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Interviewing indie founders about their journey and their products. itslaunchday.com
Dagobert Renouf (00:01)
Hey Tadas, welcome to lunch day.
Tadas Gedgaudas (00:04)
Hey, dog, so amazing that you invited me here. I think it's so much worth the value than the 100 euro I spent on this. think it's like I was thinking before joining, I think it should be 500, maybe even a thousand.
Dagobert Renouf (00:18)
I like to hear that, what do you think so?
Tadas Gedgaudas (00:22)
I mean, your audience, have an incredibly large Twitter following. I think your product is going to grow really fast. So it's like a super easy opportunity for somebody like me with just a hundred euro law reach a part of your audience. know, it's, it's influencer market.
Dagobert Renouf (00:43)
which is what your product is about and we're gonna talk about later. So I just understood now why you said that, that makes sense. Because you're in this world, so you know that they charge way more. But my vision for launch day is I think, and yesterday I sold a lot of sponsorship yesterday and I keep increasing the price, know, sponsoring used to be 500, now it's six, seven, now we are at 800, every time I add 100 and people keep paying. And I even sold a slot for like a...
Tadas Gedgaudas (00:50)
Yeah.
yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (01:11)
a secondary slot, like at the bottom of the list, but on mobile that makes you close the chat, is where people spend some time. ⁓ So, because I want to turn this into kind of a community of indie makers that are vetted, that are real, that are actually building products, because they're all launching something.
And actually I started a Slack group with everybody who's on launch day now and you're gonna get your invite just after this interview. It's like the interview is like the kind of like the last point before getting invited. yeah, and then so because of this, like I don't wanna make it too expensive because I want it to be open to people. It's not about, you it's just about filtering low quality and having people who have some dedication.
Tadas Gedgaudas (01:43)
Awesome.
Dagobert Renouf (02:05)
So I think I could bring it up to maybe 200, but not much more than that, because I don't want to be like, I don't want to have only people who are already successful. A couple hours ago, I interviewed someone, Daniel, was, ⁓ he doesn't even have one customer yet. But this is cool, he's interesting. yeah. ⁓
Tadas Gedgaudas (02:12)
Okay.
Okay.
Then it makes sense, I guess it's all about the targeting, like what you're doing, if you want to support like different kind of creators, know, indie hackers, you know, but like I am like, I would say smaller indie hacker, you know, and but I saw some big names on your launch day, like ⁓ Dan as well, think Dan, the one who was building Next.js while we're playing. So he's kind of a big guy, you know, and hundred dollars.
Dagobert Renouf (02:52)
Yeah, I try to have
someone big at least per launch because my ideas like in one launch day, there's going to be people who are very small and at the beginning people bigger and the ideas were all like kind of like help each other, you know. And that's why I push everyone to give the biggest deal so that it's kind of like, okay, everybody's doing their best and motivating people. I don't know, like a community thing, know, like it's a cohort for like
between 10 and 15 every lunch day. ⁓ yeah, so yeah, I wanna, my thought was like, and if I do this, it's gonna become something kind of cool. And then sponsors will wanna be a part of this. And that's what I'm seeing now. Like I'm seeing people wanna sponsor and paying for sponsorships because they wanna say, I'm supporting the indie community. They wanna be, it's an image thing. It's not just like they're gonna get sales.
Even though, you know, launch day number two, Simon Heuberg had a bunch of sales because he has a perfect offer. He's so good at this. So it was perfectly tailored. But in general, they just want to be like, you know, they want sales, but they also want this image, this long term, I'm supporting the indie community. So I think it can work out this way. Like I don't have to increase the price too much. And for indie makers and I can just, you know, so yeah, that's the vision.
Tadas Gedgaudas (03:54)
Yeah.
Yeah, I guess just play with the sponsorships that can also work. So you have a launch every week or every two weeks?
Dagobert Renouf (04:23)
Yeah, I'm gonna...
No, I think every week would be boring,
would be too much. So I want to do every two or three weeks. At first I wanted to do once a month, but I realized after doing it that once every two weeks is kind of perfect. Because if you do once a month and you have 30 products, probably too much for people to check out. I think two weeks and having like on average like 12, 13, 14 products, it's kind of great because like people have the time to forget about it.
And then, there's a new launch day. because I wanted to, you know, because this thing with all these product launches, it's every day. But so because it's every day, like it's nothing. You're not afraid of missing a day. Like, it doesn't matter. But if it's like, you know, once in a while, you know, it makes sense also because I want to do these interviews because I want to, you know, create a deeper connection with everybody like you and everybody who comes on there. So it takes some time, you know, I'm not going to do.
Tadas Gedgaudas (04:58)
Yeah.
That's right.
Dagobert Renouf (05:25)
Every day, I could have one product per day, doesn't make sense. So, I think all goes together, basically.
Tadas Gedgaudas (05:33)
Yeah, I'm thinking about product hunt now, know, there are like what, 50, 100 product launches a day? Like if you want to keep up with all the new projects launching there, you need to build an AI agent, which will scrape the projects and give you an analysis daily. And I think there are people who do that, at least the VCs maybe.
Dagobert Renouf (05:41)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It makes that's that's a good idea.
Yeah, product product and a curator or something. Only the good products of product. So, ⁓ today there's nothing I'm kidding. know, yeah, that's that's my marketing at least I'm trying I'm trying my best. ⁓
Tadas Gedgaudas (06:01)
Yeah.
And on lunch day, there's a few.
Are you doing well?
Dagobert Renouf (06:13)
So, you know, we've been interacting with each other for a while on X, but I don't really know your story. Like, so how did you become an indie maker? What's your journey, man?
Tadas Gedgaudas (06:26)
⁓ I guess it's like everybody, know, who see levels.io. I know you got a little beef with him, but let's mention him.
Dagobert Renouf (06:32)
No, it's not beef. I think I just annoyed
him, but I admire him. mean, he annoys me 30 % of the time and I admire him 70 % of the time. So I still follow and I still look at everything he does because he's like so creative in what he does. I think if you miss what he does, you miss so many opportunities for learning. you know.
Tadas Gedgaudas (06:39)
That is it.
True, true, So I guess like I saw him somewhere, maybe a few years back when he wasn't making 200K MRR or so, maybe he was making a bit less. And then, you you see him working with PHP, jQuery, all the simple stack and then come on, I can do it better. So that's how I started running products. And, like for a very long time, no success, I didn't even finish the products I'm building. You need to build some kind of, you know,
Dagobert Renouf (07:21)
Yeah.
Tadas Gedgaudas (07:24)
⁓ skin in the game I guess because you just need to finish a project and that takes discipline so if you
Dagobert Renouf (07:32)
So why do you think, give
an example of one project you didn't finish.
Tadas Gedgaudas (07:38)
So I remember a very big project I was doing. was Reddit comment tracker. It's way before AI and there are a ton of projects like that, but it was more like, you know, just some statistical analysis of Reddit comments. I wanted to launch, I was doing it like with really difficult tech and then, you know, it took me like six months and I was nowhere close of finishing it. I just gave up, you know, that's a single project.
Dagobert Renouf (08:05)
And
why do you think you gave up?
Tadas Gedgaudas (08:09)
I think it was just poor code in my opinion. Poor code, it was difficult to manage and I lost interest. I didn't know how to market it.
Dagobert Renouf (08:16)
⁓
Like it became too, the code
became complicated. So it became less fun to build or less something like that.
Tadas Gedgaudas (08:27)
Yeah, yeah, pretty much. It became too complex. It's not fun anymore. You know, you go into the code, it takes you like full day to solve one issue when you had planned, you know, to build something in that day, but you only were able to fix one small issue. So that kills at least my motivation real quick. And, you know, I was younger, I didn't have any discipline to go through. Of course, right now, yeah, like there are these problems in my project as well, but, you know, I just have the discipline. just...
Dagobert Renouf (08:56)
Because now
you have two products or more, I forgot, two products. Okay. So what changed? How did you find? Because the tech can always be messy. So what changed?
Tadas Gedgaudas (09:01)
Yeah, I have two products here.
So the biggest motivation what changed now is that the products I make I do are making money So because they are making money because like some clients rely on these products. I need to keep them working I need to keep working on them. I can't just drop them like I did
Dagobert Renouf (09:27)
But before making money,
how did you get to launching them?
Tadas Gedgaudas (09:32)
Those were a lot smaller projects. For example, Leads on Trees, the first project that made some serious money from my indie hacking, it was just a simple funding scraper, which was quite easy and fun to build. it's like really one feature, it just aggregates all the VC funding into one table and display that, nothing else. know, login system, payment system, that's it. So very simple, nothing too complex. Then top, yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (09:54)
Yeah. And you launched it and you started getting
custom meals.
Tadas Gedgaudas (10:00)
Yeah, and people were saying, wow, you've got something. I remember one guy told me you got something with this.
Dagobert Renouf (10:05)
And how did it feel
for you? What did it change for you?
Tadas Gedgaudas (10:10)
At first, yeah, it's like very ecstatic, know, but right now I can't get that feeling anymore, but it's fine.
Dagobert Renouf (10:18)
No,
but like in your way of building, for me that's exactly that. Like once it becomes real and you have people buying it, it changes everything. And it's not just about, at least for me, it's not just about the money, it's about, I'm doing it for somebody. I'm useful. It's not just in my head. Like the fact that it's connected to someone, that like, I don't know, like motivation just becomes 10 times easier. Is that something like that that you felt also?
Tadas Gedgaudas (10:31)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. It's like, you know, ⁓ having customers, I think it's like having an employer in some sense, because, know, you have to do this job because like your customers are not going to be happy and maybe they rely on this product a lot. And I know some of them do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I get, you know, very often the question like, okay, you're an indie hacker. you know, there are like,
Dagobert Renouf (10:58)
They need you, they're counting on you.
Tadas Gedgaudas (11:10)
Bigger companies that do the same thing that you do like how do we know you're not gonna burn out and not gonna quit in a month So, you know this I want to prove for the customers
Dagobert Renouf (11:22)
Hmm. Yes. I don't really get what you said with the big companies. What's the... Can you repeat that?
Tadas Gedgaudas (11:30)
Yes,
so for example, top yappers, yeah, like influencers database, there are like very big companies, VC funded companies, which do exactly same thing. So, but they, they cost a lot more because like 20 times more than top yappers. And I've got customers saying, okay, like I know I can pay them more money, but they know they will not disappear in a month. And if we build our infrastructure around your app, then you know, how can we trust you will not disappear.
Dagobert Renouf (11:41)
Yeah.
And that's a big ⁓ hurdle to overcome for indie makers. For example, me, I often don't buy indie products because of this, because I've seen enough shit, I've seen enough. yeah, yeah. And then they give up. So that's a big hurdle. And that's why time is so important for us. Like once you've been in business, like, and that's why it's hard to find the customers at the beginning, because you've been in business for nothing.
Tadas Gedgaudas (12:01)
So I want to prove that.
True, yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (12:28)
But once it's been one year, two years, man, it changes a lot because people trust you. And that's like invisible thing. Nobody tells you, nobody talks about this, but just time, time in business, depending on how critical it is, of course, ⁓ if it's just like ⁓ a PDF that you buy, it doesn't matter. But if it's a service, something or like, for example, there's somebody else in this launch day doing analytics product.
I could switch to his product, but like, if I switch to an Indie maker and then they stop, what the fuck happens to my data? Because I want to have my data, you know? And so hopefully, I mean, this guy is actually super reliable because he's been building products for four years and his previous product, he still runs it five years later, so I trust him. But that's because of time.
Tadas Gedgaudas (13:20)
Yeah, yeah, makes sense. It's like compounding interest. I'm now thinking you should write a tweet about this. About this exact idea. I'm saying you should write a tweet about this exact idea. It's really nice. It would really fit.
Dagobert Renouf (13:27)
What? Yeah.
Yeah, maybe, Good
point.
Tadas Gedgaudas (13:37)
If you don't write, I'll write.
Dagobert Renouf (13:38)
Fuck, I'm not... You know on these... You
know I do... No! You know, on these days where I'll do all these interviews, because I do all these interviews in the same day... ⁓
Tadas Gedgaudas (13:42)
Just kidding.
wow.
Dagobert Renouf (13:51)
I run out of Post-its. So I exhausted my Post-its, so need to buy to get some new ones because I have so many ideas from all these conversations. So give me just one second.
Tadas Gedgaudas (14:05)
That's good, that's good.
Dagobert Renouf (14:13)
but I always buy so many posts. So tweet about...
Time is value. I will just, you know, I have transcript of this. I will ask ChatGPT to pre-write some shit.
Tadas Gedgaudas (14:32)
It makes so much easier.
Dagobert Renouf (14:33)
And then I would... But just
to organize the ideas, then I will write it. Because otherwise it's usually shitty.
Okay, we're good. So where are you based, man? Actually, where are you?
Tadas Gedgaudas (15:09)
in Lithuania.
Dagobert Renouf (15:10)
Lithuania, okay cool. Wow, we have a bunch of people in Lithuania, Estonia...
Tadas Gedgaudas (15:12)
In train, yeah. In the wilderness.
Yeah, it's... mean, there's not much to do here. I think a lot of people are just on their computers. And we're grinding, you the summer is cold. The winter is really cold. So you're just on X all the time.
Dagobert Renouf (15:32)
⁓ Shit, that doesn't...
me, just because I just have one friend here, so that's why. ⁓ But yeah, how cold is it this summer? You scare me when you say that.
Tadas Gedgaudas (15:41)
⁓ yeah.
It's like in the morning 15 Celsius during the day is about 25
Dagobert Renouf (15:50)
it's okay.
⁓ well you have similar weather as in Lille, France, in north of France, 100%. ⁓ That's cool. ⁓ Okay, so you made these two products and what's your... So you ever had a job or something? How?
Tadas Gedgaudas (16:10)
Yeah, I work actually in 95 until now. But I'm quitting in ⁓ 8 days. 8 days until the last day at my job.
Dagobert Renouf (16:14)
Still now, you mean? Yeah.
tell the story. So how, what's this job? What's the job about?
Tadas Gedgaudas (16:26)
Yeah.
I'm a web scraping engineer at Oxylabs. So I guess like if you look at my projects, those gonna make sense because they're all like around web scraping and like data collection. So yeah, I work there, but I'm Just wanna focus a bit on my own projects and then do some freelancing on the side. I think it's gonna be just gonna make more sense in the future.
Dagobert Renouf (16:43)
Why are you quitting?
Tadas Gedgaudas (16:56)
because like the 95 is eating a lot of time and then I come back home from work pretty tired I gotta still work on the projects and basically no free time at all
Dagobert Renouf (17:08)
100 % agree. I think some people can do it. I've seen proof of that, but I can't. When I had a nine to five, I mostly freelance, but I also had regular jobs. But even with freelance, I had the same problem. Like, because I like it's boring to me to do a job badly. Like it's not interesting. So I have to, I'm passionate about it. But once I've put all this passion into my job,
I don't have energy for, it's not just, it's mental energy. It's not just, you know, being tired or shit. It's just like, and I was also always feeling guilty, you know, even on the weekend, it was tough for me somehow. I don't know why, but you know, to not give everything to my job because I'm very passionate. Yeah.
Tadas Gedgaudas (17:41)
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean it depends I guess on which field you work and maybe if you get a lot of equity there is no problem you know giving all of yourself into a single job and look at the guys in San Francisco who work at OpenAI some of them are tweeting on X as well.
Dagobert Renouf (18:06)
Yeah. There's
another dimension. Like if you work at OpenAI, you have like kind of like a mission. It feels deeper. So that's, I think the only job I could take now would be something like that, where it feels like, okay, it's a mission I could like, if there was early Apple again, and I could get a job there, maybe I would be like, okay, this is important, you know? But there's so little jobs that feel important now. So much bullshit jobs, you know?
Tadas Gedgaudas (18:26)
Yeah.
True, ⁓
Dagobert Renouf (18:36)
Or not
bullshit, but just like it could stop existing, it wouldn't matter.
Tadas Gedgaudas (18:42)
Yeah.
So that's a real problem for the employers, guess. That's for them to solve it. For us in the hackers as well, if we want to scale the product.
Dagobert Renouf (18:52)
What do you mean? yeah.
Tadas Gedgaudas (18:53)
if you want to hire employees like
if you want to hire employees in the future so that's that's a problem to solve you know you have to build your business around a big mission I guess you need to have some kind of permission
Dagobert Renouf (19:07)
Yeah, that's what I'm doing now. I mean, for launch day, it's becoming clear that the mission is really to...
Basically, the more I do it, the more I think it's gonna replace, the goal is to replace IndieHackers website. Even though I love them, I really do. I talk to them on Twitter, I'm really big friends with them, like Channing and Cortlandt Allen who created it. But it's just this website is dying and everybody's missing it and there's no place for community. And I think launch day is gonna be that. And that's really something I really feel deeply. ⁓ So that's my mission right now.
Tadas Gedgaudas (19:44)
Yeah, within the hackers, think the problem is that it's really difficult to get there for new users. Like I wanted to post there something and I can't because I don't have some kind of permissions. I have to go comment and on your website on launch day, I remember when it launched, it was so free to access that they even DDoS'd you or something like that.
Dagobert Renouf (20:01)
Yeah, yeah, they did
ask me. to be honest, wasn't even, yeah, no, it was did ask. It was not did ask, it was just like, I had zero limits on anything and there's this live chat and I just like, okay, let's go. But there was not like a limit on like, for example, you could just leave the return key and it could just keep sending messages. So some guy did that with like three megabytes messages and then
Tadas Gedgaudas (20:30)
⁓ Yeah, so, so, yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (20:30)
and then, and I was on a
shared, I'm using Fly.io for hosting, I love them, because I built my website with Elixir and Phoenix and super crazy tech. And so I didn't know that their basic host that I I was like, I can run launch day on this five because Elixir is so high performance. I'm like, can technically, I could run launch day on this $4.
Tadas Gedgaudas (20:42)
Yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (20:56)
Dino and I use SQLite so I don't even need to pay for a database. It's just in the volume. It's just nothing. And so I did that, but then I didn't know that when you buy one of these very cheap things at FlyIO or any providers actually, it's a shared CPU. So if they see you have a problem, they will throttle the shit out of you. And when they throttle me, there was not enough memory for the app to run. So it kept crashing the whole day and I was on Twitter.
you know, on doing a Twitter space, debugging life. And then I just paid the $25 fixed, like made, put a limit on the chat. So if you, if you send more than five messages in one minute, it's gonna, you know, pause you. And that was it, you know, and now it's working. But yeah.
Tadas Gedgaudas (21:28)
Yeah.
But that's perfect, know, it was kind of what he does and I like that's what makes the internet fun, know, the freedom to post anything you like and when those websites like limit you. Yeah, it sucks. That's why indie hackers might be dying the website. mean, because you can't post there anything.
Dagobert Renouf (21:52)
Exactly, that's exactly what I think. Exactly. Yeah, yeah.
Well, that's...
So that's your experience, I think it's because...
It's because they have so much spam that they're trying to solve it. The other problem I hear most about indiehackers is that now, well, first of all, that the UI is confusing. There's too much shit, which, you know, it's just UI. So I think people like, people don't like. It's a bit more about taste. I'm not a big fan, but it's okay. But it's more like now, it used to be just indiehackers tips. It used to be indiehackers. Now it's like the most, you know,
Most common marketing stories or startup stories like all this big startup did this, know, yeah We don't give a shit it used to be like I remember like four or five years ago when I was on there It was because I before Twitter I actually started with Indiehikers.com and I was and I was making one blog post a week and I was get starting to get a bit of popularity there and I Remember you just had this home page and you just had interesting shit
like at least once per week, something that was really interesting. Like somebody was like, it was early days of TikTok marketing for people like us. And it was like how you can hack TikTok. And that was for now it's basic, but it used to be so interesting, you know? And so, so yeah, so.
Tadas Gedgaudas (23:20)
Okay.
Yeah, yeah. I have to go back to this website and check what they're about. Maybe even try to grow my account and see. Maybe I'll be able to write articles there as well one day.
Dagobert Renouf (23:32)
No, don't do that.
I'm gonna actually add this feature to launch day. That's a idea. Because the previous call, she told me that. I'm like, holy shit, that's a good idea. So yeah, it's time to do this. Cool. Man, I'm gonna hide this idea. So you build the first scrapper for a founding database. And now it's top Yappers. And by the way, you should meet Lydia.
Tadas Gedgaudas (23:36)
okay. It's gotta be better.
Perfect.
Dagobert Renouf (24:01)
who was the previous girl who you would see on Slack and she's on this launch day like you because her product is perfect for TikTok, I think. It's ⁓ B2C anti-phishing for Gmail. It's an extension that tells you immediately if this email is phishing or not. It works on mobile, on desktop, really well done. And I was telling her that this seemed like the kind of shit for TikTok marketing. What do you think?
Tadas Gedgaudas (24:31)
Any B2C app works on TikTok basically, because you know, especially if it's a mobile app. So you just make a lot of videos and I'll show you with upyappers how you can find specific creators, maybe even for this app. So it's for Gmail phishing. Yeah. So basically maybe.
Dagobert Renouf (24:47)
Yeah, you can show your screen and
you can show us. Yeah. That's going to be perfect.
Tadas Gedgaudas (24:52)
student.
And we can also check other ideas as well. Yeah, so what basically the platform, what it is, I'll just gonna show a quick demo. ⁓ We support all these creators, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. I recently added newsletters as well, ⁓ working on adding X. I'm probably gonna have you on X there, Daigo as well as an influencer. Maybe somebody will want to sponsor you through launch day.
Dagobert Renouf (25:17)
wow.
Tadas Gedgaudas (25:26)
So we'll see that. ⁓ So yeah, I'm scraping all those four platforms and I'm sending all the information about specific creator and their videos to large language models. So basically I process 1 billion tokens a month just to extract like what kind of products they promoted in the videos and to categorize them. So you see T-Series, know,
music production, film production, movie distribution, but that's not interesting. Those are bigger doubts.
Dagobert Renouf (25:57)
So you have
a transcription of everything that is said on all of their content.
Tadas Gedgaudas (26:03)
Not all of them, unlike the past 30 videos. Because all of that would be just way too much. Yeah, of course I want to scale this, but ⁓ not yet, maybe later.
Dagobert Renouf (26:07)
Yeah, but that's enough. That's enough. Okay.
No, but that's amazing
because I was expecting there would just be a fucking list of people and that's way better than this. That's awesome, man. That looks awesome. Wow.
Tadas Gedgaudas (26:18)
Yeah.
yeah
yeah so gmail yeah so for example we can even search for people who talk about gmail on their videos and you can see there are like a lot of creators but maybe we're not interested
Dagobert Renouf (26:34)
So show me, did you,
so did you, okay, cause you find one here, okay?
Tadas Gedgaudas (26:39)
Yeah,
so you can have the mentioned products filter. So Gmail, for example, ⁓ which creators mentioned Gmail in their videos.
Dagobert Renouf (26:45)
Yeah?
And what happens if you click on one
of these? you have issues? get the contact or you can save them.
Tadas Gedgaudas (26:55)
Yeah, so we have their email. Not all creators will have the email. So some of the creators have the email on their TikTok profile. So I parsed that. Some of them have a website. So I scrape that website and find the email there. So yeah, this creator has it on their bio. So it's pretty easy. And then you can have like the video. sorry. So it's not the perfect creator. Maybe let's see Gmail.
Dagobert Renouf (27:02)
Yeah, you see.
Yeah.
Tadas Gedgaudas (27:23)
I can also select contact data exists and maybe
Dagobert Renouf (27:26)
and you can play the videos
right on your website to get an idea. Wow.
Tadas Gedgaudas (27:29)
Yeah,
and maybe let's select ⁓ fewer, probably like 10,000. Let's focus on micro influencers because if the girl, that lady I think, is ⁓ just a beginner maybe, maybe she doesn't have a big budget, she might be...
Dagobert Renouf (27:44)
don't worry. She
will surprise you.
Tadas Gedgaudas (27:48)
perfect so yeah and basically maybe also let's see if there will be any technology entertainment yeah this one technology how to tricks for example 6,000 followers average goes 15,000 so pretty good but it's in Thailand so maybe you would want to focus on United States creators so you can see
Dagobert Renouf (28:08)
Nice.
Is that something that
you can filter for or you're still building that, that filter per country?
Tadas Gedgaudas (28:19)
Yes, so it's also there.
Dagobert Renouf (28:20)
language specifically.
Tadas Gedgaudas (28:23)
Yeah, language.
Dagobert Renouf (28:26)
Yeah, okay, okay, just you didn't think about it.
Tadas Gedgaudas (28:33)
trees in the United States. That would work better.
Dagobert Renouf (28:35)
Perfect. Wow.
And so you scrape it continuously like in the background, you always scraping new content on all these platforms.
Tadas Gedgaudas (28:46)
Yeah, so the system is built with microservices. So the whole app is just the API. It's built with Python, but the scrapers are also built in Python and they continuously scrape in the background. I manage to scrape about 10,000 to 50,000 creators each month. But there's a lot of steps that have to be taken into account because I also send the profile pictures and the name, surname to age and gender.
categorization so each creator is categorized like how many, how old they are, what gender do they belong to. So there's like a lot of processing power done in the background.
Dagobert Renouf (29:18)
Mmm.
And what's the hardest
data to get? What's the hardest part? I'm just curious. Yeah.
Tadas Gedgaudas (29:29)
What was the hardest part?
It's just maintaining all the scrapers that can be very difficult. Also adding new platforms like newsletters was really difficult to add because you have so many different newsletters, platforms, substack, kit, and a lot of other ones. So I have to support the scrapers for all of the platforms. So it's quite difficult if you're building.
Dagobert Renouf (29:46)
Subscribe.
Yeah.
Tadas Gedgaudas (29:57)
But ⁓ other than that, also age and gender filter, that's quite difficult because like the processing power you need to process all those images of creators to determine the age and gender, it's just...
Dagobert Renouf (30:09)
Yeah, how do you determine that
was that that's where I was going in initially. How the fuck do you know the age and gender because it's not on every profile.
Tadas Gedgaudas (30:12)
So.
Yeah, so all of the profiles do not have that, but it's basically determined based on the pictures. So profile picture, for example, you have, can, you can even find open source models on the hooking face. So hooking face is like a model database, maybe like a GitHub, but for models. Yeah. So a lot of French people made so many good tech recently.
Dagobert Renouf (30:35)
Yeah, yeah, for AI models, yeah. It's a French guy who made it, so that's why I know.
Yeah, launch day as the first one for sure. Crazy tech. Okay, now keep going.
Tadas Gedgaudas (30:47)
That's amazing. So yeah, basically
it's gonna be, it's gonna be. ⁓ So basically I just use one of the Huggins face models for that, but I'm running on CPU on CPU. It's slow. So I have a bit of a bottleneck there. I'm solving it right now. So it's like a big task I have to solve. You know, it's a bit boring, but I need to do it. Once I solve that, I'll probably be able to scrape a hundred thousand tick tock.
day maybe 200,000 we'll see
Dagobert Renouf (31:18)
Wow.
This age thing is fascinating to me. That's really cool. Yeah, I like when like, you you come from scraping, you're like the scraping expert and now you have this like super power to build this incredible machine. Yeah, I think this product is awesome. I think it just makes so much sense.
Tadas Gedgaudas (31:35)
Yeah.
Yeah, in
this current age, yeah. And another feature I just wanted to show real quick because a lot of people don't even know about this and I'm failing to market it. It's like the viral video database of TikTok and YouTube as well. So for example, you can have people who have maximum 100K followers and we're getting minimum 100,000 views. Just click search and you can sort by newest.
Dagobert Renouf (32:01)
This should, you know, I think
this looks like side project marketing potential. Like something that should be free, like a tool that you put on SEO and shit. And that brings people to discover your app.
Tadas Gedgaudas (32:12)
Okay.
Yeah, good idea.
Dagobert Renouf (32:20)
Because if I think myself
I need influencers, I don't actually really care about this, like in the use case, but as a discovery tool, maybe. I'm just brainstorming.
Tadas Gedgaudas (32:30)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, yeah, there are separate apps who just do this exact feature, video database, you So you can see the creators with low followers who got viral.
Dagobert Renouf (32:41)
Yeah, but you probably have,
guess for example, the age data must be quite unique. Like what's viral for nine years old? I'm not sure everybody has that.
Tadas Gedgaudas (32:54)
It's a programmatic SEO I think. Pretty cool.
Dagobert Renouf (32:57)
Yeah? ⁓ Yeah, that's interesting. Another thing is that first launch day there was Stuart with SassiDB and that's busy. You remember that? Yeah, okay. You know him? Okay.
Tadas Gedgaudas (33:00)
truth.
Yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (33:17)
And so for him, it's more like B2B, I think, sales, and now he's more, guess, on LinkedIn and shit, and it's working for him, I forgot. But I remember ⁓ the data was valuable, but the thing that's scary is like, how the fuck do I send a cold email? I've never sent a cold email, it scares me. How do I do this? And then he's like, it's obvious. And for him, it's obvious, so he didn't think of explaining. So then he made a short guide, and that's way better. And so I'm just thinking.
I know I should do TikTok, you know, or at least, you know, try to do some shit, but I'm so scared, And I know it's crazy because, you know, I have followers and shit, like, I have no idea how the fuck do I reach out to these people? I don't know, man. I'm scared. I'm scared. Like, how do I reach out to someone? And they're not going to, because I'm scared to be like the guy who sends a cold DM and looks annoying. And like, I don't want to be put in that bucket. So I'm just scared of doing it.
Tadas Gedgaudas (34:02)
Yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (34:17)
So if there's a way you could explain or unlock on your website or somehow that could maybe unlock some people, know.
Tadas Gedgaudas (34:18)
Yeah.
Yeah, I want to push out more content on TikTok. That's for sure. ⁓ One of those ways is like how to post. Another is like how to do influencer marketing because it's still kind of a new advertising marketing idea.
Dagobert Renouf (34:39)
Yeah,
it used to be something for big companies, but now we can do it even for indie makers, we are small. But how do we do it? I don't know, it's scary.
Tadas Gedgaudas (34:46)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so what I'm doing right now about that, you know, there is a lot of people on X posting about influencer marketing. So I just bookmark the posts, then gonna collect all the information and just gonna keep posting. But still, I'm right now not that much focused on marketing. I just need to make the product really, really good and fix all those small issues that it may have.
Dagobert Renouf (34:57)
Yeah.
So what's the big vision? What's the big thing you're working on?
Tadas Gedgaudas (35:18)
the mission, I guess, what we were talking previously, right? And remember the employer mission, the company mission, like what would, yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (35:24)
No, no, I know, but like I'm just curious what,
because you said you still need to, because I'm afraid it's a bit a way to avoid marketing what you just said. So I want to check. So what are you building? That's so cool. That's so important.
Tadas Gedgaudas (35:35)
true.
So the mission is like to have the largest influencers database. I want to have like all the tick tock creators Instagram YouTube I want to have I want to make this a hundred million database hundred million creators 200 million whatever we're able to reach But from marketing side like I I do it my marketing is pretty much Twitter shit posting Like people people hate me a lot for like posting the link in the replies, but that's what works for me right now
Dagobert Renouf (36:06)
no, you know that's
how I started on Twitter. So I never judged someone doing that.
Tadas Gedgaudas (36:13)
That's great. Finally meeting somebody.
Dagobert Renouf (36:14)
I block people for AI replies,
but somebody who's like putting their link, I'm like, yeah, fair.
Tadas Gedgaudas (36:21)
That's ⁓ such a relief to hear that. But for like cold emails, I must do that as well. I want to be on LinkedIn a lot more as well, which I'm not doing because that's where a lot of the companies who do influencer marketing are. So also like on LinkedIn, you have like people who you can find who are working as influencer.
Dagobert Renouf (36:25)
Yeah.
Tadas Gedgaudas (36:45)
maybe managers in big companies. So I want to outreach them and say, Hey, know, top yappers could be a useful tool in your tool set. So, yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (36:52)
So B2B play kind of for
you? Yeah. Because I thought it could be used, you know, it's probably not the best market, but it can still be a small market like indie people. Because like it's so trendy now on X, these influencer marketing on TikTok. It seemed like the product a lot of people need, you know, it seemed like there's probably some demand for that. So everybody has FOMO about TikTok. So if there was an easy way to get in, that's interesting.
Tadas Gedgaudas (37:14)
There is, there is,
Yeah, so I guess like the tutorials on influencer marketing would work really well and maybe would even give some credibility on the platform if I post that show as an expert.
Dagobert Renouf (37:32)
man, you could make literally like a long tweet, like
a long story tweet explaining exactly here's, you know, how you reach out to TikTok influencers. And you give maybe different, like you make it super deep, like maybe some example, like what if they have this number of followers? What's the approach? What's the approach if they have this number? Blah, blah, blah. And then at the end, you know, top yappers and that's it. That can be so big. Like people say, I mean, levels say.
You shouldn't put links, it's bullshit. You can put links, it's not a problem. It's just that you need to make sure, you put it, but you put it at the bottom and you remove maybe the preview. So people just see a long post. So they start reading, they spend time on the tweet, boom, I'll go boost it and you have a link, it doesn't matter. Just giving you tips, but you know, yeah.
Tadas Gedgaudas (38:19)
nice
that's amazing that's amazing i should buy your book as well about twitter marketing is it still available
Dagobert Renouf (38:25)
Yeah, it's not a book,
it's video, but yeah, you should, everybody should buy it, remind this. ⁓ But actually, you will be on Slack of launch day, and there is one special deal for people on launch day, you get a discount, you get 50 % off. So you will go to Slack after this call, you can get this. Yeah.
Tadas Gedgaudas (38:29)
video.
That's perfect timing for me.
Dagobert Renouf (38:47)
Because I'm trying, you know, and I think I'm going to offer that I'm going to build this community and it's going to be not just me, but like everybody in this community can offer discounts just for other members of the community, you know, and we're just like, you know, all scamming each other. That would be beautiful. Yeah, no, I'm kidding.
Tadas Gedgaudas (39:03)
It's
a Y Combinator for IndieHackers.
Dagobert Renouf (39:07)
Yeah, we need to find a fun play on words of that. There's somebody who created Vibe Combinator. I forgot whom, but I've heard that Vibe Combinator. ⁓ No, no, no, I forgot what it was. ⁓ But we can make a fun play on words with that.
Tadas Gedgaudas (39:18)
like also like VC or something just for fun.
True, true, like launch day community.
Dagobert Renouf (39:32)
It could be Z combinator because we're supposed to be the bottom of the...
well, something went shit. So wait.
Dagobert Renouf (39:48)
Okay, we are back. We had like a small problem with the recording, but it seems okay now.
I forgot what we were saying.
Tadas Gedgaudas (40:00)
about Twitter, the Twitter post, along form tweets.
Dagobert Renouf (40:05)
Yeah,
yeah, I think that's a good opportunity for you. yeah, I wanted to build a community with Launch Day. That's what I was saying, but I was kind of like over my rent anyway. ⁓ Yeah, man. So anything you work like, what are you working on exactly right now? What's the thing that's keeping you? So I guess you're quitting now. So it's like in 10 days, you're like in one week you're out. How do you feel? Did you do that already in your life? Like be completely solo like this?
Tadas Gedgaudas (40:30)
Yeah.
It's gonna be first time, but I think I'm ready for that. ⁓ I think I need that. Because I'm just more mature, you know, I've been working like this for two years. Two years with Anantify and growing these products. So, but we'll see, you know, how I'll succeed. I'll be posting on Twitter how it works. I'm also joining BASED Space.
Dagobert Renouf (40:40)
Yeah? Why do you think you're ready?
Yeah.
Tadas Gedgaudas (41:03)
So BaseSpace is like a community, like build space. Maybe you remember they had in San Francisco, think with Forest Farza. Yeah. So ⁓ it's basically like an office space for all the indie hackers in the Vilnius in the city, in Lithuania. Yeah. So I'm going to be surrounded by a lot of like small businesses, small business owners who are all coding software as a service or maybe other products, whatever they're working on.
Dagobert Renouf (41:10)
Okay, you have heard.
wow, that's awesome.
Tadas Gedgaudas (41:34)
So I'm still gonna be having that office life, I guess, which is maybe gonna make me more stable, I guess, than just working from home, but also gonna have a chance to work on the products full-time and do a lot more.
Dagobert Renouf (41:34)
that.
That's beautiful, man. That's very important. was in an amazing co-working in Lille, north of France, where I live, two years ago, one year ago, but they closed it sadly and I could never find a replacement. So now I'm just home. And my dream now is there is the biggest startup incubator in Europe, in Paris, which is called Station F. I had applied this winter and they took me and I went there.
But the problem is it's so expensive to go there every day. The train is gonna be 500 a month just to go there. Then you have the subway. everything together, basically then you have to pay your spot. So it's basically 800 or 900 a month. And I couldn't afford that, so I stopped. And also it's like two hours in, two hours out. So you can't do that every day. And then you feel like, I'm paying so much, I need to go every day. So anyway.
But man, the vibe was insane. The vibe is so, I mean, it's so cool to be surrounded by like a big problem we have is we're all alone, like in our specific place. And that's why we're so much on Twitter because it's kind of like connecting. We need this community. But man, when you have it real life, my God, it's the best. So I think it's awesome that you have that and you're really good, good move to do it, I think.
Tadas Gedgaudas (42:49)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I think I'm lucky here now, hearing what you say. I think I'm lucky. What about you? Like moving to Paris? Not an option right now? It's maybe a lot more expensive.
Dagobert Renouf (43:22)
It is, it's just that, you know,
in France, renting something when you don't have a job, impossible. So I got this when I had my job for a few months, two years ago, you know, after my burnout, had a job so I could rent this. And now they cannot kick me out, but they're not going to check again. And I'm paying, there's no problem. But yeah, I cannot rent anything in...
Tadas Gedgaudas (43:28)
⁓ okay.
Yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (43:49)
Even in Lille I couldn't rent now. If I lose this I'm like, f**k. So in Paris it's even harder and it's more expensive. But I kind of like my hometown, it's important to me. So my crazy plan is more like, no you know what, I'm gonna get rich this year and then I buy an apartment in Paris and I go three days a week. That's my plan. We'll see how goes.
Tadas Gedgaudas (43:54)
Yeah.
That's perfect,
yeah. I think you'll do it. think where lunch day is going, it's going in very good direction. Also, you got funded, I saw, with the 4K for the wedding. So congratulations on that, I guess, yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (44:21)
Yeah, Daniel Masallo sent 4k
and he and and yesterday he also paid a sponsorship for launch day number four, which will be the next one ⁓ And he paid like $700 for sponsoring so that's awesome So I will interviewing next week in your in your place. So, you know, that's gonna be fun Yeah, that's really cool. That's gonna help me grow also because he's gonna promote it as well probably so that's gonna be cool
Tadas Gedgaudas (44:33)
this.
that's great. That's Yeah, really fun.
yeah,
that's like another 200k followers was gonna see this I guess so that's crazy. I followed him instantly when he did that and turned on the notifications, you know, so I'm gonna be launching my products in his replies, in his posts. We'll see how fast he blocks me. I hope he does.
Dagobert Renouf (44:54)
Yeah, that's awesome.
Yeah
Yeah, I hope not. Yeah, you know, maybe he respect the hustle, you know I I made a lot of negative comments about small bets like I was saying, you know, cuz I'm on small bets and I'm his community and I'm like, man It's so slow this fucking app that you use for like the discussion because he used like this thing by the Ruby guys like by the base camp guys That's called campfire and it's so fucking slow and I keep teasing him about it, but he doesn't he's not mad He's still supporting me as you saw. So yeah
Tadas Gedgaudas (45:37)
Yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (45:37)
He's good, he's really... It's cool, you can talk, ⁓ You don't have to tiptoe, you don't have to pretend, so it's cool. Really enjoyable.
Tadas Gedgaudas (45:46)
Yeah,
that's nice if you have people like that on X because some are more sensitive I'd say.
Dagobert Renouf (45:53)
That's the point.
Yeah, yeah. All right, man, that was awesome meeting you. You're getting this email in a couple of minutes to join the community. I will try to connect you with Lydia, because I think you guys can do something. But yeah, I'm really happy you're on launch day, and I hope it brings you some sales, know, everything you can, some awareness, some visibility. You know, I really wish it's gonna do that for you.
Tadas Gedgaudas (46:09)
Okay.
Yeah, yeah, like I'm so grateful to be here as I said at the beginning, 100 euros, it's like nothing. It should be 500, maybe 1000 in my opinion because of the reach. And then like the stats show talk for themselves, know, launch day, like everyone made the sale, think almost everyone. So.
Dagobert Renouf (46:39)
Yeah, man,
so much pressure, man, every time, but I'm gonna try, I'm gonna try. Yeah.
Tadas Gedgaudas (46:44)
Yeah,
it's no worries. And then you got access to Slack community, which is like Indie Hacker for Y Combinator. Y Combinator for Indie Hacker, sorry.
Dagobert Renouf (46:50)
Yeah, yeah, ⁓ Z-Combinator,
we'll find a better term. cool man, so yeah, good luck for lunch day, have a good one.
Tadas Gedgaudas (47:01)
Yeah, thank you, thank you. Goodbye.