BootstrFM

Welcome everyone, to already the second season of Bootstr, episode number seven, after a quite successful experiment, I think, safe to say now in November and December last year, we had six episodes with six different guests. And, I think in total we managed to reach about 13, 000 listeners not unique listeners. I'm assuming some of you have tuned in to multiple episodes, but nonetheless, that's quite remarkable. And so Dom and I were, looking at each other and realizing two things. Number one is we probably need a little bit of a break because doing this every single week is quite intense.

Um, and number two was we definitely have to have a second season because this is amazing. Those were the two conclusions. And so, we took a bit of a break, which coincided with the holiday. So that's perfect, and then we are back. I'm Erwin, the host of Bootstr. I'm also a founder of [00:01:00] Tailscan. It's my product that I've been building for about a year and a little bit now, and I'm co hosting Bootstr with Dom. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Yes, hello, I'm Dom, I am been bootstrapping Helpkit for like, I guess almost three years now, two and a half years, which is a tool that helps people to turn Notion pages into like a professional help center. And that's like kind of like what got me started in the bootstrapping world. And that's what I'm still working on and like, I guess like learning every day. And, I'm wishing every one of you a happy new year as well, as cheesy as it is because it's 3rd of January.

Yes, I always think of step two, three, four and five, but indeed step one, happy new year, everyone. I would also like to introduce our guest for today, Marie, uh, Marie has been, someone that I follow. I think the very first time that I opened up Twitter, I think, she was already up on my feed and building things. Marie, would you like to introduce yourself?

Yeah, cool. Happy new [00:02:00] year, everyone. My name is Marie, and I'm building LlamaLife, which is a productivity tool that helps you manage your attention and your focus. So not just managing your time, and I started bootstrapping LlamaLife as a solo indie maker, uh, around 2020. So about three years in now and it took a lot of grinding and a lot of work. But by about 2021, I got to about 700 paid customers and then ended up getting into an accelerator program. Um, I'm not sure if people know Jason Calacanis. He's a angel investor in Silicon Valley. He spotted LlamaLife because I was building in public on Twitter and kind of just sharing everything on Twitter as a lot of us do.

And he got in touch and invited me to join one of his accelerator programs. So I did that. And as part of the [00:03:00] accelerator program, a bit like the Y Combinator ones, you do Demo Day at the end. So I did Demo Day and Ended up not raising money from demo day, but raising money shortly after that, still as a solo founder and ended up raising 680K, uh, US, so technically not bootstrapped anymore, but we now have a small team. So it's me and two other people. We're still really lean though. So we don't go crazy spending. Like the VC money, we try and be really careful about how we're spending it. But we are currently a web app and we are just about to launch our iOS app probably this month in January, and yeah, before doing all this stuff.

I used to work in advertising and branding for about 10 years. So that was kind of my corporate gig before doing this and taught myself to code a couple of years back. And I do the coding and the design for Llama Life. Um, but now I have one extra dev with me helping with [00:04:00] that.

That's amazing. What a journey. I actually never realized you started in 2020. Um, so we were already on the road for say, almost four years or three years.

Yeah. It's been a while. I think that the funny thing is on Twitter, everybody thinks things are like an overnight success, but it's been going for quite a while. And yeah, there's been quite a lot of ups and downs as well in that time and you know, obviously like a lot of decisions had to be made as well about whether to take, you know, the VC funding or not, or whether to stay bootstrapped. And we can talk about some of that stuff today if it's of interest. There was, yeah, a lot of like thinking behind that and trying to figure out like the best way to The best way to survive, I guess, as a company, because that's the first thing you need to do, because if you can't survive, there's really no point. But yeah, it's been like three, three years going on four years now.

Yeah. So it's funny you mentioned the funding part already. It's a question that was requested by, I think it was Jason that mentioned. I'm not entirely sure, but, [00:05:00] um, he wanted to know more about your decision making for the funding part. So initially you plan to bootstrap LlamaLife. I'm assuming that was always the, the initial plan, or you just, you know, build a company. And it's not really, I suppose you don't make a decision beforehand. But what factors influence your decision to shift towards, seeking investment, and how did it impact your business strategy from that point onwards?

Yes, it's a really interesting question and I'm really glad someone asked it because there's so much context that's missing sometimes when people post stuff on Twitter and There's only so much you can do in like a 140 character post, or what is it now? Maybe it's 280 now, a bit more. But um, I guess at the beginning the decision was not even to bootstrap LlamaLife, So LlamaLife is, it's probably the most serendipitous Startup I've ever done. So before Llama Life, I actually did three, three other startups before then, and they all failed spectacularly. And I was actually at a point [00:06:00] where I was gonna have to go back to corporate because I'd used all my personal savings, but then COVID hit, so this is like 2020, right? It was like peak kind of COVID. Oh wait, when was cOVID? 2020? Was it 2020? 2020, the start, yeah. Oh my gosh, it sounds, it's so weird to say that. It feels like it was That feels like so long ago now, but right. Yeah. So yeah, it was kind of peak COVID, right. And everybody was learning a new skill, a lot of my friends were learning to, you know, cook or make sourdough and things like that.

And I had just, kind of come off my third startup that failed and was trying to figure out, you know, should I go back to a corporate gig? Cause I really need to replenish some savings, but then COVID hit and I was like, well, it's kind of hard to get a job right now. So maybe I should learn a new skill like everybody else and just kind of wait it out. Because at that point. We didn't really know what was happening with COVID. So at that point I decided to teach myself how to [00:07:00] code and just kind of went crazy on it, to be honest. I, I've actually tried twice before and it didn't really stick, but this time I started watching a lot of YouTube videos and apparently I learned really well by watching videos versus like reading books.

So, I just started going crazy, like spending five hours a day trying to teach myself how to code and Llama Life came out of that because like, you know, when you're learning to code, everybody says, hey, build a to do list. Like, that's a really good way to, to learn how things work because you're creating data, you're storing the data, you're retrieving the data, that kind of thing. So I built a to do list like everybody else. And at its heart, LlamaLife is kind of like a to do list, except that for every task that you have, you set a countdown timer against it. And then, you know, we make it really fun as well from a design perspective to make it. Like just easy to complete tasks and focus on one thing at a time, but it started off as a really basic to do list and it wasn't actually meant to be [00:08:00] monetized or it wasn't even meant to be like, yeah, it wasn't meant to be a business.

Wasn't meant to be monetized. It was really just a coding exercise. That I did for myself because I wanted to build a product like that because I just couldn't find anything that, you know, exactly fit what I wanted. I could find to do lists and I could find timers, but some of them weren't really put together and some of them were just really boring from a user sort of interface perspective. So I just started building LlamaLife to practice those skills. And then what happened was I put it on Twitter as part of building in public, like, Hey, I'm learning to code. Here's all the stuff I've been doing and look what I built. And straight away, somebody said in the comments, like, what is this?

Like, where can I get it? And I was kind of surprised because it was just like my personal project. So I just started sharing more and more stuff on Twitter and it grew very, very sort of organically and naturally from there, people just started gravitating towards it. And then that's when Jason Calacanis saw it and was like, Hey, have you ever thought about raising [00:09:00] money? So at that point I actually said, Hey, I'm not thinking about raising money. I'm probably, you know, if anything, just going to bootstrap it a bit because I don't know where it's going to go, but then I went through the Accelerator program and I think as part of the Accelerator program, they kind of make you think like bigger, like where could this go?

Like what could the actual audience be? And you know, how big could you take this? And of course, it's also like, do you want to take it that far? Because some people might not want to, and I think that's like a big thing that's missing on Twitter as well as all the context around, like some people want to bootstrap, some people want to take VC money. There's really no right or wrong answer. It's really about what your goals are and you know, what you want to achieve with your product, and I suppose after going through the accelerator, I thought, well, maybe I could raise some money for it and it could be bigger than it is, and it would be fun trying to grow out a team because I've never really done that before.

And I think also just the opportunity was there, you know, cause Jason was involved and I was like, well. That doesn't happen every day, so maybe I should seriously consider it, [00:10:00] and then the other factor was, I don't think I could have continued with it using personal savings because I just come off like three other startups where I use my own money and you know, it was kind of in a weird spot with that as well. So, I suppose I just looked at everything and went, well, maybe it was supposed to happen that way and why not just take the chance and see where it goes?

Yeah, and so ending up with your, project to, to learn to code all the way to it raising 680, 000. That's quite wild. For me personally My perception of, you know, getting funding and like how it really just all works is mostly based off of what I read on, for example, Twitter or what I hear from other people. Um, it's by no means the full picture. And so I'm not really familiar with the different types of raising, but one thing that I am wondering is because you took some funding up front just to make sure that it can actually be, you know, have more [00:11:00] longevity, do you have any additional plans for raising funding in the future because you already did it in the past?

Yeah, that's a good question. So we raised a pre seed round and, you know, obviously there's many different stages you kind of go from where you go from like a friends and family round to You know, pre seed to a seed and then you can go on to series A, etc. And they get bigger and bigger as you go, and you also give away more of your company as you go. So I think for me, like the goal is not necessarily to raise money. The goal is more to build, a sustainable business that's obviously growing fast and will give the investors a return as well. But the goal is not necessarily to hit like the next round for me.

It's almost like, where is the business going to end up at the end of the funds for this round? So we have about 15 months of runway left. Which is really good for the amount of time we've had the funding. So we got the funding in 2020. I think it hit the bank like May 20, sorry, March 2022, [00:12:00] I think is when it hit the bank and we've managed to make it last till now, plus we have 15 months runway from now, so it's a pretty long runway. Given how long we've had the cash, and I think that just goes to say that, like, we haven't been spending it like crazy.

We're really careful about how we spend it, and I think if we're able to break even and then some, um, my goal is almost not to raise any more money because. Every time you raise, you're giving away more of the company. The only reason to raise the money would be to use the money to perhaps grow the team or spend it a bit on marketing. But if we don't need that because we're hitting certain targets, then I wouldn't necessarily try and raise more. The other thing with raising is it takes a lot of time and effort, and we are currently three people, and if I had to raise again, I would probably be taken out of the equation completely because.

I'd have to spend all my time speaking to investors, you know, almost doing like a mini roadshow, pitching, putting together pitch deck showing our [00:13:00] numbers and all the different metrics and that stuff's super time consuming and it would mean I wouldn't have time to spend on the product and helping the guys with customer service and that kind of thing. And it's tricky because if you take your foot off that and you spend time away from that, then your metrics can also go down because you're not really kind of, creating awareness for your product and adding new features and things like that.

So you can get into a really tricky spot where you start fundraising, you've taken your foot off the gas on other things, your metrics go down, and then all of a sudden your business is not as appealing to investors and you don't end up raising and then you kind of are in a just bad situation overall. So I think for me, the ideal situation would be we get to a point where we don't need to raise or we just raise a little bit. We don't really want to go too crazy and end up being, you know, sustainable.

Yeah. So really taking the path of not you know, continuously raising, which this is why I'm exactly asking, it's like my image is you keep raising and potentially, you know, either you have an exit or you get acquired or, you know, [00:14:00] something along those lines, but this would really be the third. I suppose alternative where you use the money to accelerate yourself into profitability and then just use the profits to kind of make it worthwhile for any yourself and investors and like grow that way.

Yeah, it could still be an acquisition later, but I think there's just different levels of fundraising and we often see people raising like millions and millions and millions of dollars and sometimes you look at those businesses and you go, Oh, that's crazy. Like, what are they going to spend that on? You know, it seems like overkill in a way. And I think we're kind of at the lower end of the spectrum where we just raised enough for what we needed. And at the time I was a solo founder. So for me, what I needed was to hire a team. So a lot of that 680 is just, it just goes towards paying employee salaries.

It doesn't really go toward like any crazy marketing costs or anything like that. So we're kind of, it's almost like what you call a calm business. You know how people say like there's even that company Calm that I guess do [00:15:00] like sort of micro investments for indie hackers and you're kind of growing Calm profitable businesses versus crazy massive VC, rounds and then spending that money like, you know, like crazy as well.

Yeah, it's the, um, CompFund. Yeah, I've seen them around. Yeah. So it's just a different approach. I think it also from an outside perspective, at least it kind of fits the product better as well. I suppose the way you do things, it fits much better. That's very interesting. So I also have a another question. You mentioned you had a few startups, you know, you just came out of three startups before you started LlamaLife. So you had a few attempts that didn't quite work out. Were there any key lessons that you learned from those experiences that you did differently with when you started LlamaLife?

Yeah, I think one thing with my first business was I was way too attached to it. Like I was emotionally attached to it, I'll tell you what it was, it was called PEEK, P E E K, it's not around anymore. I ended up selling [00:16:00] it to somebody, not a massive exit by any means. I don't think I even made back the money that I put in, but it was a mobile app, which was kind of like a social media app, similar to Instagram, except for every single post you had two images, one was hidden behind the other.

So you basically would tap on the first image and hold it, and you could peek behind it and see a second image. And it was used a lot for like before and after shots and sort of storytelling. Like if people wanted to tell a very small story using two photos, they would post it on the app and that product was. It was like a typical first business where like one day I was just like, Oh, this would be such a cool idea. Let me see if I can build it. I wasn't a dev at the time, so I hired like a contractor. I outsourced it on Upwork and that, that's a whole nother, that's a whole nother conversation. That's, I wouldn't recommend doing that. But I still managed to get an app out there in the app store. But it was a typical business where I just had this random idea. I went and made it [00:17:00] and I didn't really validate it. I think at the time I thought I was validating it. I was sort of playing like startup founder.

I think I got like the lean canvas and I downloaded that and I was like filling it in with like post it notes and stuff and I just felt like at the time it felt real, but looking back on it, it felt like I was just playing startup founder, if you know what I mean, and going through the motions and I read the lean startup and all that stuff and I was like, yeah, I'm gonna, you know, I'm going to win at this because I'm following exactly what I read in the book and it was just one of those things where being a first business, you think you're the one that's going to be able to crack it and do everything correctly. And I was just way too attached and I went on way too long. I should have just killed it because it wasn't, it didn't have any traction.

So I would say, yeah, a really big thing I learned was just, I guess be detached from it in a way, but that's different. It's still very different though. Like you can still be passionate about what you're doing. Like I love working on LlamaLife. I love like just the whole creation and just [00:18:00] creativity behind it and the community. But, Still try and be a little bit detached in some way. Like if things don't go well or we're not getting the traction that we want by adding a specific feature. And kind of just letting that go a little bit more quickly. I would say it's still easier said than done because we've had quite a few things this year which, I guess interestingly because it's the start of 2024, like, me and the team, we're just, we're just writing down, like, what we did in 2023 and what we learned.

So I literally was just doing that before this chat. And I think one of the things, like, we've got better at is just, like, we started and stopped quite a few things. But even when I look through the list, I think I spent way too much time on certain things like Pricing was a really big one for us. We did heaps of analytics on pricing like what price should we put it out? Should it be a subscription, one time payment? Should it be feature gated or usage gated? And we tried, like, [00:19:00] all sorts of combinations, like, in our analytics tool to see where we would net out if we made a change, and we should have just changed the price.

Like, we should have just, we should have just changed it in real life. And, you know, just to check what would happen in real life. But we just spent way too much time analyzing data. So yeah, I would say, like, be less emotionally attached to it, but you can still be passionate about what you're doing. And also just make decisions quicker, because we just Even now, I feel like we could make decisions a lot faster than we are.

Oh, wow. Yeah. Those are some great insights. I feel it like in me when you say. You know, I have the same feeling when you say the emotional attachment, um, had the exact same thing with the previous startup as well. Too much emotionally attached, thinking I could crack it, didn't crack it, thought I was validating it, wasn't really validating it and then it took way too long to actually, you know, stop it. So yeah, I think that's a great insight. and so with Llama Life, you got almost [00:20:00] immediate interest when you did put it online, right? So it's like night and day.

Yeah. Yes and no. Like, yes, there was immediate interest, but then I guess you still need to put it in perspective because it was just like one person. It wasn't like overnight. There was like, you know, hundreds of people saying, I want it, but it's all in little steps. So yeah, one person said they were, they wanted it. And then I kept going and then a few more people said they wanted it. So it was very much like an iterative thing and a very, like, lots of small step things.

Lots of small steps to kind of go, well, I think, yeah, more people are actually interested in it. And I think what really tipped me over was just the number of emails we got. And that also didn't just, you know, suddenly happen overnight. But over time, I started getting heaps of emails. People responding to our welcome email, so when you sign up for LlamaLife, you get an email like, you know, most services send you an email going, Hey, thanks for signing up, and we send that as well. And we [00:21:00] started getting heaps of people replying to that. And that was the big, that was like a sign for me or a signal because In my previous businesses, we never got people responding to a welcome email.

I personally don't think I've responded to any welcome emails I've got either, but people were emailing us back and saying, Oh my God, you know, thank you for building this. I've been looking for a tool like this and they would also tell us a lot about themselves, which is very unusual. So I'm not talking about like writing back a few sentences, like people write back essays. They're like pages of emails and I've just never had that before. So for me, that was a sign that, you know, we're actually building something that people want, which is kind of the first step, but then obviously you still need to figure out, yes, you're building something people want, but is that actually a sustainable business?

Because, you know, are people actually willing to pay for it? Like, what price point, is that price point enough to sustain me and two other employees? And so on. So it kind of, the first bit [00:22:00] was just like, yeah, there's some interest. People are actually engaging with us. They say they want it, and then it was like, well, yeah, will they pay for it. And then we tried to, you know, all these different price points and stuff. And then even with that, it's like, well, is that enough? Is that enough for us to keep going? Because, you know, at one point this year, I'm sorry, last year, 2023, we had to make some drastic changes because I couldn't see it being sustainable.

So one of the big changes I made was like, we actually removed the free plan. So we had a free plan and then a subscription model. You could basically, you could stay on a free plan forever though if you wanted and then we just decided well that's just not gonna work because we can't afford stuff if we do that so we took the free plan away and that, and that really helped.

So, those were like quite some yeah insights, especially the free plan. Well I mean I get it, I guess in a way. And yeah, one thing that I've also been wondering, because you've, you know, and this is for me, this is also something that [00:23:00] I have no, you know, experience with this. I'm very curious, you started out solo and bootstrapping and then, got the funding and then started, you know, building a small team around you, or at least, you know, work with more people. Do you have any learnings or like unexpected things that you came across when shifting from a solo builder to having some employees? And, are there any things that stick out there that are potentially interesting to know for?

Yeah, there's so much. Um, I think it's hiring a team is probably one of the hardest things I've done. It's really, really hard to find the right people. And So right now there's me and two others, but, we've also hired people and had to let them go, and we've also had people who have joined and decided like it wasn't for them and they got another offer and they left. So yeah, there's a lot that goes into that. It's very time consuming to write the job description, put it out in all the different places so it gets seen, [00:24:00] do the interviews and all that. But I would say it's, in our case, it's worth it because I don't think I could have got where I am without the team.

But It is really different, because my role used to be, like, get up in the morning, I do whatever I want. I would do some coding, I would do some design stuff. If I didn't feel like doing coding, or I got stuck, I could just swap and do something else. I can't really do that nowadays. Like, it's a little bit more, uh, it needs to be a little bit more structured. So, I, my role right now is really about supporting the team, like basically enabling them. So I have, so for context, I do dev and design and all the business admin. And I have one other guy who just does dev and he can do, we use react. So we're doing a web app and a mobile app. So he does react and react native.

So he's handling. Mostly the mobile app, I would say, and I'm handling mostly the web app. And then we have one other girl who does, content, [00:25:00] like social media content, community, and partnerships. Like if we're going to work with, say, Instagram influencers, she'll handle the partnerships for that, and we all work on the product together. We all come up with the features together. We all do QA testing and stuff like that. But that's kind of how we split up the work. But for the most part, my role is like, well, does my guy have everything he needs to do for Dev? Like, does he have all the information he needs?

Am I holding him up? And then same for the, the other girl. So my day is less about what I want to do, almost. It's like, are they good first? That's my first thing. It's like, are they good to do whatever they need to do? And then if I have some time after that, I'll be like, okay, well, what else is left to do? I'm going to work on, you know, I'm going to help with that feature or I'm going to help with maybe creating a little bit of content. My time's like really split. There's a lot of multitasking and context switching, which I personally find quite hard to do. But the roles, yeah, it's completely different now. It's less about what I want to do. It's more about like, what are they doing and what [00:26:00] help do they need?

Right. Yeah. But I can also see the other side, right? Because you spend a little bit more time, I suppose, on them, but on the flip side, you also see, you know, for my mind, at least, like magical, output that just comes out of no, almost seemingly comes out of nowhere, where you didn't really have to do much of it yourself. I don't know, I suppose that's the nice side of things, right?

Yeah, I think it's kind of that, you know, there's always so much you can get out on your own. And I see the same pattern with a lot of indie hackers where, they've got a business that's starting to take off, and the first thing they're doing is automating everything, right? And that's the right move is like automate everything that you can, put FAQs, like when you, when someone emails you for support, you know, put an out of office response on and make sure that out of office response has all the FAQs and then get to it when you can, but maybe they're self serviced, you know, and help themselves out.

That kind of thing, that's definitely the right move as a solo indie hacker, but then if your [00:27:00] business gets to a certain point, or you want to grow it past a certain point, there's only so much you can do on your own, and there's obviously exceptions to this, like, we all know Levels is like, he's like an exception, right? I don't know how he gets all his stuff done, but He's a huge exception to this rule, I would say, but most people will get to a certain point and you can't go any further, right? And there's also people like Brett from DesignJoy and he's obviously an exception as well, but I would say most people are going to hit a point where they, if they want to go bigger. The key thing here is like, if you want to go bigger, because some people don't, right? So it depends what your goal is, but if your goal is to get larger, you're going to hit a point where you need to. You need a bit of help, whether that's from a contractor coming in and just doing like small bits and pieces or hiring a team.

And I think the thing that the VC money really helped with was, just providing the funds to hire the team and also buying us a little bit more time, you know, that we could get the team working well together [00:28:00] and figure out like how to make the product work as well without worrying about, you know, personal savings going down to zero.

Right. So the additional, what you're saying is the additional stress that, you know, going down with savings would potentially cause you don't have that. And so you make different, perhaps better choices.

Yeah. I mean, I still have it a bit because the thing is like, you can't, when you take the VC money, it's not like you suddenly, like I still make less, like I pay myself a small salary, but it's not like you can pay yourself a huge salary. That's kind of frowned upon. So I was still earning way more back in my corporate job than I am today. I probably took like. I've got half a pay cut in a way, but I'm much happier obviously doing what I'm doing now. I love what I'm doing. I wouldn't trade it for anything. But yeah, I guess what I'm trying to say is there is still some stress because it's not like you're earning, I don't feel like I'm earning enough, if that makes sense.

Like, I think I have just, just enough to cover things like mortgage and just living expenses. But, it's still better than, Just seeing your [00:29:00] personal savings go down month after month. And everybody's situation is a bit different, right? Because some people are working full time and then at nights and weekends they're doing their side projects in the hope that they will take off. And other people just completely quit their full time job and go all in on indie hacking and trying to do their side projects that way. And there's no right or wrong way either. It just depends on what you're able to do, given, you know, who you need to support, if you're supporting just yourself or you're supporting a family as well, if you're renting, if you have a mortgage, there's so many different variables, but,

yeah, either way, I think there's a lot of pressure if you're just doing it out of your own savings, and that pressure can actually make you, it can actually lead you to make bad decisions, I think, because you're trying to earn money quickly. And sometimes that sort of short term thinking of like, I just need to make money really quickly doesn't mean you're going to end up with a really great product that will work in the longterm. So you kind of need to buy yourself enough time [00:30:00] to make sure that you're making the right decisions and you're building something that, that will actually work longterm. So that's where the VC money definitely helped me. It took that pressure off and I could spend time thinking about the business a bit more instead of thinking about, you know, personal savings.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I have the same thing, really. Sometimes, when I feel the pressure of like, you know, my runways shrinking slowly, especially before becoming somewhat round and profitable. Yeah.

I'll give you a good example, actually. We just did this recently, so we've done it a few times, but I think as a solo, like, indie hacker, I did it more. And that's, you know, I had a subscription model, but I was like, I need like cash right now. So I'll do a one time payment, lifetime deal kind of thing and that does work in a way, like it gives you that cash injection upfront, but I don't actually think that was like a good decision. You know, I think that was a like we need sort of cash kind of decision. It sounds a little hypocritical cause I just, [00:31:00] we just did a lifetime deal for LlamaLife. It just ended at the end of this year, but that was kind of a special thing for, it was more to reward our existing subscribers to say, Hey, like we're going to launch the mobile app soon.

If you want, we're going to do this lifetime deal. You can get in on it. But I wouldn't sort of recommend that as like a, an ongoing strategy. 'cause I feel like it's like a cheap shot almost, it's like a, it's not a long term thing that you wanna do.

Yeah. I think this is really great because, for the discussion part of this show, which we'll go to in a little bit, we actually prepared exactly this topic versus one time payments versus, you know, should you do a lifetime deal? Should you not? Perpetual license or like, should you do subscriptions? Yeah, so we'll get into that a little bit later. I wanted to share my part as well, but, I'll do it a little bit later. But there are some great insights, Marie. Thank you. This is for sure, I feel smarter about the part of like, you know, taking funding and why you should, and, you know, it makes a lot more sense, [00:32:00] I think, than I initially thought for more types of products and businesses and people. So thank you for that is there anything you'd like to add?

Yeah, I think there's no, I don't think there's like one way to do this. So it really comes back to what your goals are, and some people want to bootstrap and they're happy taking a long time to do that. They might be at their full time job and just working part time and happy to kind of chip away at it. That's totally fine. Like it's just about different goals. For me, Like I'm less, like money is important, but I'm less money driven. Like I really love just making, I just love making the product and I'm focused on one product. And some people are focused on like multiple products. Some people are doing sort of 12 startups in 12 months. That kind of thing. Which I think has some benefits, but at the same time, I'm not sure as from a business perspective, if it would work, but I think my point is just there's multiple ways to get there.

[00:33:00] And going a VC route is not necessarily like the best thing for everyone's business. But if you looked at my situation and all the things that came before it and kind of where I landed, cause it was a little bit of luck, I think just building on Twitter and someone saw my product and said, Hey, do you want to be an accelerator? And I kind of was like, yeah, well, I might as well try it. You know, I've never done that before. I've never raised that much money before. Like, what would it be like if I took the money and you know, what could I do with that? And then there's one massive caveat here, like one huge thing, which is like, you need to have traction in your business to raise money.

You can't just wake up one day and go, it would be really good to raise some money because I need it and I think I can grow the business. You will end up wasting a lot of time because you will have conversations with investors and you might talk to a hundred investors and you might get like a hundred people going, sorry, we're not investing. So yeah, the big caveat is like, you have to have the traction to, to actually get the investment. [00:34:00] And even with LlamaLife, like it was pretty tricky. It was quite hard to do that. Right. Cause we were super early and so there was a lot of convincing that had to be done. Like, you can probably find my pitch.

It's somewhere on YouTube, like there's a lot of it is like, where could this business be? And here's like some small traction we had, but if I look at it now, I'd be like, that traction is not that impressive, but you have to kind of still make something out of it, like that it was still there, but it wasn't like magnitudes, you know, that you see with lots of larger companies, but you would still need to have something to go. I want to give raising money a shot.

Yeah, it's definitely, I mean, it makes total sense, right? You're going to show up with something that isn't necessarily proven or anything like, I understand investors wouldn't want to put money on something that isn't. Well, in most cases, anyway, that isn't really showing some, some potential. Yeah. It makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Marie, for, all of [00:35:00] these answers and wisdom sharing it with us and your journey. I hope you want to stick around a little bit longer for the discussions, questions that we'll have next and I will be giving the microphone to Dom as well.

Just very quickly, I think I mentioned it before, but to repeat for the ones that joined a little bit later. The second half of the show is a open mic version, uh, open mic concept. We have some discussion questions. We'll be going and touching on a couple of subjects. If you would like to speak, and join in on the discussion or have an insight of a story of your own that we should definitely be hearing about feel free to use the button on the bottom left the microphone button that says request to speak and who knows? We'll see you on stage in a few moments. Dom?

Yes. All right. Thank you so much, Marie, for sharing your insights. I think it was a very refreshing view as well on like, the bootstrapping life and what someone that [00:36:00] is like starting their own startup is going through in terms of like, raising funds and not raising funds and then Thinking about like stuff like the pricing, I think was also really interesting. And that's also something I want to continue on, I just looked into the comment section and checked if someone has asked a question on Twitter or X. And I saw that Oliver asked a question that I think we already covered, which was like, If the growth so far has been sort of proportional to the amount of money you raised, or in other words, like if you feel yourself now richer after raising the funds, but I think we kind of, you covered this really well already, Marie.

Um, one thing I want to just add on, cause I've been thinking about this a lot lately as well, is the fact that, like you mentioned that a lot of time, like you feel like the amount you earn now could be much more and I feel like unless you are Peter Levels, probably every one of us is thinking that regardless of the amount of money that we make and one, I think important part, [00:37:00] especially in like the bootstrapping community, I think. You are like in the calm business community, you have to ask yourself, it's like, why are you even building and bootstrapping your product in the first place? Right. And a lot of times, like the term, like light building a lifestyle business comes up and everyone is sort of like talking about it. But then when it actually comes to them or yourself, you're like, wait a second, like, The whole idea, like why I want to build a business maybe is because I want to sort of like have a comfortable life and build the cool things that I want to do.

I don't want to grind a nine to five in a job that I find boring. I want to work on my own thing. And that is already so fulfilling to me. So I think that's so much important for us to kind of recognize something that I definitely also like recapping my past year had to do, which is like. I myself remember that like growth has been a bit stagnating lately and I felt really bad about it, especially because I also, obviously for the kind of like that to happen, I was kind of living more in like living more in the moment. And I was like not [00:38:00] neglecting the product, but I was just like doing a little bit less and then I kind of really, really felt bad, but then I realized, hold on like a second, like the reason why I built this product in the first place is because I want to have. That kind of lifestyle I was always kind of like looking for, and now I'm kind of having it.

And so I think that's like a really, really important part when it comes to like thinking about. Bootstrapping, building your life, doing like the lifestyle business kind of way. And I think you're doing really well in this because you said you really love what you're doing. So I just wanted to add on this in terms of the question that we were kind of already talking about, you want to say something?

Actually, I'll say one thing. It's not always calm. Yeah. Like there is a lot of work. Like I often work. I probably start at like nine o'clock and sometimes I'm working till nine as well. Like sometimes, you know, I'll take breaks for dinner and stuff, but sometimes I'm just back online and I'm working till nine o'clock or sometimes I'm working even later. So it's not necessarily like. All rosy, like I can just stop working whenever I want and it's okay. Like there's still, there's a, pressure to [00:39:00] get more stuff done. And probably more pressure because of the VC money, but I would say our VCs are pretty good. Like there was a question, I don't know if it was in this space now or before, but there was a question about, you know, how much control do you have now that you took money?

And like, I still make a hundred percent of the decisions, so I haven't felt like we've had to give up any of that control, but there are other obligations, right? Like, so every month , I've got to write an investor report. That takes quite a bit of time because it takes, it's not a long report, but I have to put in all the numbers on what happened and what we did. So you are still, you are accountable to somebody else. I can't remember where I was going with this, but I guess what I was saying was, yeah, there's still a bit of pressure because you're accountable to someone else, but so far, like I've been making all the decisions. That could also be because of the stage we're at and the amount we raised.

Like, if we raised a lot more, it might be a different story. I don't know. [00:40:00] But based on what I've experienced so far with the amount that we raised. Like we're still just making all the decisions as a team, we let the investors know what we're doing, but they haven't come in and said, Hey, you have to go, you have to go B2B. Like that was one of my concerns, like we're B2C at the moment. And often you'll get investors coming in saying you should go enterprise because there's more money there. And the topic did come up once or twice, but I was like, no, we're going to do B2C for now and see how that goes, but yeah, so sorry, I'm going on a tangent, but long story short, there is a little bit of extra work, but, so far we have made all the decisions ourselves and nobody has been saying, hey, you have to do it in a certain way. But who knows, that could change if we raise a new round and we raise. So

I think this is a great topic, to be honest, because I have to be a bit cautious when I say calm because life is never calm as a founder. I think my life has not been calm in the past three years, but [00:41:00] whatever, like, I guess what is interesting to me, at least like in terms of how I work and I think sometimes it's a bit like, I don't know, like probably that's also a discussion point. I'm really curious about other indie hackers in this space. I sometimes like work probably like 16 hours a day, perhaps. Like, I wake up and I just continue to work, maybe have something to eat and then that's it.

And like, I spend like the entire day on something and get like a lot of things done. And then I have days where I'm like, I maybe worked like maybe three hours and don't even seem to get like anything done. Now, that being said, what I'm curious about people here in the space is like, do you feel the same? Like, do you have a, do you try to keep the nine to five as an indie hacker as a, like your own founder? Or do you have like, you technically don't have to work at the same time frame than anyone else. So I don't know how it is for you, Erwin. Maybe you also want to share a little bit about this. Cause I'm, I'm really curious.

Yeah, I can. For [00:42:00] me, I actually had a bit of a realization about this for like, give or take a month ago. So I'm the same as you is for me, it's very easy to work, say. Well, not 16, but definitely like, oh, what, like 12, 12 hour days, um, 13 hour days, occasionally even a little bit more. Um, and I found myself to be very productive on some days and very unproductive on others, even though I was spending the same amount of time on it, and in December. I have been a little bit less active on say Twitter, for example, and in other ways, but that's because I did an experiment.

I worked only four hours every day maximum for the entire December, just as a way to figure out if spending more time equals more output, and as it turns out, it's actually not the case. For me, what I found out was I plan and I, you know, I don't have MP3. So for me, it's a lot easier. Of course, I don't have to sync with anyone. But [00:43:00] for me, it works very well to prepare everything I need to do. And I mean, everything I need to do. The night before I pick my clothes, I pick my breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I pick literally everything. So the moment that I wake up, I know exactly what I'm going to do in the morning I go to work and the first decision of the day is already the decision, related to work when I open my laptop and I deprive myself basically from making any other choices beforehand and it makes me mad productive in those four hours and then after four hours, I'm like, okay, cool.

I basically did the work for like eight or 12 hours worth. I'm off and I'm having a blast the rest of the day going to the gym, you know, socializing a little bit more. So I think I'm going to stick to this. Um, maybe Jim Ferris with the four hour work. Okay. It was week. Well, for me, it's day, four hour workday. Maybe he had a, a point. Who knows? It's not what he meant, but there we go.

I mean, there's this concept called the Parkinson's law, [00:44:00] right? That the time you have for a task expands as much as time as you give it to. So I think that certainly applies to this. If you give yourself four hours, you will likely get everything done in four hours. If you are giving yourself like eight hours, you probably just need eight hours, right? So I think that is definitely. A big part I want to also focus more on this year, I've seen Pat Walls talk a lot about like that regardless of like anything that happens in his life, he's doing two hours of like deep focus work at least a day.

And I think despite that, maybe for some people sounding very low, I think like doing actual deep focus, even if it's just a small amount per day, like on a daily basis, having this like compounding effect, I think is something really. Um, something I want to adhere much more to especially in this year.

I think you're spot on now. Yeah, I think, yeah, look at it this way, and this is how I actually looked at it. [00:45:00] I forgot to mention, but, the way I was thinking about it was, yes, I spent like 12 hours working on in one day and then, you know, you have to, and it's very productive perhaps, you know, like in those 12 hours, maybe there's like eight of them that are like really productive. And then the other day I simply can't put myself to work. And if you think about it, then in two days, you only had eight hours effectively, which is the same, right? So, you know, if you think about it that way, it actually makes a whole lot of sense to just focus on trying to get into deep work and really just do that, like a little bit.

I'm also very curious. I see some other people in the space, by the way. I'm very curious what, what they think. So if you do want to chip in on this. Just request a speaker, I'll give you the stage.

Yeah. Good point. I feel like the one thing also that often gets neglected is that, I mean, what I've seen, like so many people that are grinding in like the nine to five, like if I talk to like most of like my [00:46:00] normie friends, um, that are in a nine to five, the amount of work they get done in like eight hours. What you probably can get done in like two hours, it's like, it's insane. And I think most of the time it's probably just like also like spending extra time on stuff so you don't have to do much more work, which is something, I guess, that it's a bit of a, not a curse, but like us as founders, we really want to like.

You know, we want to get stuff done fast, we want to be productive. But yeah, that's a great insight. Marie, you mentioned a bit, that like you now with your team had a bit of a different Approach to this. You want maybe wanna reiterate?

I was kind of laughing because as you were talking about Parkinson's law, that law that you mentioned, it's basically, Parkinson's law, as you said, was the amount of work expands to fill the time you give it. So if you say, I am gonna do eight hours of work, if you're gonna, like, code a feature, and you go, it's gonna take 8 hours, then it'll take 8 hours, but if you go, hey, it's 4 hours, I've got 4 hours to do it, you'll probably get the same amount done in 4 hours if you focus.

It's [00:47:00] so funny because, like, that concept is literally, like, the whole concept behind Llama Life, but on a micro scale. So, every task that you set in Llama Life, you set a countdown timer, and that might be, like, you know, half an hour, or it could be 15 minutes, but the point is to like, have intense focus in that time because of Parkinson's law. So I was just kind of laughing and it totally was not planned that you said that and that we're talking about LlamaLife today, but, yeah, I really believe in that concept. I think kind of doing these sort of bursts of focus really helps, even at a small scale.

This part of the podcast was sponsored by, um,

One question I wanted to ask you, that also came up is that given your B2C tool, right? And, uh, I think I saw somewhere that you were hovering around like 800 users, probably right now it's like way more. How do you deal with like your customer support? How did [00:48:00] you do that?

Yeah, so that's one of the reasons why we got rid of the free plan as well, because we have about 30, 000 people. They're not all active. This is just looking at the database going, Hey, we've got 30, 000 people who have signed up. Some are active, some aren't, but that's a lot of people to support and we're also in Australia. So the time difference is not in our favor. About 70 percent of our customers are in the US. So we're kind of, you know, there's a bit of overlap, but we're sometimes not awake when people need help. So the customer service part was, it's huge. Like, I think I sent 200 emails between Christmas and New Year's because the team, my team was off.

So they all took the week between, you know, Christmas, New Year's off, and I was like, Oh, someone's got to man the ship. So I did all the customer service in that time, and I think I sent like 200, 250 emails. Just helping people with queries and upgrading their account and stuff like that. But, um, customer service is super hard. Like it takes up a lot of [00:49:00] time especially for business teams.

Yeah, the question was more pertaining to you, like, especially when you didn't have a team yet, right? Like I can imagine that there must be so much

Customer service is really hard for me, so one of the first things I did was, like, when we've got two people now, her name's Nhi, I don't think she'll mind me saying it, she's on Twitter as well, um, so Nhi takes care of all the customer service mostly, like, I kind of help behind the scenes on that, but she'll be the person, like, if you write to us, it's Nhi that's going to be, like, writing back, because for some reason it's quite draining on me.

Like, I don't know why. It's just one of those things where I can do it, but It's just very, very draining. So I'd prefer to spend my time doing like coding or design or thinking about the product. And Nhi doesn't mind. She's like a people person and she's really loves like chatting with people. So she just is a natural for that stuff. So we kind of just split up the work depending on who's best at doing what. Yeah. But it's, it is very time [00:50:00] consuming.

We have some people now requested to speak and have some questions. Do you have something to say, to ask, to add?

Yeah, so my question is, well firstly, Congratulations on all your success, Marie. It's pretty awesome what you've done so far, raising that amount of money is no small feat. My question is, what are your long term goals now that you've taken money? So do you have some sort of investor goals that you have to reach by certain dates? Are you just playing the game to see how far it can go? I'm just interested on that long term strategy that you may have.

Yeah, so whenever you take VC money that there is kind of this unspoken goal. Which is through, it's kind of, it sounds almost ridiculous, but it's to reach a hundred million ARR in the next seven years. That's the unspoken goal. So I don't know if we'll get there, to be honest, like that's pretty big, right. And it might not be seven years. It might take 20 years, who knows, but that's kind of what all investors have in their head. They're, they [00:51:00] always want to say like, well, what's your path to get to a hundred million in the next seven years.

And, for me personally, I'm not thinking that far. For me personally, my goal is firstly to stay alive, like from a business perspective, the business to stay alive. And we've been a web app so far, but we've had so many requests for a mobile app. We're about to launch that and I mean, I think there's a lot riding on that, but I'm really hoping that the mobile app will take off, given the amount of interest we've had, I feel quite hopeful about it. And our goal, sort of short term goal, is to launch the iOS app, then the Android app. Probably hire one more person, a customer service person, because that's like the biggest challenge right now. And then kind of see how it goes from there.

Wow. Yeah, that's an amazing goal to work towards. Uh, good luck with it. That's a huge number. I hope you make it.

Yeah, it's very high. I honestly, it's very, very high. And I don't know, I probably shouldn't say it, but like, I don't know if we'll get there. That's a huge, huge [00:52:00] number, right? But that's kind of just the number that yeah.

Well, you got to shoot for it, and then one follow up question, perhaps based on that. What do you find that you're focusing on as your most high leverage tasks in order to reach that hundred million ARR a year? Because I mean, with a team of three, I'm sure you're focused on doing the things that matter the most in the business and I'm just wondering. Perhaps, what are those things that you guys have refocused on now that you've got this massive goal?

Yeah, so we focus a lot on branding and community and design and they might not be like your standard things that people focus on, but, I come from a branding and marketing kind of background. So for me, I really see the power of a brand. And I think especially given the category that we're in, so we're a productivity tool, it's very, very competitive. One way to stand out in a crowded market is to have really good branding. People are [00:53:00] using your products, if there's two equal products in front of them, they're going to pick the one that they feel most connected with.

So, we focus a lot on our community, trying to understand the community, you know, make them feel part of the journey and also the brand. So, a lot of, actually I didn't really coin this phrase, someone in the community did. But a long time ago, it used to just be called LLAMA, like on its own, just the word LLAMA. And someone in the community said, I want to live the LLAMA life, and they drew us like a little picture and sent it. And so since then, we've been saying, we've actually been using that phrase like, you know, living the LLAMA life, and our newsletter is actually called Living the LlamaLife. And from a branding perspective, I think that it really helps to differentiate you and give someone, something to aspire to. Like it's a lifestyle that you're aspiring to when you use our product, not just using a productivity tool. So yeah, I guess in answer to your question, we're focusing a lot on things like branding, [00:54:00] community, and also just the design of the product.

And, you know, in making it feel very fun to use, because I think that's missing from a lot of productivity tools. Like, they all feel kind of boring to me, and we want ours to feel, like, lighthearted and fun, so we're focusing a lot on that.

Yeah, it's awesome. It clearly shows through are you a designer by trade, initially?

No, I'm just, just self tought,

You're pretty good at it. It's pretty amazing. Your site's beautiful.

Oh, thank you. Cheers.

Cool. Yeah. Well, thanks for that. thanks guys for hosting. I'm out.

I have also read that you have a really amazing welcome email, Marie. So, you seem to do really well on all of these sorts of fronts.

Super nice. Oh, I'm going to sign up just to see that email now.

I think the thing with welcome emails is like, they've got to be, they've got to be personal, I think. And this is kind of something that, I don't know, maybe it was a bit of luck as well [00:55:00] when I wrote it, but I just. I wrote it when I was a solo founder, so I was really just telling people like, here's my journey. And like, here's why I made this product. Like, here's the problem that I had that I was trying to solve for myself. And I think that's probably why a lot of people write back because they're like, well, Oh yeah, I totally get that. Like I have the same problem. And, you know, so I'm going to write back and connect with this person. but it's really helped. Like that welcome email hasn't changed for like three years or something. It was the first one that I put out and it worked well and we just kept it.

Nice, nice. Alright, so I want to really quickly just like reiterate the question that I proposed earlier, as founders, we struggle a lot about pricing, right? And so the question that I want to talk a little bit about is that, your opinions about like having a recurring pricing model versus a one time pricing model. What I've been saying earlier was that as a user perspective, there's definitely a lot of subscription fatigue. [00:56:00] People don't want to have yet another subscription.

On the founder slash business side, having a recurring revenue, be it annually or monthly, is something that I think is invaluable to a business. Like, I don't even have to talk about the benefits, I think. Um, like, You just don't start a new month from scratch, right? And especially when it comes to different types of products, I think, especially when it comes to software, um, when you have an info product, probably a one time payment makes a lot of sense, but for a software product that maybe has recurring costs, it seems more like a natural Perspective. However, I have seen tools that are sort of on a one time basis and are doing really, really well. They might have switched eventually down the line to a subscription model, but for the first like one, two years, there's this one product called Shuffle, which is like a, it's like a Tailwind template.

Kind of landing page builder, tool, component, [00:57:00] library type of thing. And it turned into like a software where you can like create your own tailoring components. And they have been running like a, just a lifetime deal, for like, I think years. And they made so much money at least from like what I've read online. So I'm just curious what your opinion is about this, especially also, Erwin, you have done a lifetime deal. Now, it was more like, I guess, as a promotional thing with a limited timeframe, but I'm still curious. And then also, Marie, you were talking about that. You were thinking a lot about pricing, you did do like a one time payment thing. So maybe just start really quick, like Erwin, you want to talk a bit about your opinion? And then Marie, and if anyone wants to chime in, please let me know, because I'm really curious.

Yeah, I can chime in and give it a short, so right off the bat for legal reasons, I need to say I have a perpetual license. It's not a lifetime deal. I'm not going to get into the nitty gritty of that, [00:58:00] but it's a pay once, use forever. It's not a lifetime deal because it's basically confusing whose lifetime we're talking about, right? So that's why I call it a perpetual license. But anyhow, I have been adding this next to my monthly and yearly pricing since, what is it?

August last year, and then, it has been going reasonably well. However, I seem to notice that, you know, maybe 1 percent of the people would go for it, most would go for monthly. And so, yeah, the subscription fatigue is like, you know, I didn't feel that that was an issue. However, when I changed my pricing table, and I had Danny Postma very graciously look at my pricing table and then completely roast me to the ground, burn me to the ground. And then build me back up again with a better pricing table. During the launch of Tailscan 2, I sold a hundred lifetime deals in a day. Or almost 90 of them, and so, yeah, for me personally, it makes a lot of sense because it's, you know, Tailscan doesn't have a backend.

It doesn't require much recurring costs for me, not in the hosting sense [00:59:00] anyway, and so, yeah, I'm, I'm slowly pivoting towards just doing perpetual. It's not sexy to not have a. MRR chart go up more and more. But honestly for the amount of revenue I have been making from the lifetime deals, I'm willing to just go perpetual licenses. I'm willing to just go for that. I think it heavily depends on the type of product and your costs. But it's, I think more people should consider whether their product is a good fit for it and not necessarily get blinded by the, I need to have MRR

thing. So in your example, what I'm curious about, given that you are in this like interesting space where you are building like a tool that is considered SaaS, but you are doing most like, I guess, like the Chrome extensions mostly like frontend stuff. So there's not much of a recurring cost, which by the way, I don't think should be really a necessary. Reasoning as a founder to not charge monthly because I feel like, you know, as a customer, I get value or I don't get it. And [01:00:00] depending on how long I get it, I pay for it. You know, that's what I'm saying. But what I'm curious, have you ever thought about like, just having, for example, Instead of doing a lifetime deal or perpetual license, what I've been seeing like companies like Sketch, for example, do, like the Figma alternative, it's like having like yearly plans, you know, they didn't even have a, a monthly plan.

I guess they were just coming on with the idea of like, all right, we're going to give you like a one time payment sort of fee, but then we're going to make it yearly and you get more updates. Have you thought about that as well? Is it too complicated? Technically, if you only have one yearly, like if you have a yearly plan, it's almost like a lifetime deal, but It's recurring, so it helps you to sustain, I guess, more in the future, but then if the annual plan is less than, I guess, your perpetual license, like if you know the lifetime value of your customer, everything is easy, but in the beginning, nobody knows, right?

Yeah. And for a lifetime perpetual license, you know, it's, it should probably realistically cover what, two, but probably [01:01:00] three years. Of your yearly. And so, yeah, it's very hard to figure out for me personally. I started out with just a yearly, before I added monthly and lifetime, mostly for anchoring price, anchoring reasons, and being able to increase the price more without it looking crazy. Because I increased the price 500 percent with my initial yearly price versus my current monthly price. So it's a big step. I think that that's the reason why I did it. I'm not sure if it was a good choice, but I think that, just doing yearly makes sense still for a lot of products. Especially the ones that are having a lot of costs.

Like you say, you have to consider an AI product, for example, maybe has like 30 percent of the revenue is actually costs that they have to pay to open AI. 10, 20, 30%, depending on what you do, but like you can't offer one time off pricing for that kind of stuff. Right. So again, it's very product specific. But the consideration should not be neglected by people. That's what [01:02:00] I'm trying to say. It's an important thing to think about.

Yeah. Alfonso also just mentioned in the comment section of the space that there's also other companies like VPN, like NordVPN, they have like these giant annual plan discounts, which I think is really interesting. I've seen them, like they have like, if you buy like three years upfront, you get like a huge discount, which is probably very well calculated in terms of the ATV. I actually do that one. I do think it works on me. You do that? The NordVPN one for three years. Yeah. I have that one. Oh, I was like, you have it for Tailscan. I was like, how big is your pricing table? Nice. Marie, do you want to talk just a little bit more about like, you said that you Did the one time payment thing as like a cash injection? What's your opinion about it?

So I think it's kind of what Erwin said before. It's so product specific. I don't actually have anything against the lifetime, like a one time payment or a lifetime deal. But, I [01:03:00] think just in our specific case. Our goal is to be a subscription product. So earlier, I think I said something like, it was almost like a, like a cheap shot in a way, like to do it because it's a cash injection, but it's not long term sustainable. But that's just in our specific case because our goal is to be a subscription product.

So we just did the lifetime deal as a one off thing. But if you're considering your own business, And there's so many different variables, but if you're, there's nothing wrong with saying, Hey, my business is a one time payment, you know, and not having that MRR chart. we actually stopped sharing all the MRR charts and revenue on Twitter. I was actually just having this discussion with, a Telegram group that I'm part of LlamaLife decided to stop sharing that stuff and I stopped sharing that stuff too, because I don't think it's that helpful without context, and sometimes when you post like an MRR chart, like you don't, you don't know anything about that company except the chart.

And maybe they've got like a million [01:04:00] dollars or something MRR, but they spent a million dollars to get that. So it's super hard without context. Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is. I don't think there's anything wrong with doing one time payments, if that suits your business. If you have a subscription business and you've kind of figured out like a subscription business is the way that you want to try and run the company, you could do a lifetime deal as a one off thing to get the cash injection. It's kind of like what you're saying, you work out sort of the, the lifetime value of your customer, like the average lifetime value. Like that's basically how long would someone stick around on average? Like maybe it's two and a half years and you want to price your lifetime, like your one time payment around that price. And there's a lot of arguments. People go, well, someone pays you one time, but now you have to support them for the, you know, 10 years or something.

And that's true. But at the same time, there's going to be other people who buy the lifetime deal, and maybe they only stick around for six months, which is not what you should be striving for. Cause you, you should be trying to make a [01:05:00] product that is engaging and people come back to you. But the reality is some people are going to buy it and not stick around. And so hopefully they will pay for the people that stick around for a really long time and hopefully it just balances out. So that's just another way you can look at it, but you know, you're really just getting the lifetime value of a customer upfront and that could help your business if you need that cash injection.

Yeah, I think especially in the beginning when you're starting out and you're not really a hundred percent sure and really need to get feedback, you know, there's the saying that it's very hard to get like good feedback from not paying customers or free users. You ideally want to have at least someone that is paying for your product and then basing your feedback off of that. Now you can obviously argue that feedback of people that are sort of the average, I guess lifetime deal yeah consumers might be a bit different, but I mean, I think like out of, I guess like 80 percent of people that I've talked to that did lifetime deals, specifically also on platforms like AppSumo, [01:06:00] they didn't really regret it because the amount of feedback that they got very early on in the cash injection was like very, very worth it.

Like I said, I think sometimes you would be surprised that there are other monetization out there besides like the very traditional subscription plans you might think of, but I guess like, obviously, if you really want to aim for like the holy grail, just having some sort of like at least recurring basis, I think does make a lot of sense. Um, guys, I want to wrap it up now. I thank everyone that chimed in, had something to say. The reason why we're doing this live is because we want to create some serendipity moments where we can't talk about things that just come up and that are still very, very important to, I guess, the Indie Hacker community. Thank you all for chiming in. I'm gonna give the last word also to Erwin. Thank you, Marie. Erwin, you want to wrap it up?

Yes. First of all, Marie, thank you very much for joining [01:07:00] us and being here today answering all our questions and sharing your wisdom. It's very much appreciated.

Cool, thanks for having me.

For sure, for sure. I say, whenever you see on other Wednesdays us being online, always feel free to come on and chime in as well. Very free to do so. I will also be mentioning that if you have any feedback, please send Dom and I a follow and a message. We're always, willing to listen to that as well. Please do, and then last but not least, we will invite you for next week, Wednesday, we'll have Bootstr episode number eight with Jesse from Bento. That's, promising to be a very interesting one as well. I kind of spoiled it just now, but, there we go. Everyone already knows now. And thank you all for listening in and chiming in, we'll see you next week. Have a great week ahead of you and talk to you soon.