I wasn't making much money at all, but I got the first hit of, wow, I can make money on my own. So that... feeling and that energy was probably spurring me on more than the actual opportunity itself. More recently, 100 Days of AI, which are boot camps designed to help non-techies gain tech skills.
Max wanted to be an entrepreneur from a young age and started 100 days of no code as a challenge for himself to learn no code tools during COVID. But as more people joined in, he realized he could bootstrap the challenge into a learning platform, which he's now working on full time.
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or hit the link in the show notes. Let's get into this episode with Max Haining. Max, welcome to the pod. How are you doing? Yeah, not too bad. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to chat all things bootstrapped, solar foundry stuff, and indie hacking. So...
I don't know much about your background, Max. I usually like to sort of set the scene to see what the roots of my guests are when they were younger. Did you have plans to be entrepreneurial? Was it in your family? Were you doing anything when you were younger? It definitely didn't run in the family. But it was something I was always somewhat intrigued by. And it was kind of a relief when I found out.
at about like 13 years old that I didn't need to like get a job. And I think ever since then, I was kind of interested in working at ways to kind of build income streams on my own versus like from others. So yeah, it's kind of always been an interest there.
what happened at 13 for you to realize that you didn't have to do a get a real job yeah i think i think it was one of those awful kind of business case studies that we were doing and like in like GCSEs, and I don't know where the light bulb moment happened, but I was just like, oh gosh, so this is someone that owns a business. they don't work for the business but it was just this weird realization and it kind of just an unlock of
A very freeing unlock almost of just like, cool, I can do something on my own terms. Obviously, I wasn't thinking like that fully at that age, but it was just like a nice kind of realization. What sort of life route were you going down? After that realization, it was kind of a case of... how can I try as many things to taste test or career test as many different things that I'm interested in to understand
what I'm good at but also what excites me so that kind of involved just doing like loads of internships loads of work experience all those kind of things and then on a separate like track I would just be like okay well I know at some point in time I want to be able to build my own business or start something on my own so i need to build some form of skill set that will allow me to do that so i was kind of just like focused on anything that would give me the skills to
put myself in the best position to create a cool business. And that looked like for me, going to university, doing business at university. And also like joining all the classic entrepreneur society and all that kind of stuff. So I was just kind of going all in on like trying to mix myself into that circle. Okay, so entrepreneurship, you wanted to run a business, but you weren't too sure what it was going to be. So you thought, let me just go down this education path.
and see where it might end up for you. So when you were spat out at university, did you have this great business idea? Did you want to go down this funding route, traditional business, or had you discovered IndiHacking at this point? Yeah, so my worldview at university was Mark Zuckerberg version of startup. So you need to raise a bunch of money. It needs to be this kind of epic, like unicorn business. That was kind of my only version of business that I had in my mind, which...
At the time, I kind of almost felt was quite, let's say, burdensome or like crippling in the way of, wow, like... I need to raise all this money to like start a business. I need to do all these things to like create something on my own. And I hadn't really realized that.
there was a lower barrier to entry and like a path that was less dependent on external factors at that point in time. So it was really... only when i was starting to to think oh gosh what am i going to do post-university when i discovered make a mag which was a magazine that created by and law and i found that it was the first moment i was like wow people are building businesses on their own without investment this is crazy and they're really cool and niche and exciting that lean into their like
passions as kind of people versus like these epic mission statements that kind of startups generally have so when you discovered it what did you start to build or potentially explore in terms of a business for you For me at that point in time, again, I was very starry eyed. I was very naive. I was kind of the founder that hadn't really, or the wannabe founder in a way. So I was just in full like consume mode. I was in full let's.
eat up as much material as I can let's read as many case studies all the kind of the traps almost of the glamorization of building a business before you actually get into the weeds of it yourself so I went into a kind of full consumption mode at that point in time and was just being
very inspired by the people that were actually doing stuff that's interesting do you see that as like a trap you fell into and if you were going to go back to the start and give yourself advice would it be just like try and ship something rather than absorbing all the content or do you feel kind of helps you in a way
Yeah, I think it's all well and good me saying, oh, just like ship something, like get something out there. But I think I just wasn't ready at that point in time because I didn't have either the skill set, i.e. the technical skill set or the mindset or the confidence to actually do something on my own.
So I wasn't ready at that step. So it probably was right for me to consume. But obviously looking back, consumption can be a bit of a trap if it goes on too long. Was 100 Days of No Code your first project then? And I guess... probably not thinking it was going to turn into what it was going to turn into exactly yeah so 100 days of no code was not meant to be a business at all and i had no intention of it being a business the only two things were kind of like
more of a let's say business lens that i took to starting 100 days with no code were the fact that okay so no code is a trend so people are going to want to learn to know code So that was one thing I picked up. And then two, I'd seen kind of the success of other challenges, like 100 Days of Code. Okay, so other people do these challenges. There's some form of validation around this project.
But I was never thinking about it through the lens of I could make money through this project. It was just those two opportunistic things I saw that then gave me more reason to go.
cool, I'm going to start my learning journey in NoCode by saying to everyone, hey, learning the skill for 100 days during lockdown when we've all got a bit of spare time, does anyone want to join me? And in that moment of time, it was kind of... became clearer especially from sort of day 25 onwards that other people wanted to join that kind of that that thing or learn that skill themselves as well so you talked to me about how you structured this for yourself yeah so it was essentially
most unstructured thing you could possibly imagine it was very much me just going okay so i've got a hundred days in front of me the only thing that i know i'm going to do in these hundred days is learn something for 30 minutes a day share the thing i learned on twitter and then cheer other people on who are doing the challenge but actually i didn't know what the hell i was meant to be learning i had no understanding really of like
what tools i should be learning what projects i should be building so it was a very scattergun approach so what i did was essentially like looked up what other people were doing in no code and also looked up the best courses and then basically just like melded them together in one kind of very cobbled together 100 day track and that was it so yeah there was no planning really it was it was very spontaneous day by day
So fill me in on the gaps of taking this, you, yourself, you're learning no code. Did you spell any cool projects from this, by the way? Did you actually like make stuff that could have turned into a business? and then fill in the gaps for me in terms of taking this from something you did to boot camp course community
100 Days of Monoka was always a means for learning for me. So it was never built as a business. And that was why each day was meant to be very actionable. And I kind of designed it. that way for me to learn in the best way so every day I was meant to ship some form of like
project, whether that was shipping a login page or shipping an actual full fully-paged project. And for me, that one project was a positivity map during COVID. So it was kind of mapping all the positive acts of goodwill and good gesture, whatever.
in my community at that time and i built that on bubble so people could kind of crowdsource positivity in amongst like a time where obviously not many good things were happening so that was my first project again not monetizable just pure like outlet for learning yeah and then essentially how did this complete mess go from that to kind of more of a a business and really kind of the way i look at it is we went from a hashtag with no curriculum
to a hashtag that had a bit of community to a hashtag that had community and then it had courses and education. And that's kind of the transition that it kind of made over time.
And how did you start to build out that community and then the curriculum and getting people to pay you for this? It essentially was very guided by my... lack of knowledge at the time and what i mean by that is i realized that there was a need or like a sense where people wanted to learn to know code because they were joining the hashtag with me the problem i had was that i wasn't in a position to teach people i didn't have that knowledge because i was on 100 days myself so
What I did instead of creating a course, because I couldn't, I didn't have the knowledge, was I created some form of little community where people could share their learning as they're going. And then through that community, that's when I first started monetizing what we were doing. Because what I do... is i'd bring them into a slack community just a bit like ramen club
I would charge people £10 a month so they could access community, peer groups, discounts, and essentially expert workshops. Again, not by me, but by me bringing experts into play. And then that was kind of our first month.
monetization before i got to a point where i could start teaching people and that's kind of where the educational piece the courses piece comes into play How much money were you making as this was growing and at this point were you thinking, right, this is my business opportunity now where I can solo bootstrap something into a nice cool business for myself?
so at this point i wasn't making much money at all but i got the first hit of wow like i can make money on my own so that feeling and that energy was probably spurring me on more than the actual opportunity itself because ultimately 10 pound a month charging people is not
really going to work as a business unless you have a good number of people so from a business point of view it wasn't great but from a wow I can make money on my own point of view it was like the fuel to my like fire to actually continue this thing so it was probably making like 500 pounds a month
And so talk to you about like how that then grew into something that now is a business that over 21,000 people have taken the course. You've now got five people working with you and it's like a good solid business. I think as all... bootstrap companies it's been a very messy journey so it's kind of been oh okay right well 10 pound a month that's interesting but like that's not necessarily going to pay someone's rent so how do we make
more money okay well let's look around there's coding boot camps what if there were boot camps but for no code okay well coding boot camps they charge at least you know 500 if not a thousand pounds per bootcamp and at the time the whole cohort based course kind of thing was was was popping off around 2021 where you saw on deck you saw Ali Abdao's course you saw all these other kind of creators building these code based courses great that looks like a more or easier way to make
a higher ticket or product that would more likely pay the rent so we started doing those and we were kind of charging 500 pounds with 20 to 25 people per boot camp and that was scrappy that was like a grind to get acquisition for people to pay 500 pound on a boot camp but it was the first signs of like
okay so this unlocks a little bit more money so then you just start layering different monetization streams on top of each other and then it's like oh okay well these two together are not too bad what else could we do on top of this and then from that point onwards we have kind of lent into our challenge based learning products that we keep entirely free, but we monetize from partners with tools in the ecosystem.
So in terms of distribution marketing, what sort of things have you done over the years, Max, to actually get people to discover 100 days of no code and take the course and your other learning products? I think there's probably... things that I've done and they're more zero to one things and they're scrappy and that's kind of what i'm good at the first one is obvious personal audience building the second one is kind of baked into our products so essentially anyone that signs up to 100 days
100 day programs part of the flywheel is that they share their learning every day using the hashtag so and we bake that in because the the marketing is also part of the learning process because we believe that People that share their learning, make their skills visible and making your skills visible increases the opportunities that you will have. So we've kind of combined our marketing flywheel with our learning experience.
The third thing that has been really helpful for us and I'm sure lots of other kind of... indie hackers are doing and i've seen do is growth tools so we have launched a series of adjacent products that add value to audiences that we care about that we believe we can also pull into our own programs so one example of this is
codeexamples.com we launched from product hunt in 2022 august we got 3 000 signups as a result from that launch and then of those 3 000 people we drove at least a thousand of those into our 100 day programs I end every episode on three recommendations, a book, a podcast, and an indie hacker. What have you got for me? Get Together, My First Million, and Mark Louis on Twitter.
max fantastic recommendations mate thank you so much for coming on the pod yeah thanks thanks for having me it's been super fun thanks so much Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Indie Bytes with Max Haining. And a thank you to my sponsor, EmailOptopus, for making the show happen. All the links and references are in the show notes. That's all from me. See you next week.