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Interviewing indie founders about their journey and their products. itslaunchday.com
Dagobert Renouf (00:01)
Hey, ya ya, nice to meet you.
Yahia Bakour (00:03)
Hey Daggerbird, how's it going?
Dagobert Renouf (00:06)
It's doing good man, you're my third call of the day and I am not tired yet so I think we're gonna be fine. ⁓ So where are you based actually, where are you located?
Yahia Bakour (00:18)
I am in New York, like proper New York.
Dagobert Renouf (00:21)
Wow, that explains the amazing painting behind you. Super fancy. Okay.
Yahia Bakour (00:26)
It's
honestly some generic, I'm gonna we work at the moment. it's like.
Dagobert Renouf (00:30)
Okay, okay, but
that's I don't know that gave me like a cool vibe, you know so well you're in we work in New York that sounds like The start-up life from the movies, you know sounds like the real thing
Yahia Bakour (00:44)
Somewhat, I mean it's one of the nicer ones here, so it's like pretty crazy view actually. ⁓ yeah, normally wake up early, work on stuff, and then transition. actually have a day job, so I do that after.
Dagobert Renouf (00:57)
wow, what's your job?
Yahia Bakour (00:59)
I, it's a bit weird. It's a, there's a solar company in the U S it's like the biggest one. I work in engineering there. So it's like AI automation. ⁓
Dagobert Renouf (01:15)
That's interesting because your product we're gonna look at after, it's about, I mean, it seemed like it's about design, about brand, not just design, but like, I had a very strong design feeling when I looked at it. And so, there you're telling me you're an engineer, that's interesting. So you have both kind of skills.
Yahia Bakour (01:35)
Yeah, I mean software engineers, that's the same thing. Yeah, exactly. ⁓ yeah, no, I'm super like my background, super product focused. So I think I have a semi decent eye for like design, making stuff look decent. And it actually makes sense. ⁓ but yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (01:38)
No no, yeah, you're not making rocket ships, but still.
So how did you get there? So is it your first indie project? How is that for you?
Yahia Bakour (02:05)
no, I've been building stuff for a while. I never actually like, I'm trying to get into posting on X now, but I have mixed feelings about it because it's like the first product I ever worked on actually did work out. We, we grew it a bunch, ended up selling it. I'll talk about it in a moment, but we did that all without me having an X at all actually. like
Dagobert Renouf (02:14)
Cool.
Yahia Bakour (02:29)
did not post about it on on accident, even like tweet at all. In fact, I was on the Indie hackers podcast and then they asked me, do you have a Twitter account? So I made one. And then when they shouted it out, I got like a hundred followers that day. I'm like, oh wow. This is like kind of cool. Yeah. But then never did like capitalize on it. So it didn't really grow all that much, but yeah. So first thing.
Dagobert Renouf (02:44)
That's a good start, yeah.
But so what's
the thing that, because I totally get it, ⁓ X is not for everyone. So what's the thing that makes you a bit ⁓ not sure about it?
Yahia Bakour (03:05)
I don't know, like maybe it's the echo chamber I'm in, but it feels like everyone's just selling to each other. And it's like, there's a whole world out there. So it's very easy to get zoned into like, okay, these are the only people I can sell to versus go post on Reddit. Or if you go to like these weird avenues, like Quora or Pinterest, you can reach a much larger audience of people. guess even LinkedIn works pretty decently.
Dagobert Renouf (03:12)
yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, LinkedIn, I think LinkedIn is one of the best for sales. You know, what I like about X is kind of now, now it became so fucked up in a way that it's really about having fun more. Like you can be more degen, like you can just be like, I don't give a shit because it used to be more like LinkedIn, kind of like LinkedIn now. It's kind of like Twitter five years ago, a little bit.
Yahia Bakour (03:35)
Yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (03:59)
Even though it's still like a bit LinkedIn, which is a bit serious, which is okay, but just not my vibe. like, I feel like now the value of X, if you want to grow your company is going to be more like, you can meet other founders, you can find partnerships, you can have opportunities. And also you can build up authority. Because it's crazy, once you start getting 1000 followers, or even one day 10,000 or more, it like...
Yahia Bakour (04:27)
Mm-hmm.
Dagobert Renouf (04:29)
It's super easy to get invited on the podcast. People will just invite you. When you're having some authority on X, then it opens all these doors for you. That is quite awesome.
Yahia Bakour (04:44)
Yeah.
I've noticed that what seems to be working for me, like I've been trying out all these things, the usual hustle porn definitely doesn't work at all.
Dagobert Renouf (04:53)
yeah, yeah,
Yahia Bakour (04:56)
Whenever I solve a hard engineering problem of some sort, I had a memory leak for about a week where I was diving into it every day. It didn't have to be really simple solution, but I posted the six things I actually learned. Four of them were just saying use gem outlock for memory fragmentation, but that worked out really well and people really liked that stuff. So I think...
providing, for me at least, what seems to work is like finding actual value. Because I don't enjoy shitposting as much as you do. It's definitely entertaining when you do it though.
Dagobert Renouf (05:27)
Yeah,
thank you, thank you. Yeah, it's very new for me. For years I was like way more careful with everything. Yeah, it's just that, yeah, it's really good that this example of posts you mentioned, because when you do some very deep, more insightful posts, like X is a lot of smart people also, like I think, you know, on average, and so it's really cool. It's a...
It's crazy how it's still surviving, despite Elon who basically kicked out half of the people because they were more on the left political side and he completely alienated them. So he kind of did everything he could to destroy it, maybe even though I don't think that's what he wanted to do.
And it's still there and there's still the people, know, and it's still, you know, when you try like threads or there's not the same vibe. So yeah, so, but it's a, but it's this mix of personal and professional that's, that's, know, cause LinkedIn is just professional or like personal, but like in a way that's super like, you know, ⁓ you know, it's a show kind of like, you know, yeah, yeah, very curated. Yeah. So.
Yahia Bakour (06:27)
Yeah.
It's very curated. It's like, this thing that they, ⁓ do you remember
that, that LinkedIn post that went viral? like, got married this weekend. Here's what it taught me about B2B SaaS. That's the perfect way to frame LinkedIn in my opinion. ⁓ but yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (06:51)
Yeah, it's my favorite, Yeah, yeah. I
made a joke on Twitter the other day that I probably shouldn't have made it, but some guy I know and he's kind of like, know, we know each other. So he was like, wow. Like he was talking about his best friend who's dead, who died. That was super sad, like really. But, you know, when when my mom died, my best friend, was making jokes about it to help me, you know, so.
And so I made a joke like, what did it teach you about B2B sales? Yeah, so that's the vibe of Twitter. know, that's like you're pushing beyond, you know.
Yahia Bakour (07:30)
Yeah, that's
definitely a hot take.
Dagobert Renouf (07:33)
Yeah,
yeah. Anyway, okay. So you're in New York, man, I wanna go to New York. I've been to the US seven times, I've never been in New York, can't believe it.
Yahia Bakour (07:45)
Yeah, it's
I've lived in, think all the interesting places in the U S like I was in went to school in Boston and then lived in Seattle, LA, Vegas, et cetera. New York's the only real city. Yeah, was very brief stint, but New York's the only real city in my opinion. So just come here and, you know, go maybe go to California if you want, but yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (07:55)
You lived in Vegas? Wow.
Yeah, I've been to San Francisco a few times. ⁓ Florida, also Colorado. But yeah, so why you mean real city?
Yahia Bakour (08:17)
Like Boston public transportation, think is a close second, but in terms of actually getting around here, because I don't enjoy driving, for example, or like the density or, you want food at like 11 PM and you can go out and it's not like dead streets, right? There's still life. Yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (08:35)
So New York is like this, it's really like,
okay, vibrant, okay, cool.
Yahia Bakour (08:40)
Yeah,
I think it's everything you'd expect, just a bit grimier. But I like that. I think it's... Yeah, yeah. You're in France, so yeah, Paris.
Dagobert Renouf (08:45)
a bit dirtier, bit kind of like, France is
like this, Paris is like this, you don't expect it, yeah, I see, wow, cool. Okay, so you have a job, engineering job. ⁓
And how did you go about building what you're building? Because it's about branding. And my previous startup was about branding. Don't know if you know that, but my previous startup was about ⁓ branding. ⁓ And I found it hard to sell branding, maybe because I was selling to indie makers and I should have aimed for B2B or higher. What?
Yahia Bakour (09:30)
It's actually
not, ⁓ sorry, this probably means I need to update my landing page, but it's a brand data provider. So the idea is that let's say you are normally a lot of these B2B SaaS companies, they will reach a point where they're like, I want to add a personalization feature. I want.
Dagobert Renouf (09:39)
Yes.
Yahia Bakour (09:51)
customize my onboarding or some PM gets the bright idea that instead of like rewriting their onboarding, let's just pre-fill data. Cause it does impact the conversion rate. Like it actually reduces your drop off.
Dagobert Renouf (10:02)
You know, I saw that on the landing page and it's not a problem. I have noticed myself. So I'm curious if you have an example and then I'm sure I will get it.
Yahia Bakour (10:10)
Yeah. So
right before brand dev and before this job, I had actually built this tool called essence that I was like AI customer research. was when tragedy was going hype. and one thing we needed to do was when someone signs up, it's like, you need to make the product look super custom because you're showing them you need the product, super custom, they need to fetch information on the person who signed up. like,
You need them to enter their apps, for example, so you can pull their reviews and analyze them, et cetera. ⁓ but if you tell someone to paste the link, the vast majority of people like somehow misconstrue that they're like going to paste the wrong link or type in the wrong thing or miss format it somehow. it's a lot easier to prefill it and then say, Hey, is this you? Right. And then you just click yes page.
Dagobert Renouf (10:45)
Mm-hmm.
100 % yeah.
Yahia Bakour (11:06)
or for example, we noticed people were dropping off on the signup page where we had like a put in your logo, put in your name, put in your description, et cetera. ⁓ like a lot of these AI products, they need context when you're going in, right? They tell it like, let's say you're building like a.
Dagobert Renouf (11:22)
Mm-hmm.
Yahia Bakour (11:26)
social media scheduler for companies, right? So you need to generate content for that company. You can do log in on Twitter or if someone logs in with their email, you already have their domain from their email. So you can just pre-fill the entire page and say, this, edit the content and click next, or just click next right away instead of having to ask them to enter the whole thing. It's like a niche problem, but it's still.
Dagobert Renouf (11:29)
Yeah.
No, no, no,
that note, I'm actually thinking, wow, this is much better now when you say it this way. And so I'm thinking, I'm thinking maybe you could say just brainstorming.
Yahia Bakour (11:58)
I need to redo the left-hand page. can't, yeah, it's...
Dagobert Renouf (12:09)
like the goal is to optimize, like the value I get is like, because when I your landing page, I'm sorry for hosting you, but I think it's okay. ⁓
Yahia Bakour (12:17)
Go for it.
Dagobert Renouf (12:21)
it seemed like, I mean, I just didn't get what problem it was solving. I saw what it was doing, but now when you tell it, I'm like, yeah, that's what it solves. And so I think it could be maybe something like, improve the conversion rates of your onboarding, like stop losing people that onboard, like that's just because what you told me, you have way more context, maybe there's a better headline, but.
Yahia Bakour (12:44)
Yeah, there's like,
it's, hard cause there's maybe four main use cases and my current customers are split across all fours. There's also like, I don't know what this class of business is called, but I call it directory based businesses. Like it's launched. They could count as, at it as is, although you're super, ⁓
personalized, but let's say, you know, product hunt, for example, the moment you that's what I call it, directory based business. Cause it's like a directory of businesses. the moment you enter, let's say you're signing up for product hunt, you want to add a product. Um, you type in your URL. Imagine if it pulls all of the info right there. Right. Yeah, exactly. I also pull the backdrop. So like the Twitter header or LinkedIn header or those images. So can make it look really nice.
Dagobert Renouf (13:13)
Yeah.
the logo, the color scheme, everything.
Wow.
Yahia Bakour (13:32)
so there's a lot of those businesses, immediately see the product. know what it's used for, et cetera. Like I've received two types of reactions. There's yours, which is like.
Dagobert Renouf (13:39)
Yeah.
Yahia Bakour (13:45)
went over your head because also probably a landing page problem, not a you problem. But then there's this other reaction I get, which is if you have the problem today, like you literally have it top of mind and you look at it immediately at light bulb clicks and you just pay me. Yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (13:58)
yeah, yeah. 100%. Yeah, I get
it. Can you show us? Because I'm like, now I'm curious. I'm like, I'm curious to see.
Yahia Bakour (14:07)
For sure.
So I'll load up the landing page so people can see what you're listening to. Also, if anybody has a suggestion for the landing page, please let me know. This is in the bane of my existence, redoing this. But on the bright side, it's pretty.
Dagobert Renouf (14:15)
Yeah, what I was hosting. ⁓
Yeah.
It
is, it really is. You know, I respect people who can use something else than inter font, you know, so you have my respect for having more interesting font, but like the design itself, my God, the way you can, like this kind of like, shit, I didn't even see that, that he could move. So cool. Yeah.
Yahia Bakour (14:49)
Yep.
⁓ there's a landing page. These are all actual customers. And then these are the use cases. It's you can pre-fill onboarding. You can enrich transaction data. like, let's say you have, I have an API where you can just type in a transaction line statement and it'll actually find the company. So you can make it look pretty and actually make sense. Right. Like this looks a lot better than this for any type of financial apps. ⁓ this is
Dagobert Renouf (15:05)
Yeah.
Amazing. Yeah,
so that's a good example. If you have a financial app, can automatically, for a lot of the transactions, detect the name and using your API, show the logo in the list of transactions, for example. That's a good example. Yeah.
Yahia Bakour (15:27)
Exactly. sometimes the transaction, yeah,
some transaction identifiers do have the domain in there. So that's perfect. But some of them don't like Canva will be like Canva 999. Obviously Canva is a very marketable name, but still.
Dagobert Renouf (15:40)
Yeah, but
you have a database that you can somehow, you have it to match it somehow.
Yahia Bakour (15:47)
I just added a Google search preprocessing step. It's not that.
Dagobert Renouf (15:51)
No, for sure. No,
I get it. still, you know, it's and do you have like a list of use case on your landing page, like in the home page, like a link, like use case studies or use cases or stuff like this?
Yahia Bakour (16:03)
I
have case studies on there. Like it's on the blog right now because there's only two people tend to want to also I've realized people sign up, use up their free credits, convert, and then they set it and they disappear forever. I mean, they keep paying, but they like, they just don't want to think about it. Yeah. It's great. Except when you need a case study. it's like, bro, please.
Dagobert Renouf (16:18)
That's the perfect, that's the perfect customer. That's.
⁓ You
need to catch them in the first week or something. ⁓
Yahia Bakour (16:28)
Exactly.
but also the one that bugged them before they converted. it's, it's like a, it's a fine balance. but yeah, so like one other use case that's super exciting, you know, all these like AI ad makers, like they're like popping off now. Everybody's building one. ⁓
Dagobert Renouf (16:31)
No yeah, make sure, Yeah, I get you. And also, yeah.
Yep.
Yahia Bakour (16:45)
Obviously to create an ad for a company you need to know their fonts their colors there you need some base assets So this use case super proud of have a few companies using it. They're all startups though. So it's like If they succeed they'll you know upgrade etc. But if they fail and roll over the company I lose a customer so I'm like Yeah, but like the idea is you get all these assets and you can make an ad
Dagobert Renouf (17:06)
and they're likely to fail.
Like take me through, because I read that example and since I'm not in ads business, but it's okay because I'm not the target. So it's like if you want to make an ad for somebody else, no, or you're the ad maker website. Okay, you're the AI ad website. And using your API, if somebody says, I'm making an ad for PayPal, you get all of these assets and data inside for free.
Yahia Bakour (17:30)
Yep.
Yeah, so it's like
the idea is if you want to build some type of tool that uses visual data to generate some assets for someone like a lot of these new startups trying to do, you need context ⁓ and you can ask your customer to upload it or you can just pre-fill it and ask them next. It makes the onboarding super smooth.
Dagobert Renouf (17:49)
Yeah.
And so how does it, ⁓ wait, two questions. So how big, how many companies in your database, like how big the company needs to be to be found?
Yahia Bakour (17:59)
Yeah.
I think.
it's anyone.
I test with product hunt and they NYC like daily basically at the moment I have 10 million companies in there, but about 50, 50 million links because what I also do is I, I can geek out about this for a while. So feel free to stop me. like you'll find, yeah, you find a company, you find all of its social media and like you need to fetch the assets from the social media as well.
Dagobert Renouf (18:16)
⁓ okay.
Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
Yahia Bakour (18:35)
But also some people on social media will just say like, my website is Google. So you need like a bi-directional link between the company and the social media somehow to make sure it's the right official social media. So like, that's why it's five times as many links, because I have a bunch of socials as well that I fetch.
Dagobert Renouf (18:45)
Mmm. Yeah.
I see, And I don't know, but like just...
Not sure it would help, maybe putting that, I mean, again, I'm not the target. So since I'm not the target, maybe it's not a good advice, but like putting that you have all of this company data, like the number somewhere, like a big number showing like 50 million companies in our database. Because since you give only big examples, I was assuming maybe it's only like a thousand or like the top companies. So just giving you that feedback. Yeah.
Yahia Bakour (19:03)
Amen.
Okay, now that makes sense. ⁓ I can also show you the portal. I'm gonna revoke this API key after just in case it leaks anywhere. I just deleted the line. That's why I switched back and forth. ⁓ I did not prep this demo as I told you, but the idea is you can say type in like, let's say, Nike.com, right?
Dagobert Renouf (19:33)
Okay, okay, cool.
Yahia Bakour (19:48)
And then you'll fetch like Nike's info, their address, colors, slogan, description, fonts, logos, et cetera. And what's cool is there's obviously the get brand API so you can fetch all the brand data. Also all of their socials, like if you want those for whatever reason and any apps, et cetera. But there's some other APIs like this one super proud of recently launched. Only have one person who's used it so far. It's like hard to market, but
The idea is, say I'm going to look, sorry, need to look up launch days.
Dagobert Renouf (20:17)
Yeah.
over on the screen.
Yahia Bakour (20:26)
No, no, that's fine. checked this out right before. I'm not like, fine. But we could try out a few new ones. But like the idea is, let's say you want to fetch this style guide for its launch day. it'll actually, yeah, I know. Right. Yeah. It, obviously this was pre-cached, right? That's why it was super fast. It'll take like, if it's a cold hit, like 15 to 20 seconds. yeah. So yeah, you can fetch the entire like style guide. And the cool part is.
Dagobert Renouf (20:35)
Holy shit, how did you get that? my God.
Yeah, but it's okay.
Yahia Bakour (20:55)
So there's this problem that everyone in this, there's very few people in this space. It's like me and one other companies is the actual, ⁓ like legit competitors, but there is this problem where let's say you want to fetch fonts for a company, but the company uses a custom font. So they have like legal, it's like a legal gray area because you can't pull the file.
Dagobert Renouf (21:17)
Yeah, yeah. No, yeah, I agree. Yeah,
I know. Yeah, yeah.
Yahia Bakour (21:20)
So
what I do instead is I find font approximations for completely legal usable ones that are probably built into your system. So you might not actually use enter, but your font looks like enter. It probably is.
Dagobert Renouf (21:28)
and
I really love that. I understand why you're proud of it, because that's the kind of attention to detail. Man, this is great. And you you said there's only two people in the space. And I remember when I was, my branding, ⁓ that was a logo generator, but that was really branding focused. So we asked questions about the values. We were asking you, ⁓ and maybe you can stop sharing when we talk, because that will help me.
Yahia Bakour (21:59)
yeah, I got it.
Dagobert Renouf (22:01)
⁓ And the
we were like asking questions, like crazy questions. Like if your startup was an animal, what would it be? You know, like 10 questions. And then at the end we were like, okay, this is your brand personality. And then based on that, so my ex, who's both my ex-wife and ex-co-founder, ⁓ she was like, yeah, yeah, we can talk after, but we were married, we were together for a long time, and we also built this startup together.
Yahia Bakour (22:24)
How was that? ⁓ Let me talk to you about that after.
Dagobert Renouf (22:35)
⁓ for five years. And she still runs it now, but mostly I just wait to get freelance work. Because she's a designer, she's a brand designer. And we had this thing where it would automatically, like she had prepared, ⁓ because it was before AI also, like fonts that match your brand personality, color schemes, and...
Yahia Bakour (22:47)
Mm-hmm.
Dagobert Renouf (23:01)
she had designed more than 800 actual logos that would like, know, and we would, I would, and I was a programmer and we will pair everything to make something that was relevant and people, you know, we didn't find enough cause he would, we wanted, we made something automated. So we didn't sell it expensive anyway. We sold maybe 800 or 900 logos. That's not so bad, but ⁓ you know, ⁓ anyway, when I was working on that, I remember
Yahia Bakour (23:12)
Mm.
Dagobert Renouf (23:31)
there was a lot of startups coming up around this idea of managing your brand guide. And it was very B2B focused. Let's say five years ago, seven years ago, very B2B focused. You can upload your brand or generate your style guide. You input the data of your brand and then it gives you the PDF of everything so you can send to your partners, to your employees, whatever. And it was very B2B focused.
But, I remember not getting it because I was more like less B2B. ⁓ But that makes me think of that, that they were making a lot of money with that, with that B2B thing of like, you know, solving a very niche problem. But, I mean, it doesn't matter, like it's niche, but like if there's only you and one guy, you can totally get it, you know, you can totally make it.
Yahia Bakour (24:19)
Yeah, that, no, that makes sense. I did. That idea has been floated to me multiple times. The thing is with my current life lifestyle, right? I have a job, et cetera. I need a business where it's like, I it's low churn and technical. Like there's like that sweet spot of
Small enough that big companies won't go after it. Big enough that like any random Joe with like cursor can't build it. ⁓ it's like super technical. So it's a pain in the ass and like it's in that sweet spot. ⁓ dude, it's like there's, looks super simple, which makes people just like, like it's deceptively simple, but the idea is.
Dagobert Renouf (24:48)
Yeah. What was the most painful thing? Just curious.
Yahia Bakour (25:01)
Within, you know, I think the P50 is like 13 seconds for a cold hit. I scrape five links, including social media, which needs like a good proxy. I use a headless browser as well to like render the page, grab whatever I need. And then you take all of the logos, you need to filter out junk and then dedupe them as well. So there's like image processing, et cetera. I'll make whatever other network calls you need to make and then format it in return like very quickly. So it's like...
Dagobert Renouf (25:23)
Yeah.
Yahia Bakour (25:30)
The image processing itself has been the biggest headache because that was what I like. You can end up in these weird scenarios where for Nike, right? You have the swoosh, but the black can be like huge or the swoosh could be big or small, but it's the same swoosh, right? So those three logos you saw underneath, it's actually 12 being deduped into that. I have to like crop images, take them, do like deduping on them, which involves like a
Dagobert Renouf (25:34)
Yeah, I see.
Yeah.
Wow, yeah.
Yahia Bakour (25:59)
to call it. I wrote a whole blog post on it but it's there's an algorithm called p hash it's like perceptual hashing to check for duplicates across images but you do it lightning fast. Really cool if anybody has this problem like you need to check for duplicate images but yeah it's like a whole thing so
Dagobert Renouf (26:08)
Awesome.
And so you said you didn't have the sweet spot, you think? You think it's not the sweet spot for you, this kind of product?
Yahia Bakour (26:23)
Brand dev is perfect for me because it hits all of those. It's super technical. It's interesting for me to work on. And people really love it, the actual customers who use it. And very low churn because once it's in their tech stack, they don't know. The only problem is extraordinarily slow growth. It's like...
Dagobert Renouf (26:38)
Yeah, yeah, And you cannot really replace it anyway, you have to use it.
Yahia Bakour (26:47)
Get a customer, they try it out, they have to have the problem today. Once they use up their credits, then they convert, et cetera. It takes a while and it's not like you can't just really run ads or...
Dagobert Renouf (26:58)
And
I guess the difficult part also is like, you cannot really poach a customer because once they have their solution, they're probably not going to change it. So you have to find them before, but still they need to be ready. So it's like, am I right? Like it's like a small time frame where you need to get them.
Yahia Bakour (27:17)
Yes. It's
like there's exactly, I mean, I have had a bunch of people move over from homegrown solutions because they're just like, you know, we have expensive engineers and it's a pain in the ass to maintain and there aren't many alternatives. we're all being like, there's only two me and someone and we're getting pitted against each other. And it normally it's like, at least obviously I only have the perspective that people end up choosing me, but they say it's better.
them.
Dagobert Renouf (27:44)
But you
can, that's interesting, you can get the people who are having a ⁓ custom made solution, because that's a pain in the ass.
Yahia Bakour (27:51)
Yeah, yeah.
Cause like the headache of maintaining it is not worth it. Cause normally you're using it for one small part of your product. It's not your whole product, right? Yeah. So it's like, it's like,
Dagobert Renouf (28:00)
Yeah, you could even potentially even
not use it sometimes if you were really, yeah, it's like improving your product, yeah.
Yahia Bakour (28:06)
Yeah.
I'd say it's the same exact style as, as Demetro's screenshot API. Like it would follow the exact same model. It's like same type of customer, obviously different needs, but ⁓ yeah, it's like that probably would follow a similar journey to him.
Dagobert Renouf (28:14)
Yeah.
So I hear in your voice a bit that is it how do you see the future for that? Do you see yourself keep working on it? I guess so, but like... ⁓
Do you feel like it could go big? How do you feel about it? ⁓
Yahia Bakour (28:45)
I think for this type of thing, like obviously would never raise with, you know, but I could see it growing quite big over time, mainly because, like I said, there's, it's low churn, slow growth, but people right now, my customers recommend each other. like founders, when one has a problem and has this problem, the other one immediately recommends it. And it's like a slam dunk use case. So.
Dagobert Renouf (29:08)
Yeah.
Yahia Bakour (29:11)
Right now it's in the beginnings of that curve of like, okay, get enough people to recommend more and more people. I think it's going to be, it's going to take a while, but yeah, no, I'm happy to work on it. Like it fits perfectly with my lifestyle at least.
Dagobert Renouf (29:27)
is when I saw when you showed the product, made me think, because you said it's for any company almost, like it could find launch day, is, no, but launch day is tiny still, so if it can find launch day.
Yahia Bakour (29:37)
Yeah, you,
you did 10 companies right now and you have this like the whole reason I think launch day is super cool for me. I actually watched a lot of them.
Dagobert Renouf (29:50)
You're the second person who says this and that motivates me so much because that's what I want to make. think we can make this kind of like, it feels like a community but like I think like in every day we're talking and I think that, I don't know, I'm glad you said that.
Yahia Bakour (30:05)
Yeah,
exactly. Cause it's, think what, what, you know, if you went down the product hunt route and it was just like a hundred things launching today and it's all like, there's a lot of AI slop and it's like very low effort. I would probably stop watching personally, but the fact that it's like, okay, this guy picked 10 things that coming out, it's worth taking a look at. Like it's definitely the fact that it's small and the fact that someone had to commit 30 minutes to an hour of their time to be on a call makes it like interesting.
Dagobert Renouf (30:17)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And pay also, so it filters the real low quality. But yeah, but my thinking was like, it's not about launch day, it's about your API, I think, since it works with almost everybody, every product, it means there could be, I don't know, I feel like it could create a new type of web where
Yahia Bakour (30:35)
Yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (31:01)
anybody has a personalized experience somehow. For example, if you're Product Hunt, so not me, like, you know, ⁓ and you have lots of products, I mean, everybody who signs up on Product Hunt with their product, they could immediately have the customized CSS of Product Hunt. I don't know, it may be probably not a good idea, but like in brainstorming, when I saw your API, I'm like, wait, we could have personalized everything on the web for people who are founders.
Yahia Bakour (31:22)
Nah.
I have a one page doc with a mission statement stuff, but the tagline is personalize the web, or personalize that scale. the idea is, that's the vision, is like, okay, everything feels super personalized, but you need to start small and start individual use cases. So I have like...
Dagobert Renouf (31:38)
Yeah.
Yahia Bakour (31:51)
know, five APIs, I showed you two, which is like retrieve and style guide. There's a screenshot API as well. Sorry, Demetro. I told him I'd be competing on this, there's industry classification, et cetera. But over time, that is the vision that eventually I'd create some type of SDK where somebody just plugs in their API key and it can auto pull stuff and you can integrate it into your app really easily.
Dagobert Renouf (32:00)
No, no, go ahead.
But you know,
that just, I'm sorry, I'm just excited because I love to geek out about this also. But like, you know, like Apple that just released their, you know, glass thing, that glass UI design.
Yahia Bakour (32:17)
That's up for you.
there.
Dagobert Renouf (32:27)
And that's like the last, mean, hopefully they don't, they keep using it because I think it was quite cool. like, you know, for 10 years, web design is super boring. Like it's just like tailwind UI, super boring style, super generic, which is valuable because at least it's understandable by everyone. That's the goal. But that's uniformization and Apple, like what they did with this, I forgot the name, but like, you ⁓
these glass designs, it's like even the last step of that where the UI basically disappears and there's no UI. And that's one way, but when you tell me this, I'm like, ⁓ it could be every UI is generic or has like some, like doesn't decide on colors. And everybody even beyond brands could have their own, okay, this is my style and every website, every app is adapting to that somehow.
Yahia Bakour (32:54)
literally fly.
Dagobert Renouf (33:21)
That would be cool. That could be another evolution of UI design.
Yahia Bakour (33:26)
Yeah,
I've built like a lot of, I've built a lot of stuff before BrandDev, some of it has worked, of it not, but in all of those products, I've ended up at some point where it's like, okay, it would be cool if this just looked like the customer. Like people love to see their own colors, they love to see themselves in a product, and it kind of adds a pizzazz factor, yeah.
Dagobert Renouf (33:43)
Yeah.
Yeah,
Wow, this is cool, man. I love to talk about branding, ⁓ So yeah, so your vision now is just you're gonna keep this job and you're gonna work at this on the side because of the slow growth. And what's your vision? Like what's the next big thing you wanna add on this product?
Yahia Bakour (34:05)
So I do have a whole list of things that I'm gonna do. Product wise, there's some table stakes stuff. I'm adding an is NSFW field so you can detect porn brands, because you might not want to render them. So that's super important. Industry classification on its own is a whole, there's a bunch of companies competing just to do that. So to do it semi-right, ⁓
Dagobert Renouf (34:19)
Yes.
Yahia Bakour (34:32)
Because there's, for example, NYX is one classification code. has like 10,000 types of classifications. It's a mess. SIC is another one. NAICS. So if ⁓ you're working in an insurance tech, you need to classify companies into one of these codes by the SEC provides. So that's like a whole other industry that is super interesting to get into.
Dagobert Renouf (34:40)
Which one? You said night?
Okay.
⁓
Yahia Bakour (34:59)
⁓ and it built a basic API to do it and it works decently. It just needs improvement, but there's this whole industry classification portion working on there's new fields, like industries that make sense for people. Like you would love to know if someone who signed up for your product is a B2C, B2B company. Is it like a crypto company? Like what is, who just signed up? Right. And yeah, classifications that actually makes sense. And then I'm have a list of things that I'm going down. A lot of them are.
Dagobert Renouf (35:18)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, okay.
Yahia Bakour (35:28)
Table stakes like just improving the portal, et cetera. But I'm building two side tools based off BrandDev. And one is going to be, like I said, an AI ad maker just to show that this is doable. Another thing is, I bought the domain BrandDivore, but I just need a demo tool to show the data in one place. So you can type in any.
Dagobert Renouf (35:51)
So it's like
side project marketing that also serves as demoing the use case. That's cool.
Yahia Bakour (35:55)
Yeah. ⁓
That's short term and then long term I'm keeping open just because as I get more customers, they actually start giving me more requests. So I'm like, okay, as people come in, I'm just going to respond to them rather than build an asylum.
Dagobert Renouf (36:13)
That's awesome. I like that it's a long-term thing. Because, for example, I know someone that I started at the same time with when I did this logo startup seven years ago when I started working on it. And he's still in business doing the same product. Like he's just brand guideline management software.
Yahia Bakour (36:30)
What's it called?
Dagobert Renouf (36:32)
Brandline.is because it's in Iceland.
Yahia Bakour (36:38)
Okay, interesting. I've never heard of that.
Dagobert Renouf (36:40)
And he's like freelancing.
Wait, let me check if that's, no, that's not that. Let me find his email.
And let me see, Brandline something, what's the fucking name? he had the weirdest Icelandic name, how the fuck can I remember that? ⁓ I think I'm not gonna remember. No, no, no, it's interesting to me to remember. Okay, I'm not remembering right now. ⁓ And you know, he's just freelancing, doing brand design for people, for companies, and he sell them the solution to them.
Yahia Bakour (36:59)
That's not...
Dagobert Renouf (37:17)
And now he makes so much money from it now. I mean, not so much, but like a second or two times his salary or something. Or one time, I think. And that's something once they're in, they're in. Because his customer is going to be like a design agency or marketing agency. Once they're in, they're not going to churn.
And so it's like the opposite of like the, you ship fast, you see what happened and then it dies, or it could be slow. And then in 10 years, it's still going, even if you don't touch anything. And that's kind of cool.
Yahia Bakour (37:46)
Yeah.
I think there's also something nice about businesses that grow slowly because it also like these days, the moment something works and somebody posts an MRR chart on Twitter, you're to have like five copycats the next day. So the, the fact that it takes a while is pretty great because it forms a bit of a mode. like, okay, was slow for me. It's going to be slow for you unless you do something super novel, right?
Dagobert Renouf (38:01)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, Exactly, yeah.
Yahia Bakour (38:13)
Yeah.
I worked on a pro like my first product. was called stock alarm. It's like a stock market alerting tool. And I remember when I had started, do you still go on IndieHackers.com? Yeah, it kind of, I don't know what happened, but it's going down the wrong direction for sure. The vibe is that it's been murdered. ⁓ the homepage is like unusable. I haven't logged out in a while.
Dagobert Renouf (38:21)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
No.
The vibe is gone, the vibe is gone, 100%.
Yahia Bakour (38:43)
But I used to post there and as we hit, I think we hit 15K MRR and then we started seeing these crazy copycats show up where it's like, they just copy the exact same ⁓ app store landing page, right? Like word for word.
Dagobert Renouf (38:54)
my god, yeah, never.
Yeah, well, I never had that with
my previous product, which is probably a bad sign. But okay, no, hear you. Well, that was awesome meeting you, man. That was really cool. I'm very glad you made it in lunch day because I was like, are you sure it's going to be okay for the audience, but you still wanted to be a part of it. And I'm very glad about that because it was a really cool conversation. Yeah.
Yahia Bakour (39:21)
Thanks man, thanks for squeezing me in on short notice.
Dagobert Renouf (39:25)
Yeah, 100%. So good luck for your launch day and speak soon.
Yahia Bakour (39:31)
Have a good one.