Courtland and Channing Allen interview the ambitious indie hackers who are turning their ideas and side projects into profitable online businesses. Explore the latest strategies and tools founders are using to capitalize on new opportunities, escape the 9-to-5 grind, and create their own personal revenue-generating machines. The future is indie!
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Conference or an event where I've got speakers. I want my speakers to all know, like, pretty simple. How much time do they have left in their talk? Is it 10 minutes? Is it 30 minutes? And I wanted it to be, like, on some sort of laptop or screen or iPad that they can see while they're talking so they don't go over time. But I wanna also be able to control that pretty much everything about that timer from, like, the comfort of my seat. I don't wanna have to be running up to the stage, telling them how much time is left, depressing pause on the screen, And so that's basically what stage timer.io is. You basically sign on to your website. You create a timer, and you get this whole dashboard with all these cool controls to control a timer. I can add time to it, reset it, make it flash. I can have multiple timers. I can show messages, whatever whatever I want I can do. And then there's another link I can give people. It's like a special view to the timer. That I set up for my speakers. And I will just show them the timer, and it will just show them any messages I send to the timer that I can control. And that's as far as I can tell, that's pretty much it. And I think you're charging, like, 20 bucks a month, 30 bucks a month for this. And you are at last I saw $8000 a month in revenue. Yeah. A bit a bit more already. Yeah. Nice. I mean, this is the journey. Janney, our talking party came on. Like, everybody wants to build something that's simple. That's easy understand, but that, like, makes you a living. I mean, you're making more from this than you're making at your startup job, Lucas. Yeah. It's it's a bit wild. If you think if if you think that a a countdown timer, like the, the most unlikely thing that anybody would pay money for, makes more money than than a than a startup. So it's it's a great way. It's it's a transceiver. Yeah. I saw a post actually where you guys talked about coming up with your idea. I think it's really funny how you came up with your because this is like the the most generic startup advice ever. It's like, keep your eyes open for problems in the world. And, like, one day, you'll find a problem that's worth solving and then solve it. And, like, Almost nobody does that. It's so hard to do that. It's, like, incredibly hard to just stumble across an idea, but that's exactly what you did. You were at, I think, Lucas a friend's recording studio Yeah. And then you saw them, like, start a timer on their iPad and then run to the control area to start controlling it. Like, he didn't have a remote. He had to, like,
People say, like, increasing your surface area for luck, and where it's just you put enough stuff out there. And, actually, the trends example is Sam literally had write maybe 3 articles of mine in a row that had gone viral. And so by the third, he was like, I need to hire this person. And he just DM ed me on Twitter, and he's like, can I hire you? It wasn't even, like, you know, a a proper hiring process. I mean, I had to do an assessment and all that eventually, but, yeah, I think I just In those early days of content, I think I did get a little bit lucky, but it was those few instances where I saw the power of it I was like, oh my gosh. I like, I'm getting job offers from this, like, from writing these articles, and I just then really deeply understood the power that it can have just like you're saying with code. Patrick McKinsey wrote a lot about, how, like, the best jobs to have are the ones that you can't really apply for? Yes. Like, if you're, like, you know, going to a website, filling out a job application and applying, there's, like, a bunch of other people. Like, that's not the best job. Right? Even if it's, like, know, you've spent years in school, learning how to be a back end software engineer, blah blah blah blah blah. Still, there are people at your company probably who were hired the same way that Sam hired you. Because somebody saw proof that they were doing something interesting in the world that was valuable, and they just went straight to that person and probably pay them a boatload more money because that person has so much more leverage. Right? They can negotiate their salary. They can basically leave and be irreplaceable. I mean, this is, like, what I should strike. Right? Like, Stripe had a big layoff. I don't remember how many people got laid off. But then, like, we left Stripe and, like, they're investing in us, and we have, like, an awesome situation that we can negotiate. And so I think that maybe the best thing that writing did for you isn't you said, it's kinda like a job interview without doing a job interview where, like Exactly. You've proven to the world what you can do, and now you have a ton of leverage and can negotiate your way as if you're like a business owner rather than as if you're an employee. No. Totally. And, I mean, my first job well, actually, I I would take my second job out of college. I was in a that let's just say I was in the same role as other folks on the team, and I was getting paid less than half of what they were making. And it's because I came out
Hey. What's up, dude? Hey. What's going on? We are having a very special guest today, Seth Godin, who, got us in pretty excited to talk to. He's a pretty famous dude. Think this is gonna be the first person one of the first people I've ever talked to who I've read at least 3 of their books. Yeah. That's a lot. What have you read? So I read the icarus deception. I've read this is marketing, which is amazing. And I read the dip. What about you? Cool. I've read this is marketing. It's the only Seth Golden book that I've read, but he's done a ton feel like I've encountered him everywhere. I subscribed to his newsletter. I've read his blog for years. I've watched a few of his talks. I think he's given 3 TED Talks. He's written 20 best selling books. He's like the modern day David Ogleby. He's like the the the most popular marketer of our time, besides maybe, like, Gary Vaynerchuk. Like, the two of them seem to be making the most waves is, like, Famous Internet marketers. Yeah. It's insane. In fact, I think the first viral post that was ever on indie hackers, we used to have a lot of interviews, founder interviews, but the first non founder interview that was, like, huge on hacker news, etcetera, was some guy had Seth on this podcast and then turned that into an article and was like, if I only had a $1000, I asked, you know, I asked Seth Goeden. If I only have it if you only had a $1000, what would you do? He posted that to indie hackers. That shit went ballistic. Yeah. We should maybe we should do the same thing. It was if you only have a $1000, you don't have your name. Nobody knows who you are. What business would you start today? Mhmm. I think it's a cool question for somebody who's successful because somebody like Seth is so well known. I mean, if you've given one TED Talk, you're well known. I think he's given 3 or 4 TED Talks. Like, anything he's And like Ted. It's almost like he hasn't had Ted X. Yeah. Not TEDx. Not like this, like, bullshit. Like, my aunt might have needed this thing to give a talk
We are here with Alex Makaw, the founder of reflect dot app. How's it going? Good to be here. Thank you for inviting me. This is your second time on the NDAX this podcast. I can't remember how long ago it was that you were on the first time. It was at least 3 or 4 years ago. Do you remember? It was at least 3 or 4 years ago. I can't even remember what I was talking about. I think let me look it up. I think You were definitely still doing clear bit, but now you have, like, pivoted. Your episode number 15. I found it. Damn. You came out of 2017. Like, you were one of the original, interviewees. We were looking up Clearbit because I was like, okay, Alex has, like, moved on. You started this company Clearbit. I think you raised funding for it. It was huge when I was an SF, like, every company was using Clearbit to, like, look up data. Like, if I wanted to find somebody's email address, I would use Clearbit. And now I looked it up, and it's, like, this huge, like, enterprise y company, like, you go to the website and it says, like, trying to figure out, like, what it does. And at the top, there's just a drop down that says, like, solutions. And you know if a company says solutions at the top, like, it's an enterprise company that's got, like, you know, a 1000 customers in this making bank. And then we looked it up on some other website and it's making, like, tens of 1,000,000 of dollars a year in revenue. I think it was, like, 40 something 1,000,000 and you're not even doing that anymore. You're like, that's cool. I started that. Good enough. I'm on to the next thing. And now you're an indie hacker with the bootstrap business. Called reflect. That's a crazy transition. Yeah. That's right. You say I pivoted. Well, I almost pivoted my life. I I, you know, was CEO of a, you know, a B2B SaaS business, that was, you know, almost two hundred people, and I wasn't doing any coding or building myself. And now I run a consumer app. There's four of us. We have
Hey. What's up, Emma? Hey. How's it going? A while since I've seen you. I think I saw you and Philip and London and, like, the fall of 2018, Yeah. I was like We went to, like, high tea together. Yeah. What what was that? Like, I have this, like, this memory of it where it's like, we had, like, tea and crumpets We have, like, all these, like, little fancy cake bite things. And I was like, this is, like, the fanciest place I've ever been. So this is America or No. This was this was in London. Oh, London. I expected the queen to walk in. It was, like, such a fancy event. Yeah. When Philip and I were traveling around a lot, we landed in London for a couple of months, And it was, like, a fun thing that didn't involve alcohol where you could, like, sit for 3 hours with people and have kind of a deep conversation. So Sometimes people loved it. Sometimes they hated it, but it was kind of fun. I thought it was fun. I thought it was fun. Philip was texting me, like, a week or 2 ago, and he's like, yeah, Chaney invited Emma on. She's worried you're not gonna remember who she is. And I'm like, there's no there's no way I'm not gonna remember Emma. We had high tea together. Who also had high tea with? Literally, nobody else. Emma, what you just described, I was literally talking to a friend about almost like that value proposition a couple of days ago of, like, I, currently, I'm, like, sort of taking a break from drinking alcohol, and I wanna, like, live long and be really healthy. But I live in New York City, And if I want to go out and meet new people or like hang out with friends, like, the only real default past 6 PM that's not go to someone's house, is, like, go get wasted at a at a bar or go to a club or, like, even, like, maybe go to a show, a music show, but, like, you're drinking. Right? And I'm like, why can't we just do, like, tea? Like, why can't we have tea? Why can't we have, like This might sound weird, but, like, we went to this, vintage shop in Williamsburg. And bought this, like, really old vintage China tea set. And it costs, like, 50¢ per cup. Like, it's not a you can find them in these vintage shops. But it's like an excuse where
