Community Engagement & Building EVERYTHING in Public with Ch Daniel

So we hope, I would say more than 6 million people with our guides and the part of them want our stuff. Because when we do that, they can also get their money back from institutions like ours certificates, which is what gets them, their money back are trusted by PayPal, eBay, et cetera, et cetera. And that's my solution component. Exactly.

Yeah. We'll do a couple of other things in this main business, but to quickly note the other things I'm currently building a tool for SAS founders, which should help them find and set the perfect pricing for the tool called price. I'm the moderator of Reddit, SAS. That's a community with about 20,000 people, something like that. And I write a monthly investors, update investors with Arabic coats, I should say, because I'm completely bootstrapped up until this moment.

At least this investment's obvious called dear mom slash investors. So yeah, those are a few of the things.

What I mean is with a. Where the personal look would give you, you'd be able to one localized prices, which is something that apple, Netflix, et cetera, et cetera, do. And then two, you'll be able to run pricing tests, whether that's AB testing scheduled tests back to back. So let's say this pricing from weeks one to three, and this pricing from weeks four to six, like it's all configurable. That's what the idea started out with.

Yeah, I started with bootstrappers because of the simplicity and because they're very reachable, like most of the instructors are saying stuff like, Hey, my DMS are open or they post it in the hacker. So I like the accessibility of this audience, but they keep directing me towards a more mature profile of a company. And I set myself some standards. I'll be targeting bootstrappers who do at least 5,000 in MRR.

But then I talked to my friend Saba from weed that IO, who was doing 4 million in ARR when we chatted a couple of weeks ago, and now he's already passed 5 million because of the explosive growth they've had. And I did get some positive feedback from him, but with the caveat that I would first need to be vetted, I plan to perform self surgery, so to speak. So when price is ready, I will be using it for legitimate, my main product.

And he kept growing, like he kept reaching different milestones, like 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 K. Yeah. And I'll keep doing this thing of celebrating it for a bit, but then really getting back to work because I was doing graphic design. So 50,000 old time users, I would chat to them every now and then. And at about 350,000 old time users for legit check, we turned it into a company because I was getting DMS from people saying, Hey, you made this guide on how to authenticate stuff. I have this pair.

Could you authenticate it for him? Cause I, I used your guy, but I'm not really sure. And I used to keep helping people. But the problem was that Annabel got moment 350,000 all the time users, which was April, 2019. I was getting three to 10 emails, DMS, all sorts of messages a day. And I couldn't keep up to a point. I was feeling a bit bad of not helping anyone. So I said somebody has to have priority so we can do that by charging. So we're going to estimate the daily help we're offering.

Then we're taking that money, get it back into the company. And I guess, philosophically speaking, that's what a company is or could be you getting funded by your customers. So you can report that money into making the experience better. In our case, what that meant was we charge money. Authenticating an item so we can make more authentication guides. And that's really what happened in the last two.

And a bit years, we've written more than a million words on how to integrate various items, which are going to be there for the next years. We're going to update them as better replica has come out, but we started with sneakers and now we're doing everything from a Rolex watch or Hermes bag to Adidas general

Check out our guides and yeah, you have to spend a couple of minutes reading the guide and looking at the pair is not comfortable, but for people who might have to save an entire summer to get an expensive pair of shoes, they don't want to pay us the extra 20 bucks when they saved after a couple of months of three, $400. Yeah. That's your main question on how we're growing an audience.

We help them people for free and they pay with their time because when we pitch to somebody, something we use that. Average time spent on a website, which is a minute and a half across three to 400,000 people. And yeah. Does that answer your question?

In the meantime, we've grown it to 20,000 and I think really the acceleration in growth is going to be seen in the following months, as it's only recently that I started doing this bi-weekly AMS, which, you know, there's stuff in it for the community, there's stuff in it for the guests, as they get exposed to a, we had Heaton Shaw the other day, and she was saying how he loved the questions. All the questions were from a bunch of people just trying to create something that is good for the world.

So although it's not to my credit necessarily, that really felt like a good compliment because our aim, even though despite what I just said, our aim isn't to grow the greatest entrepreneur, which has almost a million subscribers, I at least want to keep a targeted audience, which is what Heaton's compliment was about. So yeah, you've asked. When did it start how it is now? The justice will about what we do to grow it definitely.

That's really the core question I think at the end of the day is how you grew to this point. Yeah, it's a question I haven't answered. It's really down to this long prelude I had, which is that we try to keep the community. I don't want to say pure, but targeted. Four words here, but I guess people understand what I'm eating to grow with. It has to grow in a healthy manner, unlike a unicorn or what the startup, where disease used to end that material in people finding a place in it.

People who are actually just about SAS, because you've got indie hackers, but in the hackers, isn't just SAS or you've got residential. Yeah. I'm mostly a productized service indie hacker. Yeah, there we go. So we accept people from all kinds of it looks so productized. That's a perfect. Subscription, not entirely SAS, but there's a lot of overlap with SAS people. So if you come every now and then, and talked about those areas that overlap, Hey guys, what'd you do about churn?

What'd you do about Stripe integrating with this and that. What do you do about the email workflow? Two people might or might not convert. That's a lot of overlap. And if you Michael, keep in your head, this place of, oh, That's where I find a bunch of SAS geeks or very targeted SAS interested people. That's really my aim. Now I still haven't answered the question, which is how we grew.

We try to keep at bay people who don't fit into this, or people who have too foreign or what bigger subreddits are accused of all we've grown past this point. And now it's only people shilling their product in red. It says I have this. Of it's a good thing to be transparent, but for instance, I would remove a post that just self promote.

But if you're smart about it, then you self promote, but you also share your top 10 findings when you reach this milestone of 10 K MRR or whatever, there's win-win for everybody, you take that space at free advertising, but you also teach others off. Even if it's bullet point list. We had this gentleman called Stefan from friendly. She posted on indie hackers and he had some good engagement about reaching 10 K in MRR. And I said, Hey, would you like to post on the subreddit?

Maybe I can help you shape it. And we had a quick convo and most of the credits, his not mine, but his post is now in the top 10 posts of all time. And that's right below Saba, which I just mentioned from V8, who's posted is an AMA and his title. After being rejected by Y Combinator, we've