Michelle Marceline - How to build an unfair advantage from a disadvantage!

It's just like that with founders. We've got to have, we've got to wear multiple hats, especially in the early days when you didn't have enough funds to hire people.

Right. Yeah.

You just have to do what is necessary for the company. So I was, I'm the non-technical person in the company because 4 of my other co-founders, they are all like engineers. They have engineering background. So I had to do everything non-technical, including Marketing, and I do marketing by building in public on Twitter as well as on other platforms as well. And it's just that with TikTok and Instagram, you kind of have to be a content creator where you like, um, create short-form videos. Um, other non-technical things, um, yeah, finance, that's non-technical. And then HR, when we start hiring employees, I also had to Deal with the like payroll benefits, wellness kind of stuff, kind of things.

All, all of the fun things,

right? Yeah. So, well, um, if you wanna generalize it, it's, I handle everything non-technical, although if you break it down, it sounds like,

right,

a lot of different things.

Right. Welcome, welcome everybody. Thank you for tuning into the Undefeated Underdogs podcast. Today, I have a good friend who I kind of like met on the internet a couple of years ago when I was actually building and hustling, which shout out, she's also kind of hustling with her own startup. And I've been good friends with this person for a while and I admire her building public skills. I admire her Twitter skills and the writing skills and everything. So, Without further ado, welcome Michelle Marceline. How are you, Michelle? How are you doing?

Good, good. Thank you so much, Sharath. Happy to be here.

Yeah. And we recently met after a long time. It was like, you know, it was fun meeting you. Yeah, from 2021 to 2023, it's like, you know, it took some time, but we finally met. Today I have like, I think Kevin Chandra is supposed to join, but, you know, we'll try to squeeze as much as we can from you, every ounce of knowledge that you can give to us. But I'm excited to unpack a lot of things. For folks who are not, who don't know Michelle, Michelle is the co-founder of TypeDream, a powerful buffet, I would say, for creators where they can actually build websites, build link in bio type pages and everything else for their, you know, Gumroad type products or anything that they sell on the internet. So it belongs to creators. So they are creators and they're building something for creators, which I'm very excited about. And Michelle is also featured in Forbes a while ago. She's an immigrant like me. That's something that, you know, we both connect. on that level. And she's a big, big proponent of build in public movement, which, you know, I really admire. Like I said in the beginning, sometimes I just like kind of like go into your account, Michelle, to like see how you're tweeting, how you're kind of projecting type dream so that I get some ideas. So some of my ideas are like stolen from you. I'm just letting you know.

No, that's okay.

Yeah, welcome to the show. And right off the bat, how are you feeling? Congrats on getting your green card. I saw your post a couple days ago. I mean, a couple weeks ago, you're kind of celebrating 4th of July as well as your green card. How are you feeling?

Oh, I feel amazing. It's just that for the past 3 or 4 years, I haven't been able to just focus on building type dream, just focus on my work because, yeah, those visa situations, it did take a lot of time. Yeah.

So no, no, yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, it's kind of stressful, right? Like it kind of extracts a lot of mental energy, I would say, not physical per se, but mentally it'll drain you. You know, I am still going through, by the way, but Some point of time I'll get there. But yeah, talk to me, like, how was your experience? What was it like? How did you— like, you know, is it— did you go back to all the memory lane? Like, you know, talk to me about the whole journey.

The visa journey?

Yeah, visa. Like, once you got it, how did you feel? The joy of freedom.

So the journey, I think, started back in 2019. I had just graduated college. And if you did STEM, so if you're majoring in either science, tech, math, or engineering, you get 3 years of, um, like working permit in a way, but then you'll have to work for another company. And if I wanna pursue that type dream, then I wouldn't be able to do that. So I had to find an alternative. Yeah. And I think I scrolled through Bookface, which is the internal Y Combinator Y Combinator directory, and a lot of other YC founders did this thing called the O-1 visa, which is the extraordinary ability visa. Okay. Um, there were like 8 requirements, but you used to satisfy at least 4, I believe. And then I worked with the lawyers that the other Y Combinator founders worked with, and they were able to get one. So that was a relief. It was a visa, 3 years, but renewable forever. So technically I was safe, but then my lawyers convinced me, why don't you apply for the EB-1 green card? The requirements are about the same. So I was like, yeah, why not? I mean, if I could like not have to go through the hassle of renewing the visa, then that would be great. Right.

Right.

Yeah. So basically the efforts were with the lawyer. Um, I didn't really do much, but, uh, Like review the applications. And yeah, when I got it, when I got it, it was like, yeah, a really a turning point for me that I can finally focus on building my business and that I know for sure that I can build this business in the US since most of our, most of our customers are in the US. Our investors are also in the US.

Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. You know, thanks to you. For folks who don't know, Michelle really helped me push to get O-1 for myself as well. She introduced her lawyers and like she was like very, very informational, like, hey, do this, do that, avoid this. So she's kind of like, you know, kind of like, like an advisor for me in that, in that aspect, and which I'm really grateful for. You know, I'm fortunate to say that I'm also on O-1. Thanks to you, Michelle, for all the recommendations and everything. But no, I kind of know the feeling of how stressed and also like how limited you can do when you are on certain visas, right? So I'm so happy for you. Congrats again.

But thank you.

Let's talk about like, you know, let's talk about, let's go back to like the the beginning days of TypeDream, right? TypeDream is founded by 5 people. It's very unusual that you hear, yeah, you hear like a group of people like doing one thing, right? Like you usually end up having solo founder or, you know, maybe couple or something. That's like the max. 3 is like, you know, the kitchen is full. Everyone else get out. So my question is, so A, I wanna unpack, I want you to unpack, like, how did you guys meet? A, number 2 is like, how did the whole thing came up together? Like how 5 of you came together and like say, okay, we all want to do this, the one thing and only the one thing.

Yeah. So the 5 of us, we met in CS 101. So just the first computer science class in college. Um, we met probably because we are from— we're all from Indonesia. So I guess we were just looking for other Indonesians in the class and yeah, we met each other and then, um, there were not— so yeah, there were other Indonesians who went to that same college. It's just that the 5 of us came to be friends and wanted to build a life together because we shared the same vision. Nice. We wanna stay in the US. we wanna— we're into tech because, yeah, we met in the computer science class and we wanna build a startup together. Whereas the other Indonesians, they mostly were just here for college and that they would go back to Indonesia to continue their parents' businesses or something. Interesting. Yeah, that's like the more common Indonesians. Um, and then interestingly, the 5 of us were like inspired by the Same, like kind of the same thing. So we were inspired by Steve Jobs with his developments with the iPhone and then the Social Network movie about Facebook. Yeah, we were inspired

by

that generation.

Right, right. I can sense that.

Yeah. Yeah. So that's how we bonded and yeah, we decided to build a startup together. During school, we built a lot of projects together, but those were just Like hobby projects because we were still in school. And then once we graduated college, we decided to pursue this full-time. We applied to Y Combinator and we got in thankfully, or else we would've been deported because of all the visa situation. You need to be employed, right?

Wow. Was that like, was that like that line? You know, if you didn't get to Y Combinator, you were like, you have to go back. Is that like the situation back then?

Yes, I think you only have 90 days after your graduation date for you to find an employer. And YC was in, I believe, October. So yeah, like right about the deadline. Wow.

So that was, that must have been very intense for you to like, and a lot of pressure from every corner. How did it happen?

It was a 1 or 0 situation for us.

Wow. And yeah, talk to me. I think, yeah, you were talking. I didn't mean to interrupt, but yeah, go ahead.

No, no. Yeah. So we got into Y Combinator and then we got into YC with another idea before. We were trying to build Robinhood for Indonesia. So we were trying to allow Indonesians to trade US stocks because obviously nobody wants to buy Indonesian stocks. But then we faced financial hurdles and regulatory hurdles. We couldn't get the licenses required. So we pivoted to something else, which was an authentication plugin for website builders. And that's because of our learnings building the stock app for Indonesia. So what we learned is that people in Indonesia and other developing countries, they don't log in using email password like we do here in the US. They log in using their phone numbers and a one-time code sent via SMS.

Yeah. I think it's called OTP or something like that. One-time password.

Yep. So we're building that technology so other apps and websites in developing countries, they could just use our technology without having to build it themselves. Like we would save a couple months of engineering work. Yeah. So we were building that and then it got acquired by Stitch. It's a US company that does, does almost the exact same thing. We were acquired in 2021, and that is why we moved on to TypeDream. And why TypeDream? It's from the authentication company. So it's like we learned, we always learn something from the previous company. But when we were building Auth, people were asking for a Notion integration. Like they want to log into their Notion documents. Okay. So we're like, Why would you wanna do that? Right. And then apparently people say that they were building their websites on top of Notion just because of how easy the editor is. It's like so familiar to them. It's just like Google Docs or Microsoft Word that everybody could use it. It's not like, and yeah, we were like curious, aren't there a lot of other no-code website builders out there? Like, Webflow, WordPress, Squarespace, like, are they not enough for you?

Right.

Yeah. They were like, no, there's still some learning curve. Whereas for Notion, there's no learning curve at all because we've been using Google Docs and Microsoft Word our whole life. Yeah. So we thought we saw that opportunity that there could be another version of website builder that's so similar to Notion that is Like that has very low or almost no learning curve. Yeah. So that's how TypeDream was born, a Notion-like website builder.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I still remember. I always thought TypeDream is the idea you went to YC. I don't know. For some reason I feel like, you know, you guys always talk about TypeDream more than your previous products. Probably you should start doing that.

We weren't building in public before TypeDream.

Right, exactly. See, I think there's a— that's like a huge difference, right? Like once you start talking things in public, everybody, you know, so a lot many people, they just think that I only build Shoutout, you know, I didn't build anything before, right? And I was like, hey, I did like so many things because we were so vocal about one thing. So, that's, I think, probably you should talk more about your previous experience. That's a fascinating story. I feel the thing you learned from the stock platform, stocks platform, you've implemented in the auth. And the thing you learned from auth, you're trying to implement in TypeDream, right? So, that's fascinating. Yeah. And so, when you were pivoting, were you scared? Were you like, because you have this firm conviction that you went to YC, right?

Yes.

And what should, like, how do founders wrap up their mind around pivoting, especially when they're in a big stage like YC? You get a lot of attention and what should, like, you know, how was your mindset back then?

Yeah, to be honest, The pivots I've done before aren't like hard pivots. So, I don't know what the experience is like if you have a really established business, but you need to make the call to pivot. The pivots I've done before, so the stock trading app to the authentication app, well, we couldn't get the licenses required. So, it was like a no-brainer pivot, right? There's no way we could work and continue this. Mm-hmm. stock trading app. So yeah, that was an easy pivot, I would say. And then the authentication pivot to the TypeDream pivot. What we— so we were faced with 2 problems when building this auth company. And these 2 problems existed because it was a B2B company. So the first problem is that our team was really small. It was only the 5 of us at the time. Mm-hmm. And then we were serving businesses. So we had to make sure that our system is up 24/7. And it's not only because we were serving businesses, but also because our, like, the product that we were offering was like at the frontline, right? Authentication, sign up, login. So if we're down for like just a few minutes, then these businesses would freak out because they would lose their potential customers if they couldn't log in or sign up.

Right.

Yeah. So, we were faced with that engineering problem where we couldn't have a good enough SLA to serve these businesses. Like, I remember we, our system would be like, would crash at 3 AM in the morning and then we all had to wake up and fix that bug. And then we're even in the, news one time, like, no, the company that were using us were in the news one time, not for a good reason, but because their system was down. And it was our mistake at the time. So yeah, that was

really,

really taxing for us that, you know, we're kind of traumatized with being a B2B company. And then the second one is that we couldn't do sales because what we learned from the B2B business is that it's not about your product at all. They don't care if you have the best product in the market. It's more of like whether or not you can sell. And then at the time we were just fresh graduates, so we didn't know anyone at any other company. And the way B2B businesses do sales is they usually, they were usually a part of another company. So say they were, they worked at Salesforce and then now they were built, They're, they're building this B2B and then they would contact someone they know from Salesforce to like subpart of their business. Yeah. So we didn't have any connections before, so it was hard for us to scale beyond the point we had. Right. Yeah. And then there's this another, other company who does exactly the same thing as us. They just raised a round at the time. And then they decided to acquire us.

And it was not an acqui— acqui-hire?

No, just the product.

Product. Okay. And when you got acquired, like, were you satisfied? Are you guys still hungry to do the next thing? How did you like come together as a team again, the 5 of you? It almost feels like you're like this, you know, either like Ninja Turtles or something like that, that stick together, right? Like a boy band or a girl band. Yeah. So how did you come up again? Like, I want to understand how do you guys stick together for so long? Like 5 of you, right? It's such a big thing for me because people usually, when they see success, like getting acquired by someone is not a small thing, right? Yeah. Especially on that note. And once you see success, you're like, okay, I get to do this and I want to like, you know, do my own thing and whatnot. So how did you come back? What was like, you know, your bond? What was your hunger look like back then?

Yeah, we were still hungry because I think it was like around the acquisition time. I don't remember if it was before or after, but we saw this new problem, right? Where our users from the authentication product wanted to have a Notion integration. Yeah. So we saw this entire problem and yeah, we still wanted to build another company together. So we decided to build TypeDream.

And how did you go from 0 to 1, especially did you use the leverage from the auth company customers, you reach out to them. What was your good marketing strategy was like?

Yeah. So not necessarily from the old auth company, but so we were targeting people who were building their websites on top of Notion. So we would go to, I think there was this directory of websites built on Notion. Do you know Side Hustle Stack?

No, never heard of it.

So yeah, there was this website called Side Hustle Stack, just a directory of side hustles. And then a lot of websites like on that directory was built on Notion. So we decided to do the things that don't scale by—

Right.

Yeah. We contacted them one by one. We rebuilt their Notion site. To TypeDream. And we sent it, we just showed it to them. Hey, I rebuilt your site using TypeDream. What do you think about it? Yeah. So we did that one by one. I think there was like 500 of them at least. And then we got, we onboarded them to our platform, asked for their feedback. And then if they liked it, we asked them to help share it on social media, mostly Twitter. And it's just word of mouth from there. Yeah. So the beta phase lasted for about 3 months and we finally launched to Product Hunt in July of 2021. And

that's awesome.

Yeah. That was the inflection point.

Is Side Hustle Stack, is it, I kind of heard that name. Is it from Michael Nowotny? Is that the guy who built it? If I'm not wrong.

I don't know if he's also the guy who built it, but I know Legion.

Oh, probably I might be tripping. Sorry, my bad. I might be like confusing with some other thing. That's amazing. And Product Hunt, let's talk about it, right?

Yeah.

I've heard so many stories like, you know, like yours, Product Hunt actually like is the elevation point for us. It actually changed the trajectory of our startup life, our personal lives. And I'm personally one of them, personally changed my career. Shout out to Product Hunt, you know, homage to it. I'm wearing a hat for folks who are not seeing this conversation. But so talk to me about it. Like, how did it actually impact it? Like truly and gave you that confidence that— We can go all in again on this thing. And there is a big wave.

Yeah. So before Product Hunt, our product wasn't public yet. We were waitlist only. And that's because we wanted to get as many feedback as possible. And also to create FOMO. So 2 things. Yeah, we were building in public, we were sharing what we learned from almost every onboarding onboarding call we did with our beta testers. And then we also built FOMO from there because we would share it on Twitter and then people would join the waitlist and then people would tweet about them joining the waitlist in order to be pumped up the waitlist. Yeah. So that was the entire marketing slash product strategy. But when you launch a product hunt, maybe it's due to the hype we built. Like a few months before the launch, but we got number 1 product of the day, the week, and the month, I believe.

Hmm. Wow.

So that is why it was the inflection point because we finally opened our products public. We got a really good traction from Product Hunt and yeah, that, that gave us enough conviction that we should pursue this full-time because Yeah, we got a lot of volume for Product Hunt.

And I still remember, I think you guys did like a virtual conference or something like that, or I don't know, something around those lines.

Yeah, no-code event. So we made this event called No-Code November where it's inspired by No-Shave November. But yeah, so the event was Like in the month of November, we would encourage people to build any project with any no-code tool. So yeah, we partner with a couple of other no-code tools like Glide, Shoutout, and other, a lot of other no-code tools, including TypeDream ourselves.

Yeah.

Yeah. We encourage people to build a project on using no-code tools and then if they were able to launch their project within the month of November, then we would consider them as winners and we would give them a bundle promo code from all of the participating tools, which was really valuable to them because people would usually use like many different tools. Right.

Right. Yeah. I still remember, I think we did like a Twitter Space, if I'm not wrong, you and I.

Yeah.

I think on a Monday or Tuesday. It was very fun to like, you know, be involved in such things. I feel, you know, 2020, 2021, those years are very fun. 2021, 2020, like, you know, at least the beginning of it was very fun. It was like everybody's like doing such, you know, public events and, you know, talks and all that and such, you know.

Yeah.

Fun stuff. I missed that. I missed that in a way. Probably you should bring back I don't know, like, you know, October Creator or something like that. Creator October. I don't know what that is, but something that is around creators and yeah, I would love to, you know, see some action from TribeDream.

But yeah, maybe we should rebrand our event to like Creator October now that we're targeting creators and not only— People like, yeah, not, not just people who want to build websites.

Exactly. So let's talk about your whole building public, you know, philosophy, mindset, the way, you know, your frameworks, the way you do things. I just saw that at TypeDream, you're a COO, you handle marketing, you also handle HR. You also handle finance. What else? What else is there? Like, can you do everything pretty much? Like, on top of it, you do content, if I'm not wrong, for TypeDream and for yourself. And you tweet a lot, like, you know, and you do everything in public. So how come a COO HR, finance. I understand marketing is a bit of like, you know, it has that angle to it, but how come these personas in you are clashing with the persona, which is a bigger persona of someone who builds in public constantly and consistently. Right. So talk to me about that differentiation, like how you think about the whole movement.

Yeah, I feel like that's just, it's just like that with founders. We've got to have, we got to wear multiple hats, especially in the early days when you didn't have enough fund to hire people.

Right.

Yeah, you just have to do what is necessary for the company. So I was, I'm the non-technical person in the company because 4 of my other co-founders, they are all like engineers. They have engineering background. So I had to do everything non-technical, including Marketing, and I do marketing by building in public on Twitter as well as on other platforms as well. And it's just that with TikTok and Instagram, you kind of have to be a content creator where you like create short-form videos. Other non-technical things. Yeah, finance, that's non-technical. And then HR, when we started hiring employees, I also had to Deal with the like payroll benefits, wellness kind of stuff, kind of things.

All other fun things, right?

Yeah. So, well, if you wanna generalize it, it's, I handle everything non-technical, although if you break it down, it sounds like a lot of different things.

Right. And how do you manage, like what's your day-to-day look like doing so many things? And yet keeping up with Twitter, with this constant feed that changes every second as you tweet. Yeah. Yeah. What do you do?

Okay. So to be honest, HR and finance, they don't take that much of my time because I would usually need to only do them once a month, like beginning of month. And then the rest of my time, I would spend it on the marketing and customer support side of things. So what I do is I bridge the gap between my internal team and our customers. So I would promote our new features and improvements to our customers, as well as receive feedback from them and relay it back to the team. Hmm. My day-to-day, yeah, it's just like that, creating content. I would, Usually creating content's like come kind of naturally. I usually treat my social media as my personal journal.

Yeah.

So I would reflect what happened during that day, like what I learned, what new things I like, uh, what new things the company built, um, any failures, anything. And then I would just journal them. Twitter is the easiest. It's just, um, text-based. I would just write a thread about my learnings or successes, failures, or the features I built that day. Even sometimes it's a hard sell, sometimes it's about myself. And then the next day I would turn them into short videos for Instagram and TikTok. It's basically like that every day. Then I would spend some time doing customer support as well.

That's a lot. My God. You know, I don't know what you eat. Please recommend that for others too on Twitter so that We all can beef up our mental muscle to do like so many things. No, I'm impressed. And, you know, that's one thing I really admire about you as an individual and a founder is that you constantly have that, you know, new energy that you bring in, right? Like on Twitter.

Yes.

You share like some sort of something new. And, you know, I think one of your tweets led me to DM you. And we met. So it's kind of like that, like, you know, okay, I saw you, I think you're hanging out near Golden Gate Beach. I was like, yo, we can meet, like, you know, I'm in SF, let's meet, right? So I think sharing the personal experiences as well as like the lessons you're learning building Tribe Dream, I feel everything counts part of the build in public strategy, right?

Yes, absolutely.

And I hate calling it as a strategy because it's a way of living, you know. It's basically expressing yourself without any filter. You know, it doesn't necessarily have to be everything, but, you know, you have to be mindful about it. And that is a great segue for my next question, which is, in your whole experience of building TypeDream and the other 2 startups, What is like the toughest thing for you to do, you know, personally as a founder?

The toughest thing for me to do. Let me think about this question. I would say it's like my ability to adapt with different problems. So I can talk about this one thing. So with the 2 startups I built before, I mean, one didn't even launch. 'Cause we couldn't get the license and this is the second one it launched, but we were only working on it for about a year before it was acquired. So we were like, all we knew was how to grow from 0 to 1, but we never knew how to do it from like how to grow a company from 1 to beyond. That is what I'm currently struggling with, with TypeDream and what I'm currently trying to overcome. Yeah. So TypeDream has reached a point where we need to grow it from one to something. We feel like we've reached product market fit where we have a constant flow of revenue. It's just that we need to finally think of a way to grow this even bigger.

Hmm.

Yeah. So the hardest thing that I face is the ability to constantly adapt with the situation. It's continuous learning. It's not like I can apply the strategies I did from 0 to 1 to 1 to 2 or—

And what are some measures you're taking as we speak right now? You're just expressing that you're in a phase where you have to go from 1 to N, right? Like any new, anything that you recently learned that you want to share in this podcast?

Not really learning, but I basically just talked to a lot of bigger companies on how they moved from 1 to N. So from the marketing point of view, specifically from 0 to 1, all we did was word of mouth, right? I did build in public. I sometimes I post like we did this. chase hype cycle strategy where when Web3 was a thing, we would build website templates for Web3 creators. So that got us some volume and then AI was trending. We were building some AI functionalities as well as AI templates. Yeah. So just chase, we chased the hype cycle and relied on word of mouth, but for 1 to N. we learned from other companies, other founders that we need to have a, like a reliable source of growth.

Hmm.

Yeah. And that is what we're learning right now. We're testing different strategies, like including paid marketing. So we're, our strategy right now is to have ambassadors who would use our product and constantly create content about our product.

Right. Right. I was actually, I was about to ask, have you thought about building a community around TypeDream creators who use TypeDream? Do you have one? What's your take on like—

Yeah, we have. So we have a Discord community where we would invite creators who are using TypeDream to talk about anything, not necessarily TypeDream. So we would have channels for beauty influencers, gym influencers. Yeah, but we haven't nurtured it that much yet. We're still figuring it out, like which effort we want to double down at this time, because it's really early.

And how, from going from 1 to N, I'm sure we all know, I personally know, build in public really helps you to take off. You know, in the early days, it's like the best thing you should do. Any founder, it's like a written prescription, right? You have to build in public if you are a startup founder in this day and age. How much of it is really helping you to grow from 1 to N? Do you have any observations that you want to share?

Yeah. So for 1 to N, what I observed, I don't know if this is true, because again, I'm very early in the process, but, um, if I share something from my, like from my own account, it's not as effective as if someone else shared from their account. Yeah. So yeah, building in public, it's still necessary, of course, because people wouldn't talk about me or my business if I have, if my social media is dead, right? If There's no post on my account. But the, um, like, the secret sauce is if someone talks about you and your business, not you talking about yourself and your business.

And what— when you, when you do, uh, realize that, like, okay, it's— it should come from outside,

um,

Do you guys plan to do apart from the paid ambassador program? Those are all, I feel like, you know, it's kind of like experiments that you run, but any— Yeah. I'm just curious that, do you have any, you know, battle-tested lessons? Okay, this really worked really well in the past 6 months, for example. Anything that you want to suggest, like from growth standpoint, from marketing standpoint, Hey, we did this, like No Code November is a thing, right? Which actually was a, you know, was helped you, you know, innovate. And anything that you want to share in the last 6 months that, okay, wow, this really worked. Let me actually, we have to focus on this.

Yeah, actually what really worked was the paid affiliate thing. So we didn't, we didn't do any paid affiliate program earlier. People were just naturally sharing. Um, people were just, um, sharing their experience using TypeDream organically for some reason.

Mm-hmm.

So either they used TypeDream, they were very satisfied and they would share it on their social media, or there was this trend that lasted for a few months where people used to recommend like their top 10 tools for, to run their creator business or to run their small business. Yeah, there was a lot of those tweets and TypeDream was constantly mentioned in those tweets. So that used to work really well for us that we decided to do this paid affiliate thing. So we know for sure that they will constantly post about us and not only depend on if they want to do it.

Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. I've kind of tried affiliate program at ShoutOut, but I didn't, you know, after I acknowledged this, I didn't pay much attention. I thought like people, you know, they want to make money. They just like share a link and, you know, we all make money and it's not the case. Like you have to really put a lot of effort building assets, like spoonfeeding them, giving them copy, the email they might write for someone else. Like it should be so detailed. Yeah. And packaged in a way that, okay, now I have this, the link as well as a kit. Okay, now I'm, you know, I can like, you know, bring more people in, right? So it should be that intense, which I completely missed. And it was one of the things that I failed miserably at executing. It's like the affiliate program. And, you know, that's one lesson I learned. I just want to share, given that you're talking about affiliate programs.

Definitely an active affiliate partnership. If for, for passive affiliate partnership, you would just give them an affiliate link and they would put it on their website or link in bio and that's it, right?

Right.

Whereas for active, we would like constantly brainstorm content ideas for them, encourage them to create content about TypeDream or about their business, but using TypeDream. Yeah, any sort of content, we would actively follow up with them, do a Monthly retrospective, stuff like that.

Yeah, no, I think it requires a lot of effort, which I didn't have back then. So for folks who are listening, please, please invest a lot of time. It's worth it. Like I heard a lot of amazing stories about growing massively from just, you know, implementing affiliate program in the right way. So don't underestimate it, it has its potential, but do put in your time. Let's switch gears a little bit. I want to talk about your— before even going there, I think let's cover this, the TypeDream. So you were once a website builder. So how did you end up being like offering a buffet for creators? Like you have Link in Bio is a thing. So what is that pivot? How do you describe it? When did you realize it? And when did you guys actually make that move?

Yeah, I would say it's a soft pivot. And it's because in the early days, we were just a website builder and we were serving mostly startup founders. So people who want to— startup founders or indie hackers. So people who want to build a project, they would usually need to whip up a quick landing page to start accepting waitlist or like just to show their idea to VCs or something. But aside from startup founders, a lot of digital creators, especially Notion creators, were also building their websites on TypeDream. So, they wouldn't need a landing page to list the Notion templates they're selling. And then out of the 2 categories, we see a lot of like a very high churn. with the startup founders group. And that's because, not because of, not because they need more customizations or things like that. Well, they do, but that's not the top reason. The top reason why they churn is because they're, they no longer need Typeform because they know they're no longer pursuing their product, their project.

Right.

And that makes complete sense because 95% of startups fail.

Of course.

Yeah, 95% of startups fail and that is if they have a team. So I believe more, yeah, indie hackers fail more than that, right? So I would say, yeah, so that is the reason why churn was really bad with the startup founders group. And then we saw this other niche that were also using us, which were the Notion creators. And they have, they tend to have a longer niche because they don't shoot for moonshot products. They were, they're just, yeah, it's mostly their side hustle. They're not doing this full-time. They would still have another job. And then, yeah, if they sell something, then they don't have any cert— they don't have certain expectations. They would still have this business on the side. Um, and they would have just shut it down after 3 months if it's not working or something. They would just, yeah, let it be there and it would generate some cash. Yeah. So we decided to dig deeper into the second category, which are creators. And we found out that a lot of creators are also the new gen SMB, as in, so the old gen SMB, they would have Restaurants or beauty salons. The brick and mortar. They would usually start by being a creator. So they would build their brand and then they would sell something like leveraging their brand. So for Notion creators, they would sell Notion templates. Um, some other creators, they would sell a course, like maybe how to— and then, um, a lot of them also sell their fitness coaching service and then their beauty influencer, right? They even sell physical products.

I think most of the category you're talking about is, I think Jack Butcher, you know, coined this. It's those people who productivize themselves, meaning they have a specific knowledge in them. You know, they are teachers, they are like educators, you know, not in a true sense. What I mean by that is they're coaches, right? They've built this knowledge over the years and they want to, they want to like pass it on to someone else. So these are the folks who are making a ton of money on Twitter, for example, like they build an audience, like, you know, I understand. I feel, how did you guys approach that category? And they have money, right? Like they have money they can spend on things. So what was like your Your strategy was back then?

Um, like my strategy in reaching out to these creators?

Yeah, the second type of creators. How did you end up like, you know, convincing them we were building this thing?

Yeah,

for you.

Um, so we started with the creators who were already in TypeDream. Um, we decided to again do things that don't scale by hopping to a one-on-one call with them because most of them would want to hop on a call with us because when you say that, hey, do you want to hop on a call with the founder? Then they would usually be like, oh wow, I get to talk to the founder.

Right.

Yeah, they would usually be up for it. We would then ask them like, what do you need as a creator? Just tell us, we'll build it for you. Like just treat us as a software house because we want to build our products around you. So just tell us. How we can help you run your business. And then the learnings there is that aside from a website, they would also need a link in bio. And that's usually the entry point. They would need a Gumroad kind of thing, because they would need to sell their products.

Mm-hmm.

And then they would need a newsletter because they wanna like keep in touch with their audience, tell them whenever they have a new product or just a monthly newsletter kind of thing. They would also need a form to just collect leads. So yeah, after talking to a bunch of creators, we decided to build all that.

Nice.

Yeah, we have a, aside from the website builder, we have a LinkedIn bio builder, we have a form builder.

Nice.

We have a Gumroad replica. We have a, yeah, we have everything.

Nice. That's awesome. You kind of like are building for creators now, right? So,

yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And do you have any crazy story that, that creators who are using TypeDream that you want to share? Like something like, I made $1 million or, you know, I sold this template, anything that baffles your mind. Wow. We made it possible. We made, we actually are kind of like, you know, one of the reasons for their you know, livelihood. What— share us like some of the goosebump moments, you know, in the history of TypeDream.

The best success story that I can, like, that I remember on top of my head is actually Islo. He's like the number one Notion template creator out there. And he made over 6 figures a year Just from selling Notion templates. He's still a student, by the way, so it's not like he has to leave his day job for this or anything like that, but he's already making then what most people make from a day job. And he's in Singapore, he's not even in the US. So even more than people who would have a day job in Singapore.

Wow. Did you guys do like a success case study over him?

Yes, we published a blog and a newsletter about this journey.

Yeah, we'll link that, you know, in the podcast. So as you know, right, like Build in Public is not always about roses or the highs or like, you know, it's not always smooth. It's also about like sharing some of the lowest of the lowest moments. in, you know, taking the falls, right? If you may share, like, did you ever feel like, man, this is really tough? Building this thing is really tough. I can't do it anymore. I felt like, wow, you know, overwhelmed with a lot of things, like, you know, content. I have to publish this. There's a lot of stress. I have to like do marketing. Yeah. In your case, I have to do HR, Finance, like, you know, all the other things, non-technical. Have you ever like felt that? And if you ever did, how did you overcome it? What did you do?

For me, I've never really felt like it's too much that I don't want to do it anymore. Like it gets too much sometimes, but I always have this mindset that I still want to do it just because, I don't know, I can't imagine doing anything else in my life but to build a startup. Maybe it's everything I know because I've never done anything else after I graduated. So yeah, no matter how hard things get, I would still have the mindset that I need to rise from here. And continue building this.

Who are you fundamentally learning from constantly on a day-to-day basis? Like, do you have, do you have a set of heroes that you look up to?

My role model is Sean Puri and Sam Parr from My First Million. I listen to their podcast religiously and I apply the advice and the learnings I got from that podcast to my day-to-day life running type dream.

Nice. Nice. Yeah, I think you seem like the biggest fan of them. So I don't know if Sean's ever listened to this podcast, but if he ever— Sean is your biggest fan. Uh, hopefully, you know, uh, probably I'll bring them on the podcast and you never know, you know, I'll probably like shoot my shot and

yeah,

that, that might be a thing. That's so awesome talking to you, Michelle. I feel like you have that, you're still young, but you still have that maturity of thinking beyond ground, right? Like you have the tendency of stretching yourself, challenging yourself and being in the game. And I do appreciate it. I think last thing I want to ask, like, how much of this The thing you're pursuing, how much of the immigrant hunger is fueling you, like driving you? I know you've got your green card, but was there like a fire that, okay, I have to prove, I have to like make it, you know, how much of that really helped?

Oh, I would say it's a big portion of it.

Mm-hmm.

And that's because, um, when I came here to the US, I realized that, um, there are not a lot of immigrants from Indonesia who ended up staying here. Like a lot of them just went back to Indonesia. Um, and it was really hard for me to find a role model that is close enough that I could like follow their path. Because if I, if my role model is Steve Jobs, it's like too far-fetched, right? I couldn't possibly like try to follow his path to success. Um, yeah. So I thought if I had another Indonesian role model in the same field, then that would be easier for me. Um, but I didn't have that. I had to learn everything the hard way, but now I am. Um, so my sister is also here in the US. She's currently studying and she's 7 years below me. And I'm starting to see that my sister and her friends start leveraging me. Like, um, they constantly ask for my advice, my feedback on how to become like me. And I, um, see the value there. Like, okay, so I'm not just doing this for me, but I'm also here to inspire. Other immigrants, other Indonesians to be like me. Yeah, so I found this new purpose, and I really want to be the stepping stone for other Indonesians to make it in the U.S.

That's so beautiful. That's damn beautiful. I would say is you know. I feel I believe that a true purpose of a human being is actually helping other human beings. You know. and helping them succeed in their own life. And kind of like there's a joy element to it. And I just am positively envious that you found, you kind of like found your, you know, other calling, which is not the startup calling, but, you know, you want to inspire, aspire the next generation of Indonesians and not just Indonesians. I would say anybody who moved to this country. Yeah. Everybody who moved to this country with these big dreams, like big American dreams there. Yes. Who are still chasing, you know, I'm one of them. I'm still chasing. I'm still, you know, even though I have the bigger ambition of working for a thing for myself and create opportunity for others, I'm still not there yet. So I'm still in the race. And I feel like, you know, I'm so happy to hear that from you. At such a young age, you were still, you know, you're, you know, You're at a point where you're like, okay, this is not about me. It's beyond me. And I'm here to pay it forward. I love that a lot. And this is, this is an awesome conversation and thank you for joining today. Any, any closing thoughts before we wrap up?

Um, yeah, I would say, yeah, I have this one thing that I always say to People who wanna start their own thing, like finally take the leap to pursue their dreams.

Mm-hmm.

Um, yeah. And I always say this thing where, um, it's better for you to just start now. Don't worry about perfecting things before launching, cuz it'll never be perfect. So fail fast, fail cheap, fail forward. Yeah. So just fail a lot because you will learn from each of your failures, just like I did. I always learned from the failures of building my previous company. And if you fail enough times, then you will know how to avoid those failures that you will slowly go towards the right direction.

I love that. Basically, if you're failing, you're learning, right? You're not actually failing in a way. You're giving it a try, but it didn't work. And you learn how not to do or things that didn't work.

Not the same failures at least. And there's only a finite amount of failures that you can make, right?

Exactly. Michelle, thank you. Appreciate again for, you know, taking the time and joining us on this on this podcast, you know, for folks who are listening, guys, do it. You know, that's it. That's the fodder. There is no secret sauce. Like, you know, there is no shortcut. You have to put into the effort and continue, like, failing, continue learning, continue trying. And if you play long enough, you'll win someday. You know, we don't know when.

Yes.

You will definitely make it. That's the goal. But yeah, this has been fun, Michelle, and keep going. I love to see more of your posts on Twitter. And love to see you succeed in the TypeDream journey as well as, you know, as an individual person as well. So I'm rooting for you. On that note, cheers, folks. Thanks for tuning in. Appreciate you guys. Thank you.