It's the creator space. Do you consider yourself a creator?
I definitely consider myself a creator.
And so what exactly do you create besides community
digital products? I create content. Those are really the two main things that are created.
And tell me a bit about what you're
creating. So right now I'm creating a course on how to connect GP T3. My got a bunch of requests for that. After I posted that I sold my last product on micro acquire. Thank you. Yeah, it was exciting. And I posted it and it was the product that was built on top of bubble with GP T3. And it seems like a lot of people are really interested in how to do that. I got some DMS asking me for a course on how to connect GPT GBTQ to bubble some. I'm putting that together now.
And I'm thinking of putting more GB T3 courses on there. GPU three is the kind of thing that there's not a whole lot to teach about. But I think that once I started digging into all of the little intricacies that I could actually create a few different courses on it, but I'm thinking of putting up a few different courses on GPT history and probably some content just curate. GPTs read content onto that site as well. That's one of the things I'm creating right now.
Can never have just one thing going, I get bored. I need to spread my time over two or three different things. Another thing that I'm creating right now is actually a website widget for websites with bubble. So I'm creating a no-code website widget that you can put in a line of JavaScript code onto your website. And it shows the widget that I built on. So those are the two things that I'm mostly creating right now. What about on the content side?
On the content side have mostly been creating content or my personal blog. I really need to start creating more content for Indy stack for the community, but I've been lagging on that front, but that's definitely something I need to start doing, but I haven't. No. So I have not been doing the Twitch interviews. I realized that I'm a terrible interviewer and it's something that I could spend a lot more time becoming good at it, but it's not something I'm interested in doing right now.
I stopped doing those and I started doing a podcast with Val soapy, where we just shoot the shit about what we've been doing on our businesses. So that's been fun. Yeah. And that's been a much better. I don't need to interview anyone. It's just like a conversation that I can do, but yeah, that's another piece of content I've been creating.
So how'd you get started on this whole creator path.
It started with like creating blogs. So that was the extent of my knowledge back then was just blogging. And I thought a blog that was already established and I completely screw that up. I bought an English learning blog, so it was like really easy articles for English learners and basically. Rewrite the articles then really easy language so that English learners could learn English that way. And it was a blog that was doing really well.
I got it for an incredibly cheap price because the person just wanted to get rid of it. And I could have really taken it to a different level if I knew what I was doing, but I had no idea what I was doing. And I ended up getting really frustrated that the traction just wasn't there after like three months. But effort into it at all.
And I just ended up abandoning it and like it ranked first on Google when people search for certain keywords and it was getting organic traffic, I really could have done something with it. I could have taken it to a different level and sold it for a much higher price. I actually had somebody offer me $2,000 for it very early days. And I declined it because I thought I was going to build it to this amazing thing and ended up just abandoning it because I was frustrated and yeah, it's like dead.
Now. It's somewhere on web archive. Um, and it still pains me to talk about it, but at the end of the day, I don't really regret it because I did learn a very important lesson from it. But that's the kind of thing that I would say to myself, like just stick with it and see it through to the other side, because I had a lot of things. I had a potential that just died out.
Yeah. Are there any ideas that you've thought of over the years and then didn't move on that you then saw somebody. Build the same idea to wild success.
Make her pad. I had the idea for maker pad back when no code was just starting out. Like when bubble was still in its early days before Integra mat, then I wanted to build community and courses. Or no code. It was basically exactly what maker pad was. I had the idea for it. I might've even bought a domain and I just never went through with it. And then maker pad came along and I was like, good for them. They did what I did not.
How'd you start out building your audience.
How did I start out? It's really been on Twitter. And like I said, it was really just on, in the beginning of this year that I really started taking it. Seriously. Do you look at
the community separate from your audience?
Do so I do view the community as a separate place, and it's more of a place where I go to just talk to people and to share my wins and to share resources and stuff. And my audience, I view more. Like Twitter followers, product timed followers. So, yeah, I don't have a huge audience. And to be honest, like calling it an audience to me always feels a little bit like forest. I love like building relationships on Twitter.
I just like getting to know people a little bit more deeply than just like what their tweets are. So that's how I view the quote unquote audience. You're probably
taking a community first approach to audience. Even if that's never come to mind before,
that sounds about right.
How do you build your
audience now? I've been more active on Twitter. That's been my main source of audience. I have any stack, which has a lot of people now on any stack. And a lot of those people become my audience in the stack is a community where indie makers gathered to share resources, knowledge, and just having things out there like Indy stack, building things in public, completing different projects. It gives me a little bit more credibility that I didn't have in the past.
And that's been growing my audience quite a bit. And I'd say I just started this year, really 2021, probably like in March, putting in the effort into Twitter, not like trying to build a brand or anything, but I'm just posting every day and it's been paying off in terms of public than I am building in public. Yeah. Yeah. I use the hashtag and I also. Talk through everything that I do pretty much at my Twitter is a play by play of like my day, basically. But it's
how do you go about monetizing
now? I build products, my sort of model. To build quickly sell quickly. I'm building small products that I can build with no code in a short period of time. So usually I give myself 30 days to build something from start to finish, get a few users. Even if the users are free users, just get a little bit of traction and then post a for sale. I've done it once I succeeded.
I'm now in the process of doing it again with this widget and, and of course there's any stack, which the MRR on that keeps growing. Steadily and slowly month over month, I've been monetizing that as well, sort of your baseline. Yeah. It's a nice little side income. I also freelance. So I don't know if that counts, as I know we're talking about creating things here, but I do freelance as well with client work, but I haven't gotten to the point where I can only do. Indie hacking.
I do have to freelance as well, but I'm moving towards that goal. For
sure. You think that your indie hacking work or does your indie hacking work and making these projects, does that influence your freelance income? Do like your clients come in because they know you, it as an indie hacker?
No, I'm actually my last client that I did get through Twitter, but I don't think it was because they knew me as an indie hacker. I think it was because. I saw the tweet and responded to it. Twitter plays a huge role in getting those jobs as well. But no, so far it's not because of the indie hacking so far. It's just because of they know me from somebody else and somebody recommends me, things like that.
What's your north star metric for success
antifungal. It's not having to get a nine to five. That's. My absolute dread in life is having to work nine to five for somebody else at a company that I don't like. I've done that before. And it just. Crushes. My soul freelancing is completely different from me because I make my own hours. I have the power to fire a client. If they're making my life miserable, it's very independent, which I really like. And also with freelancing, I'm doing exactly what I love to do, which is making websites.
Yeah, my north star is never having to get a nine to five ever again, and I don't need to be super rich. I don't need to build a ton of wealth. That would be nice. And I do strive towards that. But if I can spend the next 10 years just doing what I'm doing now and making enough to live a comfortable life, like I'll be happy with it.
Awesome. It's funny. Cause my current goal is to get a nine to five.
The
trade-off in terms of ability to leverage income versus upside seems like a really positive one. And it would allow me to focus on building more of an audience and doing more of the creative creator. Stuff and putting out content without worrying about monetizing it immediately. And then I could get a job working for somebody in a field who's much, much better at what they do than I've ever been at something. And maybe some of that will rub off on me. So what's your current goal as
a creator? So my current goal let's say in the next year is to build four or five more small products and sell them within a reasonable amount of time. Let's say within 30 days, I think that's pretty realistic based on what I've been doing so far. And if I can do that, I will be a happy person. If I can pull off really coming up with enough ideas to build enough small products that other people are interested in taking and running with really putting my creative energy out there.
Yeah. Creating something that doesn't exist and making,
if you could send a tweet back to your start, what would it be? And when would it be that you get to choose to start?
I would send it back to 2012 ish. When I really started doing digital internet work, I started doing freelancing and then tried to build some websites on the side. And I would send something that says, finish what you start and put enough effort into it to see it through to the end, because I think I wasted a whole lot of time starting things and not finishing them or. Starting finishing, and then not putting any effort into growing because my expectations were wrong.
I needed to manage my expectations, that traction doesn't just come out of nowhere. Like you have to put a lot of effort into building traction and things compound over time. And I didn't understand that back then. And I think I wasted a lot of time, not building things out would compound over time and rather building abandoning. Building again, abandoning again. And I think if I had started in 2012, I would have been so much further along today and I'm starting today.
What I wish I would have started in 2012, I would have just reminded myself to sit with it and finish things out and put enough effort into it to see the traction coming instead of just giving up so easily.