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Interviewing indie founders about their journey and their products. itslaunchday.com
Dagobert Renouf (00:00.659)
Hey, Ellie, nice to meet you.
Elie (00:02.914)
Hey, nice to meet you.
Dagobert Renouf (00:05.129)
So it's funny, like you sent me a DM last week because I had started the first launch day and you said, hey, so in which batch am I? Because you you were like, one of the early supporters back in last year when I announced this project, which I then didn't ship for nine months. And so, yeah, so that was, I guess that's been a long time. Like how do you think about this?
Elie (00:29.998)
What would you mean? How do I think about sort logic?
Dagobert Renouf (00:32.879)
No, I mean like how was it for you? Because I'm wondering, you sometimes I feel bad, you know, for everybody who paid and shit.
Elie (00:38.358)
No, yeah, I mean, no, I didn't really care so much. mean, how much was it at the time? was like 30? Yeah, so I mean, like, I guess, like worst case scenario, like I wasn't expecting too much. So yeah, I realized it was eventually gonna launch anyway, I figured I'd wait. Obviously following you on Twitter, seeing it was coming along, sometimes products take longer to launch. I know it's become a little bit of a meme now, right, that it took you so long to launch.
Dagobert Renouf (00:43.625)
29, 29.
Small investment, yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (00:52.495)
Okay, okay.
Yeah, good.
Dagobert Renouf (01:05.765)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it did. how, actually, like, how do you, how do you work? How do you, I mean, first of all, like, how did you become an indie hacker? I'm just curious to know, like, your journey. Like, did you have a job before? Do you still have a job now? Like, what's happening?
Elie (01:23.148)
Yeah, yeah. So it's funny, I've never had like a real job, which is sort of crazy. Like my background, I...
I did a whole bunch of stuff, like, um, I was in serving in the IDF. I'm based in Israel and Tel Aviv. And I served in the IDF for two and a half years. Like I did a computer science degree. After that, I went to the IDF and that I finished at age 27. And so I had like quite a late start to my career. I'm 36 now. Um, but basically I was working as a programmer in sort of the IDF and like off to university. And in that period, I basically had, I created this fantasy football game or soccer for Americans.
Dagobert Renouf (01:43.805)
Yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (01:47.88)
Okay.
Dagobert Renouf (02:00.041)
Okay.
Elie (02:00.104)
And it became, it went quite viral, like in total, it's like 10 years old now, but it's had like over like 250,000 signups. And so this was happening, sort of, I was working in the day. Yeah, well now it's paid at the time it was free. Yeah. It doesn't, despite having so many users or like historical signups, doesn't make like a ton of money. It makes enough to keep going. It's like nice, like sort of side income.
Dagobert Renouf (02:11.879)
Was it a free app?
Dagobert Renouf (02:27.195)
And fantasy, fantasy league things. It's really an American thing, I think. Right? It's really...
Elie (02:31.946)
Yeah, I mean, people, so this was for like the UK, basically, I grew up in London, and I had like friends in America, friends in London, like, and we would play like, I basically brought the American style of fantasy football to the UK, basically, back in like 2014 or so. And one summer, like, like during my service, it just went viral, like 20,000 people signed up in a month. Servers were crashing and everything. And yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (02:37.425)
Okay.
Dagobert Renouf (02:53.736)
I see, I see.
Dagobert Renouf (02:57.523)
So you had your first kind of like success, even though it didn't make a lot of money, it was a kind of like a glimpse of like lots of users, traction. So I guess it gives you confidence for trying something else.
Elie (03:08.91)
Yeah, exactly. mean, from there, we basically, after I finished my service, I brought, I was fully alone at the time. It grew to 20,000 users alone. Then I brought on a co-founder, co-founder as well. We did like an accelerator in America. We did raise a bit of money for this, so.
Dagobert Renouf (03:22.793)
Okay.
Elie (03:25.102)
we raised like a few hundred thousand dollars. But forever since then, basically, so I sort of stopped with that around 2018 time, but I've kept it running on the side anyway, like since then. So it brings me passive income, enough to keep going. But yeah, basically after that, was like anything I did, was either like freelancing, like...
I did freelance for a year or two for different clients and then that sort of freelancing turned into its own business as well. And then since then I've like run other businesses. Some of them have funding and some of them were.
Dagobert Renouf (03:55.636)
So which business? I'm just curious. What business did freelancing lead to? I'm just curious.
Elie (04:03.562)
So it led to like a freelancing business basically, like an agency. I, yeah, like I would hire out freelancers. So it was more like if you're familiar with TopTal, like that sort of model.
Dagobert Renouf (04:07.419)
Like agency, you started hiring? Yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (04:15.175)
Yeah, so just for people not knowing top talents, like top talent, that's the name of like in a field so you can hire, I guess, it's like vetted freelancers and an agency helping you, I guess, hire them, right?
Elie (04:30.378)
Yeah, exactly. So I was like top tower, but like for Israeli companies and some US clients, but primarily like Israeli developers for the Israeli market. And so that went, that grew to around 15 active projects at AIDS peak. ran that for a few years. Also that ran for a few years on the side as well. Now it's like very quiet. I don't have any active projects running, but for like the last few years, till a few months ago, I always had sort of like passive projects where the freelancers were working and I would just sort of get income from that just for having made the match.
Dagobert Renouf (04:38.046)
Yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (04:55.581)
Yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (05:01.725)
Yeah, so kind of quite passive, not fully passive, because there's never really passive, like quite passive income from that.
Elie (05:06.188)
Yeah. Well, this, I would say if you saw the business, like the last three years of it were like very, very passive. It was like literally just like sign a contract and then like collect money each month and pay the developer. It was, it was really like very hands off. would like, it could have been like less than an hour a week type thing, but less than an hour a month. Yeah. But both, both these two businesses I mentioned actually, like this draft still exists and that is like very passive. Like it's like it runs on its own, like the last six years or so.
Dagobert Renouf (05:22.225)
Yeah, okay. And, yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (05:33.939)
Wow, okay, awesome. And so how do we go from there to your current product? What's the journey?
Elie (05:40.942)
Yeah. So I ran, like I did like a few other things over the years in between and like different businesses raised money for another business as well. And then when I was finishing with the last thing around two years ago, I was just spending like too much time on email. I was like, Oh, it'd be great if I had an assistant that can manage most of this for me. And it was around the time that AIs were becoming quite good. Like I know GPT-3 or 3.5 went around that time. And so I started sort of building this product and yeah, was like, that's what we've been the majority.
Dagobert Renouf (05:55.045)
Okay.
Dagobert Renouf (06:05.277)
Yeah.
Elie (06:11.038)
of my focus the last two years basically.
Dagobert Renouf (06:13.265)
And so can you show us and explain to us what this does actually?
Elie (06:17.452)
Yeah, for sure. I'm actually gonna...
Let me share the screen.
Elie (06:34.67)
Cool. Yeah, so this is, I guess, the logged in product. The product's called Inbox Zero. It's an AI assistant for email, basically. The idea is that it manages your email for you the same way as a human executive assistant or VA would do it. I'll show you around a bit, but when you first get set up, we sort of...
Dagobert Renouf (06:39.037)
Yeah.
Elie (06:58.072)
give you lots of different categories in terms of how you can set up the product. For example, we label all emails that need a reply, different newsletters, marketing emails.
Dagobert Renouf (07:02.216)
Yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (07:07.693)
so AI is doing labeling? how is that?
Elie (07:11.862)
Yeah, exactly. So it's just like organizing it all. And the react, like the outcome will look something like this, where it's like, okay, I have three emails I need to reply to today. A lot of inboxes, you know, they'll get a hundred emails a day, but only three of them actually matter today. And so we sort of want to surface that, just find like a removal of the noise and just give you what you actually care about.
Dagobert Renouf (07:22.93)
I see.
Dagobert Renouf (07:34.728)
Yeah, okay.
Elie (07:38.222)
And yeah, WK works with Gmail. So this app, like you use it for the setup, but everything runs in the background with Gmail. So here you can see a screenshot of the real.
Dagobert Renouf (07:45.543)
Yeah, you don't have to log into a separate app, okay.
Elie (07:50.286)
Pardon.
Dagobert Renouf (07:51.271)
You don't have to log into us. You don't have to open a separate app every day. It's inside Gmail. That's what you mean. Yeah.
Elie (07:56.128)
Yeah, exactly. Like the general setup is in inbox zero, like this website getinboxzero.com, but then once it's set up. so yeah, we have some defaults. There's this like, we try and make it easy for people. But then the product has a lot of customizability. Another thing we do is any emails that need a reply will AI draft a response for you if you want this.
Dagobert Renouf (08:01.202)
Yeah, yeah.
Elie (08:20.622)
So yeah, like this can, this works to varying degrees on like depending on the type of inbox. Um, but if you like often like you'll have a draft just ready there to like just hit send, maybe I'll adjust it a bit. The AI will try and come up with a response for you, but without you having to do anything. This is a new feature, which actually, if you're using the product today, you won't see this yet unless you turn it on in the early access features, but something we've released very soon.
Dagobert Renouf (08:42.491)
Okay, also you have the ability for people to turn that on. That's really cool, you know, to have early access features. I think that's a cool thing to offer.
Elie (08:52.556)
Yeah, yeah. And it's here for people that want it, but it's like, I don't know if I have like people using post hog, but they're like very little effort. Like a lot of the features I release these days, especially if they're bigger, I'll first put them into early access and sort of like, you can like toggle them on and off basically. And then when I'm like comfortable enough with it, I'm like, I'll release it to everyone.
Dagobert Renouf (09:14.195)
That's awesome. That's awesome for power users and that's awesome for you to kind of like beta test it, I guess. So that's quite cool.
Elie (09:20.79)
Yeah, exactly. It's almost like a staging environment, but it's like on the real thing. So I can test it on my own account, like really like sort of like get a feel for it on like a real inbox and others can as well and give feedback. yeah, Postdoc makes it really easy. Like in the past, I would never have thought to do something like this, but it's really not a lot of lines of code. These just like, add like a new feature in Postdoc like market and yeah, it's pretty minimal effort to do each time. Also, we even have like personal rule.
Dagobert Renouf (09:32.218)
That's cool.
Dagobert Renouf (09:45.033)
So you're using post hog for this. That's interesting because to me that sounds like super advanced, big enterprise thing, but that you're doing it on an indie product. think that's super cool. Yeah.
Elie (09:55.606)
Yeah, I agree with you. It's like one of those things I'd be like, no, you don't need that on an indie product. but I, I just, guess I added it and it was just like very, very minimal. And now any like new feature we do want to like release in that way. We even have like a cursor rule where we just like tag the cursor rule, like, Hey, make this, make this early access. And it just does it very easily. There's, there's not really a lot to it, but we were using post hoc anyway for AB testing and it works in a very similar way to that. So.
Dagobert Renouf (10:15.977)
Yeah, yeah, I see.
Dagobert Renouf (10:22.607)
Exactly. I looked into post hoc for analytics of launch day, but then I'm like, no, it's too complicated. But I saw they had all of these insane features. I think that's cool also for like people to like, you know, if they, if the power users can feel a bit special, it's always cool. Like you give them a little something, you know, you give them more, you give you make them feel involved. You know, they have early access to think it's cool. Like it makes your fans even more involved, I think.
Elie (10:50.67)
yeah, yeah. I probably don't push it enough. Like we don't like announce it over email is like when there's a new feature, it's like, at least not in the early access. It's more people that find it randomly. but yeah, like, yeah, that could be a smart approach to make people feel special. Be like, Hey, like if you want like some, something new has just launched.
Dagobert Renouf (11:00.23)
I see.
Okay.
Dagobert Renouf (11:12.251)
And so what are some features that you're really happy about, excited about? What's the thing?
Elie (11:17.302)
Yeah, so this one is like sort of one that is like coming out, which is like basically we can like, let's say you get 20 newsletters today. We can like bundle them all up, archive them, like they skip the inbox. So your inbox doesn't have any of these newsletters in, but we give you like one long summary email, which looks something like this. So we can clean your inbox with it then give you like instead of 20 emails, we just give you one summarized email. And so this is like quite an exciting one that's just like launched and very soon.
Dagobert Renouf (11:41.193)
it is. Interesting, I've never heard of that. Yeah, really cool.
Elie (11:46.318)
and
Yeah, like the product itself, it gets like a little bit like more complex. Like once you dive into it, you can really say up however you want. So like we have these different personas. If you're a founder, maybe this is how you'd say it up, but you can really write whatever you want. But let's say I want to forward all the receipts to my accountant or I want to label everyone on my team as like sort of a team email. You can really like sort of, yeah, let's say you're an inbox, like a support inbox or an
influencer inbox, you keep getting the same emails in every day. So you can really like set it up. So it just like sort of manages the email for you automatically for repetitive inboxes. it, like there's a lot of power basically where you can just sort of train it. Like you would a personal assistant. You can have like a document that this document basically explains to the AI how it should manage your inbox.
Dagobert Renouf (12:40.881)
It's like cursor rules, but like for you. That's cool. That's awesome.
Elie (12:43.532)
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Cursor rules. And then yeah, that was like the initial inspiration. And then there is like more of like, this is a demo account. has like loads of different things in it and looks a bit messy, but yeah, like you have like sort of more specific things as well. can set like, there's like these real like individual rules and like this like prompt file, which is like a cursor or a cipher file. So like, yeah, they sort of work together.
Dagobert Renouf (12:53.501)
Yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (13:08.157)
Yeah, general thing. Wow, man, cool. how is it going so far? You have some users already. When did you launch this? Is it a recent product?
Elie (13:17.046)
Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, just like other features, like the core features, the AI system, but we like block code emails. have this bulk unsubscriber as well, where you can like, be like archive, like unsubscribe very quickly. You can see like, Hey, I only read like 8 % of morning brew emails in the last three months. Like I'm just going to like unsubscribe.
Dagobert Renouf (13:26.17)
Yeah, okay.
Dagobert Renouf (13:34.301)
that's a nice idea. How many emails you read so that you can automatically remove them. That's cool. So yeah, you said it lives in Gmail, but like the site is quite full. It's like quite a bunch of cool things on your website as well.
Elie (13:41.431)
Yeah, exactly.
Elie (13:49.882)
Yeah, yeah. So I should say, so the assistant itself, that like the setup and what you saw, like this cursor, like rules document type thing, this like, I guess this lives here, but like once it's set up once it's just everything it's doing is running in your regular Gmail. You don't need to log in here every day. The bulk unsubscribe feature does like live in this product, I guess. And that's also like something you might come to like when you first sign up and then once every few weeks or so you might unsubscribe for more stuff.
Dagobert Renouf (14:07.369)
Yeah, I see.
Elie (14:19.022)
Dagobert Renouf (14:19.271)
And so what's the, is it your main product? Is it like the main thing you're working on now?
Elie (14:24.66)
Yeah, yeah, it is. In terms of what you asked a second ago, 14,000 people have signed up for the product. There's a few hundred paying customers of those. It's growing steadily right now. I also recently took money from Tiny Seed, if you've heard of them. So they're like an accelerator for like bootstrappers basically, where there's no like pressure to become like a billion dollar company, but they want to build like big businesses, but like
Dagobert Renouf (14:42.493)
Okay.
Elie (14:51.286)
multi-million dollar businesses or businesses that sell for tens of millions, not necessarily like, yeah, a billion dollars.
Dagobert Renouf (14:53.021)
I see.
Dagobert Renouf (14:59.387)
I see, yeah I've heard of that. There used to be something called maybe Tiny Fund or Calm Fund, there was a bunch of things like this, like Tiny...
Elie (15:07.414)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Calm Fund. Yeah. He had another name before. Yeah. Yeah. I was in touch with them as well. I don't think that runs anymore, but similar concept basically, like funding, like I think there's a, there's a great market for like funding these types of businesses. and yeah, there's like a lot of good, like that what we see on Twitter, like businesses making like tens of thousands in MRO, which are good businesses to find. They have a different risk profile to like a VC backed business.
Dagobert Renouf (15:27.461)
And so how does that work?
Dagobert Renouf (15:35.121)
Yeah, I was going to say it's different than VC. how would you explain the difference?
Elie (15:40.844)
Yeah, so I mean, it's up to the big difference is like, think the valuations you'll get from like these sorts of things like tiny seed. I mean, it's an accelerator, so you'll get a low valuation, but they get like.
I guess they get between 10 and 12 % of the business for anywhere between $120,000 to $220,000. That like sort of varies by company. They don't expect you to like have to raise like another round. think around 30 % of tiny seed companies do go on to raise more money, but that's not like the focus of it at all. It's just like, how do you grow this business to like, how do you get to that next level? How do you get to a million dollar ARR rather than like, and you can, you can shoot for like smaller ideas where there is a good market for it.
Dagobert Renouf (16:00.381)
Yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (16:10.482)
I see.
Elie (16:23.5)
It's just not like a hundred million dollar market type thing. So that's like, sort of, would say the main difference. And also when you take VC money is just like that pressure to...
Dagobert Renouf (16:23.656)
Yeah.
Yeah, okay, I see.
Elie (16:34.424)
to really do something big. Like if you see an opportunity where you're like, I can make $2 million a year doing this. And like, there's a clear path to doing that. Like that's not interesting for a VC backed business. Even if you think there's like a 70 % chance if you, getting there, but a company like an accelerator, like Tiny Seed, was like, know, 70 % chance of getting to two million. It's probably not like I made up those numbers, but that, that, that, is a good investment. It's just not an investment a VC would make, but Tiny Seed would let's say.
Dagobert Renouf (16:48.062)
Yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (16:54.599)
That's cool for them. Yeah, For them, that's cool. Yeah, okay. Because VC would be like, they bet they rather have 1 % chance of making one billion, I guess.
Elie (17:09.238)
Yeah, exactly. yeah, like, like, if they can get like one in 10 of their companies to like be like a huge, huge exit, like the model is just it covers everything else. But if you're in there is like a whole group of businesses where you know, you know, it's a like $20,000 a month business. That's like that's not a business that is going to die. And so it doesn't matter so much to tiny seed if
Dagobert Renouf (17:18.801)
Yes, he.
Elie (17:31.79)
The cap on that business is a hundred million dollars, but there's probably like a clear path. It's like low risk in terms of that business could always be sold off. Let's say you're a 20K a month business that could be sold off for a million dollars or so. So the downside protection for the investors is like quite good. Like they could always get their money back. If it sells for a million dollars, they get their, you know, 150K back investment back. But like obviously it's like, you're just not the model thereafter. They sort of want all or nothing approaches where it just, it has to be a massive exit.
Dagobert Renouf (17:44.52)
Yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (17:51.016)
Yeah, which I guess when you... And VCs, don't care about that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I see, see.
Dagobert Renouf (18:05.929)
Yeah, I'm sorry but it was only for indie products and I'm a bit uncomfortable with that. I'm just saying exactly what I'm thinking. Because I'm not sure if I should publish it, if I should post it.
Elie (18:17.505)
Okay.
Elie (18:23.33)
Yeah, well, I would say, by the way, would still like when I have like, this is quite recent, honestly, in terms of like when I joined time, see it is like month or so.
Dagobert Renouf (18:30.623)
yeah, okay. Yeah, I guess since the time I announced launch day you had time to get funding or something, but at first you didn't. Yeah.
Elie (18:36.014)
Yeah, Yeah, but also I would say I would still see myself, like, if you look at all the tiny seed companies, like, I would definitely see it as like more of like the indie hacker, like, like every company in the batch is like...
Dagobert Renouf (18:48.115)
But that's a good point because I know some other people like Damon Chen who does testimonials.com and he just took a little kind of funding like you, like a small thing like this. But we still consider him like an indie hacker. And so that's an interesting case actually. And maybe I should just, maybe I will just put it up and let people watch this conversation and see what they think because...
It's interesting because I think I kind of like agree. Like for now, I was just super strict. Like, did you have external funding or no, because it's just simple. But when you submitted, you didn't have any. Now you do. And so I'm just curious, like what's the. Because, know, and also it somehow this doesn't make sense because some people, are indie, but they are just loaded from.
Elie (19:27.202)
Yeah.
Elie (19:32.663)
Yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (19:46.929)
something else, you know, and some they have nothing so you can have external funding that is not VC. So it's an interesting thing.
Elie (19:54.638)
Yeah. I would say you also like in turn, like let's say the inbox zero business, it's like almost, think two years old, honestly, like 95 % of that time is like, you're like me, like running it as like an indie hacker. So I do like see it like more in that light, like the funding, we're not talking about like a million dollars of funding. It's under 200 K. Like it's less than that. Like the number isn't public, but they asked not to share, it's like, it's not like.
Dagobert Renouf (20:07.08)
Yeah.
For sure.
Dagobert Renouf (20:13.458)
Yeah, yeah.
Elie (20:19.342)
It's not on that VC path, like how do I make a billion dollars? It's a very, like Tiny Seed is for exactly the companies that are like on launch day type thing. They might take a little bit of money, but it's not like, it's a very different profile. Like a VC wouldn't invest in most of the companies that Tiny Seed is investing in right now. Maybe down the line they do.
Dagobert Renouf (20:22.226)
Yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (20:32.359)
Let me check out Tiny Seed.
Dagobert Renouf (20:39.625)
No, you know what, that's super interesting. I will put it up. You are still in, I will leave you in because I think that's interesting. Yeah, you know, I'm still figuring this out, trying to find the good balance. And I was almost considering myself doing something like that because it can be so hard to, you know, use your own money all the time. So that's interesting. So, yeah, well, I'm glad actually, because that's another part of this video that's interesting.
Elie (20:44.833)
Ha ha.
Dagobert Renouf (21:06.057)
And so like, let's just go fully into that then. So how did you get the funding from them? Like I'm just curious about that.
Elie (21:14.026)
Yeah, like funding wasn't like on my mind. I never went out to fundraise. Like I do see myself, like I was comfortable like sort of like funding the business. The main expense was just my time. Until recently, I didn't have anyone else working on it.
Dagobert Renouf (21:26.184)
Yeah.
Elie (21:28.974)
Um, I had like some interns and stuff, like it was, 99 % of the business was me. But, um, but yeah, I saw sort of tiny seed. It's a bit random how it came about. There's another one called tiny. Um, who you probably know. I've got Andrew Wilkinson, I think is the guy's name. And I was just like, look, he was like, had a, like a podcast episode where he was talking about competitor and was like, Oh, it'd be like, he runs tiny. It's nothing to do with tiny seed, but that sort of. Yeah, exactly.
Dagobert Renouf (21:42.139)
I've heard I think.
Dagobert Renouf (21:54.687)
yeah, Tiny, buy the businesses. I think they bought like Dribble like five years ago. That's how I know them, I think.
Elie (22:02.163)
interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, could well be. The one I know they bought like long time ago was Meteor, which was like this development like...
Dagobert Renouf (22:09.72)
yeah, that's why Meteor is still running even though it's not trendy anymore. Yeah.
Elie (22:14.06)
Yeah, I was gonna you used to use Meteor?
Dagobert Renouf (22:17.049)
No, but I remember it was so trendy. was around the time, a bit before React, I think it came out. Dribble, yeah, Dribble is part of Tiny Seed, creative market. Yeah, mean Tiny, sorry. Yeah, I see. And we work remotely, this job board that was created by the guys at Basecamp a long time ago. So they bought it also. Interesting. Okay, sorry.
Elie (22:22.934)
Yeah, exactly. And then you could use Mito with React.
Elie (22:29.548)
Yeah.
Elie (22:37.762)
Okay.
But yeah, so it actually had nothing to do with tiny, but this is sort of just what triggered me to apply because they had similar names. And I was like, like, I'm not like trying to go for like endless funding, but I would definitely like take money. If like, if the investors were on board with like, this doesn't need to be a billion dollar company. I didn't want that pressure of like having to like grow the business beyond its means. If I can get to a billion dollars one day, like amazing, but like that, that's not sort of not the path I'm taking. And so there's not that many investors around that are like comfortable.
Dagobert Renouf (22:54.888)
Yeah.
Elie (23:08.634)
of that model, were like, they were some investors actually randomly I was speaking to that were comfortable and I almost took money from them, but it didn't work out in the end. But yeah, it was like, I never sort of went down the fund path, fundraising path for inbox zero, but like if there was like money I could take in quickly and like sort of give me a little bit more breathing room on the business and allow me to move a little bit faster. So I figured like, why not? I can still do exactly what I'm doing now. I give away 10 to 12 % of the business. And so it seemed like only upside, not that much.
Dagobert Renouf (23:34.014)
Yeah.
Elie (23:38.596)
downside and so yeah it was sort of like an easy choice for me and there's a mentorship on the program, there's the network as well of other tiny seed companies. You see another 15 businesses or 10 businesses you're doing the program with so you get to learn from them as well and everyone has ideas so you've got like sort of that community aspect as well so yeah that's why I sort of decided to go for it.
Dagobert Renouf (23:46.505)
Yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (24:01.929)
Super interesting man, this is making me think so much about this. Can you just stop sharing your screen, please? Because I didn't find a button to do that. I think I can't, but anyway. Super interesting man, I didn't expect this. I love when these conversations are like this. Like there's something new that I didn't expect. We show your product and then there's this interesting story about funding. And this is making me think, yeah, I could open it up like...
Elie (24:05.166)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (24:28.411)
not to big VCs, I guess it's on a case by case basis. Like, you know, if it's just a seed, just the beginning, or somebody just having some angel investors or something, I guess that's fine. that's because you do definitely have this indie vibe. And another person I really like is Marie, like who lives in Australia, who is not on Twitter anymore, but she created something called Lama Life, which is this productivity app for people with ADHD. And I remember she took a little bit of funding.
So she could hire one person for support, but she still has such an indie vibe. So think this dichotomy maybe needs to be split a little bit differently. So that's interesting.
Elie (25:11.234)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think 90 % of like, probably 99 % of like funded like companies, like they are looking like to keep raising more and more money and like, you know, go down that path, like raise VC money and so on. But like, yeah, someone like me or maybe Maria as well, it's just like...
Dagobert Renouf (25:25.896)
Yeah.
Elie (25:29.87)
That might happen one day, it might not, but it's like that I have no plans that I don't have like a pitch deck to raise money. It's like, so that's why I would put myself in the indie camp basically. And the fact that like 90 % of the business's life has been like just me like hacking like everyone else as a solo developer.
Dagobert Renouf (25:35.315)
Yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (25:46.441)
Yeah, it's very recent. No, no, for sure makes sense. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. I hope it's going to make people think about it also differently. I think that's interesting topic. well, you know, thank you, man. That was awesome. So it was really good to meet you and see your product. So good luck with your launch day.
Elie (26:03.15)
Thank you.