Arvid Kahl: Is indie hacking truly dead? Or is this just
another conspiracy theory? Well, I went to the source, Channing
Allen, co founder of Indie Hackers will help me today,
debunk this myth. We explore the challenges of maintaining a
still very vibrant indie hacker community where members both
compete and collaborate simultaneously. We get into
strategies of monetizing such a community, how maximalism and
minimalism impact how the indie hacker founders navigate
business decisions, and we explore how constraints inspire
creative problem solving. You will learn a lot from someone
who's been at the center of the indie entrepreneur world for
many, many years. Just like our sponsor today, acquire.com, more
on that later. Now, here is Channing.
Welcome to the show. A few weeks ago, I talked to Pieter Levels
on this show, too. And he proclaimed that indie hacking is
dead. Now, you're the co founder of indiehackers.com, a great
community that I think is very much alive still. Right? So
what's going on with indie hacking?
Channing Allen: What was the Mark Twain quote, the rumors of
my death have been greatly exaggerated. No, look, I love
that because it's just it's the rumor mill. The rumor mill just
gets people talking. Pieter Levels showed up in my replies
on Twitter and was like, hey, you know, we're getting good at
this UFC style, like pretending to fight just to get people
talking. And it's great. I think that I still have yet to listen
to the episode, shame on me. But yeah, I think that the idea is
that indie hackers started, the indie hackers community started
as this tight community of not that many people. And when you
have a small community, it's a lot easier to kind of manage the
constraints of how the community defines itself, right? It's
easier to police the norms and make sure that you don't have a
lot of bullshit. You know, like the things that might seem
scammy or fake or inauthentic. And my read of his point, of
Pieter's point was, it's grown so big, right? The tent has
become so big that now you have a lot of people who are on the
edges and just say, you know, it's very easy to show up, say
on Twitter and say, hey, here's how I, you know, I'm 17 years
old. And here's how I've grown this business without any code
or any effort to $20,000 a month, right? Just to get
eyeballs. And so some of the tactics to grow and some of the
elements about of the community that sometimes might be
considered unsavory. You get enough people in the tent and
you can't really control.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah
Channing Allen: You know, what the community is like, but I
think it's a good problem to have, right? Like, the community
has gotten so big. And so many people are calling themselves
indie hackers that, you know, we can't orchestrate you know and
curate exactly who uses a label and what they say. I mean, it's
just a natural process.
Arvid Kahl: Does that create any problems for you like organizing
and maintaining the community, the forums, I guess, of
indiehackers.com?
Channing Allen: No, I mean, look, the forum on
indiehackers.com since day one, is you just have it's a, I wish
I had a good analogy of any feed on the internet from the first
day of the internet until I'm sure the last day of the
internet, unless the AI bots control spam is you know, it's
damage control. Like if anyone can show up like it's going to,
you know, if it's unfettered, if it's uncurated, it's going to
either be a ghost town or it's going to be a bit of a cesspool.
And so what what we do is we have algorithms that make sure
that things that the community votes on are the things that
typically get seen. There's a lot of stuff that's unsavory
beneath the surface. We have human moderators. And still
things slip through, right? Still people game the system
because everyone in this community is, I think that the
good thing about the indie hacker community is also the bad
thing. The good thing and a bad thing are that the people that
are involved in this tend to be extremely high in initiative.
They seem to be, they tend to be extremely intelligent and
interesting, but they're also kind of go getters. Right? And I
don't know who the boxer was but I think some professional
athletes says that if you're not cheating, you're not trying. And
so you got a lot of really clever people who try to like,
you know, get voting rings and
Arvid Kahl: Right
Channing Allen: And get stuff to the top. So you just you manage
it as well as you can.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, I always found this so interesting about the
indie hacker community both the forums and the wider community,
that it's both extremely aligned. People all have the
same goal. They all want to have a really good lifestyle
business. They want to make it and then they want to live off
that and have the life they always wanted. And they're all
competing with each other on some level. What attention is
that? That's so cool.
Channing Allen: Yeah, yeah. Well, it's funny that you
mentioned Pieter Levels because he and Danny Postma both
Arvid Kahl: Collaboration has always been a big part of the
superficially were competing for the mantle of who's got the, you
know, like, you know, right. They were kind of like some of
the really early AI face recognition and AI like photo
creation founders. And so again, ostensibly, they were in
competition with each other. But then they really cleverly played
up the idea of that competition. And then what happened, right?
The tide rose, both boats rose with it, right? Especially when
you're small enough, there's not really you know, there's never
been and there never will be an indie hacker monopoly on
anything, right? And so there are a lot of opportunities to
work together.
community. And I kind of like that and I somewhat bemoan that
too because it feels like people are getting hesitant to
collaborate too much because there are a lot of copycats and
there are a lot of clones in the community too, right? The more
you share, the more you open this attack surface. But also,
the more you share, the more you build a reputation and then you
get like distribution. It seems to be a balance to strike all
the time.
Channing Allen: Yeah, look, I say this all the time to people,
privately. I try not to say this too much publicly because
everyone is at a different phase. But every problem that
you have as an indie hacker, except for the problem of
getting started, is a problem that comes with growing pains.
Right? Like if you get to the point where you're really afraid
of a copycat, you've graduated to that point, right? Like
someone who has an idea, right? You're an ideapreneur, you don't
have to worry about copycats. Right? And like, you know, even
with one of the community movement, you know, elements of
the indie hacker culture that is sort of beyond our culture,
which is the build in public community. Building in public
even has its own physics, which I think a lot of people are
beginning to speak about, which is look, what's the benefit of
building in public, right? Well, you get eyeballs, you get
attention, even if you don't have a lot of capital and other
resources. That's cool. People get to see you, you need to be
transparent. But then there's a certain point that I think, you
know, Cory Zue and a few other people, maybe even Pieter
Levels, but actually Pieter Levels is one of the few
exceptions. But a lot of people talk about how Justin Jackson of
Transistor talk about how and there's a sort of an early
phase, where building in public, sharing everything is a really
good idea. And then there comes a point and it's not well
defined, you kind of get the feeling. Maybe you'll see the
copycats. Maybe you'll see your competition speaking about you,
where it makes a little bit more sense to dial back how
transparent you're being. And that's just a growing phase,
right? It's a dynamic thing. There's no good answer to
whether or not for example, building in public is good. Or
even take your example collaborating is good. You just
say, where am I at right now? What are my challenges now? What
are the tools that I'm going to reach for that makes sense now
until they don't make sense anymore?
Arvid Kahl: That makes perfect sense. There's always kind of a
stage of your journey for which certain tools have certain
effects. And I think the tough part is that advice as it comes
in, from the community, from people who share their advice
comes either from a different stage than you're in or it's in
the same stage but it's a different field with different
dynamics. It's really hard to contextualize, right? Advice to
begin with, which makes a community that is getting more
diverse and growing like the indie hacker community is that I
also think is not dead at all, right? It's getting bigger and
bigger and people are trying it out. That makes it harder to
figure out which people should I even listen to or which people
are trying to cheat me because they want to make money off me
with their course. And which of those courses are actually
helpful? Like it becomes a minefield and trust is eroded as
well. Right?
Channing Allen: There's like, you just stated that really
beautifully. The difficulty, which is I mean, effectively,
you're getting advice. You're getting advice from people who
share your situation. But I think it gets even more complex
than that because I think you'll have people who superficially
are the same, same industry, same stage, right? So into the
same market. And say, the founders themselves will just
have different dispositions, right? You'll have an introvert
and you'll have an extrovert. You'll have someone who knows
how to build and someone who doesn't really feel that
comfortable building things. Right? And so I think a lot
about this actually because I'm fortunate enough to have like,
tried to perform in enough different domains. So I was like
a really competitive basketball player growing up. I really am
into video games. I try to put those aside because I get too
addicted to them. Here with the business and entrepreneurship
and another life, I'm trying to write a novel. And I do a lot of
thinking about story theory. And one of the things that you
notice, if you see how people try to, like operate in these
different fields, is that if you have a field that has some kind
of clearly defined metrics for what right looks like, then it
becomes a lot easier to say, oh, okay, you know, you're trying to
become a martial artists here. You're a white belt. From a
white belt to the yellow belt or whatever you need to do these
types of things. And then when you get to this stage, you do
that. Same thing with things like chess, right? They're sort
of like, here's what you learn at first. Here's what you learn
after that. But then when you have something that's open
ended, anything artistic, anything business oriented,
there's just this open field. And in a sense, you're the one
who defines what direction up is. Right? And so I think that a
general principle that I've seen that seems to work when you're
in sort of an open ended field like this, is to look at advice
through two possible lenses and the choose the best one. So the
two lenses are, advice is a yellow brick road, right? People
are telling me what the path should be, right? And wait, is
it this yellow brick road or that yellow brick road? This
person says you should be a minimalist, that person says you
should not do any coding, right? That doesn't work for something
like this. I think that what works for this is instead of
yellow bricks, they're all Lego bricks. All advice is Lego
bricks, right? If someone says, here's what I do, then look at
them and be like, okay, well, you know, his castle is built
out of these seven Legos. Let me see if there's one that I can
plug into my, you know, sort of operations and see if it works.
Oh, it doesn't work. Okay, cool. No problem, pop it out. You
know, like, pick another one up, pick one up from there. But you
have to be someone who is you've got your ear to the ground. You
have to learn from other people because you don't know
everything. But you have to be very like provisional, you have
to be very, like experimental. And, you know, always take
things with a certain grain of salt and with a certain like,
playful attitude, if that makes sense.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It sounds like you need a
lot of context, both for what you have going on, like, where
does it fit for me? And what they have going on? Why and
where does it fit for them? Right? That's often neglected in
people giving advice. They kind of isolate the advice from the
context in which either they came up with it or they
understand it or even from where they look at it now. And that
makes it unusable in many ways.
Channing Allen: In general, when I see and I see this all the
time, when I see communities, like real like face to face,
like you and me right now. Right? As opposed to Twitter or
whatever. If I see a situation where you have multiple
different entrepreneurs and they're sharing their issues, a
really good sign of the conversation that's taking place
is when one entrepreneur says hey, I've got this problem. When
the other person, even if they maybe they let's suppose that
they identify the problem. They're like, oh, I had that
problem. I did you know, XY and Z. And I, you know, it was easy.
Instead of jumping in and saying, here's what you should
do, here's what I did or saying anything that's a statement or
an assertion. They constrain themselves to first asking a
question. Like some like, okay, you're having a problem, say,
you know, what is it that you're trying to achieve? Why is that
the problem? You know, what happens if you just let that
problem be? Will, you know, will that be some, you know, would
that be a failure mode for your higher level goals? And very
often, it's what you just mentioned, we're all coming from
different places. This is a situation where very frequently,
you'll be like, ah, I thought I had the solution. But, you know,
that was because, you know, that solution was a ladder that was
leaning against a wall that I was climbing, but they're trying
to climb it an entirely different wall. So yeah, I think
being a lot more patient. And in a sense, inhibiting that
impulse, right? To make a decision for people makes for
much healthier, more useful conversations
Arvid Kahl: And relationships, honestly, I learned this, like
how to communicate well and how to communicate kind of, I
wouldn't even call it defensively but like cautiously
and without pushing and just just allowing the other person
to pull, that has been helping me in my personal relationship
in life, non business, right? Just romantic or all other
kinds. It's really useful to be a good listener. That is
generally good advice, right?
Channing Allen: Yeah
Arvid Kahl: Don't need to contextualize that much like
listening and taking in, mirroring back and giving people
the opportunity to find themselves in what you heard.
That tends to create a better opportunities and better results
than other things. It's funny because that exact thing is
lacking so much in such a both context and size reduced kind of
communication such as Twitter. Twitter is like, used to be 180
characters or 140. Now it's 280. That's a long threads or
whatever. But people still try to condense as much as they can
into a shorter tweet because they rank better, they perform
better, right? You have that stuff that loses all context and
it loses all just opportunity for reflection.
Channing Allen: Yeah, yeah. It's really unfortunate. It's one of
the reasons why I don't follow anyone on Twitter. Like, I don't
like Twitter. I don't like what it does to my brain. I am active
on Twitter, especially these days. I mean it probably more
over the last four or five weeks because that just is the place
and our media company flywheel for indie hackers were like,
that's the best decision for the business. But yeah no, it's a,
it's hmm, I wrestle with questions like these, right?
Because, look, there's a trade off. I think that the quality of
conversation, the quality of information when it's bite size,
fast and immediately delivered into your nervous system is much
lower. At the same time, you have to balance that out with
the fact that there are people who, in a previous era of only
long form communication, just were inaccessible, right? I
mean, I've got a shelf full of books behind me. And there are
five of those humans that I've DM messages or I've gotten
replies from them. I've like entered into conversations,
again, bite sized, you know, like 180 character kind of
conversations. But it's just, you know, one of those weird
trade offs of technology.
Arvid Kahl: That's an interesting point. Accessibility
has a cost. And that cost is some kind of reduction, right?
Reduction of intensity. I was thinking a lot about this
because you mentioned Cory Zue earlier. And he today, which is
a couple of weeks in the past for people listening at this
point and talked a lot about authenticity and being online,
right? Being on Twitter, being authentic and what that means in
a world of, you know, just outcry and polarization and the
attention economy. That was the conversation that he wanted to
instigate and did on Hacker News of all places. That was an
interesting place to read the comments.
Channing Allen: He's number 16 on Hacker News, as we speak.
Arvid Kahl: He number one for a long while.
Channing Allen: Yeah
Arvid Kahl: That funny enough, is exactly the attention economy
in which this conversation takes place. There's a lot of meta
layering happening here. And I was thinking about this too
because like with a sizable audience that I personally have
and that I see a lot of founders looking for, they want to build
that audience for reach, for distribution, for sharing what
they have, what they sell, what they know, right? With that
comes a lot of parasocial relationships, I guess like ours
before we actually got to talk
Channing Allen: Yeah
Arvid Kahl: Both on this show and on your podcast, back in the
day, a couple years ago at this point. And it reminded me of
Dunbar's number and how this is a concept that is so
intrinsically linked to the human psychology, but cannot
deal with more than 120 or some meaningfully deep relationships.
How can we even be authentic beyond that? Do you have any? Do
you look at this, like for your own community that you're
building? Do you have any kind of way that you push people to
towards more authentic behavior? Or how do you do that?
Channing Allen: I have like a, let's say, you know, society
wide thought on this. And then I have an indie hacker specific
way that I think about it. And there's like a fractal self
similarity to them. So that it's just, you know, the big and the
small, but the same thing, which is that I think when you have
and this is all throughout the history of like economic
history, the history of innovation, what you do is over
time and with things like Twitter, you just have much
bigger, you know, sort of tools for connectivity. It's you know,
communication is easier, communication is faster, you can
reach more people, but you do it in a more superficial way. And
you can actually turn those lemons into lemonade if you are
extremely highly intentional. And it just so happens that I
think kind of a fraction of the overall population is really
highly intentional. Right? I mean, if you have Facebook and
Facebook is addictive. Most people are kind of get to sit in
the seat and take what's given to them and they're like, okay,
well this is how I use this. What's the I guess that would be
the Apple versus Windows ecosystem or like the iPhone
versus the Android ecosystem. So I think that you can turn this
really negative situation basically just not having good
superficial, having only superficial relationships, you
can turn it into a good thing. If you're doing what we do and
you're doing what, there are a lot of indie hackers, who I've
reached out to. I have them in my DMs and then we try our best
to get in touch with each other. And like, unfortunately or
fortunately, like these are more or like, you know, sort of, I
have better relationships with them. I connect with them better
than I connect with a lot of people that are just naturally
organically around me. Right? So I've taken the situation. And
because I was highly intentional and they were highly
intentional, we've turned it into something really good. To
think Sahil Lavingia from Gumroad just moved kind of close
to me, so I get to go hang out with him, which is awesome. But
if you aren't intentional, then you don't get that benefit.
You're kind of like caught up in this maelstrom. And so with
indie hackers, you know, I think that the group self selects for
high initiative. And we have some, we have a couple lines of
revenue, the ads for the media company, we've got some like, I
think I saw you bought one of the little cheap profile
Arvid Kahl: There you go
Channing Allen: Like profile page. But another one is we're
doing meetups, we're doing masterminds. And we're trying to
tap into exactly what you're talking about, like getting high
resolution relationships as opposed to kind of the low
resolution comment sections drive by shooting types of
relationships that you can only have with like an online
community.
Arvid Kahl: Intentionality, I love your focus on this. Like,
it's a great way for people to self select into a thing. And to
also kind of self select out of it, if it's not aligned with
what they have. I kind of see it as a vector, right? You have a
point where you are and you have like a directionality to it and
also probably an intensity to the vector like a length. And
then let's just do some math. But you know, like, there are
other people who have similarly, like angled vectors and the
closer you align, you do some vector multiplication and you
know, this alignment between them and I think that that is
one of the things that is a solution, or at least an attempt
that we should be taking in terms of authenticity in a very
scalable virtual world is just to accept that it can only scale
along the aligned vectors that we have with each other. Like we
cannot be the person for everybody. We can meet the right
person for the people that are just have affinity for us the
way we are. And I think you're doing this in a really cool way
in the community. I also liked the idea that it's turned into a
community powered media company. That to me, as somebody who is
also trying to build a media company, not as much community
powered, but community centric. There's a lot of alignment there
as well. It's nice that you have found a phrase for this, that is
something that I really, really like about what indie hackers is
now because I think before the whole thing when you repurchased
the company from Stripe, which is something that's probably
also interesting to talk about, although you have talked about
this at length, on your own podcast there. That to me was
the day where you shifted gears. And you went into how can we
determine who we are precisely and where our alignment is going
to be in the future? How much of an intentional process was that?
And are you done with it?
Channing Allen: No, first off, well, number one, it was very
intentional and everything is intentional that we do, that
doesn't mean that it's successful. Right? We try to
design a lot of outcomes, just like you know, genetic
mutations, most of those fail, some of them succeed. And then
we get to celebrate the wins. But yeah, look, there is a new
direction that we took when we became independent, this
community powered media company direction. But again, with that
point that I made before about like, self similarity and things
being kind of fractal everything that we do, we run through a
heuristic because it's just me and my brother, right? And we
have a few really talented contractors. In fact, the person
who does our newsletter, who's our editor of our newsletter is
probably more talented than we are. She's written two books.
She's, you know, a journalist for The New York Times. But
we're still significantly, like under resourced to manage the
kinds of communications and informational volume that goes
through the indie hackers ecosystem, right? So look we're
seven years old. I think for six years, every decision we make
about features we ask ourselves, okay, like, what do we want to
do? And can we do that in a way that where we crowdsource the
content from the community itself? Eventually, in the
beginning, we were text based interviews with founders, well,
you can crowdsource that, right? You can create a questionnaire
that's templatized. And you can send it to a lot of people, you
can have very minimal overhead on that. We have product pages,
right? And so this is quite easily the most valuable asset
that we have in the entire and all of indie hackers. I think
it's something like 42,000 founders have created products.
They often share their revenue, that's like Stripe verified,
they give a bunch of updates. And they have a lot of data in
there. We're just we're choosing not to monetize it right now
because we don't have to and it is useful to the community. But
we had that switch to flip on. We don't touch it, right? We
look at it every month and oh, now there's 41.5, you know, 1000
people who have these things. The form itself is crowdsourced
so. And I could go on, we have a bit of a leader. We just have a
job board, crowdsource right, two sided marketplace, we have a
meetups widget. I don't mean to belabor the point, but
eventually going okay, well, media is the thing that is
really useful for a lot of our now business outcomes, were
selling ads. It kind of went without saying, okay, well, how
do we do this in a way where we don't have to hire a
professional journalist and you know, have to constantly manage
this really big editorial calendar, where every piece has
to be touched and approved by us.
Arvid Kahl: So you tapped into the already pretty strongly
existing capacity of indie hackers, founders, creators, of
wanting to share their story and wanting to share what they do
anyhow, that's pretty smart.
Channing Allen: Exactly!
Arvid Kahl: At the same time, you're also tapping into a
market that is very scrappy, and very unwilling to pay money for
anything. So I guess, no balance there.
Channing Allen: Yeah
Arvid Kahl: How do you deal with this? Like, how do you deal with
this innate inability to pay for things that you could build
yourself or that you could do yourself in the acquisition and
debts?
Channing Allen: Well, there's kind of two sides to that, which
is that, I think that on the one hand if you are, say, I hear
what you're saying if you're a developer and you're trying to
build developer tools, good luck. On the, you know, the
bottom line, right? Unless you're trying to sell it to a
company and you know, you're trying to get like seats for the
whole, you know, for all the developers there. You know,
these people are very frugal and they can build it themselves.
Everything looks like a ripoff to them. You want to build for
people who can't build and then what you build seems like magic.
But with us, we're fortunate enough that because we are a
place where a lot of developers go. And specifically a lot of
developers are trying to, are going to build businesses, there
are people who sell to businesses, who want to sell to
us to gain access to our group, right? So if you are to our
community, so if you have we you know, we have our newsletter.
The newsletter is a business newsletter with at this point,
we've pruned it down to like 80,000 subscribers. And like, if
you sell a developer tool, you probably have a lot of money and
you're willing to spend that money. So on and so forth. And
then I mean, if you take the, what I mentioned before the
product directory, even if we're not talking about selling to the
people who own these products, who are developers and founders.
If you're just talking about access, which we could shut off
at any point in time, right? As soon as we want to, like sell
out, right? You know, there are, let's say well known venture
capitalists and investors who have well known podcasts who are
in our DMS that are like, shut this thing down and we'll pay
you a lot of like, we have a lot of options because the business
ecosystem writ large in the startup ecosystem writ large,
has a lot of different parties to it, right?
Arvid Kahl: Yeah. And I think it's smart to go to where
there's actually profit. You know, nothing against indie
hackers, but most are onepreneurs. Most are starting
out trying to make it happen. So going to the places that supply
indiepreneurs that help them on their journey makes perfect
sense. Same for me, that's kind of how I monetize my media
empire as well. I have the newsletter. I have the podcast.
And I'm also trying to build actual relationships with
people, which is hard at scale. But people notice that,
advertisers, sponsors notice that. I've long had a standing
relationship with acquire.com for that reason, right? They
want access to the fine people that are listening to this
Channing Allen: Like Gazdecki, right?
Arvid Kahl: Gazdecki, right.
Channing Allen: Yeah, yeah
Arvid Kahl: One day, these founders will want to sell their
business. So you know, that's kind of a long play, which I
quite enjoy as an advertising strategy. It's just to put
yourself in there having a conversion, maybe at some later
point, but you're already there. I don't want to talk too much
about the find sponsor of this show, acquire.com. I wanted to
give you
Channing Allen: It's very flattering thing to say about
that sponsor, right? I mean, it's like the
Arvid Kahl: It's an actual relationship.
Channing Allen: Exactly!
Arvid Kahl: You know and you were talking about, like being
in DMS with people. That's exactly how that sponsorship
happened. It wasn't just, oh, yeah, we're gonna pay your
money. No, no, I was talking to Andrew. I had him on the show. I
was like, if we're gonna do this, I want to like what you
do. And I want to like what you offer and want to be aligned,
again, alignment, right? But let me just throw a compliment at
you because you talked about your product pages. And I have
to tell you this because I might not have told you this in the
past. But the reason that I sold my SaaS business and I'm now
Channing Allen: Yeah, we have, the amount of companies that
sitting in my studio doing whatever I want to do is because
we listed Feedback Panda on a product page with Stripe
verified revenue and we were found by a private equity
company there and that's where we started, that's when the sale
started with this feature that you still have and still don't
monetize. So just saying that, you're creating so much
opportunity here for free, which is
scrape that thing, you know, I get DMS every like month or so
who's like, you know, from someone that's like, hey there's
this company over here that's like monetizing, like, their own
database that just scrapes your database, like, do you want that
to happen? And we're like, hey, listen, you know, we could try
to stop them. But we really like we have to turn off the faucet.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah
Channing Allen: And like, it's just, you know, Merry Christmas
every day to everyone who for the time being is, you know,
making a living off of that thing.
Arvid Kahl: But that's what I really enjoy because it shows
you have like an abundance mindset that is still kind of
constrained by, you know, the capitalist endeavor to monetize.
But you see it as more at least that's what I think and correct
me if I'm wrong, but as an opportunity surface and larger
and not just a way to make like 20 bucks a month from somebody.
Right?
Channing Allen: That's exactly it. I'm gonna steal a quote from
Rupert Murdoch, I just read a biography of him and he's got
like, you know, the sort of the family dynasty and they've been
around for a long time. And with the benefit of kind of keeping
it in the family, one of the things that can be assured about
is that they don't have to go the way that a lot of
corporations do from quarter to quarter, trying to like reach
for earnings and make short term bad decisions that just, you
know, juice their numbers. And the quote is, he's like, we're
not in it for dollars, we're in it for decades. And I think that
it's a, you know, it's a nice bumper sticker. And a lot of
people would say that they could, but they can't, but we
can, right? We aren't necessarily financially hurting.
And so we get to say, okay, right? Let's just take for
granted that we're going to be around for the next five years,
let's take for granted that we're going to be around for the
next 15 years. What are decisions that we want to make,
that will a sort of serve the community the best? Again, I'm
not saying that to kind of be a kiss up or whatever. It's
literally we're like, we don't have to make money. Like we do
not have to make money from the community. And anything that we
do if even if I take the most selfish perspective on this,
right? I like to say things, I like to think out loud in public
through my writing about how things work and put them out
into the atmosphere. What better thing to own than a platform
that's thriving, that people have really goodwill toward it,
right? We can always put things on this media machine. And so
for us, the thought of like, what is it killing the golden
goose? Right? Any version of killing the golden goose, it's
like, hey, listen, that's our like, break glass in case of
emergency thing that we can do. Unless we can figure out a way
to have it be kind of win-win all around. But otherwise, yeah,
I mean, we have the privilege of being able to be abundance
mindset about it.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah. And I can feel this. I think it's very notable
both from your work but also just from how the community
approaches their work. It's kind of this infinite game thinking,
right? The idea that that's a game you can only win by keeping
playing that game and feels that you're of the same mind. You had
a wonderful thing you just recently said and I kind of want
to quote you on this because you said long term optimism for
difficult projects is made out of short term pessimism. That I
found very interesting because it's also like a long term
vision, you know, that's bright and open and a very, is
calculated look at the present. Can you explain to me first of
why you think so? And also where does it come from? What's the
actual thing that triggered this for you?
Channing Allen: Well, I think what triggered it is first off
reality. I mean, look if you do a project, many people that do
projects that are of a sufficient amount of difficulty
know, what's that there's like some eponymous law that you
know, time expands to fill the time that you
Arvid Kahl: Parkinson's Law
Channing Allen: Yeah, there's Parkinson's Law, then there's
what's the one that's like, if something can go wrong, it will,
right? And these are, I think it's Murphy's Law. These are all
ideas. Like if you build things, you just realize what we said
before, which is that you can design some outcome. You can lay
out your mental yellow brick road in advance, like shits
gonna hit the fan, something unexpected is gonna happen.
Sometimes it's a happy windfall, sometimes good things happen.
But if you do it enough, you just realize like, essentially,
if you internalize that right up front and you're like,
everything's gonna go wrong. And then you operate accordingly,
you often are going to front load whatever work you have. And
if you do that enough at the small scale, you're going to
have compounding wins, like just a higher percentage of
compounding wins and you'll be able to be successful in the
long term. And so I mean, to be a little bit more concrete about
this look, every single day, I have a plan. There's seven
things that I want to do, right? And those are kind of cross
discipline, right? There's some stuff I want to do for indie
hackers, have a great conversation with Arvid today.
You know, their stuff I want to work out, I want to work on my
novel, I want to have a good date with my girlfriend tonight.
There's a lot of stuff. With every new thing I add, there's
complexity and there's a chance that things aren't gonna go
right. And I've just learned that if I want to make those
things happen, it's useful if I wake up and I'm like,
everything's gonna go wrong, right? I need to front load, I
need to be really pessimistic about the day and then the way
that I kind of execute throughout the day, a little bit
anxious, a little bit pessimistic seeming to someone
on the outside, is going to mean that when something unexpected
happens and a wrinkle gets thrown into my plan, I'm two
hours ahead. Right? Well, I've already knocked the thing out
that was hard or I've already eaten the frog, so to speak.
Arvid Kahl: You know, I'm trying to internally because that's how
my mind works, rephrase it into something positive. I wonder if
you could just say, while you're leaving room to be pleasantly
surprised by almost everything?
Channing Allen: Sure
Arvid Kahl: It's kind of what that sounds like to me. I think
a certain level of just realism that is like pessimism
cautiously applied, in terms of these things makes makes a lot
of sense to me, particularly as we both are in creative roles,
right? Like entrepreneurship or media stuff, like all of that is
essentially being a creator or creative. So there's the
wrenches and stuff, there's sub O's that get thrown into the
gears, right? All that stuff is present every single day. I kind
of liked that. I liked that as a mindset because what it does in
effect is to prepare you for micro failures, right? It
prepares you for the little setbacks that you always get.
And this is okay. Yeah, sure. I thought that might happen. And
now with that, let's do something else.
Channing Allen: Yeah, exactly. And what I would say is, we're
talking about intentionality. I'm happy to share some details.
But I find that getting into some of the weeds of like, how
Arvid Kahl: Does that ever like exhaust you? Like it sounds like
individual people operate often is harder to communicate
verbally. But, I mean, I'm fairly, like systematic about
this. So for me, it's not just saying like, oh, you know, short
term pessimism, it's not like I sort of, I say it in the morning
and it's like, kind of my little affirmation. And then I do, do
that I just go off into my day and forget it immediately. Like,
when I'm doing my plan at the beginning of the day, like I
have a thing that's like, account for this, like I will
say it and I need to like actually stop. It's like a speed
bump and a bit of a reality check. And I'm like, how am I
going concretely, what am I, you know, how, what's the hardest
thing or the most uncomfortable thing in this list of like,
seven tasks? And, like, sort of implementing that principle is
like, okay, well, I'm gonna do this now. I don't really feel
like it. Yeah, but I'm not gonna feel like it at noon either,
right? And what I do is I try to do this in a way that scales up.
So I will plan my day. The plan for my day is drawn from my plan
for my week. My plan for my week is drawn from my plan for my
month and my quarter. And then I don't go any higher than that
because I can't see into the future. And for every layer of
planning, of multiscale planning, I do the exact same
thing. I say when everything goes exactly upside down from
the way that I expect it to, you know, how am I going to have
proceeded through this week in a way where I still get to the end
and I'm like, I want that week.
a lot of internal mini fear setting exercises that you do
all the time. Like I would assume that there are people who
just couldn't handle this. So I wonder, does it drain you?
Channing Allen: This is exactly one of those things. Like, I
wouldn't give that advice to anyone. I would just say, hey,
look at my Lego tower. Like this is my Lego tower.
Arvid Kahl: Yep
Channing Allen: And my Lego tower is, like I said, it's kind
of rigorous. It's nowhere near the far end of the sliding scale
of the amount of like, you know, go listen to a My First Million
podcast episode with what's his name? Rob Dyrdek. I mean, this
guy will plan his, he plans his bathroom breaks, right? It's
that level of slicing and dicing and analyzing his day. And then
you have people who are like caution to the wind. I mean,
look, Courtland, my co founder and my twin is the exact
opposite, right? He wakes up and he goes, well, what I want to do
today. I don't want to work today. Right? He doesn't,
another day, he's like, I just want to, all I want to do is
work. And I don't want to go to bed, right? For three days, I
don't even want to eat. Right? And he just does it that way.
And that's what works for him. And I think that there's a, you
know, it's, we're all kind of self expanders, we all, it's
very comforting to feel like the things that are difficult for me
are difficult for other people and things that work for me,
work for other people. And when you see, like, I've got a lot of
computer monitors. If someone like me sees other people that
have it, it feels really good. And we want to sort of expand
that. But I think that when you see enough examples of
successful people, one of the first things you'll learn is
like, oh, there's no fucking playbook. There's just no
playbook. There's an exception to every single rule. Just
because everyone is different. Everyone comes in to something
is, like I said, open ended as entrepreneurship. Everyone comes
in with their talents and their insecurities. And it's just a
different deck of cards, right?
Arvid Kahl: Oh, for sure. And it would be sad if it wasn't the
case. What world would we live in if we didn't have that
variety in the small just as much as we have it in the
sizable? What I wonder, like, could you imagine working with
Courtland if he wasn't your twin? You know, if you hadn't
built like a lifetime of coping mechanisms to deal with each
other's style?
Channing Allen: Well, you know, it's funny is, I don't feel that
we really got too much of the benefit of the lifelong coping
mechanisms because so for context, I mean, so we're
brothers, we grew up together and all we did was bicker and
fight. We're, like, you know, if competitiveness is a sliding
scale, we're both falling off the edge. We're just extremely
competitive people probably because of us, we probably self
accelerate it towards the cliff. And when we went to college and
we separated, he went to a different state. I went to a
different state, we didn't talk too much. And it was actually
the separation that enlightened us because now we're sort of
operating in these different social environments, how similar
we were in certain ways, right? How well we got along with
different sort of ways of communicating or collaborating
or standards or whatever it is. And then we kind of converged
again, but then, you know, so we moved to San Francisco. I'll
kind of go a breeze right through the story. But I mean,
we lived together. I was doing something. He was doing
something else. We still weren't all that close. It was
specifically starting indie hackers, where he's like, here's
what I'm looking for. You got what I'm looking for. Right? And
we started working together, where I think the only thing we
really knew was that I was not going to divorce him. And he was
not going to divorce me. And that we both are willing to do
what it takes to be successful. So like, those two things and
we're both like relatively smart. We both are technical. We
both know enough about business, like, you know, the soft stuff
was there. But I think the hardest, the most convincing and
useful stuff wasn't necessarily that we knew how to communicate
because we didn't. Like, we've had wars and we've learned so
much now. I think now we're great communicators. But that
happened after we've chosen to jump out of the plane together.
Arvid Kahl: You're making a pretty good case for going into
business with family something that people most of the time do
not suggest. It sounds like you Yeah, I love this. The mutual
non divorce agreement that you have going on, in many ways,
yeah, you can't. Like there's this bond between you guys that
is just irrevocable, right? You can't take it out, very
interesting. And if you don't have this kind of threat of
being pulled away from each other, you kind of have to make
it work. So what I hear you say is that you develop your coping
mechanism after the fact like as adults in the context of your
business now.
Channing Allen: have a challenge and we want to address that
challenge, particularly in the West, we think about everything
as like billiard balls. How will I knock into some other physical
object to make it work? And one of the things that you don't see
are constraints. So in other words, like, what are the
possible options that are even available to me? And in a sense,
what we had wasn't, you know, an ability to knock into each
other, like, you know, me set him straight when he's sort of
fucking up. Or if we're having an argument, we just know that
we had the tactics or the tools. What we had was like, straight
jackets, we're like, well, you know, here it is. It's you and
me, like, we've got this. We've got this, you know, almost
irresolvable conflict where I think we should go right with
the company and you think we should go left. But I guess
we're both sort of trapped in the car. And then we eventually
work it out. And we learn things along the way. And it's like,
again, it's a constraint where, almost certainly, I mean, I can
say this. I feel pretty confident about it, especially
kind of early on. If we didn't have this constraint, things
would have gotten kind of hard. And it would have been really
tasty to just be like, look, it's just this doesn't work,
right? You do this, you'd like doing it this way. I like doing
it that way. Neither of us wants to give in. And it's maybe
easier to just be like, you know, you take this part and
I'll take that part and we just walk away. But we just didn't
have that option. And then we evolved. And then now we don't
need the option.
Arvid Kahl: Do you still have constraints, though, in your
current state of the business?
Channing Allen: I don't think that there is such a thing as
not having constraints. I think that like, everyone has them
even if you don't see them. You know, certain people, they're
your friends, they are constraints that are invisible
to you, so on and so forth. But I think that we don't have the
same level of like intentionality about the
constraints. I think that we just like when you try to create
a new habit. At first, it's conscious and then increasingly,
it becomes this thing that's a matter of automaticity. I think
that with us, we kind of, you know, if there's a trigger of
some kind of a problem, we both kind of know, like, what the
protocol is.
Arvid Kahl: That's an interesting one. To me,
constraints from my personal experience as a developer,
reminds me very much of design systems that are adaptive to the
view that you take on it. That's where the constraint defines and
the content of the thing you do forms itself into the
constraints that you define. So I guess the question would be,
if you are not consciously aware of your constraints, how can you
become more aware of them? What is your approach for that?
Channing Allen: Well, I think the only real approach is to,
it's almost like I would take a step back and I would use like a
meta constraint in that sense of, like, you know, have a meta
design, which is that when you run into problems, I mean, what
I literally do is, I have a way of thinking about the world that
is based on, I think, the best design thinking. Have you read
The Design of Everyday Things by Don? So this guy is like one of
my heroes. He's in, by the way, he's like, 90, he's like in his
90s. And he's still writing up eds and thinking about design.
But in any case, one of the big points of emphasis on his book,
which was like, you know, smash hit. And by the way, before it
was called The Design of Everyday Things about design. It
was called the Psychology of Everyday Things because what
he's talking about is he is talking about designing human
systems for people to operate amongst themselves. And what I
took away from him that I applied to situations like what
you're referring to, is trying to get outside of your own head
with your solutions. And so with me, I largely took this from
him. I think about every problem that I want to solve as having
what I call the five T's and there's like, this is like sort
of extra mental resources that I tap into. One of them is like,
well, you know, what are the techniques that I might be able
to like implement in this situation? Again, that's like a
billiard ball knocking into another one that doesn't work.
What are the tools? What are the tools outside of myself? Right?
And even a book might be a tool so like, if we're having a
relationship issue, my brother and I and my girlfriend and I, a
friend and myself, I have in my head ideas, but like maybe I
should like consult something outside of my head. The other T
is territory like constraints, like what changes can I make to
my surroundings, my environment? Teams and teachers, so those
three things. I mean, typically if I have a problem and I don't
know how to march around it, I'll just kind of go down,
right? Again, techniques, tools, territorial constraints, teams
and teachers. And there's usually this is like a creative
constraint and itself, right? To think like, what am I missing?
What am I not picking up?
Arvid Kahl: That sounds like you're just externalizing or not
just, you are externalizing the perspective from which you then
try to look back at what you're doing in many different ways,
through people, through ideas, through teachings, through
tools. I like this. I'm a big fan of that because like zooming
out zooming back in, probably the best thing you can do in
many ways.
Channing Allen: Right
Arvid Kahl: But you need the space, right? You need the space
to be comfortable zooming out. And reminds me of something you
said when we talked about maximalism, to me that is
allowing space for multiple things and not just minimalism,
like a very pointy perspective that is just in one particular
kind of specific space. So I really enjoyed when you share,
like that picture of your desk, in front of which is sitting
right now because it reminds me very much of what I'm sitting in
front of. Like, you don't want to see the other side of this.
That's what I'm trying to say, right? And I found myself in
your description of this, like in maximizing opportunity,
maximizing, I guess that's the word,. Maximizing just the
potential of things, instead of limiting yourself to certain
things that sounds like your five T's belong into that category.
Channing Allen: Exactly. Yeah, yeah, well, the five T, you
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, it sounds like you're really just setting your
know, look, everyone has a different approach to life. And
I think that your approach is like the input. And then the
only thing you can, anyone else can really measure or even you
can measure is like, what is your corn? What does that grow?
What is the yield of that thing? And I think that that with me.
So I said this thing that I'm a maximalist. And I'm kind of
countering what I think is the fad is the culture now, which is
being a minimalist. But, you know, like secret, I'm neither
what I am is I just look at again, I'm a Lego brick builder,
right? I just, I take the Lego and plug it in. And I see what
works. And what I think I've seen specifically when it comes
to this is when it comes to like, you know how. So in my
case, for anyone who hasn't seen and I don't recommend that you
go and try to find it. But I have like three different
screens. I have two computers and a big display. And then I
have often like an iPad. I have a lot of different screens that
I use at my normal desk that I sit at every day because this
has worked for me. And so in that sense, I'm a maximalist. I
also use a lot of different software. I'm really big fan of
Notion. Notion is a bit controversial because people who
like simple things don't like Notion. It's got all these
building blocks and it's got databases and it's got all these
things that people can be overwhelmed by. And so in these
own constraints. Like you take them, you set them and you
senses, I'm a maximalist. But then there are other senses,
where I'm a total minimalist. I mean, I very rarely will post on
social media, that's a deliberate decision. I'm fairly
disciplined and fairly strict. So I mean, my and this is true,
my favorite app of all of the apps that are out there is one
called Freedom. And Freedom is just a website blocker. And it's
like, operating system wide. And at like a regular schedule
throughout the day, this thing is shutting off my access from
the internet and I have no choice but to like, get off my
ass and go to my gym and workout, go walk outside, right?
Go talk to a person, go touch grass, or whatever it is. And so
if, you know, it would be hard for someone to come in and like
archetype me, right? To reduce me to a thing. And it's like,
well, what's the decision rule that I go by? And the answer is
I just I try it. If it works, it works. If I try something, if I
add a new screen and then I get overwhelmed, I take the screen
away. If I try like kind of going with something that's kind
of simple and I feel bored or I feel under stimulated, I try
adding something else. And I think that what you end up with,
if you were authentic, that word that Cory Zue is, I think
rightly touches on is every single person will look
different than every other person. Right? And that's like,
you know what works for you.
Channing Allen: Yeah
Arvid Kahl: The social media thing is a great example of
this. Like, you're active, you're inactive depending on
change them over time as well.
what you want to do and what do you want to use it for? And that
brings me to the thing that I've been wanting to ask you for days
at this point because there was a thing that you used to do for
a long time that has stopped in June. And that's the podcast,
right? It's the anchors podcast, which to me, I looked at the
last couple episodes that I listened to and I thought, oh,
yeah, they had stuff going on. Who else are they going to get?
Like you got the best one. So you know, that's over. But I
wouldn't be interested in what caused you to kind of first off
not continue the podcast until today, or at least, as we record
this, there hasn't been a new episode for a couple months. And
if there maybe is a constraint that changed for you or a
priority or perspective?
Channing Allen: Yeah, I think all of everything stayed the
same. And then this was sort of a natural outcropping of
following these rules, just like creating a community powered
media company was the outcropping of the rule of
constraining things to crowdsourcing. And then now we
have a new one tweak, we have a new business objective. And so
that's, you know, sort of the emergent feature that we build.
Look, we have a constraint that, again, we're trying to do this
for decades, like we want this community to be here for
decades. And so if there is any element of just what our daily
lives look like, that creates what the rationalist community
is called OG Fields. Ever heard of this before? An OG Field
where step into and just like, right? If you soldier through
that thing on a regular basis, anything like that, it could be,
you don't like answering emails, it could be you don't like, you
know, it doesn't fill in the blank. And there's no reason why
it's going to, you know, that feeling is going to get reduced
over time, then it's just you're just setting a recipe for not
liking your job or resenting what you do. And so, I may be
oversold that because the podcast wasn't that for us. It
wasn't, it was just, it's a lot of work. We are, like I said,
we're very ambitious. And I think the easiest way to put
this is that everything that we touch, we want to make it
increasingly higher quality no matter what. We don't like
stasis, we don't like, you know, kind of keeping on the same
path. And that was the case with the podcast. And when we became
a business, we decided early on, like, hey, we don't want to sell
ads on this podcast, for reasons that may be worth getting into.
We sell ads against the newsletter. We might do website
ads. But number one, even long term, we don't want this to be
an ad sponsored, like an ad funded company, even the
newsletter right now, like we see it as we're doing ads. We'd
like to transition over time to having high enough quality
content that we have subscribers, then we have a
little bit more creative control and other benefits that come
with not basically ad sponsorship. And we didn't want
to do that for the podcast. And so therefore, a huge amount of
the growth to say the media company, what like we're pouring
resources into this podcast because we really care about it.
I mean, every podcast was more than a day of our seven days a
week, a lot of energy. If we have any kind of creative
differences, that's even more energy. We bring on Seth Godin,
we got to go bigger, right? Because we don't have we're just
not chill, we're not chill about that kind of stuff. And so we
had a decision to make, like, can we like we looked at the
mirror, which is really just to say we looked at ourselves as
twins. And we asked ourselves like, can we put this damn
podcast completely on autopilot effort wise? And we're like, no,
the answer is no. And so we didn't stop it. And like an
official, it's officially dead kind of a way. We're just like,
it doesn't make sense now. It doesn't feel good to pour
resources into it when we don't think it's justified from a
business perspective. And life has been absolutely amazing. The
site is growing, the newsletter is growing. I mean, all the
things that we care about are growing. But the downside is
people that enjoy the podcast, which is humbling. I mean, like
there's a huge reaction. There are a lot of people who really
liked that podcast, but it's like, you know, we got bills to
pay, we got contractors to pay.
Arvid Kahl: You describe this pretty well, like you talked
about like lifestyle creep and how you don't have that but you
have productivity creep.
Channing Allen: Yeah
Arvid Kahl: That feels like
Channing Allen: Absolutely, yeah, yeah.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, you can just overextend yourself into these
things. But if there are other things that you need to do and I
think that is the lesson for indie hackers. I think, even
though it is, I guess for many people regrettable because it's
a routine for them to listen to the podcast, which is why
podcasts are so popular, right? There's this constant retention
because consistency is there. But hey, if the absence of the
podcast means that you guys get to be a glowing example for how
indie hackers are allowed to pivot within their business,
then all for the better, right? I feel that's absolutely worth
it.
Channing Allen: Yeah. Well, and then, you know, so much for
Channing as a maximalist thing, right? This is another example
of minimalism. But like, again, it's not this and you know, so
this is you're exactly right. One of the huge benefits of
being an indie hacker is you get to make decisions that are right
for you. But like, even on top of that, part of the decision is
like, we want to do things that feel good, because we run the
business, the business doesn't run us. But it's also like, we
also were responding. I mean, it's a business. So you know, we
have people that work for the business and that care if it
does well. We have a strategy. So I posted a, we have a
flywheel. Right? For the media company, we've got a few other
revenue streams as well. And like those have their own sort
of self contained strategy. There's a sort of an overarching
strategy. There's a dynamic element where like, we see where
this is going and we kind of want to constrain things to move
them in that direction. So there's a lot of this stuff and
like when pieces don't fit, I think that just being a good
business owner, this isn't indie hacker specific, this isn't even
startup specific, is saying what is the business need? And then
doing that thing, even when it doesn't feel good. I mean, let's
be really clear. The podcast from a business perspective
didn't make sense for a couple of months before Seth Godin,
believe it or not. Maybe he's the one that got us going,
getting him on the calendar extended the life of that
podcast little bit longer than it should have been extended.
But you just like, I think that being a good founder is saying,
well, I really love coding. But right now coding isn't needed.
So I'm going to take a left and I'm going to go talk to people
or it's all you want to do is talk to people but it's like,
hey, this, you know, the faucet is leaking. You gotta go screw
in, you know, you got to fix the components of the actual
business, you got to like, do what is required. And I think
that that's ultimately like the thing that, that's the North
Star that led to us, temporarily for the time being, not having a
podcast that's active.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah, do the things you need to do. So what does the
business require? What does indiehackers.com need in the
next couple months or years?
Channing Allen: Need is a strong word. Indie hackers is going to
be fine. How would we like to have it grow? And what are some
of the challenges? Look we're a media company. And it's funny, I
mean, this is a moment in history and the history of like,
you know, the modern internet, where, like there's kind of a
media bloodbath, right? People don't trust media. A lot of
companies that have gotten that have a lot of funding are going
under. It's not easy to run a media company. And so, I mean,
for us, it's relatively simple. I mean, we have community
contributors, people like you. You've contributed. One of the
things that you mentioned is true, which is that the people
who read, say the indie hackers newsletter, the people who come
and try to learn from the indie hackers homepage are all highly
intelligent, highly self motivated people who are
building things. And the people who want to contribute also
happen to be people who like have a good advice, right? Cory
Zue, what he was talking about, which is that in a sense,
Twitter seems to be devolving into a cesspool of people who
are sort of just professionally just trying to get content out
there. Indie hackers is, you know, our community is filled
with people who have like real things to say because they have
scar tissue and they can talk about it. So getting the word
out that we are a platform that will give those people that kind
of win-win like eyeballs and people who are following them
and learning from them. And for us, obviously, that's more
content, right? That's us being able to provide that value to
the whole community. That's a piece of the puzzle. We have a
lot of technical things to do on the site that are a little bit
more boring. We have advertisers, many of who for you
know for the newsletter and other situations to build. I
mean, it's all just I mean, it's just like building software. I
mean, I could just name the very specific things that we need to
do that are highly well defined. And it's just about like
stacking bricks.
Arvid Kahl: Yeah. Lego bricks. Right? Always more Lego. Well,
thanks for sharing this. And thank you for also sharing many
of these things in public. I think you do a lot on Twitter
now, which is really cool for somebody who doesn't use
Twitter, using Twitter pretty well and sharing the flywheel,
for example, to just get the insight as a founder, as a media
business person myself. Let me just selfishly say this into
your thinking and your planning, which compared to mine, I'm kind
of more like Courtland in that way. I wake up and whatever,
right? So
Channing Allen: Yeah, no, thank you. When I think about I mean,
Channing Allen: Yeah
Arvid Kahl: It's nice to see somebody who actually has
thought about stuff and crystallized it into a shape to
this is again, going back to Cory Zue, but I've thought a lot
then share it. I really appreciate that. And what I feel
about this. I've had conversations with a lot of
and what you just said about the future of indie hackers is that
you're striving to go for alignment over everything else,
people that are kind of like private rant conversations right
right? You're not looking for the shortcuts, you're not
about I mean, it's kind of no secret that it's sort of easy
looking for the massive scam based sponsor revenue kind of
thing. That's not where you're at. You want to build the place
these days, for example, on Twitter to have a bit of a
where people can trust other people. I really appreciate that.
formula to the way that you craft a tweet, right? We have
this term of thread boys, right? Like there seems to be a sort of
a path that you can take and a way that this sort of just hit
me, I think I was taking a shower. And I was like looking
at the water going down the drain. And I thought to myself
that almost like the shape of a lot of people who are only say
on Twitter to gain more Twitter followers to get more
engagements on Twitter. They start to sound a lot like each
other. And they don't produce new things or new styles. And it
almost like the collective shape of their content on the internet
is like a drain, it's like a whirlpool and it goes into
itself. And what I think you want is you want the opposite
shape. You want people to go out into the world away from this
body of water and learn things, get scar tissue and then come
back and then drop that wisdom into the poll. And then it will
be a ripple that goes outward, right? It'll be new to everyone.
And then it will sort of what we say about indie hackers being
dead, right? Indie hackers, if it goes sufficiently mainstream,
it's no longer this isolated, unique thing. It kind of just
dissipates and becomes part of the texture of things in a
sense. I love the idea of Twitter posting there. But if I
write stuff, like I feel this urge to try to make it ripple
content as opposed to whirlpool content.
Arvid Kahl: I love that. And I'm glad you took the whirlpool like
the shower drain and not the toilet drain for this particular
visual, it is very, but in many ways it immediately brings to
mind and yeah, that the water that goes down that drain is
dirty. Right?
Channing Allen: Right
Arvid Kahl: Like a spring is fresh and clean and cold and
interesting. So I like that visual. I really appreciate it.
And I do like what you do on Twitter. You're just
authentically yourself and you're not like leaning into
these games quite like this. So if anybody were to want to
follow you on Twitter, even though you probably won't follow
them back.
Channing Allen: So by the way, I got a it wasn't a nasty DM. But
it was like a kind of a hurt DM from someone whose starpower is
much bigger than mine. They're like, hey, I follow you. What
the fuck? Yeah, he seems kind of arrogant. And I'm like, no, no,
no, you're on my list. So I have Twitter lists of people that I
follow. And I almost like want to like publish this list and be
like, hey, look, I'm following tons of people. But again, it's
for me, it's 100% goes back to intentionality. Like, I don't
want to open Twitter and then for Twitter to tell me who I
need to like see. I'm very easily distracted. And it's hard
for me to like to choose not to see it. So I like to have those
situations where I'm like, okay, I'm now going to look at the
list. Now, and you're on that list, I should say. I feel
obligated to say it's true.
Arvid Kahl: I really didn't mean to put you on the spot with
this. Of course, you have a list like otherwise, how would you
interact with people on Twitter? Right? And that's the thing.
Channing Allen: Right
Arvid Kahl: That makes a difference. So if people want to
That's one of the big problems that Twitter has, just a new UI,
even. If they could show how many people you follow through
lists, then you would you would see probably 1000s of people in
your account and Pieter Levels too, right? He follows a couple
and he used to follow zero same deal like he was still
interacting with the community. So you might unfollow them. But
even better on a list at least you're going to be read so
get onto this list, where should they go?
Channing Allen: Just @channingallen
Arvid Kahl: Sounds about right.
Channing Allen: And I'll try to be a little bit more active.
Like I said, my job dictates it, but also the freedoms of my job
dictate that I get to lean a lot more into ripple content than
into toilet flush content, well, I'll call it. And I'll say one
extra thing about it. And this is a thing. I also, I mentioned
this to a friend who saw the way that I was doing Twitter and
specifically was like how they mentioned like the authenticity
and like the bravery. And I feel like this is more apt to people
who are entrepreneurs and indie hackers than anyone, which is
you have to keep in mind that you can either stand out or you
can fit in. And all of us want to do both of those things. And,
you know, with me, I don't go onto my page and do like
clickbait stuff. I don't say contrarian things to get
attention. But I do a lot of things that are highly unique to
me. And with those things, like I am super trigger happy. And
like, I do think that if I do something that is me and I feel
secure about and it's like weird, for example, like the
bullets going to be out of the barrel immediately, sorry I used
a gun analogy. But I mean, it's like, that's gold, right? Like,
that's me. That's a way that I can sort of be me on blast. And
I think that I know through direct experience, like I've
helped people write copy for tweet and I've seen them write
copy for like headlines on blog posts and stuff. And people will
often significantly neuter and make things safe because they're
kind of afraid. And it's like, dude, no, like, if there's an
interesting, unique thing that's a little bit edgy. Like, you
know, your post is going into a feed filled with other
interesting things like, don't be afraid to stand out.
Arvid Kahl: That is definitely worthwhile advice. Let's just
say that, coming from a person who has and that's the thing I
really enjoy about you and your presence not just on Twitter,
generally. It's actually very reflected. And you found ways
that work for you. I think a lot of people have not come to this
point yet. And they choose like the safe path. But in choosing
the safe path, they choose no path at all. Because
Channing Allen: Exactly
Arvid Kahl: They just don't show up, right. So I'm really, I feel
grateful to be part of your universe, right? To see things
that you share to be part of the conversations that you
participate in. And I'm extremely grateful that you were
here on the show today and shared all of these wonderful
things with me. That was awesome. I really, really
appreciate it.
Channing Allen: I think, as I said it before we started
recording, I think, but it feels really good to be on this side,
right? I don't have to worry about like, the editing and I
don't really like you know, I don't have bad hair days. I
still have hair. But I don't have to worry about it almost
anything. So I just get to show up and give opinions.
Arvid Kahl: And I would not trade the extra effort of having
to do a little editing for getting this wonderful
conversation with you today. Thank you so much for being on
the show.
Channing Allen: Yeah, yeah, thank you.
Arvid Kahl: And that's it for today. I will now briefly thank
my sponsor acquire.com. Imagine this: you're a founder who's
built a solid indie hacker SaaS product, you acquired customers
and everything is generating really consistent monthly
recurring revenue. That's the indie hacker dream, right? The
problem is, you're not growing anymore for whatever reason,
maybe it's a lack of focus, lack of skill, lack of insight into
the market really or lack of interest, maybe you don't care
anymore. You feel stuck in your business and with your business.
The story that everybody wants to hear what you do now at this
point is that you buckled down, you reignite the fire, you start
doing marketing and sales, and outreach and working on the
business, not just working in the business and six months down
the road, you made all the money. You tripled your revenue
and you have this hyper successful indie SaaS business.
Reality, unfortunately, is not as simple as this and your
situation, the situation you might be in right now is looking
different depending on who you ask and who you look at. Too
many times, the story here ends up being one of inaction and
stagnation until the business itself becomes less and less
valuable over time, or worse, completely worthless. So if you
find yourself here already or you think that your personal
story is likely headed down a similar road, I would consider a
third option and that's selling your business on acquire.com.
Because capitalizing on the value of your time today is a
very smart move if you're a founder with limited time.
Acquire.com is free to list. They've helped hundreds of
founders already. So go to try.acquire.com/arvid and see
for yourself if this is the right option for you.
Thank you so much for listening to The Bootstrapped Founder
today. You can find me on Twitter @arvidkahl and you'll
find my books and my twitter course there too. If you want to
support me and the show and I would really appreciate that,
please subscribe to my YouTube channel, get this podcast in
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It really makes a massive difference if you show up there
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And that matters if we want to teach each other how to be
better indie hackers. Any of this will help the show. Thank
you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day and bye bye.