BootstrFM

[00:00:00] Hello, everyone, welcome to our fourth episode of BootstrFM. That's amazing. My name is Erwin. I'm the founder of Tailscan, a startup that I am bootstrapping, and had the idea to start Bootstr At some point, because I felt like there was something lacking, like a good conversation, a good back and forth. Um, and so I decided to just start a Twitter space and see where that would end up, and now we're here! So, I think this concept is slowly becoming a bit of a success, I say very carefully. Um, and at this point in time, I'm hosting Bootstr with Dom as well. Dom, would you like to introduce yourself too?

Yes. Thanks, Erwin. Hey everyone. My name is Dom. I'm also bootstrapping for like three years now, working on a tool called helpkit. so, which turns notice pages into a professional help center or documentation page, also bootstrapping a couple of other projects on the site, but that's my main stick right [00:01:00] now. And yeah, I did the first episode with Erwin and then he asked me if I wanted to co host with him and I happily said yes. And so now we're here.

So I will just very quickly go to the concept so that everyone knows what we're about to be doing for the next, give or take an hour, maybe a little bit longer. Um, the concept is as follows, at first we will have a interview with Pieter. We will ask him a couple of questions and hopefully learn a lot about him and also some things that we may not know or that are hyper relevant right now. And then after that, give or take 20 minutes, we will be Uh, starting with some discussion questions. And those discussion questions will be for another 40 minutes or so. Those discussion questions are meant for not only us, but for everyone to think about, answer. Um, so if you would like to chime in on that, you definitely can.

Um, and Pieter, would you like to introduce yourself and what you're up to [00:02:00] right now?

Yeah. Uh, thank you for having me guys. Man, it's a big honor, and because we tried to do it last week, but then I was in London suddenly to visit my brother. Um, so I just came back to Portugal and it's like nice and sunny here and very chill. And nice clean air and I can see the ocean and yeah, perfect life. So, uh, man, that's not really introduction, right? But, yeah, I'm Pieter Levels and I'm on Twitter and I make IndieHack startups kind of, uh, yeah, that's it.

I'm very glad you can still join us, even though last week didn't work out exactly. But that's all good. It's all right. And of course, yes, I asked you to introduce yourself. I'm very confident that most of the people in this space know a thing about you already. So just, uh, ask you a first warm up question, because Dom and I were, um, we're kind of wondering about this, what is your daily routine like? And how do you decide, like, for example, in the morning on [00:03:00] what you're going to work on or what you're going to do that day, given that you have so much going on?

Yeah, uh, Man, this thing is so cool. I can see all these people. Like, I see David Park, and I see Adriaan, Jack, Klaas, Vasco, Alfonso, Raspan, Aaron, Mate, Nim, Jasper, Deboer, Bamu, Margote. It shows your friends first, right? Yep, the ones that you follow first. Man, so cool. Man, this is crazy. Okay, so my routine, man, it's like, I wake up. Uh, around like, man, now I wake up a little bit early, but I wake up around 10, 11, something, 12, and with my girlfriend and then we shower, we make coffee, uh, we kind of chill on the balcony, we try to read Kindle, you know, like we try to read the Elon Musk book, but. Then your phone is looking at you and you're like, man, let's check telegram.

Like what's going on Twitter, you know, difficult to focus on reading, but I try. And then after like one coffee, man, I need this coffee. I think it's a real incentive. It's like makes my brain focus and wake up and want to make stuff. [00:04:00] So after like one hour or something, I start coding a little bit. But a lot of it is like, I need like some boot up time, which I think is like four hours or something of just kind of fucking around. And I have fights about it with my girlfriend because she's like, you say you need to work, but you're not doing anything. You're making like memes and stuff. But I need this bullshit time to get to the real serious stuff, like after four hours kind of, you know? And then. It's like 4pm, 5pm, and then I really start making like cool stuff and working on features or, you know, but the creative stuff, it doesn't come automatically. I need to, uh, it takes time to boot up, you know, and I think it's for a lot of people like this.

Yeah, I have the exact same thing, honestly. Like I need my first coffee, that smell in my nose, and some warm liquid in me and then, you know, then I. Jesus christ, Erwin, warm liquid. Oh my God. You're so funny.

Yeah. But so, and then, um. You know you do your startup time a little bit, [00:05:00] like four hours. Yeah. And then, then I want to go to the gym. Like now I want to go like four times a week, you know, cause I'm getting older and I think if you go to the gym, you can kind of, you know, increase your longevity, staying fit. So if I go four times a week and if I don't go four times a week, I pay my friend Oscar a hundred dollars on Revolut.

It's like a bet we have or he pays me back as well. And how rich is Oscar right now? Well, so I paid him already like $400 this year, but then he also paid me like $500 because he didn't go five times. So right now I'm a hundred net profit, but it can change fast, you know? 'cause man, once you start traveling, you stop going to the gym. That's another problem. So I try, uh, I just need to go or I need to pay money. So I go to the gym usually like late afternoon or evening. Um. And we cook dinner, like we, we buy local meat here, like free roaming, cow, or chicken, organic vegetables we try and then make it ourselves and, uh, try to eat quite clean, you know, like rice, maybe vegetables, steak, chicken thighs, and it's [00:06:00] like very simple, but, um, I mean, all this stuff really, I think it really affects your brain, like your clarity of thinking.

Yeah, yeah. I honestly, I have a question about that a little bit later as a matter of fact, um, because I am very curious on that. I want to zoom in on that, for sure. Um, and just to just clarify, so you start up your day and then Do you decide to work on a specific product or like you just, uh, let yourself be guided as to what you feel like that day or how exactly do you do that?

Like people, I think I see a lot on Twitter, people ask like how people prioritize their tasks and I never understand this question because it seems like super obvious. You know what you need to work on. Like you get. For example, you see those bugs on your site and you know, which is the most important bug, which is like really difficult, really problematic bug.

Like the site doesn't load, you need to fix that first. And then if most of the big bugs are fixed, then you can maybe work on like something you're excited about, some feature, like I'm excited about like speeding up the [00:07:00] photo AI image generation process from like 30 seconds to five seconds. That's something I really like. I don't know. You feel this burning urge in yourself, like, I want to work on this. This is really cool. If it works, it's like a challenge and it seems to be automatically prioritizing stuff I want to do. And I think also like posting on X about stuff and reading stuff going on there, it really helps you put a finger on the pulse of like what's going on. And that also influences like what you want to work on. Like, Oh, okay. Like now, um, open AI create all this new custom GPTs builder that you can make your own GPT. So I want to do that, you know, so that affects it as well. But it seems like prioritization happens automatically. For me, it's just like, it's obvious what I need to work on.

Right. Yeah. It's just urgency based basically. Yeah, for sure. Urgency. Right. That makes sense.

And excitement. Like what are you excited about? Like what features are you excited about? What new technology you're excited about? What do you want to make? Like it's creativity, right?

Yeah, yeah, definitely, and if you put that, [00:08:00] if you're like, Oh, this is super cool. You know, some new API comes out or whatever. And you're like, I really have to do something with this. And you put it on your to do list. Yeah, you're kind of actually already killing off that initial

Man, I think that's it. Yeah. You're a hundred percent. I think that man, this whole generation is obsessed with note taking. It boggles my mind. Like what is going on? Everybody has productivity apps and note taking apps and it's insane, man. And there's like some 3d note taking apps like Obsidian or whatever, man, it's cool, you know, but your brain has an automatic note taking function and it also automatically forgets stuff that's not important.

And of course, I write shit down. I write shit down in Telegram in like my own group, but um, this other thing, like saving, you want to see an article, you read an article on Hacker News, but you don't want to read it. So you save it for later. Nobody ever goes back to read these articles, I think. You know, it's this whole, I think it's all because we use all these artificial note taking and bookmarking apps that your brain has an automatic system to deal with [00:09:00] stuff. You know, it automatically, if this article is really interesting, you're going to read it now. You don't need to save it for later. You know, I think.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Once every year, perhaps I stumble upon all the bookmarks that I have, and I'm like, well, that's a whole pile of things I wanted to do and turned out to not really matter at all.

Bookmark, bookmark bankruptcy. And I think the same to do list, like I used to write so much stuff down on to do list and it almost gets annoying. You have this to do that's like two years old. And you're like, man, do I need to really fit? Is this really important? Like it's not really relevant anymore, And because time constantly changing and your personality constantly changing, your business always changing. All these apps do not take into account that things become irrelevant and it become less important over time.

Actually I think there's one app, Workflowy, which I used. It automatically grays out with opacity, things that are older and not important anymore. So it just disappears. That's kind of cool.

Yeah, like mimicking how the brain works a bit more, right?

Exactly, yeah. I think we should go back to the brain, like biology, like [00:10:00] basics. It should match your brain interface.

I think Elon is building something for that, by the way, but that's a side note.

What is he building? I don't know, what is he building? Neuralink, right? Ah, yeah. Yeah, true.

That's true. I wanted to move on to the next question, which is something that I personally am actually struggling with myself, so it's a bit of a question that comes out of my own incentive. It's about your early days, like perhaps more early than most people know you from. Um, was there a point in the past where you felt like it wouldn't work out with your startups? Or, you know, in a financial sense, perhaps? And was there a time when you finally put yourself at ease and just Stopped worrying. And when was that?

Man, a hundred percent. And I remember this, it was like 2013 or 2014. And I would be nomading and like, I would get like a massage or something like foot [00:11:00] massage. And I was thinking like. Because I was so anxious, so I had to get a massage and then I was just being like, how am I going to get out of this? Like, because I told the story so many times, but my revenue from YouTube was shrinking really fast. So I was, I didn't, literally didn't have money to live off. Of course I could just go back to Holland and live with my parents. So that's a nice backup, right? But I didn't want to do that and I didn't want to get a job.

So man, I've thought about this recently also, like, it's very different to think now, cause now things are more stable, but when things really don't work and you don't see any future where it's ever going to work, it's really depressing, you know, it's like you want to build a business, you want to make money with this to just pay your bills and nothing you do works and you're like, maybe this is not for me, you know, and I had the same with music where. You get kind of, you get further, but then you get kind of stuck. You don't get bigger, you don't get more successful. And, but in this case, it was more like it really didn't work. Like [00:12:00] TubeLytics, my YouTube analytics thing, it had customers, but they didn't really pay, like it had Vice that tried it out, Vice News, but it didn't really work, so I think it's really difficult in the beginning when nothing you do takes off and nobody gives a shit about what you're doing.

To keep going like now it's easy, you know, now it's easy to keep going, but it's very, very difficult in the beginning. It's very, I know this feeling, like this empty feeling, um, this hopelessness where like, how the f**k is, how the f**k am I going to fix my life? You know, literally my life is f**ked. I mean, relatively f**ked, right? But you're not doing what you want. You want your own business and it's not working. You know, it's very hopeless.

Yeah. I hear what you're saying. I always think of like, in terms of if someone like from back home or like your family, for example, would ask you, what do you have to actually have to show for, um, what you've been working on all this time? And I think, yeah, there's two answers to that really. One, it's never enough, kinda, for some reason, [00:13:00] humans are just wired that way, but on the other hand, yeah, eventually you can say, you know, I worked my ass off, there's finally this company, it's worth something, it's making money.

What startup was actually the one where you were like that, where you're like, okay, this is making enough. Was that NomadList or was that another one?

Um, when was it making enough? I think when you cross 1 million a year, you make enough, you know, you're like, oh shit, this is like, man, a million is big, you know?

Like, I remember crossing one moment and like, f**k, this is really cool. I was like dancing in the shower, like, yeah, we did it, but it wasn't just one project. I think it was just the sum of all projects. You know, it was like, I think around 2018 or something. Because when you cross that number, you're like, okay. And of course inflation means it might mean less now, but, you're like, okay, this is going to work. Like now we can kind of survive and. Live off this money. And, uh, man, I was so traumatized by YouTube because it's, it made so much money for me relatively, like it made 8k a month at some point, when I was doing YouTube channels like [00:14:00] 2010.

And then it's crashed so fast that since then I'm kind of like, man, everything can crash so fast. You cannot rely on any business to stay. And it, like, maybe that's why I keep making new business because I don't trust any business to remain profitable or just making money or successful, you know?

Yeah. That's the harsh reality. Really, like, you build a startup, it is successful, money is flowing in, but it's not forever. Everything has an end as well, right? Yeah, yeah. In some shape or form.

I mean, that's why people sell the business, I think, also, and get rid of it fast. But, yeah, man, I think the point is, like, it's quite difficult. I think doing a startup thing is, like, one of the most difficult things you can do in your life. It's really difficult. I mean, obviously it's more difficult stuff in life, but this is one of the most challenging jobs you can do, I think.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I obviously can't say no, I'm in it too, but, yeah, no, it's definitely [00:15:00] tough at times. Um, I don't want to zoom in too quickly. I will maybe perhaps later in the space, but, I think, the last couple of days, I have personally felt how difficult it actually can be. Yeah, I, uh I have another question for you.

What happened in the last couple of days? You launched Tailscan 2.

Yes, yes. Well, I can zoom into it very briefly. I launched Tailscan 2, version 2. So that is the same product, but just like a major version up with like a lots of features. And I was planning this and the product hub launch was on Monday. And I have a tweet about this. If anyone is curious on my profile with more information, but the bottom line of it is I found out. Maybe half an hour before I launched on ProductHunt that, there had been a bug that prevents pretty much the entire extension, the entire product from working properly. Um, it's a very niche, unfortunate kind of circumstance and, you know, it is what it is, my heart sings, my stomach drops, it happens.

Like, shit, okay, well, let's, you [00:16:00] know, let's fix this. Fix was actually crazily easy, two minutes, maybe three. Packaged it up, submitted it to the Chrome store, where the extensions are distributed. And it took, uh, calculating quickly, 58 hours to be approved, while, for four lines of codechains, while normally, all of my reviews go through in about 5 to 30 minutes, half an hour at best. So, for 50 something hours, my customers were not able to use my app. Uh, well, you know, new customers were purchasing it from the launch and all that stuff, and I send out hundreds of emails and refunds and all that stuff. Trying to like, mend the situation, trying to figure out what to do. I have actually great news, like, an hour ago it was actually approved, so finally everyone can use it again and I'm very relieved that was it in a nutshell.

Man, it doesn't sound so bad, right?

It sounds, honestly, right now it already sounds lots better. But in the moment, my anxiety and stress levels [00:17:00] were quite high, to say the least.

So did you deadlift this week? Haha,

I love the question. Um, particularly because I do have actually a question about it. I'm going to ask it right back and then we'll talk about it.

Because I know Alfonso and Vasco here, they deadlift 100 kilos.

I want to see them while I'm asking you this question, I want them to post the pictures in the comment section, just for proof, you know, um, but so this is interesting because at some point you switched from like, I know you for a while you switched from not, I wouldn't say not an unhealthy lifestyle or anything, but you know, it wasn't your primary focus. And at some point you, what is it, two, three years ago perhaps, you switched, like you started advocating much more on people should be eating good, you know, you go to the gym, you should deadlift, uh, air quality matters, like watch out for, you know, where you live and what you inhale, And, I'm kind of wondering what [00:18:00] made you shift and also how does that tie into like, you know, potentially shipping or like quality of work?

Yeah, man, this must be the most annoying thing ever when somebody, you know, is successful in one thing and then they start talking about the other thing, man, extremely annoying. I would unfollow myself, but I think it started with COVID because a lot of people died with COVID and, uh, got sick, very sick, and then I was like, okay, I was already going to gym, like since 2017. But I wasn't doing it, aggressively, and I think with COVID, I realized, okay, we're getting older and there's a real risk that we die, that we get sick. And also you pass like 30 and I started hearing like stuff, the main thing that really did it.

And I say this so many times, but like, I realized that I read that your muscles atrophy by 1, 2, 3, or 4 percent per year, some crazy number, which is exponential. It's like an ETF kind of right. Compounding interest, which means that if you don't do any strength training. [00:19:00] And cardio is also important, but also strength training that you literally turn into a, like a football with like tiny limbs. You know, when you're older and when you see older people, when, how they walk, like kind of arch, you know, this is because they are not flexible because they don't have the muscle, um, strength training. And man, I met a guy in the gym here and he's like, 35 or 40 or something. And he was really annoying.

He was like, he was like Dutch and he was trying to be friends with me. I was like, nah, kind of like too desperate to be friends, you know. Like kind of strange, so I kind of avoided him and then I heard he's not 35 or 40, he's 65 or something. And I started talking to him, he's a, his whole life, he's been doing kickboxing and every day he's been working out. This guy looks 35, 40. It's amazing. And he's 65. And I was like, okay, this shows a lot about longevity and I think seeing how unhealthy people are generally realizing this, that, you know, you can't [00:20:00] have a Coca Cola with your every meal. It's like insane. It's, you can do whatever you want. But I think a lot of problems. That you start having when you get older are due to diet and nutrition and exercise and all this stuff. And yeah, but of course it's not really my, my, my topic, right? It's not, I should talk about starters, but I hate when people tell me what to talk about.

Like it's annoying to get boxed into one place. So I just share what I do. I share, like when I make nice food, I share going to the gym and stuff. And maybe it helps people that they also go. Um, but people should do whatever they want, you know, but it works for me. I think it works mostly on the mental level. Like it gives me real mental clarity because I do have a history of anxiety and depression with me and in my family a lot. And, my dad's side of the family is completely insane. Like they're in mental institutions, I think. Um, so for me, not going crazy, like really. It relies on me doing exercise and eating well, or I literally go [00:21:00] crazy.

Like I've been crazy, you know, especially with startups, the stress is so hard that, you can easily, man, you know, it's happening because you also have your own stuff to deal with. And it's, I think just exercising. Whatever you do and good nutrition really helps your brain stay not neurotic and stay clear, you know?

Absolutely, yeah. You need an out, basically. And most of society I think has their ways. Um, I say alcohol for a big part of the world, a hundred percent. Or other part of the world, they replace alcohol with smoking or something else. And, um, yeah, you need an out. So it's easy, you know, when you're working hard on startups and you're in this world, it's just tough. There's more stress than you can handle inside of your own brain without any action.

Yeah, and it's insane the level of stress. It's insane. You're making a company and then there's millions of other people who are trying to do the same thing and trying to compete with you, trying to destroy you on the social media, right?

Like, it's such a minefield and [00:22:00] it's so difficult. And of course you cannot sleep. Like, of course, your brain is full of stuff to think about. It's normal to get anxious about all this stuff. It's not a, we're not made for all this stuff. You know, we're made for a more chill life. Biologically, like we're made to maybe have a farm and walk around and catch some fish. We're not made for this highly connected. Like you're competing with 8 billion other people in a online world with a screen. So I think this kind of stuff really helps balance it out, keeps your brain clear, keeps your body healthy. And I think mind body, it's completely the same thing, it's very connected. Man, I agree, it's completely cliche that I'm talking about this and I would probably unfollow myself if I would see people talk about this, you know?

Honestly, I'm asking you because, well, first of all, I love you being an advocate for things that you think is just good for people, right? Which means that you just, you care. Like, if you would be able to help like a hundred people get a better life, live longer, [00:23:00] then, you know, that's a win, right? So, I don't think it's a cliche necessarily, I think it's great.

Yeah, I think I do care. I think it's nice to fight for Indies, Indie businesses. And so people have a higher chance to get rich than VC, this kind of stuff. It's nice to fight for people have a freedom of their lifestyle. They can go travel and go nomad and live in another country if they want, and be more accepted there. Like all these things are things I think are very valuable for people potentially. So it's nice to talk about this.

yeah, absolutely. Can you finish the sentence for me? It starts with lift heavy stone.

Make brain happy, right?

Make brain happy, make sad head voice quiet.

Yeah, make the sad voice quiet. Yeah, that's it. One of the more iconic memes. But, you know what the problem with gym is? Like, when you start with low weights, you're kinda like, what the fuck is this? It's not working. And then you start doing, like, Over your body weight, like for example, deadlifts and squats. And you're really like, wow, this is really happening. Then your brain just shuts up. It just goes, I think there's actually oxygen deprivation in the brain then. And [00:24:00] that really sounds kind of not healthy, but that really shuts your brain up. And It's just, you're just like, okay, I exist and it's a drug, and I also think you need cardio, you know, runner high is the same thing, kind of oxygen deprivation probably. So it's good. Dopamine, serotonin.

I didn't know you have a PhD in physical exercise.

Destroyed. Absolutely destroyed, man. Jesus Christ.

But just to chime in. Absolute reckoning. Yeah. Just to chime in, to close up this question, I feel like I had like a thing today. Where I stood in front of a problem and I literally thought there is no way out. Like I cannot solve this. I was like at the, I was really depressed. And then it struck my mind. It was like, wait a second. I just go to the gym. Let's see what happens afterwards. I go to the gym, I deadlift my body weight, maybe a little bit more. And then after the gym, I literally come out and I have a solution. So, and this happens so many times that I'm also now such an advocate for just keeping your body, I think is the first priority, even if it gets super [00:25:00] stressful in your business. Because eventually this will be the thing that will help you succeed in the long run, I think.

Thank you, Dominik. I will deposit your Ethereum now. Thank you for supporting my, thanks, dr. Levesio.

No, but okay. So one argument against it, which I think is really strong is like, Man, I didn't gym, didn't go gym like 10 years ago. And that's when I started making stuff and getting people successful. And so you probably don't need it in the beginning, right? I don't know, maybe. It's valuable if it doesn't help anyone.

Honestly, it's something you can never know, right? Because maybe, you would have been twice as successful if you would have started lifting 10 years ago. But you just don't know. So, that's tough. So, I have one more question for you. To move a little bit away from the health and a bit more to the bootstrapping side of things.

Hopefully. So, Pieter the last question for you. What do you think will be the next successor to, to indie hacking? Or do you think that there's actually still a place and a time and value in things like, you know, [00:26:00] older frameworks, like 12 startups in 12 months, for example, or do you think like the entire Playing field and paradigm will shift.

I mean, I talked about it on Arvin's podcast, essentially, I think that it's become mainstream, which means that you're competing with everybody now. You're competing with a lot of people. It's not like the small indie scene anymore. And there's also big companies that are following us on Twitter and seeing what we're doing and then copying us and making it much bigger, like Adobe or this company. So. I think now you're just, it's not a niche anymore.

You're playing in the real, real world league of business, and it's just business now. And VC companies are competing with bootstrappers and vice versa. And it's essentially just, yeah, a level playing field now. You're not protected. It's not some cute indie niche scene on Twitter. It's, you know, a lot of founders now start out indie because there's no funding right now. And then they raise funding once they have revenue. So it's become more difficult in a way. But also it's just bigger. So there's more [00:27:00] information out there, but it's definitely more competitive.

And I mean, look at all the clones, like you make something and you get in a week, 20 clones of your website. Everybody gets that now. People are definitely watching us. Not just me, but they're watching everybody. They're watching what's. It's a real, like, dog eat dog scene, as Danny Posma wrote before, it's just the real world now. It's not some cute niche anymore, I think.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. So, obviously, there's still a time and a place for everyone, but it's good to, yeah, to be aware that there's more competition and there's more, um, it's a bit more of a minefield, I suppose, right now, like you need to be more strategic about things in some ways. Do you have any idea or any indication or something that you notice or see that you think could potentially be the next thing?

I don't know, but, like, one thing I see, I do see, this is very funny because I don't really like San Francisco, but I do see a lot of people moving to San Francisco now. And I see, like there's this Twitter scene, E slash [00:28:00] ACC, like E A C, uh, they're like about acceleration of society of technology, kind of like Elon Musk fanboys. I think they're like the opposite of social justice war is the opposite of D cells. D cells are like. People that want to complain and decelerate.

And I think a lot of these people, they moved to San Francisco now, actually, and they're flying there and they're building stuff there. And just like in Bali, there's Bali's like Indie Hacker Central. I think there's so many people building stuff, actually Bali and San Francisco, you know, might be the most important places now. I mean, I'm not super fan of Bali because there's trash burning everywhere. So everywhere you go, you smell like ash, you know, but apart from that, I have to admit that those two places are very important and that's where I think the next startups will be built. The next big startups, I think. And like look at how people in San Francisco live.

Like there is homeless people with fentanyl on the streets, except when Xi Jinping visits, like now, but when he leaves, there will be homeless people with fentanyl again. And it's very sad, but [00:29:00] the San Francisco and California, they don't do anything to fix this. It's a very unlivable city, I think, but essentially people just lock up in their home or in their capsule hotel in San Francisco and they code and then they meet their maybe investor, you know, at the VC, what is it? The VC road in South San Francisco. I don't know, but I do see a real trend there. I do see a lot of people moving there, of course, because open AI is there and they, you know, reinvigorated the scene Also Gary Tan from Y Combinator, he's trying to push a lot in politics there to make it a real cool city. Like we have a lot of cool cities in Asia that are really modern, and he's trying to do that with San Francisco. And that's I think very admirable. It's not just complaining about San Francisco, like we all do, but they're actually changing stuff. So, man, there could be something really special happening there.

It's interesting. I don't really know much about Silicon Valley and like San Francisco myself, so I always find it a bit hard to really have an idea as to what's going on there. But, [00:30:00] Bali for me it's a little bit easier to talk about given that I've been here for a couple of years at this point.

Dominik What do you think about San Francisco right now?

I personally have never been to San Francisco. So my opinion on San Francisco is very limited. The only thing that I see from, I think like Twitter and I've seen from the past is that it does seem a bit, maybe getting more traction again. I've seen definitely a couple of years ago that people. Well, were very bearish on San Francisco, people getting stabbed, a lot of homeless people there. A lot of like toxic VC culture. But I mean, I think like we're kind of changing now. We see where it is kind of down. So maybe there's like a new resurgence of like resurrection of VC stuff. But I do agree with you. I think Bali in terms of like indie hackers, like startup heaven kind of is really a good call because like. Erwin is here right now. I'm here, a lot of people in the space for now as well are here in Bali and it does feel like a good community here, especially if you're a solo founder, [00:31:00] you can really get like a lot of help that you would otherwise never would have gotten otherwise. So I think Bali is a great place for indie hackers. I mean, it always has been right. The trash burning is also true. I agree with you.

Yeah, if that gets fixed, honestly, it would make it 10 times better for sure.

Yeah, man, sorry, but this trash burning, like when you're after 30, you're kind of like, okay, I don't want to have clean air. I don't want to have like AQI 200, you know, but I mean, I'm, I'm a Bangkok supporter. So, I don't have much to say, but I'm usually indoors in Bangkok in clean filtered air, but it does become, uh, kind of annoying, but yeah I agree on all this stuff. But yeah, what's the next thing? I don't really know. AI, you know, obviously it's not a hype. It's a real thing. People use it. I use Chat GPT every day. So I think it's a real, it's a real thing.

Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, I remember just when OpenAI started getting into the proper GPT release and it [00:32:00] started to become like seriously impressive. I remember people going like, Oh, Web3, it's just the same as AI. It's one of those hypes, right? Like everyone moves from Web3 to AI and then it. Blows up again. Honestly, I think we're calling it here, right here, right now, it's here to stay. That's not going to go away. That's just going to get wilder and wilder and wilder as the months progress.

Yeah, man, the difference with Web3 is like, man, I was not against Web3, but I felt kind of like I never really used this and I don't really see the point and I do invest in Bitcoin and stuff, but I never used Bitcoin either. And I do still believe in Bitcoin, but like AI, I use every day, like it really changed all of our lives, I think. And normal people use it too, not just coders. Like a lot of people use it. My girlfriend uses it all the time. Just ask questions, like what clothes to match with other clothes, you know? So, I really think it's here to stay, and yeah.

Yeah. My mom is actually using it for her work as well. Believe it or not, and she's quite a technical, so she works in the hospital for like a dental surgeon office and, you know, like very niche [00:33:00] things. She would like, ask like, what does this medication do in combination with this or what should we do in this scenario? Are there other options? Blah, blah, blah. And actually it's good for that kind of niche information. It's not necessarily, you should trust it, obviously,

but if you have your own expertise, you know what is right and what is wrong. Right. So, I mean, as long as you don't take it for truth right off the bet, I think it's the main thing.

I think it's not perfect. None of his AI stuff is perfect. Like with PhotoAI, my startup, it's also, the photos are not perfect, but they give you a nice idea. For example, what clothes you can wear, you know, or how a suit looks on me, which color suit, that kind of stuff. It's not perfect, but it gives you ideas, you know?

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, with PhotoAI, I think it's actually an amazing example of, um, it's getting there, the first 90%, you can really see like the progression in the first couple of weeks and months that, that you made. Like, everything looked so much better with every iteration, and then that last 10, maybe 5% is just, it's just [00:34:00] hard. It's always hard.

Get there diminishing returns. Yeah, yeah. But you do see this gen, this variant with ai, they're all the same models, kind of, it doesn't matter if it's text or imaging, like LLM chat GPT is the same as stable fusion kind. The same concepts like transformers and stuff, and you see everybody hitting kind of like diminishing returns a little bit. Now, uh, that's interesting. Like even Sam Alman said it like he, he doesn't believe the next versions of GPT will be remarkably better. They will be iteratively better, you know, we had this big leap now a year ago with suddenly AI working, but there might be more iterative leaps, like not even leaps, like just iteration from now on.

Yeah, it's very likely what you say it's going to be. I think there's just always like this phases, right, like of the fine tuning phase that it's not a massive release necessarily, which is a fine tuning phase and they're like working behind the scenes, researching more, doing all that stuff. And then there's another leap, and it really feels like they're on a leap spree, so to [00:35:00] say, like there have been quite a few. It's no reason to believe. I don't think there's a reason to believe they'll show slow down. But um, yeah, I guess time will tell.

Yeah. Is a good Leaps pree is a good startup name, maybe leap

it's really hard to pronounce though. Leaps leaps.com. Yeah, it's a bit tricky. I just started Leap Spree. It's now registered you, you just said it. It's just Leapspree.com. Jesus Christ. It's gone. It's gone. Okay. Whoever owns this now, might want to buy it off of you later off your space.

I'll buy it. I'll buy it for a hundred thousand dollars in two years.

I think whoever is registering this now is probably, jumping or maybe it's already taken by now.

Leap spree industries.

Oh, that's great. All right. So I want to wrap it up, because we also have discussion questions. You should not forget about those and give some other opportunities to people to speak.

I have enough time. So you don't need to wrap anything up. Maybe it gets boring, I don't need to go anywhere. No, I honestly, I can only speak for myself really, but it will never get boring. I think we can talk about this for hours and [00:36:00] honestly, you will be forever invited to every single episode from here on out if you would want to join in and Talk more, of course.

But we will have some discussion questions and, if you want to hang around, and talk as well and chime in that'd be great. But Pieter, thank you very, very, very, very much for joining in. And for the tons of insight, I think this 45 or 40 minutes is jam packed

with, you know, amazing knowledge and things. And, thank you very much.

Yeah, sure, man. Thank you for having me.

I want to give the microphone to Dom. We will be doing our discussion question segment.

Yeah. Thanks, Erwin. Also, thank you so much, Pieter. Our PhD in physical exercise and startups, both. Um, he branched out. Right. So guys, we're now heading over to the discussion part, as Erwin already said. The idea of this is to make it a bit more bi directional. We're going to have a couple of questions prepared and just throw them into the group. And then we're going to invite you into the Twitter space. You can just request to speak on the bottom left corner. [00:37:00] And we're going to try our best to invite you. This whole thing is a bit buggy. So if you haven't gotten like accepted, just try again, and we're going to do best to encourage you to speak.

I want to start with the first question that I think is also tying to what Pieter talked a bit in the very beginning, and that is, we have a lot of like new people here, people that are new to bootstrapping, building startups, being an indie hacker, maybe for the first time, working on it for like maybe a year or so. And so one question Erwin and I came up that is really interesting to us. And we're curious what you think about is when and why do you branch out into another product? And, uh, the thing is like you're currently already building a product. It's going maybe well, or maybe not, and you're considering adding on an additional product.

So we've seen Pieter, I think is the best example, like in the very beginning, started out with NomadList. It was a great success. Then he kind of branched out to RemoteOK. And now after a while, Pieter is working on AI tools for AI, interior AI, which are actually, as I've seen in a tweet from Pieter [00:38:00] are basically outperforming in terms of MRR, his previous two projects. So there is a case to be made to also start multiple projects. But the question is like, when do you do that? Like there is a, obviously a trade off in terms of like you, knowing very well that your focus is very, like your focus time is very limited.

The time you have in a day is very limited. So the question is like, when do you branch out? And so all the indie hackers here that are working on multiple projects, or maybe are considering, what are your doubts? What are your fears? Kind of, maybe Pieter, if you're still here, like you mentioned you're scared about inflation and like that kind of taking away your MRR, so that's why you branched out or is there any other reason why you actually branched out?

Uh, I mean, I always try new things kinda. But yeah, there's a fear that businesses end, you know, that your income ends, that's a real fear and inflation can evaporate your savings. So that's a real [00:39:00] incentive to it doesn't matter if you have millions, but you need to keep going to survive, and of course it's a little bit artificial incentive just to keep me going, you know, but you need some kind of incentive.

Yeah, totally agree. We have a couple of people invited as a speaker. There's Brian. If you want to chime in, please let us know your thoughts.

Hey guys, it's great to see you all. It's funny that I just, exchanged emails with Erwin, I bought his Tailscan and he followed up so nicely that it's, he had a little bit of a glitch. And of course, Pieter Levels, Rockstar, and Arvid is here. Man, all my favorite people. Daniel's here. Hey, I'm in San Francisco, and I just wanted to represent and say that it's easy to walk around the shit on the street. It's like avoiding, it's probably easier than avoiding the trash fires. And the great thing about San Francisco, besides the weather, is that the people are super responsive to hard workers like all the people here in this chat probably. So if you reach out to somebody and say, I want to have a meeting, I want to tell you my idea, it's [00:40:00] nice and you can really make some connections fast. It's, not as cheap to live probably as Bali though, so other than that, I can recommend San Francisco.

That's awesome. We have also Isaac here who requested to speak. You're invited as a speaker as well. Do you have something to chime in? Maybe the multiple projects? Anything else you want to say?

Hi, I was just saying thanks for having me on and thanks for hosting these spaces because I'm one of those early, not necessarily, but new bootstrappers who, you know, just trying to figure out how to start a business and how to run things without, you know, the funding and without the whole team and everything. And, it's not really a question that I have, but sort of a comment that I have because When I started bootstrapping, I had a job, like a full time job, and it was crazy difficult to juggle both my full time job and to be a bootstrapper at the same time. So I eventually quit my job, and, I think something that a lot of bootstrappers, they don't emphasize a lot when they're talking about their [00:41:00] success stories, which are great, by the way, is what backup they had while they were building their business, because in most cases, it's not realistic. For instance, to just, let's say, move to Bali and start building your startup for six months without being certain of where you're going to get revenue from, I know a lot of bootstrappers who have had like, you know, a supportive spouse, or who have had like, let's say a freelance, career on the side. And I was just saying for the space and maybe for future guests who you have on, it would be great to get a bit of insight as to, you know, what they did to support themselves or what they did to put themselves in the position to have a successful bootstrapping career. I know levels earlier on in this space spoke about how he had a YouTube channel. So that's something new, like, I haven't followed him for a really long time, so I didn't really know about it. So my assumption was, maybe he had a job, maybe he had a good exit from his company or something. So, just a comment, and it's just something that I would like to see more of in the Bootstrap community.

Um, [00:42:00] because, well, it's something that I kind of have struggled with. I've had to go back and forth, you know, like, should I get a job again? Or should I continue freelancing, et cetera? But other than that, thanks Erwin, thanks Pieter, Dominic and everybody on this space. Thanks for having me and thanks for having these spaces.

Oh yes, I love this question or this statement more so. Um, I think this is definitely something that is a bit neglected. Most of the time you see people, like you said, moving to Bali and then you're like All right, I'm going to just bootstrap and I have like magic cash coming in from somewhere. How do you do that?

I think maybe just to give you a little bit of a perspective, which helps a bit, like people that come to Bali specifically, that's where I draw most of my knowledge from, is you can live here in Bali still, even it's 2023 now, comparably cheap. So something that like, I think people from the US maybe can't even imagine, like you can live here for like under a thousand dollars. Like all in and still somehow live quite comfortably and just focus on your startup, which obviously you need to [00:43:00] get their 1k somehow anywhere. What I have seen most of the people here in Bali doing, if they are starting out their startup are freelancing, most of the people do freelance and then they build up some cash reserve.

And from that day, either quit the freelance work or just do it very minimally. And luckily most freelance gigs, especially in like software development are really, really well paid. So that kind of adds up to their runway. That's what I've seen the most people doing here in Bali, very few. And I think it's also not like recommendable. I just literally have no cash reserves and just go all in and hope for the best. I think that's not the best way to go. Um, I for myself also had another little mobile app that was making just enough for me to get by so I could focus on other projects. And I guess that was really just a lucky, coincidence that this one first app that I made was just making enough for me to like bootstrap out of that, I would say. So I didn't have to freelance in the beginning. So yeah, I agree with that. We have some other people here, for example, Davis. You have something to say about what we were just talking about?[00:44:00]

Sure. I can say a bit of comment about San Francisco from my personal experience going there. Yes. And a question at the end as well. Uh, I went to San Francisco this May for a week just to check out if I would enjoy, like, living there and maybe try to apply to Y Combinator, etc. And the environment there, to me, felt like Bali, but in US in terms of openness of people and events every day about AI.

And it was, like, initially hard to find. But once you start attending those events, you get invited to more events, to private events, and in a week I was already like going to lots of private events about like AI hackathrons, etc. So you meet all kinds of people if you have like an idea or if you're open to those experiences and it was I think it's super beneficial to be there if you can do that if you're doing something in AI But of course on the streets, I was living in the very [00:45:00] center I think it's like Tenderloin or I'm not sure how it's like called You're scared to literally cross the street when it's dark. It's crazy.

Wow. Wow. You said you have a question at the end. Was that already cleared? Yeah. Uh,

the question have you seen a benefit or have you tried any of you to have a support buddy in gym or in bootstrapping, even if it's a competitor, like maybe you're competing with them, but have you tried setting something like that up with intention, or is it better in your opinion to go alone and go through it on your own and then you'll find your people?

Man, I think we all have like supportive, uh, a lot of it is like chat groups for me. Where we have like small chat groups of like, let's say 10 people, 10 to 20 people or something, which is like a mix of people who just do freelance work, but are interested in startups and people who do actually startups.

Uh, I have this founder chat on Telegram where It's about [00:46:00] revenue. So if you make over a hundred K a year, there's one chat, and then if you'll make over 1 million a year, you go in the next chat and then there's a 10 million per year chat. So I think it's super important to have people around you, and I think that's why San Francisco and Bali probably the two places where. You meet those people who, where you can go together on a journey, you know, of making a business. And especially if you do it solo, like, I don't think you need a co founder, but you, of course, like, I ask stuff all the time to my friends in the chat, like, what should I do with this? And they give me, you know, real good advice, like about hiring and firing. For example, this week, I had a lot of problems and I asked my friends also asked my girlfriend, she's also very, very smart and very supportive, and very helpful. So I think it's very important to, to get this advice. Yeah, for sure. You can send out a tweet, sorry.

No, that's great tweeting. I think, especially for me in the beginning, I literally didn't know anyone. I was living in Austria. I was starting my bootstrap kind of like journey and I, nobody in Austria at that point, at [00:47:00] least that I knew from the city I was from, I wasn't living in a capital. I didn't even know what bootstrapping was and so I didn't know anyone. And then the only thing that actually kept me motivated was tweeting in public and finding people online, and that's how I made friends. I met like Alex. I met actually Erwin. Eventually I also met Pieter via Twitter. So like that was, it was a big thing.

And there's also one more thing, maybe as a bit like as an advertisement for anyone who considers coming to Bali, we have this like weekly hacker group called HackerGoo. Like Hacking and Changu, which is like the kind of like Mecca of like Indie Hackercy in Bali where we meet on a Thursday and we essentially all talk about like the problems we have and the things we're working on while working on our own projects. And we also have a very supportive Telegram group where if you have been once joined to our group you can be added to the group and then it sort of functions as well as a Community where you can ask questions and get help. And this has proven to be, I think, one of the most important things for indie hackers.

So yeah, that's just a little advertisement. If you ever come to Bali, just reach out to Erwin or [00:48:00] me. And we're going to tell you more about like how to join the group. It's very easy. It's just a cool working space here. So yeah, one thing before I move on to the, well, we haven't really discussed the question about like, with the group, whatever, like moving into other projects. I do know that like Alfonso here and Vasco, you're both co founders and you are kind of working on multiple projects. Do you maybe just like, before you move on to the second question, do you have something to chime in here?

Okay, um, so yeah, regarding the Twitter thing, it's funny because I just, I started tweeting because Vasco forced me to, because I was in Bangkok in I think April alone, no friends, just there by myself. And actually we were starting out like, trying to create things, me and Vasco. And Vasco told me, oh, you should tweet more, you know, like, you'll meet more people. And I was always like, you know, I'm a developer, don't like to put myself out there and everything. But then I started tweeting and then you start meeting like cool [00:49:00] people and knowing what they're up to. And you see like this new whole world and eventually I meet so many people on Twitter and then, I find out they're all in Bali. I go to Bali, I meet them. So that way I can, I could also like. Build the network of people and the supportive environments and that's great. Especially, when you see people that are not smarter than you making shit ton of money like fuck This makes me pissed, in a good way, you know, so yeah, so I remember first time Vasco introduced me to Pieter I was like kind of pissed because he was making a lot of money and I was broke and I'm like, man, this is the best incentive guys competing about money. It's like, it works completely. Like biologically, it's a great incentive, man. Yeah, I agree.

If I can add something like, man, I think the biggest mistake people do is they quit their job. They have like, you know, 5k savings and they're like, Oh, let's do this. That's [00:50:00] because it's bullshit. You need cashflow. You need to have like at least freelance gigs or contract something to get cashflow to, to pay for your rent and your food. You can work on the side of something. And when it takes off, I think you should quit. And you should never quit if you don't have cashflow. I think it's insane. The only person that ever did this and got successful was under Azimov, my friend. And he had 6K in savings, I think and he spent, no, he had 3, 000 in Bali in 2017.

And he went into what's called a hardcore hotel. A hotel without fan, without AC, with aggressive dogs outside. And it was like, I think like 80 a month or something. He drank cereal with water for breakfast. Then he would go to Starbucks to get like 50 cent filter coffee or something. It's insane. He didn't have a scooter cause he couldn't afford it. He would walk to the Starbucks to work there for free, but then his flip flops got stolen. So he had to walk bare feet home at night at 2 AM with a big stick [00:51:00] branch. We have a video of it. And he did this for like months and then finally somebody took off and now he's making shit loads of money. And so this is the only guy who did it and he, but he's insane. He's Ukrainian. He's super hardcore. Most people cannot live in Bali where it's 40 Celsius degrees sometimes in a room without AC, eating cereal with water for breakfast, it's insane, you know, but so don't quit your job.

Yeah, absolutely. I want to chime in very quickly and say, um, I agree, yeah. What Andrei did, I would not recommend. I've seen him fending off the dogs. It looked pretty gnarly. I personally, by the way, also freelance on the site still, just to, you know, have some extra cash flow and stuff and I wholeheartedly recommend anyone to not make that leap too quickly because there's one thing that is extremely detrimental for your mental Clarity and ability to ship and all that stuff, and that's financial stress. It's an absolute killer in that regard. So, always have the [00:52:00] backup.

I love that Pieter calls it hardcore hotel. That's a new term for me as well. Hardcore hotel. If any one of you like wants to hear more about like Andre's journey, by the way, I think he did a very early interview on the Indie Hackers podcast. I remember listening to this like years ago and it inspired me actually to go to Bali. Not like cause of the dogs, cause more like of like how he prescribed it. So yeah, definitely recommend listening to that Indie Hacker Podcast with him.

Man, André's story is like the best because it started from literally nothing, like hardcore hotel, water for breakfast, and then now he's like, he's my neighbor here and he has a great life, and he literally just, he's so happy and grateful to have like this money and just a normal life and he will walk around and sit on a bench. In the park here and just look, you know, in front of him happy, it's so beautiful, grateful guy, like coming from nothing and then it's so beautiful to me.

That's so good. I've seen him. He seems very, very [00:53:00] happy. Let's move on maybe to another question. One question that is a bit, I would say like maybe something you don't regularly talk about like in the bootstrap world, but I think it's just really interesting, especially to hear. Your opinion on this Pieter because you also talked about this a bit. So I'm curious. We indie hackers, right? We work a lot. We work tons You just mentioned earlier in the interview that it takes you like four hours to just like fuck around to like actually get into A flow state and so the question is for those people of you here chiming in that actually have a partner Girlfriend, boyfriend, or anything in between.

How do you get focus work done? I can just only speak from personal experience, especially in the beginning of like a relationship. You spend so much time together with your partner and hopefully also later on, by the way, but finding the time to work on like a really, really demanding project, your own startup, where you put in so much work and blood, how do you focus like, How do you make compromises? And so I'm just curious, because Pieter [00:54:00] talked about this a bit. Would you maybe just share a bit? Like, how do you do it? I don't get into personal stuff, obviously, but I'm just really curious because I've been there too and I really struggled with this.

I think it's so difficult man, it's, uh, because you don't realize that we're insane, we're working insane hours, actually. And even when we're not working, we're kind of working, we're like reading about stuff on Hacker News or, you know, Oh, this shit, like you're in the bed at 2am and you're reading about some new technology. Like, okay, tomorrow I'm going to work on this stuff, you know, and we have no time. Entrepreneurs have this problem. They don't have time off, right? Generally. So it is a real cause of conflict in relationships, I think. And I think my girlfriend understands now that I need, like, I think communicating is very important. Like you get angry about stuff, like you cannot work when you should just communicate explicitly.

Like I need to sit now and fix these bugs and explain the bugs. Like, this is what's happening. Don't assume that they don't understand. They will understand your business and say all [00:55:00] these things and explain everything. And then you can work on it. And, but you need a supportive partner. And man, a lot of partners are not fucking supportive. And they do not understand that you, this is your dream. You want to make, you know, online companies kind of, and you want to make money with this. And I think also that people that don't code believe that somehow the business is just going to keep going. Like you don't need to work on it because they see a website or an app and they're like, ah, why do you need to work on this?

It works, right? Man, it never works. It always, it's starting to fall apart. It's entropy. The whole thing every day is trying to kill itself. You know, it's like a suicidal business. You constantly need to fix things like libraries. And like now I had to change the Twitter library on all my sites that tweets. Jobs and Tweet Nomad List meetups, because the guy who makes the Twitter library for PHP, he doesn't like that Elon Musk bought Twitter, so he's boycotting everything. So the library doesn't work anymore, so I need to change everything. Like this kind of shit, you cannot rely on anything. So they need to, your partner needs to understand that. You need to work and it's not [00:56:00] a hobby. It's a real job. And you as a person need to understand that she or he or whatever needs time from you. So for example, like date day and having nice dinner together and times where it's off but this is, it's very difficult still, like we still have problems with it, but it's better getting better, you know.

Yeah, I love to hear this because I think definitely been there. And I think the thing you mentioned about like having, like setting out specific dates, essentially time management and talking openly about what your needs are in terms of like, okay, you need to work on this. And like, sometimes we work on like things where we need to like focus them. Right. And it's maybe not even sufficient to work on it like a full day. Maybe you need two days. Right. And just communicating that and making sure that your partner is aligned. I think it's just really hard. It's kind of comforting to hear that like also everyone is a bit struggling with this, and I think it also definitely helps talking in public a bit more about this. We also have Lukas here requesting to speak. You can speak now if you want to. Do you have something to [00:57:00] add?

Oh yeah, thank you so much. Great space by the way. So I requested to speak regarding the multiple projects question before. So I was just going to say that it feels like a big part of the community is super afraid to try things and kill projects. You know, I always try to embrace like failing. And I think it's very difficult for many. And I also think that, the whole time allocation thing is a big part of as well. So for me, for instance, last week when openAI released their new APIs, I challenged myself to build an application in 24 hours. And I managed to release a full stack AI application with the new APIs. And then that gave me, as a new indie hacker with only 300 followers at the time, a lot of traction. It went viral, the post. So it was just to say that it's, definitely possible to try stuff quick, see what sticks, and don't be afraid to kill off projects. I love this. I just checked out your tweet, Lukas, and like, totally resonate. It looks really cool.

I feel like in this regard also, when is it time to kill a project? What do you think about this, [00:58:00] guys? It's so hard. Like there is like, I think I listened to this one. I think he had a podcast with the wife of a Rob Walling. Who is a psychiatrist and she's specialized on like founders, wealth, wellness, right? And she was talking about like, there's this correlation of founders associating their startup, like it releases the same chemicals in your brain, then you actually having a actual baby so getting rid of your startup idea or your startup that you have kind of like attached to yourself a lot is really, really hard.

So I'm curious, but like, you know, like startups and like babies, you can actually easily get rid of if you wanted to. But it's really hard, right? And you have this idea, you think it's like amazing, but it might have no traction at all. So how do you get rid of it? When do you get rid of it? How do you, like, when do you kill the project? Does anyone like some thoughts on this?

Yeah, I definitely have a thought on this. And the reason for this is I just want to say I am extremely bad at this. So I can, give you my experience and then you just do the exact opposite as to [00:59:00] what I do. First project went kind of nice, build it very quickly, relatively quickly. Was, doing maybe two, three, 400 a month, you know, at the very peak, from like two or three big customers and then it kind of sizzled out again. And unfortunately they churned and I kept working on it for another six months. That's number one. Don't do that when you're, you feel like your startup is thinking, don't try to drag the dead horse, just consider it dead and move on.

Don't be like me. Second one, didn't talk to anyone, just had an idea, built it. Took me eight months besides freelancing, it was part time, but for eight months trying to find customers, nobody ever converted from trial to paid user. Basically eight months down the drain. Um, I would say give yourself a week or two to build it, publish it, see what happens. If it's not good, kill it. Basically what Pieter has been advocating to every single one of us. I was just too stubborn not to listen really. But, yeah, those were my two cents.

I just want to like play a little bit of like the devil's advocate here in [01:00:00] terms of like, I do certainly agree with this whole emphasize on Indie Hackers should build something in like one week or two weeks and if it takes too long, like that's absolutely bad, but also like you do see is sometimes an idea like you launched the product. Let's say you have an MVP after like two weeks. Amazing, right? And then what I do see a lot of people have like actually really, really well made products, but then after like a week of like trying to market it, they give up.

Because you're a developer and you hate marketing and you realize actually you have to do stuff that is not really fun, like doing maybe code outreach or sales. So, I mean, seeing if your product has product market fit after one or two weeks after you launched your product, I think is a bit ridiculous. So just to play a bit of like the dev as advocate here, the question is like, when, at what point, or like, what's the timeframe where you actually can say, this is really not working out? Is it maybe? I mean, it's definitely in my opinion, longer than two weeks, maybe a month is like a good proxy. I don't know what you think about this like everyone that's a speaker.

[01:01:00] I think there's a problem here where people try, look for golden rules and they absolutely do not exist. And like, it can be very different based on what kind of business you're building. Some businesses take off after years. I think if you do a certain math method, like what we do is like try validate fast. And try kill off fast, right? It's just one method. It doesn't mean you need to build every business like this, but like, what this Lucas guy did, he jumps on a new technology, he makes something, very fast, it goes viral, and he probably spends minimum time on this. I think that's in our methodology, I think that most of us use, that's amazing, that's the perfect way to do it.

Minimum time spent. See if there's a market and then now you can work on it more to monetize it and develop it further. And I think if you choose that method, that's the way to go. And then you should probably kill it off fast if it doesn't take off after, you know, one month. But I also have examples where like I made RemoteOK and [01:02:00] it didn't take off until one year. And actually the real takeoff was during COVID, you know, so it's hard to predict. I think one good way is keep projects alive, actually. Just keep them highly automated and then keep them running and see, maybe people start signing up after a year or two, even, you know.

Yeah, that's a good point. I actually do have a project where I kind of now seeing a bit more traction again, which is hilarious because I haven't touched a project in like three years and people actually subscribe that product is kind of outdated. People are like subscribing. I'm like, wait a second. That's interesting.

Often it's also because it starts ranking on Google because Google likes old websites, right? They like, they don't like new, you don't rank immediately so fast. So when you're six months on Google, you start going up and then people start going to your site and buying. So, I would say. Try launch fast. Keep it running, but you don't need to work on it. Make sure things are automated so you don't need to work on it. I think.

Yeah, and there's also, for everyone chiming in who has maybe not heard about this, gets a bit like [01:03:00] regurgitated now in the indie hacker space, but there's this concept called like 12 projects, 12 months. Pieter also kind of pioneered it. He wrote like a lot of blog posts about it, tweets about it. And now a lot of people are following the same approach where essentially. Well, you try 12 projects in 12 months cause your timeframe is limited and then you kind of see what sticks and that has proven to be successful for a lot of people.

So, that can be still an option. I think it's still viable. Yeah, one more question I want to ask into the group before we wrap it up, and that was also, already kind of great transition by Pieter is, like how much long term success can you attribute it to having a mode?

So Pieter was talking about like Lucas, right? Building this new AI, like little tool based on the new OpenAI API, like OpenAI wrappers, et cetera. We see like Chat GPT, UI wrappers, et cetera. And then kind of OpenAI coming out with a new tool that might or might not kill it. Afonso's startup and Vasco's startup have been killed already like 10 times by OpenAI, as [01:04:00] we've seen on his, on their Twitters. The question is like, how do you like, like you ride a hype wave, right? But how do you actually like turn it into long term success? Like, can you have a mode forever? I don't think so. But, Pieter, what do you think about it? You've been talking about this also a bit, and I think that you're now branching into like marketing, you're doing TikToks as you were like born in 2000.

I'm maximum TikToker, I'm trying to become a TikToker. Yeah. Um, man, the weird thing is I never know why my products work or not work. You know, like PhotoAI now works. Shit loads of competitors, but somehow it makes money. And people keep signing up and like, you wish you could associate things you did to why something takes off, you know, but usually it's just markets. I think the Gumroad founder wrote about that. Like 80 percent of your success is just the markets. Like the market goes up and you're part of the markets. So you need to try be. A very good product that solves a customer problem and there's demand for it. And then the market [01:05:00] you're surfing, the waves come, and I think that has much more effect in your business often than anything you do. All this A, B testing or even marketing you do. So, it's very hard to see why something takes off and why then it goes down. You know?

Yeah. Hey, Pieter, I have a quick question. You've really set the bar high for automation and I think for a long time there was that meme of like a single index. php page, which was awesome. Can you speak a little bit more about how you think about automation? Yeah. I think the word is too, it sounds too difficult for people, but automation simply means you make the, your script, your code thing run scheduled, so you just set it hourly or daily or weekly or monthly and it does something.

But even a website itself is automation. It just means that you remove the human elements where you need to do stuff and minimize that. So for example, refunds, you can do refunds automatically. Like Danny Postma on this headshotpro. com website, people ask for [01:06:00] refunds. So you go to support, ask for refund, ask why you want a refund, and then it gives you a refund. And the robot checks if you deserve a refund or not. Uber does the same thing. You can ask refunds for cancellation fees and it'll just check if you deserve a refund. This kind of basic stuff. That means you don't need a person to check the refunds, right? Or you don't need to do it anymore. So a lot of things you can automate.

And I think it's a necessity to automate if you're a solo or a small, you know, founder, small team, right? That's literally just automation. And I think everything we do is automation. We're coding stuff, it runs and it runs itself and making sure things don't automatically break, like with all these dependencies and libraries these days, you know, that's definitely a risk.

That doesn't help it because you keep needing to jump in and fix it. Trying to make it just keep the website going for one year without touching it. That's really nice. And then that's for me also automation, you know.

I feel like you, in your book, like you mentioned, you didn't call it automation, you called it robots. You have like little robots working for you. [01:07:00] That's so cute.

Yeah. But they're cron jobs. They are robots. You can check in, in top, like the, the status system status of your server. You can see all the robots, running and doing stuff and working for you. And it really feels like employees. And I have hired people this year. And it's really, man, it's good and bad. And it's very stressful. Like people does not without empathy, I say, but people get sick. People suddenly are like, man, I'm not really interested in work anymore. Sorry. I'm not really excited about it anymore. Or they're like, ah, I want a share of the revenue, you know, which all makes sense. But like, there's a lot of stuff to deal with humans and which you don't have robots. They never ask for anything. They generally just work really hard and nothing against humans, you know, but that's reality.

I hate to say this, Pieter, but those cron jobs being tiny robots, I think we are going to transition into, you know, AI agents actually having an opinion with AGI at some point they would demand payment. Exactly. That era might also end very soon.

But I think they do [01:08:00] demand a raise and that will be OpenAI sending you an email that they 10x their API, you know, and then we all say this, that's going to be the raise. And that's a real thing as well. Yeah. Yeah. True. True. We also have Brandon. Will you want to chime in as well to conversation?

Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me. Yeah, well, there's also like open source models, like the Lama one, but I just wanted to ask, like, do you guys think it's worth it to continue something that is getting attention, but isn't necessarily making money right away? For example, Pieter, you retweeted my like million dollar metropolis thing. That was like many years ago. That actually made a few thousand dollars, but I couldn't like continue marketing it basically, or maybe I should. Yeah, I remember it was like this 3d city where you could buy a logo on the skyscraper. Right.

Yeah, it's still up, and I actually have like a remote iOS, uh, RemoteOK it's still like the central. Yeah, cool. Yeah, I think for that part, so this was like, so you go to the website and you see like a kind of vaporwave cyberpunk 3d city with, uh, logos on the [01:09:00] buildings. And it was really cool. I think the question is like, what product, what problem was it solving? You know, like, is this going to be like a. Multiplayer virtual world, or there wasn't really, there wasn't really a problem or a big user experience in that yet. And so it can get attention for being cool technology, but it doesn't really have a business aspect to it, you know? Exactly. But the thing is, it actually wasn't getting that much attention.

I had to do marketing, but now I'm working on like. AI stuff, which is getting a lot of attention and I'm not even going to try hard, but I don't know how to like monetize it, but it still might be worth it just because it's getting attention that I never got for that product kind of thing. Do you have a Stripe account?

Yeah. Yeah. So do you have like a Stripe payment link button on the website for a million dollar Metropolis? No, for your new projects, your new AI projects. The thing is it's just showing interest, interesting stuff. It's not. Like I'm able to market it because it's not actually selling anything. That makes any sense. So what if you add a Stripe payment [01:10:00] button to it?

I mean, but what would people be buying though? Like, well, using the service. Yeah. I guess it's more just like building an audience first. No, it's not. You need to add a Stripe payment button to it. Okay. Okay. Like, you don't need to build an audience, you're not charging money. Of course you're not making money. But that was like the problem with the million dollar Metropolis is that I didn't have an audience, I think, or no. Okay. But now you have the audience. You have, you go viral, you have a product, you have AI products, but you're not charging money for it. That's why you don't make money.

Oh yeah. It's not really an AI product. It's just like cool visualizations, visualizing AI stuff. Okay. Try adding a stripe button to it to do something extra like, now the visual colors are black and white, but if you want colors, pay 5. I don't know, I don't know the project that you're doing, but add, you know, a premium feature to it and then charge money for it and see what happens. And if they don't pay, shut it down, [01:11:00] maybe. Or, I mean, it can be a nice creative project, but if you're trying to build a business, see if people pay for something. And then if they don't, shut it down. Yeah, I was thinking about just making ads in the world, but making the AI thing, which people would really love, the center of attention, so people actually visit it. But anyways, thanks for your time.

I feel like when it comes to this, also one thing that is important when you're in IndieHack, when you start a project. There I do see a lot of indie hackers just starting like passion projects, something they are really passionate about, but they don't really think about, I would say maybe that if there is even a market demand, does it, like Pieter said, does it really solve a core issue that people want to pay money for?

Like, does it make people more money? Does it save them time? You know, all these like core. things that actually make a business valuable. So if you are like, the question at hand is like, do you want to treat this project as a hobby or do you actually want to treat it as a business that can potentially make you enough so you can make a living, right? And these two distinctions are really important, and I think, especially for like new indie hackers coming up, [01:12:00] they don't really know this distinction. They just build a project, think it's cool, it gets some hype, but then I will think about the monetization afterwards. Oh, I will maybe add some ads, right?

Like this can be easy if I have a million visitors, but it's never going to be the case. So like Pieter said, I think summing this up, be more pragmatic and try to charge whatever you have. As soon as possible is definitely the way to go, especially as an indie hacker. Yeah, and you know, Facebook started with something that went viral. This Facebook website, everybody signed up, they weren't making money, but the traffic never left. The traffic kept growing. And if you have traffic that never goes, you still get traffic. You can monetize this traffic. This is like when you start thinking it in a simple way where there's people coming to a website or app.

And a percentage of them will pay for something for a certain price. You can do, you know, 1, 000 visitors times 1 percent is 10. People will pay for this and they'll pay 5. Okay. Now you made 500, right? You can estimate. Based on conversion rates and traffic, what you're [01:13:00] going to make. And if you approach business, online business, like this way, it becomes very approachable. You're like, Oh, I just need to make something cool. It gets traffic, keeps getting traffic every month and a percentage will convert and pay. And I'll make this money. And this napkin math is usually very, uh, in the ballpark, very close to what it's going to make, you know? Yeah. Maybe I should have continued that project.

Cause like just that retweet and only like 200 likes got like a few thousand bucks, uh, It's just the continuation of that marketing was, I guess, the problem. Well, the problem is like, if you get a retweet by a big account, for example, it can be an incidental thing. If you make something that a lot of people will retweet and it's really, really something special, solve something or it's very cool technology, like man, even then it's hype.

Like a lot of things are still hype. Like a lot of things you see that you, everybody knows, everybody sees in the whole world. It's gone after a month, like famous people, they're gone after two years, you know, being famous. It's like, does anybody hear about Gary V anymore? He's gone. [01:14:00] I don't hear about him anymore.

Blueberry. This is the same. Blueberries. What? I don't hear about him anymore. It's, it's all about, it's a hype. So making something that sustains traffic and people buying stuff is very difficult. And that means solving a customer problem that there remains a customer problem the next few years. And you can do that. Well, yeah, wrapping this up ultimately, I think as an indie hacker, and this is the ever longing issue we all have. We're building things, but we also need to market them and maybe even spend more time on the marketing than the building, which is super hard, but I think that's the most important thing.

Guys, thank you all so much for tuning in. I want to slowly wrap this up. Pieter, thanks also for joining the discussion. That was absolutely amazing. I want to throw the ball back to Erwin to say a last few words. Wrap it up. You want to chime in, Erwin?

Crazy, that's beautiful, I don't really have much to add. I think what you guys said is, uh, is pretty fair and legit. You gotta figure out if something is a hobby project or not. You [01:15:00] obviously can't make money when you don't charge money. It's a very important thing. So the add a stripe button, you know, it never hurts. That's the thing. It can only work out well, or it can give you a realization that it won't. So, it's a bit general, of course, but I think that's very true. Um, I think we should probably invite Pieter to like a Bootstr special edition, where we look at your startup and roast it for five minutes, or, you know figure out what to change. But also dangerous. And, uh, it's very dangerous, but, Well, who knows? Maybe one day, to find out whether we actually will at some point, I suppose, you should follow me and Dom and the BootstrFM account, to be updated on if that ever happens. Who knows? And for all the Upcoming episodes with amazing guests as well. Pieter, thank you very much for joining again. Very much appreciated. And thank you all the other speakers to join. Thank you for everybody for asking questions. Thank you and, um, by the way, I wanted to give, one very last mention. Pieter Leapspree. com [01:16:00] is indeed just registered just now. Um, David actually snatched it up. No, David snatched it up. David, David Park got Leapsprey. com. Yep. So you gotta pay him 300k for three years. Man, I'm gonna sue him for damages.

History in the making.

I want to be co founder, please.

David, I think that's a clear invitation. Probably DM Pieter after this. Thank you all again for chiming in. I think we had a record amount of listeners. I'm looking at, uh, 300 and 380 at the peak. So yeah, very proud of that. Very happy. Please tune in for the exactly.

Why you did this? How did you do this?? I wanna do this. That was a great sound. It's like the magic wand. AlrightErwin, let's wrap this up. Yes. That's the very end of it. See you all next week.

[01:17:00] Have a great one. Ciao, ciao. Ciao, ciao. Bye bye.