BootstrFM

Episode 2 - Jon
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[00:00:00] Welcome everyone to the second week of Bootstr. Last time I had some technical difficulty with my microphone, so I hope everything is going to be better now.

So, hello everyone, welcome. My name is Erwin. I'm working on a couple of SaaS as a bootstrapper myself. The one that I'm working on most right now is called Tailscan. Before that, there were also some failed projects that I have under my belt. Definitely don't want to be mentioning them, so, nobody will look them up.

Two weeks ago, we decided to start the Bootstr Twitter space because I really think this was something that was missing in the bootstrapping community, here on X. And I do not regret it. The last episode was amazing. You can still hear the recording from last week, if you'd like.

We're very busy also making a website, so it will be much easier to listen to it. The main guest from last week was Dom and we had such a blast that we decided to do it together. So, um, Dom is now officially also my co host and [00:01:00] for those of you that don't know Dom, Dom, would you like to introduce yourself?

Sure. Hi, all. First of all, thank you, Erwin, for having me as your first guest. I really appreciate it and even more so, to be your little co host now. My name is Dom. I'm a Bootstrap founder as well, been working on a couple of Bootstrap products over the past few years. The one I'm working on the most is called Helpkit, which turns Notion pages into a professional help center. That's the one I'm focusing on the most now and if you're curious about more, we talked last episode a little bit.

Anyway, that was about me.

Don just introduced himself, so that's perfect. I wanted to talk very briefly about the concept. The concept of Bootstr is twofold. We're going to have Jon as our guest, whom I'm going to ask to introduce himself in a bit and we will be asking him some questions. Hopefully we'll be able to get some wisdom from Jon to apply to our own projects and have a good interview. Uh, the second half of Bootstr, we're going to open up the space, if anyone would [00:02:00] like to talk. You definitely can by going to the bottom left and clicking on request to speak.

We'll notify you again when you can and we'll be going through a couple of discussion questions that we've prepared. So first of all, Jon, would you like to introduce yourself as well?

Yeah, Okay, my name's Jon. Jon Yongfook, I'm Yongfook on Twitter, and I've been a bootstrapped indie hacker founder for the last sort of four years or so, um, oh sorry, maybe a bit longer than that, but um, I guess maybe People might know me from, my SaaS product, which is called BannerBear, which I started four years ago, still going today, running a small team, still, you know, bootstrapped, independent, never raised outside funding, and yeah, enjoying myself.

That's great. Never, ever accepted funding. Will you ever in the future, you think?

Probably not. I mean, I think it would just be such a drastic change from my current lifestyle that I don't think it would really, it [00:03:00] just wouldn't really work. The idea of it is nice. I mean, obviously, you know, if you get sort of like free money to grow the business, the idea is nice, but then you kind of suddenly have a boss, essentially you have a, someone you have to produce work for. And then it becomes less interesting, so I like it the way things are currently, where I really only, um, answer to myself, answer to our customers, and that's it.

Right, yeah, Bootstrapper now and then Bootstrapper forever. I'm with you, I think I'm going to walk that same path. It's great to have money to grow to business, but it does trade in some freedom that I'd rather have. I have a couple of questions prepared for you and the very first one is about how you got into bootstrapping yourself. We'd like to know, what were your early days looking like? What is maybe the first couple of things that you built?

Yeah. So I made a point of like documenting my early journey. So if you want to go back and sort of [00:04:00] Google, you know, Yongfook 12 startups, then you'll find a lot of information about the early days. So. Which I don't really talk about much these days. So it's kind of been a little bit lost in time. So if you've only recently started following me, you know, in the last couple of years or so, then you might not know the whole kind of story. Um, basically I left my last job in 2018. I was working in Singapore and I kind of realized, for context, by the way, I'm 43 years old. I'm almost 44 years old.

So I'm maybe a little bit older than some of the people who are listening. But, um, I kind of realized in that last job that that was the last proper job that I was ever going to have. It it's weird. It became very clear to me. I'm not going to be useful in this company. Any more than I am at this point. So when I left that job, I really sort of left it, thinking that I have to start something for myself. Like [00:05:00] it's not a sort of, it's not an option. It's like, I have to, because there's no way I can go back to working for a big company because I know like my limits, you know, I know like how useful I am in those kinds of scenarios and I'm only useful up to a certain point.

So yeah, I. I left that company, had a bunch of savings as a cushion, a bit of runway, and then I started, you know, Launching a bunch of products. I have a developer background, so I was fairly comfortable coding, you know, like building a simple product, getting an MVP together and then launching it quickly, and I just did that over and over again and after the sort of like maybe the 10th attempt, one of them started sort of taking off and I've sort of grown that business from there, that was 2020. Uh, March 2020 is when I kind of like officially launched Bannerbear, which again was like number 10 of, you know, 10 [00:06:00] attempts and then, yeah, I've been running that business ever since.

The Bannerbear that we all know. Yeah, cool. And Just to, I didn't actually write this down, but just a side question. I'm kind of curious, when you went all in on the thing that you noticed was actually working very well, um, you say in March, 2020, did you stop all the other projects? Did you literally just, uh, took them offline or did you just kind of made them run on autopilot or anything?

I think, um, so basically when Bannerbear started to make a bit of money and by the way, this was not sort of like a overnight success or anything. It was like, you know, in the first month it made a hundred bucks, in the second month it made a few hundred bucks, and the third month it made, you know, a few more hundred bucks. It wasn't like a runaway, overnight hockey stick sort of overnight success. I was confident enough within the first couple of months where I was like, okay, I can feel [00:07:00] something is a bit different about this and you know, A, it's making a bit of money and B, I'm also really quite passionate about this product.

In terms of its technology and in terms of where it can go, so yeah, let's kind of like shut down all the other stuff and focus on this one. So yeah, to answer your question, yeah, within the first couple of months I had pretty much shut everything else down, um, which was fine because those products didn't have any customers anyway, so it wasn't exactly a difficult decision. It was more like, you know It's more of like a personal decision. It's like, ah, should I keep these hanging around just in case they get some customers? But I decided to, yeah, just make it a sort of clean break and focus on Bannerbear.

Right, yeah, and clear up some mental space. Well, I suppose it's easier to shut down when there's no customers, yeah. I have personal experience with this as well, with the previous thing that I built based on. It was very easy to take offline and clear up that mental [00:08:00] space as well, yeah.

The next question is something that I've heard a lot of times on Twitter. It's all too familiar, that you already have followers, so then it's easier to start something. But what about the people that, you know, are really starting out and don't really have, any followers or any, you know, marketing experience much? This question is definitely for them. Jon, are there any early marketing strategies that you use and that you can share and you think others should definitely be using as well?

Yeah, this is one of my least favorite little tropes of Twitter is like, you know, every time Peter Levels posts an MRR update ,someone says, yeah, but you wouldn't be able to get that if you don't have like a hundred thousand followers. So I don't know. I, I feel like. Yes, building in public, and, you know, gaining a following through that is absolutely a viable marketing strategy. It's a go [00:09:00] to marketing strategy for like a lot of different types of products, for sure. Like undeniable. There's products that I subscribe to, the SaaS products that I use and pay for that I use because I found them on Twitter. So, I'm absolutely not disputing the fact that, you know, Twitter is a viable distribution channel.

But, at the same time, it's not a requirement, like, it's not the only place you can distribute. So, I think, there's a whole bunch of stuff happening in TikTok that I don't understand. I think. You know, the next generation of SaaS entrepreneurs are going to leverage really well. You don't have to have a massive following on TikTok. You just have to get your product on there somehow. And I know some people in our network have managed to do that and, you know, James and Danielle from leavemealone. app, they get a whole bunch of traffic from TikTok because a TikTok user featured them on TikTok, and James and Danielle are not on TikTok.

So that's the cool thing. [00:10:00] They are not actively using that platform, but someone discovered their product and made a post and it went sort of viral. So there's that. There's also, don't underestimate the effectiveness of Google ads. I know it costs money, but you know, it's sort of tried and tested. The people who are responding are, kind of like have high intent. So that's definitely something worth experimenting with and I don't know, I feel like there's so many other marketing channels that you can talk about that, really having a big Twitter audience in the end of the day is just, I'm really not sure if it means as much as people think.

It's good to get sort of like, get some buzz going, get some conversations going around your product, maybe get some feedback as well, but I'm not really sure how much actual real customer acquisition it drives. I feel like your, the real customers are coming from places of higher intent, like Google, Google search, Google ads. Um, yeah, [00:11:00] I would say those are the main two, maybe affiliates, for example. I don't have a great answer for you, I'm afraid, Erwin, but, um, I do think it's a little bit overblown. Especially when you look at my feed, anyone can scroll through my feed of tweets, right?

I've got almost a hundred thousand followers, but if you look at my tweets, they don't really get seen by that many people. It's like, okay, maybe if I have like some viral thing, viral funny meme or something that goes, that gets a bit more, attention, then fine. But if it's just some product update, look at the amount of likes. It's a very small number. So, yeah, I think it's a little bit, a little bit overblown.

Right. And so, listening to you, you say, try to focus on some of the marketing strategies that could potentially be getting higher intent, higher intent users, besides obviously social media and stuff.

Yeah, I would say that Twitter is a good way to sort of augment everything else. So, Twitter is a way for maybe your customers or [00:12:00] friends of your customers to, to realize that, okay, you're an actual human being, you're working on this thing, you're really passionate about it. It sort of like augments everything else, I would say. It's not like a, a core sort of customer acquisition channel by itself.

Right, yeah. I mean, I'm probably guilty of this too, and should probably be branching out into these things as well, so I am making notes for myself as well. I have one more question for you, Jon. I was wondering if you, suppose that you know what you know now with everything that you learned over the years. Is there something that you would have liked to do differently with BannerBear? Or a particular thing you could have done, uh, maybe not differently but better, supposedly, with the wisdom you have now?

Hmm. Okay. So first of all, for everyone who's just joined, if you're wondering why me and Erwin sound a little bit low energy is because it's 9. 30pm here, so it's like, we're not, it's not [00:13:00] like the middle of the day or anything. This is the end of our day. This was a strategic choice on Erwin's part to make it sort of a 9pm thing so that the rest of the world can tune in at a more sensible time. But, yeah, this is like almost my bedtime. So, that's why I'm a bit of, a little bit low energy. But, okay, what would I do differently? Let's see. Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, part of me honestly thinks still that wouldn't it be nice to work on something that's a little bit more kind of, sticky? So, sometimes you can overthink what idea you work on, and sometimes, you know, you don't think enough, but there's definitely sort of, product ideas that you can work on that are inherently more sticky than others. And one of the things I've always kind of like wrestled with Banner Bear is that it's kind of like one of those products where yes, some of our customers need it on a constant basis.

That's great. But there's also a lot of other customers who [00:14:00] sort of like need it for a month or two, and then they'll kind of like wind down their account. Maybe they'll put it on pause. We have a pause feature and then they can spin it back up or they just you know, cancel and then they rejoin, you know, like in a year's time or something. So the nature of like a utility product like Banner Bear, which helps you sort of like you're outsourcing, you know. CPU, your outsourcing processing power. The nature of that is you get some customers who just need it for a temporary project. You know, if you don't know what Bannerbear does, it helps you generate images based on a template and you can push different variables into that template, if that makes sense. So some of our customers really only need it for like a month or two. They've got some big project. They need to produce, you know, a million images with all different sort of variables.

And that's what they use Bannerbear for and then they sort of cancel their account. So I guess if I had to sort of go back to the very, very beginning, I would [00:15:00] just think a bit harder about like, okay, what's a business that has a bit more stability in terms of the customer need. That said, you know. I can't complain, things are going well with Banner Bear. It's just, I do notice that there are certain types of customer segments that will spin up an account for a couple of months and then cancel. But, yeah, that's just life, I guess and I'm probably not the only SaaS that experiences that I'm sure. Like there's many other types of SaaS products that experience that, but. If you're here in the sort of something more like hosting space, for example, like Heroku. Heroku, I've been paying for, I don't know, like 10 years or something on a constant basis. There's never been like a couple of months where I thought, Oh, I'm just going to like spin down my Heroku account and maybe spin it back up again.

You know, I'm just paying them on a constant basis. So there's a stickiness there that I admire. Yeah, if I was going to do it all over again, I'd just think a bit harder about, okay, what's sticky, what's the type of product that, customers are basically going to get [00:16:00] locked into, because they need it, and maybe sort of like try to stay away from products that are sort of a bit more,

Transient.

Transient, yeah, it can sort of comfortably spin up and down. There's no real consequences to them. That would be one thing. The other thing would be I think if I was starting again from scratch today, in the beginning I had like a very sort of strong Content marketing focus like we wrote a lot of blog posts. We still do write a lot of blog posts and that's sort of been a core. pillar of our marketing strategy. I think if I was going to do that again from scratch today, I wouldn't place such a core focus on content. I would probably focus on free tools, which has also been a good acquisition strategy for us is creating kind of free tools that people find and use and then they, you know, eventually sign up for Bannerbear.

I would probably do more of that these days. I think content is in a bit of a, [00:17:00] I would say limbo kind of phase where, I mean, if you're creating amazing content, then. You're fine. If you're creating sort of like average content, then I think you're kind of like just lost in the noise these days. So if you can create amazing content, you're good. If all you're doing is pumping out sort of like, normal blog posts, then I think that marketing strategy is sort of coming to an end.

Right? Yeah, You're saying this and I'm realizing that as you say it, Obviously, when it comes to SEO. I suppose a little bit of a threat For it taking up knowledge and kind of replacing the traditional SEO traffic and stuff so More high targeted, more high quality blog posts, I think, definitely, yeah. Yeah, that's a good advice.

I would say that so we have a bunch of content on the Bannerbear blog that does really, really well. [00:18:00] I think we've been fairly smart about, the keywords that we target and stuff like that. But, um, I can see that there's a limit to that. I think there's, you know, that time is sort of coming to a close now. I do think, however, that sharing your insights as a founder on your blog is always going to be well appreciated. I think that type of content does really well. Whatever kind of learnings you have as a founder, whether it's early stage bootstrapping, growing a team, getting to X. You know, X amount of MRR. I think that kind of content does really well. And okay, maybe it's sort of like only targeted at other founders, but at the end of the day, what you're looking for from content is to sort of like, get linked to get back linked, get mentioned, be part of the conversation. So that type of content does really well in that regard. I would recommend that any founder. Still invest some time in [00:19:00] writing that type of content, for sure.

I think we will have to move to the discussion questions for a bit because I see some people were requesting speaking and would like to probably chime in and participate in the next couple of discussion questions we have. Jon, thank you. Thank you very, very much. for coming on Bootstr and answering all my questions and giving us all the insights. I'm very grateful that you could make it and feel free to also stick around for the discussion questions, of course.

All right. So, we're going to dive in some discussion questions. I'd like to hear what the community thinks about these things and hopefully get some extra knowledge, extra wisdom from others, some extra opinions. And just have a good time and a good conversation, of course. So the first question that we have prepared is, how important is it that you are building a product that you love versus it making money? And what if that balance changes after a while as well? Also possible to[00:20:00] kind of intrigued to find that out.

I've always had a bit of a tough relationship with that, to be honest, Don, what do you think about this?

Yeah, that's a great question. I've been struggling with this thought like for a really long time, I think, because my very first product that I built, I absolutely had no passion about. But it sort of was on a trajectory to be quite successful. And, uh, after a couple of, well, weeks of building it and then seeing some sort of traction from companies that were, I would say much out of the scope that I thought they would, the like target audience that I was thinking was more like standard B2B, not really enterprisy.

But then it turns out that most of the sort of potential customers were like very enterprisy. They wanted to have like a SLA. They needed to be GDPR combined from day one and I started to realize like the thing I'm building is actually for a crowd that I could never really cater to, or don't want to cater to and so, While I had a product that was [00:21:00] maybe on the brink of being kind of successful, I luckily pulled the block early on and was like, okay, let's think about why I'm actually, why am I a bootstrapper, right? Why I am building products. And the reason is because I'm thoroughly enjoying the process of doing exactly what I want in a way.

And so going through these customers, knowing the pain that it would cause, I would say, okay, no, I need to find a product where at least I wake up every day and I'm really happy to serve the kind of customers and it is a tough question though, because sometimes you start a product and you don't really know until maybe a year in that it's not really what you actually love doing. So I'm really curious for like everyone listening, what are your thoughts on this? Because certainly as a, with any product in any sort of relationship, really, you will realize that, well, it has its ups and downs and you kind of lose your interest for a while. Um, I certainly had that now after three years with Helpkit for a bit.

And what [00:22:00] I did is I just started working on a little side project on the side just to keep my mind a bit sane and now I'm kind of getting back the motivation for my main product. But, yeah, it's a great question. I think if you ultimately start with a product you don't really like, you're in for a really, really bad ride. So yeah, I wonder like how it was for Jon in the beginning. I mean, were you like really passionate in the beginning about Bannerbear already? I know like all the merch Bannerbear has like attracted over the past few years. So it looks like you're really into it, but I'm curious.

Yeah, I'm not an expert on bootstrapping, I've just done it once, but, I would say that the first sort of like 10, 000 dollars of MRR, it's a slog, so you need to grind it, right? You need to like try every marketing strategy. You need to like redo your landing. Sorry, redo your copy several times. You need to listen to customers, build features. It's a slog after 10k MRR. So you kind of have to be into your product for sure. Like you, you have to [00:23:00] be excited to get up every day and work on it. If you're not excited, then someone else will be more excited and they'll beat you.

I would say like there's a point after that, though, where, you can take a step back and you can be a bit more kind of detached and you can treat it more like a business and things get much less personal and the pace can be a bit less frenetic. But I would say, yeah, like up until that 10K MRR point, you kind of need to be excited to wake up every day and work on it. So yeah, it's much, much better if it's a product that you're really passionate about, I would say.

I think I'm thinking about it slightly differently, but with a little bit of a nuance, so for me personally, like, Tailscan is something that I really have a love for both the community that is my target audience, but then also the framework itself, I've been using it since forever. So for me, that's a really good fit when it comes to, you know, really loving it. I [00:24:00] do, however, have a second product that I most often don't talk about in public and for anyone wondering is not generating money right now.

Although, I do think that it definitely will in the future, but yeah, I think the nuance I want to apply is I think especially for the first business that you're building, you have to have more love for, and once you become a bit more of an experienced founder, Then you can potentially do something, potentially more for the money as long as you know your business, of course. Do something more for the money and still be able to make it work. I think there's a little bit of a nuance there, but, um, especially when you're starting out, yeah. I think love for the space and the product and the positioning and all that stuff and, uh, affinity with it is very important.

That's what bootstrapping is all about. Moving on, we have like Sonny who requested to speak like very early on. Sonny, do you have anything to, to chime in here?

Yeah, so, for better and worse, presumably, um, somebody once described me more as, uh, Davy Crockett than Ray [00:25:00] Crock, which is kind of an Americanism, but, uh, I've always been a better founder than a CEO, if you know what I mean. And I found over, like, six, startups, we'll see about the seventh, that there's, like, there's a big difference between going from zero to a thousand users to a thousand to ten thousand, or ten thousand to a hundred thousand, right? Whereas, you know, once you have a thousand users, you at least have some data.

And you can sort of scale, you know, I mean, if you have a thousand users, you probably have about 9000 people at a 10 percent conversion, that didn't decide to use your product and so you probably learned something about not only what your users like. Um, and what they're sticking around for based on retention. But also the things that didn't work and I think there's like a, certainly for like early, early founders, there's like, um, it's very tempting to sort of look for the solution to the problem. Um, when in reality, sometimes one's [00:26:00] understanding of the, of the customer and what their needs are and what matters. And the prioritization structure of, you know, if you've got ten features, which are the features that really matter, and which are the ones that are sort of ancillary, or a result of, wouldn't it be cool if we did this? Okay, cool, but do people really care, you know? I heard some, startup dude, whose name escapes me, um, like ten years ago release this blog post.

And it was called Killerfeature. And the premise was, stop adding a bunch of features, and instead, kill features. Uh, kill one feature every week, and when your customers scream, you've discovered the one that matters. Right? Um, and I kind of liked it. And so, I think that, you know, understanding why people are using the thing that you made, or visiting the, um, the content repository that you're building, or whatever else it might be, having that is I want to say a predicate for growth, um, because if, marketing when [00:27:00] you don't have product market fit, it kind of just loses you money faster, right?

Or if you're checking, you know, 100k behind, uh, or 1k behind something that is, where you're not solving something, it just, you just lose money faster. It just shortens your runway. Um, but so if you can understand. You know, to the extent that you're building something really valuable and getting that right. Um, that can be dangerous if you're doing it for free because suddenly you find something that people want for free, but when you try to monetize it, it doesn't necessarily scale . Um, but you know, I find the protocol that I have in those early days in that sort of discovery phase versus the scaling phase is quite different. Whereas with the scaling phase, you can sort of optimize for specific variables. Whereas the discovery phase, the more different the acquisition channel tests are, the more stuff you will learn and the faster those, um, testing cycles are, the faster you'll learn as well and so I try to optimize,[00:28:00] for Wildly different acquisition approaches early on and then like rank them by how fast you can execute these experiments to get material data. Um, on the outcome, and sort of timebox them, costbox them, stack them up, and then, you know, either do it yourself, or bring somebody on who can sort of push it and have a little rigor to the process and you just pour fuel on the fires that work, and be ready to kill the ones that you don't, because you set your exit criteria for those experiments before you do them, otherwise you'll convince yourself, oh, what if we just do this? Um, but yeah, I found the mentality quite different, whereas, uh You know, early on we sort of say, well, we just gotta do this. Okay, what's everybody else doing? Well, let's just do that and that can work sometimes, but I've seen models that, you know, people thought it was marketing was the way to go, but turned out hard sales, old school, hard sales out outperformed.

Thank you for your thoughts. We've heard some more questions. One of them [00:29:00] is what is the thing that, or how important is it to have an edge when building and how to spend out from the crowd, especially in participating in an early hype cycle. So, to elaborate a little bit, suppose that you're building in the AI space right now, I think it's very relevant. How important is an edge when building and how to actually stand out from the crowd? Of course there's marketing ways, there's feature ways, but, yeah, I'm kind of interested in hearing. Um, Dom, maybe someone else that is like, Oh, I actually am building something with a real edge and this is how I'm doing it. Um, just request to speak.

I can certainly chime in a bit. I think in terms of edge, I'm not sure if edge is the right word, but in terms of like hopping on a trend, it's an interesting question because, um, the thing now with everyone building on AI and sort of like you see a lot of. Sort of hate now on Twitter for people that are building products on [00:30:00] AI, but then seeing how many are actually successful, even if it's just a short term kind of speaks for itself, right?

And what I mean with this is that I think if you're an indie hacker and you're Trying to build maybe your first like bootstrap product. It does certainly make sense to jump on some sort of trend because if you're, so like the best analogy I had is like, um, I built like this product where people can like preview how their app would look like on the app store. It's called Store Previewer and I spent so much time on it and what I realized back then, a lot of people were using Figma. I built this like nice web app. I tried to. Tell everyone how cool it is to use like a web app instead of Figma. But I had to kind of educate everyone first that you kind of should use the web app 'cause it's much better. Um, versus people kind of already knew Figma and it was just a, it was a hawk for me to tell people about this. The next project that I was thinking about and then eventually building was Helpkit and one of the big, big reasons was because I was using basically [00:31:00] Notion for everything in my life.

I was documenting my other businesses. I was documenting my own life, my personal life, but then I also realized Notion is right now on a trajectory to grow more and more, more people around me are talking about Notion in my coworking space. Everyone is using Notion. So I was immediately thinking, Oh, wow, if I build some product that is built on top of Notion, perhaps there is already people underneath me kind of doing most of the work, educating people about Notion. I mean, now it sounds ridiculous, but there's people now making 300k a year just. Selling Notion templates, right? So there is certainly a huge, huge growth that happened with like the underlying ecosystem of, I was basically building on. And that definitely gave me like a big edge, I would say in comparison to other products.

And you can see this a lot with like plugins that are built on other ecosystem, Shopify. Um, you name it, all of these kinds of stuff and as an IndieHack in the beginning, do you want to swim against the current or do you want to have something that is kind of pushing you [00:32:00] maybe down the river where you're already feeling the traction in the very beginning on? Um, I think it's a really important question you have to ask yourself and definitely, you want to be aware of your resources. So have something that is like, on a trajectory to grow rather than decline or stagnate.

Yeah, I just want to add. It's going to sound a bit cheesy, but I think everyone's got some sort of edge, right? So maybe your edge is, you know, like for example, Peter Levels, I would say his edge is the fact that he can ship really fast. So Peter Levels, Danny Postmar, those guys can ship features in like hours. They can ship fast. Other people, maybe their edge is. Writing really good blog posts. Other people, maybe their edge is, let's say, I don't know, they post really good memes on Twitter.

You gotta figure out what your edge is and you kinda like have to leverage it. Um, [00:33:00] me, I would say, in the early days, in the sort of like 0 to 10k MRR, um My edge was definitely the fact that I was shipping really fast. Like every week we would have new features. And you know, I had competition back then and they weren't innovating or they weren't like shipping anywhere near as fast as I was. So, yeah, you've kind of got to figure out what your edge is and just leverage it. Maybe your edge is, your app is faster than the competition.

Oh, we actually, I guess about after the 10K MRR, maybe between 10K and 20K MRR, I realized that one of our edges, one of our sort of like, USPs is, um, support. We have really good support. So if you email the support team for Bannerbear. You'll get a reply within minutes, basically, and that's an edge. So we lean into that, we regard sort of support as a feature [00:34:00] and we charge accordingly. So, yeah, kind of got to figure out like, what edge do you have? What It's something that you can leverage early on and just sort of lean into it as much as possible.

Awesome. We also have Al Amin requesting to speak. I'm sorry if I mispronounce your name. I'm trying my best here. Do you have anything to add?

So good afternoon, everybody. Um, I have something to talk about Bootstrapping. I was working on a project and dominic said, I don't know if I pronounced that well . Notion But my project is steering against the current. As Pari said, it's not moving with the current . Since everyone is using Notion , and the market for Notion is actually large nowadays. So I'm building a products that are actually better than Notion. Maybe, let me put it like that, with my team. And we are looking to get, to be VC backed. So, what do you think about that? Can bootstrapping actually work in [00:35:00] that case ?

I think honestly it can work in any space, right, given bootstrapping is, you know I'm probably not going to have the terminology exactly right here, but, bootstrapping in general is starting without having prior funding or without prior money, starting out something and building it into a business. Essentially without being dependent on others. So I suppose it definitely can be, yeah. Um, Will, I also invited you as a Speaker, would you like to add something?

Yeah, I hope you can hear me okay. So, you know, One interesting thing to me is that, they always say, uh, skate to where the puck is going, right? Uh, and so it seems like every day there's new AI tools, there's new features, and I just, you know, it's difficult for me to sit down and think about the future, right? To think about, you know, all these new tools and things coming out that what you're doing today, like, is it? Bold enough. How do you like think about where these are going to so that you can [00:36:00] intercept it at a future date or is that all distraction and, you know, just keep your head down and do the thing that's in front of you?

Wow, this is I totally feel that sentiment, Will. I think that if you're starting out as an indie hacker now, like in 2023, yeah, I think it's, A lot harder than it was in the last few years. There's just so much, the pace of innovation, the amount of distraction, it's really hard to sort of like cut through all the noise these days. So, yeah, um, I don't have an answer for you. I'm just saying that, yeah, I totally agree. It's like a, it's a conundrum. If I was starting out now, would I sort of like join the AI bandwagon or would I, like you say, just sort of stick my head down and just do what I think is right, work on something perhaps unrelated to AI and just sort of hope for the best. Really hard to say, actually. At least I think within our community we have, real life [00:37:00] examples of people sort of making a living either way, you know, so I would say, me and like a bunch of others in our community here are not really part of the AI sort of bandwagon, but we're still, you know, making a living and then there's other people that we know who are very much part of the AI movement and they're killing it, so

Well, you know, it's funny, it's hard to gauge, like, how saturated it's become in the general public, right? Because everybody in this space listening right now, I'd imagine is, you know, 100 percent or 100 times more into AI than the general public, right? So it's like is everybody in this space listening an early adopter of AI and, where everybody here is on the leading edge , or is it, you know, starting to proliferate? It's very confounding to me to like, get myself out of my head .

Yeah, I hear you, Will. I did tweet about this about, well, a couple of months ago, that I personally, myself, first of all, was in quite a bit [00:38:00] of a stress seeing all these things come out at such a great next speed, that I was also fearing a little bit for my own product. And I can also, yeah, hear what Jon says, it's like there's a couple of us that have businesses that don't touch on AI, or at least not very strongly, and they seem to, thus far, come out very unscathed, as a matter of fact, in some cases even increased the demand for certain services, um Say, API integrations, for example.

So, which one to choose, first of all? I would say stick to something and personally, I would also very much advocate niche down very deep, so that you can have one more and deeper conversations and more difficult problems to solve that more or less people will be also solving. So, to give you an example, the other thing that I'm building is specifically targeted towards Dutch lawyers, which is a very tiny market if you look at it globally. But, um, when you look at it from the [00:39:00] lens of how much competition I will probably be getting, it's close to zero. So as long as you have domain knowledge about it and you, for example, speak that specific language, you can definitely find some niche. And then I just say, just keep your head down and like, just work on that specifically. And that'll be your little corner to conquer and you can definitely make still big bucks, uh, out of that as well, right? Like, the riches are in the niches, I think is the quote.

Well, it's interesting because it seems like AI will like make some things much easier and other things much more difficult. The last thing is an example here of I've been seeing like AI will help me write my cover letters and I saw a service that will be like, why apply to jobs anymore? Here's a service that'll apply to a hundred jobs for you, at once. Right. And so if everybody uses that, what I'm hearing and the job market is like, now people are flooded with job applications and they're all just made up stuff. So it's interesting that it's solving some things and creating new problems . Thanks for letting me speak.

Yeah, no, I hear you. I absolutely hear you. I think, as a matter of fact, [00:40:00] I heard Jon at some point also mention, like, I'm getting way too many applications to actually sit through and, yeah, I can only imagine that the quality can potentially be much less because it's all just generated.

This was pre AI. So this was like, back when I was hiring in 2000 and, uh, 2021. This is before ChatGPT and all that kind of stuff. I put out an ad for like, customer service kind of role, remote customer service. I've got a thousand applications, and they're not real people . Like, uh, so I can only imagine it's just got even worse now. So, yeah, I don't know, I will sort of answer your question. I've sort of taken a position in the last, I guess, like few years of kind of ignoring any of these like big tech trends, like crypto web three AI. I mean, I'll dabble in it a little bit, but I never sort of [00:41:00] like bet the house on that kind of thing and so far, you know, like Touchwood , that strategy has paid off. But we'll see, I mean, Bannerbear and my other product, Browser Bear, both have, you know, some small AI features, but we're not sort of like betting the whole house on AI. We're not branding it as like an AI product or anything like that. So yeah, we'll see.

One thing I'm curious about when it comes to this is that, I mean, speaking of the edge again, right. If you think about the AI image generation tools we had in the very early days, even on Twitter here, if you take a look like Peter and Danny, they were basically the kind of first ones that were really pushing it, building their own sort of like hacky Python scripts to like really make it work where nobody else really even knew how to make like these models work and I think in that regard, if you can, like, if you see a trend growing and you can really be one of the first that excellently executes on these ideas, [00:42:00] I think you can position yourself in the market and really make it stick. One other, just kind of playing the devil's advocate thing, I want to throw into the space here is that What I'm curious about is like, I mean, let's take the very cheesy example of people, everyone building nowadays chat with PDF, kind of apps, right?

What I'm curious about is what do you think if you like intrinsically really think you can make a better chat with PDF tool that has like all these, I don't know, features that you think are like absolutely amazing. I feel like that's certainly also a different angle you can possibly take or justify building versus if you just blatantly school on Twitter. You see like five people building a chat with PDF tool and you're like, Oh my God, like there is money. That's, I'm just going to make yet another copy. So just like from the approach you take, if you're interested, really passionate about a problem, I think, yeah, you can probably also.

Make a good living out of it. But I kind of resonate with Jon in general, likely [00:43:00] staying out of like this very hype trends probably also keeps you sane. I feel like now everyone's chasing all these like hyper trends, whereas probably you can make a really nice, comfortable bootstrap, like make a living SaaS business that is maybe a bit more boring, but maybe everyone's just like looking away right now. So, yeah, definitely think that kind of going, like not looking at these hyper trends all of the time, maybe it can help you stay a little bit sane.

Yeah. Second that. I hope we did give you some extra insights at least for what it's worth, Will. Um, those are some good questions. I think honestly, I think it's quite, quite a good idea to potentially soon do a, uh, AI oriented Version of bootstr or at least one of them one of them the extra episodes we can dive more into this I definitely think that it'd be very interesting

We also have Ed from hello startup I think you're wanting to have a startup and wanting to speak if you want to chime in Ed

Hey guys, Thanks [00:44:00] for having me. Number one Jon like big fan. I remember first stumbling upon you When you had a PHP aggregator thing and I was like, oh, that this is the coolest thing I've ever seen. Anyway. Um, yeah, like I'm a big fan of bootstrapping and here in LA or in the US it's like everybody wants to do a VC funded thing, but I'm a big fan of bootstrapping and Indie hacking and these guys, you guys are kind of always kind of come up on top. But you know, number one, following on trends, I think it's kind of important, um, but you can't bet the house on it, like others have said, there are probably opportunities to make money, but, you know, it's like, you gotta have like a core business first, the way we think about businesses here and startups here is that it's great to be able to jump on a bandwagon, take a little bit of cash off the table, off the market, and then see how it goes.

But you still gotta have like that core business. You gotta think [00:45:00] about your startup or your bootstrap business or your SaaS as like, as a Chinese restaurant or like a pizza shop or a bagel shop, which is kinda like something anyone can do. But, you know, maybe the trend is some sort of fusion food or whatever. Maybe you could jump on that real quick, but you still gotta have a core. And I think what I see a lot of bootstrappers do is, jump from one trend, to another trend, to another trend without really understanding what their core business is or what is their core thing that they want to do. I think earlier in the conversation, you guys were talking about like, you gotta enjoy the thing that you do and try to make money off of it.

But I think fundamentally, if you don't enjoy, number one, the community that you're building for, number two, The thing you're building or the industry you're building in. If you're not passionate about that stuff, it just doesn't work. And it doesn't matter what trend you follow. You're always gonna kind of fail . Anyway, that's [00:46:00] my two cents. Thanks.

Yeah, I would just add to that by saying I think it's fine to experiment. I think, most of us, if not all of us have gone through that phase of sort of like not really knowing exactly what we should work on and spending a however long, you know, six months or a year working on different ideas. It's not like nobody sort of like figures it out on the first go. Right. So you have to. There's definitely going to be an experimentation phase for, for everyone. I definitely had that, I worked through sort of 10 different ideas and some of those were very much, I was just like chasing a trend, you know, like I launched a job, a job board as one of my projects.

It was like a, just a job board just looked exactly like Remote OK, and I thought, Oh, you know, if Remote OK is making money, then I can make money. So, you know, you've got to go through this kind of phase of trying a few sort of, tried and tested ideas. And [00:47:00] then eventually you have some of your own ideas. Some of them are not so good. Some of them are good. And then, you know, eventually you sort of like hit on the idea. That's kind of like your own idea and it also resonates with your target audience. So, yeah, it's kind of a journey, I would say the road to sort of the roadmap to working on an idea that you really love and you can own and you can be successful with takes like a year, I would say, at least just sort of like, if you're starting from scratch, figuring out like what you should work on will take about a year.

Yeah, I second that, Jon. I'm even willing to admit for me, that was even two years and honestly, by the way, this is a very small side note to this, but it's even more dangerous when you do have something that seemingly seems to work, but then somehow is like, you know, not really working out because you get some false validation from some Well, in my case, big [00:48:00] corporates that definitely wanted to use it, but, didn't quite know how to use it.

And I had the hope of like, wow, I'm making money right now, this is great. Except that it really slowly fizzled out after. So, yeah, I definitely had that phase as well, I'd say. Um, there's one other thing, Ed, that you mentioned that I find interesting. You mentioned there's a lot of people in your circle that say that, you know, when they want to do a startup or they want to do something for themselves, they instantly do think about funding and that this bootstrap, I don't know how to say this, like side world, like a niche, I suppose we are, um, it's a bit of a different approach.

I think I also want to probably, put this in the next episode, because it's an interesting discussion, but I'm a very big fan specifically of bootstrapping because we get to tackle problems that are too small for most big companies to tackle. But for us would be absolutely amazing. So to give you an example, we could niche [00:49:00] down. This is why I'm really advocating niching down. We can niche down to a market that has a potential of 200 or 300, 000 dollars. Um, and, you know, be able to capture 10 percent of that niche because we get to spend a lot of time and energy on it and for us, you know, if we would be making 10 percent of that market, that would be 30 grand a month, would be absolutely amazing as income.

Whereas most companies wouldn't even shrug, or wouldn't even want to look at the 30k, like they totally wouldn't be interesting. So it's also funny, we, I don't think we always Compete with VC. We actually have the unique opportunity to not do that and solve more niche problems to serve more niche audiences as well. It's a superpower, really, I think.

You know, it's an interesting divergence, really. In the U. S., we're kind of obsessed with trying to be VC funded. There's a lot less bootstrappers in the U. S., I would say and I would definitely say that there's a lot less successful [00:50:00] bootstrappers in the USA. The bootstrapping and the indie hacking mindset seems to be very strong in Europe.

And it's like a weird fork in the road here. You know, there's a lot of start up ,events, especially now during the holidays. And there's very, very few in between to see a bootstrapper. Again, I personally love bootstrapping. And I think it works, but, it's really, really hard to find talent or to convince talent to work for a bootstrap organization. It's an interesting dynamic.

Yeah, I've personally been to a couple of these startup meetups, and, yeah, well, honestly, even in Europe, I would say It is not as common as you would think. I think most of my friends that I talk to back home, that are building something, they usually, I wouldn't say big VC money, but they would usually take like an angel investment here, or sit around there. Honestly, it's a bit of a, well, I wouldn't say a controversial opinion, but it is quite out there, I [00:51:00] suppose. I sincerely think that bootstrapping, especially with, uh, you know, going from absolute zero to something is just extremely, extremely hard. Um, it's not easy at all. It comes with many challenges that you wouldn't necessarily have with when you go down a VC route, it's just, yeah, it's starting from absolute zero without any other chance of getting money other than earning it, it's a different beast, I suppose.

Alright, um, we did a couple of discussion questions. I think I, at this point, have more questions for the next episode than that we have actually spoken about here, which is great. I hope that will forever in perpetuity continue. I would like to again, thank Jon for coming as our main guest and I would like to Thank Will and Ed, and the others that have spoken. I can't actually see them in the list anymore. Thank you [00:52:00] very much for chiming in as well. All you are very welcome to come again next episode.

It'll be every Wednesday at this time. Give me and or Dominic a follow and you'll be able to see when the next space is. Thank you all for coming and we'll see you in the next one. Have a good night.