Navigating the Startup Landscapes – Courtland Allen – MicroConf Starter 2018

0:00I was goin cool finally up here wow I've been hiding out my room trying to finish this talk all microc off just recently finished it we'll see how this goes so I am Carlin Allen I created nd hackers comm and I work at stripe they actually bought any hackers it's been a year now since we announced the acquisition at last my comp it's been great highly recommend stripe so what is ND actors for those of you who don't know and the actress is a community of software engineers and founders and entrepreneurs and micro goth attendees apparently who are all helping each other build their businesses so we've got a community

0:50forum where people will describe their specific challenges give each other feedback on their landing pages and just a general help each other build their businesses I've done 50 podcast interviews with founders so they've asked how they got to where they are today and what kinds of things make their businesses tick and I've also done about 300 interviews with founders just like you every one of whom has shared their revenue numbers their growth strategies their marketing strategies their business model their goals etc so that you guys can go read and learn from what they did now one of the things I've recognized with these founders is that

1:23most of these are success stories most of these founders are making hundreds of dollars a month or thousands or even millions of dollars a month but every one of these founders failed and they failed and they failed and they failed again before they finally got to the point where they succeeded and as they failed they learned things like the way that they viewed the startup landscape the way that they viewed the challenge of starting a business ended up different after each one of their failures and experiences than it was before so I'm gonna try to attempt to do today is help you guys skip a few steps

1:53hopefully skip a few of these failures by imparting a few experienced founder mental models onto you so you can sort of see the way and see the world the way that some of these experienced founders do rather than having to repeat their mistakes now we'll see how this goes my my approach is going to be talk about four different landscapes four startup landscapes each of which is a metaphor for challenge that you'll face as a founder growing your business and it doesn't really matter what your goals are doesn't matter if your goal is financial independence if you want creative freedom if you want the time to

2:27work whenever you want if you want to be able to work from every location you want no matter what it is you're more likely to get to your goal if you have the right mental models for visualizing the challenges in front of you so without further ado let's get into it first one I'm gonna talk about is the startup runway it's the most basic of startup landscapes but I thought I'd spruce it up a little bit because this doesn't really quite get across how dire and importance landscape is so we'll call it the startup runway of almost certain death you don't want to go off this runway right we run away is a

2:57representation of how much money you have left in the bank so run it's a representation of how much time you have left until your business is dead and ultimately how do you navigate this landscape how do you never get a runway well it's pretty simple right the goal is to reach profitability to become cashflow positive at least before your company runs out of money right you want to take the plane off before you get to the end of the runway and you do that just the way do you think you would so a pilot will always measure the distance between the front of his plane and the

3:24end of the runway I don't know the capabilities of explainin how powerful the engines are how long it takes to take off probably know exactly you know the capabilities of his plane and how long it takes to take off and we'll add some buffer as well right it's just in case he goes over and the entire time the pilots going down the runway love his eyes on the end of the runway to make sure that he can make adjustments to the controls and the speed so it can take off right this is what every pilot does so they don't crash the plane on takeoff and it's what every founder

3:48should do with their company as well but that's not quite how it works out so let's look at some examples of how not to do this exhibit number one me in 2009 I just graduated college and I won 25k and a business plan competition which was enough for me to last one year so I got a one year lease on an apartment in Boston I said let's do this thing and I spent the next year writing a lot of code I built a product I was refactoring it was coming with great designs I've got a bunch of landing pages I wrote unit tests and I even found time to launch

4:18about 11 months in I launched my product it did pretty much everything in my list except for charging money for a product to customers and after the end of the year my startup was dead I ran out of money how could this have happened right I had no idea this was coming I was as shocked as anyone now you guys are at Microsoft you guys understand you should probably charge money for your product you should probably know how much runway you have and adjust you know your plans to make sure that you get to your goal in time right but I think after this talk go out

4:46in the hallway talk to some other founders ask to them you know when was the last time you calculated your runway when was the last time you adjusted your plan based on how much money have left in the bank now do you have a graph showing your runway and I think the answers might surprise you so that's a good look at exhibit number two was my buddy Chris Chen he's a company called insta painting we did y combinator together back in 2011 I think Chris got $120,000 as a solo founder which he somehow made blast for three years so let's see what Chris has to say about

5:12how he navigated the startup runway of almost certain death he said I survived on my various ideas and pivots for about three years I just spent an absurdly long amount of time pivoting he had a social music startup who didn't charge any money for it said but as I ran lower and lower on cash my ideas would start focusing less and less on building social music apps and more and more on how to generate revenue immediately right so he's a pilot on the runway he was like oh I should probably try to take off and then I ran out of all my cash I was four thousand dollars in debt

5:40so I had to put up the website for my last idea to collect money I created tested and launched it in just a couple of days I put that page up on Reddit and in two weeks I've made over $2,000 in sales so it took him two days to launch a profitable product after spending three years pivoting right and this is why I call it the runway of almost certain death because he actually went off the runway he was in debt and he somehow pulled up and survived so it's it's not the best way to navigate this landscape but it's certainly better than what I did so it's like it's got a pro and see

6:08what a pro does this is max live in he wants a company called grammarly with this co-founder I had the pleasure of having max on my podcast and I asked him you know max you're an experienced founder you've had an acquisition before you build a successful company before the co-founder how long did it take you guys to reach profitability with grammerly he said less than six months it was very quick it was very quick because we had a really solid plan for how to get there we didn't know who was going to buy our product so we tried to sell to institutions to organizations individuals at the same time to see what

6:38works better and eventually figured out who their target customer was and by the time we finished building version 1 we had a pipeline of organizational buyers about lined up so I thought this is very impressive impressive I asked max like how did you know this is what you should do why did you do this and he said necessity we realized that building this product could be really hard and really expensive so by the time we were done with the MVP we'd probably be out of money all right so this is a pilot on the runway who's measuring the distance between his plane in the end of the

7:04runway he's realizing my planes not gonna make it I need to change the scope of my product I need to shrink it so it can actually fit with me a lot of time I need to change the order of operations and do sales and marketing before I continue building my product so I can reach the end of the runway and they ended up taking off well before the end of the runway and navigated this landscape perfectly so that's exactly what you want to do if you're on the startup runway of almost certain death but I have a secret for you which is that you don't have to navigate the

7:28runway of almost certain death you can buy a helicopter right you can just take off at your leisure whenever it's whenever it's appropriate for you and how do you do that right how do you get one of these helicopters well the secrets to realize that the runway of almost certain death is really just a metaphor for burning through cash and if you don't want to burn through your cash don't quit your job about 30 percent of the founders that I've talked about any hackers started their companies this way they didn't quit their jobs they built their business while they were working a full-time job while they were working as a consultant

7:57well they had a services business or worked as an agency and they were fine right and I can already see a lot of you looking at me like Courtland I don't have time to build a business on the side of my job right I worked 40 hours a week I got a family and got a wife I got kids I got hobbies man I've five maybe ten hours max every week towards my business I can't get done what I need to get done in that amount of time I need to be over there I need to be on the runway of almost certain death if I want

8:21any chance of surviving I don't know that's true I think that's necessarily a good idea I think you should instead take a page from max Lipman's playbook and instead what you should do is plan right if you don't think that your helicopter is able to take off in five or ten hours a week then what you need to do is actually adjust your plan and your model to fit within the constraints that you have allotted all right you need to shrink the size of your helicopter right change the scope and the ambition of your product change your launch strategy and actually adjust to the time that you have so you can take

8:47off and those five or ten hours a week and interestingly this is the exact same skill set that you need to navigate the runway of almost certain death it's the same thing right even if you're on the runway runway you still have time constraints you still have to change what you're working on you have to make sure that your strategies actually gonna work within the allotted time and I think if you have a lot of trouble developing the skill set to do that on your helipad while you're at your company it's probably not the best idea to quit your job and bet your life savings that you're suddenly gonna

9:12develop a skill set while you're on the run waves of almost certain death so let's go to our next landscape this landscape has to do with ideas a couple weeks ago I found her on the indie actress forum made a post and he said hey everybody after a year of looking for an idea I've achieved nothing ouch it really sucks a year's a very long time it's been looking for an ad and achieve nothing and it wasn't for lack of trying he had a beautiful cello board set up you dozens of ideas in his cello board and you put them in the first column and sort of shift them along from column to

9:46column as he tried to validate them and some didn't make it and somebody said these were just bad so it never made it to the end and some of his ideas are really good ideas and the only problems that they were very obviously good ideas by the time they got to the end of his cello board he realized that somebody else was already working this idea they already had a product built they were targeting the same niche that he was targeting they had a team that are making tens of thousands of dollars a month in revenue and he would get discouraged and toss the idea out and I could really relate

10:10to what he was I think people here in the audience can probably relate it's hard to come up with a good idea right and a lot of the best ideas you come up with someone else already stumbled upon it and people will tell you well that's just normal right and too bad because you can't brute force coming up with ideas you know you have to sit around and wait for inspiration to strike you you can't really force it if you try to force it you're gonna come up with bad ideas and you know I really don't like that advice I don't think it's true I don't think it's very inspirational

10:35I think you need to learn to come up with ideas I think part of running a business is constantly coming with ideas it's not just at the beginning how do you build an audience you need ideas for that how do you decide a product you're gonna work on you need ideas for that how do you know how to launch successfully well that requires ideas what happens when you exhaust your first marketing channel you need ideas for new marketing channels what happens when you've completely saturated your first target customer segments you need to find a new target customer segment and that requires ideas as well you never

11:01stop coming with new ideas throughout the lifetime of your company and so it's important for you to actually develop a skill right you can't just sit around the shower and hope for ideas to strike you it's very passive it's not very inspirational and kind of boils your business down to luck which I think all of you guys want more out of your business than that well you need to do is actually figure out the right levers to press to increase the ability to come up with creative ideas that are actually going to work and you know the right mental models in order to do that and

11:25for that I like to use the landscape that I call the Eldorado of ideas so Eldorado is like this mythical Spanish Kingdom full of gold if you indulge me for a second just imagine a landscape that's full of some clipart I found and put together imagine that landscape is just full of hills and rivers and valleys and trees and if there's just millions of golden nuggets underneath that landscape and there's also thousands of people shuffling around with pickaxes and shovels and pans trying to find all this gold right now El Dorado represents the market the gold represents good ideas and the people what the pickaxes are all

12:00of you they're all the founders in the world looking for good ideas to work on I think if you imagine coming up with ideas sort of in this framework you you come to a couple of insights first of all what does it mean to come up with ideas that are obvious right what does it mean when the ideas that you come up with are good but everyone else has already discovered them well in El Dorado what that means is that essentially it's gold that everybody else is found right this is literally surface-level bold surface-level ideas that's so obvious then anyone walking around is gonna pick it up right and it's not a very good

12:29strategy for coming up with ideas because ultimately when you go into work every day when you go into the grocery store when you're sitting in your house looking out the window the chance is that you're going to spot some gold that nobody else has picked up or tiny it's almost impossible for that to happen and it happens every now and then right you can go on any hackers and read stories of people who come up with ideas that they just randomly discovered but if you could see the denominator if you could see the vast number of people who are going through life and never hit on any

12:54really good ideas they never discover any gold that someone else hasn't already taken you would see that the ratio is not very much in your favor it's not a great strategy for finding ideas and I think you should be more deliberate than that another strategy you'll see is what I call the shallow diggers these are the people who actually take their shovels in El Dorado and they dig a hole and they take a few steps cuz there's no gold there and dig another hole and they just keep doing this all over El Dorado hoping to strike some easy gold right there's someone on the indie actress forum

13:21who came in every single day he was kind of a spammer every single day you would come and post like two landing pages and you wouldn't say anything like I made this landing great check it out and he eventually stopped coming to see Bo complained but his whole strategy was to dig these shallow holes he would just find the new industry make a landing page cross his fingers hope that something happened and nothing ever happened right maybe if I make 100 landing pages a year and don't really do any research or look into it people will like my idea it's not a great strategy for finding ideas and it's not what I

13:45recommend I think what you wouldn't want to do if you if you do this you end up spending uh pretty much all of your time sort of traveling around Eldorado sort of traveling around the market and that breadth really you should exchange for depth right instead of searching far and wide this isn't more of your time digging deeper and so what does it mean to dig deep right what does this actually mean digging deeper basically means you're actually getting your hands dirty right you're digging deep into a part of the market you're understanding those customers you're trying to empathize with them and understanding what it's like to be them it means asking

14:15questions like who are these people right where do they hang out what do they like what do they buy what do they not like what are they not by where do they get their news where do they get their plot of recommendations it means you're actually digging deep and a part of the market and getting to know these people and the thing is not very many people do this once you start digging deep you start uncovering all sorts of gold that other people haven't found because it's not on the surface and you'll come up with more creative ideas and you'll build a better product as well when I was working on any hackers I

14:43spent three straight days just reading hacker news and a lot of people here on accra news three days reading achenes it's not a pleasant experience but as a result I learned a lot of things that people in hacker news liked right I understood what kinds of things they wanted to see in interviews I understood that I needed to include transparent revenue numbers and that's something that nowadays seems obvious but back then I had no idea you know was that I was agonizing over this people would say no I won't do an interview for your site because you forced me to share your revenue numbers then I would read

15:08hacker news and people would hate on anyone he shared a story and didn't share revenue numbers right there's been a lot of interview sites before Indy hackers that have done interviews entrepreneurs and many of them didn't dig deep enough and I didn't know what people really liked and didn't know people didn't like I mean that's what you should do for your products as well dig deep and understand your customers actually care about you build a better product and you'll figure it'll figure out gaps in the market they're not really serving what these people want and what these people need what if I wanted to come with a new idea right earlier on I said

15:35you never have to stop coming with new ideas for your company it's not just the initial idea it keeps going let's say I wanted to expand Indy hackers to focus on indie game development not just you know bootstrapping a startup what would I do I would dig another hole all right go back into Eldorado that's a different part of the market that's a whole different idea even though it's similar to the current indie hackers but I would dig another hole and another strategy you'll see an Eldorado that I don't think works very well it's people who refuse to dig they say you know what I've got pretty good intuition for the

16:02gold is I know exactly where the gold is I'm gonna build my house ski area cuz I know I'm sitting on a gold mine and then it turns out that there's no gold there they didn't do any digging didn't talk to their customers they didn't figure out what people actually wanted right every single time you have a new idea you need to you need to dig at stripe stripes a company worth billions of dollars you know people at stripe do they come up with ideas and they talk to customers a lot when they're doing new things they don't just use their intuition if that's good enough for

16:25stripe it's good enough for all of you so if I wanted to build you know a new segment of indie hackers for indie game devs I would find out when the game does work I would find out where they live I'd find out where they hang out online if I know what they like I'd ask all the same questions go through the entire process again and my interviews would come out probably different I would ask different questions they would look different and hopefully they would be successful as well finally where should you dig in Eldorado you know you need to dig deep you know how to dig deep and by

16:51the way if you're if you want like more information on that go to a me holy site stacking the Briggs bricks she's got a lot of information she got sail safari it's great on the questions you should ask and where to find people like this where should you dig I have my own personal thoughts and where I want to dig right I want to dig where the money's at Justin Jackson gave a great talk the other day and he was talking about how he was selling products of snowboarders who didn't have any money right ideally you should be in a business that has money a friend of mine started a website

17:16key values it's basically in the hiring space for developers companies pay a lot of money to hire developers it's absolutely nothing for a company to give her three thousand dollars to feature their profile on her website because they're gonna hire engineers as a result of it right she's digging in a place where money actually exchanges hands and it really helps alright there's all sorts of other questions she can put on here I made this list of questions in literally five minutes just preparing for this talk I think you should go make your own checklist right you don't need to look at my checklist you can make

17:41your own chocolate something about what you want and a business what do you want do you want to make money do you want we're gonna feel that you like right wherever you dig it going to determine the next five years of your life feel like if you get into this business if you decide you want to start a company because you want creative freedom and then you decide to dig in a spot in Eldorado where there is no creative freedom and you're gonna be unhappy with yourself in five years if you want more time soon with your kids but you start a customer support intensive business you're gonna be

18:05unhappy and it's gonna be a tragedy so I would say put a lot of thought at least a few hours and to come in with your own checklist for where you want to dig an Eldorado and then dig deep and don't spend all your time digging shallow holes or just guessing where the gold is so let's talk about growth for a little bit third landscape is called the climbing wall of growth any talk about growth and startups and tech and businesses usually starts with a slide like this right this is all startups grow it's an exponential growth curve and when I talked to founders were a little bit less

18:34experienced it's interesting to see what their mental model is of that explains this curve usually it's something like there's an explosive happening at the beginning right this curve is so smooth and it's so continuous that it must have been the result of some sort of rocket ship launch right it must've been the result of some sort of amazing viral growth hack and after that you know the company just rode the wave and it was smooth sailing all the way up to the top right and the problem with this at this point of view is that you actually go looking and you go looking at example stories you find a lot of corroborating

19:04evidence right how did hotmail grow well they just put a link at the bottom of other emails and said sent by hotmail and after that they went straight to the top you know Airbnb they got professional photographers to take photos of their their people's apartments and then smooth sailing from there right yelp put badges on their websites and they went straight to the top of Google Dropbox right who could forget Dropbox and their infamous referral strategy they get free space by referring a friend after that Dropbox fired all their marketers and everyone in growth and they just grew to the top cuz it was smooth sailing right and it's

19:34not just like these like high-growth tech startups it's Andy hacker type businesses right you can talk to read Nathan Barry story of convertkit right well most people come away with from reading his story is that Nathan Barry just quit all of his other stuff and did direct sales and made you know 100 X times the revenue right it's very easy to believe in these very simple stories and the problem is when you do you're buying into sort of a lie it's never this simple very rigged maybe one out of a million businesses as a simple grow test it's that simple and it probably won't your company I think a much better model

20:04for envisioning how growth happens as a climbing wall who here has ever been to a climbing wall or knows what a climbing wall is all right climbing all the way it works is you start at the bottom you climb the way to the top one step at a time and I got a secret for you there is no magical viral growth step at the bottom of the climbing wall that will launch you straight to the top does it exist Lisa I had never been to a climbing wall that had that climbing the wall is hard you have to go one step at a time it's not easy these people are

20:30really good every single step takes effort every single step takes your attention and if you stop climbing up the climbing wall you'll stop progressing it doesn't just happen automatically you shouldn't trust that it will I think a lot of experienced founders are well aware that growth is kind of a slot that they're gonna run into roadblocks and have to figure out new solutions and a lot of any experienced founders aren't aware that this is what's gonna happen so this isn't the whole story whenever you see a growth curve looks exponential you say wow this must have been the result of one thing remember that underneath this there's a bunch of

20:58people there's founders as employees we're working to solve problems they're working hard to make that graph continue to go up into the right and if they were to stop at any point in time the graph would level off so let's go through an example this guy here is Jason Griffith he's one of the first people that I interviewed on indie hackers he's the first person that I had on the podcast I talked to him last year about his business submit hub now Jason's story is that in 2009 he started a blog called an indie shuffle I talked about a lot about the semi round table groups he ran this

21:27blog for seven years it's a music discovery blog so he would find indie music people who liked any music would subscribe to his blog because he had good taste and he grew it to many hundreds of thousands of visitors every day eventually Jason realized he was getting 300 email pitches a day from artists from publicists for musicians who said please put my music on your blog right they wanted to get discovered the real estate blog was popular they were emailing him and it was driving him insane right and so Jason had the bright idea that he's gonna start a business right he started a SAS business called summit

21:58hub or for a small fee you could submit a song to his blog and you would guarantee to get a reason why he would or would not feature your song on his blog it was like a dollar to submit now by the time I interviewed him Jason was making fifty five thousand dollars a month in revenue only a couple years after he started his business and we shared the story on Hacker News and what do you think people on how can you said said I can't learn anything from this story all right Jason already had a successful blog and it was smooth sailing from there the only work he had

22:26to do where all the calories he burned from laughing his way to the bank he basically you know it was easy for him right I can't do that is this no there's no story here and I don't blame them for coming up with that conclusion because Jason didn't quite share the full story but I've got on my podcast you told tell me what really happened said I hand-tailored more than 1,000 emails to blogs it took me five months of doing it every single day people were skeptical they didn't respond so he would tweet then he would Facebook message in him he'd send them SoundCloud messages he

22:53would send another email and they didn't respond he'd find another person who worked at that blog he kept trying for five months sending emails every single day right and he's still doing it to get other blogs to sign up for his platform it wasn't easy it wasn't like he automatically because he had an audience shot straight to the climbing wall up climbing wall up growth he had to take it one step at a time I resolved issue after issue and this is what almost every single business looks like and it's what your business would look like to want to keep growing and even after that even after he got their business

23:20off the ground yet other issues right it's different to get a label sign up and get a blog to sign up it's different to get creators and channels from YouTube to sign up and support submit hub the nose to get bloggers right it's different to get publicist to submit songs than it is to get artists to submit songs every single one of these steps was a different step on the climbing wall that Jason had to figure out a climb and every single step you thought dang I don't know how to figure this out and you had to learn something and then do something to overcome that

23:42barrier right that's why it's one step at a time I took him eight months from the time that he actually built synmat hub to get his first dollar people were so skeptical they wouldn't sign him for his platform and then took him two years today jason has done over three and a half million song submissions cost between one and three dollars to submit a song depending on what blog you submit to so you can do the math figure how much money is made you sign up four hundred fifty blogs right and it's been hard work from the entire time but it's a really cool business and it's been

24:09incredibly profitable as well so if you envision growth as a climbing wall right just as you envision ideas a sort of Eldorado you realize a few things right first thing you should realize is the first step it's the simplest you don't have to be a genius to put your foot on the first step of the climbing wall alright it's the same with growing your business right you don't need an elaborate Oh strategy to email a thousand people you don't need any sort of skill set you don't need any knowledge you just email 1000 people and when I started indie hackers I emailed 200 people to get them

24:39to be on the website and almost everybody said no they didn't want to share that revenue they don't one takes time to do an interview they didn't see what's in it for them but I wasn't particularly clever it was just brute force and it's the same thing with the climbing wall you just put your foot on the wall and the thing is if you go to any climbing gym there's a lot of people who aren't on the wall most people aren't on the wall right and then started playing mostly pelant on the wall because they don't want to take the first step right they're spending all

24:59their time searching for this magical step they don't want to do anything that's not gonna scale right they see all these examples of all these businesses that seem to catapult rates at the top and they think you know it's not worth doing anything unless it can counter pull me straight to the top of the wall but that step doesn't exist and you're much better just doing something simple doing something that'll get you on the wall you realize that it's okay that you start small this is advice here all the time like what does it mean that's okay to start small what it means is that when you take your first step on

25:23the wall and you look up you suddenly see all these new steps that you couldn't reach when you're on the ground right just by taking that first step by me getting the first ten interviews on any hackers I was able to launch something and it got way more people interested in interviews right by Jason getting his first people into his blog all right are the first people on to his his mid hub website it was way easier for him to convince other people to do it right as you climb up the wall it makes the newer steps easier to do which is why it's okay to start small because

25:48you can continually build your way up the wall and take new steps the other thing is you need to keep climbing right nobody ever jumps straight to the top of the wall and if you stop on the wall if you don't even realize you're on the wall or you don't keep climbing you're done it your girl that's gonna stand Dane it's not gonna keep going alright there were I think like four or five hundred other popular music blogs before nd shuffle and every single one of those music blogs was sort of on the wall like this looking straight ahead like I am a music blog and this is all I can ever be

26:14in there are no steps above me I mean Jason was being extremely creative he was thinking what else can I do I'm getting all these submissions right he realized he's on a climbing wall and it was hard for him to take that actual step and pull himself up but the reason he was able to pivot from the music business and to the submit hub business is not because he got lucky it's because when he was actually searching for new steps to take and other people weren't so you have to always keep climbing no matter where you are right now you might think you're stuck you might think your

26:37business is one thing but a lot of business it's a lot of startups a lot of companies end up becoming something entirely different they were at the beginning because they keep looking for new steps and you're never gonna find those new steps unless you actually try and you keep your mind open finally plan your route when I launched it the hackers I basically spent the next six weeks in a panic because every single day the traffic was lower than the day before right I had no follow-up plan to my launch I didn't think about it in advance I just like I'll launch we'll see what happens but I

27:04could have had a follow up plan I could have thought about it right there's other people who've launched - there's other people who are also climbing the climbing wall and you can see the routes that they take you can see the steps that are available to them and you can plan your own route and see what works for them and what such steps lead to other steps easily right one thing that I did do right was I started a mailing list I didn't start that on accident I started because I started previous businesses without a mailing list and then kicked myself once I launched and got no emails right so I was already

27:28looking at code of step two even though I was taking step one and that made it easier for me to take a more efficient path up the mountain I think you should do the same thing right see what steps to other people were taking take look multiple steps ahead and see if you can sort of find an easier route to go up to go up the wall off your company and finally stay on track to your destination one of the things that people don't realize is that you end up with a sort of to-do list when you have a company and your to-do is only ever it

27:53gets bigger right every single time you add a new feature you serve a new customer segment you get more people on your app and then start getting more ideas more things to do you're gonna get very distracted it's very easy to get to the point you're very myopically just climbing to whatever step seems next to you whatever seems easiest and you look up and you find you've just climbed sideways along the wall and you're nowhere near your destination so I think having a vision it's a good way to make sure that you know what to say no to always keep your eye on the top part of the wall you want

28:17to get to and don't go sideways if you can avoid it finally we're gonna talk about what I call the living room of vision so we're in mica cough probably if you guys hear the word mission statement or vision you start thinking about sort of cheesy corporate stock photos I know I do I think vision is interesting you know a lot of companies above a certain size have a vision pretty much everyone does and when I get these founders on my podcast like to ask them why do you have a vision because I want to hear in their own words why they why it's necessary and they say a lot of things they say we

28:50have a vision because it helps us hire right no one's gonna join a company unless we have a vision or a mission or they say we have a vision it keeps everybody on the team on the same page right we don't have a vision how's everybody gonna know what to do what direction to go in and it's kind of unsatisfying because if you're you know a micro confident Dean you're a one-person startup or a two-person startup some of these reasons don't apply to you you might not be hiring right you might not have a giant team that you need to keep on the same page and so you don't need a vision right

29:15there's no point in having a vision there's no point understanding what you're going for I actually disagree with that I think having a vision it can actually be extremely helpful for you and here's why the number one reason that your fledgling business will die is because you quit right a lot of people are afraid that I'm gonna get sued by patent troll and they're gonna shut down my company you know a competitor is gonna take me to the Dead Pool and my servers are gonna crash I'll never be able to recover that almost never kills your business who kills your business is that you quit right you try a few things

29:42they don't work out you get discouraged and then you stop right and the way to avoid this is to have confidence all right and so let's talk about the living room envision for a little bit this is my living room there's chaning working on my couch let's say I invite you to San Francisco you come to my living room and I tell you hey I had a really valuable diamond in here the other day it's worth like three million dollars but I just misplaced it and if you could find that I'll just give me a million dollars how long are you gonna spend searching my living room for this

30:10diamond a few hours yeah a few days yeah a few weeks months maybe years right you're gonna rip up my floorboards you're gonna tear pop my sofa cushions you'll flip over my TV disassemble my stereo you'll do whatever it takes to find this diamond because you have a lot of confidence that there's a diamond there and it's just a matter of time before we get to it right it's just a matter of eliminating all the options and you'll get there you have a ton of confidence it's the same thing with your business like founders you hear about these stories where they're doing all these things for month after month year

30:39after year they're trying everything and it's not working yet they eventually make it succeed why are they doing that right why do they feel so confident that it's gonna work it's because they have an idea that for whatever reason they have a lot of confidence in their vision it's not something they chose on a whim it's all something they think can't work it's something they're absolutely 100% sure will work they just have to find the right path and as a result they try much harder right they try a bunch of marketing strategies when their first marketing strategies fail all right they try a bunch of different distribution

31:04channels when their first distribution channels fail they try different features right because they are very confident but the end goal just like you'd be very confident about the presence of this diamond if I guarantee it was there and will give me a million dollars my vision gives you confidence confidence makes you try harder becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy let's try a different scenario let's say invite you to my living room and I say hey look there may or may not be a diamond here I don't really know I didn't see anyone job a diamond here but you know it's a possibility right how much time are you gonna be spend

31:33searching my living room I don't know a minute all right you're gonna give up really easily right and a lot of people are starting businesses like this but they didn't spend a lot of time thinking about the initial idea right they didn't dive into the market didn't ensure that people actually care about this that this is a problem needs to be solved that people will pay money for and so of course you're gonna quit when the going gets tough right so I think even if you're a small indie hacker business it helps to have a vision right for indie hackers and my vision is to inspire

31:58people to create internet businesses and to help these new founders succeed at a scale large enough to have a global impact like to me this sounds like a lot of fun and there's absolutely no reason that it's not possible I can't think of any sort of law of physics as this violates I've talked to enough people to know that it's possible I can spend every day for the next 10 years working on this vision and never get bored never get discouraged because I hit a rock never think oh do I need to pivot and quit and go into something else because I have a vision I think everyone here

32:21should have a vision as well you'll enjoy building your companies a lot more and finally I'll say that all of these landscapes are just landscapes that I arbitrarily came up with right you could have your own metaphors and as you read and learn about startups I encourage you to create your own metaphors it's very difficult to memorize thousands of facts from interviews and books and podcasts but it's easier if you can sort of group these facts together and like metaphors and analogies I know rob has his stair-step approach which is great and someone to the climbing wall of growth and me who he's got her sail safari come

32:47up with their own metaphors figure out your own way to think about growing your startup and I think you'll learn a little bit faster and you'll be a little more effective Thanks [Applause] all right great talk Courtland we have time for some questions we got yeah we got time so if anyone have a question for Courtland all right thank you so much for the presentation apart from content and using Google as a search engine is there other ways for a newly launched business to the interaction yeah so the question is apart from just content marketing and using Google how else kind of newly launched business gained traction I

33:35think it depends a lot on your target customers what I see a lot is everybody knows sort of like the default places to launch they know about hacker news you know about product hunt and that's it and they see other people doing in so they do that but I think it really depends on who you're talking to so the example I gave in the talk was like if I wanted to for example get any hackers in front of indie game developers and start doing interviews an indie game developers what I would do is spend a lot of time with indie game developers cuz they're my target market I would

34:04learn that indie game developers go to these conferences in Japan and the United States and other countries I would learn what sort of influencers they care about my doctor Rand Fishkin on my podcast recently and he said like growth is easy for him and the code is the hard part he sort of the opposite of most startups and I asked what makes growth easy and he's like two things number one I know how to make things that aren't boring to my target audience and number two I know how to find the influencers right he knows how to find the people to target audience care about where they get their news from where

34:30they hang out online and yeah Google is a great Channel almost everybody searches but almost every customer segment has some place online where they get their news where they discover a new product recommendations I think if you can get in front of them and you understand them you're much more likely to succeed so I can't give you one blanket answer I think it depends entirely on what your product doesn't who you're trying to serve hey thanks those a great talk and you said you're talking about keeping your eye at the top of the climbing wall and stuff like that and like my model is always like you

35:03know I'm like I'm bored and she's like that's cuz you're boring not because there's nothing to do sometimes like I feel like well maybe the reason the question is how do you know what that top thing is yeah cuz it's very easy to get distracted by like you said all the things that are level to you and especially when you're starting you have no idea what this thing could be yet you know and you got your first two customers so how do you keep your eye on a goal that you don't even it isn't defined yet yeah so I had this issue in any hackers trying to grow

35:38the site what are we gonna do to grow the site it's only me and chanting working on this right there's only two of us how much contact we produce and we're very myopic we focused on what can we do that will grow and so we're like okay we'll do these self-serve articles random could write an article it'll be like medium and then I talked to Patrick Collis and he was like where are you guys gonna be in two years I'm like I have no idea right depends these articles work out there will be like medium and if they don't we'll be doing some other idea he's like no you need to

36:01have a vision right and at the end of the day like I think you can decide your vision you might not know what's gonna work for your company like we've thought long and hard about what indie hackers is what makes it special what we want it to be without about what we could be confident and growing and what we would be happy growing and we came up with the vision from you know if you slides ago and this is a vision that can encapsulate almost any possibility right and the actors might be a forum under this it might be a podcast it might be a ton of podcast it might be a bunch of

36:26meetups right the path doesn't matter right the diamond might be under my couch or under my TV or doesn't matter it really matter if you have a vision that you're confident in then you can sort of break away from being obsessed over like your particular growth strategies and you can be more like focus on solving the problem that needs to be solved and serving the target customers that you want to serve and whatever they whatever that looks like is what it looks like so I think like in a way if you do enough research and you have enough interest in what you're trying to actually do you can go over

36:54the vision that's completely independent from sort of the very specific tactics they're using to get there all right any other questions this is your chance all right thanks so much : you [Applause]