Life hasn't been the same since the pandemic. Instead of working at an office around people all day, like we used to, most of us now work remotely from home, in isolation and solitude. We sit and we stare at the cold blue light of our computer screens toiling away at our meaningless work, hour after hour, day after day, month after month, year after year. Sometimes you wonder how you made it this far without blowing your fucking brains out. If only there were something happening out there, something in the real world that you could be a part of, something fun, something exciting, something borderline, illegal, something that gives you a sense of belonging and companionship, something that helps you get back that zest for life that you have forgotten how to feel because you haven't felt it in so long. Well, ladies and gentlemen, hold on to your fucking asses. What I'm about to share with you is going to change your life. So listen up.
Speaker 1:I, jason Sweat, host of the Code with Jason podcast. I'm putting on a very special event. What makes this event special? Perhaps the most special thing about this event is its small size. It's a tiny conference, strictly limited to 100 attendees, including speakers. This means you'll have a chance to meet pretty much all the other attendees at the conference, including the speakers. The other special thing about this conference is that it's held in Las Vegas. This year it's going to be at the MGM Grand, and you'll be right in the middle of everything on the Las Vegas strip.
Speaker 1:You got bars, restaurants, guys dressed up like Michael Jackson. What other conference do you think you can go to, dear listener? Or you can waltz into a fancy restaurant wearing shorts and a t-shirt, order a quadruple cheeseburger and a strawberry daiquiri at 7 30 am and light up a cigarette right at your table. Well, good luck, because there isn't one Now. As if all that isn't enough, the last thing I want to share with you is the speakers. And remember, dear listener, at this conference, you won't just see the speakers up on the stage, you'll be in the same room with them, breathing the same air. Here's who's coming Irina Nazarova. Oh yeah, here's who's coming For Freedom Dumlao Prathmasiva, fido Von Zastrow, ellen Rydal, hoover and me. There you have it, dear listener. To get tickets to Sin City Ruby 2025, which takes place April 10th and 11th at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, go to sincityrubycom. Now on to the episode. Hey, today I'm here with Ryan Culp Ryan, welcome. Hey, jason'm here with Ryan Culp Ryan welcome.
Speaker 2:Hey, jason, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:So I think you and I have a lot in common. You're a developer and an entrepreneur and a language learner, and so there's a lot that we can dive into here. First, I'm really curious about your entrepreneurial experiences and background and stuff like that. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Speaker 2:Sure, I guess I've always kind of had that entrepreneur bug. When I was much younger, I did what a lot of young kids did went door-to-door selling things, whether that was frozen popsicles at the pool, or asking if I could rake someone's yard, just anything and everything I could do to get my hands on a couple bucks, which I think also was bred out of my parents just not giving me a suitable allowance or free money. So we'd go to the mall with friends. All my friends were buying Pokemon cards. My allowance was, I think, 75 cents a week for a while, so I would have to save up 10 weeks to buy the Pokemon cards.
Speaker 2:Were you born in the 1940s no, I was born in 1990, and we had a list of chores and I vacuumed my room, dust my countertops 75 cents. I got a raise, I think, in middle school to $3 a week. I got a raise in high school to $5 a week. But I wanted to do things like any other kid. I wanted Panda Express, I wanted Pokemon, I wanted gas in my truck, and so you know, that kind of forced me to figure out how to make money and minimum wage. I worked a few minimum wage jobs for five bucks an hour, 525, 550., after taxes it's obviously even less. So I always had to kind of figure out how to make more, not because I wanted a lavish lifestyle or because I liked, enjoyed working, but just, you know, I had a girlfriend or I had friends I wanted to hang out with or I wanted a new video game, and so I was always kind of selling things and comfortable in that way.
Speaker 2:But then it started really in college I did a couple LLCs. We did everything from hookah catering to nightclubs so we'd set up and rent out hookahs to even making pinback buttons. You know that politicians or athletes will sell for their teams with their logo. Those went kind of okay enough money to live full time and I really didn't know what I was doing. And then I started getting you know, got a real job after school for a while and just was in learning mode, right, learning how to lead, how to manage, how to build products that are more scalable than these services that I had dabbled in. And it wasn't until my mid twenties I really became an entrepreneur officially, or at least at the scale that I could, you know, support my support myself. But yeah, it all kind of started much younger interesting.
Speaker 1:yeah, I never really dabbled in that kind of stuff all that much when I was younger, like we were. So you said you were born in 1990. I was born in 1984, and so I grew up in the time when people were just starting to get internet and my dad's a programmer, and so we got internet at my house like before anybody else, and we got a CD burner before anybody else and so I would like burn CDs for people and sell them for five bucks or whatever. So that was kind of so. That was kind of a um, that was kind of a a you know business endeavor that I had going, if you call it that, very, very small potatoes, um. But then, starting around 2008, um, I've been I've been trying to start an online business, cause, like I got my first real programming programming job in in like 2005 and I just like had a hard time sitting down and making myself work. My first job was by the hour and I could work whenever I want, which is like a blessing and a curse, because you're free to do.
Speaker 1:You're free to make your own schedule, but you're also like burdened with making your own schedule and at any time you can just get up and walk away and go do something fun, and so it like was really hard for me to just sit there and do this stuff. That, frankly, felt like kind of pointless. Um, and then, and then, my next couple jobs. I moved to Austin, texas, and I just hated my next couple jobs. I worked at this place where they just did everything so dumb, like they didn't use version control. They didn't even have production environments, Like they didn't have separate development and production environments, Sorry they only had production environments, so we would just like make code changes live in production on clients websites.
Speaker 1:it was a development agency, um, and so I left that job because it was just like nuts, you know um. And I got another job at a different agency. They did the same fucking thing. They would make changes live in production. And I'm like you guys are fucking idiots.
Speaker 1:Um, and I, I worked there for like a couple years, um, but I just hated it because everything was just so stupid. And so I'm like, all right, I, I don't want to live like this. And you know, it just takes so much time like just sitting in a chair all day. Every day it sucks, um, like I lived in austin, where it was like nice outside every single day, um, and I just wanted to like be doing something fun instead of trapped inside all day, um, and so I started reading uh 37 signals and I had the idea to to do my own kind of startup.
Speaker 1:Back then there wasn't really this indie hacker thing, as you know, I'm sure, and so it was like you can have a job or you can do a startup. And so I'm like, all right, I'm going to make my own startup. I cycled through several ideas None of them were very good, none of them made very much money. Through several ideas none of them were very good, none of them made very much money. Fast forward to 2016, and I wrote an ebook and I launched that, and when I launched that, it made I don't know like a thousand bucks in the first month, which to me, was incredible. And then within the year, I have a hard time believing this. It's just like a memory of a memory at this point, but I think I made like 10,000 bucks on that book in the first year, which again to me at the time was great, and ever since then I've kind of been doing the info product, personal brand entrepreneur kind of thing.
Speaker 1:now I'm doing consulting and, um, I'm making a lot of money doing it, um way more than you could with with a regular job. And so I'm kind of permanently on this path now, like I could never go back to a regular job because it's like I'm I'm just spoiled by this nice lifestyle of having like more freedom and more money and all that stuff. It's just better. Anyway, I didn't intend to tell my whole life story. Tell me a bit about the stuff you did later on.
Speaker 2:Well, a couple of things you mentioned there I resonate with. I would say, though, to start at the ending, I have been an entrepreneur full-time. No jobs since, maybe since 2016. And so I've been doing this eight years, and before that I maybe had a job and a side project, right, but since then I've only had my, I guess side projects, and I, for a period, thought the same as you that I could never go back, and I think definitely my personality is suited to be in control and do things my way and play chess, you know, with, with ideas, the way that I see fit. But even a year ago, or less than a year ago, I thought to myself you know what the stress, the stress side of it kind of sucks and maybe I should get a job. And I actually looked for a job for a week or two, had had two interviews only one was a technical interview, didn't go amazing and then the week after that was when I started the company I'm now working on, and so I think there's a little bit of the grass is greener thing going on.
Speaker 2:I think there's also the case that, you know, just having an entrepreneurial mindset, or even having a project that makes money or makes a lot of money, is necessary but maybe not sufficient to make that decision to never go back to working. So there's been periods, for example, where, as an entrepreneur, I had no stress, right, and everything was going well and I was kind of doing the four hour work week. And then there's been periods as an entrepreneur where I'm working really, really hard, making almost no money, except what's weird about it is that the periods where I'm like working hard and making no money, I might be doing better work, or maybe I'm smarter, I'm better at programming, I'm better at selling, than the periods where I was doing minimal work and making more money. So there's this like correlation, causation thing that on its own, can make you kind of go nuts Like why was I killing it in 2021, doing nothing? And now I'm struggling. But I'm a better programmer, I have a bigger network, I'm more connected, I've learned more lessons about marketing and sales, and so to me, that's the part of entrepreneurship that never gets easier.
Speaker 2:Per se is se is that the outputs don't always match your inputs, whether it's the sincerity of your inputs or the intensity of your inputs or the cleverness of your inputs, and so I'm in a season now, kind of in between oh I wish I had a job versus oh I wish I was in the promised land. I love it. I'm, you know, operating a few projects right now. They're going well, but they're longer term right. Most of my wins from these projects will be if and when we sell the projects. They're not from daily or monthly cash distributions.
Speaker 2:But yeah, it was an interesting moment to observe myself last year, after eight years of full-time entrepreneurship, of maybe I should get a job, and then, ironically, that week or two of questioning was what led to the company I'm working on now, which kind of became the cure for not wanting a job. So I wanted a job because I was feeling stressed and I hadn't experienced that in a long time. And then the project I'm working on now is designed to reduce stress, so I was able to literally solve my own problem, or begin solving my own problem. But that's interesting that you consider it as well. You know doing better more successful. Therefore, I can never go back To me.
Speaker 2:That was one variable, but not sufficient to make that decision for sure. So I don't. I have to be careful. Let's say I'm posting on social media against the anti work for someone. Flavor of content, right, and then a lot of that. Oh, you know, you should never work for someone you should do this. You'll always have like a glass ceiling of what you you can't break through. Your earning potential will never be that high and I think to myself A if everyone felt this way, good luck to entrepreneurs who can now never hire anybody you can't build a team if everyone thinks that they should be an entrepreneur, if everyone's trying to be an entrepreneur and B it makes you go.
Speaker 2:Well, there's different seasons of life. There's times I think Mark Suster said this many years ago when I used to read VC blogs. He said there's time to learn and there's time to earn. I think it was Suster and it's like, yeah, that resonates really well with me that maybe everyone should be an entrepreneur sometimes and everyone should learn and work somewhere else sometimes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really interesting that you say those things. Those are both things that I think about a lot like the seasons of life idea. You know, I'm kind of I feel like I'm transitioning between one season and another season right now. For I don't know, do you have kids Not?
Speaker 2:yet Hopefully soon.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I have kids. I had them relatively, relatively early by today's standards. My kids were born when I was 26 and 29. And so kind of in my 30s I went through this period where I had not a lot of money, I was trying to kind of figure myself out, and where my career was supposed to be heading and stuff like that. Because I've known the whole time just to reconcile the timelines and I've known the whole time just to reconcile the timelines in 24, when I was 24, that's when I had those like crappy jobs that I didn't like. That was like the start of that period and so like I kind of like struggled and wandered for like the next 10 years or so. I just couldn't figure out like what to do with myself exactly and where I even wanted to go and all that, and I tried a lot of things that didn't work and I just kind of felt like somebody who was not a good fit for this planet, that kind of thing. Luckily, I kind of did figure it out eventually. I think when I was around 35 was when I started to get some traction and get a solid direction and that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:And now I just turned 40, and my kids are older. They're 11 and 14 now and they don't require so much attention. Little kids you have to do everything for them. They can kind of do stuff themselves now, and so it's a bit different If I have to work late one night, like it's not a big deal because they can do their own thing.
Speaker 1:And now, like you mentioned, a time to learn, time to earn kind of thing. I feel like kind of around 35 or 40, I got to a point where I had learned a lot and now it's time to like put those learnings into action and use those things. Instead of being in a learning mode now, I'm in like a providing value mode. Of being in a learning mode now, I'm in like a providing value mode. I'm taking those things that I learned in the past and now doing consulting, which often is like advisory work, using that knowledge to create value and then to capture, you know, income based on that. I give you, hopefully, an enormous amount of value and then in return, I get good income from that. So I definitely think about those things too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think there's also a looping nuance to it as well. So I think I wrote a blog post years ago after reading Mark Suster's post. I think I called it sponge theory or something like that. That was how I visualized it right, you're soaking up knowledge and ideas, inspiration, whatever you want to call it and then you squeeze it out and that's you extracting value and putting the things you've learned and synthesized. You're kind of putting them back into the world. You've taken in the raw materials and now you're putting back into the world something that's more polished.
Speaker 2:But I think that after some period of time, now you're empty again and now you need to learn again, and I think not everyone does that. I think some people say, well, in my 20s I read 300 books and then I've been doing X ever since. I kind of reached whatever they consider to be a level of mastery, and now they're just squeezing out and selling that value extraction over and over again. And I think maybe if you do the exact same thing, then you can get away with that forever. But I think, as as smart folks, we have dynamic interests, right, I could, and by dynamic what I mean is I might wake up tomorrow, or watch I don't know a YouTube video tomorrow and become incredibly interested in a topic that I'm not even aware of today, and so that's dynamically interested in things.
Speaker 2:I have the capability, the aptitude to be drawn to new ideas. Well, if I get drawn to metalworking, let's say tomorrow, or welding, I have to learn it first. I can't just go do it, and so I think that it's not so much about staying in our lane or anything like that, but just being self-aware that if our interests change and I go well, you know what, I'd love to make some money on woodworking and making furniture for people which is a hobby I've been pursuing.
Speaker 2:I make way more money if I code and it's a lot more comfortable, I can sit in my pajamas and I'm in air condition. But I'm interested in how cool would it be to deliver a table to someone's living room and get paid for that and forget about the hourly rate and how I'd be taking way more risk and getting paid a lot less and I'd be sweating to get the job done. But I'm interested in that. Well, to do that, I can't just say hey, I'm smart, therefore I can do it. I have to go back to ground zero and learn again, and I think for me that's been the case over the last 10 years. You said you've done some info products. I've done info products. I did a cold email course and then I did a marketing course and then did an intro to Ruby course, intro to Rails course. I've done a couple eBooks as well, did an eBook called Fitness for Hackers because I needed to lose like 70 pounds and get in way better shape, and I identified that a lot of people in the programming community if you want to call it that are out of shape and not because they don't know sort of like calories in, calories out macros they conceptually or intellectually know all these things, but they sort of let it fall by the wayside. They're stressed at work, they're building a startup, they're putting in extra hours, they don't feel like they can go to the gym. So I was like, okay, how could I write, make an info product that doesn't tell them all the things they already know? They all read Tim Ferriss, they all know the key, but they get it. What's the psychological component that they're missing that's going to get them fired up to do it? So info products have definitely been a huge thing for me as well, but each one of those products was really different and each one of those products probably took a few years of learning before I could turn around and say, okay, I think, I think I know something about this that's worth sharing and that's worth someone else paying for. You know, and another info product we did was microacquisitionscom, which helps people find SaaS apps that they can buy, grow and sell to someone else, and we sold that to acquirecom last summer and they're now making. They made it a free course, which is pretty cool, and so it's a cool onboarding ramp for them, and then it creates deal flow for us because people will say hey, you made the courts, Can I sell you my SAS app or whatever? But yeah, you know, each of these info products was a different dynamic interest I had.
Speaker 2:And now I'm in this point where it's like I haven't made courses in a couple of years. What does that mean about me, and am I learning if I'm not able to? So, in other words, the litmus test is hey, jason, what could you make a course about right now? And it doesn't have to be an expensive course. It could be an ebook, it could be free, it could be a video series or essays what could you make a course about?
Speaker 2:And if you struggle to answer, then maybe the next step is to go deep on some new topic, right, and so that's how I've been the last couple of years. It's like if you told me, ryan, you need to make a course, and held a gun to my head, I would not want to regurgitate anything I've already taught. I wouldn't want to teach something that I only have surface level knowledge of. I would go, oh crap, I need to explore new technologies or new ideas or something, right?
Speaker 2:And so that's kind of I think I'm now back in that time to learn period, even though I am earning in the sense of I'm I'm building things that we're selling to other people. I don't pretend to be in a position of full authority right now and mastery at what I'm selling. Right, it's like I'm working on an ink device. I have not yet gone deep on the whole history of ink and exactly how the pixels change, and I've read the executive summaries, but I haven't, you know, tried to go to micro center and build my own ink display from scratch right, or build my own PCB with from scratch right, or build my own pcb with my bare hands and a soldering iron um yeah, yes, anyway, that's just about this product you're working on now, because that's what you're referring to, I assume right.
Speaker 2:So I'm working on a product. It's called terminal and trm and l we couldn't get the domain with the vowels so did the startup thing and um, it's designed to help you focus. It's an e-ink display, sits on your desk, you can put it on your refrigerator and we connect with a bunch of different plugins. So if you want to see your Google calendar, we'll show you your schedule. If you want to see your sales pipeline for closed CRM, we'll show you that. If you want to see Google analytics data, we'll show you that. If you want to build your own KPI dashboard or connect with your home assistant, we can do that. And so we launched a crowdfunding campaign this summer on Kickstarter and that went very well and we've just begun fulfilling last week. So I think actually today, after our chat, I'm going to be assembling 50 more devices to go take to the post office. So it's been a lot of fun. But you know we're building it in Rails but yet there's E-ink and 800 by 480 pixel ratio.
Speaker 2:So we have to innovate. We're calling it innovating backwards. We're trying to figure out how do people make video games in the late 80s, early 90s, when the screens were low resolution and when you needed fonts that don't have anti aliasing, because that looks horrible on a pixel display, right? So we're like how can we adjust our, our, our linux server config so that it ignores fonts with anti-aliasing when it takes screenshots with our puppeteer browser? So it's really cool to have to kind of bend modern machines to work the way machines worked when they were dumber, and that's kind of part of our IP, I suppose. But it's also what makes it a fun challenge. And so we've sold almost 2,000 devices in the last few months and we're getting them all out to customers now and we'll see how their reviews are. Anyone can sell anything. Once is something I heard one time from someone. Can you sell it again and again and get the good review? That's how you finally complete that feedback loop. Is this a good idea, a good product?
Speaker 1:Yeah, anyone can sell anything once. That's really interesting. I've certainly experienced something like that. You know, there's that famous curve shape where you have the initial launch and it's a big spike, but then after that that it's like kind of crickets from then on. Um, yes, and it's like where do you take that from there? Um yeah, and it's. I bet it's a really different experience to sell something that's physical and actually ship it like you know literally ship, literally ship it, not just hit, deploy.
Speaker 2:It is very different, not only because you know everything moves slower, right, we're waiting on. You know we had a working prototype December of last year, but we didn't launch until the end of June, right? So what happened in those six months? Well, we're waiting for stuff to come on a boat, we're waiting for samples, we're waiting for our injection mold to get scraped out just a little bit more to fit, to fill with plastic and whatever materials we're using to look just right, to click together just right. And in the software world you don't have to think about any of that. You get the exception error. You see what line of code is broken, you see what column is broken. It kind of gives you hints at why it's broken. It's incredible. And in hardware you don't have any of that and I don't think we'll ever have any of that. The closest we have in hardware is AutoCAD, which, of course, is incredible. So we used Fusion 360 for all of our AutoCAD designs. But still, you take an AutoCAD design and you give it to the factory and they say well, here's the seven reasons. This isn't machine safe. Here's the reasons why this won't work. And even if you have your own home 3D printer, you make a funky shape and your 3D printer tool says oh, you're going to need to enable support because we can't make an L-shape hangover midair, right, it's like, well, that makes sense. But how do I incorporate that into my design? How do I make design-safe changes? And again, I'm a software guy, so I don't know what Entering the third dimension, molecules, materials working overseas language barriers? There's so much newness happening and so I guess I'm answering my own question now. Right, this is what I've been going deep on, and maybe in a few years, maybe I could begin to be helpful to someone who says hey, ryan, I want to do a hardware product. I know how to code, but I don't know anything else. Could you help me? Maybe in a few years, I could be somewhat useful to them with a blog post or a consult session or a few weeks of advisement. Right, a few weeks of advisement, right. But right now I'm back in the humble day one. I don't know anything, but I'm grateful to be surrounded by an awesome team who knows more than me, and by great manufacturers who are patient with me and by customers who are accepting of our delays. Right and so that. But that's been. It's been a blast. The other.
Speaker 2:The other challenging thing here isn't the hardware per se, it's the business model. So I've been doing SaaS forever. I worked at multiple venture-backed companies. They're all SaaS right Techstars, yc. Everybody loves SaaS. I worked in SaaS as a marketer and then I learned to program, so then as a programmer.
Speaker 2:But this new product, terminal, it's a one-time purchase, yet you're hitting our web server forever. So how do we make that work, right? Uh, how do we configure our hetzner box? Because hetzner is the new meme, it's the new lucra of startup, I think developers. It's like how do we make the numbers work where they pay us 100, 150 bucks for their device and in theory they could be pinging our servers every five minutes? Let's say forever, like. What does that pro forma look like? Is that $3 worth of compute per year or 10? You know it shouldn't be right, but is it $20 worth of compute if they run the device for 20 years? Can we advertise that? Like, does that make sense? So can we upsell them things? And so now I'm in this intersection of building software. It's in Rails. I had ripped out all of my Stripe stack from my boilerplate because there's no SaaS component. And then we're selling these devices through Shopify but then syncing it with our web app and API so that a Shopify purchase is recognized by device.
Speaker 2:And it's interesting challenges and figuring out how do you grow a company that starts at zero every month, which, again, this is a question almost all companies in the planet have always had to deal with from the beginning of time. But as a spoiled SAS person, I never had to think about that. You know your day one revenue was your day 30 revenue of the previous month and just keep shipping and hopefully your churn is outweighed by new awareness. And so here that's all out the window. We have no SaaS component, it's one-time purchases and we'll see. And that's, of course, led folks to say well, what if your company goes to zero? Will my device be bricked? So okay, we don't want that.
Speaker 2:So now we've open sourced our firmware. We continue to open source as much as we can without open sourcing the core core. You know kernel of what the app does and you know it's been totally new, new way to build software. We have a developer only discord that we invited like 650 of our backers to who upgraded to the developer edition. They're helping contribute to our firmware. They're contributing ideas, api design, architecture. You know, I've never done any of that kind of thing. I've always worked with like two, three, four people and somebody has an idea and we build it. Now it's this, this community-driven thing where hundreds of people have skin in the game because they've bought a device and they want it to do certain things and we have to figure out how to make that possible, all while not getting paid from them more than that first time.
Speaker 1:So I think if most people built this product, nobody would buy it because they wouldn't have a way to let people know about it. Um, so how did you market it so that people are actually buying it?
Speaker 2:well, I'll first say we, we got lucky, um, we, uh. You know, from using kickstarter as a consumer myself over the years, I think a lot of us have backed things here and there cool gadgets, whatever, maybe a couple art things where you're not really going to get anything tangible but you want someone to make that documentary or make the photo album, kind of thing. We've probably a lot of us have experienced being rug pulled at the worst case, or even at the normal case. We've experienced extreme delays, products that ship really late or don't ship with the quality of the renders, and so when we started working on the marketing material which was just probably five, six months ago, we had the working product.
Speaker 2:I started a checklist of what are the things that our Kickstarter or our crowdfunding launch campaign should not do. What should it not look like? What elements should we avoid? First and foremost, it was let's not even launch until we know this product exists and works and I can hold it in my hand, right. So the day we went live, I had devices like in my hand and we have white, black, clear, translucent. We have different colors. This is kind of a meme plugin of a clock. It's so wrong, it's not even right twice a day. And then here it's like my GitHub contributions for the last year, and so we have all these plugins, and it wasn't until I had these in my hand on this desk that we said, okay, let's begin to launch, because I don't want to have a project that says estimated fulfillment 12 months from now. I think that's going to reduce our conversion rate and I think people just look at it and roll their eyes and go, yeah, call me when it's ready. Right, call me when you're ready. And so those are some of the elements.
Speaker 2:We wanted to be ready immediately. I also wanted the feature parity to be exactly what we said it was. So we all get sick of them giving 20 bullet points of what the thing does and then it comes out and does three. So we had to hold ourselves back there. That was the main. Prep was just making sure that the product was real and that we wouldn't over-promise. But the second thing we did and I am really glad we did this is we hired an agency that exclusively helps with Kickstarter day one launches, like exclusively, and we hired them directly from the Kickstarter website.
Speaker 2:I went to Kickstarter slash experts and I think they were just the top one on the list. I was like okay, didn't really ask many questions. To be honest, I trust Kickstarter. They obviously had to go through some certification process. I did interview a couple not totally gung-ho immediately, but they made sense, their pitch made sense and they worked primarily on a commission basis. So it's like okay, sort of got skin in the game with my marketing arm. That allows me to focus on product and this was the first time I've ever launched something where I wasn't the main marketer.
Speaker 2:But I figured you know what it's ink, it's physical, it's manufacturing. We're on a shoestring budget. I can't do all of it. I can't do all the marketing and all the product. And so we brought them on board. They helped us produce a commercial. They helped us take stunning photographs of the product on desks and in kitchens and in just different settings. In fact, our photos were so good that when we applied to Kickstarter, they rejected us because they said we have to have real photos and not renders. And they were all real photos. That's crazy. So that was a cool. You know that. Yeah, that was like okay, at least this thing, this thing looks so much better than it would if I use my iPhone or even my DSLR to try to snap some cool pics. They know what they're doing.
Speaker 2:And then we did what's kind of the best practice in crowdfunding and this was a secret to me, but anybody who has experience running crowdfunding campaigns for other people will tell you.
Speaker 2:The way you crowdfund nowadays is you do a pre-launch campaign. The campaign is where you just hash out, I guess on the demand from your pre-launch, but your pre-launch campaign is done. You just hash out, I guess on the demand from your prelaunch, but your prelaunch campaign is done kind of secretly. I guess you could say so. In other words, we built a landing page, we drove traffic to it, they could plug in their email, they could pay a couple bucks to reserve a spot, and when we built that list up to a couple thousand folks, then we hit go on Kickstarter. Up to a couple thousand folks. Then we hit go on Kickstarter. So day one of Kickstarter, I think we did 50 grand in the first 24 hours because we already had 2000 people who specifically identified I want this and a few hundred of those people maybe four or 500 had paid a dollar, like put their credit card down, just to be at the front of the line on launch day.
Speaker 1:And where did those people come from?
Speaker 2:These people came primarily from paid media. So we did some Facebook ads, we did Instagram ads. We intentionally did not drive our own audience to these pages. So originally I thought, hey, when I came to the agency, you're going to help us market. Good news I have a newsletter. I have some followers on Twitter. I have a blog. I have some followers on Twitter. I have a blog. I have, you know, communities I can reach out to. I have people who will retweet me. You know that's going to be helpful.
Speaker 2:Right, and they said no. They said don't worry. They basically said don't. And I'm kind of sharing, maybe oversharing, here, but that's fine If it's helpful to listeners, I'm happy. They said pretend your audience size is zero, assume you will get no sales from your crew, your homies, and pretend that you're a nobody. How would we grow this? They said we make a really great landing page, we tell the story through paid media, we figure out how much it costs per lead. They had benchmarks that they wanted to achieve and they would consider that good or bad. And then, when we get to some critical mass of our list size, based on your goals, we launch. And then, when we launch, tell all your homies and all of your homies who buy the product. That's bonus dollars, right, that's free bucks. It's like okay.
Speaker 2:And I was a little bummed because I've been spending 10 years writing hundreds of blog posts. I've made hundreds of lectures, videos, tried to create a lot of value, I've tried to create more than I extract, and I thought this was maybe that moment. Right, I'm going to convert my friends and fans and followers to supporters and they're going to be happy too, because it's a great product. But the agency said, no, don't do that. And so we didn't do that. So we followed their advice and it worked, and so that was really cool, because I think a lot of folks they look at whether they look at indie hackers on Twitter with lots of followers. They just look at people with audiences and they say, well, you know, you can watch anything and it works. Don't have to have an audience that you can actually kind of even in. Even in today's world, you can launch something and do really well by focusing on the product. And that was something I had considered was no longer a power law like that. That was no longer true, um, and that belief was, you know, kind of shattered in a good way.
Speaker 2:This, uh, and that belief was, you know, kind of shattered, in a good way, this summer, because the launch success wasn't due to, you know, me having followers at all. It was due to, yeah sure, it was due to some of our copywriting, it was due to great photos, but ultimately it was due to our having a product that, you know, made sense. The pitch makes sense, the pricing was okay, it was reasonable, and so that was really encouraging that. You know, we can kind of do this. I don't want to say bang the register over and over again. You want to have a good product, but there is still quote, unquote, a formula. There's a way to break into the market with something cool, and you don't have to do 10 years of audience building if that's not your thing, you can still find success yeah, interesting.
Speaker 1:Um, you know I've had more and more success with with my endeavors. Um, as I've like stopped listening to a lot of people like, especially in the programming community, a lot of the advice is just recycled and regurgitated from people who aren't? Even doing anything, and so it's frankly, low-quality advice a lot of it, and I'm just going back and thinking from first principles and it's like, does this make logical sense?
Speaker 1:If so, I'm going to do it, if not, I'm not going to do it, rather than trying to follow a playbook that somebody put out there whose situation might not match mine, because there's good advice and there's bad advice and there's good advice that is good advice for one person but is not good advice for a different person in a different situation, and that's probably what has hurt me the most is following advice that that's maybe good advice but not good advice for me in my situation.
Speaker 2:So that's really interesting to hear you say these things, that kind of contradict what you might call conventional wisdom, at least in certain circles, and it worked yeah, it worked and in fact, as I was saying it just a moment ago, was the first time that those that exact uh combination of words synthesized for me that the convention right, that that is the conventional wisdom. Hey, before you sell something, go build an audience first. And there's nothing wrong with that. And I've definitely intuitively focused on building my personal audience for years and years. So there was no intention here to skip steps, but it was interesting because now I'm rethinking well, is that just a new, almost woke form of gatekeeping by the people who have the audiences? Because one thing you definitely can't do is build an audience overnight. I mean, talk to a girl can build an audience overnight, but like you're not her. You know, as Jordan Peterson would say, he's like, well, that's Jesus and you're you. You know that's like you're not going to build an audience overnight. And the people with audiences know that because they feel the pain every day of maintaining, building, fostering that group of folks to trust them and be influenced by them, or look at their links that they post or whatever, and so it's kind of like, huh, maybe that's actually the game, that's actually not some pure whole. And you know, holy advice, oh, go build your audience, add value for it so well you know, this whole concept of an audience is a really modern thing. You know, there wasn't a way to hit follow on somebody a long time ago, or even in the relative recent history. Ideas that were good would spread and there were certain individuals that had more good ideas than others, so their ideas would spread more, so you'd hear their name more Right, and those would be maybe authors or certain journalists or whoever it is you respect in a given field. But now this idea of like, well, if I manipulate people to click, follow or subscribe, then my audience is bigger and therefore I'm more influential, it's kind of like working backwards.
Speaker 2:It's like, I think, a lot of Gen Z, for example this has been one of my working hypotheses lately is they look at whether it's Instagrammers or whatever, and they have a large audience. And when you have a large audience you can get I don't know, free hotel room, you can get a flight somewhere, that kind of thing, sponsorships and they go well. Therefore, the formula is make my follower count high and then I get that stuff. But what they failed to acknowledge is that when all of this stuff started let's say 08, 010, with like Facebook, adding fan pages and Twitter coming out.
Speaker 2:When all this started, the people who quickly got all these followers and therefore influence were people who had actually done something really interesting. Maybe that would make a movie, write a book, whatever. And then people follow them because they're like, hey, you're the person that made that thing. I'm curious, what else do you do? I'm curious, what else do you think? I'm curious, what you have for breakfast? Right, and that that's just reality.
Speaker 2:And now the kids, let's say, and we're, we're kids too just, uh, kind of as a spiritual matter, not so much age group the kids are looking at it and they're trying to skip the step of do something interesting and just go straight to like can my integer be higher, then I'll get the stuff? It's like well, you still have to be interesting, you still have to make something, you still have to. And so we're seeing, I think, uh, when I see case studies lately that large brands are now going for what they call micro influencers versus the influencers. It's like, yeah, because what's happening is the consumer sentiment, the consumer sophistication is catching up and realizing that a lot of the the people with the yoga pants and a million followers who basically are doing soft core you know what online all day. They're hollow. They're not interesting people, they've never achieved anything and why should you take their advice about anything, unless you want to wear yoga pants and do soft core stuff online. That's what they're good for.
Speaker 2:Like Nassim Taleb says, don't hire a straight A student or a perfect test taker for any job unless the job is to take tests. And that's what we're kind of getting to now and I'm glad to see it that we're going back to maybe focusing on the craft, on the product itself. You know, even when Twitter removed or who was it? Instagram removed the like count and now you can't see likes and they're starting to. I think some of the platforms are starting to realize like, hey, maybe there's too much noise in the way of the signal when we boost the wrong variables. You know of content and ideas being spread, and can we go back to like can a good idea spread even if it's created by someone who's a nobody? And I think that's coming back.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. I used to back when I had very few Twitter followers, like just a few hundred or something like that. I asked myself, how can I get more Twitter followers? And the conclusion I eventually came to was like I should do something off of Twitter in order to get more Twitter followers.
Speaker 1:Because, like you know, I noticed that whenever I would go speak at a conference, I would get a bump of new Twitter followers, and I noticed that you know somebody who's known for something off of Twitter that helps them on Twitter. You know somebody who's known for something off of Twitter that helps them on Twitter. You know it's like Elon Musk has, however, many millions of Twitter followers, not because of anything on Twitter. Like Elon Musk's tweets are maybe mildly entertaining, but he has millions of followers because he's done. He's done things, but he has millions of followers because he's done. He's done things, um, and so, yeah, I thought about that in a similar way. Also, by the way, I found twitter followers to be not particularly advantageous from a business perspective, um, compared to, like, email, uh, subscribers, because, like, when I launch something, so much of the sales comes from email subscribers and and so little comes from Twitter followers. Although it has been interesting beyond a certain like critical mass or something like that, I found Twitter to be really good for relationship building.
Speaker 1:Surprisingly, I'm like I meet people on Twitter and kind of almost develop a social group on Twitter and then meet those people later in real life and stuff like that. Anyway, I'm digressing from from the point, but yeah, I've kind of observed some of those same things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right on and that's well, and that's where I think that's a huge opportunity for everyone who's just starting to have some interest in this kind of thing. There's a lot, especially programmers, right, there's many, many technical folks, engineers whether it's software or otherwise who have something to say, who have something valuable to say. They have insights. They have insights that other people would pay for right in the form of a book or video or whatever, and they don't know that for sure. So some of that is just confidence building and they have to kind of figure that out on their own, but some of it is. Then they go okay, I think I'm ready, I'm ready to start my blog, I'm ready to start sharing, but I don't want to make an account with. You know, my mom is my only follower, and how do I start now? And maybe I joined this, this train, too late, but I think I'd love to be part of the encouragement train that helps folks realize that a lot of the folks with hey, I mean, you can even use tools for this, you don't have to take my word for it. Go, look at someone with I don't know 50,000 followers and plug in one of those tools their account and it will show you how many are fake, how many are bots, how many the probability that they purchased some of them. Even just a quick scroll through their profile. Okay, 50,000 followers, they get five likes. Nobody cares. Nobody cares what they say. There's media publications with 2 million followers that get two likes and no retweets when they post a new article. That's insane. And so having kind of the true fan approach to the followers is really the better metric to look at, and that's something I've always been accidentally, I think good at, especially on Twitter. You mentioned that email has been a lot better for you. I think I've done generally well with Twitter for quote unquote, making money, because my Twitter strategy is gain one follower, lose two, and it's been working really well.
Speaker 2:And so what I do on Twitter is I polarize people, and the only people who follow me for more than a day are people who can tolerate that, and if they can tolerate that, we're closer right. So I'm not a feel good vibe account. I don't post memes. I don't like try to make you laugh. I'm not trying to entertain you per se. Sometimes I'm cynical. Sometimes I try to share insights about growth or startups. Sometimes I'm whatever. Sometimes I do just take a photo of, like, my lunch, I don't know but if someone's willing to tolerate that, then I perceive that, as they increase their trust in me implicitly, they don't think that they're signing a contract. Okay, I'm following Ryan today, I'm still following him and tomorrow I'm going to follow him again, even if he says something I disagree with. Therefore, I trust him more, but I think they do trust you more.
Speaker 2:The more people tolerate you, the more they trust you, and people who don't tolerate me go away. You know, seth Godin says if you don't like it, if they don't like it, it's not for them and that's it. And then some of those folks will find my blog and subscribe to the newsletter. And sure, right, when you sell things directly over email and you can measure clicks and you can respond to their questions, there's a huge advantage there. You don't get natively on like Twitter replies.
Speaker 2:But I've found that allowing myself to not try to appeal to the masses on Twitter has actually made every follower kind of count right, and so I'm not concerned with my follower count going up, I'm concerned.
Speaker 2:I'm not concerned with my follower count going up, I'm concerned. I'm not concerned per se, but I'm more interested in swapping out every fake follower or every low interest follower with someone who could be a future in real life homie right. So like since I moved here two years ago, dozens of Twitter followers have come out to my house and just crashed for a weekend. We work together outside, we do something we usually do something Neither one of us knows how to do, like construction or DIY stuff, and now I've just tightened the bond with like 36 people from Twitter. Can I ever have all 8,000 come over? Probably not, but we're working through the list as if that's not a math equation. That doesn't make sense and I don't think most people are doing that. I don't think most people are not. Most people, I think, are trying to make the number go up instead of trying to make the connection stronger. But ironically, if you focus on making the connection stronger, the number does go up because other people see that and they go oh, this guy's a little different.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I kind of made a switch at some point in time, I think around the time that I started focusing on consulting, I started focusing on individual relationships. I started a snail mail newsletter, which obviously nobody's doing, and so that allowed me to do a couple things, like one I think receiving a, an actual physical letter in your mailbox, is a bit more intimate than receiving email, and with a letter there's no unsubscribe link at the bottom, and so I don't have to be afraid of people unsubscribing because I'm diverging from the topics that they said they wanted to hear about for me. So I talk about all kinds of stuff in the letter I don't know even like, for example, in one letter I talked about like Zidong, mao and communism and how a lot of people in the programming industry are kind of Marxist-leaning and stuff like that, like stuff that I would never ever say in my emails because it would be wildly inappropriate. But I can do that kind of stuff and kind of show my true colors more and reveal more of myself, and even though it's kind of unidirectional, I can still form a close relationship with people, and then a lot of those people I end up meeting in person at conferences and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:And then I have all these like separate connections with people. Like we communicate on Twitter, they get my snail mail newsletter, they my videos, hear me on the podcast, and then we hang out in person and, like you said, that's not like scalable to everybody. But you know, I have kind of a an unachievable aspiration to like meet every single person who receives my snail mail newsletter and maybe even like visit them in person where they are. And that can never be done. But if I go forward with that attitude of like I want to meet everybody and become friends with everybody, that like somehow like grows the whole.
Speaker 1:Thing.
Speaker 2:Yes, the math doesn't math, but try it anyway. And uh, and yeah, the fruits you get from just going for it doesn't have to make sense, like uh. You know, I've dabbled in and out of youtube, for example, for years. I mean I made my account in 2005, 2006, before it was bought by google. I was making cover videos of, you know, lifehouse and you and you know Alt Rock, early 2000s stuff, and there were days I was on the homepage of YouTube with a video and I didn't think it was that big of a deal because it was just this dumb niche video sharing site and then I stopped, like I got millions of views and I just stopped and I was 16 years old and I thought like that's not that big of a deal.
Speaker 2:And then, years later I realized that if you can command that kind of attention, it's actually kind of useful. And so then I, you know, I would go a few months, I'd make another few videos, maybe about tech, maybe about music and then I'd stop again for a year. And then I lived in Korea a few years and I made videos in Korean and English and then I stopped again. And now I'm getting back into it and what's been cool about it is remembering. Okay, what are my goals? It's not these vanity metrics of thousands of views or monetization or whatever. It's like the one view by the one person or the 10 people that need it. And there's been videos and I've seen this not just myself, but observed with other people.
Speaker 2:I have a buddy who does web scraping and he makes videos on YouTube. They're two, three, four minutes how to scrape this website, how to scrape this website. And three, four minutes how to scrape this website, how to scrape this website. And for a while he was just shipping like every three days, how to scrape, you know, whatever insert brand that we've all heard of. He had the same thumbnail template. He would just swap out the word and the logo. And I went to his channel and he didn't have a ton of subscribers and each video would have 30 views, 200, maybe 200 views max. It's like huh, you know, maybe he just has this long-term goal of like. Eventually this thing will pick up. We started messaging and he's having view videos with 30 views where he gets four clients that each pay him five grand from this video it's like, well, to make that, to make 20 grand from a youtube video.
Speaker 2:You know, from the video you need, let's say, millions of views. He's doing it from 30 views and so it's like all viewers are not created equal, all followers are not created equal. I'll take my few thousand ryan homies over the million people who follow so and so I don't want to, you know, put anybody on blast um, any day, and we have to kind of keep that in mind, that the metrics that these platforms tell us are important and that we should strive for. You got to look at your goals because they may not actually, they legitimately may be the opposite of metrics that you should be tracking. So, if you're a consultant and you make YouTube videos, do you get leads from it or not? You know it's not about hey, I want 50,000 people to watch my new turbo native video. It's like, if I'm a consultant, do I get three MVPs, ips, I can build the people. Well, that keeps me busy for six and eight months that's a great freaking video.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like, my youtube videos get maybe like a hundred views each by default, and then there's some that get a few thousand, but like, usually it's around 100, which is obviously quite modest. Um, but I'm not doing it directly for the views. Um, a big part of why I'm doing it is to give people like a sample of what it might be like to work with me as a consultant, and just the more somebody can see you and hear you and stuff like that helps build trust. Like, if somebody already feels like they know me by the time we're talking, like maybe they've listened to this podcast for a few years and seen my youtube video for a few years like it's not a tough sell. Like they already know by the time we talk that they want to hire me. It's just, um, does it make sense with, like, can they afford it and all that stuff? It's not a question of trust, because all that has been built by by that content beforehand yep, yeah, that's exactly right and you have right.
Speaker 2:And then you also get the staying power when you put something out there. Now we're going back to our software vocab. Let's say you make a video, it's instantly scalable forever, you're done. So if you have something worth talking about, you might as well turn the camera on or open your CMS editor or whatever and hit copy paste and type it in and fix your grammar and hit publish and make it look nice, because now you get. You get to benefit that from that forever.
Speaker 2:I have a Ruby course, a Rails course. A guy enrolled a few days ago. Then he messaged me. He said I fell asleep. I won't say his name. He said I fell asleep watching one of your coding live streams and, frankly, he wasn't the first person to say that I have from years ago.
Speaker 2:I would do like these 12-hour long YouTube live streams and I would just build an entire app from scratch, deploy it to Heroku, buy a domain, hook up the DNS, everything, hook up Stripe and then give it away to somebody and I would have people submit an idea everything, hookup, stripe and then give it away to somebody and I would have people submit an idea and I would say, yeah, let's build that in a day and I'll give it to you tomorrow, and then we'd stream it and those videos they pushed me. I'm still feeling the stress of talking and thinking out loud for 12 hours straight, but they've attracted again. I just keep using the same word, homies, because I'm trying to figure out a word that's genderless-ish Some girls too. Most girls don't code, but they've attracted these homies over the years. It's like I was going to do it anyway. I wanted to build an MVP in a day and give it to somebody. Why not turn the camera on? Why not put it online? Why not let it stay online after the live session is over? It's let it stay online after the live session is over and it's just given me permanent benefit. And, like you said, it can build trust where someone says why should I hire you to build an app? How do I know you can build something quickly? Well, here's four links where I built something pretty quickly and you can see for yourself, you know. So, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2:Hopefully, hopefully, some of what we're talking about could be encouraging to folks who listen to your, to the show. Uh, because I just think there's so much. I think there's probably more. Let's put it this way I think there's more useful knowledge, um, in shy people's brains, uh, than what we have out there publicly right now, and that's kind of a explosive and annoying idea, if true, um, because it means there's a bunch more Elon Musk, there's a bunch more so-and-so right, the people who spoke at Railsworld, who have cool gyms or whatever it is that they're working on to contribute.
Speaker 2:There's so much more of that that's just not being shared because I think people are nervous that well, if I share it, it will only get two views. It's like it's not about the views, it's about the idea. And I think whether it's like it's not about the views, it's about the idea and I think whether it's launching terminal and the other things I've been observing my myself. There is now a mechanism by which good ideas can spread without having a bullhorn and 10 years of audience building under your belt to get the idea out there yeah, yeah, man, that is a lot, of, a lot of stuff to to think about.
Speaker 1:Um, yeah, and something else I think about. I, um, I suspect maybe you think this way too. Like anytime I hear any advice about anything, or like any belief that somebody has, I'm like like does that really, is that true? Like, is that true? Like, does that have to be true? Like this, this thing I'll remember this for a long time Um, cause it's such a great illustration of it Um, a friend of mine recently started doing consulting and he's like yeah, I think I can probably top out at like a hundred grand a year doing this kind of consulting. I don't really see it ever being able to be more than that. And it's like, why, um, and I think a lot of people they have a, a belief that like?
Speaker 1:you can either have a lot of money or you can have a nice lifestyle. You can't have both and it's like, why? Like does that have to be the case? And so, just like, applying like radical skepticism to absolutely everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, blind skepticism. I did a video something. This is related to something you said earlier about. You were listening to advice and it was wrong or it was right advice, but not the right advice for you. I made a video a few years ago and I think I even have a whiteboard and everything in the video.
Speaker 2:It's like three minutes and it's called All Startup Advice is True, and that is the core problem, because anything that's true, the opposite also should be true, and if the opposite isn't true, then the thing you're looking at also can't be true. But therefore, hey, should I quit my job and go full-time in my startup? You should do that, or no, you should actually hustle nights and weekends and keep your job to cover all of your expenses. Well, both of those advices are true and, like the way you said it, for different people or for people in different seasons of their life, depending on the context. And so the real advice, or the real way to parse advice, is by developing better judgment.
Speaker 2:But there isn't advice per se about judgment, because advice is the output of somebody's judgment, so the advice cannot teach you judgment.
Speaker 2:It is the fruit of the labor of their judgment.
Speaker 2:Right, the advice is like the apple that came off the tree, not where to plant the tree, how often to water it, how to care for it, whether to use insecticide, you know whatever.
Speaker 2:And so folks who are aware that they need better judgment to determine is this a good idea, how much should I charge for this product they go looking for advice to teach them judgment. But the advice is someone else's judgment manifest, and you have to learn and refine your judgment through other mechanisms. So it's kind of like if you want to improve your judgment, don't look for advice at all, Because again, you won't know which advice is true or true for you. It's all true, so just consider that it's all true and to practice the judgment there's not. You know, it's like I can't give advice exactly on how to do that, because that's the circular thing that we get trapped in. I would say, reading, reading ideas, synthesizing things, putting things together is a start, but those things that you're reading should probably not be one-liner, aphoristic style phrases and concepts, because now you may not really be developing your judgment, you're just memorizing the results of someone else's judgment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I think that's a really good point. Well, I could probably talk with you for a lot more time. We haven't even gotten into languages and cultures and all that stuff, the stuff you and I talked about at Rails World, but I'd love to have you on again sometime if you're up for it. Before we go, is there anywhere you want to send people online Terminal, anything else?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, if you're curious what I'm up to generally I'm on X and other places as just Ryan C Culp, k-u-l-p, and if you want to check out what we're building at terminal it is use T, r, m, n, lcom, and why not? Let's do a, let's do a. I don't know, jason is sweaty. We'll have that as a promo code For some bucks off if someone wants the device. And yeah, I hope to see you in there.
Speaker 1:Awesome, well, ryan, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you in there. Awesome, well, ryan, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Jason Cheers.