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Each episode is a conversation between me, Eli Finer, and a budding entrepreneur, indie hacker, or solo founder.
We focus on the current biggest challenge (hint: it's never in the code) and the best next step to take (hint: it's usually not adding another feature).
If you want to be a guest on the show please reach out to me on Twitter @finereli.
James: I was just realized how deeply unhappy I was working for these people. And and even though it's been really hard to be doing freelancing, this is all new to me and, I wanna build this product and all this other stuff and I've never worked so hard in my life, but, the feeling is just infinitely different.
Eli: Hey guys, my name is Eli Finer, and this is "Stop Building" where I do my best to get founders to set aside their IDE and talk to some potential users. This rarely works, but I love these conversations anyway. Today, I'm talking with James Morris who's building a platform to help creators easily sell text-based courses. Let's see if he needs to keep building or do something else instead.
Eli: So what do you actually do?
James: yeah. good question. good question. I've always messed around with computers since I was eight years old, something like that. I remember the old I, what did I have? I had an amstrad CPC 4, 5, 4 or something.
Eli: Oh wow.
James: yeah, I'm 39 next week and, So I've, I really used to have the really old computers with the tapes and everything and, yeah, and just, I, there was a book that had coding in it and stuff, and I picked that up and I spent less ages getting some silly graphic to move on the screen and I thought it was the best thing in the world.
James: and ever since then, really just been inside on a computer like most days, doing kind of the same thing in one way or
Eli: Go outside, play some football. Right
James: yeah, I know.
Eli: I'm happy here.
James: and, yeah, it was just like my, it was just my little world. It was my little escape. It was my little, it was just everything. And I used to show people stuff that I used to do. Like I used to make music on my computer. I used to do animations on my computer. I used to always, people just couldn't believe what I did with this computer.
James: So my, I think it just reinforced this thing of oh, hey, like I must be pretty good at computers. I can never get printers to work though. People always ask me to get printers to wear. That's, I don't know anyone who gets printers to work. But anyway. Yeah, so it really, basically, I I went to university.
James: I, I thought I was gonna try and do film studies and all this other of stuff, and I ended up bailing out of university after about a year, run outta money, to be honest with you. And, yeah, just picked up a book about M at CSS and started reading all of that. And then I actually did freelancing back then as a, tried to be a webmaster, as they used to call it back in the day.
James: and I had no idea what I was doing and I had no idea about business and I got absolutely fleeced by loads of people. And I worked all day long, and then ended up thinking this, I'm just not making enough money. So I ended up getting a job and I've basically gone from the very backend of coding, which is databases and servers and all this stuff, and slowly moved my way through, to being more of a front end person than going all the way further into doing UX and then going further into UI and then all this other stuff.
James: And I'm now a, what you call a UX UI designer or a product designer or whatever you wanna call it. and that's what I've been doing for the last sort of eight. Eight years. some pretty, I'm quite proud of the startups I've worked for, which have been SoundCloud, which was a music platform, buffer, which was a, social media platform and, ghost, which is like an independent publishing platform.
James: And,and as I was saying before, I was really, that was a big deal for me. And I want this to work for those companies. I really like the products. but there was a, there was definitely a sense of status with it. I really was like, oh yeah, I've made it if I get to work with these people.
James: but the imposter syndrome was huge. I've been self-taught with everything and I always distinctly remember these moments where I'm looking around and people have been to university or they've done this, or they've done that, or, they've been to hyper, which is like some crazy kind of design, school and I'm literally like just reading a book that I've got off Amazon or and yeah.
Eli: talent.
James: Just, I don't even know. Talent getting by the gift of gab. Maybe I could say the right things at the right
Eli: you got something right.
James: yeah, maybe. but I just like making shit, man. that's the thing. And I just like putting things together and so it's, I've got all of these skills of being able to code, being able to do bits of databases, being able to design things that look relatively nice and, and all this other stuff.
Eli: Yeah. When you spend, when you spend so much time in the industry, what they call these days, full stack is that much fuller, right? There's a lot more in the stack,
James: it's like a,
Eli: in yours and in mine, right? It's like
Eli: like a skyscraper Exactly. Yeah. Cuz my stack start starts somewhere, in the kind of debugging stuff in Assembler and goes all the way through everything up to marketing and sales.
Eli: It's okay, that's quite a bit taller than what people usually think when they think, oh, I want a full stack developer.
James: said this before, didn't you? you moved into this marketing sort
Eli: yeah. No, I spent, I spent, I started coding when I was 11
James: and I started doing it semi-professionally, which means people started to pay me money for it, which when I was 14 or 15, and I've been going since, so it's like, what, like 25 years of coding. and three years ago I had a little app that I really was passionate about and I left my job and decided that I'm going to set aside all my coding and technical skills because I need to figure out how to market it.
Eli: And of course, I failed miserably. and as I failed miserably, I realized this is actually quite complex. There are some fundamental PR principles to marketing. Which I didn't get. but over time and over a series of attempts and series of businesses, I'm kinda, oh, you know what? It's if you apply some engineering thinking and if you apply a little bit of, first principles, understanding to this whole vague world of marketing and sales, which is very full of tricks and hacks and quick get rich quick ideas, when you focus on some fundamental principles, you can actually get somewhere.
Eli: So that's what I've been doing and at some point I realize that I actually seem to know more about this than the other people I'm talking to. Even though I don't have 25 years in marketing, I just have three, but I have a lot of years in the space in general, and. Yeah. So that's what I do now, I help people with their marketing and business and sales efforts.
Eli: and that kind of leads me to ask you, cuz we started talking in dms about, what you're doing and how your freelancing is going and where you want to go with it.
Eli: the simplest question with this is what's your biggest hurdle right now? or your biggest challenge.
James: yeah, so I've, I, being a product. Designer, or UX UI designer, depending on how you look at it. and doing that for lots of other companies and stuff. obviously my default thing in my mind is that I would love to run one myself and see what it's like. again, going back to the arrogant bastard thing, like it, oh, I'm sure I know how to do this bad than these people.
James: and then you realize that actually these people are really, quite amazing that they've managed to pull off something and they've got this business that works and they're hiring people and it's, actually massive props to them. And I, to be honest, I've always massively respected my, the bosses that I've worked for because there, deep down this stuff is hard.
James: And, like I say, it's like you, I can. Design something that looks nice and I can code something that looks nice. but definitely hitting a similar problem to what you were saying about where, marketing is just a whole nother world. And, maybe back 10 years ago, maybe you could have built something and shared it and maybe you could have made a bit of a splash easier back then where, not quite so much you build it and they will come.
James: it, it was slightly different 10 years ago to what it is like now where, everyone and their dog with no code tools and AI now, going crazy and, it's well in good designing something that looks nice and works okay and it doesn't have too many bugs, but does anyone actually care for a star?
James: how, and not even that, like how do you get it in front of enough people to start great gaining traction? And I think, as you've seen me on TWI Twitter, I'm I'm trying to talk about various things I'm trying to do, but like everything in my life,I, I am not massively laser focused.
James: I, I end up being all over the place with things. So even now, as my, as I stand, like I'm trying to build this MVP thing, I've got a friend of mine who's helping me out as well, part-time. But he works full-time so he can, he can't dedicate too much time to it, but I'm trying to build this product.
James: I'm trying to launch, or trying to build up a blog and I'm trying to, Do freelancing, because if I don't do the freelancing, I go, this is all over this whole thing, this whole experiment is over and I'm back to work anyway. it's all of those things at the same time, and depending on what week it is, something gets a bit more attention than the other.
James: And in an ideal world, I would love to just focus on one. so yeah, it's, it is, it's, the freelancing thing to me is, I wouldn't say a means to an end because I do actually really enjoy working with people and being useful to people and. Providing a service that, that is something is actually just a satisfying thing to do.
James: honest Day's work sort of thing. And I actually do enjoy doing that, but that is purely really to make money to sustain myself and my wife. And so we don't become poor and homeless and I have to sell my computer. And,so freelancing. Yeah. Good. Always interested to find new clients or whatever, but ex That's fine.
James: That's over there.
Eli: wait a second. I just wanna ask you a question about this, because those things are related. when you're looking for clients for your freelancing, is that, do they find you, do you find them, do you feel comfortable kind of selling your services? How does that
Eli: flow for you?
Eli: And it's just the reason I'm asking is this, in our indie hacker circles, we usually talk about marketing. We usually talk about techniques that get us clients and customers and users at
James: Mm.
Eli: But everything always starts non-scalable. It starts individually. It's, it was a very unpleasant realization for me to realize that for a very, for the early stages of any business, especially solo businesses, there's no marketing.
Eli: There's only sales. You only ever have individual interactions with people, whether it's online or in person or whatever. And you only ever convince one person at a time to try your MVP to buy your $15 a month, SaaS or to hire you as a consultant. And that's why these things have similarities between them.
Eli: And the other thing that I notice is that online marketing and, s e o paid ads,becoming a social influencer, all these things, they are new and they're really context dependent. They work in a certain way for a certain period of time online in, for a few years. And then everything changes.
Eli: But individual one-on-one sales, looking someone in the eye and saying, this is what I have, will you give me money for it? This is 10,000 years old. It's been going on for forever. I imagine a blacksmith in a village somewhere, in the, in, like in the bronze era, it's still the same deal, right?
Eli: If you have two blacksmiths now they need to compete, but the competition is not marketing. It's like who you know and how you convince them. and the problem with that is that sales has this, this awful image around it. It's basically convincing people to buy things they don't need with money they don't have, for reasons they don't understand.
James: okay. So yeah, I get, I get what you're saying with all of this. So the biggest thing, so yeah, it is all related. You're right. I am trying to get better at Twitter. I like Twitter, like I'm always on Twitter. I like it. Like you, you have to get past some of the, Fred boys and all that stuff.
James: But at the end of the day, there's some very nice people and they're all trying to do their hustle and they are, we've all got things to learn from each other. and I'll be honest with you, Twitter has been how I got my jobs. It's been how I've got my first client, it was how I, I sold a little course a little while ago.
James: not for lots of money, but I did. And that's, we can talk about that later, but that's led me to my product thing I was building. it's just been a great platform really. And I know I, I dunno how people feel about Elon Musk. I don't even know how I feel about Elon Musk. but at the end of the
Eli: It's a bit confusing these days
James: it's, yeah, it's kinda, he's one, he's somebody I kind of respect and and also hate and dislike at the exact
James: same time,
James: It's really bizarre. It's, I literally have no real feeling about it. It's like it's completely balanced out. There's a lot of people I like and there's a lot of people I, rather not have in my life.
James: I cannot figure him out. but yeah, it,at the end of the day, is Twitter still useful? Do I enjoy being in there? Yes. And it's the platform I've decided to focus on and. but I'm not a salesperson. I am a, I'm an a classic kind of English sort of guy, like fumbling over my words and, blah, blah, blah.
James: and so being confident in that sense of,tweeting out what you feel, what you say, what you do, getting used to talking about yourself, in that kind of manner. That's a very un-English thing to do. And,you Amer Americans are fine with this. but,
Eli: American.
James: I was gonna, do you know what I was gonna say?
James: I was thinking I,
Eli: I'm a
James: I was like, I'm,
Eli: I'm a bunch of different things, but I'm definitely not an American, first of all, I live in Canada now, which is like a,
James: oh, that's it. I've offended twice. Yeah.
Eli: Yeah, a tone down version of the United States. no, I'm not offended, but I was born in Russia, when it was still, the Soviet Union. And then I, lived in Israel for 25 years, which is where I grew up in, had my formative years. And then, we moved here about seven years ago.
James: Cool.
Eli: but I, and despite the fact that Israelis in the world have this,
Eli: have this image of being very in your face, never shy, do whatever the hell they want. There is that. But on the scale of Israelis, I am a fairly shy guy. so I can definitely resonate with what you're saying and when I start out on Twitter, Posting things of my own was difficult.
James: And what makes it even more difficult is, the kind of shouting into the void syndrome. You post something that you think is really good and then no one, Yes.
Eli: nothing happens. but I think something happened on Twitter within the last, I think couple of months since they released the algorithm.
Eli: something's really changed.
Eli: it stopped being an effective broadcasting platform. Even if you have a lot of followers, you post a tweet, very few people see it. and it's a very effective networking platform. So again, this idea of one-on-one communication resonates a lot because what I've seen on Twitter, Recently and even before that is that the best of Twitter is in the replies and in the dms, not in the kind of top line tweets.
Eli: And I just almost completely switched to just having conversations with people. I rarely post anything to topline, to, to the timeline in general because it doesn't, it creates some conversa. Like I don't care about likes anymore. I don't even care about followers anymore. because it's just not like I have, about 2000 followers, which is not a lot.
Eli: But when I post something and I haven't been engaging with people, I maybe get a couple of likes. But if I have been talking to people, then the people I have been talking to see my tweet and like it. Typically, regardless of what I say in it. So it's like it's completely unrelated. It's not oh, if you post a really awesome tweet, it'll get traction and then you will, get your 15 minutes of glory.
James: That doesn't happen anymore. But if you just, talk to a bunch of people, then regardless of whether you become famous on Twitter or not, those connections are amazing. I think I replied to a tweet of yours at some point, and that's how we connected, right? That's Oh yeah. No, I, do you know what, funny, it's funny you say that actually, because that's how this freelancing thing ended up happening with this client. this first client that I got was, it was just the most bizarre, serendipity kind of moment. And then it ended up becoming this amazing sort of relationship I've got with this company now.
James: and I'm like, really chuffed about that. and I'll be honest, it wasn't necessarily something, that Yeah, it wasn't, it was through like talking and through yeah, I know what you mean. and I wonder if. I've definitely noticed as I'm posting stuff, like compared to now than it was like, say, yeah, six months ago, you don't see as much engagement on there.
James: and, but my enjoyment of the platform has definitely been higher because I've been enjoying the conversation. So maybe all of this has been completely intentional from the Twitter side. I don't know. Or maybe it's just some weird off shot
Eli: No,I definitely think so. I even saw, there was a new version of the algorithm released, I think a few, days ago or maybe a week ago,
James: saw someone pointing out how much more weight they're giving to replies these days. They've just, no, they, I think they're doing it on purpose.
Eli: So let's go back to the, to the MVP that you were building. what is it about,
James: Yeah. isn't that a good question? Here's your chance to give a pitch. It's yeah. so yeah, no, so it is,I dunno if I can give you the straight up pitch. I'll give you the story first. the, basically,I, about 18 months ago, I think, or maybe it was even two years ago, like time flies. I joined this cohort course with, SE Hill who runs Gum Road and it was the minimalist entrepreneur.
James: he did this cohort course and he, on Twitter, he was like, Hey, does anyone wanna do this course with me? I'm like, and I was like, yeah. and I managed to get on this first cohort, so I was actually with the kind of boss of Gum road doing this. Cohort course for, I think it was for four weeks with a few other people.
James: And we were all doing this thing based around this notion of a minimalist entrepreneur. And and it was really cool. People were doing all sorts of different stuff on that course. and it was live, we did live sessions.
Eli: I just wanna interject that I did the second course,
James: Oh, did you?
James: of the same thing. Yeah, you did the, the winter, I think. hilarious. Oh, look
Eli: and I did the summer. Yeah. Yeah. And it was really profound for me as well. So
James: it was great. It was, I'm literally re rereading the book again actually. Yeah, no, it was great. And it was, a lot of stuff I got learned from there. But, and one of, I dunno how yours was structured, but one of the kind of things was like,what could you effectively make as a, as something and try and come up with a pre, a pre-order for the, for it.
James: What could you put together and try and see if you could sell before you even make it right? and there's all these questions about who is your community and what, what could you do for people to help them out? And and for whatever reason, the first thing that came to my mind was like, cuz I'd been a developer before and an engineer, and now I'm a designer, there's always this sense of des design is this mystical thing.
James: And I wanted to try and explain that it wasn't actually that crazy that you can actually apply, apply kind of logic to it. Like you were saying, first principles and all this other stuff. And, that was the idea of this course. That was, this was the course. So I just laid out, I laid out like an outline that I thought sounded cool, and, and then I went back
Eli: It's it's a design for developers kind of thing.
James: yeah, yeah, it was like a way of, again, this is my misty not really knowing what I'm doing. I got some, there's an idea somewhere there, but it's all fuzzy. But yeah, that's the point. in my mind I was like,
Eli: Many years ago, there was a book, this is at least 15 years ago, there's a book called The Non-Designer Design Book,
James: yeah, I think I remember that actually.
Eli: which, is the only design book I've ever read. And it's my only education in the space of design is that little book. But it was enough, spacing, making sure things align, making sure that when things are different they're really different and not just slightly different.
Eli: That looks like a mistake. Like when something is big, it needs to be big. When something is small, it needs to be small. And I really appreciated that because I really didn't need a lot to be able, to align things on a page or to make a website
James: this is it, right? This is it. And it's, So this one. My first idea was I was gonna mix a little bit of UI and UX into it and then I was thinking I was gonna do a UI one, then I was gonna think I was gonna do UX one. and the thing that keeps coming back to me was the UX side of design is even more slightly mysterious.
James: Cause you was just making ex examples there of UI principles. and the UX stuff is just even more I, I dunno, yeah, it's gotta be easy to use. yeah, of course it's
Eli: What does that mean even? Yeah.
James: yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of various things and I boil in my head, I boil down these kind of 20 things.
James: I was like, look, if you can have this in any app in the world, doesn't matter if it's mobile, if it's web, whatever. You have these principles and you're already halfway there to creating something that's the least usable and good and solid, that was the idea anyway, but,I managed to get some pre-sales and I, then I took a week off work and just spent like seven days just like making this course.
James: and, the thing is, I was looking around for platforms on what to, to how to do, present the information. And I looked at, podium and I looked at,teachable, and I looked at all these different things. and podium was the kind of closest thing I was thinking That was good because it wasn't overly complicated.
James: I didn't wanna do some crazy cohort course. I didn't wanna do, I didn't even really want any community around it. I didn't want any of this crazy stuff. I was just quite surprised how hard it was to just be able to put effectively a series of articles together with some imagery and package that up as a sort of a digital interactive thing that uses the web as a medium and.
James: Selling entry, a selling access to it in a way that looked nice, that looked was easy to do, where I had relative control over the layout, et cetera, et cetera. and I dunno, again, this goes back to the arrogant bastard thing. I dunno if it was cuz I'm arrogant bastard, I dunno, whatever. I ended up building my own static course, layout and everything and website and everything.
James: Cause I was just like getting so pissed off with the tools that were out
Eli: It's the combination of being an arrogant am bastard and having the skills to do it, to follow
James: yeah,
Eli: Like you have a natural tendency and then you have the skills to follow through. of course you're going to build your own thing.
James: yeah. yeah. And it's was, it was ridiculous, right? Because I set myself this seven days, but I spent half of that just building the website. and I focused less and less on the content. but anyway, I. I put it out on Twitter and anything, and I made a couple of grand out of it in three days.
James: and I sold it through Gum Road as like the payment thing, and then it was a link through into my thing and then, and I just couldn't believe that feeling of I literally, I was waking up and I'd made like an extra 600, $600 I think. I think I charged it in dollars, I can't remember.
James: And I was like, oh my God. I literally made money whilst I slept and
Eli: Yeah, money. You know when something like this happens, wait a second, I was told that money did not grow on trees, but here it is, growing on trees. there's
James: Yeah.
Eli: there's no correlation between your effort and the money you're making, right? You're working really hard and you're making nothing, and then you're not working at all and you're making a lot of money.
James: cra it's crazy, right? And but just a combination of that feeling, the combination of I'm not some super duper designer dude person, like I'm just somebody who has, I felt like I had something to say. Looking back on it, I would've done the course content in a completely different way.
James: It was all a bit fud, it was, didn't have a clear thing,whatever. But, I always had this thing in the back of my mind. I was like, and funnily enough, actually, just to say, funnily enough, the best feedback I got from the course wasn't, oh yeah, great content. It was actually, oh, what did you use to build the course in, right?
Eli: Oh, nice.
James: funny. You, funny you say that, right? Cause they were like, oh, it looks really clean and nice and, how funny you say that. So anyway, in the back of my mind, that was just in the back of my mind. And anyway, back in November last year, my mate, my really good friend who I met at Buffer, Dave, he reached out to me.
James: He was like, I really wanna build a product. if you could build any product, what would you build? And I was like, funny you say that. I just can't get this course creation thing outta my mind and I don't want it to be like podium. I don't want it to be like teachable. I don't want it to be like,the others.
James: I think there's something in the middle. It's a little more than an article that you would share and it's a little less than some elaborate community, member driven course. It's like it there, there's something there. And I think if we could add interactive elements to it and various other bits and really focus on it being a sh sort of a smaller course creation tool, I think something's really cool there.
James: It's a little more than an article, it's a little less than a book. It's something in the middle. and that's how this thing started. So this film that building's called Convey, and it's web first, there's no sort of notion of PDFs or downloads or anything like that. And yeah, the last little couple of months we've been just experimenting with what we think this thing is.
James: just sec,I just want to interject here, an observation. so the course that you built, which is the, design for developers or whatever, what, whatever it is you wanna call it, that thing had product market fit.
James: Yeah.
Eli: was accidental, right?
James: It
Eli: it rose out of your understanding of, I actually, I'm I have one, one foot and one,in one area.
Eli: Like I'm a designer and I'm a developer. I can bridge the gap. but it had product market fit. And we know this because it's sold well.
Eli: and I've had
Eli: at least six experiences where I built something, it had product market fit
James: I offered something and it had product market fit. And people were like, yeah, this is cool, and I'll pay you money for it. And then for one reason or another, I kept looking for something more fundamental or more generic, or more scalable or more whatever.
Eli: And in my own personal search for that fundamental, scalable, generic kind of thing, which I thought, if this has product market fit, the more generic, fundamental, bigger, wider, broader, more applicable thing will definitely have even more product market fit. But what I realized, painfully over and over again that's not necessarily true. It's often the case where a very specific narrow thing that you randomly landed on that has product market fit works, but even minor changes in pricing and how you talk about and what it is, and like, how generic it is, how broad it is, suddenly eh, nope, no one's interested. it's a completely different thing.
Eli: So I'm just,the reason I wanted to, to say this is I'm noticing, and I think it's something that engineers just typically do. We're just looking for the most generic, the most flexible, the most conceptually beautiful solution we can. And we keep looking for it even after we land on something that is actually successful from a business point of view.
Eli: So because we're used to thinking. As engineers, we're used to thinking in terms of solutions to problems, right? And we used to think, we used to think that, generic is better than specific, and abstract is better than concrete and reusable is better than one time. And all these things that are so ingrained in how software engineers think can work and, we've been talking about this and doing this for years, and then you do something really specific, really narrow, really niche.
Eli: It succeeds and naturally as an engineer, it's let's expand. And then you expand and it's, and you end up and you, and suddenly you're like, wait a second. So who's the audience for this? And then you start to rack your brain. It's and it doesn't work wide, the same cuz it's a completely, you end up in a completely different type of business.
Eli: So go
James: no, so really good point. so it, it is funny. So before,about, it must have been about four years ago, me and my friend Dave, we, when we work, worked a buffer, we also came up with another product idea, which was called method. And, that actually got to the, I think it got to like number three on product hunt, I think.
James: and it was a way of combining a calendar and your to-do list where you could actually block specific time off. Cause we were convinced that just having a to-do list wasn't enough. You had to actually assign some time to it. Now that's a, that's actually quite a common thing these days in apps, right?
James: Back then it actually wasn't. And when we showed it to people and we launched it on Product Hunt and stuff, and it took me months to like, get this coded this thing. Cause I was doing it outside of full-time job as well. we actually got some really good interest in it and people were asking how much it was and like, yeah, we even got an investor sniffing around it and stuff
Eli: Yeah, shut up and take my money
James: Yeah, no. And then, and then me and Dave were like, we've gotta market this thing. We've gotta market it. We've gotta get it. look at the interest. And we were like, are you interested in productivity? I was like, not really. I was, I've got no idea what to talk about. I dunno, what do you do?
James: Yeah, you put to tasks in and I, we completely told ourselves this bizarre story that we had no idea what to do or talk about whatever. And I
Eli: because market, because marketing is necessarily content and you have to write articles about this thing that you're building, which is actually the opposite because if you have a tool that people want to use, then you don't need, you need to figure out a way for people to recommend the tool to each other and maybe make some virality loops within it.
Eli: But you don't need to figure out how to do content marketing because maybe that's not the right way for this thing to
James: is though,it goes back to what you were saying about we just basically stumbled onto this bizarre, weird little niche little thing where you can, do, I mean it was pretty sophisticated. you, I coded all of this stuff. Like you could add your Google and your Google calendar and then it pulled it all in and then you could add all the to do, and it was, and that's quite a common thing in productivity apps now.
James: But back then it really wasn't. And and we'd started seeing success with it. And I think weirdly we'd just told ourselves this story or what we thought it was because we were quite comfortable in our jobs. We were having a bit of fun putting a product together and then suddenly I think we maybe got scared or I don't, I dunno what it was.
James: even to this day, we look back, we were like, oh, we had this super niche thing. How do we now make it bigger? And it was not like we actually made much money off of it. We just had a lot of initial interest and. I think it's what you are. I think it's what you were saying. Like we were like, oh, now, so okay, now we got this, what's the next stage?
James: What do we do? What's the next version? Like, how do we do? And it just lost all of this motivate. It just lost all of its like power somehow in, in us. And we were like, whoa. I dunno. Do you have to write articles about productivity? I dunno. should we just go back to our fulltime? Yeah, let's just go back to our full-time jobs.
James: Like it, it was bizarre. And then, and yeah. And then this course little course thing happened and, I saw some initial interest from that and then I didn't know what to do with it. A again ah, yeah. and so
Eli: and when you ask yourself, what should I do with it again as an engineer,I should build some sort of thing, right? That's the, if there's a question.
James: my thought, so I, my thought there was, I. I would like to go back and redo that course myself, like actually spend some proper time doing it. Cause I think it's a very interesting, topic to talk about in general beer, if I did it on podium or beer, if I did it on anything else. I think generally it's a course that I feel I should make because I feel like I could, I have a lot to say about it.
James: I think it's a really interesting thing. I think it would help a lot of people, be it no coders or indie hackers or engineers or anything else. it's just just the sunk about demystifying UX and just going, look, these are just, you can make usable apps. You can, I can't solve all your problems, but this at least put these in cause these are good.
James: I wanna do that. And so it got to a place where I was like, I really wanna make this product that helps me make those courses. So why don't I make the product that helps make the courses and then I can do the courses on top. But again, it's now I'm talking about this stuff. It's all very much like the engineering mindset of I've, I've refactored myself into a,I dunno what I've done.
James: But, but it, but I feel really excited about the conveying because the only thing that I'm struggling with is finding that niche. and,
Eli: you found, you f that, that, that's really cool because you found on two separate occasions you randomly stumbled on niches for things you did. That worked. And now you have a different situation where you basically have a solution looking for a problem or a product looking for a
James: A little bit. A little bit,
James: yeah.
Eli: because you have a sense that there's, or you needed a course platform, which was like you said, more than an article, but less than a full-blown course thing. Which kind of reminds me of, the original gum road idea. Which was, I want to put a link online and charge money, from people to be able to access that.
Eli: So it's it's a ified version of something that exists. And there is value to finding like an overserved type of customer. So people who would like to make a course, they'd look at Padia and they're like, oh, this is a lot of work and a lot more intense than I had in mind.
Eli: but obviously the question is where you find people like that.
James: Yeah. And that feeling that you just articulated there is that feeling. and I think me and my sort of co-founder, I, my friend Dave, was talking about this the other day. it, I believe now, like the reason why I didn't do the podium thing and the teachable thing and all that is for that very reason of it felt so heavy, it felt so fucking heavy.
James: And I was like, I don't want. To enter into this insane thing, like I all this responsibility. I wanna share what I want. I don't want it to be an art cause it's not a newsletter. That's not what I'm sharing. I'm not se sharing a new, that's a very different thing in my mind. I used to work for ghosts.
James: Like I, I've got a blog on ghost. it's a different mindset completely to what I'm thinking over here, which is it's a course that I want to wrap up in a bow and it's a entity, it's a thing, it's a web first thing that I can sell and you can have access to and you can enjoy and and it's a different thing and I, but I want it to be light and I want it to be easy and I want it to be quick and I want it to be easy to update.
James: I want it to be easy to, I want, I wanna take out any design decision, so it just looks great, it just looks great. You don't have to worry about any of that. Just worry about the content. That's all you have to worry about. And so that's the kind of thing, it's almost like the part-time creator or something, or it's for people who.
James: Courses aren't their soul bread and butter, but they want to put something out
Eli: so here's the thing. The, your incentive to build the course. Arose from you being on the Minimalist Entrepreneur course with, Sahi,
James: Yeah.
Eli: for which you paid quite a bit of money, if I remember correctly. That was not a cheap, of course,
James: I think I got quite lucky. Remind the first one. I think the second one was a bit more expensive, but yeah, I think it was about seven. mine was about a thousand dollars, I think.
Eli: It's still it's, it's not a hundred bucks. It's like it requires a certain commitment. I'm just describing the experience to see where we can find more people like that. This is a situation where you've already committed time and money
James: into a course that, gently nudged you to think about creating a course of your own,
James: Yeah.
Eli: right.
Eli: So you were not, you were not randomly thinking or. just having this idea of a course, you were within a structure, a fairly committed structure that now that you have ide an idea of a course you're actually accountable to, to do something with it. it was more than an idea. and as an example of how committed you were, you took a week off from work to do that.
James: Yes.
Eli: That's like a sig, like this is not,an evening a week for a couple of hours type of thing. You actually dove in, seriously.
James: hour days as well.
Eli: Yeah. I was like, it was a serious commitment. so here we have this, potential client of yours or potential customers, customer of yours, who is at the same time deeply committed to creating a course.
James: While at the same time feeling offput by the complexity of teachable and podium. now you also said that about half of that week was for you to build the platform for the course
James: Yeah.
Eli: and not the course itself. So the particular kind of person, if we're like, where are more jameses like that, like more jameses like that are as likely to build a platform of their own as they are to use something that is simpler than padia.
Eli: And that's the problem of, that's a common problem with scratching our own itch
James: Yeah, I know what you're saying. Yeah.
Eli: we scratch our own itch. A, because we have something itchy. But B, because we really like to scratch itches. And when we're, and when we're trying to figure out where can we find more people like us because we thought this need needs to exist, right?
Eli: and when we are thinking about, where can I find more people like me? The answer is often, people like me prefer to build things themselves. And there is a cool story about this cuz the app that got me into this cycle of entrepreneurship was this stress relief app I wrote, for myself, I found this technique and I really enjoyed it.
Eli: And I'm like, this needs to be an app. I built an app and it really helped me regulate my emotions and it really helped me. It's It was like faster and more effective than meditation. And I was really excited about it. And at one point I posted, on Hacker News. I wrote an app that cured my depression.
Eli: And there were lots of comments that there's,it was on the front page for a while, but, there was one comment that really stuck with me. Someone says, oh, so I get it. So in order to heal from depression, you need to write your own app that heals you from depression, right? I was like, I was like, no, this is not true.
Eli: This is like an awesome technique and an awesome idea that, how can you say this? I didn't write that comment, but that was my internal reaction. Like, how can you, this is so unpleasant to hear, but three years later I'm like, yeah, that's, I am the kind of person who is much more likely to build an app to cure my own depression than to use someone else's proven app to cure my depression.
Eli: That's just, that's just what an engineer, what being an engineer is, right? the not invented here principle. so sometimes the customers we're looking for are just like us.
James: And I think in your case, that's not where you'll find them No.
Eli: because the people who are just like you are just as likely to build a static website from scratch and spend 60, 60% of their time on building the platform and then 40% on building the content.
Eli: Because building things is just so exciting, and invigorating.
James: I dunno if, so we, for the last couple of months, it started off as a very simple idea of just making it, let's at least start with the idea of it being very easy and very fast to get your content in, play with it, edit it, do all this stuff. So we spent quite a lot of time on the editor and stuff, and then you can publish and update it very quickly.
James: And that was very inspired by the ghost kind of feeling of, it's very quick and easy to get your article there, publish it and like as well, right? and. taking all of that kind of newslettery feeling and applying it to a course. And that was in my head, was like, that's a nice thing.
James: I th there's all the tools I'm using are not really, and I'm very conscious of the fact that I'm now entering into this stage of trying, I've got this pro product and I'm trying to find solution. there's trying to find the problem for it. but also I can't get it outta my head.
Eli: And it's there's, okay, there's something here. I can s I can smell it. Oh, there
James: but
Eli: It's just need,it's just needs,we say a solution looking for a problem, and it's a bit of a derogatory term. It like means, you went off and built something. But I think that a better way to frame it as a is a solution seeking a problem. we're not hoping for a problem to find us.
Eli: No. There is an actual process we can follow
James: to, to find the right problem, to find the right niche. It's not, it's like there, there are a few steps to go through. It's not like you sit with your product and you keep adding features and you hope that the problem will find you, that's probably not going to work.
Eli: but you can take your, you can take your solution and you can break it apart into what it does, which is basically the features.
James: then you can look at every one of these features and look at,what kind of benefit does this feature provide? So you have this, you have the quick ability to edit.
Eli: You have the stellar, beautiful design that you know, don't need to tinker with. you also have the limitation that the design is probably not, Not flexible, you're not designing it yourself. The benefit is that you don't need to design the limitation is likely that you don't have a lot of control over the design, so that fits a certain type of people.
Eli: So you take those features,you figure out the benefits and limitations of every feature. None of that is good or bad in its own right. Just to have a sense. And then you look at these, and that's where kind of the magic happens. how do you combine these benefits? And what kind of person would this fit?
Eli: Like what kind of person would, for example, appreciate the ease of use of Ghost or ck
James: right? and the mindset of publishing a newsletter, but would also like to publish a course possibly based on the content they already published in the newsletter,
James: Yes.
Eli: which kind of works in the same way and feels the same way.
Eli: And feels familiar and feels comfortable and is nicely designed, and then they can offer that course to their newsletter audience. And then when you think about this way, it's interesting. Maybe the message here is not build a course, maybe a message here is turn your newsletter into a course.
James: very good point. It's a very good point. one of the, one of the things, part of the reason why, another reason why I didn't like the tools that were out there, and it's not true for all of them. A lot of 'em are very much video based, right? So the video on your thing. and I've done courses like that and some of them are very effective and some of them are not.
James: Now there are certain things that you can learn through, video-based courses that are just perfect for that. I would never change it. But there's other things where actually text-based, structured textual learning where you've actually got images to go through and various bits at various stages.
James: You've actual sections and reference points and all this other stuff. There's other course content that actually, that makes much more sense and. Again, a big part of what I'm building has got actually nothing to do with video whatsoever. It's all based around text and imagery. And even actually, again, this is not MVP stuff, but in my mind in the future, it's like, we're not basing this around email.
James: so it doesn't need to work in an any email inbox. it feels like you're putting together a newsletter, but we are not constrained by that. So what if not only being able to include imagery, but what if it's like interactive elements that you could put in there? if somebody's doing a course around code, like actually there's some really interesting things we can do with that.
James: We're not constrained by having the landing in an inbox somewhere, et cetera, et cetera. So using the web as a basis, like it's got nothing to do with PDF downloads or, stuff like this is like using the web. It's re easily readable, mobile, all the, all this stuff. So anyway. Yeah. going back to what you're saying, it makes a lot of sense what you are saying because.
James: It was all very much inspired by that idea of newsletter type things. it's more than that, but it's not YouTube. go on YouTube if you wanna go and look at videos. It's not that either. there's a whole, I know that there's a whole group of people who enjoyed learning in that fashion, in that text-based, web-based
Eli: And there is a whole group of people who enjoy presenting their knowledge in text,
James: Yes. Cause I'm a fumbling Englishman. I've bought a nice camera. I sat in front of the camera. I tried to talk like I, I can't do it in front of a camera. But if I sit down and I've got a blank, word document in front of me, I can construct my thoughts and I can take some time and it can sound half coherent, right?
James: I enjoy it is harder, but I enjoy doing that than just sitting there in front of a camera and stuff. again, that it takes the, this convey product down to another niche because it's we don't, you might be able to upload bits of video maybe, but it's not based
Eli: It'sit's not a video course.
James: many more.
Eli: It's, and so when you're talking about this, you are talking about the experience of learning, right? But you're, the product market fit you're looking for, is primarily for people who want to teach that way, right? People who want to learn that way, that's like a one step removed, but your clients, your customers are going to be people who want to teach that way.
Eli: And I think the point I want to make here is that people who want to teach that way are people who are already teaching that way.
James: those are people with blogs, those are people with new newsletters. those are possibly people on Twitter that post
Eli: kind of educational Who tweet?
Eli: Yeah. who tweet.
Eli: But who, whose intention is to teach. not everybody's intention is to teach, but there are people whose intention is to teach to put out content that teaches people. But thing is, everybody in this space struggles with monetization. Like people write news. so here's the basic idea.
Eli: People write a newsletter and even if it's popular, how do you monetize it while you put links, right? You put affiliate links. that's the way to monetize it. but some people may feel uncomfortable about it. Some people may not be able, and this is these are conversations you'll need to have, but some people may not be able to make enough from it.
Eli: And there is a bit of a, there is a bit of an icky feeling to that. It's like you're selling your audience basically. If you're doing that, you're not offering a product for a good price that people will buy and they say thank you. You're shoving things down their throats, even if it's really relevant.
Eli: And even if it's, products that you really enjoy yourself, it's still advertisement and not everybody enjoys that kind of thing. so when I'm looking at this, I'm like,you're thinking about features and the thing, the things you could build and the things you will build and all of that.
Eli: It can be more than video. sorry, it could be more than email. It could have interactive elements. You have all these features and ideas and and my re reaction to this, listen, dude, you need to talk to 20 people who are publishing newsletters and find five of them who want to build a course.
Eli: that's like job one.
James: No, so we spoke to, we've spoke to people right? and Sue, I dunno if you've been, of course I'm not expecting anyone to be following my tweets at all, but it was just, it was, we, I went, we went, we, this is exactly what happened. Like I had this idea, then we started building this thing and then it was like, oh, what if it was this?
James: And what if it was that? And we, at one point it was like this LinkedIn bio thing, which had all this, it was crazy, right? And then literally about, literally about two or three weeks ago, me and Dave were just like, what the hell are we doing? he actually said to me like, what are we doing here?
James: I was, I dunno, we just cut out loads of stuff. Like we just stripped it right back to the whole original point of this is a text-based, easy to publish, super fast, super nice text-based, blah, blah, blah. but part of this process and over, over the course of the last couple of months, we have been talking to people, but we, at first we thought it was gonna be for marketing teams, maybe marketing teams, cuz they'd like guides, right?
James: They put out guides. So maybe it's for marketing teams who are doing guides,and they put out these PDFs, it's yeah, but this is better than a pdf. Cuz it's, you can, PDFs are shit to read. didn't read PDFs on mobile. Horrible. I put out something this not in no nothing, right?
James: This just didn't make any sense to those people. And then we talked to freelance writers. Why did we speak to, we spoke to freelance writers because we thought, oh, they write, right? So they write. So maybe they wanna put something nice together for their clients or saying, that's what we thought about that.
James: Maybe it's gonna be some sort of document maker thing, or, and then I spent ages on Instagram collecting all of these things together where people were putting, free guides out. So they were just individual people, agency people or SEO writers, whether, and they were putting out these small guides, and I was like, wow, maybe they're good people because, but none of these people were, it was just, wasn't resonating.
James: Nobody really cared. nobody, like they would, I just used PDFs for that. Like, why do I care? it's ugh. I don't know. so that's why we went back to this thing of why was I scratching my itch? Why was it so itchy for me? and now you are saying it's about newsletters that makes so much sense.
James: and in a way it's what it kind of avoids was meant to be about because I was at the time,working for like a newsletter making company and I was
Eli: which whichinformed your way of thinking and kind of
James: yeah,yeah,
Eli: to this. It's it's like a newsletter. It's like newsletter content, but it's a little more, it's a little more structured.
James: Yeah.
Eli: It's a little more, like there's in, of course there's pacing, there's exercises, there's
James: There's a beginning, middle, and end to it. I think that's the thing, like a blog, a newsletter blog, and I love newsletter blogs. don't get me wrong. And I'm built, I'm right. I'm doing one myself. and you are doing one is, but there are, there is no beginning, middle, and end.
James: The articles have beginning, middle, and ends, but there isn't a sense of it's just, and there is something really cool about that dedicated destination. It's look, this is a topic. Come here for this topic. enjoy the content at your leisure. here it is, there's just something so nice about that.
Eli: and it's a fair trade. It's okay, here's how much I'm offering for it. And you get to have it, it's okay. this is a thing. yeah, I just, I like that. I like it. I like that thing. It's, I haven't been able to get it outta my head, but I, Yeah. the other, thing that, I think you could explore. Do you know who, Kevan is? Kevan Chung? He has. Okay. he's fairly popular in the kind of indie hacker space. He has a course he just released that is called the email course engine, I think. And his, actually, I had just bought a copy,a week ago.
Eli: what he teaches is how to build an email-based course that you would give out to your audience, and it would be a free course. It's he's this is the best lead magnet you may have. And he has a course that teaches you how to build an email course, a short one, like a seven day email sequence with, actions and tasks and a bunch of things and a bit of virality built in.
Eli: And he is, Promoting this approach where if you have a good email course, then that people share with, their friends, then you can create an engine of growth for your audience.
James: yeah, I'll post a link to his course,in the
James: Yes, please. Yeah,
Eli: for you and for anybody else.
Eli: but I think at least he's a really nice guy too. I think a conversation with him would be useful because these are parallel efforts, what you're doing and what he's doing. those are parallel efforts. I don't, I haven't gotten too far into the course. I don't know what kind of tech he's using for that, but it's possible that he noticed some of the same things that you noticed.
James: the interesting thing is that his, the way he's. What he's teaching to do is how to create a text-based course,
James: Interesting.
Eli: course, it's a text-based course that it gets delivered to your email every day. But maybe there is some crossover between the email delivery and having, like you said, a web first space for the course.
Eli: there may be I don't know, right? There's, but there's something there. there's some crossover there. I think it, it might be interesting to explore. but again, just from here, you talk, from hearing you talk about this, the idea of, turning you a newsletter into a course or offer a course to your readers or something along these lines feels like a very nice fit.
Eli: And if you have, if it's like there's a rule of thumb that I use. If you talk to 10 people of the same kind.
James: you tell, you talk to 10, people with newsletters and say, newsletters that have like over 50 issues, like they've been doing this for a while. You talk to 10 people and you ask them about their modernization challenges.
Eli: You ask them about info products, you ask them about them. You don't talk about what you're building. You ask them about their experience with newsletters and you use your experience working for ghosts. Knowing so much about how newsletters work and what kind of features exist, like the whole thing you talk with about this, you will find a problem that needs solving. It might not be exactly the problem that you want to solve. It might be adjacent, but you will.
James: the weirdest thing about all of this, I've read some tweets about this. The, I can't remember who posted it. It's like I'm a product designer, right? And like for the last eight years I've worked with product design, I've had, especially in SoundCloud, we used to have dedicated UX researchers who actually set up entire studios where we had user testers coming in and all this sort of stuff.
James: We had
James: access to people like all this stuff. ever since, most of my career over the last 10 years, the idea of user testing, asking questions, doing interviews, standard stuff, right? Let's be honest, right? But when it comes to building your own product, I dunno why all of this fly, all this flies out the window and it is completely bizarre
Eli: the syndrome.
James: Exactly. I dunno if this just comes back. It's no, I know this, I know. There's something here. I don't need to talk to anyone about this. It's bizarre. It's totally bizarre. what everything you say makes total sense. And I think it's, I think what, so my, my, my friend Dave calls it like, we are in the fog at the moment.
James: We need to clear the fog, right? We need to cl we're wandering around like it was all, so it was a nice sunny day and now everything's just, we need to f it is good. It's, it is a good analogy cause we need to lift the fog from this and realize the direction was actually north. And I know we are in the general area. let's keep the hiking thing going. We know we're in the right kind of national park, like we know, but we've lost north. We dunno where north is. The fog's descended. And, we need to do, we need to do what we can to get that cleared. And I know what you are saying.
James: And is what Dave was saying, we need to talk to the people, and we have been talking to people, but we've been talking to the wrong people, and so it's only made the fog denser for us. We're like,
Eli: because everybody, everyone you talk to has their own ideas, maybe their own feature requests, and they pull you in different directions, which is when interviewing people, when having conversations with people. These conversations are only useful if you've pre-selected these people to be of a certain type and having at least a certain hypothesis of a problem.
Eli: Because if you talk to different people, a bunch of different people who may want what you have, then you just get pulled in a million directions and you never
James: and that's what happened. Yeah. And that's what happened. And it is, maybe that's a topic for another day. Really. it's a fascinating thing, the pros and cons of scratching your own itch. it's, it does, it starts off so clear and then,
Eli: it's clear when you, it's just you and the id, right?
James: yeah.
James: once you meet the real world, it's wait, what? What's going on here? I was having
Eli: why doesn't everybody,
James: building the bass.
Eli: Exactly, why isn't everybody like so hyped, hype, hyped up about this as I was like, why is it not just clicking?
Eli: And we, there are so many stories where. It seems like someone scratched their itch and then went out to the market and it immediately took off and it just worked. And the problem is we only hear about the stories where it worked. We never hear about the stories where it didn't, which are probably a thousand times more prevalent than the ones where it did work.
James: Yep. I think that's become very obvious and I think that's why we made some drastic changes to just strip back everything. And I'm excited to get it to a place where I can at least just talk about it and actually have a link to it and people can play with it and whatever. But that doesn't, that isn't gonna stop me from,I want to get to a place where I've not done any more than was necessary.
James: it's a, I wanna start talking to people and I don't wanna hold off any longer, of, to not talk about it in some sort of form as well. and so I want to kind of balance that a little bit where I'm not just going off for another three months. Again, not actually having anyone playing with it at all, just that seems really bad.
James: and stripping it back I think was the best idea. That's really helped clear the fog a little bit. and you talking about the newsletter thing? Yeah. That's really interesting. It makes a ton of sense. And may even be what was in my head originally. Yeah. Wasn't clear at the time. cuz it makes a lot of sense now when you talk about it like that.
James: I'm like, huh, why didn't I think about that? so yeah, it feels, that feels good. feels really good.
Eli: the last bit of advice I can give you here is just stop building. Just don't touch the code for a little while.
James: Ah, yeah. Okay. I've removed a lot of stuff, which was
Eli: No, not even. Not even that. Not even that. Because the point right now is not to show people what you've built to get feedback. The point is to talk to people to understand their point of view on this.
James: mm
James: you don't talk about courses, you don't talk about any of that. You don't talk about what you've built.
Eli: It's hard to not talk about these things. But as you said, you have the experience of interviewing people properly
James: Yeah. No, of course.
Eli: Right, and you don't, and you don't talk about these things because you want to understand the person you are talking to in
James: Mm.
Eli: Like my rule of thumb is like you listen for half an hour, at the very least before you mention anything about your product, and by the time you get to a point you mention anything about your product or what you're even trying to resolve,
James: you frame that in a way that matches what they've been talking about.
James: Yeah.
Eli: And then it still may not land well, but at least it's a real attempt.
Eli: Thank you for listening. If you want to be a guest on the show and talk through the problems you're facing with your business, you can send me a message on Twitter. At finer Ellie, my DMS are always open. And if you need something a bit deeper than a single conversation on the show. I do one-on-one consulting and we can talk about this too. See you next time.