Scaling an Airtable extension to $10k MRR: Andy Cloke (Data Fetcher)

In this episode, Ramen Club founder, Charlie Ward, has a conversation with long time member, Andy Cloke. They discuss Andy’s unconventional journey to becoming a software engineer, how he discovered indie hacking and how he’s grown not one, but two, successful bootstrapped projects.

His current product, Data Fetcher, is a tool that allows you to bring in data from hundreds of apps into Airtable automatically. Since starting it in 2020, he’s grown it to $10k MRR.

The Ramen Club Podcast brings you in-depth conversations with bootstrapped entrepreneurs building profitable internet businesses. Including both members and friends of the Ramen Club community. Ramen Club is building the community, content and tools supporting founders to ramen profitability, and beyond.

What is The Ramen Club Podcast 🍜?

In-depth conversations with bootstrapped entrepreneurs building profitable internet businesses. Including both members and friends of the Ramen Club community. Ramen Club is building the community, content and tools supporting founders to ramen profitable, and beyond.

Charlie: 00:01

Welcome back to the Ramen Club podcast where we discuss stories, tactics, and actionable insights that will help you take your bootstrap startup to Ramen profitable and beyond. Today, we have a very special guest, a longtime member and friend of the Ryman Club community, Andy Cloak. Andy is the founder of DataFetcher, an Airtable plugin letting you connect Airtable to any application or API with no code. On today's episode, you'll learn how Andy Butra passed 10 k MRR, his framework for discovering profitable SaaS ideas, how he came up with his Raman profitable goal, and much more. I was very excited about this conversation, and it more than lived up to my expectations.

Charlie: 00:42

So without further ado, let's get into this one. Hello, Andy. How are you doing, mate?

Andy: 00:47

Yeah. Good. Great to be here.

Charlie: 00:49

I think we've done one, two of the interviews before over the years as as you've hit kind of certain milestones, but I think it's nice to to hit, like, the kind of quintessential Indie Hacker milestone about saying, hey. And kind of check-in with you and see how things have been going. Yeah.

Andy: 01:03

It's Rahul Tel's been a huge part of it, and we came before that with, like, my last project on this one. Yeah. It's been it's been a massive part of it.

Charlie: 01:10

Yeah. Well, it's been great having you in the community from day one. So, you know, everything's definitely mutual. And, you know, there's with these podcasts, like, you kind of sometimes you do go over, like, you know, questions that you may have asked answered in the past before or a lot recently. But I do think for a lot of people, sometimes the simple questions are very valuable.

Charlie: 01:28

So I think just for those who are not too used to you, Andy, and your story and DataFetcher, Why don't you describe a bit more about what DataFetcher does and who it's for? So DataFetcher

Andy: 01:39

is an Airtable extension. For anyone that's not familiar with Airtable, it's very similar to Google Sheets. For some use cases, it's it's it's a lot more easy to use. And so a lot of kind of small businesses will use it to to manage their operations. And, yeah, they'd purchase it on their marketplace.

Andy: 01:54

So they've got a marketplace similar to Shopify or or, you know, HubSpot or whatever do. So it's an extension on the marketplace, and what it does specifically is it lets you import data from other places. So if you wanna put in metrics, Google Analytics, prices from finance API, any sort of third party, it lets you do that. And so it's quite similar to a tool like Zapier or what was Integromat is now make.com. But for certain use cases, it's kind of a lot easier to use DevFetcher specifically because it's kinda sits within Airtable.

Andy: 02:22

So you're not changing tabs. It can do certain things at Zapier and other tools can't. And so I it's kind of a competitor to Zapier's Airtable integration rather than, like, the whole of Zapier, right, which is how I've managed to kind of carve out a little niche for it as sort of one person team.

Charlie: 02:35

I guess with API type tools like this, there's just, like, you know, creating, like, a customer persona must almost become difficult because, like, there's so many ways that people could use it or, like, different types of companies and that kind of thing. But, like, are there any kind of typical just commonalities between your customers or just, like, ways you think of different types of personas?

Andy: 02:56

There's a few different kind of major, like, use cases I see over and over, and then kind of and, like, often that's they're using the same API. Right? So it'd be marketers connecting to Google Analytics, connecting to Facebook ads, trying to pull their metrics, or it'll be agencies doing that on behalf of their clients. So that marketing agencies wanna pull everything in to Airtable and then create, like, reporting in it that they then show to the to the clients. So that's kind of a massive one.

Andy: 03:18

And then, like, another big one is, like, finance and, like, crypto and exchange rates and stuff like that. So people kind of managing their personal portfolio or, like, yeah, their kind of their company stuff through Airtable. So those are two of the the really big just, like, common use cases. But then I see kind of types of personas. And what this often is is, like, someone's using a legacy system.

Andy: 03:37

For example, like, if they run, like, a suite of, like, yoga studios, they've got to use Mind Body online because that's like everyone uses to do their their bookings and their class management and stuff. But they're using that, but they don't actually like it very much. So they're stuck with it. They can't change all their booking processes, but they wanna get their data out of that legacy system into Airtable because Airtable is very nice to use. And so they use DataFetcher to basically just import everything every fifteen minutes.

Andy: 04:01

Everything is pulled in from their legacy system into into Airtable where they can build automations. They can create, like, client portals, whatever they need to do. And so I've got a few people. So there's one using, like, a Chalet CRM, one using your Mindbody online, and, like, there's all sorts of different CRMs and kind of old systems like that that they're kind of piping the data into into Airtable. So I'm starting to see, yeah, a few use cases that come up again and again.

Andy: 04:22

But, yeah, as you say, it's it's super broad. And so in some ways, that's great because it means I'll never run out of, like, content topics or kind of integrations to build, but it does make targeting those people, like, quite a lot harder. Right? So the one thing they've all got in common is is the air table users. And so I think staying in the niche of air table is is gonna be the path forward with all the platform risk and and kind of other nuances that that come with that.

Charlie: 04:46

Yeah. I I definitely wanna touch on that a little bit later. And just on the different types of API based use cases, like, you ever have you seen any kind of that you can talk about, any particularly, like, weird or funny or just, like, memorable sort of things that people have been using it for?

Andy: 05:00

Oh, yeah. Definitely. Yeah. Probably the strangest one that I well, like, when I

Charlie: 05:04

was most surprised paid for data.

Andy: 05:05

That sorry. Paid for data fetcher. So there's a sewing social network, right, where people swap sewing patterns. It's called Ravelry. It's been going for, like, ten years.

Andy: 05:13

It's it's kind of it's got Wikipedia page and stuff. Someone's connecting to their API and importing sewing patterns on a schedule to Airtable, and they're like a paid user. We just went to someone else. They're like a like a OnlyFans person or like a streamer. They're pulling in their, like, metrics from, like, one of these, like, adult streaming sites.

Andy: 05:29

Yeah. There's there's so many so many niche ones.

Charlie: 05:31

There's, there's, you know, there's lots of, like, tactical stuff I wanna ask you about. But before we get to that, I just wanna ask a little bit more about you, just a bit about your journey to get to this point. You know, you've gone from zero to 10 k MRRs. It's quite a feat, but, like, before that so I I do I understand that you didn't study software engineering at university. Right?

Charlie: 05:50

You studied was it mechanical engineering?

Andy: 05:53

It was kinda everything. So Yeah. You know, went to did you just studied, like, general engineering, and the idea was first year, you kind of see a bit of everything, then you slowly specialize. You graduated as a civil engineer or mechanical engineer or whatever. I realized within the first year that I didn't particularly like any kind of engineering.

Andy: 06:08

And so managed to change course to engineering, economics, and management, which is great because it was a bit broader. Studied a load of, like, macroeconomics and quite interesting stuff like that. But, yeah, graduated with, like, a hodgepodge of different engineering modules and some econ and management stuff. Yeah. And then after that, kind of had this feeling in my gut.

Andy: 06:24

I'd always, like, messed about with building little websites and stuff, but not really taking it that seriously. Like, I'd done a couple for, like, mates or I'd messed about with WordPress and built, like, my mom a site for her business and, like, little things like that. And I kinda always knew, like, I'm probably gonna end up doing that, but I never really, like, sat down and learned to code properly. And so, yeah, I graduated, messed about a bit. I went to went traveling and stuff, and then realized I kinda needed to get a career at some point.

Andy: 06:50

So, like, basically moved home and just learned to code for three or four months, and that was kind of, yeah, how I how I kinda made the switch. And then, yeah, got a job as a software developer for two of my friends from uni. They're a startup. So, yeah, had a bit of an in there and just learned loads of the senior engineer there. So Yeah.

Andy: 07:06

Yeah. That React and TypeScript and, yeah, kind of front end stuff. And then, yeah, started freelancing. So that was, like, the next step after that and then kind of freelance for a bunch of different startups. So, yeah, that was kind of a path from engineering to coding.

Charlie: 07:19

And where did entrepreneurship come into it? Is that something that kind of you said your mom has a business. Is that something that sort of ran in the family you've always wanted to do? Were you like a kid of a lemonade stand or just sort of naturally evolve a bit later?

Andy: 07:31

Yeah. It was definitely that desire to have my own thing was always there. I mean, just really unsuccessfully for for loads of years. So, like, yeah, I was definitely the kid that were like I was like buying chewing gum, taking it to school, and then, like, selling it. And then, like, I was buying Lego in bulk.

Andy: 07:46

So I was buying, like, 10 kilos of Lego at a time on eBay, splitting it up into, like, small packets and then reselling on eBay and just basically doing, like, arbitrage like that. So it was always like I've always had little hustles, and very few of them made any money. They're like, oh, think I spent a whole summer on it and made, like, four, five hundred quid, which sounds great. And then I worked out the hourly rate. It's, like, £2.50.

Andy: 08:05

So, yeah, there was always there was always a lot of things I wanted to do. And then I think that was part of the reason for switching from engineering to coding was, like, with coding, you you can literally launch your own thing as a as a one person team. Like, to do that on engineering, basically impossible. I mean, it's really, really difficult unless, you know, you know, you need capital. You probably need a team.

Andy: 08:21

It takes a lot longer to be senior and to, like, be a consultant and get those high day rates and stuff, which give you the freedom to to own your own time a bit more. So, yeah, that was part of the reason for for switching. But, yeah, my mom has a she's self employed rather than, like, a huge business, but she's self employed. My brother has a little business. He's tree surgeon.

Andy: 08:38

So, yeah, there's definitely, I think, something in the in the family as well. So, yeah, that was kind of that was always there, that that desire. And then once I was working as a freelance developer, was doing stuff on weekends. So, yeah, as I was doing, like, launching little little projects and trying to trying to get something off the ground.

Charlie: 08:53

Yeah. As I understand, and correct me if I'm wrong, your your your first kind of major success with data fetcher was was a site called Influence Grid, which lets people search for TikTok influencers for campaigns and that sort of thing. And something other things particularly interesting is the sort of framework that you use to discover that idea and also to discover data fetcher. Do you wanna talk a little bit about, like, how you how you use that to find, like, that framework to find low competition ideas?

Andy: 09:19

Yeah. Sure. So, yeah, both data fetcher and influence code kind of followed a very similar pattern. And, essentially, the the framework is is looking at, like, a new platform that's that's taken off, and there's a really good site to do this, which is called exploding topics. And, yeah, looking at that, and then what it does is it basically services like Google search volume, Google Trends, and just crazy platforms like ideas.

Andy: 09:40

Just keywords. Right? But, like, a lot of them are businesses or platforms or whatever that are taken off. And so in the case of Influence Grade, that was TikTok. For data fetchers, Airtable.

Andy: 09:48

And looking at, like, a a similar platform that but that's more mature. Right? So for Airtable, that's just Google Sheets. For Influence Grade, it was Instagram. And basically saying, okay.

Andy: 09:58

So what exists on those on those more mature platforms that I could build? What's the equivalent tool I could build for the new platform? And, essentially, just just building an equivalent tool as quickly as possible and then relying on the fact that on this new platform, it's most likely gonna be a need for the same tool for for this thing and then building it. And, yeah, it seems to have worked quite well. It's think it's quite good in Yakkas because it's like you're you're tying yourself to one platform, but it kinda makes it way more manageable.

Andy: 10:25

And if you're willing to live with a platform risk of doing that, then you can often, like, find a little a little niche. So another example would be, like, Notion Forms by Julian, who's, yeah, a huge success where basically, notice that on Airtable, if you've got, like, table of data, they give you just by, like, a a default feature on Airtable. You can just create a form off that table, and it'll have all the fields that correspond to all the fields in your in your Airtable. And he thought, why wouldn't people on Notion need this? Like, this should exist for Notion.

Andy: 10:52

Notion just launched an API, so there's that element of, like, fortunate timing as well. And he basically built the equivalent tool for Notion forms, and he's at, like, 13 k MRI or something. So, like, I think that that framework can work really well. And I think the other nice thing beyond just, like, finding product ideas is it helps you with the marketing as well. Because you look at what marketing did that original tool do, and I can just do that same thing for the new a new platform.

Andy: 11:13

So for for my last project, I looked at what keywords all these Instagram platforms were tagged in, placed Instagram with TikTok in in a keyword, and then just built all these landing pages. And the keyword volume was zero. Right? But I could tell it was about to to go up. And so you're kind of you get some of the first landing pages and the first, like, results, and then slowly it just, like, ticks.

Andy: 11:32

So, yeah, I don't think it's a great framework if you wanna raise funding or go for, like, a massive, massive, sector or whatever. But I think for for kind of bootstrapper, indeed, top businesses, it can work well.

Charlie: 11:42

Yeah. I think it's a great framework, by the way. It makes several sense. Are there any other platforms that are taking up or have been taken up you think perhaps are worth looking at besides Airtable and TikTok, obviously?

Andy: 11:54

Yeah. I think Notion. I'm desperate to come up with some sort of, like, Notion idea because it just seems like the energy around, like, the Notion community and the stuff on, like, Twitter is just huge. Now that they've just launched an API, there there must be kind of ideas out there. But, yeah, I feel like Notion's the one that I'd be most looking at the moment.

Andy: 12:13

It's a bit of an obvious one, but, yeah, that's probably where I'd be looking.

Charlie: 12:16

Yeah. I've seen some cool stuff. I've seen, a product called Feather recently, which is like blogging on Notion. And, obviously, that's super as well for making websites, but there must be tons of other things you can use on that, actually. If people like spending all day in Notion and not having to leave it and doing more and more activity there, it kind of I think that makes sense.

Charlie: 12:32

I mean, even super, right,

Andy: 12:34

there's Potion as well, which is just another version of what is basically super. It's just like another website builder of Notion. And then there's, I think, Helpkit, think it's called, which is basically, like, within that niche of turning Notion into a website, turning it into a help center. So, yeah, you could probably even fragment, like, existing tools into kind of specific niches. Because the growth of that underlying platform is just so massive that, yeah, you can turn it to a load of different use cases.

Charlie: 12:57

And, yeah, with that same framework we've discussing, so you eventually sold Influence Grid for was it 55 k? Which is a great outcome. And you were kind of thinking about your next one. What was the story of how you use that framework thing come across today's fetcher? Because it sounds like there were some other experiences you had which kind of all combined to to lead you to it.

Andy: 13:16

Yeah. So I was basically just sort of stumbling around trying to find the next idea. And so what that involved was, yeah, looking on exploding topics, looking at product turn, looking at, like, products forums, so, like, Notions forums or tables forums, whatever, trying to find, like, little little pain points so I could kinda fill. And there was also a news that's massive, like, 2020. So I thought maybe I can do some sort of programmatic newsletter where I don't actually need to write all the content.

Andy: 13:41

I can just kind of, yeah, have the content, have a bit of manual creation, but then it basically is just surfacing, like, numbers. And so the idea I kind of settled on was IPO alerts. So looking at upcoming IPOs and alerting, like, retail investors to the IPOs in the same way that, like, institutional investors might get. And, yeah, I wanted to manage all the content from Airtable. I'd seen that Airtable was, like, becoming really, really popular, and I thought just as a kind of little test, maybe I could could pipe all this data into Airtable and then use that to create a newsletter.

Andy: 14:12

And I wanted to do, a follow-up. So, like, here's last week's IPOs. This is the starting price that they went on to market as. Here's the price now. Has it gone down or whatever?

Andy: 14:20

And I couldn't find a nice way to just pull their stock prices in. There are a couple of tools, but they all seemed a bit, like, janky and a bit or a bit expensive or too hard, like, too intense to, like, set up the stuff yourself. So I just pulled the prices in manually because it wasn't worth the the effort trying the tools. So, yeah, I launched that, waited about a week, realized there was a much better IPO newsletter out there and kind of yeah. It was gonna take a lot to, like, anyway hear that.

Andy: 14:44

And then a couple weeks later was, yeah, doing the daily product on, like, draw and saw there's a tool called API connector, and that was data fetcher for Google Sheets, basically. So I wanted to connect to APIs, and that was the the light bulb moment, I guess, where I was like, okay. So that problem I had two weeks ago with Airtable trying to get stock prices in, This would solve that for Sheets. Why don't I build this for it? And, yeah, the nice thing is API connector have now copied features from DataFacture back into to their tool.

Andy: 15:12

So we have, like, a really good relation relationship. And, yeah, it didn't just completely clone out. I kind of looked at, like, why that worked, but then worked, like, kinda looks also at, like, how is Airtable to different test sheets? So it is fundamentally quite different in terms of how they treat data. It's a database, not a spreadsheet.

Andy: 15:28

So it wasn't just a case of, like, copying it, but it was, like, use that as a starting point, and then how would you port this over to to Airtable in a way that kind of makes sense. And interestingly, actually, I've just got a competitor, so my second competitor, like, directly on the marketplace, and they've got a really successful Google Sheets add on. They got, like, a similar number of installs, I think, to API connector, and they've just launched on Airtable. Luckily for me, they built it exactly as you'd build it on Sheets. So every time you do an import, deletes all your data and creates it from scratch, makes absolutely no sense.

Andy: 15:59

And so there is that nuance between platforms that you need to really pay attention to. And so, yeah, I think that's another reason to just go really hard on one one platform rather than trying to, like, spread yourself too thinly across platforms.

Charlie: 16:12

Yeah. I think this is a really interesting topic as well, especially when it's more of a bootstrap tool and you don't have, like, you know, teams of people who can just, like, take this and make it work across multiple platforms. It's, you know, mostly you. What's your decision making process around focusing on Airtable versus, you know, maybe hiring some contract devs and trying to make it work on other things like Monday, maybe sheets yourself, maybe something else?

Andy: 16:35

For long, I'm like, definitely for the first year, was thinking, like, this is gonna go multi platform, and I was thinking like that. That's the way to remove that that platform risk. And I actually ended up launching a Monday or trying to launch a Monday app earlier in the year with that aim of just being like, if I could get half the MRR from one from a different platform or even, like, third or a quarter, even just some revenue stream that's not completely dependent on Airtable, that'd be worth it. I got slightly burned by that mainly for technical reasons, but, yeah, it just became really tricky to build on the Monday platform, and it actually started killing my motivation to work on the project at all. So I kind of sacked it off that for a few weeks.

Andy: 17:11

But, yeah, it's definitely something I'd consider again, but I think it would be a totally different ballgame. Just in terms of development and the code base and, like, the the maintenance of it, I think it would mean you'd probably wanna raise, like, a little bit of funding or would need to, like, plow most of the revenue into hiring, like, another, like, developer or two. Like, I think it'd be really a manageable one person team. And not that, like, you couldn't do it, but you couldn't do it to a really good standard. And I think the reason that people switch from Zapier to DataFetcher is that within that use case, I just pay more attention to detail than, like, even a big big company can because it's just it's just so specific.

Andy: 17:45

Now the flip side of that is if it's a ball wanna kill it at any point or they wanna build the equivalent thing and and launch it into their product, they might do it right and say that's kind of terrifying. And so you also have to weigh up, like, how likely are they to do that? And the way I look at it is they've got a a feature called sync, which lets you sync to, like, Salesforce or Google Calendar, whatever. And so there is a real risk that they they could broaden that, but that sync feature is very no code. Like, it's it's quite easy to use, but it's also, like, because my tool is really flexible and people are using it with all these different APIs, I think it's really unlikely that Airtable would launch something that's, like, quite as flexible as that.

Andy: 18:21

And so I think I'm kind of building, like, just outside of where they'd wanna go with their product because their thing is slightly less technical. And so we overlap a bit from, like, certain use cases because I've got certain no code, like, these kinda, like, prebuilt, like, templates. But, yeah, I think they're quite happy that, like, they effectively fills this gap, and they're definitely going for, like, the ecosystem play and, like, having a platform where, you know, the the sum of what all the developers build across the platform, third party and their developers is kind of bigger than what they could just build on their own. But, yeah, it's it's definitely like that's the the big scary thing about the business. And I think, yeah, the my kind of solution to that is probably just try and rinse it for all its worth at the moment.

Andy: 18:58

By being in a one specific platform, it means I cannot like, I check the Airtable subreddit and forums and stuff like that, like, every day. And so that just gives you, like, that little bit of, like, attention to detail that, like, a tool that's crossed loads of platforms doesn't have. So I wanna rinse that for all its worth, Try and get as much of the funds in the profits into index funds, and then hopefully, one day, you know, if they if they do build it or some massive competitor or something comes along, like, hopefully, I will have made enough money to for it not ruin my life. But, yeah, we'll see. It's it's definitely a that's a risk reward thing that's, like, pretty intrinsic to the business.

Charlie: 19:33

Because when a marketplace or app is making these sort of ecosystem plays, you know, they've gotta think about the trust that devs are gonna have in in their platform that they're not just gonna absolutely rug someone and just, like Yeah. Copy their feature, which, you know, Twitter, I think, made that mistake a few years ago when they when they just removed their entire, I think, most of

Andy: 19:51

their API access. Have you

Charlie: 19:52

had much communication with their table about data virtual or anything else?

Andy: 19:56

Yeah. I mean, they're they're a big fan of what I'm doing. They're really supportive. So, yeah, I deal with the product manager on their platform team. He's responsible for, like, the marketplace and the API and and kind of any any kind of interaction with, like, third party developers.

Andy: 20:10

And, yeah, like, they follow me on Twitter. They celebrate when I have, like, a big milestone and stuff, or they'll they'll, like, drop it in an email and stuff. So, like, they're super supportive so far, and, like, I think they so same with Apple. Right? They've they've basically got a droplet, and so there's been quite a few examples of them just basically, like, cloning someone's, like, iOS app into the operating system and someone just, like, completely losing their business overnight.

Andy: 20:35

I think with Airtable, because they're not, like, the only sort of tool that you like, no code tool that you could use for that, I think the the risk of that is a lot less because they, as you say, like, they don't wanna burn developers. They wanna keep good relations. They want it to be a good thing to to build on, and they've got a whole team dedicated to making it a good platform to build on. So I think I think the risk is less. At the same time, if all of their enterprise customers were asking for a tool like they've actually prefer, you know, yeah, they they could totally build it.

Andy: 21:00

So I'm not kind of naive about that. I do think there's a decent chance they're working.

Charlie: 21:05

That's great to hear that they're very supportive like that. And I guess one of the other benefits being on a marketplace is for marketing. I think you've said before that most of your installs come from the marketplace itself rather than outside their table.

Andy: 21:19

Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. It's probably it varies month to month, but, like, historically, it's probably about 80% of customers come. Like, I can see that they they've just found it through the marketplace.

Andy: 21:29

They've searched for, like, API, and then they've installed it. So, yeah, it's been been massive, and I think there's not that many apps in there. Like, even two years after they launched it, it's probably only, a 100 apps on the marketplace. So there there's not, like, loads of people trying to build on it. Obviously, that's gonna slowly tick up.

Andy: 21:43

But, like, yeah, it's it's a massive source of, like, leads at the moment. It's obviously hard to do attribution when you have a marketplace like that. This is, having your own site. So you can't put, like, a tracking pixel or anything like that on there. So the way that I kind of try and do the attribution is looking at the use case that someone has, so when they become a customer, and they see, is this one that I've got a YouTube video on, or is this just, their own stuff?

Andy: 22:08

And so if it's, their own stuff, I just don't assume they come from marketplace. And then, obviously, asking people as well that wanna do support on, like, customer interviews. And, yeah, most people say they just found it through the marketplace. So, yeah, that's another huge benefit of being really early to to the platform.

Charlie: 22:22

Besides the marketplace, your main growth channels are kind of educational blog posts and YouTube videos, like you were saying. Right? And how did you arrive on those two? I mean, they make sense, but did you see, like, there were analogous companies where this had worked well and thought that was good for you, or was there any other kind of things you tried?

Andy: 22:41

Yeah. It was the same company I copied the idea from. So API connector.

Charlie: 22:44

So they yeah. They've got a

Andy: 22:46

really thorough blog with all different use cases, and then they were just starting to experiment with YouTube videos as well. And they were getting some, like, good view numbers, and and I spoke to Anna who runs it, and she was saying that that YouTube videos were going really well. So the, yeah, the the YouTube ones are kind of there was a Airtable support post about someone's use case that they wanted to want to extract favicons from websites. It's super specific. Yeah.

Andy: 23:12

I found an API where you could do that, made a little, like, two minute YouTube video and replied in the forums with that video just to to assess if anyone would watch it, if they follow it. And, yeah, it answered their question. They followed it. And then over the next few weeks, I noticed that a few other people also followed that YouTube video. Like, I hadn't promoted it anywhere, but clearly, like, YouTube surfaces it to people that are interested in Airtable, and then people were seeing it in the forum as well.

Andy: 23:35

So that was kind of, yeah, my experiment with that inspired by API connector. And then I kind of tried to take, a more systematic approach and looked at, you know, what are the most common APIs that we're connecting to. So turning those each of those into a tutorial. And, yeah, it's worked really, really nicely. It's still hard to say, like, how to do the attribution exactly, but, yeah, I think it it works pretty well, and there's a there's so many different topics I can can do for it.

Andy: 24:00

And, yeah, the nice thing about YouTube, I think, is whereas SEO, it takes quite a while to rank and stuff. YouTube will immediately start showing your your YouTube video to people who are interested in their table. And so it's not like you need to then go promote it on Twitter and on, like, whatever, subreddits, whatever. It just kind of sits there and just just slowly the views tick up. And even if the view numbers aren't that big, if it's a really specific use case like this, like, the intent behind them is really high.

Andy: 24:24

Right? So the chance of someone following it and then converting is is pretty high.

Charlie: 24:29

Yeah. I think it's an interesting point about, you know, just because something doesn't get, like, tens of thousands of views doesn't mean it's not valuable because, like you said, it has very high intent. But something else I wanna ask is just on the number of channels. Like, do you have to deliberately stop yourself from, like, trying out, like, I don't know, paid ads or, like, a bunch of other things that, like, seem, like, sexy or they'd be they'd be valuable? Do you deliberately try just to keep it quite focused on, like, those two channels, or you thinking of expanding?

Charlie: 24:56

Yeah.

Andy: 24:56

What I'd love to now the MRR is a bit hard, love to try, like, paid ads and see if I can get something working. I think as soon as I could see that a channel was working, it was a case of, like, right, rent that for for all it's worth. And I definitely wanna be more aggressive just within SEO and and YouTube. So at the moment, I'm probably putting out three bits of content a month, three to four, and I think love to get that up to, like, you know, six, seven, eight. Like, if I get two bits of content out a week, I think, like, that would be massive, as well as kind of moving up the funnel a bit.

Andy: 25:25

So at the moment, they're all super specific use cases. I think it'd be great to just, like, do Airtable content more generally and have people following for that and then eventually converting. But, yeah, haven't really considered any other channels beyond doing, like, a few podcasts. So there's a couple of Airtable specific podcasts and then kind of the Indiaca building public thing as well, which I think has worked pretty well doing. When people say, like, message on Twitter saying, do wanna do this, like, boundary interview or whatever?

Andy: 25:50

Just defaulting to yes because as long as it doesn't take hours, it's it's a backlink, and there's a chance it might go yeah. Might get decent traffic. And had a good experience with that a couple of months ago where one of the interviews, like, was on top of our news for ages. Probably got, like, a few 100 or a couple 100 at least, like, quid of MRR off the back of it. And, like, the interview itself had taken, like, an hour.

Andy: 26:09

So, yeah, that's why I'm here.

Charlie: 26:12

Hopefully, this will be the same for this one. Stick on a hack in the news already. We'll see. There's a bit more of a lifestyle question, you know, from, like, when you were starting your marketing plan and stuff. Did you always have, like, a rather profitable goal, like a fixed figure in mind?

Charlie: 26:26

Like, I think you're the first person I saw tweet London rather than profitable, which is like, I don't know, 5 k a month or something, probably higher than living in Chiang Mai. But, yeah, do you always have that in mind? Did you ever consider, like, moving out of somewhere like London, or were you always kinda like, oh, I wanna maintain the lifestyle of being here and just try and hit my goal?

Andy: 26:46

Yeah. I think the big two of me were five and ten k. So five because it's like, yeah, that's kinda like, you can live in London. You're not gonna have amazing lifestyle, but you you can live, like, pretty decent lifestyle after cost and tax and stuff like that. And then 10 because it's like that's pretty similar to what you make as a, like, a contract developer.

Andy: 27:03

I don't think I ever wanted to, like, move out of London. I just enjoy it too much. It wasn't really a case of, like, oh, I'm gonna go, like, yeah, like, move to middle of nowhere or go to some, like, low cost of living country to do this. That would have felt, like, too much of a sacrifice, I think. The way I kinda made it work financially apart from selling Influence Code was doing freelance work as well.

Andy: 27:23

So, yeah, I was doing a few days a week, or I'd work contract for a month or two, and then I moved on to, like, fixed price, like, freelance projects. So I was actually doing Airtable extension development for, like, Airtable's enterprise people, and the rates were really healthy, and it was like, I could completely manage my own time. So they would basically, you know, have a month to do a few days of work. And so it meant that if support emails were coming in or I needed to get something out of the day, if it took a bug fix or whatever, could just focus on that and and do the the freelance stuff around that. So what I did was just use that to top up my finances and then gradually reduce the the time.

Andy: 27:57

And I think, like, a lot of India hackers seem to follow that often. It works very well, right, because you kind of derisk yourself, like, financially and not kind of going all in. Having said that, it's a bit miserable. Like, having to juggle the two is is pretty hard as you probably, like, find yourself, like, trying to deal with just the amount of stuff that piles up knowing that you need to be keeping your freelance client happy. Wasn't great.

Andy: 28:20

So, yeah, it's going full time, but just quality of life just went massively. And so I was happy to pay or kind of have a little bit less money coming in just for the the reduction in stress, really.

Charlie: 28:32

I think this is a situation, like, more and more people are finding themselves in as they're building a business and to pay the bills. They're also working part time or sometimes full time. Like, I'm doing that myself. I contract a couple of days a week. I find the biggest issue is just like it's just like the context switching of, like, you know, having these two very different things to think about outside of, like, day to day life.

Charlie: 28:53

Was there, like, anything, any little tricks that you did or just, like, ways you you worked just to help you just, like, be productive at both of these things without, like, you know, stressing yourself out too much?

Andy: 29:06

Yeah. It's definitely a massive issue. I think the big one for me is that Paul Graham essay on, like, make a time and manage a time. So, basically, if you've got meetings, you think, like, I'd put, you know, one a day, and then that's only an hour a day in meetings, whatever. But, actually, what you're better off doing is just putting all the meetings on one day.

Andy: 29:24

So, yeah, trying to get them all into one day. And then the days where you don't have any meetings and, ideally, you're not doing the freelance stuff, you can just have a full day with a 100% focus on on your project. I think, yeah, once I switched to that, made a huge difference. And then the other thing would be looking at Calm Fund and Tiny Seed. I think, like, the reason that they're really popular is because they get you over that initial hump of, yeah, I need to keep the money coming in my freelancing or my day job.

Andy: 29:50

So I think just having 50 or a 100 or however much they give you grand in the bank to to make that switch and and fully commit. I I kind of didn't do that because I'd sold influence grade, and that was worth 50 k, which kind of felt like a bit of a I had that site safety safety net. But if I hadn't managed to do that, a 100% would have looked at those options.

Charlie: 30:10

Would you say this kind of period where you were sort of working and building data fetcher, just managing that, was that kind of the most difficult part, or has there been, like, another sort of situation which was like, would you say is your lowest point so far in building it that you managed to get through?

Andy: 30:25

Yeah. It probably was that time. It was also just the very early days. So, like, the last project, Influence Credit, it grew like a weed. Like, it was I was adding, like, 500 to a thousand in MRH month for, like, the early months.

Andy: 30:37

The average price was, like, $60.70 dollars, and they're all churning. They're all going out the other side. Like, over the short term, it just seemed to be growing really, really nicely. When I switched to this, it was like I started with a price of $12 a month, I think it was, or 9. Yeah.

Andy: 30:51

12. And so it was just ticking up so slowly. So even if you had a day with two or three customers, it felt great. It's still you've only got, like, 30 or 40, and then maybe you lose one, and it just was inching up so slowly. So it was just I was trying to work out, like, is this gonna take, like, five years to get to ramen and just, like, real kind of, I guess, that crisis of confidence of, like, is this the right thing to be working on?

Andy: 31:10

And then there was a month where it went down, and then I got really worried of, like, have I just spent, like, six months, like, kind of, barking up the wrong trade? But I had a good chat with Michael from Round Club, and he basically said basically just preached patience and said, you you're you're essentially, like, you're ahead of where a lot of projects are. Like, you're six months in. You're on a few $100 now. Like, it probably will work.

Andy: 31:31

There's no time. No one knows about it. Yeah? Like, it's got no real momentum behind it. And so, yeah, that those early days are still probably the worst.

Andy: 31:40

Yeah. And then there's been a few really horrendous, like, sort of technical moments where, yeah, I've just made real stupid mistakes. I'm more of a front end developer by trade, and so bit a couple of moments on the back end. I deleted the project in Google, in, like, Google Cloud so that all integrations that involve Google or YouTube or Google like, search analytics, whatever, they all just fail. And yeah.

Andy: 32:04

So I deleted it on a Friday, went out, woke up on a Saturday morning to, like, a customer email being like, why can't why is my Google Analytics coming in? And, like, luckily, Google Cloud has a sort of undo mechanism that they they keep your project around for, a month, which, yeah, might be the best UX thing I've ever seen from Wow. Google Cloud. But, like, yeah, that was that was a a pretty low moment as well. So, yeah, there's been a few things like that where you just you just, like, you just feel like a real impostor actually or a real cowboy, and it's like, how the hell has this got the place it is?

Andy: 32:34

But, yeah, I think the nice thing there is, like, I'm gonna be able to hire a developer quite soon. And so just having someone else to come in and and kind of look at some of the weaknesses in the code base can be very nice as well.

Charlie: 32:44

Yeah. Guess that takes you to a whole new stage. Right? You know, as you bring on more people, we're sort of moving from the solo bootstrapper to kind of manager mode kind of thing. And, like because I think you also have marketing freelancers as well.

Charlie: 32:56

Are you sort of already trying to get advice or getting clued up on that part of the journey, or are you gonna sort of take it as it comes?

Andy: 33:04

Yeah. I think at the moment, I'm a little bit before that stage, so it's not quite like switching to, like, growing a small team and having a remote culture and that kind of stuff. At the moment, it's very much keeping it really lean. So the developer I'm hiring is just gonna do one day a week. He's traveling, just wants to do some freelance work, and we've worked together before at an old company, so it's gonna be it's gonna be super informal.

Andy: 33:24

And then, yeah, both the marketers, it's just I think we've only spoken over email for, like, six months now. So it's just at the moment, it's it's just kinda using freelancers where where necessary and where to pick up some of this that. I don't wanna see how how big we can get. Just keeping it really lean like that. Longer term, it might be nice to have a team.

Andy: 33:39

Right? It might start to get a little bit lonely just just having, one full time person, I say. I'm definitely open to it, but I don't think I'm quite making that switch. There will be, I think, a case of, like, trying to codify bit of their knowledge that's in my head, especially, like, on the code, but then also on support and stuff like that and just just documentation. And, yeah, at the moment, there's there's nothing.

Andy: 33:58

So, yeah, there's definitely gonna be a bit of a switch when even just a part time developer joins just to to get stuff down and to to document why certain decisions have been made, as well as just a a switch from, like, okay. This is the MVP, and I need to get it out as soon as possible. And even the integrations, like, trying to just hammer integrations as quickly as possible to, like, suddenly, like, okay. Quite a few businesses, core operations are relying on this stuff. We really can't afford, like, major bugs because we will lose customers.

Andy: 34:26

And so I think there's probably a shift in speed of drug development as well and just just slowing down and and being a bit more thorough and stable, I guess. So that's something I'm thinking about at moment. Yeah. I think I think it is a bit of a mindset shift over the next couple of years.

Charlie: 34:41

Yeah. Makes sense. Something else I know you've attributed to at least part of your success is kind of, like, gaining as a developer. And I know not all developers are keen on doing this, but, like, sort of more of an appreciation for user testing and user research and that sort of thing. It was something that's obviously close to me as I do a lot of user research in my in my day job.

Charlie: 35:01

But, yeah, do wanna talk a bit about sort of what your approach to it now as a data fetcher that you think is, like, something you wanna continue doing?

Andy: 35:09

Yeah. So, originally, I think I had really taken onboard this concept, like, the MUB test and done that. Like, don't talk about solutions. Only talk about people's pain points, their day to day, like, specifics and stuff like that. Never talk about your product.

Andy: 35:22

And for some reason, I kind of took that to the point of, like, so never watch anyone use your product, which is definitely a completely separate thing. That's user testing versus, like, customer reset. But yeah. So for the first year, year and a bit, I saw probably only saw, like, a few people use it when I was on a call with them, whatever. And then sort of through accident, I changed the UX fit quite radically of of DataFetcher.

Andy: 35:43

So rather than it just being like an API tool, it was kind of like a a no code tool. Right? And so because it's such a big change, I want to watch, like, a load of people use the app. And so I had, like, a load of calls, some with, like, yeah, rival club members like yourself, and then some with existing customers, and I gave them, like, a free month, whatever, to get them to do it. And then I saw all of these UX issues and the rest of the app and in, like, other bits of of the UI and stuff that I just had been there for months.

Andy: 36:09

And so, yeah, the rest of it improved loads. And I suddenly realized that I should have been doing this the whole time. Like, use like, just basically telling someone, okay. Try and do x. I'm gonna shut up now, and then just watching them do it on a on a call.

Andy: 36:21

And, yeah, it was huge. So what I do now basically is I don't have any sort of formal thing where I'm like, okay. I need to keep keep doing that. But I have a thing where anyone can book a support call. So there's the Calendly on the on the website.

Andy: 36:32

And so anyone, like, free user or paid can book a support call. And what happens on, like, 80% of those support support calls is they share their screen, and then I watch them setting stuff up. And I see bugs, and I see, like, other bits and pieces. And I I try to see what they do instinctively and then tell them how to do it, obviously, within the like, without being totally unhelpful. But that's quite good because it kinda forces me to do that user test in most weeks.

Andy: 36:55

Yeah. And then the other thing actually similar to that is for a long time, I wanted to, like, outsource the support as soon as possible, just, like, get a part time customer support rep that could could do everything. And now I've realized actually it's way too soon to do that until the product's, like, more mature. I think doing that's actually just gonna, like, cut off the biggest source of feedback. So, yeah, it's annoying doing all the, like, I don't know, reset my password or change my pattern or whatever, but that's only about half the support.

Andy: 37:23

The other stuff is super nitty gritty, like UI feedback, or you start noticing that the same setting is being misconfigured, like, over and over, and you need to kinda make the label clearer or make, like, a default a different setting, whatever. So, yeah, that's been been a massive help, actually. And, yeah, as you say, it's not as we not really used to doing that, but it's, yeah, it's super important, I think.

Charlie: 37:43

It sounds like, you know, obviously, you've learned a lot from doing this and from doing infinite squid and that that sort of thing. What's the most common advice you tend to give, like, other aspiring bootstrap founders based on your experience?

Andy: 37:56

Yeah. I think launching something pretty quickly is is the big one. I think people you do see people spending, like, six months on something and then launching it. And and, yeah, so I think that you probably need to launch with, like, less less features and and less kind of quality than you think. So if you can launch something in two or three months, just use the tech stack you know, assume you've got, like, products on on Reddit and stuff like that as an initial test of will anyone pay for this, not as a scalable market channel, but just trying to get something ASAP and then launching it.

Andy: 38:25

You can get one or two customers through that, and then you can find discover a marketing channel. Like, that's all you need. Right? So that's probably just launching quicker than than you than you think you need. Like, influencer got the first version of it.

Andy: 38:37

He upgraded, like, bought an account. All that changed is the sign in header changed to sign out. Like, there was nothing except the TikTok data, and that's what people there for. And so, yeah, I think you can actually get away with a lot less stuff than than you need if you're solving, a real pain point for people.

Charlie: 38:52

It sounds like you try and get some sort of signals that something might be interesting, you know, to to start working on something. Like, you saw the Airtable's taken off and something similar works on Google Sheets, and that was enough to get you started. But you don't really know for sure until someone starts paying for it. But, like, how much kind of effort or time are you willing to put in to go from, like, I've come up with an idea to, okay. It's possible someone can can pay for it now kind of thing.

Andy: 39:17

I think you probably want one like, you wanna find one use case. Right? So, like, one specific path through the product. And so for data fetcher, that was, like, important data from an API. But things like what it does now is it'll look at, like, okay.

Andy: 39:33

What the what type of data is it? Is it emails? Is it URLs? Is it image attachments? Whatever.

Andy: 39:37

And it also just feels, and it is quite it's super nuanced within that. The original version basically just pulled it back, was opinionated about what feels it was gonna map to an air table and just, like, threw it in there, and it was, like, really pretty, pretty tricky to use. But it did do that one core thing. So I think it's basically trying to find that, and often that's like a forum post or that's someone on Twitter being like, is there any way to do this in Airtable or something like that? And so, yeah, basically, just finding one, like, happy part through it and then building something that solves that.

Andy: 40:08

But, yeah, yeah, I'm afraid there's not, like, a really nice, like, sort of general test of it. I think it's each case is a little bit different. Right?

Charlie: 40:15

Yeah. I don't think there's I think everyone's looking for a formula sometimes

Andy: 40:18

Mhmm.

Charlie: 40:18

With these things, and I think it comes from, like I think instinctively, you learn it from trial and error and shipping a few things, seeing what works and what doesn't sort of thing. So now I think that was a perfectly reasonable answer. But, yeah, I think sometimes people are looking for, like, a pain by numbers of how to create a successful business, and it just doesn't always exist. There's just sort of principles that do and don't work. Right?

Andy: 40:40

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I had the experience recently where I tried to launch, like, another project using, like, the stable diffusion to create, like, art prints. And, like, with that, I almost still feel like there's something there, but, like, I felt like I'd built a happy file. And over, like, a week, no one bought anything, and I thought that's that's enough of a signal that my sort of this, like, that's that's not gonna work.

Charlie: 41:00

Yeah. Yeah. For sure. And in terms of where you wanna go from here, do you have, like, a vision for, like, where you wanna take data fetcher in, let's say, a three year time frame in terms of, like, you know, any goals in terms of, like, revenue or team or just, like, what the product does, basically?

Andy: 41:21

Yeah. In terms of the product, I think for the next, like, few months at least, there's a lot further to go just within this core concept, pulling data in from somewhere else into it. There's massive tools built on Google Sheets. There's one called Supermetrics. It's like a 100,000,000 ARR, and they're essentially just connecting to marketing APIs and pulling that in.

Andy: 41:42

So I know there's a lot more room to grow just within that use case. Beyond that, I might start to think more about kind of two way syncs. So syncing it with Webflow and Airtable and having kind of more platforms and then more directions and not just go somewhere else into into Airtable. So that's kind of how I think about the products, but I definitely just wanna do one thing really, really well rather than trying to make it too broad. I think that's the reason that people use it at the moment is because it's really good at that one thing.

Andy: 42:10

And every time you introduce something different, you risk complicating that, making it harder. In terms of team, yeah, still pretty open question. As I said, like, I wanna keep it really lean for now and just keep profit margins high. But longer term, like, it might be fun to to grow a little team. I do worry a little bit with platform risk on that one where it's like, if it's just my livelihood and freelancers where you have no obligation to keep funding them, then that's fine.

Andy: 42:33

But, like, if I wanted to hire people full time and give people sort of longer term opportunities, I would worry bit more about platform risk, I think, than if it was other people's livelihoods at risk. So maybe that's something that comes up trips, cover broader tour. But, yeah, that that stuff feels quite a way off. For now, it's keep it too really lean, keep adding integrations and tightening up the UX. And then, yeah, I'd love to get to, like, a thousand customers.

Andy: 42:56

Sort of 300 at moment. Love to get a thousand customers in a couple of years and just keep the profit margins really high and keep keep funneling off the, the funds into into more diverse income streams. And, yeah, I've got a couple of other SaaS ideas as well. So in some ways, I think DataFetcher might be the perfect project to, like, use as a a cash cow, basically, and accept that, yeah, it probably won't be around in, like, ten, fifteen years because Airtable might be irrelevant, but it's, like, a perfect kind of small to medium, like, SaaS business. I can use the the freedom and the the funds from it to, like, launch other slightly slightly bigger ideas.

Andy: 43:29

So, yeah, who knows?

Charlie: 43:30

That sounds, all sounds awesome and and very achievable. You ready to drop the alpha and those other SaaS ideas yet? Are you keeping your cards to your chest for now?

Andy: 43:37

Yeah. Absolutely not.

Charlie: 43:40

Yeah. Yeah. Probably wise. Probably wise. Before we open up a few questions from the community, I saw this interesting quote that you said on, like, the end of one of your blog posts related to what you were just saying actually and data fetcher, which is diversify the profits, not the products.

Charlie: 43:58

So in terms of, like, you know, where you kind of spend that revenue in other maybe non SaaS areas rather than, like, creating shitloads of, like, similar features or different features. Yeah. Do you wanna touch a bit on that?

Andy: 44:10

Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I think it as a as a business, like, as a product, it does sit in this really nice sweet spot at the moment.

Andy: 44:17

Right? So there's no, like, VC backed company on the marketplace that's that's coming and built and because the total opportunity is just probably not big enough. So there's obviously the platform risk of air table, but the the risk of, like, massive competition, I think, is reasonably low. So there are a couple of competitors. They're similarly small teams or, like, one person businesses, and I've kind of backed myself against them.

Andy: 44:40

But there's no, like, 200 pound guru that's gonna come in and crush me at the moment. And so I think given that, it sits in this lovely sweet spot where it completely changed my life. Like, if you get to 500 k ARR, that's completely life changing. Right? But it's also way too small for any sort of massive competition.

Andy: 44:58

So why not shoot for that? Got I'm kind of a third away there. That seems like a really, like, big goal, but but doable. So that's kinda how I look at, like, the competition, like, the financial side. And then I don't think you need to complicate the product together.

Andy: 45:13

So it can just stay where it is, keep making it better, keep improving the marketing, and get to that. But, obviously, if you can keep the profit margins really good, you could then be funneling off, I don't know, a $102,100 grand a year into index funds or, like, rental property or something that's more of a a surer long term thing. And so I think that would be a great way to kinda derisk over $5.10 years. So that's kinda how I think about it. Like, trying to use it as a, yeah, like I said, like a cash guy rather than being like, oh, I'm gonna try and make everything to everyone and then starting to compete with Zapier and, like I mean, there's loads and loads of integration tools and and connectors.

Andy: 45:52

There's you you work for one. Right? There's there's literally dozen of dozens of, like, ones with, like, serious funding. So I think trying to compete with them head to head would be really difficult. But trying to just stay in my lane could get to somewhere where this has, like, completely changed my life and livelihood without, like, a massive risk of of it of it not working.

Andy: 46:09

I guess it's, the whole India hacker ethos. Right? Like, do you want to raise funding and go for the one in a thousand or one in 10,000 billion dollar exit, or do you just wanna bootstrap steadily and get to something that's doing a few $100 and bit, like, a little bit more in in AR and then, yeah, having a really nice lifestyle business?

Charlie: 46:29

Yeah. It's an interesting one, isn't it? Because, like, as a boot shop, once you get to, like, certain degree of success or growing quickly, suddenly you get interest from investors when you don't need them or don't need them as much as maybe when you're, like, starting out. So it's a interesting paradox. But, yeah, what you're saying, yeah, I think that there's definitely something for a lot of street shoppers to aspire to.

Charlie: 46:49

So just before we open up to others, are there any other kind of questions that you've done a lot these interviews now, Andy, or, like, you know, they're certainly speeding up the last year or so. But, like, are there any questions that nobody ever asks you or or things that you wanna talk about that you would like to?

Andy: 47:04

Not really. I mean, it's gonna sound like a plug, but I do think, like, you do need people around you that are doing similar stuff. Like, I think it would I think the MRR would not be as high without doing stuff onto Twitter, rum club. And then the other one actually is not just people at a similar stage, people a little bit ahead of you. It's been lucky to meet a couple of people, customers who've given me really good advice, and then reached out to a couple of people through Twitter and just said, how do you feel about mentoring me?

Andy: 47:30

And people who are sort of two to ten years ahead of me just basically asking if they could be like an infrequent mentor. And so whenever there's been like a huge decision, like, do I try and build a Monday hour or, like, whatever decision it is? Basically, just, like, talking it through with them as well. And so I think, yeah, it is I think people probably underappreciate how important the network is. And I definitely did, like, start a night where I just, yeah, kinda just build and launch and and think it's all about the tech and the marketing.

Andy: 47:59

But actually, so much because it's just you, so much of it is your motivation and your decisions, and that comes from from people around you. Right?

Charlie: 48:08

Yeah. I I totally agree. Because I always sort of think there's just certain types of questions where, like, there's just not there's just not, like, a piece of content written or good piece of content written on every question that's easy to find. Like, a lot of these questions are, like, you can they kind of better answer it, like, in conversations or, like, in communities and that kind of thing. There's also some things people don't really wanna write about too much publicly, or they don't think there's a big enough audience.

Andy: 48:35

So Yeah. Some stocks.

Charlie: 48:36

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All sorts of things. Like, you know, books and blogs and YouTube is great, but sometimes you just need to ask, like, a real human who's being there.

Charlie: 48:45

Yeah. Definitely.

Andy: 48:46

Definitely. And, yeah, often often the situation is is slightly unique or slightly yeah. Like, it's it's a recent, I don't know, a recent change. That's in general and stuff that the blogs that I've written about it are five years out and say, like, the things that used to happen don't don't really make sense anymore. You you need somebody's kind of got their way to the Yeah.

Charlie: 49:08

And I think also sometimes when you the answers you get from, like, asking someone in a similar position, it's it's it's a lot more sort of earnest, like, the answer. Whereas a lot of the stuff is easy to find on, say, Google, but sometimes just SEO to death and just trying to get

Andy: 49:20

you to,

Charlie: 49:20

like, sign up to something. And, you know, that that makes a difference as well. Cool. Alright. Well, we've got some time to open this up to a few kind of questions from the community.

Charlie: 49:31

So, first up, what percentage of customers come from Airtable marketplace versus other channels?

Andy: 49:37

Yeah. So it's probably about 70 to 80%. Yeah. It's it really varies. Like, I thought that all the extra marketing I was doing was driving it up, but there were a couple of months at the start of this year where it's going up to, like, 40%, and then it slowly started creeping down again.

Andy: 49:51

So I'm not totally sure why that is, but, like, yeah, generally, it's about it's about 30%. And, yeah, it's as I said, like, it's really hard to do the attribution, but people I could see directly came because the way that I do it, as I say in the tutorial, like, save your request with this name, and then I can see in from their usage, have they have they done that? And, yeah, it's about about 30%, which is nice because it means you can actually get you can work out, like, a return on investment on a on a video. So if you can see that five people followed that video and your lifetime value is $200, you'd be happy to pay something under a thousand dollars for the for a video. So, yeah, it's it varies by about 70%.

Charlie: 50:32

From Airtable marketplace, would you say you were fortunate that people were already searching for API solutions?

Andy: 50:39

Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. I mean, yeah, there was definitely a underlying need. And it's interesting because there's there is scripting on Airtable.

Andy: 50:48

It's probably something I should have mentioned. So you've got all these no code tools, Zapier or whatever, and then you've got a lot of APIs and stuff that aren't on Zapier. There and then there's the scripting. So there's, like, an Airtable extension that lets you write in a JavaScript in the Airtable and and import stuff. So my sweet spot is between those two extremes.

Andy: 51:06

Yeah. It's it's kind of near the scripting, and then I'm kinda moving it more and more towards Zapier as it becomes more no coding. But, yeah, people are already looking out to do this. Yeah. One thing I didn't say is because my sweet spot is semi technical people, it does increase the support.

Andy: 51:21

It's very often to help people understand the API that they're trying to connect to and then how to use data fetching can be a bit tricky. But I think it's quite like that means that they're not gonna be able to write a script and replace it super easily. It's quite good in a way. Yeah. Nothing about that actually is because the marketplace is really early, there's no, like, marketplace SEO or anything too sophisticated.

Andy: 51:43

Versus like Shopify, they I think they're constantly, like, ranking the different apps against each other to the point when, like, now when people launch on Shopify, they'll make the app free for six months just to get ratings and reviews and, like, climb those rankings, and then they'll turn on paid stuff. Luckily, Airtable is so new, the number of apps is so low that, generally, there's not that, like, cutthroat competition for search terms. It's more just, you know, having a few keywords in there. If they search for any of those, then data fetcher shows up.

Charlie: 52:14

Andy, thank you so much for coming on this pod. Great to speak to you as ever. Really insightful answers. I think this would be really useful for people like in a similar or slightly earlier position or trying to reach your kind of successful data fetcher. So yeah, very much appreciated.

Andy: 52:30

Awesome, it

Charlie: 52:30

was a pleasure. See you soon, Cheers. Bye. Bye.