- The podcast was started because many people requested it and it provided a platform for guests who didn't want to share their revenue.
- The host had a lazy approach to starting the podcast and didn't have any specific podcasters that he admired.
- Skills developed include efficient preparation, asking engaging questions, and adapting to unexpected answers.
- The host initially disliked the sound of his own voice but has become comfortable with it over time.
- The host tries to integrate advice from guests into his own life and has become more conscious of repeating advice.
- He believes that starting a VC-funded company is not a good bet for most people and that it's better to be honest about financial motivations.
- The host was influenced by Jason Fried and Kevin Hale's perspectives on VC-backed companies.
- The idea for Indie Hackers came after spending two days reading Hacker News threads about profitable side projects and business earnings.

- IndieHackers was created as a better version of popular threads discussing small businesses and non-VC backed companies.
- The rise in popularity of indie hackers may be due to more people thinking about small businesses and non-VC backed businesses, as well as more people in the software development space.
- The traditional story around tech companies prioritizing growth and raising a lot of money is starting to change.
- Practical factors, such as difficulty in raising money outside of tech hubs, are leading more people to prioritize profitability over growth.
- Many people starting businesses in similar industries fosters camaraderie and allows for advice and support from others who have treaded a similar path.
- Copycat concerns are generally not an issue, especially in non-winner-take-all markets.
- The founder of IndieHackers found a hack to streamline the interview process by creating a standardized set of questions and guidelines for answers, resulting in more entertaining interviews with less effort.
- IndieHackers has evolved into a community of founders and entrepreneurs who share knowledge and help each other build successful businesses.
- The focus now is on growing the community and developing tools to make the lives of indie hackers easier.

- The speaker discusses the importance of building the right product and avoiding wasting time on the wrong things.
- They mention a successful real estate forum called Bigger Pockets and a resource for digital nomads called Nomad List as examples of successful niche communities.
- The speaker emphasizes the need to organize a forum around a topic that people enjoy talking about and can continue discussing.
- They also stress the importance of having a strategy to consistently drive traffic to the forum, such as through content marketing.
- The speaker shares their experience of starting Indie Hackers as a blog and creating interesting discussions and content to attract and retain users.
- They advise against relying on growth hacks and instead focus on building something that people actually want and finding ways to get people in the door.
- The speaker also discusses the challenges of conducting text interviews and how they coax better answers out of interviewees.

- Building a startup alone is difficult, and it's easy to quit when faced with hurdles.
- The key to success is to not quit and keep running towards the finish line.
- Working in solitude makes it harder to stay motivated, but being part of a community helps.
- Transparency and sharing your journey with others can provide support and motivation.
- Joining an accelerator can be beneficial for the mentorship and support, but be aware of the investment terms and expectations.
- Building a side hustle or small business requires solid business fundamentals, regardless of location.
- Access to capital, community understanding, and legal considerations may vary based on location, but the internet allows for customers from anywhere.

- The interviewee, Brian D. Rubinstein, discusses his experience interviewing a variety of companies, including SaaS companies.
- He highlights the success of Scott's Cheap Flights, a non-SaaS company that started as a side project and grew into a $4 million business by offering a mailing list for cheap flight deals.
- Rubinstein mentions role models such as David Heidemeier Hansen from Basecamp and Jason Fried, who provided inspiration and valuable business advice.
- He emphasizes the importance of starting a business by first understanding what people want and finding the best way to provide it, rather than focusing solely on the product.
- Rubinstein mentions common failures among indie hacker founders, including not knowing the first step, struggling with legal issues, and quitting too early.
- He encourages reading and learning from others' mistakes in order to avoid repeating them.
- Rubinstein recommends reading the Indie Hackers interviews and posting on the forum to receive feedback and advice from the community.
- He mentions several startup books he found helpful, including "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries, "Crossing the Chasm," and "Zero to One" by Peter Thiel.

- The video discusses the psychology of habit-forming products and the importance of reading books outside of the startup echo chamber for creativity.
- It also discusses the transition of indie hacker projects from lifestyle businesses to startups, with examples of companies that have successfully made the transition.
- The video offers advice on when to quit a job and pursue a side project full-time, emphasizing the need for product market fit and revenue growth.
- The speaker shares their experience of being acquired by Stripe and how it has benefited the indie hackers community.
- They mention the possibility of future side projects, specifically in the area of social media tools.

- The Indie Hackers podcast was started due to popular demand and to provide a platform for guests who didn't want to share their revenue.
- The host developed skills in preparation, asking engaging questions, and adapting to unexpected answers.
- Indie Hackers was created as a better version of popular threads discussing small businesses and non-VC backed companies.
- The rise in popularity of indie hackers may be due to more people thinking about small businesses and non-VC backed businesses.
- The founder of Indie Hackers found a hack to streamline the interview process, resulting in more entertaining interviews with less effort.
- Indie Hackers has evolved into a community of founders and entrepreneurs who share knowledge and help each other build successful businesses.
- The focus now is on growing the community and developing tools to make the lives of indie hackers easier.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of building the right product and consistently driving traffic to the forum.
- Transparency and sharing your journey with others can provide support and motivation for indie hackers.
- Building a side hustle or small business requires solid business fundamentals, regardless of location.
- The interviewee, Brian D. Rubinstein, discusses his experience interviewing a variety of companies and common failures among indie hacker founders.
- Rubinstein recommends reading the Indie Hackers interviews and posting on the forum for feedback and advice.
- The video discusses the psychology of habit-forming products and the transition of indie hacker projects from lifestyle businesses to startups.
- The speaker shares their experience of being acquired by Stripe and mentions the possibility of future side projects.

Courtland Allen is the founder of Indie Hackers - https://www.indiehackers.com/

YC's podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon - http://twitter.com/craigcannon

But yeah, why did you decide to start doing a podcast after the site was going?

I mean, the number of people who asked me to do a podcast was so much higher than people who asked for any other feature.

And also, I think, a part of the text interviews was that you have to share your revenue.

And the number of people that I reached out to who I thought would have really good stories for the site that people can learn from, who were willing to share everything but their revenue, was pretty high.

And so I kept getting tired of people saying, you know, I'm not going to come on.

If I have to share my revenue, you need some other way where I can come on and share my story.

So the podcast kind of helped me kill that bird.

And also, you know, it appeased people who wanted me to do a podcast.

But I was terrified of it because, like I said earlier, like I don't, I'd never done a podcast.

Was it, were there people you admired at the time?

You're like, oh, I want to make a podcast like X,

Yeah, I mean, I was just like, you know what, I'll try this.

I'm just going to try talking to people and see how it comes out and have my own style.

Well, what are the skills you've developed, do you think?

I think I've gotten a lot better at preparing efficiently.

Yeah, like knowing what to read and what to listen to, what kinds of questions to ask that'll be engaging and that they'll give good answers to, and how to follow up on a question if you get an unexpected answer.

I'm like, okay, here's exactly, at least in the beginning, I'm going to ask question ABCDEF, and this is how it's going to go.

And like, you know, you ask a question, they start giving you answers all over the map and suddenly your perfect plan is thrown into disarray.

So I think just like having the composure and the ability to calm down and be like, okay, it's okay.

Just listen to what they're saying and have a normal conversation was difficult at first.

Other things, like I don't know if you'd call this a skill but just being comfortable like in my own skin, like not not cringing at the sound of my own voice.

Yeah I had my own podcast but I mean I would go back and listen and it's like, I don't know, like if you hate the sound of your voice, but I hated the sound of my voice at first.

Now I'm fine with it, but at first I was like, man, I sound awful.

You can only spend so much of your time cringing at yourself after you're like, oh God, I mean, like the amount of hours I've seen myself on video and listen to myself on a podcast or whatever.

Like, yeah, that is 1 of the things that I thought the fear would remain and it completely goes away.

But yeah, the video element has thrown a few people.

It's hard to say a favorite episode because I'm always like, I'm going to hurt somebody's feelings.

And then I forget too, you know, what happened in that episode?

But some of the coolest ones, I did 1 with my friend Julian Shapiro, who's got a growth consultancy called Bellcurve.

And he just deep-dived into a bunch of different stories of him working with different clients.

And he was not afraid to share times where he just messed up, So I thought that was really cool.

I really liked the episode I did last week with Wes Boss.

He gets an enormous amount of work done to be just a 1 person.

He's got an email list of 170,000 developers on it that he's built by himself in like 5 or 6 years.

Twitter following of like 100,000 people and he's just trucking along.

He works 9 to 5, puts his laptop down and then goes to hang out with his wife and his kids.

Like is there a list of people that you admire like man that that person has it figured out like I want to do Do exactly what they're doing.

Yeah, there's a lot of people and it's it's like I always forget I'm like man that person's got it figured out in the next week.

I've totally forgotten about it I've moved on to other things.

I've seen a handful of like roundups of indie hacker pro tips from every episode.

Are you continuously integrating their great ideas into your daily life or do you kind of just go your own way?

Yeah I think it's funny it's 1 of the things I was telling a friend a couple days ago I think generally speaking like all of us tend to overweight like novel advice like things that are new or flashy or we haven't heard before.

And it's so easy to ignore the things that we hear all the time.

But I try to have the discipline to when I see that kind of repeated advice to take it to heart and not look at it as something that, okay, you know, have I heard this before?

Yes, it doesn't matter, but more, you know, as a reminder to myself, like, am I actually living by this?

You know, I've internalized this or I like to think I have, but like, am I actually talking to my customers?

So I think when people do these roundups and people analyze things and I see this advice repeated, I take the time to ask myself if I'm doing it.

And I think I've gotten better at it, just repeated reminders to myself.

Yeah, I think you've become conscious of it, but I agree.

So we posted a bunch of questions, or other people posted questions to Twitter for you.

Ryan Hoover, Product Hunt, asked, what do you believe that most others do not?

I'm glad I got this question on Twitter rather than just being asked randomly because it's hard to answer unless you've thought about it.

So I think this question originally comes from Peter Thiel, who would ask the founders of companies that he was interested in investing in, just as a way to find out if what they're doing is truly unique and whether they'd be able to have a monopoly and very few competitors.

I liked it when I heard it because it's kind of a sneaky way to get somebody to say something controversial.

So when I was in YC 5 years ago, I asked Paul Graham.

I was like, hey, PG, what do you believe?

The guy asked, what do you believe that other smart people don't?

He was just like, I don't know, my thoughts, they're not indexed that way.

But then he ended up coming up with an answer and it worked.

I don't think anybody would, very many people would agree.

I can't say what it was, out of respect for him, I don't mean to be a tease.

But luckily I've had some time to think about it.

Probably the most obvious 1 is I think that it's probably a bad bet to start a VC funded company for the vast majority of people.

I think that and the value of kind of this culture of always talking about like, you know, what mission drives you and we kind of are not honest about the fact that a lot of us are motivated by money and financial things.

I think it's probably better for the world if people can just be upfront and honest about that.

I think I Got a few others, but like let's start with those 2.

No, I completely agree and I think I'm your Everyone's ability to rationalize is unbelievably powerful Yeah, and you can be into anything and if you're good at it Like just being good at the game is often enough to drive people.

So you see like folks criticizing, you know, anyone who works in anything and they're like, Oh, why do they care about this?

And I'm like, it's because they're really good at it.

it, it's fun to do things that you're good at it.

Was there a point at which that you kind of turned on the interest in VC-backed companies?

It was before I even got into YC, funnily enough.

I went to startup school in 2009, and Jason Fried was there from 37signals, they called it at the time.

And he was like, he stood out like a sore thumb.

He was completely different than everybody else who talked.

Everybody else is kind of a VC or they were a founder of a VC backed company.

And he got on stage and basically said, everybody else is lying to you.

Credit to YC for inviting the opposite opinion there.

But I was very taken by what he had to say because no 1 else was saying it at the time.

It didn't really change my approach at that time, but then I got into YC and we had the weekly Tuesday dinners where founders would come in.

We had a lot of VCs come in, we had a lot of founders of well-funded companies come in.

He was the only person, he was kind of an Andy Hacker at the time.

He was just like, yeah, I packed up my company, we moved to Florida, investors call us every day, we just, you know, politely say no and we're just happy making money, you know, they're making millions of dollars a year and I was intrigued by that, like, huh?

You know, but it wasn't until like recently, like basically last year, I really decided that's what I wanted to do for myself.

I wasn't really, you know, in the mood or really inclined to do the whole fundraising thing and I'd rather just make money from an idea online that I enjoyed doing.

Dave And that idea, was that Indie Hackers?

So I mean, the company that I did YC with, Task Force, still exists.

It still actually makes money, passively.

I kind of worked on that for a little bit, but I didn't think it was really going to go anywhere.

And so I sat around for a couple days thinking, okay, what am I going to work on?

PG wrote about this like 12 years ago or something but a lot of people when they come to the idea phase they think that it's something that you naturally have to be good at.

You just get a good idea or you don't, right?

Whereas, the reality is, it's like any other creative endeavor.

If you practice for long enough, you'll create a good idea.

You don't try to paint the Mona Lisa in 15 minutes, and if you don't get it, you give up.

So I was like, all right, I'm going to push through this.

I'm going to spend 2 days coming up with ideas.

But by the end of 2 days, I realized I was consistently coming up with much better ideas than I had before.

I was just reading through Hacker News threads.

People would ask every month, ask HN, what's your profitable side project?

Or ask HN, how much money are you making from your business?

I figured, okay, there's hundreds of stories here.

If I read through enough of them, maybe I'll glean some insights, I'll see some patterns that I can apply and it'll help me come up

And that's literally exactly what happened.

I mean, the idea for Andy Hackers was based off of the realization that, hey, I'm not the only person who's researching all this stuff.

The reason these threads are so popular is because everybody else is really interested.

I could probably do a better version of these threads and that's what IndieHackers is.

And I was wondering, is it Because there's been a rise in the popularity of indie hackers, right?

But I think there's also a rise in just the number of those threads all over the internet.

Is that because more people are now thinking about small businesses or just non-VC backed businesses?

Or there's more people in the software development space right now?

So I read the book Sapiens earlier this year and my takeaway from, it's kind of a history of all of humanity from the beginning of evolution.

And my takeaway from Sapiens was that human societies tell stories.

And it's tricky because it's difficult to determine whether or not something you believe is just like an arbitrary story that your society happens to tell, or if it's like some immutable fact of the universe.

And for the longest time, like the story around tech companies has been that like, if you start a tech company, you have to raise a lot of money and prioritize growth over funding.

It's amazing how much everyone just believes that and doesn't even consider the possibility that you can start a profitable company that doesn't have to be that big and you don't need any sort of investors or gatekeepers to tell you what to do.

I think the story started to change a lot.

And once people hear this alternative version of the story, and once they see examples of it, people kind of wake up out of this zombie-like state, and they're like, oh, I guess I can do that.

But there are other practical factors and reasons why the story has changed.

A good 1 is, if I look at the IndieHackers traffic stats, something like 60% of the traffic is from not in the United States, let alone Silicon Valley.

People are all over the world starting these companies.

And just from a practical standpoint, it's hard to raise money if you live in Bucharest.

It's difficult, you don't live in Silicon Valley, you don't have access to investors.

And so your options are, either you suck it up and try to raise money locally, you move to a tech hub and raise money there, or you just prioritize profitability, which is kind of the easiest of those 3 options.

And so I think there's a lot of just natural pressure as more people over the world get interested in tech to start profitable businesses and to care less about growth overall else.

Paul Matzkoff And have you seen that there's a common trend in folks just getting started, like starting similar kinds of software businesses?

I mean, the other thing is, if you look at the companies that VCs tend to invest in, they're generally in winner-take-all markets.

Because venture capitalists want some massive return.

So it's social things like Facebook or search applications like Google versus things that are profitable.

You don't want to be in a winner take all market.

You don't want to be fighting for your life every second of the day.

You don't want to be in a zero-sum game where everyone else has to lose for you to win.

And so people end up starting businesses that are very related.

How many profitable analytics companies do you know?

You know, how many different ways are there to teach somebody something?

I tell people all the time, if you want to start a business, just teach people.

People like learning in like a thousand different ways.

Some people want to go to college, some people want to like classroom settings, some people want to read, some people want video courses, some people want to email newsletters, some people want to learn through games.

There's no reason why you have to completely differentiate from everyone else in the market.

You can do something that's similar and people will like your own unique style So people for sure start related businesses, and I think it's a good thing because in it It kind of fosters a sense of camaraderie.

You don't have to compete with everybody.

You don't have to be mistrustful of everybody.

And you can get advice from people who are similar in doing things that kind of tread that path before you.

Well, I've been wondering that with all of the guests you get, you know, because they're divulging most of their information, right?

Like usually like how much money they're making, all of these kinds of metrics.

Are they worried about copycats or is this something that now that you have some traction they kind of like know the deal and it's easier to get people?

Yeah, I mean people that I've talked to are generally not that worried.

I've had some people who refuse to come on because They say, what's the benefit of me revealing my secrets?

And then I've had people who've revealed their secrets that have actually been copied, and it's always hilarious because if you think about the kind of person out there who's going to like just listen to your podcast and read your interview and is just waiting for someone to reveal all the details, and then they clone everything that you've done and make some crappy version of your website but that's different in no way at all except that it's 2 years later.

That's not the most competent person that you should be afraid of.

I think generally it's a non-issue, especially if you're not in some sort of winner-take-all market.

David Adamu asked this question to both you and Ryan, which is part of the YC application.

It is, tell us about a time you successfully hacked a non-computer system to your advantage.

Yeah, I do remember doing this on the YC application.

My answer now I think would be more interesting if I related it to ndhackers.

But early on in ndhackers history, I was kind of running myself ragged.

I thought that, I mean I really wanted to put out a lot of content.

I wanted to do 3 or 4 or 5 early on interviews per week and these are not small interviews.

So like sometimes a thousand, 2000 words.

I had to edit and I had to follow up with the person.

And then I was sending a newsletter and then I was trying to grow the business as well and so my trick early on was like, I'm just going to work 80 hours a week.

Yeah, but eventually I realized like, okay, this is not going to work.

It's okay to do things that don't scale, but you can't do that forever.

You need to figure out a way to make it work.

And so what I wanted to do was increase, or at least maintain the level, the quantity of content that I was putting out without having a drop in quality.

And so I wanted to, the ultimate would be to have some sort of interview system that worked for everyone, it was generally applicable, and yet still got interesting answers, and didn't take me very long to do.

And the answer that I hit on, I kind of stumbled into it.

I just started doing it naturally, and it ended up working out.

Every time I would do a text-based interview, And I did these interviews over email.

I would ask pretty much the same questions, and then I would look at the responses and ask follow-up questions.

And then I would take a note, okay, why did I have to ask that follow-up question?

They probably should have included, how could their answer have been better?

Like, why did I go with them and give me a better answer?

And after a few months of interviewing companies from all sorts of different industries and verticals, I had a gigantic list of ways that people commonly gave uninteresting interviews.

And so I just factored that into my interview questions.

So I would have a question followed by 10 or 11 bullet points for like, here's how you should answer it, or here's what you should avoid in your answer.

Here are things that people like listening to.

And so I started sending that to people, and instantly, the interviews that I got back were much more entertaining, and they required less effort, because I could send the same packet of questions to everybody.

So it's kind of a, I guess it qualifies as a hack, where I no longer have to do as much work.

But they're handwriting, well, they're typing these answers?

Yeah, they're typing the answers to me over email.

Every now and then I'll send a follow-up question, but it was optimized to be as little work as possible on my part so that I could do other things like start the podcast.

Cause I found that the, the best hack for me, we did a bunch of interviews with the first employees at a tech companies and the thing that worked was just doing audio interviews, transcribing them and then doing like insane amounts of editing.

Because I found that there were just issues that you have trouble going back and forth to get deeper and deeper and deeper.

Maybe you figured this out through repetition, but giving someone 1 chance at an answer, and then they painstakingly write the perfect answer, oftentimes it comes out kind of flat.

for me early on, which is why I had to do crazy amounts of follow-up emails.

And I was just resistant to doing the call.

I didn't want to get on the phone with people.

That's why I was so scared to do a podcast.

I just like the whole programmer behind the computer, type on my keyboard and that's it.

When we launched Indie Hackers last August, it was like 10 interviews.

It took me 3 weeks, I sent hundreds of emails to get 10 people to agree to do an interview.

And 1 of them was me, so it was really only 9 people.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Your Whole Goal Is to Not Quit - Courtland Allen of Indie Hackers