I already know it's the creator spaces show. Do you consider yourself a creator?
Oh yes. Everyday I tweet every day, of course. And the long-term rating info products. I'm not an artist and a painter, not good with visuals, but a bit above average with boards, I would say. Awesome.
And you've got a news.
Yep. I've actually about three newsletters. I started the first one as a general newsletter without any niche and it bombed, it didn't have any growth, but it was good for me because I was doing a lot of reading and writing. So it's going on even today, send it out every Sunday and spend 106 weeks. Now it's gotten me to create a habit of publishing. I started the second one, because I was fascinated by indie hackers.com, the website, the community, the podcast.
Yeah. You know, people were stopping their way towards freedom. And I loved that idea. So I just started listening to not having the export. Are very inspired by all the successful indie hackers who had built and sold their companies from scratch for tens of thousands of dollars MRR and shop like that. Yeah. So I started writing about them because that's all I knew. Yeah. And India has this cool feature where you can start a series on the platform itself.
So this time, instead of substance, I basically went to there. I started in India for his newsletter and that gives you good distribution. And so is that the. Uh, no, the integrator, the attorney that I started last month, return review, I'd been on this creative journey for a while now. So integrate that as an audience of one that is me from one year or 18 months ago, who is just figuring out how to do this creative thing. It's very short. It's three minutes.
I know like a big newsletter fatigue issue going on that are not email inboxes are getting filled up. So I wanted to keep it crisp and really short with three minutes of ideas, insights, and it's mostly tweets and spot indicators, basically anyone who's just starting out and figuring out how they should go about this integrator business. And how should they start off?
You create a lot of tweets. You create a lot of newsletters. Oh, do you still have the hackers?
Yes, the Indiana is the one that's doing the best so far. It's been more 20, 25 weeks and it's gotten almost like close to 1500 subscribers. Oh, wow. That's the benefit of going to a platform which already has a lot of distribution. And then you write for an issue, right? For the platform. The title of the newsletter is that actionable insights for busy indie hackers. The good timeless wisdom from India occurs for indie hackers. It's very niche.
And anybody outside that bubble will probably not find any value in the new.
Yeah. Uh, you're not already an indie hacker. Yeah. But,
and that's why the subscriber and that's all the creative needs apart from some money in itself.
And I'm wondering how your thoughts on audience building have changed now from when you started.
So a couple of things here first is like the old concept is old idea of build it and they'll come. That doesn't work. So you have to go with people are, be it on Reddit, on hacker news. Ancora on indie hackers on Twitter. And we'll talk about your creation on Instagram, because these are the watering holes of the internet as electricity. That is the first step of audience building that you go to a platform, you figure out your audience, or do you want to say.
And then you start creating content around that audience around a specific audience. And that's what 10, like I got some Twitter followers only after I realized that I need to like fit myself into a box for people to see me as some guy X guy and on Twitter. Like that's how you start audience building. You create content that serves your audience. I think the half-life of a tweet is like a few hours. Yeah, exactly. It's even shorter. So if a tweet doesn't do well, it doesn't do well.
You take another shot at it, right?
We can rewrite the tweet, put out the same tweet the next month. Absolutely.
Exactly. Right. So that gives you so many signals. So I tweet 20, 22 times a week. And at the end of the week, I just look back and I know exactly what my audience likes and what it doesn't like and whatever it likes, I double down on it next week. So I think that's like the basics of audience building that I think everyone should be doing right now. And any creators should be doing on Twitter right now. Yeah. If
you're not engaging, you're not. Yep.
Absolutely. You need to figure out what's working and you need to go back and actually speak to on Twitter, specifically, speak to people on DM that on calls with them. Get on zoom calls with people you meet on BMC, respond to anybody who responds to you. And of course the oldest trick in Twitter is being the reply guy. You go to big accounts. And just start replying you don't meaningful responses. Get to your initial followers, to anybody who starting from scratch from zero.
That is the best way. Yeah.
I feel like you've got to turn on notifications for those accounts. So if I'm the first one to reply, I can get five or 10,000 impressions real quick. How are you monetizing? Now? I
had a couple of info products. I was big into atomic habits, so I made a notion document to deploy at the book atomic habits by James clear. So I initially to info products. Uh, they made some sales. I didn't have much of an audience. So what happens is that, that in food products, with small info products like that, you get to build an audience, especially if you want to start giving stuff away for free, which I did for a bit, but I needed to make money.
So that was my first dollar on the internet. Yeah. Is it all right
if I go on a short rant? Sure. Please go ahead. You said that you're working. Part-time. And that it covers all your bills. It's only 25 hours a week. I feel like we should reset that to be a full-time creator job in that for creators, the ideal situation is that they have that job that takes half, maybe a little more than half of their work week so that they have everything covered and they have that.
Because otherwise it takes years or a bunch of money to get definitely enough audience to get to a big enough. To be able to really monetize effectively if you're going that audience first method.
Absolutely. I figured that out within like my first three or four months of being active here, it will take me years to do this, to make money out of this. But I do realize that once I have a substantial audience and I have a quality product or multiple quality products as a creator, I will be able to make good money from it to print off. And that's what I'm doing. I'm using my 11 years of experience in the tech industry to fund my creator career. Yeah, I think
that's a great way to think of it. Circling back around to you rant over show. You talked about your primary source of revenue, but did you get the job because of your work as a creator? Yes. So
that sped, my writing jobs came in, so there's a founder put out a that they're looking for a product manager and what was interesting. And she got probably like more than a hundred DMS evidence and their CVS and resumes and credentials. I wrote a thousand word notion document where I mapped out the strategy, the positioning of her company, how they should be going about it and how they should be doing it.
It was basically a blog post, well thought out well-written well-structured and I got the job I am in India. They are in the U S I to the profile was good enough for them to try. And then many of them interviews and I cleared those because I'm good at what I'm doing, but you have to get into the door. I've got through the door by 10, sent out a cold email. Like the old times. I probably wouldn't have gotten a response
almost certainly not. What's your north star metric for success. How do you know you're on the right. Yeah.
So this book called the psychology for money by Morgan Housel. He's a finance writer and it says like true wealth is your ability to do what you want with who you want to do. And at what time you want to do it on. And like that's my time. It takes to have that freedom to work on the projects that I want to work with, the people I want to work with. And whenever I want to work right now, I have an empty calendar that I've been able to achieve and set my own time. I set my own project.
Uh, that I'm working on. So I think I'm on the right path. And basically all this comes from being able to make money. So right now, I'm not making money as a creator. Eventually I want to go there. So that's like my north star being able to fund my basic lifestyle through my creations and then work on interesting problems and interesting projects.
So I want to dig in on your creator goal because you've gotten so clear. Good. You make it smart. Is there a specific. You're aiming for, or a specific MRR or time period that you're trying to get all this
done in. I would say three years of runway. And it's getting added on to, to my part-time job. So I'm not in a hurry in time wise to go anywhere, but I'm creating a free day. That's my primary goal. I would want by the end of the year, made the India ACA newsletter, more of a paid gig, like a paid newsletter. Part of it is paid. Part of it is free. Let's start generating MRR
sponsorship or affiliate deals.
I have, I'm not convinced with the incentive structure of sponsorships and affiliate deals. I don't want to compromise on the kind of content. I think the best bet would be that I write for the reader himself and he pays. They're getting value from me. I'm getting money from them. So it's obviously a very idealistic goal because newsletter prescriptions are really, you know, really by love and there's sufficient fatigue and people stop does not have John.
If you could send a tweet back to your. What would it be? And when would it be? You could choose the start.
It'll be seven, September, 2019. That was the day I started my first substantive newsletter, which was for nobody and everybody. And I would say two things in that week, buddy, niche down, you know, you don't know shit. And the second thing would be start getting active on Twitter. Don't be scared of all the toxicity and all the politics that goes on. I based it like two years. By not being active on Twitter, just because I was afraid of what people would share about my writing.
I will block and, you know, mute anybody who says any negative things about me and I'll just start being more active on the platform and it's paid off to do, um,