54. How we chose the market to go after

99% of users probably do not need this, but at 1% it's probably like why doesn't Apple have it? Why doesn't Spotify have it? And Spotify would do like, it's not big of a market price. And this will be coming. And you and I felt these needs we talked to other people and a lot of people don't care about these features but there are some very passionate people who do and we want to target them. Hello and welcome to Metacast behind the scenes episode 54. I am your host

Ilya Bestelev. And I'm Arnaud Dekka. Arnaud Benayko, founders of Metacast. Metacast is a podcast player app for iOS and Android where you can not just listen to podcasts but you can also access transcripts, search transcripts, bookmark transcripts. You can use it for research of any information that's locked up in audio. We are currently in Open Beta. You can download the app at metacast.app for iOS and Android. Yeah, please go check it out. Send us feedback. We have a subrate at

our slash Metacast app. If you see any bugs, if you have any feature requests, please go ahead and submit a post. Or you can just send us an email at feedback at metacast.app. Okay, so about today's topic. This is going to be about product market fit and how we chose which area to build in and how we did some early validation. And I think Ilya, you wanted to do something a quick tangent like we always do before we get actually started with the topic.

Yeah, let's launch the 15 minute tangent. A short 15 minute tangent. 25% of the episode. Five minutes before we start the recording, I was like, I'm really hungry. And so I went ahead and grabbed some food. Luckily, you were a bit late for the recording because otherwise, I would have been eating during the recording. And it just made me think about all of those meetings during the pandemic where everybody was just eating during meetings because they're home, because they can.

And it made me remember my experience of interviewing with Google. So one of the interviewers, he was actually a very senior product manager guy, I think 15 years of Google experience. So this is March 2020. Everything just shut down. First peak of the pandemic. Yeah. In terms of working from home, it's just like the first couple of weeks. Google never works from home before. So they're still figuring it out. And he's like, do you mind if I eat?

Yeah, sure. You have the power on your side. Why would I say no? Right. So yeah, of course, I say yes. It's nice of him to ask. Yeah, but it takes the laptop to his kitchen and starts to make an instant. For himself. For the first, I don't have five, seven minutes of the interview. What I see is a wall, a kitchen wall. I don't even see him. Right. So I just see the kitchen wall. And I hear this clinking and clanging of the knife and the other utensils.

Yeah, then he finally made his hand. He sits in front of the computer and he eats it in front of me and asks me some questions. And I was just so off boot about that interview. I actually emailed the recruiter about it. You were like distracted. I was distracted. Yeah, I was actually stressed by that. Very interesting. I interviewed at Amazon twice. The first one when I was working at a bank for a IT services company from India.

So it's very formal setting. People are wearing ties and all. And I go to interview at Amazon. And my second interview of the day, the first one is with a recruiter. So that was very nice. The second one is with a guy who is actually a good friend of mine now. But at that time, that interview was exactly like yours. He comes into the room sits down on a chair. He's wearing shorts and sandals and puts his feet up on the table.

He's leaning back with his feet up on the table and asking me questions, a system design, I think. And I was very distracted because I'd never been in that kind. Such casual, but atmosphere at work before because I was in a bank. But I didn't email anybody about it. I didn't know.

He just felt very disrespectful. And also that interview in my opinion didn't go as well because he was a bit of a challenging personality, a bit of an asshole. In terms of how he asked questions, I think we also ran out of time at the end. So I thought I failed the interview, that particular one. And I blamed it all on being distracted. So that's why I also emailed like, oh, can you take this data point out? But in the end, I ended up getting a job.

I think there is also thought about that. It's a very important in February 28th. Today, we just released the Builders Gonna Build episode 4 with Henry Kirk, who also spent a significant amount of time as Google. We talked about Google's culture. So it's so fresh in my memory how the culture has drifted from where it was.

One quick note, there is unlike you, I was totally distracted in the interview, but also that was one of the first moments I immediately liked Amazon compared to where I was is the casualness of it because I hated wearing a tie being strict with rules and formalities and all that. And here I was. I mean, an interview is a pretty formal setting. If this guy is coming in in shorts and sandals and putting his feet up on the table.

Then this must be a very casual place to work at. So I was like, okay, I love this already. Even though I was super distracted, like I think I focused on his sandals while writing things on the system design interview, maybe trying to get feedback from the way he's feet back. Was his particular already. He was wearing sandals, so I didn't get to see. Okay, so I think for this episode cover, if you have a picture of you in tie, we should use that.

In a tie, I'll see if I have one. You'd probably be also very childish looking because it was a long time ago, right? It was a long time ago, yeah, 18 years. Yeah. Okay, so today's topic, how we chose the market to go after product market fit and potential revenue model research. So this came about from a friend in LinkedIn, again, from very old friend from college. He asked, I had a question regarding market fit and potential revenue model research.

How did you guys go about it, especially for something that partially exists in the market, but there is no strong players. And I think we should clarify right at the outset that we're not experts in this. We haven't achieved product market fit, but we're going to talk through how we went through this exact thought and what calculations we did, what we figured out from there.

Yeah, so maybe started to this podcast, we decided that we are going to be vulnerable. So man, this is pushing my vulnerability to leave it. So maybe we should reflect a little bit on the origin story first. When we first discussed an idea of building a podcast app, we didn't really think about the market. We just knew that the market was big and it was growing, but we didn't even know the numbers really. We didn't do much research into that, yeah.

Coming from an MBA background, I saw a lot of MBAs going after a market where there is money, even though they may not have any expertise in it, any passion for the market. Okay, so mattress sales are growing and there is a niche of whatever, like organic mattresses. So we'll just go into that thing, knowing nothing about mattresses, how they deliver, how they manufacture, nothing, right.

To be fair, it can work, right. And lots of people make it work, make it big because of that research. But you and I were coming from a very different place at that point of time. Right, yes. We were like, we want to build something that's really exciting. Something that's really fun for us that you would love. That somebody else should have built five years ago, but they haven't. So that's built ourselves.

By the way, here we are two years later and we still haven't like fully built it, but okay. Maybe that's why nobody built it five years ago. But yeah, so we started with that and only much, much later. I mean, we were bouncing ideas for a few months. Much, much later as in maybe three months later. It's not like years later. I think it was actually about a year later because we first talked about the idea, I think March, April 2022.

Right. We didn't leave our jobs. We were not serious about it at that time. This was like, we are both passionate about podcasts and we don't love any of the apps out there. And there's so much that can be done in this space and we would love working on our own thing. That's where we were at. So yeah, the idea was born then two years ago, right. I want to say only about maybe February 2023 is about a year later.

We either first financial projection for does this actually even make sense as a business to be clear in that year. We hadn't actually done anything because until about December or maybe even January, we hadn't even seriously considered that this is what we'll do. Right. Yeah, the point I'm trying to make is that we are like, this is the idea. What does a financial model look like?

Not like these are the 15 different opportunities. These are 15 different financial models. These different scenarios which want to be choose. No, we were like, this is the idea doesn't make sense or not because if that idea did make sense, we probably wouldn't have done anything. Or maybe we would have done something in a podcasting space, but we didn't have another idea. We didn't have a backup plan.

You and I, we took maybe a couple of weeks. We had some things written like one liners or I had a couple of half pages written about a few ideas. We discussed it, but the thing that was clear to both of us was that this space, a podcasting app and a platform is exciting to both of us. And we are willing to basically spend a few years working on this area. And that's why we went after it. And after that, we wanted to do the financial revenue model research and all that.

The alternative approach you are talking about is trying to figure out what space you want to work on based on the revenue potential of that space. Right. I think for me personally being passionate about the space, really caring about the space was very important because I remember those days when I was at Amazon or Google actually most of Google,

like I was working on this Kubernetes thing or the cloud functions. Some days I would be very stressed or maybe sleep deprived or whatever something is going on in the personal front. And I would wake up like I really don't want to go to work. I just don't care about it. I only care about it because it paid me money. That's the reason why I care about it. And that's not a big enough motivator just generally, right.

Unless you are really struggling with finances, right. So for me, I wouldn't want to work on something like that. Just for the money, it never made sense for me. I was talking to somebody, a colleague of mine, I was probably 23, 24. He was 10 years older, so he must have been his mid 30s. And he was telling me this idea of a selling sugar and rice in bulk. He found some glue pole that allowed him to sell sugar and rice in these big volumes. And I was just like, this is just boring.

I know you can make money there, but it's just so interesting. You and I have also met people because we are in more of the founder circle places now. We have met people who are considering like going into supplements, vitamins, that sort of areas, because there is a big revenue potential. And there's a lot of success for indie or small scale businesses doing well in that area. Our prime motivator, I think, is passion. So that's what we went with.

And additionally, you and I and Jenny, I think we all love working on spaces where we are very close to the customer. So that's something I figured out very early on in my career, working in the back of a bank, the software and the technology may have been challenging, but there was no connection to the end user. And I did not like that at all. Whereas in Amazon, especially in EWS, there was a lot of back and forth with customers all the time. And I love that aspect.

And I think finally for me personally, building a consumer app, I mean, we knew that it's going to be a challenge, but we wanted to take on that challenge because we have never worked on a consumer app before. Right. So I also want to share a framework that I just remembered from, it was either Mark Andreessen or Ben Horowitz. It was in the A16Z podcast many years ago, many, many years ago.

So they were talking about where ideas come from. I think actually that's a title of the episode. Where do ideas come from or something. And this is there are three paths. So first one is the NBA path that we talked about. You just like peak, whatever is most lucrative, and just go there. And then the second path is you have a technology. And then you look for a problem that this technology can solve. And then the third approach is they call it earned secrets.

So you work in space enough, if you gain enough expertise and you also have enough passion that you understand the ins and outs, the loophole, the inefficiencies and you see the opportunities that somebody who is an outsider would not be able to see because they don't understand it enough. And that's also partially how I felt about podcasting. Maybe a bit arrogantly so, but still have done the podcast, I've understood how the whole ecosystem works. We understand hosting.

We understand the integrated details of it. I mean, we understood it before starting working with it. I think that was also very helpful. But to be clear, you had done podcasts before. I had not done anything in that space. So I was more confident about the technology aspect of it rather than the podcast aspect of it.

The thing that gave me confidence, and I think this is actually a great thing to ponder about is why we chose podcasts and not like say a video or a different social media based on audio clubhouse sort of thing. One of the main things for us to talk through was podcasts is an open ecosystem. So the content is already there and it's open. It's kind of like blog posts, right?

Podcasts are distributed on the internet via RSS feeds, which are basically just XML files. They describe like what are the episodes and where are the audio files hosted and all that. And this is all open data in a way. This is public data. Thanks to Apple. We talked about this in I think the Justin Jackson episode of our at least a year ago. We talked about the genesis of how podcasts came to be.

But this is something that we considered is we don't want to go into a consumer app space where we are also in charge of generating the content or basically building up that network of users who will generate content because that is a significant zero to one problem. Right. Or even policing the content. Yeah. But the technology that we're building is equally applicable to any sort of audio, probably even video at some point.

In the future, but we decided, OK, we don't want to fight the content battle in the beginning. So that's why we would go with podcasts. Right. It's also an interesting thing about passion, right? And caring like an average podcaster probably doesn't have a clue how podcast ecosystem works. They just upload their files to the hosting provider, send it link to Apple.

And maybe the podcast host actually can send a link to Apple and then they are done. They just upload their episodes like they would on YouTube without any understanding of appreciation of how the thing works for me. It was always interesting because I think it happened when anchor blocked Russian apes and my podcast stopped working there. But it was in Russian language. So I had to do something about it. But I didn't want to pay for podcast hosting. So what I did, I had a website.

So I just grabbed the arrow says feed from anchor and put it on my host puts the files behind the CDN on my website and edited the XML file manually. And I'm like, oh, this is how it works. And it just made things so clear to me that, OK, wow, this is so open and distributed. It's like the web you can go and access any page that's not behind the paywall. And it, yeah, that's exactly how podcasting works.

So yeah, part of the question was question that your friend asked how you think about entering a market where competition already exists. I think that's a good segue into that thing. We don't have to bootstrap the content like you said. So if we were entering the general social media space, what was the latest social media thing? Threads. A threads, threads, yes. Yeah. This is kind of unfair because they are piggybacking on.

They have a hundred million people ready to jump on it immediately. Exactly. Yeah, but something like Mazda don that doesn't have a bootstrapped user base. It's hard to compete with Twitter with LinkedIn with Instagram. What have you read? So in a way, podcasting is like all of those other companies have a head start.

But we can enter and access the same content base as everyone else. If you build a better user experience, if you build something people willing to pay for, we can carve out a small niche for ourselves. Yeah. And I think some of the early validation. So a year after we first time discussed this episode 24 part one and part two of our podcast, we go through the journey.

Or when we decided or why we decided to leave our jobs and actually work on it, right? But eventually after about eight, nine months, I decided, okay, this is it. I'm going to leave. I left to get some experience. I built a app just for like figuring out how to build apps and all that we had never done that. And then started working on this. I think about February of 23 and you jumped in a few months later, but this is the phase where we worked on a revenue projection model.

You worked on it. We'll go through it a little bit detail. But I think one of the earliest signs for product market fit and potential revenue model was that because this is an existing market. There are two dominant players, right? There's Apple podcasts and there's Spotify. And to be fair, there was Google podcasts and all that. There's a whole bunch of other bigger companies with not that much of a slice of the pie.

And there's a lot of smaller, much loved niche podcasts, like overcast, there's pocket cast, there's one for Android. I'm forgetting Castro, maybe. Cast box, Castro podcast addict. Yeah, there's a whole bunch of apps that have subscriptions. And so there is already an intrinsic validation for the space for us that why would 25 different companies or even small companies think to build these things and charge subscription. That means there is already some market fit here.

Right. You could also see the reviews for those apps, the ratings. So there is obviously people using them and they're paying for those apps. Yes. So this is the intrinsic validation aspect of the space that we were going to go for, which is I think as the question was there, if there is already a partial market and there are players, maybe not strong players, that's a good sign, I think that the space that you're picking is a good space to be in.

Yeah, I think there is a framework, maybe from Michael Porter or something, I think it was describing how business view the blue ocean and red ocean strategy. I may be butcher explanations now, but I think the idea is that the red ocean is a place where it's like commodity markets, lots of competition. So it's a blood bath. That's why it is red.

So it's like rice, rice would be like commodity market, just get whatever rice is in a shelf, right. And then there is a blue ocean, which is let's see the opening the I case. They create something out of blue and they have no idea if somebody's going to chat with the intelligent assistant, right. Well, let's exceed it. And many others failed.

So that's blue ocean. So it's like an empty space. And then I think there is a purple ocean. I think the idea is there is a market like our podcast up market. There are lots of players. Yeah, you can still enter there. And there is already some validation for the market. So it's all about the execution.

It's all about are you able to create something that users are willing to pay for and market it in the cost efficient way in your execution because there are already established players, maybe not strong big dominant players, but there are established players. So whatever you build, I think if you have a small team or not much funding, then it's better to go for a very specific niche where these existing players have not figured out the best way to do it and start there.

But if you have funding, maybe you have a substantial ability to deliver quickly, then maybe you could go for basically I want to build the best in class X in this space. Yeah. And you know, when we started Metacast, the transcript was the big idea. It's something that others don't have or didn't have. Now the Apple podcasts will launch it soon. Spotify has it for some podcasts host on Spotify service itself.

So it is going to be there. If you were starting today and you were doing transcripts, we would look at what is the gap? Like in any app you can tap and play from that part on. That's not rocket science. But little things like can you share a specific segment with the timestamp? Can you maybe create a share image that will have nicely formatted thing that you can post in social media or send to your friends?

Can you bookmark? Can you search your bookmarks? This kind of stuff. That's where we start to get into the niche. 99% of users probably will not need this, but at 1% would probably be like, why doesn't Apple have this? Why doesn't Spotify has it? And Spotify would be like, it's not big of a market for us.

And this will be coming. Yeah, it's 1% you don't care about. And you and I felt these needs we went with it. We talked to other people and we figured out that, okay, these gaps are actually there. And a lot of people don't care about these features, but there are some very passionate people who do and we wanted to target them. So at this point, I think we started building something, but we were also thinking about VC funding, applying to I see bootstrapping. We hadn't figured it out yet.

So that's when I think you started building up a revenue model so that we could apply to I see and have compelling case. Right. You got off your corporate paycheck. I haven't yet by the time. And we needed to make sure that we're not just doing a nice cool app. We are creating a business. So put together a model. This is what MBA entrepreneurship class is a good for. Just like crunch numbers. It was a very simple back of the envelope projection based on public data that we were able to gather.

There are like 5 million podcasts on the certain percentage of them are active. At the time when I was building this, the number of podcasts listeners in the US was 100 million people who listened to at least one episode in a month or something like that. And of those certain percentage was a heavy listeners who listened for like multiple episodes per week worldwide. If I'm not mistaken, there were like 450 or so million podcast listeners, which includes the US listeners to.

And the growth rate recently. Yes, which actually has slowed down since then. But it's still it's not a one person. I think at that point it was more like 15 or 18 person. I'm forgetting. But now it's maybe like eight or 9% recently. Right. Yeah. And then we took this assumptions and basically built a model. So there are factors that you can't control like how many listeners there are how many podcasts, right, etc.

But there are levels you can control like what percentage of users do you think will upgrade for premium subscription? How much do you charge for premium subscription? How much you can make on ads by showing your ads to free users like what are the CPMs there? I mean, obviously you can't control all of it, but it's something that you can influence it list like you can't influence micro trends, but you can think of some micro things to be clear.

We had not figured out the whole pricing model and the features yet. What we are talking about is at a very high level. If we have two pricing models. One is free, but add supported. And the other one is subscription based. And then you plug in some hypothetical numbers about if it is add then take the all open data that's available publicly. You take the CPM basically you factor in those things or you put in your subscription par month number in there.

Yeah, we've actually done both for the 5% of the paying the assumption was 5% of the pain users who upgrade this is the revenue we are going to make right. So 5% of users of the app will upgrade to subscribing users others will remain free that was one of the assumptions yet others will remain add supported and this is the approximate revenue we can make from ads.

And then so this is a total number of users worldwide I mean listeners what percentage of those can be captured and we took some ridiculous small number like 2% or something. I think it was even half percent or something maybe in one of the models. Even super conservative with everything it still made good sense for a team of two.

But then we were like okay so we are applying to I see maybe we look at VC finding this is just not good enough. And we were like okay so let's jack up the adoption percentage like 30% because we are going to build the best app ever to be clear. So I think Apple has about 40% market share right now right. I don't know how correct this is because they are only on iOS. But on iOS there is a bigger number it's not 40% there is a bigger percentage of people on iOS who are that.

I wonder if the 40% Apple number comes primarily from the US and Western countries. US yeah that would make sense because there are more iOS users. And maybe most of the big podcasts are also in the US and probably that's scoozy statistics because the statistics comes from hosting companies.

Somebody like lip scene or transistor or others they would be like okay this is the distribution of downloads from our app. But if you host most of the podcasts for American audience then you will get most people using the iPhones. Right. I guess what we are saying is when we were doing this Spotify had about 25% and Apple had 35% or 40% and we were saying if we want VC funding and we build a humongous company.

That grows into a Spotify or an Apple just in the podcasting space not music not everything else they do. So we capture let's say about 25% of the market share. Basically become a strong number three. Strong number three. Then the revenue potential was basically do you want to say it? It was like the hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah this is annual revenue.

And all the way like ARR at scale right. And then we started also looking at what are the other places we can branch out to do ads for example right in audio ads. Maybe even to podcast hosting we started to get really really ambitious. I remember we created that pitch deck that we showed to just one we see that we met with just for international it was just some acquaintances of mine.

And we had these four phases where it's like a first the podcast tools for creators think was a second step which I think we will be doing. We need to have tools for creators once we have certain critical mass. But then there are all sort of branch out to all sorts of different things. It was like a social network right. That whole thing was that I think billion dollars ARR I think. We were like okay so this is the big enough number. That was more like a projection to show to VCs.

I think it was very far away from what we could execute in the next couple of years. Yeah. That was basically a potential. So if you have 500 million dollars revenue you're a unicorn you will be valued at like whatever $5-10 billion. And also in the meantime you were talking like do you really want to be that big? Yeah. Do we really want to grow that fast?

Maybe it's a good problem to have when you have a large company and all that. But only if you have the right VCs on board and they don't drain you out of energy and also like you don't have to sell your company for like 10 billion. Otherwise you don't make any money. Plus additionally I think we talk a lot about what makes us happy at work in episodes 24 part 1 and part 2.

One of the things you and I have clearly talked multiple times that we don't want to work with more than I think your number is a bit more than mine. But mine was maximum 15 to 20 people I don't want to work with more than that. I think mine was like 30 or so. My happy space is maybe 5 people but I can go up to say 15 maybe stretch myself to 20 but at that point I'm so distributed between everything else that I get no time to do any deep work myself.

And what fulfills my day today is deep work. This is what I learned at Amazon over the last few years. So I came across an Eric Schmidt interview where he was talking about Google culture with Reed Hoffman about 8 years ago. The video was published 8 years ago. And he said very interesting thing. He said that there are people who do the work and there are glue people.

So people who sort of help the work to be done. He's like everybody likes them. They help to see the seams between teams and all that. But he's like we don't need them. Also remember talking to somebody who said that the moment you hire your first TPM. It's an education you've gotten too big.

When you start having like project and program managers to orchestrate the work it's too big. And for that particular person was like I'm out because like I don't want to be in an environment where you have to have glue people. Too big inherently says it's bad but it's not necessarily bad. It's just what fits your mental model of a place you want to be at.

Right. Yeah. I think if you want to have this kind of a maybe Armada moving the slow pace, crushing everything in the spot using the military analogy. Maybe it is. For me like I want to be on a jet ski. Jet ski to the solar apprenticeship thing. But it's more like I want to be on a speedboat that maybe sits 10 people. Right. That's the speed spot.

But what we enjoy is taking decisions quickly being in charge of our own destiny whether that's for the good or bad we'll see in the long term. But we love that side of it. We love big hands on we love building things ourselves. So a 60% company does not fit that mental model for us. Alex Harmohs just said on the podcast. I mean I'll get to that at the end of the episode too.

So he was saying that how to be more effective if you make a decision between an hour and somebody makes a day to make a decision. You are whatever seven times 24 times more effective than they are obviously it's over simplified. Right. But if you make things very quickly make decisions very quickly you are more effective and for both of us that's a speed spot. And that's the dead horse of beaten to death at this point.

Plus I feel like the cost of decisions or mistakes we want to be in a place where the cost of decisions are not humongous enough that it requires a bureaucracy of seven levels of people approving your decision. Because to be fair in a place like AWS or Google the cost of the decisions that you make could be humongous. And that's why there are all these checks and balances which has been I think ultimately didn't enjoy that structure.

But I think this whole exercise us talking you doing the financial model what it illuminated for us is even if we capture half a percentage of the English speaking part of the market. Then there is a significant revenue here to fund a basically bootstrap and have a profit generating small company with a handful of people without projection of costs. And the money we want to make personally which is not obscene but it's sizable.

It's comparable to what you make in big tech. And obviously I want to make more money but this is break even point which actually makes sense. Okay. So we didn't leave our push jobs for nothing. That break even point is a three hundred seventy five thousand users which is less than half a percent of a hundred million users US market alone. I mean there's numbers they were enlarged in absolute but relatively they were small.

And this is to bring you or me back to what we were making at Amazon and really but I think my perspective on that has also changed quite a bit. Making like half or one third of that money but if I get to do what I'm doing basically work in a small space be deep at work be in charge of our decisions. Observe how we are feeling and course correct that will be much more fulfilling than basically earning twice or twice that amount of money.

Yeah I agree I think my situation is a bit different for the short term I agree for the like mid and long term. I need to sort of recuperate like recover from all of the expenses I've had in the last year while building the company because like my wife doesn't work.

And we were basically living off the savings and I'll actually need to earn more than I was making it Google over the longer period of time so for this to make sense my ultimate goal is to not have to work at all my ultimate goal is to have certain amount my savings account or bonds whatever it is right. And I'm like I can just afford to do whatever I want I can take a sabbatical and record music for a year right I'll leave off five percent for that.

So basically for me it's like I'm happy living off let's just say like a couple hundred thousand grand a year which will be like pretty comfortable but it's not lecture right. If that's the five percent of what I have the dividends and I can do nothing at all so that's good for me. Yeah by the way the conventional wisdom is that number is about four percent but it also factors into how many years do you want to fulfill this off.

So if you let's say stop working at 60 then maybe 30 years is the maximum that you need this 4% at every year as a dividend without decreasing your initial investment or the investments that you have at 60. If you let's say do this at 50 or 45 then that number is going to be even lower but it's not 5% prevailing with them is more like 4% but for I think our case it's more like you should consider 2 or 3% as the max.

So it increases the money you require from the business even more to sustain that. Yeah my ultimate goal is the financial freedom. I listen to an interview with Alex Bloomberg from Gimlet Media on how built this from 2019 after this old Spotify for what are some obscene amounts of hundreds of millions of dollars. And he said that I'm rich now what I realize it money does make you happy but it does make you feel safe and I'm like that's it.

That's it. That's really resonated with me. I think when you have that stability as in you have that cushion right and you don't have to work you can really feel safe to do whatever the hell you want. So I think in episode 24 we have talked about it quite a few times in this but we did both discuss our finances leading up to the decision of leaving Amazon and Google.

And that's where some of the differences between you and me where that definitely influences this right like for me if I am enjoying what I'm doing like I am right now then I don't see myself needing to like stop working. But if I don't enjoy what I'm doing but it is paying me big bucks then there is a definite I don't want to do this more than X years scenario for me. Yeah, make sense. There is a golden middle there where you enjoy what you're doing and you get paid a lot.

I'm thinking about the 37 signals folks I mean I don't know how much they pay themselves but looking at the cars the DH drives they as we pay in themselves pretty well. So that's a sweet spot that I want to be in like doing what I want with people I want to be with very small team while still being paid a lot more than a VP at Google. And not in salary but more like his dividends so it's performance based.

Ultimately I think it comes down to the reward that you get from your work financial reward non financial reward for us the independence building something that we can touch and feel and we use every day that is a big reward already. And I think this is going to grow from here.

Yeah, I talked about how I'm passionate about the space and I also take a lot of pride in what I do generally and this is something like we can fully control the user experience here and what users actually get to an extent but still it's not like there is a VP that would say like no we can do this or you have to integrate with other piece of shit in the org and then the destroy your user experience right.

We have that agency right ourselves every time I use metagas I'm like this is so good and I take a lot of pride in this. Yeah, and we talked about this specific thing about a few weeks back maybe in our slack but I'll say it here in the podcast is because you and I started working on this in February we had a very clunky prototype with lots of hard coded stuff.

And then we kept iterating on it more and more and more in my eyes I had never looked at it as like a professional developed app internally I never realized that part of it when you made the landing

and you put those screenshots of the app in there that was the first time I felt like it actually looks good and we have had multiple people tell us that the UX and the look and feel and everything looks good and that's where I think one of the challenges I had for me and but I think all three of us had is we have never worked in a consumer app we have never worked on a mobile app before.

So we want to challenge extend ourselves and basically extend the limits of what we know to can do and I feel like I am getting a lot of reward from that already and this is only going to keep growing. Yeah, totally. It also made me reflect that my entire career I worked for brands that are really respected at least initially when I start working for them.

If you work on a big product I would never want to work at Oracle for example I'm just like why would you work for a company I mean there are reasons right but for me why would I work for a company whose products I don't use and I don't like even if it in Google like I wouldn't want to work on Android I just find Android you said it pretty well in our last podcast. Let's not do that again trolls come back.

Yeah, I was a hitter. But yeah, but I work in Google maps and I think it's one of the best products in the world and the SDK that they have it's clunky in its own way but it powers so many wonderful apps like a RIMB and Uber and others I feel a lot of meaning and also pride in having worked on that right and that's why like even when we start our app the name was very important for me.

How do we make it a brand because like I'm not just building a company I'm not just building a technology I also want to build a brand because these three things are independent but when they work together in the synergy then you get great experience because most of great companies also great brands perfect MBA speak synergy they fuel each other little leverage each other.

Yeah, all right, so I think on this offensive note to MBAs. We love MBAs. Yeah, I mean I have an MBA and frankly it's a bit of attention. It was the pivotal moment in my career that's when I moved to the US that's what allowed me to join Amazon.

I had an offer from Amazon before an MBA but it was like one fourth of the salary and in the country that I didn't really want to be in it was a different kind of job. So I might have gotten where I am without an MBA but it wouldn't be much slower anyway and I learned a bunch of skills but MBAs do have a stigma because of maybe consultants and just bankers kind of MBAs.

Again, I don't want to like blanket. There's nothing negative about it at least from my side. It's just whatever fits your life. Some people I'm sure they love that job and they're making big money doing that. Like making power points until midnight. Maybe they find a different purpose in there. Maybe influencing a big client is a reward for them.

I've spoken to multiple of those because probably half of our class were in us bankers and consultants. Pretty much everyone hates the aspect that they don't execute on the thing that they recommend.

That you just like throw it over the fence and somebody else in many cases just shelves it. But at the same time I think maybe this is what earned MBAs this stigma. In many of them they prefer the safety to the actually risk taking on going into the industry and actually being the person who takes the accountability to your point.

I don't have any other layers of approval because your decision can cost you billions. Not everybody has the gut and the personalities to be there. Many MBAs played safe by going into those fields where actually they can't play safe. Maybe that's what makes it such a stigma. But I think it's been changing also in recent years, last 10 years. A lot of people who maybe like initially made this not necessarily mistake but maybe misjudgment went from college to investment banking.

I really hate this but how they are breaking the more acknowledges pace and then they go to get an MBA and that's pathway to and they become successful product managers in companies like Amazon or Google. So yeah, there's nothing wrong about MBA per se but I think there's definitely this stigma. Okay, so what are you listening to or reading? So I watched the movie interstellar. I don't know if we talked about it last time. No, we haven't. I watched it five years ago whenever it came out.

It's been 10 years actually. It might be coming to theaters again because of the 10 year anniversary, which would be cool. I never saw it in theaters actually. I watched it. I loved it and I remember that I have this book by Kip Thorn. Kip Thorn is the main scientist who was working with Nolan and the people making the movie about the science. His book goes into much more details but he wrote a book called The Science of Interstellar and he very clearly says this is what we know.

This is what we are at the edge of knowing and this is what speculation is and he breaks down each of the things in the movie in these buckets and explains. So it's a book with pictures and diagrams and all that so I'm reading that book to prepare. So Bobby verse book number five is coming out in the spring. It was supposed to come out in February. Now I think it's more like me or something because it's audio book right.

So I'm preparing for that by listening to all the Bobby verse books again for the fourth time. For like the fourth time maybe but now I'm listening to it 1.5x or something to go faster through it. I'm skipping through parts that I know very well already. While doing all this I thought hey you know what project Hail Mary was so cool. I want my daughter to listen to it so I started her on that and we were listening together.

But I got completely engrossed in that again so I just added like bookmarks for her that this is where she is and I am aware of her now. Those are the two books I'm listening to. Any podcasts? Podcasts, a hard fork, all of the usuals recently formula one season is just starting up this week. So I'm catching up. There's a lot of drama in formula one right now. I wouldn't go into all the details.

I remember where I was when I learned about Mikael Schumacher accident in the mountains. It was like 2014. When we later 2013 such sad story. Let's pretty much my extent of knowledge of formula one is like he had been the champion and then he yeah sad story. Yeah. What about you? So for the last two months we have been watching Harry Potter every weekend we would watch two of the movies. This is now with your younger kid I guess.

The entire family. But your older kid has already seen it once or no? No. My older kid was actually afraid of Harry Potter. We start reading it when he was maybe eight or so and he's like no this is too scary. Yeah there's a lot of darkness, snakes and evil and all that. So we put the book aside. Well she'd be ready for the first book but the second book he didn't want to continue.

But my younger one discovered the books and they had like those illustrated books and he loves them and he's like I want to watch Harry Potter. So yeah we start watching and actually my older one he's 11 now almost 12. He's really gotten into it and he actually read the whole seven books, the whole collection in two weeks. He read it ahead of how we were watching it. Now we just have the one movie remaining which is the 20 years later or whatever it is.

So you're done with book seven part one and two already. Definitely hello to your done. Yes we've done with those and I never read it. I never watched it actually. I think I only watched one of the movies when I was younger. So it was interesting to watch you know especially later ones are pretty dark and also this whole like teenage love stuff. It's different. The movie that was recently made two, three years back I think that's actually a prequel now because I remember watching it.

I actually don't know. I'll have to look at it. I'll watch it on Saturday and let you know. From what I remember it's Dumbledore childhood and kind of getting into all this. My wife told me that they were going to make a series out of it too. I think I just going to milk the franchise. I like the Star Wars. You look at this. It's like 500 hours of content now. And the whole story has walked in so many different ways into different universes. It's crazy.

Which brings me to the book that I just finished. I finished the third book in the June series. Children of June. And I started reading the fourth one. And I'm not enjoying it as much because it's like 500 years after the previous one. I actually don't know how many but it's hundreds of years in the future. The entire character cast is different and I like. I just don't enjoy it as much so I dropped it.

But I hooked my son onto the June book. I was telling him about this. And after he read the three-body problem. So he got more accepting of my recommendations. He considers my recommendations more seriously now. Definitely. So the June, we watched the first movie earlier this week. He loved because he didn't watch it before. He loved it. Despite all the killings and stuff that happens there, he was fine. He was able to watch it.

So now he's halfway through the book in three days. And we are going to watch the second part on Friday in theaters. Because it comes out in theaters. Oh, this Friday it's coming out? It's coming out tomorrow but tomorrow my wife is going to watch it. Then on Friday my son and I will go. Because we can't go together because we need to leave the younger one with someone. Is she into sci-fi also? Not so much but she really loved June because June has a lot of that deep meaning in there.

And also the cinematography and the music is just something else. Yeah. So I also, I think I mentioned one of the podcasts, the Bone Comics by Jeff Smith, the comics from the 90s. I was reading them with my younger one. So I was skipping a lot when I was reading this. I only understood the plot in like, broad strokes. But I spent about a week to go through all of them and to end, which I was by myself, reading them properly. Enjoyed them a lot. I really loved them.

Yeah. I guess the last thing I want to mention is the podcast. I will not be listening too much, but I will listen to a couple of episodes. The one that I want to call out is Alex Hormozzi interview on the Chris Williams and podcast. I forgot the name of the podcast. But also Hormozzi on his podcast, the game. He republished his interviews that he gave elsewhere. I think it's called something like 21 and comfortable truths. So they were talking about the concept that I didn't hear before.

The opportunity cost. As like when you're doing something, you're not doing something else. And that has a cost of not doing the other thing. But there is also anxiety cost and attention cost. So anxiety cost is like if you agonize over a certain decision, you don't take it and it lurks into your brain. That you have to make this decision and you're anxious about it. So the longer you procrastinate, the more you are sort of less effective because you're anxious about that decision.

And that's what he called anxiety cost. The other concept, which is very similar is attention cost. So it's like you have to do something, maybe like a small thing, maybe like this morning, I got a text message with the utility bill. Usually I was just like, keep it off and then until you remind me. But now I'm like, why do I have to spend time on this at all? I just paid it right away. And okay, so for the next month, I can forget about the utility bill.

I could have also done the autopay, but it's just such a big hassle to set it up. I'm like, okay, whatever. Autopay or like batch, batch processing, these kind of things also is pretty effective. The problem is like they come in different places. Some of them come in paper, some of them come in text. But to your point, you can set up a process, autopay ideally, right? Or like batch processing, or just do it right away. So you never have to keep your attention on these things.

So you can free up your memory. And that's what he calls it, attention cost. I just loved those concepts. And yeah. So that's on the Chris Williams and show, but also republished on Alex Hormuz is the game. Yeah, and I'll add links to the show notes. Cool, cool, cool. This was good. I think the topic was good.

The question was awesome. Thanks for asking that again, we are not by no means we are experts in this, but it was awesome to walk back through our top process through this and document it on the podcast. Hopefully other people find it interesting also. So yeah, to close it out, go to metacast.app. If you want to try out our app, download it there for iOS and Android. It's available. We have a newsletter that Ilya does every week and this podcast links to those things.

As well as we have another podcast we've launched recently called Builders Donor Build. You'll find all those links on our website. Yeah, and with that, thank you for listening. Adios. Amigos.