsor) TwilioQuest (sponsor) MicroConf Indie Hackers Indie Hackers Podcast Making $125,000 a Month as a Solo Founder with Mike Carson of Park.io (podcast episode) Codeland Conf Codeland 2019
Don’t miss this leadership interview with Rand Fishkin, @randfish. Rand is the founder of SparkToro and was previously cofounder of Moz and Inbound.org. He’s dedicated his professional life to helping people do better marketing through the Whiteboard Friday video series, his blog, and his book, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World. When Rand’s not working, he’s most likely to be in the company of his partner in marriage and (mostly petty) crime, author Geraldine DeRuiter. He did also say that if you feed him pasta or a decent whisky, he’ll give you the cheat code to being ranked #1 on Google. His interview with TheSchoolHouse302 was insightful, check it out. Listen to what Rand says about failure not being the end of an idea. He challenges many commonly held beliefs about American business culture and stresses the importance of diversity. He told us to follow @DHH for inspiration as an entrepreneur, Dharmesh Shah, co-founder of HubStop, and Courtland Allen. Listen to why he recommends these leaders. Rand talked about self-awareness and grounding ourselves in our WHY, asking daily questions about how we feel and if we’re happy. He plans to be more philanthropic with social efforts. Stay tuned for more from Rand Fishkin...for sure. He told us that we have to diversify who we’re learning from and surround ourselves with people from different backgrounds and experiences. “You learn more when you’re uncomfortable than when you’re comfortable.” And, you have to hear what he says about forgiveness and forgiving yourself. Rand ’s interview is filled with practical advice for leaders, and really connects with our purpose of developing leaders by getting to simple. Be sure to get your copy of Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World, and let us know what you think. Please follow, like, and comment. Use #onethingseries and #SH302 so that we can find you. Joe & T.J.
Today we caught up with Courtland Allen, the creator of Indie Hackers. In this episode we dig into Courtland's background in engineering, design, and product building, how he ended up creating Indie Hackers, the journey to the Stripe acquisition, and so much more.
When Courtland Allen was an 8-year-old tinkering with computers and teaching adults around him how the machines worked, he probably never imagined that many years later he would build a small company that would eventually be acquired y tech giant, Stripe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Courtland Allen is the founder of Indie Hackers, a place where the founders of profitable businesses and side projects can share their stories transparently, and where entrepreneurs can come to read and learn from those examples.Check out the Indie Hackers podcast here.
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Mike interviews Courtland Allen of Indie Hackers, about commonly held expectations new founders have about their businesses.
Software Engineering Daily examines the world through the lens of software engineering. In most episodes, an expert in a particular topic joins the show as a guest, and we go into deep technical detail. Occasionally we like to do episodes where we survey a collection of topics. In today’s topic roundtable, Caleb Meredith and Courtland The post Topic Roundtable with Courtland Allen and Caleb Meredith appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Courtland's story is great because he's been on a bit of the roller coaster, and now he's starting fresh with Indie Hackers. He's interviewing other founders of businesses of all sizes and helping to shed light on what's possible for small independent software-based businesses. At the same time, the stories are also grounded in realistic stories of slow growth and hard work instead of just focusing on those businesses that hit the jackpot. Courtland's past experience combined with his discussions with other founders has given him some great perspective and insight on what works and doesn't work for small software businesses. Special Guest: Courtland Allen.
Our guest this week is Courtland Allen; MIT graduate, Y Combinator alum, full-stack web developer, and professional designer. He’s spent over 8 years building, designing, and marketing web-based products and companies, and is currently running IndieHackers.com.This episode is for you if you’re into bootstrapped businesses, side projects, and community.Favorite Quotes I’ve been doing startups ever since graduating from school. The idea behind Indie Hackers is that it’s completely transparent. Everyone shares their revenue. They share their strategies for growing and marketing their business. We built community through transparency. You can go on Techcrunch and you can hear about the Snapchats or Ubers of the world. But you can’t learn about Joe the Hacker who is running a $2k/ month business. The cultures could not be more different (bootstrapped vs VC backed). Instead of worrying about raising money from VCs and building a billion dollar company, you could instead focus on your product and solving for a need that your customers will pay money for. A lot of startup founders don’t achieve their goals because the bar is set so astronomically high. In a VC funded startup, sometimes if you don’t reach that goal, your expected value goes to zero. Indie Hackers community has a lot of people who are making $1k or $2k/mo per side project while working a full-time job. That’s basically like giving themselves a raise. I wish more people knew you didn’t have to do this crazy all or nothing thing. The tech press is incentivized by what gets the most eyeballs, which is inevitably going to be the craziest most flashy stories with the biggest numbers possible. The unicorns are what they call them now. This venture capital narrative is fed to everybody. There are binary outcomes with VC funded companies. They tend to either fail spectacularly or succeed spectacularly. They give you advice and resources that push you to those binary outcomes. I wish people were aware you could build businesses in more of a traditional way, getting revenue from day 1. Having all of our interviews be transparent was an important value from the start. I wasn’t going to publish any interviews where the founder wasn’t going to be transparent about how they build the business. I was building Indie Hackers for myself, thinking of the time in which I was trying to build a side business myself. I get inspired by putting myself in the interviewees shoes and seeing the kind of decisions they made to get to where they are. If you want to start a company, start a company in an area you’re interested in or want to learn about. I need to read books, I need to learn about business, marketing, growth if I want to be able to curate good interviews. ‘I’m a developer, I’m pretty confident in my programming skills. I’m not a great writer, or marketer, or salesperson.’ But what people don’t realize is that you just need to know the basics. Learning how to code is a lot harder than learning how to do a lot of these skills at a passable level. One of the things I’ve learned about Marketing is the importance of targeting a niche: A specific group of people who share qualities and characteristics who ideally will use your product. If you target a small specific group of people that you have almost no competition. You can build features that only they care about. A niche isn’t a group of features your product has. You need to describe an actual existent group of people. Having a monopoly is important. Whatever target market you’re targeting, you want your audience to look at you as the best possible solution to their problems. Is the market I’m in super humongous? No, there’s not billions of people in it. It makes sense to position itself as the one place you can get one specific thing first, then expanding into other markets. I think virtual reality is super cool. Maybe this time around we won’t hit on VR that works for the masses — portable and affordable, doesn't get us sick. In the long run, it’s some percentage as good as the matrix. Its the final frontier for bits taking over the world from Atoms. AI is pretty cool. What I think is cool about it is not that it’s going to replace what people do, but in many cases, it’ll augment what people do. It’ll work alongside them in a way that allows new business models to exist. There are a lot of developers on Indie Hackers. One of the things you get as an engineer is a ton of focus on what it means to be a good engineer. It’s very difficult when you transition to being an entrepreneur it’s very difficult to draw a line in the sand and say “OK some of this old advice I got only applied to Engineers as a profession”. When you are a founder and have a business you have to worry about customers, learning from your customers, increasing sales, setting prices, building a sticky product. You can’t focus as much as you could before on engineering best practices. I’ve seen a lot of people build products that followed the best engineering principles; extremely well tested and reliable, but make $0. You can’t be a perfectionist engineer if you’re going to be an entrepreneur (unless you’re building a library for other engineers). You need to focus on the entire business and bring yourself to not obsess over trivial technical details of your product. Be flexible, don’t be tied to using the latest greatest technology. It’s OK to massively screw up. Almost every startup I’ve worked for has massively screwed up. Reading is tremendous. It helps you encounter problems others have had without having to go through that pain first. But nothing quite sticks like actually having experienced something. If you’re hesitating to do anything, whether it’s launching your own website or starting your own business, there’s no better way to learn than do it and fail. Be forgiving with yourself and realize that failure is likely but you’ll learn a lot. You need to be patient as much as you are ambitious.
At the first Software Engineering Daily Meetup, the speakers explored a range of topics. A few weeks ago, we published Courtland Allen’s talk about how to build a small software business. In today’s episode, we are publishing Haseeb Qureshi’s talk, called “Everything That Rises Must Converge: Why Engineers Disagree About Everything (And Why Fraudsters Do The post Convergence with Haseeb Qureshi appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Engineers today have a variety of career options. You could go work for a large corporation, you could raise money and start a startup, you could freelance and move from job to job with freedom–or you could start a business with the goal of quickly becoming profitable. Courtland Allen was a guest on Software Engineering The post Making Money Online for Software Engineers with Courtland Allen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Engineers today have a variety of career options. You could go work for a large corporation, you could raise money and start a startup, you could freelance and move from job to job with freedom–or you could start a business with the goal of quickly becoming profitable. Courtland Allen was a guest on Software Engineering The post Making Money Online for Software Engineers with Courtland Allen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
In this episode, Two Black Nerds talk to Courtland Allen, MIT graduate and YC Alum and the founder of IndieHackers’. Courtland tells them about his career as a programmer and how he made the progression from developer to founder and the lessons and skills he learned while at MIT and YCombinator. They also discuss the history of IndieHackers and how it was initially founded and created and the future direction of the website, with snippets of technical discussion here and there. Links Taskforce YCombinator IndieHackers IndieHackers: How to Come Up With a Business Idea NomadList Levels.io Courtland Allen’s Twitter Our intro and outro music is Sorry by Comfort Fit
Indie Hackers is a website that profiles independent developers who have made profitable software projects, usually without raising any money. These projects make anywhere from a few hundred dollars a month to more than $100,000 as in the case with park.io, one of the services profiled by Indie Hackers. Courtland Allen is the creator, engineer, The post Indie Hackers with Courtland Allen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Indie Hackers is a website that profiles independent developers who have made profitable software projects, usually without raising any money. These projects make anywhere from a few hundred dollars a month to more than $100,000 as in the case with park.io, one of the services profiled by Indie Hackers. Courtland Allen is the creator, engineer, The post Indie Hackers with Courtland Allen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
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