"Startups we love right now" with Indie Hackers' Courtland Allen & Pioneer's Daniel Gross | E1162

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crowd.com/twist. Hey everybody, welcome to This Week in Startups. I'm Jason Calacanis. And one of the things I like to do is work with very early-stage startups. But one of the things that's happened in Silicon Valley is, as the market has exploded with the number of startups and the cost of starting a company has gone down, well, a lot of the VCs have decided it's just too much work. It's too much work to work with a 1 to 10 person startup. So what have VCs done over the last couple years? They've moved downstream. They are no longer in the orchard. They are no longer at the well. They've just moved downstream and they wait until startups get traction and they get to $1 million or $2 million or $3 million a year in revenue, $75K a month, $150K a month, and then they pop in and try to overpay. For 20% of the company because you've reduced all the risk. But that's not when startups need help. Startups don't need help when they hit $75K a month. Then it's just about growth and scaling and management issues.

It's—

there's a playbook when you get to $1 million in revenue and you can play the playbook. The discovery phase, when you try to find a new idea, a new founder, with a new idea, with customers who maybe are just super inspired by it or even confused, that's where the magic is. But most people, as their years go on in investing, move downstream. Why do they move downstream? It's economics. The amount of time it takes when you're a seed investor in a company like, I don't know, Robinhood, Uber, whatever it happens to be, it's going to be 10 years before you see your exit in all likelihood. Maybe you can sell some secondary in year 7 or 6 or something, but—

Yeah.

Basically, you're in it for close to a decade before you see any money. But if you do late stage and you jump on in the Series A, Series B, Series C, which are really like the B, C, and D these days because they happen further down the line, well, you could collect your money, your return on investment as a venture capitalist, in as few as 3 to 7 years. In other words, there's economics at play and incentives matter. And so I ask myself, who's actually doing this hard work anymore? Who's actually helping the 2-person startup? And I found 2 people who are doing that, and I had them on the podcast, and they got an incredible response from you, the audience. And so I wanted to try a new format. It's a new format we're going to try today, which is startups that are inspiring us right now. And I've brought back Daniel Gross, who is from Pioneer Labs, which is an incredible concept. He's gamified startups. I had you on the program before, Daniel, so welcome back. But maybe you could explain for people who are unfamiliar and just hearing about Pioneer, what you do at Pioneer.

Yeah.

Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me. Very honored and blessed to be in this company. A great way to kick off the year. So Pioneer is effectively built for people that are working on projects where they're not even really sure if it's a company, or maybe it's a small company and they're not sure if it'll be a big company. And it really gives people kind of before they have real product-market fit, a leaderboard and a metric and a score to optimize and grow. So the way it works is you go to the website, fill out your application, and then you basically get a score. And the more revenue you get and the more progress you make on your project, the score grows. And if the score reaches a certain point, you get reviewed by an expert at Pioneer. And if that works out, you can actually become a Pioneer. So it's almost like a venture capital firm built it with Strava, so to speak, where there's very clear metrics, numbers to optimize, which I think is very pleasant for founders. It's actually quite motivating. And, you know, our long-term goal and mission is not necessarily to be first in the door to startups that would've been created regardless, but to really, you know, be counterfactual in the creation of companies that wouldn't exist without us. To me, it's pretty interesting that in the venture world, at the end of the day, there's like 3 to 4 great deals a year. That's it.

Crazy, right?

And I don't think the world must be that way. Like, I think the world can afford to have 1,000 $1 billion companies instead of a trillion-dollar company. And so we're kind of trying to create that by almost trying to convince people that their startup is real, just like Strava can kind of convince people that they should take running a bit more seriously. And it's about 2.5 years old. We've funded— we've about just shy of 200 pioneer companies to date. Some of them have gone on to raise Series As or large seed rounds. So it seems like the people— And Some of them are launch companies. Um, it seems like the people that the network is finding and selecting are actually kind of working on good things. I'd urge everyone that's kind of interested slash confused about what we do to just go check out the website. We don't own— we don't own the .com yet. That's the Japanese company pioneer.com. Um, but we are at pioneer.app.

Well, at some point you can do a, uh, an IPO takeover reverse merger with Pioneer and then sell off the DVD business or whatever business Pioneer is still in. But we've been lucky enough to invest in publicly 2, Remote Hour and Palabra, which we found at Pioneer Labs. So we call them— we don't call them lunch companies, we call them Pioneer Labs companies because you got to them first. And one thing we found was actually whatever you're doing in this secret sauce of gamification or breaking down what happens into components, And checkboxes and lists and missions before you get product-market fit. Whatever you've done there has, I believe, you've attracted people who GSD, who get stuff done, get shit done. You've got that crowd. And so it's absolutely delightful when our accelerator comes in, if we find somebody, even if they've got really modest traction, I'm talking about $500 a month, $1,000 a month, so delightful to work with a founder Who is motivated to get stuff done, right? It just makes everything super smooth. And also with us today, as if having Daniel wasn't enough, Courtland Allen is here from Indie Hackers. And Indie Hackers, you were just on the pod. You were on episode 1143. Daniel was on episode 1079 if you're looking into the archives. And Courtland, maybe you could take a moment to explain briefly what you do at Indie Hackers and then maybe even take a moment to compare it to what Daniel's doing and what your thoughts are on Daniel's business and how he goes about it.

Yeah, thanks. Glad to be back. I'm here wearing my Pioneer hat in support of Pioneer that Daniel sent me for doing an AMA with the Pioneer community.

Oh, you guys did an AMA together? Very good. The collab is strong.

Exactly. Um, it's interesting the way that Daniel described Pioneer as, you know, we could have a world where there are, what'd you say, 1,000 people building billion-dollar companies. And with IndieHackers, I think of like a million people building million-dollar companies. It's even one level up, you know, how do we increase the sort of size of the top of the funnel of entrepreneurship, so even more people can start a company, people who previously never thought they could start a company before. And so the way I would describe IndieHackers is that it's a sort of community-powered media company, where we exist just to inspire people to start companies. We find people who have Really cool stories, people who are kind of the underdogs, the people who you wouldn't expect to start a company. And we ask them how they started it, how much revenue they're generating. Really big on transparency because it's so inspiring when you see exactly how much money someone's making and how it transformed their lives. And that gets really a bunch of other people— what did you call them? People who get shit done— to get off their asses and say, you know what, maybe I should do this. Maybe I shouldn't be working my job at Google, or maybe I shouldn't be, you know, contracting. Maybe I should start my own company. Uh, and so that's kind of our goal with IndieHackers.

And, uh, and we haven't invested yet in a company, but we're in touch with a number of companies that you put us in touch with. Um, and we are really inspired by a lot of those companies, you know, targeting $1 million in revenue because they are going to be successful with or without the venture community, right? And that's super interesting to me in terms of how much courage and confidence that gives, uh, Courtland, your founders, is that they can look at that option and say, you know what, I could take that path, I could go fast, or I can just take, you know, this— or I could take that hypergrowth, or I could take this fast path or the medium path. And they, they seem to be very level-headed about it, which I guess I find that super attractive. I don't know about you, Daniel, but most venture capital firms probably would find that as a not attractive quality. But I kind of like people who are realistic as well in how they build these businesses.

Yeah, they're not trying to build companies that investors would invest in, and that completely changes their outlook and how they build companies. They're not trying to become a world-changing unicorn. Most of the time, they're just trying to improve their lives, their family's lives, the coworker and their community's lives. And once they get to that point where they're like, okay, my life is radically different, I have complete autonomy, I have creative freedom, I can work whenever I want to on whatever schedule I want to, then often people branch out in different directions. Some of them go big, uh, some of them decide to stay small, some of them start another small indie hacker company. It really runs the gamut. And I think the sort of juxtaposition between looking at a lot of these indie hacker companies compared to a lot of the companies coming out of Y Combinator or the Bay Area in general shows you how much of an influence investors have on the decisions that founders choose to make.

Right. In some ways, what you're saying, Courtland, is the founders start to game um, instead of customers or, you know, build for customers, they start building for investors. And that is a path to disaster. And when we get back from this quick break, we're gonna do a little roundtable here. Courtland and Daniel will talk about companies that they've invested in or they're working with on their platforms and why they are super obsessed or inspired by them and what lessons they're learning from them. And I'll include, uh, 2 as well. So by the time we get to this end of the— end of this episode, we're gonna have talked about 6 companies and what we think is really interesting about them. Maybe even a couple more, we'll see if we throw a couple in when we get back on This Week in Startups. Last year alone, false declines cost the US, UK, French, and German markets over $20 billion with a B. False declines are what happens when an online purchase is declined when it should have been accepted. This is something that anybody who's running an e-commerce company knows about. About. And that's why if your business takes payments online, you need to check out checkout.com, right? A great domain name, checkout.com. They desilo the payment process. Their modular cloud payment platform is ideal for businesses looking to delight customers and unlock new revenue streams. Checkout.com will give you the insights you need so you can optimize your customer experience, get more out of every transaction, and gain a granular understanding of how cash flows in and out of your business. And with checkout.com, your business can innovate, adapt to your markets, create outstanding customer experiences, and make smarter financial decisions faster. Big brands like Adidas and Samsung trust them, but Checkout loves to support growing businesses— that's why they're here on This Week in Startups— and support their digital transactions. So they just raised a $450 million Series C at a $15 billion valuation. They're not going anywhere. They know what they're doing. Learn more at checkout.com/twist and see if their payment solution works for your business. You can even create a free test account to see how their dashboard works, and it's very beautiful and elegantly designed. So go ahead and check out checkout.com/twist. Make sure you go to checkout.com/twist. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. We have 2 amazing guests here who are doing the hard work of working with founders When they are just getting started with their companies. Courtland Allen, he is CS Allen on Twitter, and he is running IndieHackers.com. Daniel Gross is Daniel Gross on the Twitter, and he is running Pioneer.app. P-I-O-N-E-E-R.app. All right, so let's start off. Maybe Daniel, you could tell us what's one of the startups you're working with right now that you find super inspiring and why?

One interesting one to start with would be a company called RoboFlow. I believe their website is roboflow.ai. They just raised, I think, a $2 million round today, so they're quite topical. They're one of the earlier pioneers. The product is kind of obvious. We quickly touched base on it. The high-level gist here is that pretty much every business application, you know, I think initially went through a wave where it was powered by an abacus and then, you know, kind of software hit the world and it was powered by SaaS and software. There's this kind of next revolution where it's going to get powered by machine learning. Really, what machine learning means when we think about it today in terms of what AI can do, it's really computer vision. That's the main thing computers can do today that they couldn't do previously. Now, the issue is the abstractions for using computer vision are not really that great. It's reminiscent of the Steve Wozniak era of computers where it's really only for for nerds. These guys have basically built a fairly simple piece of workflow software that lets you train and deploy models into your business, into whatever business logic that you have. I actually am of the personal belief, be it Roboflow or another company, this will be part of every single piece of software you have. The fact that the computer can just understand and use images. My proof for this is basically that's how humans operate. The visual Cortex is the most powerful part of our brain, I believe. So they have traction from a lot of companies, large and small. And there is kind of another interesting— so basically, I think the business case is extremely obvious. This is just like the next revolution in software.

And they charge enterprises for this, right? So just to sort of give an example, I'm an enterprise. I mean, security is the one that comes up. So if you wanted to tag people and have a workflow built for what happened in these— in this insurrection on last Wednesday, uh, or whenever we tape this. Um, you could have somebody who's non-technical frame each person, and if there was something on their uniforms, like they wore some kind of a badge or something, you could highlight that badge and train it to look for that badge in other videos or something to that effect, correct?

That's totally true, yeah. So, so obviously you got a vertical in security, you have a vertical in agriculture where you could— there's like tons of work for flow software for agriculture that involved manually labeling, like, how good is this plant right now? What is the state of this plant?

Oh.

Obviously, that can be done automatically by a machine. You have in the healthcare industry just tremendous amounts of epic healthcare systems. Take a photo of the pill the patient's been using that they're not sure of, and then that's getting— obviously, that should be done by a machine. So across pretty much every single industry, Opendoor uses a bunch of computer vision. There's always something involved in understanding the visual space. And yeah, so the way it works is you call them up and you say, I'm the CEO of this company, or I'm the engineering manager in this company, and we've read a cool paper, implementing it ourselves will take a year. And they'll say, great, we'll get it. You can use RoboFlow and use it in 2 days. A company called Lobe.ai did something fairly similar, got acquired by Microsoft. The space is, I think, extremely obvious and lucrative. What's kind of funny is the founders, and kind of great and funny, is the founders are, you know, Pioneer for the most part, half of it's international, half of it's from the United States. But when we say the United States, a lot of it is, I mean, most of it's not New York, San Francisco. And I think these guys are from Iowa, from Des Moines, and they are as international as a founder from Ireland, in my opinion.

Mm-hmm.

And I think it really speaks to the fact that we'd love having an international charter. I didn't grow up in the United States. I grew up in Israel. Being able to support the greatest immigrant country on the planet, to me is great and wonderful. But there are also a lot of immigrants to Californian culture that are technically US citizens. And they're kind of funny now if you chat with them, their goal is to build the largest tech company in Des Moines. I don't know who else they're competing with, maybe John Deere. And it's, and that's a real thing. I mean, I think if you look at people that have come out of Georgia Tech If you look at people that come out of the University of Alabama, there's a lot of great technical folks. I mean, University of Alabama, I think, made the Saturn V rocket, if I'm not mistaken. It's all out of that area. So I think it speaks to the fact that we think a lot of the important intellectual immigration into the United States, Elon Musk maybe being the prime example, grew up in Pretoria. But I also think within our country, there's a lot of great Airbnb founders, one I think from Rhode Island, drew house—

They know they went to RISD, right? So they might— I don't know if they were from Rhode Island or they went to just the Rhode Island, uh, was it Institute of Design? But it is a great point. Courtland, what are your thoughts on this, uh, startup? I'm curious.

I think it's very impressive, and I'm curious, like, what their— how much funding do they need to sort of democratize these computer vision tools? Are they, uh, and where are they from?

Founders are, I mean, from Des Moines. I don't exactly remember what they were doing previously, they managed to get to a decent amount of revenue, I think like 6-figure revenue without that much funding. I think it goes to show one kind of neat thing. I'm sure you guys have this too. When you join Pioneer, you get $100,000 in Google Cloud credits and AWS credits. And I actually think like for companies using computer vision, that's extremely helpful because there is, you know, There is fixed CapEx in training the model that is just GPU training time, and that dynamic is pretty unique. It'd be the equivalent if I told you that every SaaS business got 3 salespeople for free for a year. That would actually be quite helpful. So that's how they got started, I think.

Courtland, what's your startup that is inspiring you right now?

Yeah, so I'll talk about one of my favorite indie hacker stories. It's called Key Values, www.keyvalues.com. So this is a site that helps engineers find teams that actually share their values. So if you think about being an engineer, you're looking for a job, often the number one thing you care about is salary, you know, location, stuff like that. But increasingly, people want to work at companies that actually share their values, right?

Mm-hmm.

Are these places that practice inclusion? Are these places that have good work-life balance? Are these places that are good for parents? Or maybe you want the opposite of all these things. Uh, regardless, you can go to key values and basically select from a list of your values and it'll pull up some of the best tech companies that align with the values that you want to see.

Oh my Lord.

And I think as— yeah, it's great. And I, I think probably the most inspiring thing about it, I mean, you look at some of the companies that are on here, GitHub, Asana, Webflow, Airtable, Y Combinator, Instacart. Uh, but this is all done by one person. Her name is Lintai. She's like the prototypical indie hacker. She doesn't have any co-founders. She doesn't have any employees. She's just sort of by herself in her apartment working on this site, onboarding all the companies, doing all the sales. And it more than pays for her salary. It's a very profitable one-person company. And she actually came from kind of outside of the tech world. She had nothing to do with tech. And she ended up getting her first tech job at Homejoy. So Homejoy, if you remember, was kind of the Uber for home cleaning back in the day. Uh, they raised a ton of money.

Very controversial.

Very controversial. There was a ton of money. They were, uh, growing like a rocket ship, but they were also burning a ton of money too. And they eventually kind of imploded. And while she was there, she saw that, hey, like she had this job as kind of like a city opener and she was very operational. She was kind of the glue that would tie the different organizations, you know, have sales, talk to HR, talk to the engineers, et cetera. But she just saw how well the engineers are being treated and she's like, well, this is like a chump job that I'm doing. I need to learn how to code and do my own thing. So she spent a year learning how to code, and at the end of it, she was trying to get her job herself and she just didn't like how opaque the process was. You had to jump through so many hoops as an engineer before you could even talk to anybody in the team and figure out like, what's it actually gonna be like to work at this place?

Mm-hmm.

And so she had the idea to create keyvalues.com. And, uh, I think the first 10 or 20 companies she onboarded were completely free. And then she ended up going through Y Combinator herself, but she had a very indie hacker mindset. She wasn't sure if she wanted to go big. She wasn't sure if she wanted to become a billion-dollar unicorn. She really wanted something that would just make her life better and the lives of her customers better. And so at the end of YC, she didn't do Demo Day and the partners were not very happy about it. They really wanted her to do Demo Day, but she didn't raise a dime. I don't think she even touched the money that she raised initially from YC. She just started doing sales. So to get a profile on keyvalues.com, I think it's 5 or 10 grand a year these companies are paying. And she does a little bit of upfront work to sort of get them featured and to make sure that their profiles, you know, actually reflect the values that they have as a company. But after that, it's pretty hands-off. And I interviewed her on Indie Hackers and she was making, I think, 80 or 90 grand a quarter, just putting up these profiles for herself.

Amazing.

And she's gotten quite a few acquisition offers as well. So, this is one of my favorite stories. I think it's like the way it's transformed her life has been pretty significant. And all the companies using it, it's super valuable for them because it's not just, uh, sort of lead gen for hiring engineers, but also like their recruiters are putting a link to their profiles at the bottom of their outgoing emails. And it's forced them to be a lot more thoughtful about, you know, what kinds of places they want to be as companies to work at.

Pretty great. I mean, when you look at what they're actually asking people, hey, do you want to be in a B2B or a B2C company? Do you want one that's remote? Okay. Something ideal for parents, work-life balance. one that is, uh, you know, design-driven, etc. What a brilliant, simple idea, and what a simple, uh, brilliant economic model. You give the first 10 away for free, then everybody's got to be up there. It's hypercompetitive. And she underpriced it, right? If she's only charging $5,000 or $10,000 a year, that's less than what you would pay when you, uh, convert one— but, but one—

Yeah.

—developer. And if you convert one developer a year, that makes it well worth it. And just being able to state your values, like you're saying, is just a great way to have clarity inside your organization. It's a clarifying tool for your organization, right? But that's what I read into it, was that sales strategy of underpricing. Daniel, any thoughts on key values?

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I think there's— to me, I feel like there's this interesting migration of like a 1.0 of internet review sites to kind of the 2.0. And Glassdoor Glassdoor comes to mind as like the way people currently decide, you know, where to work. And you get a sense from, you know, Glassdoor just how big this type of thing can get. But as these companies get big, like you have all these weird stories that you hear about Yelp and you hear about Amazon too, the reviews being distorted, they hold companies hostage, all sorts of weird stuff start happening. And that I think devalues the currency of the review.

Yes.

And so I think there's, you can actually see across every industry, be it job selection, which is what Key Values is doing, I imagine this will happen to product search, you know, in the future as people lose faith in Amazon reviews. And I imagine, you know, this has kind of already happened with Yelp reviews kind of meaning less and less over time, especially compared to Google reviews. There are all sorts of these, I think, new platforms that will hopefully provide— I think the interesting thing for her to reason is as she becomes successful, how does she ensure things are high quality and trustworthy? Because there does seem to be— The economic incentive is, you know, at some point I think potentially going to compromise the quality of the reviews. So having kind of rigid founder grip strength there I think will matter quite a bit. And wouldn't surprise me if 2, 3, 4 years from now we see this becoming kind of more impactful than Glassdoor.

Amazing. When we get back from this quick break, I am going to share a company that I absolutely fell in love with because they were charging $35 a month to be part of a Slack community. And they got thousands of people to do it, and they just raised their $2 million seed. I'll tell you the name of that company when we get back on This Week in Startups. I am in love with a new product. It's called ChartHop. It's new to me. I mean, it's been around, to be honest, and many of you are already using it. You can go see it at charthop.com/twist. When you want to create an organizational chart for your company, this is a critical moment that shows you are venture fundable. If You know, these are my top executives, these are my units, this is my group that's going to do customer support, this is my marketing group, this is my CTO, this is, uh, finance, this is operations. Well, you can do all that and make like some cruddy little drawing with like some painting program or sketching program, or you can make your own org chart that has all the data around all of your people. We call this people data. We call it human capital in the industry. But in this org chart, you can also put in performance reviews right into the org chart, and you centralize all the data there. And you can build a nice agile, adaptable, and inclusive team because you can look and say, hey, where's my diversity? How am I doing with building out my organization? And at the core, a startup is about people. We all know that. Go to charthop.com/twist and try it out today. You're going to get $600 in credits. I talked to the founders, I talked to the marketing team over there, and I said, just give people hundreds of dollars. Just come over the top and throw— like, just grab a handful of hundies and throw them at the audience. Well, here it is, charthop.com/twist. $600 in credits. Go and get it set up now. Basically, that $600 is going to cover your first 5 employees on the platform, which makes it a no-brainer to get started. Go ahead and check out ChartHop, c-h-a-r-t-h-o-p.com/twist. For six hundy, get it now because I don't know if they're going to keep that offer up. All right, welcome back, Daniel Gross. Just made a great point about structured reviews. Let's just call it reviews 2.0 because we all know Yelp reviews just immediately go to like three and a half stars, and these dipshits will write reviews like, "Ah, this is the best sushi I ever had in my life." They sat me ten minutes late. One star. And you're like, "How am I supposed to process this?" Like, or in the in the case of Glassdoor. It's just this constant like, oh, I was fired, I was let go, I'm gonna go flame the— my former boss because they didn't let me do what I wanted to do there. Courtland, what's your feedback on Daniel's insights into your startup keyvalues.com?

Yeah, I think, uh, Daniel used a very important word there, which is incentives. When you're creating a platform like this or any sort of website, uh, you've got incentives basically to grow, to make money. Uh, and I think for any platform, there comes a certain point where the incentive to grow can outstrip the incentive to make your customers happy in certain ways. And you have to be very careful about that. So if you look at a company like Lambda School, for example, uh, Austin, the founder, has been very careful to align their incentives with, uh, basically that of their students. So they don't really get paid unless their students actually get placed at a job. For something like Yelp or Amazon, for example, like they're not necessarily incentivized to clean up a lot of the bad reviews. It might be better for them to just leave that there. And I think in general, companies that are more motivated to sort of grow at all costs face this dilemma more often. And so in Lynne's case with Key Values, she doesn't really need to grow at all costs. You know, she's like pretty happy doing what she's doing right now. She really does care about the trustworthiness of the site and the reviews and the sort of profiles on the site. And there isn't some sort of external pressure where she needs to grow 5% a week, every week, that's going to make her compromise that trust. And so I I like— I've seen this pattern, you know, very often with indie hackers companies where they end up being a little bit more trustworthy just because they don't have anything pushing them in the direction to make these decisions that would compromise their ethics or their values or the quality of their site.

Uh, Daniel, any final thoughts there on reviews and, uh, the incentive of founders to go too fast and basically from pressure from investors do the wrong things that are not in the best interest of their product or customers?

Well, I do think it's an interesting point, and it kind of speaks to Courtland's opening statement about his company kind of almost being a media company, and I think a lifestyle brand more than just simply, you know, a subreddit, in the sense that founders I have found for the most part, and I still experience this myself, are kind of performing, are kind of, how would you say, I mean, We are apostles looking for a god to perform for. So you kind of are like, what should I do? And you perform for whatever that person is. And you meet these people early on in life that invest in your company if you're in the venture world, and they kind of tell you to go big. And you're thinking, okay, I want to make something as big as Stripe, as big as SpaceX. And for the most part, actually, that leads to wonderful outcomes. I don't think I'd be speaking to you over Zoom had we not had that culture. Occasionally, it leads to things like WeWork, which, you know, get overfunded. Still interesting businesses, but they get overfunded a little bit. And I think it's because you kind of overdose on that, whatever you want to call it. You know, it's like cortisol— too little and you get Addison's, too much and, you know, you get whatever that other disease is. There's a perfect dose-response curve. But here's my point, my final point. Cortland is, I think, creating a different model and a different culture, more importantly, where you actually can live an amazing life, and by the way, probably be just as rich because you own so much more of a business that just is so cash flow rich. At the end of the day, Peloton, the most probably beloved home fitness name on the planet, I think John Foley, the CEO of Peloton, by the time of IPO owned like 4% or 7% of it. Box, And so, you have a situation where you have, say, a $10 billion company. The CEO owns 4% of that company. It's not too different from someone who just has a business that grosses $10 million of free cash flow a year. So, like, I think the concept that IndieHackers people can, you know, to the extent that you care about money and that's your forcing function, be any kind of less financially successful than the venture model is just not true. It's just a different lifestyle. And I think until AntiHackers was created, there was no outlet for it. And so Cortland's really the, you know, the Chris Nolan of of that movie, which I think is awesome because it alludes to different flavors of companies.

Yeah, and and the great news about it, I think, is a great way to frame it, Daniel. And the great news about it is it's not a permanent decision. You can, Cortland, at any point in time, the founder of Key Values, she could say, "You know what? I got it to seven million in revenue." Now I would like to raise money at a $150 million valuation or $100 million valuation, and I'm going to be super capital efficient, which is what com.com did. When I invested, it was a $5 million company, and then I woke up the next day and they did a $250 million round, and I dubbed it a Pegasus. And I think Notion falls into the Pegasus category too of skipping— how many rounds of funding did they skip? Many.

All of them.

All of them. It's crazy. And so there is definitely a model here, and it is, I think, very disruptive to venture capitalists who, as I started in my preamble, Courtland, I said they don't seem to want to do what we do, which is hang out in the orchard or hang out by the spring where all these startups start. They don't want to do that kind of work. Courtland, anything you want to respond to there?

Yeah, I mean, it's hard work. There's a lot of founders at the top of the funnel, and if you need these venture-scale returns, it's not super simple to sort of pick and choose and work with people at that phase to figure out who's going to be big. I mean, Y Combinator's done an excellent job at it. I think Pioneer is obviously a really good accelerator of people who might not otherwise be able to build these like impactful companies. But it's much easier as an investor to sort of sit back and see, okay, who is sort of, you know, bursting out of the pack, and then use your access and connections and network to try to get into those rounds.

Yeah, and it's really interesting when you look at the area we're in and where we all operate in this early stage, it feels collaborative. Right? We all feel like we could all work on a deal together, or an Indie Hacker company could become a Pioneer company, could become a Launch company. It's all good. A Y Combinator company, they could go any order of those routes. But then when the venture capitalists get involved, they're just super sharp-elbowed. They're like, nobody else can be in this round. I have to take the whole round. There's no room for everybody else. And they just give take-it-or-leave-it term sheets, and they get into this sort of zero-sum game. All right. Anyway, My pick is really interesting. It's a company called SoleSavvy, and you can go see them at solesavvy.com. And what they're doing is they use off-the-shelf software. It's called Slack. I think Slack costs whatever, $7 a month, $10 a month for a premium account. I'm not even sure if they have a premium account or if they use the free version, but they created a subscription platform for sneakerheads, and they put e-commerce into it, and they used off-the-shelf, you know, I'm assuming Zapier or If This Then That to pipe in deals on shoes, et cetera, so that their sneakerheads get an edge on the market to get the best sneakers and they help each other out and they talk about collecting, et cetera. And if you're spending $500 on a pair of sneakers and you're doing that 20 times a year and that's your hobby, well, why wouldn't you pay 35 bucks a month to be part of a community that helps you get an edge? And they don't need to have tens of millions or even millions of people. You could have thousands to tens of thousands of people. This could be an incredible, incredible business. And they just raised their $2 million seed. I don't know if you guys have seen this sort of no-code, off-the-shelf software or anybody doing paid communities like this where people are paying.

Yeah, it's super popular with indie hackers actually. Paid communities, paid content, paid newsletters in general are one of the sort of easiest stepping stones So if you think about the types of capital that people come into startups with, if you're gonna fundraise, like you're gonna get financial capital right off the bat. But often, you know, if you were, you know, living in the suburbs of like Minnesota, you don't know anything about fundraising. No one in your hometown cares about VCs and you're gonna like bootstrap things. You really don't have much to get going besides, you know, social capital or something. So a lot of what indie hackers will do is they'll build audiences by collecting resources, by curating resources, And by learning things and then sharing what they know. And then they'll find different ways to convert this social capital, this goodwill that they've gotten from so many different people into a platform. And so for something like this, you know, like I would have to trust that like, you know what you're talking about when it comes to sneakers, et cetera. But if you can build that audience, I think it can work really well. And it's an easy stepping— easier stepping stone than having to build some sort of groundbreaking technology that might cost millions of dollars and dozens of engineers to end up building.

Yeah, and what's also inspiring about it for me was the, the daily active users engagement was like 90% plus. So basically they're just in there all day long, and Slack is so persistent that it totally makes sense. Um, Daniel, have you seen anything in the community space that's similar, or any thoughts on SoulSavvy before we move on to your next company?

Yeah, it's an interesting question. I think I wonder a lot about— for Courtland, but for me actually, like, you, you do see some of these Slack communities just be really successful in charging money. And Courtland, I don't know how you think about it. I have moments of consternation where really depending on the day, I think, okay, the software that we're building is quite impactful and the uniqueness in the software really matters. And then I watch someone who's like has a Substack and forget them making money, like the influence they're commanding is just like much greater than ours. And I think Maybe we're thinking like, are we working too hard? Should we just do a Slack and move on?

I think the software could be useful from a branding aspect. I know with IndieHackers, I thought a lot about it early on. Maybe it was mostly just the appearance. I just didn't want IndieHackers to look like something else. And Pioneer certainly doesn't look like anything else. I think that in a way can capture people's imagination. At the very least, it can help them remember who you are. You know, assuming you have like positive aspects to your brand. With Pioneer, I think of the gamification and the motivation that comes from like your sort of program. I think it's hard to sort of get that on a Slack. And it's very easy to look at one Slack and conflate it with every other Slack. So I think it depends a lot on your ambitions. But there certainly are, like, there's been a huge proliferation of these tools that allow you to build communities. Like Circle.so is a really big one this year that's come out. And I've also seen people with podcasts just creating these massive Facebook groups that aren't even paid. But they'll just grow to like 10,000, 20,000 people and they'll be super active. And here I am like plugging away on IndieHackers trying to get people to develop a habit to come directly here. And sometimes it feels like a little bit of a waste. Like this is definitely the hardest way to go. But if you can capitalize on the brand you build from your own proprietary software, I think it's useful.

It's so funny because to give you guys the perspective from where we sit, we're looking at what you're doing going, I guess we're doing it wrong. We should be building software. They're building software. Yeah, it's so funny.

That's crazy.

We use Slack and we're like, oh God, making this huge mistake. And, you know, we have the largest angel syndicate in the world. Yeah. And it's super embarrassing. We have 6,000 members. We are doing 40 deals a year, 50 deals a year, putting $30 million to work, and we don't have a platform. It's literally a Mailchimp list, a spreadsheet, and a Slack.

I don't think you need a platform.

Yeah, it's— it— to me, it's so funny that every founder is insecurely staring at the other person being like, well, wait a minute, that strategy seems Much smarter. I think, by the way, one way to square this for both sides is often when you're managing engineers and you're mentoring them, one piece of advice I would often say is, look, if you're a software engineer and there's a task and it'll take you 4 hours to write code for it to get the task done, or it'll take you 3 hours to do it just manually, you probably should spend hours on it because that's what your personality is. And so I think Courtland— I know for me, I don't want to speak for Courtland, I can only build software. I'm not as blessed with your extroversion, Jason. So it's quite possible. I know for Pioneer, it is certainly a tax basically that the culture and the team, with the exception of maybe 1 or 2 people, are such introverts. All in want to do is write code. It's quite possible that the better version of Pioneer is actually just started by extroverts who are like, look, I don't care, Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram, just get going. Whereas we are like, wow, look at the animation. The animation is really nice. And so I don't know if that's a boon or a tax. We'll find out in 10 years.

Yeah. All right. When we get back from this quick and final break, Daniel will give us his next company, then Courtland, then myself, and we'll do a quick round robin when we get back on This Week in Startups. Do you ever wish that you invested early in some of the best-performing IPOs of 2019 and 2020? I bet you did. Well, OurCrowd investors were able to invest in many of those IPOs because OurCrowd allows accredited investors to invest directly in these startups, and they can do it easily and they can do it early. And that's what it's all about. And you know, these companies Companies go on and sometimes they IPO and other times they get bought. OurCrowd investors benefited from investing early in companies like Beyond Meat that IPO'd. Amazing, right? That's a great exit strategy. Another one is many of OurCrowd's companies have been bought by really high-end acquirers like Intel, Nike, Microsoft, and Oracle. OurCrowd's professional research team identifies these promising companies and promising funds Across a range of sectors, and they do it across a range of stages and many different locations. And OurCrowd is investing in medical technology, agtech, food production, the multi-billion-dollar robotic industry, and so much more. So here is a very easy call to action for you: you go to ourcrowd.com/twist, O-U-R-C-R-O-W-D dot com slash twist. You go to ourcrowd dot And then you can start investing. OurCrowd is free to sign up for, and you just go to ourcrowd.com/twist. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, Daniel, you're up. Tell us about the next startup that's inspiring you right now.

Excellent. Um, I'd love to chat quickly about a company called Palabra, which is actually a launch company now. Palabra is— let's talk about the business first. And then we can touch base about the person. The website is palabra.io. Actually, it originally got started as a product a bit adjacent to it now. Originally started as kind of a Zapier for email. And Karen, the founder, did a nice job of focusing it on a much more specific use case, which is basically this: no one has truly kind of dethroned Salesforce. force to date. And I think the right strategy to kind of dethroning it is not trying to build the whole thing whole hog, but just plucking piece by piece off. And so the message for Palabra is this, and maybe we'll pitch it to Courtland here. You have users arriving on your website. There are different flows in a funnel in terms of where you'd like them to be. You're not a traditional SaaS business. You're not selling software, but maybe you can imagine a person made an account, a person submitted one upvote, Person wrote a post, person wrote 5 comments. And maybe that's kind of your terminal goal is I wanna get a lot of users into the 5-comment phase because you figured out, boy, if they just write 5 comments, they're committed. And so it organizes your users in different steps of your funnels, and it'll basically automatically manage when to email each user based on triggers and different steps of their funnels. And it's not the only tool in the world that does this, but I do think it's one of the more specific and precise ones. You can contort Salesforce to do this, but you can contort a database to do whatever you want. It's still helpful to have a more specific tool. Karen, I really see as— I don't know if you guys have read his books— as Lisbeth Salander from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, your kind of penultimate hacker, female hacker personality who Who is seemingly very strong and quiet. Like, you won't hear her much on— we do all sorts of calls on Slack. Quiet assassin. Quiet assassin. You said it best.

So, um, well, I mean, it's so interesting because I watched her— we're having like a little inception point here— I watched her on you having her display the product, and I just watched her and I just thought, who is this person? And I think she had like $500 in revenue or something completely de minimis. And I just said to my team, usually we're looking for more than this, $5K to $25K is kind of our sweet spot. I was like, get me this person. We have to get it. Just so completely understood her customer. And then I was watching her build the product and I had looked at different videos you had done with her. And I think that's actually something very strong you're doing, Daniel. Even though you're an introvert, you fake being an extrovert pretty well on your livestreams.

Yeah.

Nobody would know. And those livestreams are so, so powerful that you do. Where you bring somebody in who's a founder, who's notable, who's got knowledge, and then you just have them give feedback to another founder. And then you know people are lurking, and so I'm sitting there lurking, and I'm like, "Wow, what a great idea!" She's doing this email automation and these triggers, and it feels it looks like Notion. It looks beautiful. So it's got this incredible design. And then I went under the hood, and I started looking at you know her expense base and how quickly the product velocity was. And that's one thing I'll say, Daniel, about the companies Remote Hour and Polaris. The product velocity is extraordinary on those 2 companies. It's some of the fastest I've seen. And we all know speed is important because with the iterations comes the lessons, right? You start to learn and understand your customers faster than your competitors or just another company. And that means you can get to profitability, get to break-even, you know, before you run out of capital or run out of energy. Courtland, any thoughts on Palabra?

Yeah, I like that insight that they're moving quickly. I was talking to David Xu, the founder of Retool, on the Indie Hackers podcast a while back. And when Retool got started, I was always in their little Intercom chat bubble saying like, hey, I need this feature, I need this. And they were incredibly quick about executing and getting new features out the door. Same with Heroku. In the early days, I was using Heroku and I was talking to the founders and the early engineers and they were like iterating super quick. And every company where I've seen this pattern where I'm trying to build something and they're like building features, you know, the same day I request it, I regret not investing in those companies because they always end up being worth a ton. So maybe we should be investing in Palabra.

Well, it's interesting, you know, that is a— that's a very interesting insight, is that the velocity could equal the success eventually. It could be like a really good tell. Keep going, Courtlandt.

You want more iterations through the loop, and the faster you're going, the more iterations you go through the loop, and the faster you learn and you course correct. I also like that it seems very opinionated. Um, these kind of tools are— indie hackers eat these tools up because they're all trying to build websites. It takes a long time to build something. It's hard to find traction. And when an opinionated tool comes around that gives you more insight about your users, and not only that, but tells you like, this is how it should be. Like you should have a funnel set up that, you know, your customers or users go through, et cetera. Um, people just build better companies, not because they're genius founders, they've read a bunch of strategy playbooks, but because the tools themselves are telling them what they should focus on. So I like this because I think it will end up, you know, assuming it gets big, increasing the size of the top of the funnel because more founders are gonna find it easier to get started and to find success, which means I'll have more success stories to broadcast on Indie Hackers itself.

All right. What's your next one, Courtland?

Uh, so I'm gonna talk about another one called Closet Tools. So Closet Tools is kind of similar to, um, Key Values in that what I like about it is that it's a very prototypical indie hacker story. The founder, his name is Jordan O'Connor. He, again, doesn't have any co-founders, didn't have any investors, doesn't have any employees, just one guy in his pajamas building this app. And he also, you know, came from sort of an underdog background where he had tens of thousands of dollars in student debt. He was married, he had kids, he had a full-time job. He just didn't have a lot of time. And at a certain point, he was like, you know, this is crazy. Like, I've gotta dig myself out of this hole. And so he just started waking up a few hours before his family every single morning and just learning web development. And he would learn by like reading tutorials and taking courses and then just going out and trying to help people. And for 3 years, he didn't, he didn't make a single dime. He would just wake up early and build things online to help people who needed help. And sort of the last person who needed his help was his wife. She was selling her clothes on this platform called Poshmark. Not sure if you're aware of it, but you can basically sell your used clothes to other people.

Of course.

And she was like, this just takes forever. I have to share, you know, my closet on Poshmark to my feed. And he's like, well, I can automate this. You know, I'm a web developer now. Let me look at it. And so he automated it and one thing led to another and eventually created this business that's making him $40,000 a month in revenue. Pretty much all profit. He's producing no expenses from all of these like Poshmark fanatics who love using this tool that makes them more productive. And what I love about it is that essentially Poshmark itself is like creating a sort of, sort of widening the top of the funnel of entrepreneurs by allowing people who don't really wanna learn to create anything to build an online business of their own. And then what Jordan's doing is he's coming in and he's building a tool to support the people on this platform. And it's not even like an officially supported tool. Like Poshmark doesn't have, uh, an app store. They don't have an API. He just sort of hacked this together and people are using his tool to make more money. And so I love this pattern of people looking at these platforms that are helping other people succeed and building tools for them, whether it's YouTube or OnlyFans or Twitch. Uh, all of these people are super motivated.

The story of PayPal, you know, according to Sacks and, and Thiel and everybody over there, was they, you know, eBay didn't have this. And then of course eBay winds up buying them eventually in what became one of the great under— one of the great acquisitions ever. And talk about an underpriced asset. Uh, every time I talk with Sacks about it, he's just like, I can't believe we sold so early. You got to ride your winners. Daniel, thoughts on Closet Tools?

Oh, what I love is to kind of pull up your bootstraps and figure it out how to code and made a business all on your own by waking up a couple hours early. Very much the Jocko Willink energy just applied to the internet, which I think is great. I also think, to me, it's awesome that the internet is big enough that we can support, like a browser extension can support an individual. Because the common venture bet of Honey, Acquisition aside, it's like a browser extension. Who would care? But the internet is so big now. And by the way, it'll still double. We still have 3 billion people that aren't on it. That yeah, you can build a browser extension and you can live off that. And I don't know, I just think that's awesome. To me, it's really exciting to think about the fact that there will literally be 10 million of these in our lifetime. People who just figure out how to code and I don't know.

Yeah.

So it's not particularly intellectual of a comment, but it's just enthusiastic. That's my, that's my—

there's a lot of these very profitable browser extensions. Like I talked to Ali Mawani, who runs Streak, which is kind of like a CRM that sits in your inbox. Yes. And he went through YC, I think a year after I did back in 2012. And he's grown the company to like many millions in revenue, very profitable, with a pretty decent sized team. And again, just like a browser extension, which, you know, 5, 10 years ago, you wouldn't imagine anybody paying any amount of money for.

I pay for, I think, 3 or 4 different browser extensions. Grammarly, Which I I experienced mostly through a browser extension. My password manager, I won't say which one, but there's a number of them that are all pretty obvious. And I have one called Push Bullet I pay for. Push Bullet was a really interesting one. I'm not an investor, and I don't know the founder, but I was looking for a way for my Chrome OS desktop to talk to my iPhone, to talk to my iPad, to talk to my Windows desktop, to talk to my Mac desktop, or whatever. You know, I'm always on. all these different gadgets and devices. And what it does is whatever webpage you're on, if you press the Pushbullet button, it sends it to all your other devices. Because you know when you're kind of like, oh, I got to get this thing on my Android phone, how do I get it?

Cross-platform AirDrop.

It's a cross-platform— exactly. Uh, and it's just amazing. Okay, I'll give you my next one. These cats worked at— they worked at InVision. Anyway, uh, blush.design. It's kind of, you know, when you get all these beautiful illustrations on your website, You have a choice. You can go hire an illustrator and clench your fist and go, okay, I hope I'm spending $3,000 on illustrations or $2,000. I hope they come out well. Or you can use the same illustrations that everybody uses from Canva or any other platform. And what they decided to do was it turns out all of these illustrations are using components, pieces, right? An illustration, all the beautiful illustrations you see on websites, So what if you could have an illustration and you say, I want 3 people in this illustration. I want one to be a woman, one to be a man, or I want them to be non-gendered. I would like them to have these skin tones. I would like to have them be kids. I want them to be wearing a jacket or a hat. I want them at a beach, and I want to try 4 different illustration styles. And you can just click and change and make whatever illustration you want. So if you want the background to be a city, and eventually with GPT-3 or GTP-3, whatever it is, you could literally talk to it and just say what you want. And so they're hiring illustrators. And the real lesson I learned from this is this niche of a niche, like you were talking about, Daniel, of just cutting on a really tight little value proposition, they're charging so little. I think it's $15 a month and you can use these things basically royalty-free, license-free. And I was like, this is so cheap, it's ridiculous. And that was what made Canva into a unicorn, a super simple, Easy-to-use tool, underpriced, right? So underpricing and creating massive value for people, they probably will sign up for this and use it but once every year or 2 and not even turn it off because it's just such an incredible value.

This reminds me of, we do something similar for our newsletter at IndieHackers. And so we're constantly putting out content. Our newsletter might have 5 or 6 stories in it and we want illustrations, but it's not particularly financially viable to hire an illustrator to draw something different every single time.

Mm-hmm.

And so we use one called Streamline HQ. I believe my brother's sort of in charge of it, but it's kind of the same idea. You know, you like drag and drop these different, uh, images together and you put them into one and it looks professionally created and it's super easy. And I think again, this just goes to, it's, it's kind of the same category of, um, build tools for people who are trying to make money on the internet. So there are a ton of YouTubers, uh, they need their videos edited. There's a ton of podcasters, they need their videos and, uh, their MP3s, you know, basically cut into clips and promoted. The people making the most money and having the most successful businesses in this space that I've seen are just building tools to help you do this better. And if you're a writer or a newsletter author, you probably want illustrations. And if something can make it much easier, then it's, it's a powerful sort of high-leverage place to be.

Yeah, what I like about it too is you can click the randomize button. Go ahead, Daniel.

I was gonna say, just, just to embellish both of your points, there's a company I think quite successful called Splice that does this for music.

Oh, really?

Splice.com. Yeah, where they have loops and VSTs. Basically, you're a producer and you kind of need a bunch of stuff to put into your music, and you just want that sample or that loop. It's a marketplace for that. And I mean, it's huge, it's large, there's a bunch of these. Now, it's not as automated and generative as Blush.com design. Um, but I, you know, I think to Courtland's point, you, you could— if you're the founder, you're trying to figure out what to build— you could literally go through every single vertical where there are creators that are making money, and you could basically build picks and shovels for them. So I'm sure Twitch streamers, there's a whole bevy of products. YouTube influencers, a whole bevy of products. Instagram influencers, there's already a lot going for that. Um, one variant of this that I think we've seen little sparkles of that I imagine will be huge, again, on this concept of supporting the creators with software, is to me, it's pretty interesting. If you look at this trend where MrBeast has their own burger, The Rock has the best-selling tequila, I think, in the United States. Ryan Reynolds has his own MVNO mobile operator. There's this trend where the celebrity who's kind of basically a distribution platform on the internet, uh, has a white-labeled brand, uh, and is making a tremendous amount of money off that. So I think a very interesting company to make would basically be a white labeling platform for celebrities, where I can imagine all sorts of variants of these that you could hook up. And the key insight is that because everything's digital now, BevMo doesn't matter anymore. What matters is who has the most followers on Instagram. So the question is like, how could you get MKBHD, or how could you get all these YouTube influencers to white label a thing you make and you command 80% margins on it? They have the last 20%. Um, I think would be a very interesting company to start that's kind of adjacent to what we're talking about.

I love just to riff on that, Daniel, of your insight there, which is, oh my God, The Rock or George Clooney are essentially like Walmart. Their shelf space. You could just envision them being a giant warehouse and they just cut through the noise and take you directly there, whether it was Ace of Spades with Jay-Z or the tequila company that George Clooney did, or I guess The Rock has one now. Alexis Ohanian has a— he's got some kind of beverage. I was like, you want to talk about having— I was so jealous. I was like, I need a beverage. Alexis has a beverage.

Well, I assure you, I don't know who this is, but I assure you the way a lot of the stuff goes down is someone reaches Out to them and says, "Here are the economics if you have a branded beverage," and it wouldn't surprise me if The Rock started two years, three years ago. He's now I think the most followed man on Instagram, and he was like, "I don't drink tequila. I just like weight lift all day." And this person was like, "Here are the numbers," and he was like, "Okay, I drink tequila now." Avion.

Wasn't that in Entourage? Was Avion? Yeah. Did they do that? Yeah, Casamigos. All right. Who's next? I'm losing track because we're we're going so many different rabbit holes. It's awesome.

I think we're talking about, uh, your company, Blush Design. Um, but to this point, there's my friend Lee, uh, put together this, uh, sort of no-code tool. She actually just created a Notion document. It's called sidehustlestack.co. And the whole idea behind it is it's a resource to find platform-based work. So like you want to have a side hustle or a side gig, you just go here. It'll tell you everything about, you know, Twitch, Instacart, et cetera, like hundreds of different platforms. And it's blown up. Like she launched it a month ago. It's got like 2 million page views, I think, in the last month because a lot of these Gen Zers on TikTok keep sharing it. 'Cause everybody in Gen Z feels like, you know, they shouldn't have to work a normal job. They should work a job that they're passionate about. And so they love stuff like this.

Love it.

But I would just do kind of what Daniel's saying, like, go through these platforms. Don't get a gig job on one of these platforms. Like, think about, okay, who is succeeding on these platforms? Talk to the top creators, the top video makers, and see if you can create some sort of bespoke solution for them to like sell merch or throw events or host their own paid community or something. Because These people are usually really good at creating content, but they're not the best at building products.

Pretty amazing. No, wait, is Side Hustle Stack part of the IndieHackers community or just the— you're mentioning it's not.

It's just like Lee's side project that she sort of put together on her own. But it's very much in the vein of an indie hacker company because like it's completely no code. You know, this isn't something that like she raised—

Basically a Notion instance, right?

It's exactly what it is, hosted on her own domain using this other app called Super. Another indie hacker company that helps you basically take a Notion website or Notion page and turn it into a website.

I found this person and I reached out to them. I found them, I think, on IndieHackers. And I was like, what's the future of this business? He's like, I don't know. I was like, okay, fair enough. He's like, I mean, 'cause you gotta think Notion is gonna allow to have your own domain at some point, right?

Yeah, totally.

I think there's some business.

I mean, it's very IndieHackers-esque. I've built this thing, it's cool, it's making money right now. I don't have any grander ambitions. We'll see what happens.

We'll see what happens. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's the kind of brave thing, because if you, if you put that company super through a venture lens, now you're having board meetings like, oh my God, and it's all this anxiety. And, you know, what if you hire 10 people and it's growing and then it all gets taken away, right? Whereas in this case, if it all gets taken away, it just moves on to the next project, right?

I think it's very cool for the world in general to have so many people who feel, uh, capable and inspired to experiment with this stuff, because even if 99% of it doesn't go anywhere, The more people you have creating stuff, some of it will, and some of it will become the next unicorn companies that are changing all of our lives. And most of it won't, but it might change the lives of their founders, and that's good enough.

Any other closing thoughts here then? We'll sort of wrap it up with a— I think this was a good experiment. I like this. I mean, this is compelling to us, I think. I'm not sure if this discussion is compelling to the audience. They'll have to let us know on Twitter. But I just texted Nick. I was like, producer Nick, I was like, this is really compelling to me.

Yeah, it's fun to talk.

Yeah, I think, look, if you, if you follow a lesson from, from indie hackers, it's people making things that are compelling to them hopefully become compelling to others. So if you believe that axiom to be true, hopefully this is compelling to other people, but they'll let us know.

What is the deal that— okay, Daniel, you're gonna say something.

Yeah, go ahead, go ahead.

No, no, you go first, and then I was just going to ask you to inform the audience of how you invest in the companies.

Sure, I'll do both. I was just going to say that it's, to me, you look at these charts of the distribution of technologies over time, like how long did it take for people, for everyone in the world to get the printing press, and that's a curve, nice slope. And then you look at that same thing for refrigeration, for microwaves, for televisions, for mobile phones, and the slope of the curve is getting more and more extreme with every new technology. And what's exciting to me about the internet is that itself is a force multiplier on distribution, meaning like you can make things, you can learn things, and you can distribute to people in a way you were never possible before. You talk to some of these indie hackers, some pioneers, some launch companies, and they're like, yeah, you know, life's kind of tough because I have some customers in the UK and I have some customers in Japan. And I'm like, that's not possible up until now. So to me, that's a, that's a huge, huge deal for human productivity and happiness.

It's such an It's such an important insight, Daniel, because even just 20 years ago, the ability to understand a term sheet, the ability to understand how to incorporate, right? These are things that took forever to rack and stack a bunch of servers. And now literally people are like, yeah, I've got customers in Canada and Japan. I mean, Stripe takes care of it, and I've got this other international payments platform that works. But yeah, I've got to manage this third one because I want to get these other 6 countries and I gotta get Adyen going or something. You're like, okay, you don't have any employees in the country, you don't have an affiliate there, you're just collecting money from Japan. Okay, amazing. Like, it's— the world has changed dramatically. Tell everybody, Daniel, what, uh, the deal is and how you decide which companies to invest in. So obviously Palabra, you did invest, I assume you've got equity in now. So how does that part work?

Yeah, correct. So the way, um, Pioneer works is pretty simple. Um, you go to the website, uh, if you do well on the leaderboard if you hit the Global 100, you get reviewed by one of our experts on the team or myself. And if you'd like and we'd like, you'd be— you're invited to become a pioneer. And basically, in exchange for 1%, uh, of your company's equity, we help you form an entity on the spot. We put you through kind of our equivalent of, or sure, or a condensed version of YC, basically a month-long pioneer camp. And then we put you on this live stream, which tends to, in most cases, lead to company raising money. We will occasionally, you know, additionally invest in companies. We haven't quite figured out a rubricized way to do that. It is kind of like off the cuff now, just because only recently pioneers are kind of maturing enough to the point where they're raising proper follow-on rounds. So we'll come up with a, you know, a mechanized way of doing that over time. But the initial steps to pioneer are very simple, very straightforward. There's like no negotiation. It's, it's really built for someone that, you know, is fairly earnest and, and kind of just wants to get started. And, you know, obviously we, you know, help incorporate your company.

And, um, what is it, $10K for 1% or something? Something's— there's some easy—

It's 1% in exchange. Yeah, there's a whole bunch of things you get. Um, uh, it's all on the website. It's all transparent.

So basically 1%. I have the— I have the secret for you. I did it. And, um, People were like, some venture capital firms were like, I don't like this. And all the founders were like, I love it. So 3 or 4 years ago, every time I graduate a class, we would have this experience where the best company would have some VC or seed fund come in and say, we're taking the whole round or we're not doing it. And then there'd be no chance for us to put additional money in. So we just said, hey, listen, if you come to the program, here's a feature. We will do half your round if you get the other half of the round set up. And super pro rata. And some VCs were like, "This is too aggressive." And I was like, "I don't care if you think it's super aggressive. The founders go to market with half their round complete. So when Palabra goes to market and Karen wants to raise a million, she's got five hundred. If she wants to raise five hundred, she's got two fifty just sitting there. So it accelerates. Imagine if every Y Combinator actually Y Combinator companies had this. Remember Yuri Milner did it? Yeah. And it was like, "Whoa!" So. For you, you should just say, hey, for the next 2 funding rounds, can we have 10% of the next round and 5% of the round after that? It's such a de minimis amount and they'll want to give it to you. And then they just have to give you a formal notification. You say— what I said was, we'll tell you within, I think, a week. And we normally do it in 48 hours. We tell you if we're in or not so you don't slow people down. But it does make it— it codifies it. And only one time in like 100 companies did somebody not want to do it. And they kind of lobbied me, and I was like, you know what, why don't we sell into this round? We'll sell half our position. So I just called the founder on— I was like, listen, if you don't want us to take half the round, how about you're so oversubscribed, we'll sell half our position? So we sold half our position, and we still have somebody insurance, and we, we were like, okay, keep going. It just— it told me that the person didn't want me involved, right? They didn't value me as much. So I was like, okay, thanks for letting me know. It lets me know where to focus my energy. Cortland What is the business now? I know you guys are part of Stripe.

Yeah.

What is the business now in terms of how do you set goals for it and how do you define success? Because you're not a fund. And are you getting fund envy now? And are you going to have to go to Stripe and say, hey, listen, can I invest in these companies? Or what's the story here?

I'm sure I could if I wanted. Uh, yeah, I'm a little bit different than the two of you because I'm not exactly trying to create value, but I'm not as concerned with capturing the value because Stripe can sort of do that, right? The idea being, if we can inspire more people to create companies, internet businesses, and if Stripe can remain, you know, sort of the best product on the market for them to use, then it's a win-win. And I don't really have to, you know, do any sort of hard sell on IndieHackers to go use Stripe. In fact, it's the most mentioned company when we do interviews with founders already. And so the goal for me is really just to get the word out to as many people as possible, to inspire as many people as possible. as possible, sort of in the business of inspiration. And, you know, it's telling, we were talking earlier about how having investors sort of changes your mindset as a founder. The same is true with acquirers. You know, if indie hackers had never joined Stripe, like, I would not have been nearly as ambitious with the platform as I am today. I would have been content to be an indie hacker company myself.

Stripe's done pretty good too, so I think it'll all work out, right?

Yeah, they've done, they've done fairly well.

You did take equity, right, Corland?

So, uh, it's been great. You know, the goal is, the goal is to get big and to keep getting bigger. And we've got, uh, you know, many hundreds of thousands of founders have come through the platform. Uh, tens of thousands of them have created a little product on our directory, which we talked about last time, uh, where they're kind of just like building in public and sharing their progress. And it's super fun and cool to go read through what they're doing. And so I hope to do a lot more with that directory later on.

Yeah, 2 of my favorite places to hang out when I'm just You know, I've gotten through my Slacks and my emails and tweets and everything, podcasts, and, you know, I'll just go check out Indie Hacker and look at the conversations going on. Or just— I have a little alert set up when you have Pioneer Labs go off on YouTube and you have a live stream. Sometimes I just jump right into it, Daniel, and watch it real time, right? Or I watch in the rearview mirror. For me, it's like what you guys are doing just allows me to find more startups, and I'm really grateful that you both are doing the hard work because it's so easy to just— and both of you could do this if you wanted to to just go downstream. And I could— I got offered to be at a growth fund, and they're like, you're an idiot. You invest in 60 companies a year, 70 companies a year. It's too much work. We'll, we'll let you make $150 million bet a year. Come work with us. And I was like, yeah, no, I like what I do too much. Maybe it was a stupid move putting $50 million a year into 70 companies versus one.

It's not what you want to do, so don't do it.

Exactly, exactly. Life is short. All right, listen, everybody check out IndieHackers. Follow Courtland on the Twitter and follow Daniel Gross on the Twitter and go check out Pi .app is the domain, correct? I got everything right. Any other plugs, boys, that we need to get in?

Check out the Indie Hackers podcast. We interview founders, we tell inspiring stories. Excellent. So we have a huge variety. Check it out. Just search for Indie Hackers in your podcast player.

Fantastic. And you're really good, Courtland. Um, just really enjoy listening to your voice. It's appreciated. You've got a future at NPR and public radio as well. Uh, and Daniel, did any plugs at the end here? Uh, new— is there new semester starting, or you can, you can jump in anytime at Pioneer, right?

It's infinite. It's open 24/7. As long as the internet's on, we're on, hopefully.

Great, awesome. So hopefully you don't get canceled and get turned off, uh, the internet gets turned off. But yeah, I don't think you're doing anything that would result in a Trump-like ban. All right, uh, thanks for tuning in everybody, and we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.