Hey, what's up, dude? Hey, what's going on? We are having a very special guest today, Seth Godin, who got us in, pretty excited to talk to. He's a pretty famous dude. I think this is going to be the first person, one of the first people I've ever talked to, where I've read at least three of their books. Yeah, that's a lot. What have you read? So I read The Icarus Deception. I've read This Is Marketing, which is amazing, and I've read The Dept.
What about you? Cool. I've read This Is Marketing. It's the only Seth Godin book that I've read, but he's done a ton. I feel like I've encountered him everywhere. I subscribed to his newsletter, read his blog for years. I've watched a few of his talks. I think he's given three TED talks. He's written 20 best-selling books. He's like the modern day David Ogles. He's like the most popular marketer of our time. Besides maybe Gary Vaynerchak, the two
of them seem to be making the most waves as famous internet marketers. Yeah, it's insane. In fact, I think the first viral post that was ever on Indie Hackers, we used to have a lot of interviews, founder interviews, but the first non-founder interview that was like huge on Hacker News, et cetera, was some guy had Seth on his podcast and then turned that into an article and was like, if I only had $1,000, I asked Seth Godin. If you only had
$1,000, what would you do? He posted that to Indie Hackers, that shit went ballistic. Yeah. Maybe we should do the same thing. If you only have $1,000, you don't have your name. Nobody knows who you are. What business would you start today? Do you think it's a cool question for somebody who's successful? Because somebody like Seth is so well-known. If you're given one TED talk, you're well-known. I think he's given three or four TED talks. Anything he starts...
And like TED talks. It's almost like he isn't... He's not TEDx. Yeah, not TEDx, not like this bullshit, like my aunt and my wife are using this thing to give a talk down the road at my local school, like really on the main TED stage with like Bill Gates and the audience. If you're like that, then anything you do, there's kind of an asterisk by it, which is like... Can someone learn from what you did because your name and
your existing distribution channels are a huge part of your success? And so I like that question for somebody like Seth, because it's like he'll be able to dispense wisdom and like how to advise for somebody like all the rest of us who don't necessarily have that privilege position. I wonder how conscious he is about being everywhere all the time. Like if you heard of
the 7-114 marketing rule, I read this in this marketing book recently. It's this idea that like if you want to get your brand out there, you want people to be exposed to you. And so the 7-114 rule is you want someone... Like someone's going to be really into you if they see seven hours of your content on 11 different occasions, like times, and in four different like digital locations. So like you have a YouTube video, you have some stuff on that stuff.
That's why I see you on like Pog. It's a ton. But like it's like, you know, if I bet fucking Seth would see that and be like, oh, that's child's play. Only a 7-114. He's like, yeah, add two zeros to all of them. And there you have Seth Godin. He, I mean, he is everywhere. His time is everywhere too. Like I know Patio 11, Patrick McKenzie is very fond of saying like purple cow, right? You want to do marketing? You got
to make sure what you do stands out. It's got to be a purple cow. Well, that's like literally a Seth Godin book that just became like common marketing parlance or permission marketing. It's another thing that Seth Godin came up with, which is just like a common term of art. But it's like traceable back to Seth Godin. Like this guy has created dozens of
terms and concepts that like everybody uses. And so even if you don't see him for seven hours and 11 different places or whatever, like you see his words and then you Google them and look at, look him up. Like that's what you find. Right. And I think the thing that's so cool about Seth in my opinion is it's not just talk. It's not he's not just someone that's on Twitter trying to coin terms and get like a lot of exposure. He's one of the OGs, right? Like he's like, you know, back in the,
in the zero zeroes. Not just a teacher. Right. He's not just a teacher. Like he was, he's been around doing, doing startup stuff since before the dot com boom. Yeah. And I looked up some stuff on him. Like because I hear him talk, but I never hear him talk about himself. So I looked up like, okay, who is Seth Godin? Like where do you come from? He, I think his first real success was this company called Yo Yo Dine. I looked up the
story. It's kind of hard to find anything about it because it was like a very early internet company. He started it in 1995. He was 35 years old. So he was already like well and he was career. But he hadn't done anything big yet. And then three years later, he sold it for $30 million. $30 million in Yahoo stock. This is back. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's stuck not worth a lot today. But like in 1998, like that was huge. I mean, by the way,
1998, that's when Yahoo is like the search engine. Like they are like the Google of today or whatever, right? Yeah. Yeah. They were like the biggest internet company by far. They were like the All Stars. Their market cap was insane. There were billions of billions of dollars. And like that $30 million of Yahoo stock. He got like 1998 or whatever. Probably was worth two or three times as much in 1999. And then by 2001, it was probably worth
like 10% because of the stock market crash. But Yo Yo Dine was, I think it was such a smart company. It was right at the heart of like sort of the 90s tech boom. The internet was crazy. Anybody who added.com to their domain name just could instantly IPO and see their stock like shoot up. And Yo Yo Dine was a marketing company, which is not surprising for Seth goat. And so they had a bunch of different things that they would do. Part of it was like
they were an agency. So I found like this really cool article from some publication called Chief Marketer. There were 1999. They're quoting Seth goat and they said, we brought promotional thinking to online commerce. Seth goat and says that matter faculty. It's a big claim, but it's true. The whole sort of offer response reward sequence was common enough to offline businesses. So that's giving customers like premium offers and free trials and sample
products. But that hadn't really happened on the web. And so Seth goat and kind of brought this to the web. And the article says with the net selling its embassy, many consumers weren't sure of its security, many retailers found the technology for Bidden. And you can tell this is articles from 1999 because they called it the net. But yeah, but basically his company Yo Yo Dine would like work with these companies. They would offer promotions.
They'd make banner ads. They were with Mastercard to create something called EasySprey, which was this giant online like mall, they called it a merchant factory. So it was a search engine where any sort of shopify for yeah, it was like Shopify. It was like early Shopify. They said any merchant could come and create an identical online format for their store and set it up and start selling products and less than half an hour. So
that kind of reminds me also of Paul Graham. Paul Graham also built, he built Viweb. And in the mid 90s, he also sold it to Yahoo become Yahoo stores. So now there's sort of early version of Shopify back when everybody was scared to put the credit card on the internet. Paul Graham. That's interesting. I've never actually known what Paul Graham did. Like I knew he did some kind of startup, but it didn't actually look up. Look at look into
it. They both did the same thing. They both sold huge e-commerce marketing businesses to Yahoo and the 90s for tens of millions of dollars. Hopefully they both exited the stock market before it crashed. And then they both became writers. Paul Graham started blogging politically. Seth also started blogging. So he has one of the biggest blogs online. He doesn't talk a lot about the numbers, but I found a blog post that said he has over
a million subscribers to his blog. And in 2009, he had I think 253,000 RSS subscribers to, but he started this blog in 2002. And since then, he's been sending out a blog post literally every single day. He's written 8,500 blog posts. And sometimes they're just like two sentences are like a paragraph. But sometimes they're like a legitimately huge blog post. Like I've been subscribed from years. I've had to like unsubscribe because it's
too much sometimes. And I've resubscribed. But it's like, I mean, can you imagine having a million people on our newsletter? We would crush it and add right now. And it's just like one guy's blog. It's not like a whole company. It's just one person blogging about what he thinks every day. Just firing off thoughts. And like some of his posts, it's funny. Like you read it. Some of his posts, just like you said, are like three sentences. But they're always, they're always.
You're in the right place at the right time. Hey, there he is. The guy himself, my Seth, welcome to the show. I love it when that happens. Thank you for both for having me. It's a pleasure to have you. We were just talking about basically your career. Like I've watched so many of your talks, chanting his red three of your books. I've read one. I've been subscribed to your blog on and off. Sometimes it's too much. I'm like, God, he's been set every day unsubscribe.
And then like six months later, I'm like, I want to hear him set that. So say you're right. But most of the time, I hear you talking about like other people, internet phenomenon, case studies, like what's going on in the world? I don't hear a lot about like you. And so I want to take a minute. It's cool with you to just like pick your brand about you and the things that you've done. I do that on purpose. And so I'm not really comfortable making a podcast about me. I'm
happy to explain why that is. I would love to hear why. There are two reasons. The first one is when my kid was six, I made a blog post that he was peripherally mentioned in. And someone said to my wife the next day, how's your son feeling? And that was so weird. I was like, never doing that again. And the second thing is if I make my stories about me, then I let people off the hook because they can say,
well, he had privilege or he had a really cool family or he had this, I don't. And so what I try to do is make them varied enough and generic enough, but still interesting that people put themselves on the hook because I don't want to be hero. I want to be a teacher. That's a profound way to look at it. I think that it's it's like playing on hard mode because probably the easiest source of stories for anybody is their own life. You don't have to
go out and do any research. Exactly. So you got to become an expert on other things. What's your process for that like like what is the behind the scenes machine of Seth like to be so prolific, for example, like to write a blog post every single day to give I think you've given like a thousand talks. Where's all this come from? Well, you know, we had a problem with our garbage disposal last year. And when the plumber came over to fix it, I didn't ask him because no one ever
asked him, where do you find the inspiration to fix all these grains? Right. He doesn't say, you got any whiskey. I'm having plumbers block because there's such thing as plumbers block. So I don't go to meetings. I watch very little television. I don't use social media. I got seven, eight, nine hours a day to do stuff that people could easily do and have that time. But they get distracted with chores instead. And again, it's about being on the hook. I don't view my benefit of
the doubt in my privilege lightly. And if someone's willing to listen to what I have to say, I don't want to waste it. So our community, our podcast is called Andy Hackers. It's all about basically people who quit working for the man to start their own sort of one person online tech company. And it's so common for people to go to work every day, year after year, put in 40 hours, 50 hours a week of work. And then they quit to do their dream and struggle to get anything done
on the week. I remember chanting when you quit your job, chanting your store, can sales and he quit his job and I taught him out of code. And then he wanted to be a program. He's like, Portland, I can't believe you worked from home all day. I get so much done. And then like a month after he quits, he's like, I'm going to the gym in the middle of the day. I'm doing my laundry. I need to clean my room. Like suddenly life becomes all these other chores and distractions. And
it's really hard. I don't know what it is about the workplace where we can sit down and focus. Maybe it's accountability to our teammates. But once we're working for ourselves, like you do, Seth, it's hard to yeah, you make it sound easy, but it's hard to put those distractions aside. And just resistance, right? You've read Pressfield. Resistance is the thing that when we stare into the sun, it holds us back. And what I mean by chores is more than chanting laundry.
No, chanting probably does an excellent job on a laundry. Chores also include sending up bills. They include maintaining your servers. They include any job where you can write down the spec to get it done. And the reason it's hard as a soloist to do that is if you start spending cash money to get people to save you time. You are on the hook to have your time be more valuable than the money you just spent to solve the problem. And all those years I was struggling freelancer. I did
so many chores, which was good in the sense that I learned how to do a bunch of stuff. But it was bad because I only had a couple hours a day to be a productive freelancer. I was spending the rest of the time being the support staff for that freelancer. And so I don't have any problem without sourcing. The one thing you can outsource is the thing you want people to value from you. That has to come from you. How sort of swiftly did you move into that phase?
And whether it was anything you learned, you had to learn to get there. Okay, so I think it's a two-part process. The first part is getting in the habit of seeking out the hard parts. And at work, there's very little reward for that when you work for somebody else. At the gym, the only people who are fit are the people who sought out the hard parts. That's why
they went to the gym. Like, back when I would go to the gym, there would be people you'd see them there for three hours and between going to the drinking fountain and walking over the power, they worked out for six minutes, right? Because they were avoiding the hard part. That's me in the gym. But if we think about the creative grates,
you know, I just finished Herbie Hancock's autobiography the other day. If we think about people like Dylan or like Leonard Cohen or writers, they say the part that I'm trying to avoid is the reason I am here. Let me figure out how to relish that. Look forward to that. So then once it becomes a habit, here's the amazing thing. It stops being that hard. So in my case, it took me about a hundred blog posts before I wrote a blog post that sounded like me. And then once I knew what I sounded like,
I proposed blog posts all day long to myself. And I regularly reject them not because they're hard to write because they don't sound like me. And once you got the groove, then it's just joyful because they think and frustrating because now I miss the hard parts because they're not hard. And so I have to go do a new project where I'm incompetent so that I can get that feeling back. There's this one of your posts that resonated with me was I think you call it process versus outcomes.
And it's, I've seen this idea in a few other places too where I think the analogy you painted was like certain people like a sports fan goes to the game thinking about the outcome. I want my team to win and they've predetermined if my team doesn't win, I'm going to be sad. They do win. I'm going to be happy. Whereas other professions are a lot more process oriented like a scientist. You're
a committed to a very particular process. You trust in that process. Whatever the outcome is going to be, you're going to be able to live with that regardless as long as you put the inputs and you're not worried about the outcome so much. And you know, that's true to some degree. Of course, every scientist wants to get published in nature and whatnot. But I think for entrepreneurs, it's really hard because most people who start to become entrepreneurs like they want to get rich
or they want to quit their job, but they want to work on what they want to work on. They want to be a success. And that's an outcome. And it's really, I think, nerve-wracking for a lot of people to sit down and like try not to think about that outcome when it's so hard to achieve. Most entrepreneurs don't succeed. I wonder how you think about this with your career. Are you, are you really process oriented? Do you really just sit down and not think about outcomes? And
to what degree like do you think others can think about that? Because it's just so difficult to succeed. So I wrote about this in the practice. I think that there's a, the, the, the, the Buddhist idea of attachment is really important. If the three of us wanted to run from here across town and be near each other, if we just kept an eye on each other and stayed about six feet apart, it would be very easy. But if we attached to each other with a long rope, it would be really hard. Because
everybody's movement would jerk us around. And your team winning is out of your control when you're playing a sport. What's in your control is did you make the pass to that other right-winger in a way that they could receive the pass? So you need feedback groups. The scientist needs to see the result of each experiment to find out if their process is any good. And so, you know, I failed a lot at the beginning because I was ignoring the people I was trying to sell to. I had bought
into the make it for yourself, be authentic thing, which is completely wrong. I needed to make it for them. I needed to put on a show for them that they wanted to buy. So I need to pay attention to the clues of why things weren't selling. But once I had publishing partners, I needed to ignore whether or not the book sold a lot of copies because that's a somewhat random event. And being
attached to random events takes our eye off the process. And so it's both. You need to, you can't drive a car without feel from the steering wheel in the curb, but you also can't drive a car if you need to make sure that there's no traffic chance between here and Toledo. It's never going to happen. You, maybe you just answered this question, but it's something that I've thought about because I've read a lot of your work and you speak about this tension between everybody wanting to be authentic,
but then you're here to serve your audience. And yet you've, I think famously, as much as you blog, you've turned off your comment section. And you've mentioned that you don't want to be writing, you don't want to be a hack, right? You don't want to just be writing things just for the sake of getting engagements. And is that connected to you figured it out for the most part? And now once you figured out how what you need to do and how to execute everything else is a bit of a distraction?
Well, I didn't figure anything out. I think that what I, I realized that one of my many personality defects is anonymous trolling really gets under my skin. And so what was happening was anonymous trolls were writing comments on my blog and I would read them thinking I was going to be a better blogger as a result. And instead I just didn't want to blog anymore because why would you invite someone into your living room to dump crap on the floor? And so the only way I could have a blog
is if I had no comments. I don't have to host the trolls. They can go somewhere else. But feedback, advice is different than angry criticism. If someone gives you a book of one star review, they're not saying they didn't like the book. They're saying the book wasn't for them. And for the solo software entrepreneur, this could not be a more important idea. You don't need everyone. You will not have everyone. Even WhatsApp didn't have everyone. You will have the people
who it's for. And if someone says this isn't for me, you shouldn't try to explain yourself. You should say thank you. Thank you for telling me it's not for you. Go over there. That might be for you. This is for people who want this. And so I don't seek out new readers. And I got a new blog, a new book coming out. And I want to talk to my existing readers that the song of significance is here. But I'm not trying to get people who have never read my work to go read it because they probably
won't get it. This is a good point to switch over from exclusively asking you about yourself, which we've been doing, even though you don't love it. To talking about your new book, it's called The Song of Sons of the Gens. When does it come out? It's out Tuesday May 30th. And the audiobook almost killed me recording it, which is a whole other story. But it's personal and it's urgent. It's a rant about bringing humanity back to our days as opposed to being
colleagues in a machine. It's about false proxies. And it's about the brutality of late stage industrial capitalism. Yeah, you've come on the right show to discuss these topics because we're literally talking to tens of thousands of people right now who are their number one dream is to basically stop working for the man stop working these big companies and do their own thing.
And I think your book takes a little bit of a different angle. And the media kit that you sent us, I read the intro and it says, as we mechanize and routineize and surveil every employee, we haven't already replaced outsourced or automated, which is very relevant with all these new AI developments we're having. It's become clear that work isn't what it used to be. Bosses are letting their employees down. Justice quickly as employees seem to be letting down their bosses. And so I've
seen a lot of stories like this. People are quite quitting. People are getting two and three jobs because they've realized they can phone it in one job and then we're working remote now and people just don't care. Right. It's about what can I get away with? It's not about valuing the work. It's not about valuing employees. And you said there's a fork in the word either we race to the bottom and we make work more soul sucking, innovating and fungible or we decide to choose
significance instead. And so I think a lot of what your book is about is about for people who run companies or manage people like how can we make a better world for ourselves. And I think what we're doing at Indie Hackers is we're just like screw all that just quit your job. Go start your own thing, work for yourself. All these same technologies that are automating you out of your job you can use to be more productive as an entrepreneur. What do you say to that? Is that like a
dystopian nightmare? Is that where we want to see things going? Or is there a better way? Oh, I think small sea market-driven capitalism is the only way that I can see how we're going to make things better. If you are a solo entrepreneur you have to listen to the market. You cannot command people to do what you say. You cannot seek to buy out your competition. You have to say I have something of utility. If you want it this is what here it is. If you don't I better make it
better. And as somebody who has been a soloist off and on for 40 years it's thrilling. It's important I think to differentiate between freelancers and entrepreneurs a lot of freelancers like me aren't trying to build an entity that works when they're not there are not seeking outside investment and then be able to sell an asset. That's what entrepreneurs do. Freelancers say I am
the star of this particular show. I don't have to put my name on it but it's me and I'm going to leverage me to get better clients to solve more interesting problems and to get paid fairly for doing so. The danger of being a freelancer who thinks you're an entrepreneur is you will do all the things entrepreneurs do raise money scale etc. When you actually have a business that sings
when you're a freelancer and stumbles when you're an entrepreneur. So an example that isn't tech at all is if you bake wedding cakes in your home kitchen and you from scratch build $4,000 wedding cakes it would be a mistake for you to take a 6,000 square foot facility higher 12 people and build wedding cakes incorporated because the very thing that made you great is now going to
make you not great. There reminds me of let's call it the McDonald's evocation which is one way that people productize their services is they say well let me figure out how to do it myself then let me sort of create this you know what is it Taylorism right create the standard operating procedures from head to toe of everything that I do and then have basically people come in and the more robotic
they act the better it is for me. That's a legitimate way to make money. I don't think it's a legitimate way to live the life you want to be proud of and most of the mechanized jobs that like flying an airplane or getting french rights they've people have figured those out we don't
need you to do that what we need you to do is bring something special and innovative and flexible to the table because the world is changing so fast that the big people big companies can't figure out what to do in time but you can and the other piece of it which I just so many people
in this day and age don't understand the network effect really didn't hit its stride until 20 years ago the network effect is does your product or service work better if other people are using it too so if I tell people about my financial advisor my life will not get better if I tell people
about my doctor shows in souls my not my life will not get better but if I tell people I'm using this social network and they should join me my life will get better because they are there too and the network effect built the world we are in right now and if I was starting from scratch
today I wouldn't do what I did 40 years ago I would build communities I would use tech I would use discourse I would use tools like that to say here are 3,000 or 5,000 or 20,000 people who will pay to be part of this circle of people and I as the ringleader organizer and creative culture
will get paid for more than fairly to do that so do you think of community as more squarely entrepreneurship or freelancing because to some degree being the community organizer like you're bringing yourself to this a lot of communities just die outright when the leader leaves it's
almost like a tribe or just a group of people that follows a particular vision and everyone's similar but there has to be someone in the core uniting that vision but also people get a lot of value from each other because that's the network effect and so on one hand like maybe our freelancer
right you're trading your time to bring value to this community to connect people but on the other hand there's so many tools and products and people can code now you can build something that that does work when you're not there yep when Channing and I go to sleep there are people on
Andy Hacker is posting meeting co-founders meeting partners is changing ideas reviewing each other's websites etc so like which which campus has fallen to or are we squished right in between no it's a brilliant example of how it could transition so nobody knows who runs alcoholics anonymous because
it's anonymous and nobody cares who owns wait watchers so yeah it begins with a freelancer who's using tools but you don't have to say this is the place to come hang out with so and so you can say this is the place to hang out with each other and just like the person who starts a bar that
person may start out as the soloist but if the bar is working they don't have to work every day and the same thing is now amplified by tech that the community should be bigger and more vibrant than the founder and we don't have all the communities we need yet and we're not even close to
filling out void there's ridiculous a number of like 10% 100% 1000% communities that could exist that don't exist and because the internet allows people from all over the world to connect like if I wanted to start a community in my town be hard right well if in Seattle it's pretty big
so maybe not that hard but you can start like the most niche enthusiast communities on the internet if people don't even aren't even aware of just how niche you can get and you can connect people who like would never in a million years think they can meet somebody else who's also into
Japanese dolls that have orange hair and you know breeze underwater or whatever it is and you connect them and suddenly you know they'll pay to be together so I totally agree with you I think communities underrated and I also think to your point one of the big questions you ask in
your book is what if we created the best job we ever had right we have this world where people are being like squished into these gig worker jobs and impersonalize them and take away from like what makes them human and they're treated like a resource for like a number I think community is one of
the best jobs slash like businesses almost anyone can participate in because it's kind of like positive for everybody its relationships has shared interests it's a human connection it's not automatable or community without people is I mean I'm sure somebody out there has made some sort
of AI community that's just a bunch of AI is talking to each other but excluding that community without people it's not a thing and so I guess my question for you is like how do you expand this principle with this realization like what does it mean to create the best job you ever had or if you're
an entrepreneur what does it mean to create the business that's good how do you design a life so it feels to me in Portland like folks like you and I would get great satisfaction from organizing a community there are other people who aren't gonna find anything positive in that at all they
might want to write a piece of code like osan audio which I use all the time that is the best editor for sound files but I don't know these people's names and they don't interact with anybody right so there's all these this whole range of things that would be the best job you ever had
but let's at least find enough confidence to describe what that is right do you want to day where your inbox is full or do you want a day where your inbox is empty do you want to have an anonymity or do you want to be in front of people what kind of interaction some people really like
talking to trolls some people don't right so you can figure out what would light you up that you could commit to for years at a time and go build that work and the one thing you're not allowed to do is say I want to do my hobby I want to get paid really well and I don't want to interact with
customers you're just not going to be able to make a living doing that yeah it doesn't work do you think it's possible for society to change as a whole in this direction I think like a lot of the trends that are making work less personal and less enjoyable I think aren't trends at any one
person is deciding on like if anything I feel like our culture is becoming like more human like 50 years ago every business owner would have said profits all that matters right whereas like today like I mean you have a B-Corp right like you're literally certified to care about other
stakeholders or customers or partners or employees and there's like hundreds of people who've signed I think about the name of it was there's like a business roundtable thing a few years back whereas like people said you know hey capitalism isn't just about profits about these other things I think
there's more people consumers holding businesses accountable today than they were in the past so I think culturally it feels like we're like going in the right direction like we want to be more human we want to care more you know people in my generation I'm a millennial are a lot more
focused on purpose and enjoyment of the work than like my parent generation for example and yet like the technological forces that we have like artificial intelligence the internet programming in general are like driving things in the opposite direction where it's like harder to find purpose for
a lot of people my question here is like how do we what do we do it feels like we're trying to fight and trying to push in the right direction but like is this even a thing that like we as people can do like if we start a company that follows the advice in your book you know what effect
will that have and when we not just be squashed by these bigger companies that are just like oh we're going to be much much more economically efficient than you and use AI for everything okay so it's a couple parts to this question the first one is don't underestimate the indoctrination of 12 or
more years of school of parents with a sticker on their car of people being pushed to ask will this be on the test so if you walk into one of those big box stores that are still in business if you look in the corner there's a kiosk and it's not an ATM machine it's actually how you apply
for a job type in your social security number your name it looks you up and then it hires you on the spot pays you an minimum wage easy and easy out there are people who want that job they want that job because they don't want to be on the hook they don't want to bring the full
self to work they don't want they because they have been brainwashed into believing that it is not possible to get more than that out of work and so there's a lot of brutalized traumatized people who aren't going to show up the way you two have the way your community has is it none of
me I demand more so that's the first part the second part is you know I invented email marketing and then the industry came and turned it from a zero billion dollar industry to a 20 billion dollar industry and I had a leave because once it catches on this is not room for folks like us
and that's probably going to happen to everybody who's listening to this who's successful and when the time comes you should sell and go to the next thing because you're not looking for a cynic cure you're lucky to make a difference I like that idea there's been a lot of people a lot of
Andy hackers have been building just cool AI tools and there's been a lot of pushback about like well what you're doing is not going to last it's not going to be your forever but some of people I see building these tools like they're like the tinkerers tinkerer you know like they just
like playing with new stuff and they're not concerned that this is going to last for 25 years like I had a moment this was fun I made some money I made people's lives happy I made myself happy and I'm on to the next thing and I think being nimble and quick like that is not only underrated
but probably is going to become more and more important as technology speeds up which is like to your first point also troubling for me personally because it's like I don't want half of humanity to be left aside right and to be forced into these meaningless cog and a giant machine jobs
and it's not my responsibility nor what I even know where to begin to like stop that from happening but like it would be nice if everybody was an anti hacker creative creator whatever they like but in some way found what they wanted to do I don't want our society to turn into like the
haves and the have nots to turn into the people who are fulfilled and the people who are being used by the people who are fulfilled to be cocks to turn into by the way that one of the fathers of this mechanized way of working uh Frederick Winslow Taylor the quote that he had his
grand vision was in the past the man has been first in the future the system will be first yeah you didn't say that like the science fiction this is going to be a fun thing he was dreaming and then here we are yeah so um if we're talking about something as different as obesity we see the
systems problem that people made a lot of money persuading a significant portion of the population to become obese even though it's not healthy even though some of those people don't want to be that way and other people tried to figure out how to insulate themselves from those
systems so that it wouldn't afflict them and we see this in any free market economy around the world in so many ways that doesn't mean we have to accept that it happens we have to start building guardrails so it doesn't happen who gets to build the guardrails community organizers do
people who connect the others set the agenda and amplify the ideas and we believe it's top down it's never top down it's from the foundations up we get what we tolerate and so when we start addressing what kids are taught when they're five years old when we start addressing what people
are paid when they go to work and everything in between the systems begin to change and they're changing too slowly there's way too much trauma but they only change because we persist and so you saying it is so valuable and then the question is how do we do it and do it and do it and do it
again because we're not going to save the world by speculating with Bitcoin but we might save the world if we can create a resilient open database that keeps track of things so that people can own actual assets going forward so they're near each other but they're not the same thing right
well I think this is like essentially your book when I when I look at the description of it it's kind of like a save the world book right how much I would love to know like you're a perspective on like what why are you writing this book what do you want to happen but essentially it seems
like that's the goal like hey let's all come together and realize like we have the power to make things better and here is maybe an outline of how we do it all my books so far have rhymed and if you pick up survival is not enough a book I wrote in 2001 if you pick up the Icarus
deception a book I wrote 10 years after that many of the same themes keep coming up so I haven't saved the world yet because I can't save the world but what I can do is activate people who are looking for a shared vocabulary and you never know when the right time and the right places to have
the conversation so I persist but I'm not alone in persisting it used to be a much longer to have these conversations you know I got kicked out of the direct marketing association in 1997 for arguing against spam they're like we're a direct marketing spam is a good thing you're out of here
who argues for spam that's crazy and like this was at the US Senate I was testifying and there are other people from my industry saying I was an idiot so you just speak up and the beauty of all of this is you everyone has a microphone now you don't need authority you don't need a license
you don't need a huge track record you just need to organize some people which is exactly the same thing that the indie hackers have to do to make a living who which kind of customers you're going to organize in a way that the ratchet moves forward so you know another thing that I could
imagine doing if I was a software person today is build a simple app that let me if I work for any big company find out the difference between what I'm getting paid and what I should get paid and I could imagine plenty of people who would happily pay $50 for that report particularly if
they could walk into their boss with that report and get a $5,000 raise right many tens of thousands of people are writing scribbling you know you know you know you get the idea is that you don't have to just come up with a different way to make a Google Doc you have to come up with a problem that
can be solved that isn't interesting enough for a giant company to solve right now but is useful enough that a customer wants to connect with other humans or their data in a way that they're willing to pay for to make this slightly personal again you just mentioned you know you were in email
marketing until it wasn't cool anymore until it didn't align with your values then you're you're on to the next thing and that has happened a lot of times you're an extremely prolific not just writer but I mean you have so many workshops and online courses this and sometimes it makes my
head spin how do you figure out once the you know Seth Godin by the way is it is it Godin or Godin that was another question I had my grandfather made it out so you can say anything you want but he always said Godin so that's fine with me Godin when you are tapped out on on one thing do you have a
process do you know do you go into the woods for for a month and just meditate how do you come up with the next thing to to work on so the great Derek Sivers and I'm sure a lot of people with seen know who he is reached out to me when someone offered to buy CD baby and I said if you care
about the project you need to sell and he was sort of stunned at that because everyone else had told him you know this is your lifetime thing blah blah blah I said by the time a big company is coming in and willing to buy what you've done what they are saying to you is you have higher
leverage somewhere else and so whenever I start a project I am very clear with myself where the dip is where's the hard part where's the part where most people quit and then I also have to think about well but when will I stop because I am not going to be running this thing in 40 years for sure
so what is that like so with Yoyodine which I sold the Yahoo it was there was a moment in time when we needed to raise more money but the noise in VC world was so loud that our competitors were selling what we sold for a quarter of a million dollars for a dollar just to get big and they
had raised 80 million dollars and we had raised five or four or five and so for me to raise a new round there would have been so much delusion for me and my partners that it would have taken us six years of hard work just to catch up from that round so when one of the people we were approaching
for funding said we'll just buy you I was like yeah fine done done because it was a really long 10 years log to get here and this is not my family and this is not me this is a thing we built and my friends will still be my friends and the people we serve we can serve again
and that was one of the most difficult things I ever did it dislocated a lot of people I cared about but I learned from that you can't have it both ways you can't launch a new record album and also keep touring was that album forever sooner or later you got to say I'm making a new record album
well you're also not doing one thing at a time and then you know sort of boxcar of consecutive projects we're only doing one thing you're in the blog is a not it's an unstoppable force the books are an unstoppable force you released a hip book when you were doing yo-yo time so one thing that
a lot of especially indie hackers who don't necessarily have to please their vcs and boards that they like to do is think about all of their activities as a flywheel where you know one part is is adding to another part and is that something that you do and if you do it are you deliberate
about it is it something that I've heard you say where you kind of think about things is blowing on a dandelion you're like what's like the pedals fall where they may how do you explain flywheel a little bit more because I love flywheels and I feel like
go for a corner like it's good to see you back tell us what flywheel yeah sorry I'm like my mic dropped so I was gone for a few minutes I have no idea what you guys said but I jumped in on a good part a flywheel you can think of like a waterfall is like a straight line you
do a then b then c then you're done and you look back and you say that was cool but a flywheel kind of feeds step c back in a step a it's a circle so everything you do with your business sort of pushes on a lever that makes another part of your business easier or better or more
effective and what's hopefully an infinite loop so you can just kind of push on different parts so the classic example is amazon they sell things for cheap customers love them customers love them there's more customers there's more customers there's more vendors you want to sell there's more
vendors you want to sell than amazon can sell stuff for cheaper right and it just feeds around in this infinite circle and a lot of people don't realize is that as an entrepreneur even as a freelancer you can have a flywheel too you know have to but it can and so yeah I'm curious to
set to see if you have a flywheel and you think about producing stuff so I had a record out for a couple years and one of the groups that I produced lived in a van there were two of them they were a couple and they would drive into a town and find the coffee shop that would book anybody
if you just walked in it wasn't open mic but it was close and they might make 40 bucks and then they would get an advantage drive to the next town and do it again and I turned to them I said you need to stay in one town and go from the $40 to the $80 to the $200 to the $1000 gig
because this driving around isn't getting you where you want to go you were just doing the easy one so the two things that I would say are one the flywheel that I have found is the most useful is the one that earns you the benefit of the doubt which gets you more benefit of the doubt
which gets you more benefit of the doubt so when I was in the book business I got had nothing for a year and then people started returning my calls and then they would go to lunch with me because I kept showing up and so by the time I did the Stanley Kaplan Test Prep books
they paid a silly amount of money for them because they trusted me because I'd been showing up for four years whereas when I briefly showed up in the film industry they were like we got people fly by here all the time check back in after you failed 40 times like all right I'm done with this
and so that's the first thing and then the second thing is resistance is real and you need to write down on a piece of paper what is the very very hard thing that if it happened your project would work better go figure out now what are the steps to make that hard thing happen so when I
used to run the podcasting workshop with Alex the Pama people say one of my podcasts will go great as soon as I can get Michelle Obama on the podcast I like yeah but you call Michelle Obama she's not going to say yes so who would you have to have had as a guest before that
so that she would say yes oh Madeline Albright okay what do you have to get to get Madeline Albright oh work criminal Henry Kissinger okay okay you work your way back until my next renaver my next renaver is the first guest and the 12th guest is mission or the 100th guest right
and people hated to write this down they hated it because they wanted to just believe in lightning and so what makes the flywheel useful is the beginning of Amazon my mom who died shortly after he started it ran a bookstore in Buffalo and she gets a call from someone in
Amazon they probably had 30 people at the time and they said we see here that you sell this book blah blah for a hundred dollars it's an art book can you mail it to one of our customers please we will send you a hundred and fifty dollars to cover the book and the shipping now there's no way
Amazon could have made money selling that book that way right but they needed to be able to say we have every book in the world and we will sell it so they made a hundred people that day really happy and then a month later 400 people the flywheel before AWS was do people trust Amazon
how do we do that every day because once I bought 400 things from Amazon if they scoot up the 401 first order I was fine cognitive dissonance it was an error yeah but they had to get to the point with their flywheel where they could could pull that off which is funny because it's very it's
almost the same as the flywheel you're talking about using for yourself it's the benefit of the doubt flywheel what they're doing is they're they're building more trust basically a bet a brand of it says you can trust us to come through we're here for you which and I I don't know I mean that's the same flywheel that we're trying to do for Indyhack because I got a paper here somewhere where I've drawn this flight with like a hundred times and Channing probably hates me because I keep showing
it to him every day but essentially the best component in there is like to people trust us to do what we say we're going to do Seth we're out of time we've just hit the limit of your time so I want to respect it thanks a ton for coming on the show can I ask you one more question before we get out of here you can't ask me a question until I point out that you're superstars that I am in awe of what you're building and this was such a great conversation so thank you what's the the question
asked at the end of the show is is you've got a long career you've obviously dispensed probably 10,000 different pieces of advice of your career what's something you think Indyhackers you'd like Indyhackers to hear today that you know something that could take away from your journey your learnings
your career maybe something related to the book that you're putting out next week the shortest blog post I ever wrote you ready it's also one of the most popular blog posts I ever wrote back when I used to check my stats you don't you don't need more time you just need to decide
love it Shan is pleased us yeah we're talking all the time about how we don't have any time Seth thanks a ton your superstar hopefully we're going to have you back when your next book's coming out and even before that put it in your calendar I can't wait to come back we'll talk to you