Arvid Kahl: Welcome to The Bootstrapped Founder. Today, I'm
talking to Danny Postma, one of the most prolific and publicly
active indie hackers in our entrepreneurial community. I
talk to Danny about running a business with a global customer
base, how to deal with copycats and clones, and why SEO plays
such a big role in building a successful indie business. Danny
shares his thoughts about outgrowing the solopreneurial
life or being at that point, what being a digital nomad means
for the stability of your personal and professional life,
and how he deals with being a pretty big deal on Twitter.
Danny is an amazingly humble and insightful person. You will have
a blast learning all about him and his journey. And before we
dive into our chat, a quick thank you to our sponsor,
acquire.com. More on that later. Here's Danny.
Thanks for being on the show, Danny. Now we're recording this
with a 12 hour time difference here and you're in the Kuala
Lumpur timezone, if I'm correct and I'm in Eastern Canada,
that's like directly on the other side of the world. And I
think a majority of your customers probably are located
in North America too, right? Or somewhere in this time zone
here. So yeah, has this quite substantial time difference
affected how you built your businesses or your products and
how you engage with customers? How does that work for you?
Danny Postma: I think it makes me more productive because most
of the time when all my customers are sleeping, I am
awake, right? It's like, I think it's 9pm at your place now. And
it's 9 am at my location. Yeah. So I get to especially because
all my friends are in Europe, I get to work until 3pm without
anyone messaging me what's happening me blah, blah, blah.
Social media is super quiet. So I get quite a lot of
productivity. The downside to it is that if something happens,
most of the times, it's at night, I get a lot of messages.
Partners I work with, they missed me at night. So the
nights are a little bit less calm than I like, but it's like,
yeah, it's a payback. So yeah.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, I guess you just shifted around, right? You
shifted by half a day. So do you do anything about this? Because
I certainly remember having a lot of customer service stuff,
you know, happen to random times during the day. But if all of
this happens in the middle of the night, how do you deal with
I don't know outages or customer service messages with like, high
priority? What do you do? Do you just wait?
Danny Postma: So when I launched HeadshotPro, like for the first
few weeks, for the first week, I think all the servers went
offline while I was sleeping. So my subconsciousness would wake
me up all the time at night checking the servers and then at
3am, the server would be down. But I think it's now robust
enough that it's out of scales, customer support can wait to be
honest, like my wife does the customer support when she wakes
up in the morning and then we just basically ignore it for 16
hours until the next morning. Because I have one mantra, I
don't build tools and software that really rely on me always
been there that need to be offline like like email tools or
anything like this. I don't want to build it like a lot of
respect for anyone who does those things. Like I want to
make tools where I could be gone for a week. And if I do ignore
customer support, it's not that much of a biggie. So yeah, it
doesn't live in media at all, to be honest.
Arvid Kahl: So it's about not building critical tools, but
building tools that are so good that people treat them just the
same way when it comes to budget. You know, because most
of the time we say like critical things are the things that
people have budget for. But you have built like successful
businesses from apparently non critical things. So how did you
do that? Like how did you instead of criticality focus on
something else, what is that other thing that makes your
businesses so interesting to people?
Danny Postma: I think what I'm focusing more on now is before I
Arvid Kahl: That makes a lot of sense, I guess. Do you still
used to make software right like headline, which was a
copywriter, a corporate generator. I think a more going
into the B2C B2B one off payments, like it's not the
software anymore. It's just a one time purchase, like the
headshell AI headset generation. You purchase it once you upload
it and you get your product back, right? So it's like a one
off product. We've automated the complete refunds customer
support and everything. So when I went on holiday with my wife
to Holland for two weeks, I just turned on the auto refunds so
anyone that had an issue, they could request a refund. So we
just all get out automatically done. I just love to make robots
like I want to completely automate anything. Yeah, that's
the mantra. Yeah.
consider yourself like a solopreneur at this point? I
mean, you say your wife is involved but that is from a
technical perspective. Are you still the only person doing this
at least?
Danny Postma: So she helps two to three hours a day. I'm still
a solopreneur but I'm actually I posted my first job post
yesterday to looking for a machine learning engineer.
Arvid Kahl: Saw that
Danny Postma: Yeah, I'm making a rough, there's two reasons that
led me to get there. So number one is I'm pretty sure I've add.
So it's six months into HeadshotPro now and I'm like
mentally unable to build any more features because I've been
there, I've done it. And I'm so like it doesn't like stimulate
me to work on those features anymore. And then my brain just
doesn't want to do it anymore. So I haven't built anything for
three weeks. That brings me back to getting anxiety because I
know there's a lot of competitors coming that way. So
it makes me really stressed. And I'm like, HeadshotPro makes a
lot of revenue right now. So I was like, yeah, it's quite dumb
if I don't use that to build maybe like a little
synchronically team that's remotes, find some like senior
people that can help me out, focus on what I'm not good in.
So yeah, you might see me moving from a solopreneur to more of a
small team support this way. I'm trying to like figure out how
it's going to look like because I don't want to build a team in
the sense that I don't want, you have a lot of companies that
have discovered the culture. You're always online chatting
with each other and stuff like that, like, that's not how I get
work done. So I would love to have a team that they can self
manage themselves. You give them some bigger tasks and they come
back in a week with the solution you have like maybe some chats
via Discord or whatever. I still want to keep that solo founder
monitoring side of it even though I tried to build a team.
Arvid Kahl: I guess the easiest way would just be to hire
somebody on the other side of the planet. So there's no chance
that you ever get to chat, right? It's probably gonna do a
trick.
Danny Postma: But that's an issue because I tried it out
once with a friend of mine and he's in Europe and then he would
wake up and he would start the day at 10am, which means it will
be 5pm for me. It doesn't work because I'm tired. I've worked
nine hours. I don't want to just dive into work anymore. And if
he has questions, for example, we'll be like 8pm. So your
complete downtime where you are supposed to rest as an
entrepreneur like it's gone. So I'm really trying to hire for
Asia now. Like America will be impossible for me. Europe isn't
ready, kinda. And no good, to be honest. So I'd like to keep
everything in the same time zone.
Arvid Kahl: So you wanted to be in the same time zone, but you
still wanted to be remote. Am I getting this right?
Danny Postma: Yep, correct. Yep.
Arvid Kahl: Okay, yeah, I saw not only the tweet with your a
higher, that you're looking into. But I also saw this tweet
about you trying to shadow a remote team to learn how to
manage it, which is a really, really cool idea. Can you expand
on this, like, why you're doing this? And what do you think
you're gonna get from that? And also, has anybody allowed you to
join the teams just yet?
Danny Postma: Yep. So I learned from doing, right? That's the
way I'm doing. But good luck learning how to build a team
process task manager because I haven't worked in a team. I
worked in the team as a freelancer, but it's like a
different thing. So I don't know how to process is of a remote
team. So I could try to figure it out myself, which, like, I
don't know where to start. So I was like, hey, maybe some crazy
person is going to allow me to just be a fly on the wall, sit
in the discord and the Task Manager, see how that team goes.
I actually got a lot of replies like Sahil from GumRoad's and a
meet to his notion. And it's like yesterday, so I've been
taking notes all day, how they work. And it's so interesting.
So based on that, I've actually put some processes. I'm being
like, seeing how I'm gonna put in my notion how the task
manager is going to be. So I've learned a lot from it. Like, I
think more people should try to do things like this, like just
shadow someone. Yeah, that's interesting. It's cool that
people are me. And tomorrow might be joining someone else.
It just needs to sign an NDA because it's a lot of like,
sensitive information, right? That you get access to. So yeah,
we learning a lot. It's dope.
Arvid Kahl: It's really cool. I'm really surprised and in a
really good way that this actually works, you know, like
that somebody is actually letting you see their internal
stuff. I think this kind of culture that people allow others
to see the internal stuff, their business is effectively building
in public, like through you as a proxy, right? That's kind of
what this is. That's so cool. I feel would have never happened
like 20 years ago, like nobody would have allowed like a random
stranger from the internet in their business communication,
right?
Danny Postma: Well, I think this is because I've never met them
in real life, right? But because I'm building in public, I think
already for the last five years like people see my personality.
They get to trust me, I guess, like they see what my, yeah, I'm
working. Because how did you for your company that you sold a few
years ago? How did you know to scale it? Did you work in a team
before or just trial and error?
Arvid Kahl: Well, here's the thing. We didn't scale it
personal wise. I was afraid to hire. I'm probably at the point.
I'm probably a month behind where you are right now because
I would have had to force myself to do it, but I didn't. I just
thought ah, I can deal with this. You know how it is, right?
We build something and then you spent a lot of time and you wish
you would have had more time but it's not enough to hire somebody
for because it's just, you know, a couple hours for the project
or whatever. And I had that all the time, like we had five and a
half 1000 recurring customers like that was not just one off
payments. That was SaaS subscriptions, most of which we
automated away. I am like you, a big fan of automation. And we
had a lot of automation. That was pre AI times pretty much. It
was like, at least before any kind of GPT existed. And
intercom, we were using that at the time for our customer
service stuff. They already had AI tooling. I don't know they
had some machine learning in the background, I guess, that looked
through your knowledge base and then suggested like word
matching kind of substitution matching. I don't know what they
did. But they brought the articles that were the best
potential articles right into the first reply. So people most
of the time found the things that we had written and solve
their own issues. But it got complicated. And I think most,
the biggest reason that I had burnout at the end of Feedback
Panda when we sold it, was this reason. I did not know how to
hire, which is why I'm so impressed by you actually doing
this, like going out and saying and I think it's an identity
thing, too. And I was going to ask you because that's kind of
why I asked, are you still a solopreneur? Because the moment
you choose to build a team, you're not a solopreneur
anymore, right? It's a different mindset. Like, I wonder, what
are you goals now that you're building an actual business,
like not just a business in a formal sense, but like a team of
people building something together? Did that shift the
goals that you had for whatever you're doing?
Danny Postma: First of all, I'm completely winging it and I have
no clue what I'm bringing. It scares so much. It's right to
do. So I sold the Headlime, three years back two years back,
yeah, two years back because I had three options. I could get
VC funding into hyper scaling or talking about unreasonable
rates. I could have bootstrapped it and build a team or I could
have sold it because I had two people interested in buying it.
And I was like, I don't want a team. I'm scared. I don't know
how to do it. And now two and a half years later, I'm running
into the same position with HeadshotPro where I cannot do it
alone anymore. The only option would be either to sell it again
or to build a team. And I've been starting to realize like,
yeah, look, I'm 29. I'm gonna run into this issue a lot of
times in my life again. I'm financially stable now. If I
ruin it, revenue wise and whatever, like, I do have the
backup like, this is the moment where I could learn to do it and
ever fuck up. And if I don't like it, I'm trying to set
standards with anyone I'm interviewing. I'm telling them
like, this is my first time. I don't know how it's going to go.
If you're going to quit your job for it, don't. You're not the
good. This is what I'm trying to start like as with contracts,
like maybe like part time. People that already have another
client, like straight to start it in like, more of a safety
area in that sense. Yeah, I need to. Yeah, it's also I need that
identity, right? Because I built my whole solopreneur stuff
around it on Twitter. Yeah, I think it's time to stop doing it
by myself because I'm gonna run into another burnout.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, if you keep going like this and have nobody
to help you, you're gonna have a little trouble and it becomes a
lot of little troubles. And then they just set up. The thing that
I find so interesting is that there are two ways here, right?
You could either do the same thing over again. You could sell
it, build another one. Sell it, build another one, right? That's
kind of how platforms like acquire or all these other
things, you just exist for this. You get it to a certain point,
that's the point where you can Peter Principle where you stop
being good at, right? Where instead of going to hiring
yourself into the next biggest position where you don't have
the skill, so you stay where you are and kind of sell the thing,
but you chose to go beyond that. That is cool. But it also means
a lot of change for you, right? Because now you're a manager,
congratulations. It's gonna be very different from indie
hacker, indie manager, maybe that's gonna be a new thing. I'm
just excited for you to take this step because not only is
this something that I would personally be very afraid of to
do myself, but I know that you're a person that shares a
lot of your journey on Twitter and in the build in public
community. So everybody's going to benefit from this and this is
really cool. So thanks for taking the step. This is awesome
and doing it in public at the same time. That's really cool.
Danny Postma: I'm happy, other people get some something out of
it. Thank you so much. Yeah, and I'm planning to go share it like
I'll be public about it. I'll share how it's gonna go, it's
how I learn. I can scroll back later a year back in Twitter,
see what I learned, what went well and stuff like that. So
yeah, I'm gonna see. I'm really nervous.
Arvid Kahl: I bet and I think that's okay. I guess like, you
know, entrepreneurship everyday is another mystery, another
challenge that we have no clue how to deal with and we try to,
you know, grasp at straws and try to figure out how things
work. That's just what it is. What I'm happy about in
particular is that you're honest with the people that you're
hiring, that this is an experiment, right? That's really
cool. I mean, that's just shows what kind of business
perspective you have, you're going to try it out, you're
going to learn to get better, right?
Danny Postma: Yeah. And I think this is the issue. Like, if I
have the mindset that I like to ship products really fast and
kill them really fast, they don't work out. But if you're
going to ship a team really fast and kill that, you cannot
because people their families are, like, it's a whole
different mindset. You cannot do it because people depend on it.
Their salary, like emotions are involved with it instead of
like, just a bunch of code. So like,
Arvid Kahl: Yeah
Danny Postma: This is what I think that's the most scary
part. Like I can try it out. But it's going to hurt people if it
doesn't work out. Yeah. Being upfront about it, contractor
only. Yeah
Arvid Kahl: Well, that's a good point because if I look at your
website, the postcrafts.com with all your projects that you have,
which are I don't know what 16, 17, almost 20 projects that
you've done in the past. Like the moment you go full on one
project, that kind of precludes you from building other things,
right? Because that responsibility you just
mentioned, now all of a sudden, you have to pay these people and
their families, maybe their mortgage depends on you keeping
running this project. That is a big step to take. I don't want
to scare you any further. I'm just trying to say like for an
indie hacker, this is a pretty sizable move to make. And I
don't see many people make this move because they get scared and
you are scared, but you're still doing it, which is really nice.
I quite appreciate that.
Danny Postma: Thank you so much.
Arvid Kahl: Well, yeah, it's cool to see this happening. I
think this being a lesson and a learning experience at the same
time because you learn it and you teach it as you go. That's
just something that is such a indie hacker community thing,
right? Like, where would you be without people like you who are
sharing their experiences here? We would never even try. So
that's really cool. But on the other side and we talked about a
lot of your build in public stuff that you've been doing and
you've been sharing a lot over the last year, it's just how you
built these businesses, the ideas you had and how they came
to be. What I wanted to talk to you about this kind of the
reason why I contacted you in the first place. There was a day
where there was this copycat thing happening on Twitter. And
that was kind of when I reached out to you. I don't know if you
remember this, but you probably do. Because it was a pretty
weird day, right? Somebody just cloned your full product
completely, like down to the copy and then posted some weird,
like, kind of rich bait tweet about telling you not to be mad
at them, right? Can you give me like, do you want to talk about
this? Or does this feel traumatic to you?
Danny Postma: I've grown a thick skin over it. So we can
definitely dive into this. So it's such an odd thing.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, wasn't that weird? How did that feel to you?
Because I remember you kind of engaged with it. And then at
some point, you just deleted all your tweets that you did to this
person. So what happened there? And how do you deal with these
things? Because that's probably a fear that many indie hackers
have, that somebody just clones the whole thing and then tells
them not to worry, right?
Danny Postma: Yeah, so with Headlime back two years, this
happens a lot like people carbon copying, so there's a difference
between copycats and inspiration, right? Like
inspiration is you, you, you. I don't care if people take the
same product as me because I also get inspired by other
people like it's fine. But once you take someone's whole landing
page, copy, branding, colors, and everything and all their
like, everything is the same. That's a copycat. So let's just
stay like set that down because a lot of people argue with me
because it's a bad thing. Because people gonna think they
are your, like the competitor is you, so people gonna get
confused. That's like the biggest issue. So we'd Headlime
for like, two months, I was just busy fighting them being
negative on Twitter about everyone copying me and people
got so fed up with me, like telling me like, shut up, stop
being so negative. And like, it really got me down at that time
two years ago, but that fueled me to actually build the version
2 of Headlime that got acquired differently because I was like,
fuck, my product is so easy. Everyone's copying it. I think I
need to take three months and just build it into a bigger
thing. So I'm ahead of the curve again. So what happened so many
times now two years later, like it happens a lot. I don't care
that much about it because 99% of them, they don't go anywhere.
This one just rage baited me so badly by just like calling it
out that he copied me on purpose, making a tweet about
it. That was 10pm and I was about to go to sleep, so I was
already so tired. I was like, what the fuck is this? You gotta
find this tweet. And like, I know he deleted it, right? I
think he deleted it. Like, he just rage baited me and I sent
it to Pieter and Pieter Levels is like, dude, you're just
feeding the trolls. He's gonna get engagement clicks out of it,
delete it. I was like, yeah, you're right. I shouldn't spend
time on this. I DM him. I was like, dude, there's something
called DMCA, which is the Millennium Copyright Act. I can
mail Cloudflare right now. They're gonna take you down
tomorrow, like, you better just turn it into something else. So
he actually listened. He changed the copy. So it's still the same
product, which is 100% fine. Like, that's competition. But
now he has his own landing page with his own images and his own
copy. So yeah, you grow a thick skin after a while. It stays
annoying. This is why I'm blocking everyone. Everyone
that's competing with me, I blocked them on Twitter. I just
don't want to see what they're doing.
Arvid Kahl: Right
Danny Postma: It's like, as a mindset for myself. I don't want
to see what you're doing. I actually unblocked the founder
Arvid Kahl: Interesting. Yeah. I mean, it's a good mix of don't
feed the trolls and also kind of protect yourself from just their
stuff, right? The influence that they might have. And I guess by
blocking them, I mean, if you block somebody, all they need is
a second account and they can still read your tweets, but at
least on the main account, they're not gonna see your
of Copy AI two weeks ago, after blocking him for two and a half
stuff, right? Which is algorithmically, probably
interesting because it's not gonna get pulled in that much
into their feeds either. So you don't see them. They don't see
you. Everybody is at peace. So that's great. Yeah, it's very
interesting. I'm absolutely 100% behind you on this, just don't
years just because I don't want to see what Copy AI was doing.
feed the trolls thing. I also did not reply to this or retweet
it because I did not want our community to either grew up a
shitstorm because I don't want negativity like this either.
It's bad enough, they copied you. They don't need to have
their lives ruined by a couple, you know, a couple of 1000
Keeps you sane, to be honest.
nerds. Now you don't need the nerd brigades to come in and
destroy their lives. And also, any like, any retweet is kind of
validation for them, right? That was the rage bait. Let's see
what we can do with this, right? That was their idea.
Danny Postma: If you have 80,000 followers, it will pop up in a
Arvid Kahl: That is right.
lot of people. Twitter promotes rage bait and engagement, people
commenting. So I think everybody in 15 minutes it got 10, 20,
Danny Postma: That is dumb
Arvid Kahl: Right
Danny Postma: So dumb
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, it is really destructive. I agree with you.
30,000 fuses like yes, it's not a good thing. What I don't
understand, like just slipping into this, like, the whole
And if you look at this, like if in a less emotional level, it
building in public is like, five years ago, I couldn't dream I'm
really is a highly destructive behavior because the only thing
interacting with you, other people, Sahil, founder of
Gumroad, and any other like, big guys on Twitter. Like building
you have when you're building in public or when you're in the
in public is, the best thing about is you get to meet people
you've been inspired by your whole life. You learn from them.
And by making a carbon copy cat of someone else's product, you
indie hacker community is your reputation as a good community
just destroy your name and any chance to. I'm gonna get fed up
already. But they're building in public. They're building in
public so their whole purpose of it is to go there, I guess. And
you destroyed it by just doing one thing because no one is
going to trust you anymore.
member. So by doing anything that destroys that reputation,
you burn any potential future opportunity. Like those people,
I'm not sure if I even followed them or if I blocked them out of
spite, just at the same moment, right? As it happened to you. I
was like, I don't want to interact with people who do this
kind of stuff to Danny. I like Danny. I don't want Danny to
suffer. I'm not gonna talk to them ever again, which, I mean,
it's probably fine with them. But it's still in this community
where reputation is everything, like these acts are really short
sighted. That's the thing, right? It's super short sighted
to just copy and hope to make a couple of sales and then not
turn it into something better, just like try to stay a copy of
something. It's really, really like a short term when that
turns out to be a long term loss. It's unfortunate. That's
what it is. I do wonder now that you are very active in the
visual AI space. If I look at your postcrafts like I'm just
going to drop your domain a couple times here because it's
really cool to see your projects. If I look at like the
top 7 or 8, 9, 10 projects that all AI based and most of them
are like visual AI, right? You have HairstyleAI, you have
Photoshed, you have HeadshotPro and Deep Agency all of these are
really about, you know, physical visuals of people. I don't know
mean morph is gone but you know, this model does not exist and
Profile Picture AI all of this is AI. How much competition do
you have there? And I'm not just saying indie hacker stupid clone
competition. I mean, like actual meaningful competition from I
mean, Pieter, always competitor of yours. I know that but you
know, the much bigger pockets like how much competition do you
have within this field right now?
Danny Postma: I think this should be focused on
HeadshotPro, I think there's five big competitors. I see on
my AdWords, one VC funded company who actually stole also
all my landing page and tries to steal my marketing agency and
all the things which I think is very odd for fizzy HD. So I
think there's five competitors in that sense. Profile picture
when it came out had like hundreds of competitors. Lensa,
obviously, everyone knows Lensa. I think it was the biggest
competitor. I love it when I get a highly popular competitor
because then they do marketing for me and earn the money. Like
last week, Remini is going viral, which now does AI
headshots on iOS and my sales have been tripled since that day
because everyone's googling for AI headshots and I'm ranking
number one on AI headshots. So I just get all that traffic and I
confer them. So perfect!
Arvid Kahl: Awesome
Danny Postma: The hairstyle has like a one competitor, I think.
No one is doing hairstyles yet. That's the one I acquired. Not
that much but most all these products are basically pivots of
each other Stock AI or Tattoos AI turns into Stock AI. Stock AI
turned into Profile Picture. Profile Picture turns into
headshots. That's why I have so many products in them. It's just
like an evolution of them. And I just keep them online. Yeah, so.
Arvid Kahl: That's really cool. That's a smart move. I guess
like the underlying, like models might be different. But
everything the chrome, the UI, everything you put on top of it
probably is very similar. So you're reusing your own
templates. That's an interesting move. Not a surprising one
because obviously, you're kind of niching down into every
single field. How did you you pick this honestly? Like visual
AI, there is a lot of stuff going on. There was a lot of NFT
things going on in the past. How did you go into like headshots
and professional headshots too? That agency thing, that stock
thing?
Danny Postma: So start with this, generative AI came out in
September 2022, I think, when stable diffusion launched and I
just decided yet the obvious point you can do is make a stock
photo website. So I built Stock AI, but the quality wasn't
there. People weren't willing to pay for it. I was deathly scared
that I would get a cease and desist from getty images or
whatever because they have so many big lawyers. I was like,
I'm not gonna sit on this one. So then I've worked on yeah,
then I think on Twitter, I saw dream move launching. So Austria
did AI. They made, yeah, they made a you could turn your face
into styles. And Pieter sent me a DM on telegram. He's like,
dude, check this thing. And he was building something. I was
like, you're fucking kidding me. I'm also building it. So we
basically just shipped it in 30 hours. He shipped without a back
ends and database because he knew I was going to ship faster
than him. So he launched on Friday night. I was, fuck. So I
launched on Saturday morning, absolutely exploded on Twitter.
I think I got like, six figures in sales in a week because it's
such a shareable product, right? And it was super new at a time.
I was lucky to rank on Profile Picture. And there's a lot of
searches on Profile Picture, like lots and lots of lots. But
then Lensa came out. I got like a boost of revenue. And then it
started to go really, really down like these days. It's
barely any revenue. And I was pivoting. So I was working with
a friend of mine, a developer and we split up. I was going to
do Deep Agency which was basically folded to the AI as an
editor. David was going to use the model I built in Python,
like I made a special pose. We can use photos of someone. You
can get the pose out of it so you can make headshot with it.
You could do anything with it. So that was building the
headshots direction, both launched them at the same time.
Deep Agency got a lot of press coverage, but no sales and
HeadshotPro got a lot of sales. So that's when I decided to dip
down on yeah, on the Headshot part. This was really just an
evolution of trying things out and I didn't expect Headshot to
have so much. Yeah. So much demand for it. So yes, pivoting,
pivoting, pivoting, trying it out in that sense.
Arvid Kahl: That's a really smart move. I like that. I'm
just surprised that the stock thing got press coverage but no
sales. You would think that something like this being
covered would be some kind of lead generator, but it was just
a novelty that made the press interested in that. What do you
think?
Danny Postma: So with Deep Agency, the one where I tweeted
out these models are fake, you can hire in them. Everyone went
mental like, models are going to be replaced. The fashion
industry is going to be destroyed. This is the worst
thing. People are going to lose their jobs.
Danny Postma: Yeah, it's all my fault. Like everyone wanted to
Arvid Kahl: Your fault
use a model and put a fashion products on top of it.
Danny Postma: But that's so hard to build. And I'm not like I've
Arvid Kahl: Right
managed to build my own deep learning stuff. But I wasn't
able to put a fashion at the same time Headshot Pro was easy
to do. So I was like, I'm gonna just gonna deep down on that.
There's gonna be some other bigger company who has that
clause in the fashion industry, they're going to do that. So I
was like, yeah, okay, it's super popular products. It doesn't
make sense for me to chase. I'm just going to put it down there
and focus on another one. Maybe one day we're going to go back
there again. Yeah, impress and clicks doesn't pay the bills. So
if you have a product that earns more revenue and has a higher
conversion rate, I think Deep Agency had a conversion rate of
0.3%. And HeadshotPro had a conversion rate of 10 times
that. So then, like, you know, your products
Arvid Kahl: Absolutely. Yeah, I guess particularly for an indie
hacker that needs to make money to pay the bills that using the
product or just serving the images incurs, right? Because
nothing is free on the backend side. That is an absolutely
smart move.
Danny Postma: Yeah
Arvid Kahl: Well, one thing I do wonder, particularly because you
already said like with profile picture that kind of doesn't
have sales anymore. And HeadshotPro is now in a
different vertical, I guess. But do you also think that that will
end one day? Like you seem to be very, like focused on
experimenting and going where the money goes. Do you have a
kind of time horizon for any project? Or do you think this
one is going to stick around a bit longer?
Danny Postma: I think this one's gonna stick around longer
because you're competing with like Profile Picture is for
vanity, right? It was a fun thing for WhatsApp and stuff,
Arvid Kahl: Yeah
Danny Postma: Yeah. And yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, it's a
but Headshots people actually into headshots for their CV, for
really interesting industry. But yeah, it can always go to shit,
their LinkedIn, for their teams, whatever. Currently, you have to
like a bigger competitor comes in and whatever. A lot of people
pay $300 if you want to get a photo shoot. If you can get that
done for $39 and it almost looks the same. And 9 out of 10
people, it looks really good, then you're competing with a
more expensive physical products. They suddenly that
people can only do in one city with a limited amount of
photographs. And suddenly you can just build a robot that can
do it worldwide. Yeah, I think this is a massive market that
no, there is a 5 to 10 billion market size for portrait
photography worldwide. So if I can just take 1% of that, I'm
happy. So this is a big market. Like I see this getting bigger.
And that's why I also want to build a team to grow it out.
say, yeah, you have to build a sustainable business. You need
to take revenue overtime. I'm more of like this get as much
revenue upfront because your company, especially with AI, it
could go so fast. Like, you could be obsolete next year. And
they'll just move up to new products. And then they have a
team to ship even faster to move to the other product, try out
different things. Yeah, I'm not that scared about it, to be
honest.
Arvid Kahl: That's an interesting point, though. I
just understood that the team you're building is not a
Headshot Pro team. It's kind of the Danny Postma team. It's like
the postcrafts.
Danny Postma: Yeah, they can work on 16 products. I just want
to try out new products and whatever, product market fit,
then I have a team skill that went out because I love to
iterate. I like to mess around. I hate many things, scheming
things. So if I can just have a team that likes to do those
things, then I have the feeling it's going to be a monster. You
could have a lot of products using the same technology into
different markets. Yeah.
Arvid Kahl: It's kind of the studio model, right? You have a
reliable template of tech stack and you have people who know
what to do, how to execute, how to deal with spin up a customer
service platform or whatever. That is really cool. Oh, I'm
excited. So what I hear from you is that you're still
experimenting with things in this space, right? You're
finding things that work, you go into them, you monetize them as
much as possible upfront, which is also new. You know, it brings
me back to my whole solopreneur question from earlier because
you know, back a couple years ago, five years ago if you would
have asked me what is a good business, I would have told you
my recurring revenue every month solopreneur living lifestyle
business, bla bla bla bla bla. I would have counted down a couple
things. But if you asked me now it's like, well, you want to
monetize as quickly as possible. Recurring revenue is great, but
it's not required. And if you need to build a team, then you
need to build a team. So this seems to be the change that
happened in my life. Does that happen for you too?Did you just
like, let go of these preconceived notions?
Danny Postma: So I always thought B2C is you should never
go into B2C. B2C is horrible. Don't go into B2C, which is
still horrible, like a lot of disputes, angry customers, blah,
blah. Yeah, I want to replace my wife eventually because she also
gets to shit with customer support. But what I've realized
is that the difference between B2B and B2C like, it's really
nice to have recurring revenue, but you need to keep building
features. You need to have a relationship with your customer.
If you're more in B2C like my skills are, I'm really good in
conversion optimization. I know how to build a high converting
landing page. You only have to get them once to buy. There's no
recurring thing. You don't have to add features because they
don't pay monthly, they just buy what they want. It needs to be
good at that moment. You basically don't have to support
them after because they will not come back. They just come for
the one product. So you don't have that much of a support
load. You don't have that much of a help desk. You can more
scale with SEO on ads. So it's like this whole different. I
really like it to be honest. Like, I really like to optimize
traffic coming in converting them giving them what they want.
And then it's done. Like that's where the relationship ends.
That's what's cool about B2C.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, definitely is. It's not something you looked
into when you were like purchasing businesses because
you recently went a bit on an acquisition spree, I guess, and
bought a couple things, right? And is that something you
actively look for like a B2C product that has a pay once,
used once and then be gone forever kind of customers?
Danny Postma: So I saw Nick, Nick at Hesti AI and he's also
in Bali and I saw him listing it on acquisition.com. And so I sit
down with him. I asked for his conversion rate and his
conversion rate was really low. But he got a lot of visitors
from SEO. So I was like, this is going to be complete an
experiment like I know how to make the landing page converts 5
to 10 times better. If I can make the landing page four or
five times better, I earn. Like if you say okay, now acquisition
price is four times revenue, right? Yearly revenue four times
profit. If I can optimize a landing page to have five times
more conversions, I earn back the acquisition price in 10
months. If I do it 10 times, it's five months. And I already
have the better AI generation. So I just copied HeadshotPro,
put it on his domain name. I think conversion rate is up six
times now. So I earn a back in nine months. So it was a no
brainer for me to do in that sense. And then the other
acquisitions are, I bought profilepicturemaker.com, which
is like a 12 year old domain. And then that one, like people
want to make a profile picture. So if someone that wants a
profile picture probably also might want the new headshots. So
I've put a big banner on it to link back to HeadshotPro. I'm
trying to like have like all these acquisition channels to
funnel back to the main product. It's more like as an engineering
as marketing, I guess, like making tools, getting traffic,
sending them to the main server.
Arvid Kahl: It's interesting to see like how you're using the
same kind of technology in so many different ways. That's
really cool. Also how different those domains really are. And
domains is something that I want to talk to you about because you
were talking about domain leasing a couple weeks ago, I
guess, at this point. Like, that was something that I've
personally never heard before. So I'm very grateful that you
introduced me to the idea.
Danny Postma: Yeah
Arvid Kahl: Right. Getting a domain for a short time. Can you
tell me more about that experiment like what you did
there with that?
Danny Postma: So I wanted to have stockyai.com because I
thought that was pretty dope domain. But the owner wanted 30
to $25,000 for it. If you don't have like product market fit,
you're not going to pay 30k for a domain name. But then so
dan.com has the option. You can pay it in 12 installments, 24
installments or maximum 60 installments, which means they
take a higher commission fee. So I think I paid 20% commission
over that extra. So I only have to pay $500 a month, which is
still a lot, right? But if it's a good domain, it's worth it. So
I had to pay $500 for the domain. If you don't want it
anymore, you can cancel it. And if you cancel it before you've
paid it off, the owner of the domain gets the domain name back
and you can stop paying for it. So I paid three months of domain
transfer. So I paid $1500. I didn't get product market fit.
So I just said I'm going to quit paying for the domain name. So
you can like lease it. Yeah, lease to own, I guess is the
name for it.
Arvid Kahl: That's really cool.
Danny Postma: You can try out because I believe domain names
is you need to pick a good domain name because that's how
you're going to rank in SEO. Like HeadshotPro basically tells
Google that you should rank number one for headshot,
HeadshotPro, professional headshot because it's in your
name like Google gives like a little bit of a boost to it
because it's in your domain name. So if you want to make AI
stock photos, like better get the domain stock AI, so it's
worth paying money for, to be honest.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, absolutely. Did you get Headshot Pro? Did
you have to buy that?
Danny Postma: $3,000
Arvid Kahl: That is surprisingly good for a domain. The most
money I ever spent on a domain was probably for Zero To Sold.
Like I spent $1,000 on that for my book. That was really the
zerotosold.com, which was nice. Like, that was a solid name. And
I'm glad I got it. But I've never spent more than that. And
it kind of frightens me, like the expense that a good domain
name can incur on a business, which is why this whole lease to
own thing is a really interesting one
Danny Postma: If you've already picked the name for your book,
Zero, yeah and then you get the .co domain or .io name like,
we'd have like, I had so many people typing in Google headlime
com, headlime co, headlime eo. Like they couldn't find my
website because they had the .io domain name. Like imagine how
much and I think Damon from Testimonial made a tweet about
it. He bought the .com. And all the domain put an affiliate euro
on it. And he basically, I think he paid 10 or $20,000 for it.
And he earned it back by people just going through the website.
So imagine having your competitor buying the domain.
You're gonna lose all your customers like it's worth, if
you can spare it to buy the domain, that's good to be
honest, the .com.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, you seem to have a lot of insight into SEO,
which is something that I don't really know much about. But
you've been mentioning several times how well your things rank
and how much work that you put into SEO for your products.
Danny Postma: I only build products where there's SEO. So I
don't know that much about SEO, just to be honest, like, I just
know kind of how it works. Like, for every product, I do
research. So this is for how HeadshotPro came out like I was
Googling, like I was trying to rank for profile picture. And I
saw there was a lot of search, like you can go to
ahrefs.com/keywordfinder. You can type in a keyword and it
will show you how many searches there are for a website. So I
saw there's a lot of search for headshots and that the keyword
difficulty, which means the higher the number, the harder it
is to go rank in Google. So the moment you have like a keyword
difficulty that's under 10 or 20, you're guaranteed to go to
the front page if you have like a one or two backlinks. So I
only pick product ideas that have a lot of search and a lot
of keyword difficulty. Why? I hate marketing. Like I hated
marketing. Now I'm getting a little bit better at it. I think
it's really like if you're an indie hacker, the easiest thing
you can do is pick a product that has a lot of searches with
no competition. You never have to do marketing because you're
going to rank number one on Google. Everyone goes through
Google like you have. You don't have to do marketing for it
because people search for it already. So that's how often the
IDs and postcrafts.com They're all based on me searching on
ahrefs for some keywords and then building a product off it.
Arvid Kahl: Okay, that's the money code right here.
Danny Postma: Yeah
Arvid Kahl: That's cool. Well, I was wondering, would you ever
build something where those numbers would not add up for you
where the difficulty would be way too low? Would you do that?
Danny Postma: No, no
Arvid Kahl: Even if you had a marketing team?
Danny Postma: If no one searches in it for Google, it means you
have to create the market, right?
Arvid Kahl: Right
Danny Postma: So as an indie hacker, you're not going to
create the market. Yeah, you can. But it's going to be super
hard. So if you can just find something people search for and
no one is building for it. Or maybe like one or two people
building for it, you could go number three. If you're not good
at SEO, you could even say okay, if it has a high enough
acquisition price, you could do AdWords for it. Because if
people search for it, you can also bid on it. Yeah, you're
gonna have an easy time. You know people want to buy it. You
know you can just not do marketing for it because your
website will rank for it. Yeah. This is why I try to tell
everyone on Twitter just go SEO as indie hacker. I might be
biased, though. But
Arvid Kahl: You are because you're successful with it. I
mean, I think that's a good reason to be biased if it puts
money into your pocket, right? Must work in some way. And I
think I personally very much neglected it in most of my
projects in the past, the software projects at least
because I thought I'll find ways to market it and probably do but
it's still, the other way around, kind of what you're
doing is a demand first business idea generation. That's what
you're doing. It's kind of what Justin Jackson always talks
about too, right? Like the presence of demand is a good
sign, good validation strategy for an indie hacker. Because if
people are already buying something like this or searching
for something like this, that's likely that they will also have
budget for yours. And it's not just you can have a cool idea
and everybody needs to buy it.
Danny Postma: Yeah, and you can basically calculate. If you say,
okay, let's say the landing page conversion rate is 1%. Like, you
can calculate what your monthly revenue could be if you're
listed on number one. So you can see hey, is it worth it for me?
Can I do it at that price? Like it makes so much more certainty
in your decisions. Yeah. Because how did you do marketing for
when you started out? If you don't do SEO, like you wouldn't
probably in social media parts, right?
Arvid Kahl: So in my SaaS business, it was all word of
mouth. It was all people just recommending it in the community
because we had a very strong, interconnected community, online
teachers, like teachers love to help other people and they love
to help other teachers teach better. So it was a cool tool
for teachers. So they gave it to others. But for my own kind of
media business, my media empire that I'm building, it's also all
community social media stuff, right? That's really what it is.
I'm building good reputations with people like you to come on
my show and chat with me. I have people that sponsor this show,
like acquire.com, that's for this one, right? And I have good
relationship with Andrew Gazdecki and he was on the show.
It's all relationship based for me. So it's a very community
centric and build in public, you know, it's all about people in
the end. It doesn't really matter what you're building
Danny Postma: You already have the followers on Twitter, right?
But I've seen so many indie hackers starting out who think
building in public is going to bring them the customers. It
could but it's gonna be such a smaller chance. It only most of
the times, it only worked. Like it worked for me, I had 200
followers and I grow to 15k because I was sharing a new
technology that was novel and people love to follow you for
it. But if you're building a product that's not like new,
refreshing, people want to see how you build, it might be
really hard to start off with building in public. So better
just focus on like, guaranteed marketing channel like that.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, building in public is wonderful. You have
two audiences with building in public really, right? You have
your other founder peers, the people around you, the other
indie hackers. And if you build a product for them, wonderful.
You've solved all your problems. But if your audience, your
actual customer audience is somewhere else, then building in
public will not attract them, unless you build right there for
them in a way that appeals to them, right? That helps them
that gets them somewhere, either as a content marketing, whatever
strategy or you have a podcast in this space and you get other
experts in and they invite their own audiences and whatever. But
building in public is a thing that it has to be intersectional
to meet both. And if it doesn't, if the only audience that you
talk to about your product is other indie hackers, you still
get something out of it, right? You still got good advice and
that kind of stuff, but you're not going to sell. You still
have to get people to actually look at your product and pay for
it. Yeah, that's right. So with with that in mind, I do wonder
sometimes because you're now at 80,000 followers, too, right?
Like you have a sizable Twitter audience. I mean, we're probably
yeah, we're never gonna reach Pieter because he's gonna just
keep keep moving away from us in terms of followers, but it's
still bizarre that between the two of us, it's kind of 200,000
people or something. It's like, what is this?
Danny Postma: I think Pieter, I think most of my followers came
through Pieter because he kept retweeting me, same with Jon
Yongfook from Banner Bear like I've been, my Twitter account is
built on giants man, like they've been sharing so much.
Healthy competition with me and Pieter, like, yeah, I went from
15, now it's 87,000 in like a span of a few months.
Arvid Kahl: It's so bizarre. That's like built on the
shoulders of giants, that describes my whole life at this
point. It's like everybody who ever talked about their business
on a podcast like 10 years ago, I got to use what they taught me
and I got to build something cool. And now I get to share my
story. And same for you. Not admitting that the giants and
they're still walking right there. They're still walking and
sharing these people that we consider giants. They're still
in the community. It's crazy. And that's the thing. It puts a
lot of attention on them. And then on you and on me, like we
get a lot of exposure too in front of a lot of people. Do you
sometimes wish you wouldn't have that much attention on Twitter?
I was talking earlier about the copycat thing and the shitstorm
that sometimes happen. Do you sometimes wish you could just be
an anonymous founder somewhere?
Danny Postma: No, no, because it brings me so much. There's so
many upsides to it that like the downsides that it has, yeah,
there's only a few reasons why I would not want to do it. I'm
quite Twitter addicted so not having anything would probably
remove that from its away like have more of a calm life that's
I think that's literally the only negative thing. Copycats
like you get to learn with it like you're gonna get
competition yeah but you get so much back for it like it's so
worth it. Like I basically have my whole board of directors on
Twitter like I post about Edwards, people helped me out
like where do you get that? I get to learn from other people
so much like, the only reason I can do this alone is because I
cannot ask other people for the feedback to help me out. Yeah,
and you need to start early to do it. Like you need to start
years and years ago. It's not going to be suddenly there.
Yeah, it's 100% worth it. No, I would not. I don't fit. Yeah, I
don't know if I want to go to the level of Pieter where he
gets recognized and everything everywhere. Like it's I think
what we are lucky with though is like we're like a bit more. He's
more known in like a little niche. So he's not like, real
life famous. So I guess he like it gets recognized and
coordinate space and stuff like that. So that's a nice part. But
I wouldn't never want to be like a famous, famous. Yeah, yeah
bigger.
Arvid Kahl: Have you ever heard the article? I think Tim Ferriss
wrote that one.
Danny Postma: Yeah
Arvid Kahl: How it is to be famous, that is such a scary
piece. I never want to have to change my name at the airport as
not to be abducted, right?
Danny Postma: He went regular people famous, right? And then,
like what he said in his article, 1 out of 10,000 people
is insane. If you have how many followers does he have? Like,
let's say 2 million, which means he has like at least 120 to 200
crazy people following
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, and you have nine or something, you know. You
have 8.7. Do the math on that. It's already there. That's the
thing. It's in our community. And I guess there might be a
shift between the psychological profiles between different
communities. But you know, if you then have an edgier opinion
and you attract a lot of negativity or a lot of
criticism. Yeah, I wouldn't want to travel in that kind of world.
Danny Postma: I already have it with the deep agency tweets.
Yeah, the deep agency tweet that went viral, 30 million people. I
got so many death threats in my inbox, dude. I was like,
Arvid Kahl: Wow, that's crazy.
Danny Postma: What the fuck? Like, you don't want to go
viral, viral. So I'm, like, 80,000 there's nothing on
Twitter. I'm like sitting nicely and quiet. I get to interact
with cool people on Twitter. I think it's nice. That's good.
Arvid Kahl: That is really nice in our community and that level
of just being connected with people just makes so many things
possible. I remember, I only had like 400 followers when we sold
our business back in the day, but it was already just meeting
the right people and having good connections just following the
right people and interacting with them. That was all we
needed to do. I think that's kind of among other ways. That's
how people found us to even acquire us and may be my last
question here. And in this wonderful conversation, it's
really nice that you're on. Now that you're building a bigger
team and you're still you're building the studio of all of
that and experimenting more, do you still have the you know the
dream exit kind of somewhere in your future? Do you still
consider this as a goal or do you just want to keep doing what
you're doing until you just drop dead from, you know, old age?
Danny Postma: So before it's right before I made the decision
to build the team, right? I was already thinking like I'm going
to sell HeadshotPro and yeah till arounds but it was like I
already did with Headlime. I'm just going to build another
product again. So I'm just going to be in this fishery loop of
I'm going to hit where I don't want to scale I have to sell it.
HeadshotPro doesn't have any strategic acquirers, which means
you're gonna get like a 3x multiple for it instead of like
an 8 to 10x. It's not worth it, man. You can automate it away
for three years. Get your money out. So if you have a team that
supports it, so yeah, for me at that price it didn't make sense
so I was like okay, yeah, then I need to go that way. Yeah, what
are you going to do with the money anyway? I'm probably going
to put it in a house or investments. I tried sitting on
the beach maybe depressed. I need to build like yeah, so if I
can build a team, then that's good. Yeah.
Arvid Kahl: Do you consider yourself nomadic? Do you still
consider yourself like a digital nomad at this point?
Danny Postma: Nah, I've been stuck for four years in the same
spot. So I don't think I'm that nomadic anymore in that sense.
Arvid Kahl: Nothing wrong with that, right? Like you can make a
choice to stay in a cool place.
Danny Postma: But it's annoying like it always has in your mind
if you live in another place like my family's in Europe. I
live in Indonesia. Like I never feel that this is the place I'm
going to live forever. So you always have like this nomadic
lifestyle. I'm going to move somewhere else. Maybe I want to
be close to my parents. So you will never have the rest your
mind like, this is where I'm going to build my life. So
that's always gonna. Yeah, so that's why I'm like I'm a little
nomadic. I might move to Portugal one day or to Kuala
Lumpur. I'm not like fixed to this spot.
Arvid Kahl: Okay, well that's interesting too, right? You're
absolutely right. I think I move every, what? 5 or 10 years in my
life, I've always moved around too. It's not nomadic because I
settled in that location for a while. But you know, a couple of
years ago, I was in Berlin and the time before that, I was in
San Francisco or in my hometown and now I'm in Canada. That's a
kind of, you know, sectional nomadic life that I do. I just
settle everywhere. I find a house and I live in it for a
while. So
Danny Postma: Do you have it after a few years, you get bored
and annoyed, like, so bored for pleasure? Like, fuck, I need to
just throw it all around. I need to move to another spot. Is
that why you move or is there another reason?
Arvid Kahl: For us or for myself, it was always like that
the circumstances of my life, partners or jobs, stuff like
that. That's kind of that where my nomadism came from. My
boredom is mostly with, yeah, also, just like with you with a
business, like, I don't want to stagnant things to do. And I can
find things in a place to do because we're all digitally
connected. So there's a lot of distraction. If I want to, I
just need to look at Twitter. I'm like you. I'm highly
addicted to Twitter. That's obviously the same thing. Like I
spent way too much time there. But the opportunities that come
from that, they spiced up the life that I have. So that's the
reason why I also wouldn't have never want to give it up, same
reason that you have for trying to, you know, build an audience
and be a presence in the community. It's just because so
much is coming back. And that is enough reason for me at least
right now to not care where I am because doesn't matter where I
am. The thing I'm going to be doing, it's the same anyway. I'm
going to hang out on Twitter and I'm going to do things, right?
Maybe warm outside, maybe cold. I don't care. So that's it for
me. Yeah, how's life in Indonesia? It feels like I've
never been there. How is that for a founder? How's the founder
life there?
Danny Postma: I think a large part of how successful I am now
is contributed to that kind of life. So in Europe and America,
I cannot talk for America. But for Europe, it's very normal.
You do everything yourself, right? Cooking, cleaning,
groceries, this, that, that, that. Community to work, so
let's say you already and this might be a highly opinionated,
but I will explain why it's not in a sense, like, you spent like
four hours I think in Europe, just like supporting your life
in that sense. Here in Asia, I wake up, I order my food, gets
delivered to my house, house gets cleaned. I have a gardener
in that sense. So the things you don't want to do, you can
outsource to someone else. A lot of people are going to say yeah,
that's bad. You hire someone else. But in this, like,
everyone gets a part of the country. And this is how
everyone lives in Indonesia. Like my wife, for example. They
also order food like as locals because why does it happen? You
suddenly have three people have a job as a cook because there's
no social security here, right? So everyone needs to have a job.
Everyone, like the whole economy, I think gets like
stimulated in that sense. And this is very Asian. Like it's
more of an Asia thing like you outsource in that sense, right?
Yeah, Mark got canceled once on Twitter for saying these things.
So I think
Arvid Kahl: I remember that. That was fun.
Danny Postma: But it's so normal here like everyone does it. It's
like the way in Asia different than Europe and Europe I think,
people call it Calvinistic. Everything needs to be done by
yourself and in Asia they believe more like everyone gets
a part in the community to do whatever they're good in. Like
I've read a cook of bucky Nasi Goreng from someone that loves
to cook that makes a good meal than me making a garbage Nasi
Goreng. That's how everyone thinks. That's how everyone
works in this. Like, that's how it works over here. So I get to
say four hours a day, I think, in that sense, so I can focus
more on my company instead of having to cook which I don't
like, having to drive to work, which I don't like. Like it
makes life a little bit easier in that sense. And it's also
like, yeah, I think the sun helps a lot getting to walk out
sides. Good weather.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, not so much here in Canada. I can tell you
that like there is some sun, but not much of it.
Danny Postma: I do miss that though. I miss like hiking
outside. I would love to go to Canada. I don't know where you
are, British Columbia maybe, Vancouver
Arvid Kahl: Ontario
Danny Postma: Ontario? Yeah, Ontario
Arvid Kahl: Toronto, the area. If you ever come over, feel free
to stop by.
Danny Postma: I've actually been four times there and my family
lives there. Yeah, I like it. It's such a nice area.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, it's a beautiful place. I like it too,
obviously. Having space is wonderful because I can just sit
outside and look beyond, right? And just think, that's really
cool. I used to live in big cities and cities are great too.
And you have a lot to do. But there's something about being
like close to nature. For somebody like us who works in
technology, right? Where it kind of gives you this sense of,
there are bigger things than the latest version of JavaScript or
whatever. It's kind of nice. That is very cool. Thanks for
Danny Postma: Every area has their own fate like in Asia, in
sharing it.
Arvid Kahl: It's funny, we have a dog here too, like a year and
Bali, it's harder to go out because it's really busy with a
car. So we don't go out that much that far away. I went back
to Europe, we got a car, we drove around road trips. So
a half old. And that is already a reason for me not to move
that's really missing those kinds of things. So everything
has an upside. Everything has a downside. But while I was
Indonesia, I have a dog here. So yeah, I'm living life here.
Maybe we move back to Europe. Maybe we go somewhere else.
anywhere else because she likes it here. This is her house. The
We'll see what life brings us, not stuck.
dog owns this house, right? This is her place. I don't want to go
Arvid Kahl: It's bizarre that it's so much easier to fly with
anywhere else.
Danny Postma: Trying to move or fly with a dog like it's not
a child or a group of children than it is with a dog, right?
going to happen. You're gonna have to settle down with it.
But this, I guess it's tribal problems. I guess these are just
things that come with these choices that we make. I'm glad
you've been making the choices that you made and also for
talking about them here with me today. Let's tie this up with a
bow. If people want to follow your journey and see what you're
building and see just how your cool idea of hiring people comes
along, where do you want them to go? Wherever you want them to
follow you?
Danny Postma: Follow me on Twitter, @dannypostmaa is where
I share all my journeys, everything I do. I don't share
revenue anymore. Sorry. But all the other learnings are there on
Twitter. And if you need a new headshot, go to headshotpro.com.
Arvid Kahl: Good pitch, I like it. Thanks so much, Danny for
being on the show and sharing all that stuff with me today.
That was a wonderful discussion. Thank you so much.
Danny Postma: It's good to me being here.
Arvid Kahl: Absolutely!
And that's it for today. Now, Danny mentioned earlier that he
had acquired a business at some point that was extremely well
aligned with his existing portfolio from another indie
hacker, really, that's how it happened. And that's Danny's
perspective here. But this also means that somewhere out there,
there is now a founder, an indie hacker just like us, I guess,
who is significantly more wealthy after having sold their
app to Danny. And that's what acquire.com, the sponsor of this
episode can do for you. Imagine this, you're a founder who has
built a solid SaaS product. It works, you have customers, you
acquired them over a long period of time and it's generating
consistent monthly recurring revenue. People are interested
in your product. And the problem now is that you're not growing
for whatever reason, there may be a lack of focus or lack of
skill, lack of plain interest or something. I don't know. You
just feel stuck. What should you do? Well, the story that you
would like to hear is that you would buckle down and somehow
reignited the fire. And that's what it is. You get past
yourself and the cliches and you start working on the business
instead of just in the business. You built this audience you
always wanted to build and you move out of your comfort zone,
do sales and marketing. And half a year later, you tripled your
revenue. While reality is not that simple. That's just wishful
thinking. Situations may be different for every single
founder who's at that particular point in time. But too many
times the story ends up being one of inaction and stagnation
until the business becomes less valuable or even worse,
worthless. If you find yourself there where your story is likely
headed down a similar road, I can offer you a third option
here and that's consider selling your business on acquire.com.
Capitalizing on the value of your time is a smart move, don't
waste it. Acquire.com is free to list. They've helped hundreds of
founders already. So go to try.acquire.com/arvid and see
for yourself if this is the right option for you at this
point in time.
Thank you so much for listening to The Bootstrapped founder
today. You can find me on Twitter @arvidkahl. And you'll
find my books and my Twitter course there too. If you want to
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Really appreciate that. Get the podcast in your podcast player
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wonderful day. Bye bye