240: Danny Postma — An Indie Hacker's Business Evolution - podcast episode cover

240: Danny Postma — An Indie Hacker's Business Evolution

Aug 09, 20231 hr 5 min
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Episode description

Ever wondered how to handle the competitive world of AI products and copycats while running a global business? Well, you're in luck. This episode of The Bootstrapped Founder features a heart-to-heart with indie hacker and global entrepreneur, Danny Postma. Danny takes us behind the scenes of his entrepreneurial journey, sharing priceless insights on transitioning from a solopreneur to a team leader, cleverly leveraging SEO, and the fascinating world of domain acquisitions.

Picture this: You're living the digital nomad lifestyle, working across time zones while experiencing new cultures. How do you make it all work? Danny Postma gives us a peek into his life as a digital nomad, the cultural differences that affect his way of work, and how he deals with the 12-hour time difference with grace. Tune in for a thought-provoking discussion on the value of a good domain name and how it can be a game-changer for any business. Join us on this exciting journey and tap into the world of a successful global entrepreneur.


Danny on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dannypostmaa/

The blog post: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/danny-postma-an-indie-hackers-business-evolution/

The podcast episode: https://share.transistor.fm/s/1fbba06a

The video: https://youtu.be/X36_7wRC_WI

You'll find my weekly article on my blog: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com

Podcast: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/podcast

Newsletter: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/newsletter


My book Zero to Sold: https://zerotosold.com/

My book The Embedded Entrepreneur: https://embeddedentrepreneur.com/

My course Find Your Following: https://findyourfollowing.com


This episode is sponsored by Acquire.com

  • (00:00) - Successful Global Business Building
  • (10:05) - Solopreneur to Team Building Transition
  • (17:09) - Dealing With Copycats in Business
  • (25:10) - Competition and Evolution of AI Products
  • (35:09) - Discovery of B2C and Acquisition Strategies
  • (38:59) - Importance of SEO for Indie Hackers
  • (50:12) - Building a Network, Avoiding Fame
  • (56:10) - Digital Life, Remote Work, Cultural Differences

Transcript

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Welcome to The Bootstrapped Founder. Today, I'm talking to Danny Postma, one of the most prolific and publicly active indie hackers in our entrepreneurial community. I talk to Danny about running a business with a global customer base, how to deal with copycats and clones, and why SEO plays

such a big role in building a successful indie business. Danny shares his thoughts about outgrowing the solopreneurial life or being at that point, what being a digital nomad means for the stability of your personal and professional life, and how he deals with being a pretty big deal on Twitter. Danny is an amazingly humble and insightful person. You will have a blast learning all about him and his journey. And before we dive into our chat, a quick thank you to our sponsor,

acquire.com. More on that later. Here's Danny. Thanks for being on the show, Danny. Now we're recording this with a 12 hour time difference here and you're in the Kuala Lumpur timezone, if I'm correct and I'm in Eastern Canada, that's like directly on the other side of the world. And I think a majority of your customers probably are located in North America too, right? Or somewhere in this time zone

here. So yeah, has this quite substantial time difference affected how you built your businesses or your products and how you engage with customers? How does that work for you?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

I think it makes me more productive because most of the time when all my customers are sleeping, I am awake, right? It's like, I think it's 9pm at your place now. And it's 9 am at my location. Yeah. So I get to especially because all my friends are in Europe, I get to work until 3pm without anyone messaging me what's happening me blah, blah, blah. Social media is super quiet. So I get quite a lot of

productivity. The downside to it is that if something happens, most of the times, it's at night, I get a lot of messages. Partners I work with, they missed me at night. So the nights are a little bit less calm than I like, but it's like, yeah, it's a payback. So yeah.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Yeah, I guess you just shifted around, right? You shifted by half a day. So do you do anything about this? Because I certainly remember having a lot of customer service stuff, you know, happen to random times during the day. But if all of this happens in the middle of the night, how do you deal with I don't know outages or customer service messages with like, high priority? What do you do? Do you just wait?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

So when I launched HeadshotPro, like for the first few weeks, for the first week, I think all the servers went offline while I was sleeping. So my subconsciousness would wake me up all the time at night checking the servers and then at 3am, the server would be down. But I think it's now robust enough that it's out of scales, customer support can wait to be honest, like my wife does the customer support when she wakes up in the morning and then we just basically ignore it for 16

hours until the next morning. Because I have one mantra, I don't build tools and software that really rely on me always been there that need to be offline like like email tools or anything like this. I don't want to build it like a lot of respect for anyone who does those things. Like I want to make tools where I could be gone for a week. And if I do ignore customer support, it's not that much of a biggie. So yeah, it doesn't live in media at all, to be honest.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

So it's about not building critical tools, but building tools that are so good that people treat them just the same way when it comes to budget. You know, because most of the time we say like critical things are the things that people have budget for. But you have built like successful businesses from apparently non critical things. So how did you

do that? Like how did you instead of criticality focus on something else, what is that other thing that makes your businesses so interesting to people?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

I think what I'm focusing more on now is before I

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

That makes a lot of sense, I guess. Do you still used to make software right like headline, which was a copywriter, a corporate generator. I think a more going into the B2C B2B one off payments, like it's not the software anymore. It's just a one time purchase, like the headshell AI headset generation. You purchase it once you upload it and you get your product back, right? So it's like a one off product. We've automated the complete refunds customer

support and everything. So when I went on holiday with my wife to Holland for two weeks, I just turned on the auto refunds so anyone that had an issue, they could request a refund. So we just all get out automatically done. I just love to make robots like I want to completely automate anything. Yeah, that's the mantra. Yeah. consider yourself like a solopreneur at this point? I mean, you say your wife is involved but that is from a

technical perspective. Are you still the only person doing this at least?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

So she helps two to three hours a day. I'm still a solopreneur but I'm actually I posted my first job post yesterday to looking for a machine learning engineer.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Saw that

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

Yeah, I'm making a rough, there's two reasons that led me to get there. So number one is I'm pretty sure I've add. So it's six months into HeadshotPro now and I'm like mentally unable to build any more features because I've been there, I've done it. And I'm so like it doesn't like stimulate me to work on those features anymore. And then my brain just doesn't want to do it anymore. So I haven't built anything for three weeks. That brings me back to getting anxiety because I

know there's a lot of competitors coming that way. So it makes me really stressed. And I'm like, HeadshotPro makes a lot of revenue right now. So I was like, yeah, it's quite dumb if I don't use that to build maybe like a little synchronically team that's remotes, find some like senior people that can help me out, focus on what I'm not good in. So yeah, you might see me moving from a solopreneur to more of a

small team support this way. I'm trying to like figure out how it's going to look like because I don't want to build a team in the sense that I don't want, you have a lot of companies that have discovered the culture. You're always online chatting with each other and stuff like that, like, that's not how I get work done. So I would love to have a team that they can self

manage themselves. You give them some bigger tasks and they come back in a week with the solution you have like maybe some chats via Discord or whatever. I still want to keep that solo founder monitoring side of it even though I tried to build a team.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

I guess the easiest way would just be to hire somebody on the other side of the planet. So there's no chance that you ever get to chat, right? It's probably gonna do a trick.

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

But that's an issue because I tried it out once with a friend of mine and he's in Europe and then he would wake up and he would start the day at 10am, which means it will be 5pm for me. It doesn't work because I'm tired. I've worked nine hours. I don't want to just dive into work anymore. And if he has questions, for example, we'll be like 8pm. So your complete downtime where you are supposed to rest as an entrepreneur like it's gone. So I'm really trying to hire for

Asia now. Like America will be impossible for me. Europe isn't ready, kinda. And no good, to be honest. So I'd like to keep everything in the same time zone.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

So you wanted to be in the same time zone, but you still wanted to be remote. Am I getting this right?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

Yep, correct. Yep.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Okay, yeah, I saw not only the tweet with your a higher, that you're looking into. But I also saw this tweet about you trying to shadow a remote team to learn how to manage it, which is a really, really cool idea. Can you expand on this, like, why you're doing this? And what do you think you're gonna get from that? And also, has anybody allowed you to join the teams just yet?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

Yep. So I learned from doing, right? That's the way I'm doing. But good luck learning how to build a team process task manager because I haven't worked in a team. I worked in the team as a freelancer, but it's like a different thing. So I don't know how to process is of a remote team. So I could try to figure it out myself, which, like, I

don't know where to start. So I was like, hey, maybe some crazy person is going to allow me to just be a fly on the wall, sit in the discord and the Task Manager, see how that team goes. I actually got a lot of replies like Sahil from GumRoad's and a meet to his notion. And it's like yesterday, so I've been taking notes all day, how they work. And it's so interesting. So based on that, I've actually put some processes. I'm being like, seeing how I'm gonna put in my notion how the task

manager is going to be. So I've learned a lot from it. Like, I think more people should try to do things like this, like just shadow someone. Yeah, that's interesting. It's cool that people are me. And tomorrow might be joining someone else. It just needs to sign an NDA because it's a lot of like, sensitive information, right? That you get access to. So yeah, we learning a lot. It's dope.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

It's really cool. I'm really surprised and in a really good way that this actually works, you know, like that somebody is actually letting you see their internal stuff. I think this kind of culture that people allow others to see the internal stuff, their business is effectively building in public, like through you as a proxy, right? That's kind of

what this is. That's so cool. I feel would have never happened like 20 years ago, like nobody would have allowed like a random stranger from the internet in their business communication, right?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

Well, I think this is because I've never met them in real life, right? But because I'm building in public, I think already for the last five years like people see my personality. They get to trust me, I guess, like they see what my, yeah, I'm working. Because how did you for your company that you sold a few years ago? How did you know to scale it? Did you work in a team before or just trial and error?

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Well, here's the thing. We didn't scale it personal wise. I was afraid to hire. I'm probably at the point. I'm probably a month behind where you are right now because I would have had to force myself to do it, but I didn't. I just thought ah, I can deal with this. You know how it is, right? We build something and then you spent a lot of time and you wish you would have had more time but it's not enough to hire somebody for because it's just, you know, a couple hours for the project

or whatever. And I had that all the time, like we had five and a half 1000 recurring customers like that was not just one off payments. That was SaaS subscriptions, most of which we automated away. I am like you, a big fan of automation. And we had a lot of automation. That was pre AI times pretty much. It was like, at least before any kind of GPT existed. And intercom, we were using that at the time for our customer

service stuff. They already had AI tooling. I don't know they had some machine learning in the background, I guess, that looked through your knowledge base and then suggested like word matching kind of substitution matching. I don't know what they did. But they brought the articles that were the best potential articles right into the first reply. So people most of the time found the things that we had written and solve

their own issues. But it got complicated. And I think most, the biggest reason that I had burnout at the end of Feedback Panda when we sold it, was this reason. I did not know how to hire, which is why I'm so impressed by you actually doing this, like going out and saying and I think it's an identity thing, too. And I was going to ask you because that's kind of why I asked, are you still a solopreneur? Because the moment you choose to build a team, you're not a solopreneur

anymore, right? It's a different mindset. Like, I wonder, what are you goals now that you're building an actual business, like not just a business in a formal sense, but like a team of people building something together? Did that shift the goals that you had for whatever you're doing?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

First of all, I'm completely winging it and I have no clue what I'm bringing. It scares so much. It's right to do. So I sold the Headlime, three years back two years back, yeah, two years back because I had three options. I could get VC funding into hyper scaling or talking about unreasonable rates. I could have bootstrapped it and build a team or I could have sold it because I had two people interested in buying it. And I was like, I don't want a team. I'm scared. I don't know

how to do it. And now two and a half years later, I'm running into the same position with HeadshotPro where I cannot do it alone anymore. The only option would be either to sell it again or to build a team. And I've been starting to realize like, yeah, look, I'm 29. I'm gonna run into this issue a lot of times in my life again. I'm financially stable now. If I ruin it, revenue wise and whatever, like, I do have the backup like, this is the moment where I could learn to do it and

ever fuck up. And if I don't like it, I'm trying to set standards with anyone I'm interviewing. I'm telling them like, this is my first time. I don't know how it's going to go. If you're going to quit your job for it, don't. You're not the good. This is what I'm trying to start like as with contracts, like maybe like part time. People that already have another client, like straight to start it in like, more of a safety area in that sense. Yeah, I need to. Yeah, it's also I need that

identity, right? Because I built my whole solopreneur stuff around it on Twitter. Yeah, I think it's time to stop doing it by myself because I'm gonna run into another burnout.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Yeah, if you keep going like this and have nobody to help you, you're gonna have a little trouble and it becomes a lot of little troubles. And then they just set up. The thing that I find so interesting is that there are two ways here, right? You could either do the same thing over again. You could sell it, build another one. Sell it, build another one, right? That's kind of how platforms like acquire or all these other

things, you just exist for this. You get it to a certain point, that's the point where you can Peter Principle where you stop being good at, right? Where instead of going to hiring yourself into the next biggest position where you don't have the skill, so you stay where you are and kind of sell the thing, but you chose to go beyond that. That is cool. But it also means a lot of change for you, right? Because now you're a manager, congratulations. It's gonna be very different from indie

hacker, indie manager, maybe that's gonna be a new thing. I'm just excited for you to take this step because not only is this something that I would personally be very afraid of to do myself, but I know that you're a person that shares a lot of your journey on Twitter and in the build in public community. So everybody's going to benefit from this and this is really cool. So thanks for taking the step. This is awesome and doing it in public at the same time. That's really cool.

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

I'm happy, other people get some something out of it. Thank you so much. Yeah, and I'm planning to go share it like I'll be public about it. I'll share how it's gonna go, it's how I learn. I can scroll back later a year back in Twitter, see what I learned, what went well and stuff like that. So yeah, I'm gonna see. I'm really nervous.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

I bet and I think that's okay. I guess like, you know, entrepreneurship everyday is another mystery, another challenge that we have no clue how to deal with and we try to, you know, grasp at straws and try to figure out how things work. That's just what it is. What I'm happy about in particular is that you're honest with the people that you're hiring, that this is an experiment, right? That's really

cool. I mean, that's just shows what kind of business perspective you have, you're going to try it out, you're going to learn to get better, right?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

Yeah. And I think this is the issue. Like, if I have the mindset that I like to ship products really fast and kill them really fast, they don't work out. But if you're going to ship a team really fast and kill that, you cannot because people their families are, like, it's a whole different mindset. You cannot do it because people depend on it. Their salary, like emotions are involved with it instead of like, just a bunch of code. So like,

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Yeah

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

This is what I think that's the most scary part. Like I can try it out. But it's going to hurt people if it doesn't work out. Yeah. Being upfront about it, contractor only. Yeah

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Well, that's a good point because if I look at your website, the postcrafts.com with all your projects that you have, which are I don't know what 16, 17, almost 20 projects that you've done in the past. Like the moment you go full on one project, that kind of precludes you from building other things, right? Because that responsibility you just mentioned, now all of a sudden, you have to pay these people and their families, maybe their mortgage depends on you keeping

running this project. That is a big step to take. I don't want to scare you any further. I'm just trying to say like for an indie hacker, this is a pretty sizable move to make. And I don't see many people make this move because they get scared and you are scared, but you're still doing it, which is really nice. I quite appreciate that.

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

Thank you so much.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Well, yeah, it's cool to see this happening. I think this being a lesson and a learning experience at the same time because you learn it and you teach it as you go. That's just something that is such a indie hacker community thing, right? Like, where would you be without people like you who are sharing their experiences here? We would never even try. So

that's really cool. But on the other side and we talked about a lot of your build in public stuff that you've been doing and you've been sharing a lot over the last year, it's just how you built these businesses, the ideas you had and how they came to be. What I wanted to talk to you about this kind of the reason why I contacted you in the first place. There was a day where there was this copycat thing happening on Twitter. And that was kind of when I reached out to you. I don't know if you

remember this, but you probably do. Because it was a pretty weird day, right? Somebody just cloned your full product completely, like down to the copy and then posted some weird, like, kind of rich bait tweet about telling you not to be mad at them, right? Can you give me like, do you want to talk about this? Or does this feel traumatic to you?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

I've grown a thick skin over it. So we can definitely dive into this. So it's such an odd thing.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Yeah, wasn't that weird? How did that feel to you? Because I remember you kind of engaged with it. And then at some point, you just deleted all your tweets that you did to this person. So what happened there? And how do you deal with these things? Because that's probably a fear that many indie hackers have, that somebody just clones the whole thing and then tells them not to worry, right?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

Yeah, so with Headlime back two years, this happens a lot like people carbon copying, so there's a difference between copycats and inspiration, right? Like inspiration is you, you, you. I don't care if people take the same product as me because I also get inspired by other people like it's fine. But once you take someone's whole landing page, copy, branding, colors, and everything and all their

like, everything is the same. That's a copycat. So let's just stay like set that down because a lot of people argue with me because it's a bad thing. Because people gonna think they are your, like the competitor is you, so people gonna get confused. That's like the biggest issue. So we'd Headlime for like, two months, I was just busy fighting them being negative on Twitter about everyone copying me and people got so fed up with me, like telling me like, shut up, stop

being so negative. And like, it really got me down at that time two years ago, but that fueled me to actually build the version 2 of Headlime that got acquired differently because I was like, fuck, my product is so easy. Everyone's copying it. I think I need to take three months and just build it into a bigger thing. So I'm ahead of the curve again. So what happened so many

times now two years later, like it happens a lot. I don't care that much about it because 99% of them, they don't go anywhere. This one just rage baited me so badly by just like calling it out that he copied me on purpose, making a tweet about it. That was 10pm and I was about to go to sleep, so I was already so tired. I was like, what the fuck is this? You gotta find this tweet. And like, I know he deleted it, right? I

think he deleted it. Like, he just rage baited me and I sent it to Pieter and Pieter Levels is like, dude, you're just feeding the trolls. He's gonna get engagement clicks out of it, delete it. I was like, yeah, you're right. I shouldn't spend time on this. I DM him. I was like, dude, there's something called DMCA, which is the Millennium Copyright Act. I can mail Cloudflare right now. They're gonna take you down tomorrow, like, you better just turn it into something else. So

he actually listened. He changed the copy. So it's still the same product, which is 100% fine. Like, that's competition. But now he has his own landing page with his own images and his own copy. So yeah, you grow a thick skin after a while. It stays annoying. This is why I'm blocking everyone. Everyone that's competing with me, I blocked them on Twitter. I just don't want to see what they're doing.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Right

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

It's like, as a mindset for myself. I don't want to see what you're doing. I actually unblocked the founder

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Interesting. Yeah. I mean, it's a good mix of don't feed the trolls and also kind of protect yourself from just their stuff, right? The influence that they might have. And I guess by blocking them, I mean, if you block somebody, all they need is a second account and they can still read your tweets, but at least on the main account, they're not gonna see your of Copy AI two weeks ago, after blocking him for two and a half

stuff, right? Which is algorithmically, probably interesting because it's not gonna get pulled in that much into their feeds either. So you don't see them. They don't see you. Everybody is at peace. So that's great. Yeah, it's very interesting. I'm absolutely 100% behind you on this, just don't years just because I don't want to see what Copy AI was doing.

feed the trolls thing. I also did not reply to this or retweet it because I did not want our community to either grew up a shitstorm because I don't want negativity like this either. It's bad enough, they copied you. They don't need to have their lives ruined by a couple, you know, a couple of 1000 Keeps you sane, to be honest. nerds. Now you don't need the nerd brigades to come in and destroy their lives. And also, any like, any retweet is kind of

validation for them, right? That was the rage bait. Let's see what we can do with this, right? That was their idea.

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

If you have 80,000 followers, it will pop up in a

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

That is right. lot of people. Twitter promotes rage bait and engagement, people commenting. So I think everybody in 15 minutes it got 10, 20,

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

That is dumb

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Right

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

So dumb

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Yeah, it is really destructive. I agree with you. 30,000 fuses like yes, it's not a good thing. What I don't understand, like just slipping into this, like, the whole And if you look at this, like if in a less emotional level, it building in public is like, five years ago, I couldn't dream I'm really is a highly destructive behavior because the only thing interacting with you, other people, Sahil, founder of

Gumroad, and any other like, big guys on Twitter. Like building you have when you're building in public or when you're in the in public is, the best thing about is you get to meet people you've been inspired by your whole life. You learn from them. And by making a carbon copy cat of someone else's product, you indie hacker community is your reputation as a good community just destroy your name and any chance to. I'm gonna get fed up already. But they're building in public. They're building in

public so their whole purpose of it is to go there, I guess. And you destroyed it by just doing one thing because no one is going to trust you anymore. member. So by doing anything that destroys that reputation, you burn any potential future opportunity. Like those people, I'm not sure if I even followed them or if I blocked them out of spite, just at the same moment, right? As it happened to you. I was like, I don't want to interact with people who do this

kind of stuff to Danny. I like Danny. I don't want Danny to suffer. I'm not gonna talk to them ever again, which, I mean, it's probably fine with them. But it's still in this community where reputation is everything, like these acts are really short sighted. That's the thing, right? It's super short sighted to just copy and hope to make a couple of sales and then not turn it into something better, just like try to stay a copy of something. It's really, really like a short term when that

turns out to be a long term loss. It's unfortunate. That's what it is. I do wonder now that you are very active in the visual AI space. If I look at your postcrafts like I'm just going to drop your domain a couple times here because it's really cool to see your projects. If I look at like the top 7 or 8, 9, 10 projects that all AI based and most of them are like visual AI, right? You have HairstyleAI, you have Photoshed, you have HeadshotPro and Deep Agency all of these are

really about, you know, physical visuals of people. I don't know mean morph is gone but you know, this model does not exist and Profile Picture AI all of this is AI. How much competition do you have there? And I'm not just saying indie hacker stupid clone competition. I mean, like actual meaningful competition from I mean, Pieter, always competitor of yours. I know that but you know, the much bigger pockets like how much competition do you have within this field right now?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

I think this should be focused on HeadshotPro, I think there's five big competitors. I see on my AdWords, one VC funded company who actually stole also all my landing page and tries to steal my marketing agency and all the things which I think is very odd for fizzy HD. So I think there's five competitors in that sense. Profile picture when it came out had like hundreds of competitors. Lensa, obviously, everyone knows Lensa. I think it was the biggest

competitor. I love it when I get a highly popular competitor because then they do marketing for me and earn the money. Like last week, Remini is going viral, which now does AI headshots on iOS and my sales have been tripled since that day because everyone's googling for AI headshots and I'm ranking number one on AI headshots. So I just get all that traffic and I confer them. So perfect!

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Awesome

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

The hairstyle has like a one competitor, I think. No one is doing hairstyles yet. That's the one I acquired. Not that much but most all these products are basically pivots of each other Stock AI or Tattoos AI turns into Stock AI. Stock AI turned into Profile Picture. Profile Picture turns into headshots. That's why I have so many products in them. It's just like an evolution of them. And I just keep them online. Yeah, so.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

That's really cool. That's a smart move. I guess like the underlying, like models might be different. But everything the chrome, the UI, everything you put on top of it probably is very similar. So you're reusing your own templates. That's an interesting move. Not a surprising one because obviously, you're kind of niching down into every single field. How did you you pick this honestly? Like visual AI, there is a lot of stuff going on. There was a lot of NFT

things going on in the past. How did you go into like headshots and professional headshots too? That agency thing, that stock thing?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

So start with this, generative AI came out in September 2022, I think, when stable diffusion launched and I just decided yet the obvious point you can do is make a stock photo website. So I built Stock AI, but the quality wasn't there. People weren't willing to pay for it. I was deathly scared that I would get a cease and desist from getty images or whatever because they have so many big lawyers. I was like, I'm not gonna sit on this one. So then I've worked on yeah,

then I think on Twitter, I saw dream move launching. So Austria did AI. They made, yeah, they made a you could turn your face into styles. And Pieter sent me a DM on telegram. He's like, dude, check this thing. And he was building something. I was like, you're fucking kidding me. I'm also building it. So we basically just shipped it in 30 hours. He shipped without a back ends and database because he knew I was going to ship faster

than him. So he launched on Friday night. I was, fuck. So I launched on Saturday morning, absolutely exploded on Twitter. I think I got like, six figures in sales in a week because it's such a shareable product, right? And it was super new at a time. I was lucky to rank on Profile Picture. And there's a lot of searches on Profile Picture, like lots and lots of lots. But then Lensa came out. I got like a boost of revenue. And then it started to go really, really down like these days. It's

barely any revenue. And I was pivoting. So I was working with a friend of mine, a developer and we split up. I was going to do Deep Agency which was basically folded to the AI as an editor. David was going to use the model I built in Python, like I made a special pose. We can use photos of someone. You can get the pose out of it so you can make headshot with it. You could do anything with it. So that was building the headshots direction, both launched them at the same time.

Deep Agency got a lot of press coverage, but no sales and HeadshotPro got a lot of sales. So that's when I decided to dip down on yeah, on the Headshot part. This was really just an evolution of trying things out and I didn't expect Headshot to have so much. Yeah. So much demand for it. So yes, pivoting, pivoting, pivoting, trying it out in that sense.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

That's a really smart move. I like that. I'm just surprised that the stock thing got press coverage but no sales. You would think that something like this being covered would be some kind of lead generator, but it was just a novelty that made the press interested in that. What do you think?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

So with Deep Agency, the one where I tweeted out these models are fake, you can hire in them. Everyone went mental like, models are going to be replaced. The fashion industry is going to be destroyed. This is the worst thing. People are going to lose their jobs. Yeah, it's all my fault. Like everyone wanted to

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Your fault use a model and put a fashion products on top of it.

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

But that's so hard to build. And I'm not like I've

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Right managed to build my own deep learning stuff. But I wasn't able to put a fashion at the same time Headshot Pro was easy to do. So I was like, I'm gonna just gonna deep down on that. There's gonna be some other bigger company who has that clause in the fashion industry, they're going to do that. So I was like, yeah, okay, it's super popular products. It doesn't make sense for me to chase. I'm just going to put it down there and focus on another one. Maybe one day we're going to go back

there again. Yeah, impress and clicks doesn't pay the bills. So if you have a product that earns more revenue and has a higher conversion rate, I think Deep Agency had a conversion rate of 0.3%. And HeadshotPro had a conversion rate of 10 times that. So then, like, you know, your products Absolutely. Yeah, I guess particularly for an indie hacker that needs to make money to pay the bills that using the product or just serving the images incurs, right? Because

nothing is free on the backend side. That is an absolutely smart move.

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

Yeah

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Well, one thing I do wonder, particularly because you already said like with profile picture that kind of doesn't have sales anymore. And HeadshotPro is now in a different vertical, I guess. But do you also think that that will end one day? Like you seem to be very, like focused on experimenting and going where the money goes. Do you have a kind of time horizon for any project? Or do you think this one is going to stick around a bit longer?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

I think this one's gonna stick around longer because you're competing with like Profile Picture is for vanity, right? It was a fun thing for WhatsApp and stuff,

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Yeah

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

Yeah. And yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, it's a but Headshots people actually into headshots for their CV, for really interesting industry. But yeah, it can always go to shit, their LinkedIn, for their teams, whatever. Currently, you have to like a bigger competitor comes in and whatever. A lot of people pay $300 if you want to get a photo shoot. If you can get that done for $39 and it almost looks the same. And 9 out of 10 people, it looks really good, then you're competing with a

more expensive physical products. They suddenly that people can only do in one city with a limited amount of photographs. And suddenly you can just build a robot that can do it worldwide. Yeah, I think this is a massive market that no, there is a 5 to 10 billion market size for portrait photography worldwide. So if I can just take 1% of that, I'm happy. So this is a big market. Like I see this getting bigger. And that's why I also want to build a team to grow it out.

say, yeah, you have to build a sustainable business. You need to take revenue overtime. I'm more of like this get as much revenue upfront because your company, especially with AI, it could go so fast. Like, you could be obsolete next year. And they'll just move up to new products. And then they have a team to ship even faster to move to the other product, try out different things. Yeah, I'm not that scared about it, to be honest.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

That's an interesting point, though. I just understood that the team you're building is not a Headshot Pro team. It's kind of the Danny Postma team. It's like the postcrafts.

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

Yeah, they can work on 16 products. I just want to try out new products and whatever, product market fit, then I have a team skill that went out because I love to iterate. I like to mess around. I hate many things, scheming things. So if I can just have a team that likes to do those things, then I have the feeling it's going to be a monster. You could have a lot of products using the same technology into different markets. Yeah.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

It's kind of the studio model, right? You have a reliable template of tech stack and you have people who know what to do, how to execute, how to deal with spin up a customer service platform or whatever. That is really cool. Oh, I'm excited. So what I hear from you is that you're still experimenting with things in this space, right? You're finding things that work, you go into them, you monetize them as

much as possible upfront, which is also new. You know, it brings me back to my whole solopreneur question from earlier because you know, back a couple years ago, five years ago if you would have asked me what is a good business, I would have told you my recurring revenue every month solopreneur living lifestyle business, bla bla bla bla bla. I would have counted down a couple things. But if you asked me now it's like, well, you want to

monetize as quickly as possible. Recurring revenue is great, but it's not required. And if you need to build a team, then you need to build a team. So this seems to be the change that happened in my life. Does that happen for you too?Did you just like, let go of these preconceived notions?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

So I always thought B2C is you should never go into B2C. B2C is horrible. Don't go into B2C, which is still horrible, like a lot of disputes, angry customers, blah, blah. Yeah, I want to replace my wife eventually because she also gets to shit with customer support. But what I've realized is that the difference between B2B and B2C like, it's really nice to have recurring revenue, but you need to keep building features. You need to have a relationship with your customer.

If you're more in B2C like my skills are, I'm really good in conversion optimization. I know how to build a high converting landing page. You only have to get them once to buy. There's no recurring thing. You don't have to add features because they don't pay monthly, they just buy what they want. It needs to be good at that moment. You basically don't have to support them after because they will not come back. They just come for the one product. So you don't have that much of a support

load. You don't have that much of a help desk. You can more scale with SEO on ads. So it's like this whole different. I really like it to be honest. Like, I really like to optimize traffic coming in converting them giving them what they want. And then it's done. Like that's where the relationship ends. That's what's cool about B2C.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Yeah, definitely is. It's not something you looked into when you were like purchasing businesses because you recently went a bit on an acquisition spree, I guess, and bought a couple things, right? And is that something you actively look for like a B2C product that has a pay once, used once and then be gone forever kind of customers?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

So I saw Nick, Nick at Hesti AI and he's also in Bali and I saw him listing it on acquisition.com. And so I sit down with him. I asked for his conversion rate and his conversion rate was really low. But he got a lot of visitors from SEO. So I was like, this is going to be complete an experiment like I know how to make the landing page converts 5 to 10 times better. If I can make the landing page four or five times better, I earn. Like if you say okay, now acquisition

price is four times revenue, right? Yearly revenue four times profit. If I can optimize a landing page to have five times more conversions, I earn back the acquisition price in 10 months. If I do it 10 times, it's five months. And I already have the better AI generation. So I just copied HeadshotPro, put it on his domain name. I think conversion rate is up six times now. So I earn a back in nine months. So it was a no

brainer for me to do in that sense. And then the other acquisitions are, I bought profilepicturemaker.com, which is like a 12 year old domain. And then that one, like people want to make a profile picture. So if someone that wants a profile picture probably also might want the new headshots. So I've put a big banner on it to link back to HeadshotPro. I'm trying to like have like all these acquisition channels to

funnel back to the main product. It's more like as an engineering as marketing, I guess, like making tools, getting traffic, sending them to the main server.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

It's interesting to see like how you're using the same kind of technology in so many different ways. That's really cool. Also how different those domains really are. And domains is something that I want to talk to you about because you were talking about domain leasing a couple weeks ago, I guess, at this point. Like, that was something that I've personally never heard before. So I'm very grateful that you introduced me to the idea.

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

Yeah

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Right. Getting a domain for a short time. Can you tell me more about that experiment like what you did there with that?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

So I wanted to have stockyai.com because I thought that was pretty dope domain. But the owner wanted 30 to $25,000 for it. If you don't have like product market fit, you're not going to pay 30k for a domain name. But then so dan.com has the option. You can pay it in 12 installments, 24 installments or maximum 60 installments, which means they take a higher commission fee. So I think I paid 20% commission over that extra. So I only have to pay $500 a month, which is

still a lot, right? But if it's a good domain, it's worth it. So I had to pay $500 for the domain. If you don't want it anymore, you can cancel it. And if you cancel it before you've paid it off, the owner of the domain gets the domain name back and you can stop paying for it. So I paid three months of domain transfer. So I paid $1500. I didn't get product market fit. So I just said I'm going to quit paying for the domain name. So

you can like lease it. Yeah, lease to own, I guess is the name for it.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

That's really cool.

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

You can try out because I believe domain names is you need to pick a good domain name because that's how you're going to rank in SEO. Like HeadshotPro basically tells Google that you should rank number one for headshot, HeadshotPro, professional headshot because it's in your name like Google gives like a little bit of a boost to it because it's in your domain name. So if you want to make AI stock photos, like better get the domain stock AI, so it's worth paying money for, to be honest.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Yeah, absolutely. Did you get Headshot Pro? Did you have to buy that?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

$3,000

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

That is surprisingly good for a domain. The most money I ever spent on a domain was probably for Zero To Sold. Like I spent $1,000 on that for my book. That was really the zerotosold.com, which was nice. Like, that was a solid name. And I'm glad I got it. But I've never spent more than that. And it kind of frightens me, like the expense that a good domain name can incur on a business, which is why this whole lease to own thing is a really interesting one

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

If you've already picked the name for your book, Zero, yeah and then you get the .co domain or .io name like, we'd have like, I had so many people typing in Google headlime com, headlime co, headlime eo. Like they couldn't find my website because they had the .io domain name. Like imagine how much and I think Damon from Testimonial made a tweet about it. He bought the .com. And all the domain put an affiliate euro on it. And he basically, I think he paid 10 or $20,000 for it.

And he earned it back by people just going through the website. So imagine having your competitor buying the domain. You're gonna lose all your customers like it's worth, if you can spare it to buy the domain, that's good to be honest, the .com.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Yeah, you seem to have a lot of insight into SEO, which is something that I don't really know much about. But you've been mentioning several times how well your things rank and how much work that you put into SEO for your products.

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

I only build products where there's SEO. So I don't know that much about SEO, just to be honest, like, I just know kind of how it works. Like, for every product, I do research. So this is for how HeadshotPro came out like I was Googling, like I was trying to rank for profile picture. And I saw there was a lot of search, like you can go to ahrefs.com/keywordfinder. You can type in a keyword and it

will show you how many searches there are for a website. So I saw there's a lot of search for headshots and that the keyword difficulty, which means the higher the number, the harder it is to go rank in Google. So the moment you have like a keyword difficulty that's under 10 or 20, you're guaranteed to go to the front page if you have like a one or two backlinks. So I only pick product ideas that have a lot of search and a lot of keyword difficulty. Why? I hate marketing. Like I hated

marketing. Now I'm getting a little bit better at it. I think it's really like if you're an indie hacker, the easiest thing you can do is pick a product that has a lot of searches with no competition. You never have to do marketing because you're going to rank number one on Google. Everyone goes through Google like you have. You don't have to do marketing for it

because people search for it already. So that's how often the IDs and postcrafts.com They're all based on me searching on ahrefs for some keywords and then building a product off it.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Okay, that's the money code right here.

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

Yeah

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

That's cool. Well, I was wondering, would you ever build something where those numbers would not add up for you where the difficulty would be way too low? Would you do that?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

No, no

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Even if you had a marketing team?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

If no one searches in it for Google, it means you have to create the market, right?

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Right

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

So as an indie hacker, you're not going to create the market. Yeah, you can. But it's going to be super hard. So if you can just find something people search for and no one is building for it. Or maybe like one or two people building for it, you could go number three. If you're not good at SEO, you could even say okay, if it has a high enough acquisition price, you could do AdWords for it. Because if people search for it, you can also bid on it. Yeah, you're

gonna have an easy time. You know people want to buy it. You know you can just not do marketing for it because your website will rank for it. Yeah. This is why I try to tell everyone on Twitter just go SEO as indie hacker. I might be biased, though. But

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

You are because you're successful with it. I mean, I think that's a good reason to be biased if it puts money into your pocket, right? Must work in some way. And I think I personally very much neglected it in most of my projects in the past, the software projects at least because I thought I'll find ways to market it and probably do but it's still, the other way around, kind of what you're doing is a demand first business idea generation. That's what

you're doing. It's kind of what Justin Jackson always talks about too, right? Like the presence of demand is a good sign, good validation strategy for an indie hacker. Because if people are already buying something like this or searching for something like this, that's likely that they will also have budget for yours. And it's not just you can have a cool idea and everybody needs to buy it.

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

Yeah, and you can basically calculate. If you say, okay, let's say the landing page conversion rate is 1%. Like, you can calculate what your monthly revenue could be if you're listed on number one. So you can see hey, is it worth it for me? Can I do it at that price? Like it makes so much more certainty in your decisions. Yeah. Because how did you do marketing for when you started out? If you don't do SEO, like you wouldn't probably in social media parts, right?

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

So in my SaaS business, it was all word of mouth. It was all people just recommending it in the community because we had a very strong, interconnected community, online teachers, like teachers love to help other people and they love to help other teachers teach better. So it was a cool tool for teachers. So they gave it to others. But for my own kind of media business, my media empire that I'm building, it's also all community social media stuff, right? That's really what it is.

I'm building good reputations with people like you to come on my show and chat with me. I have people that sponsor this show, like acquire.com, that's for this one, right? And I have good relationship with Andrew Gazdecki and he was on the show. It's all relationship based for me. So it's a very community centric and build in public, you know, it's all about people in the end. It doesn't really matter what you're building

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

You already have the followers on Twitter, right? But I've seen so many indie hackers starting out who think building in public is going to bring them the customers. It could but it's gonna be such a smaller chance. It only most of the times, it only worked. Like it worked for me, I had 200 followers and I grow to 15k because I was sharing a new technology that was novel and people love to follow you for

it. But if you're building a product that's not like new, refreshing, people want to see how you build, it might be really hard to start off with building in public. So better just focus on like, guaranteed marketing channel like that.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Yeah, building in public is wonderful. You have two audiences with building in public really, right? You have your other founder peers, the people around you, the other indie hackers. And if you build a product for them, wonderful. You've solved all your problems. But if your audience, your actual customer audience is somewhere else, then building in public will not attract them, unless you build right there for

them in a way that appeals to them, right? That helps them that gets them somewhere, either as a content marketing, whatever strategy or you have a podcast in this space and you get other experts in and they invite their own audiences and whatever. But building in public is a thing that it has to be intersectional to meet both. And if it doesn't, if the only audience that you talk to about your product is other indie hackers, you still

get something out of it, right? You still got good advice and that kind of stuff, but you're not going to sell. You still have to get people to actually look at your product and pay for it. Yeah, that's right. So with with that in mind, I do wonder sometimes because you're now at 80,000 followers, too, right?

Like you have a sizable Twitter audience. I mean, we're probably yeah, we're never gonna reach Pieter because he's gonna just keep keep moving away from us in terms of followers, but it's still bizarre that between the two of us, it's kind of 200,000 people or something. It's like, what is this?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

I think Pieter, I think most of my followers came through Pieter because he kept retweeting me, same with Jon Yongfook from Banner Bear like I've been, my Twitter account is built on giants man, like they've been sharing so much. Healthy competition with me and Pieter, like, yeah, I went from 15, now it's 87,000 in like a span of a few months.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

It's so bizarre. That's like built on the shoulders of giants, that describes my whole life at this point. It's like everybody who ever talked about their business on a podcast like 10 years ago, I got to use what they taught me and I got to build something cool. And now I get to share my story. And same for you. Not admitting that the giants and they're still walking right there. They're still walking and sharing these people that we consider giants. They're still

in the community. It's crazy. And that's the thing. It puts a lot of attention on them. And then on you and on me, like we get a lot of exposure too in front of a lot of people. Do you sometimes wish you wouldn't have that much attention on Twitter? I was talking earlier about the copycat thing and the shitstorm that sometimes happen. Do you sometimes wish you could just be an anonymous founder somewhere?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

No, no, because it brings me so much. There's so many upsides to it that like the downsides that it has, yeah, there's only a few reasons why I would not want to do it. I'm quite Twitter addicted so not having anything would probably remove that from its away like have more of a calm life that's I think that's literally the only negative thing. Copycats like you get to learn with it like you're gonna get competition yeah but you get so much back for it like it's so

worth it. Like I basically have my whole board of directors on Twitter like I post about Edwards, people helped me out like where do you get that? I get to learn from other people so much like, the only reason I can do this alone is because I cannot ask other people for the feedback to help me out. Yeah, and you need to start early to do it. Like you need to start years and years ago. It's not going to be suddenly there.

Yeah, it's 100% worth it. No, I would not. I don't fit. Yeah, I don't know if I want to go to the level of Pieter where he gets recognized and everything everywhere. Like it's I think what we are lucky with though is like we're like a bit more. He's more known in like a little niche. So he's not like, real life famous. So I guess he like it gets recognized and coordinate space and stuff like that. So that's a nice part. But I wouldn't never want to be like a famous, famous. Yeah, yeah bigger.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Have you ever heard the article? I think Tim Ferriss wrote that one.

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

Yeah

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

How it is to be famous, that is such a scary piece. I never want to have to change my name at the airport as not to be abducted, right?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

He went regular people famous, right? And then, like what he said in his article, 1 out of 10,000 people is insane. If you have how many followers does he have? Like, let's say 2 million, which means he has like at least 120 to 200 crazy people following

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Yeah, and you have nine or something, you know. You have 8.7. Do the math on that. It's already there. That's the thing. It's in our community. And I guess there might be a shift between the psychological profiles between different communities. But you know, if you then have an edgier opinion and you attract a lot of negativity or a lot of criticism. Yeah, I wouldn't want to travel in that kind of world.

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

I already have it with the deep agency tweets. Yeah, the deep agency tweet that went viral, 30 million people. I got so many death threats in my inbox, dude. I was like,

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Wow, that's crazy.

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

What the fuck? Like, you don't want to go viral, viral. So I'm, like, 80,000 there's nothing on Twitter. I'm like sitting nicely and quiet. I get to interact with cool people on Twitter. I think it's nice. That's good.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

That is really nice in our community and that level of just being connected with people just makes so many things possible. I remember, I only had like 400 followers when we sold our business back in the day, but it was already just meeting the right people and having good connections just following the right people and interacting with them. That was all we needed to do. I think that's kind of among other ways. That's how people found us to even acquire us and may be my last

question here. And in this wonderful conversation, it's really nice that you're on. Now that you're building a bigger team and you're still you're building the studio of all of that and experimenting more, do you still have the you know the dream exit kind of somewhere in your future? Do you still consider this as a goal or do you just want to keep doing what you're doing until you just drop dead from, you know, old age?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

So before it's right before I made the decision to build the team, right? I was already thinking like I'm going to sell HeadshotPro and yeah till arounds but it was like I already did with Headlime. I'm just going to build another product again. So I'm just going to be in this fishery loop of I'm going to hit where I don't want to scale I have to sell it. HeadshotPro doesn't have any strategic acquirers, which means you're gonna get like a 3x multiple for it instead of like

an 8 to 10x. It's not worth it, man. You can automate it away for three years. Get your money out. So if you have a team that supports it, so yeah, for me at that price it didn't make sense so I was like okay, yeah, then I need to go that way. Yeah, what are you going to do with the money anyway? I'm probably going to put it in a house or investments. I tried sitting on the beach maybe depressed. I need to build like yeah, so if I can build a team, then that's good. Yeah.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Do you consider yourself nomadic? Do you still consider yourself like a digital nomad at this point?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

Nah, I've been stuck for four years in the same spot. So I don't think I'm that nomadic anymore in that sense.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Nothing wrong with that, right? Like you can make a choice to stay in a cool place.

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

But it's annoying like it always has in your mind if you live in another place like my family's in Europe. I live in Indonesia. Like I never feel that this is the place I'm going to live forever. So you always have like this nomadic lifestyle. I'm going to move somewhere else. Maybe I want to be close to my parents. So you will never have the rest your mind like, this is where I'm going to build my life. So that's always gonna. Yeah, so that's why I'm like I'm a little

nomadic. I might move to Portugal one day or to Kuala Lumpur. I'm not like fixed to this spot.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Okay, well that's interesting too, right? You're absolutely right. I think I move every, what? 5 or 10 years in my life, I've always moved around too. It's not nomadic because I settled in that location for a while. But you know, a couple of years ago, I was in Berlin and the time before that, I was in San Francisco or in my hometown and now I'm in Canada. That's a kind of, you know, sectional nomadic life that I do. I just settle everywhere. I find a house and I live in it for a while. So

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

Do you have it after a few years, you get bored and annoyed, like, so bored for pleasure? Like, fuck, I need to just throw it all around. I need to move to another spot. Is that why you move or is there another reason?

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

For us or for myself, it was always like that the circumstances of my life, partners or jobs, stuff like that. That's kind of that where my nomadism came from. My boredom is mostly with, yeah, also, just like with you with a business, like, I don't want to stagnant things to do. And I can find things in a place to do because we're all digitally connected. So there's a lot of distraction. If I want to, I just need to look at Twitter. I'm like you. I'm highly

addicted to Twitter. That's obviously the same thing. Like I spent way too much time there. But the opportunities that come from that, they spiced up the life that I have. So that's the reason why I also wouldn't have never want to give it up, same reason that you have for trying to, you know, build an audience and be a presence in the community. It's just because so much is coming back. And that is enough reason for me at least right now to not care where I am because doesn't matter where I

am. The thing I'm going to be doing, it's the same anyway. I'm going to hang out on Twitter and I'm going to do things, right? Maybe warm outside, maybe cold. I don't care. So that's it for me. Yeah, how's life in Indonesia? It feels like I've never been there. How is that for a founder? How's the founder life there?

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

I think a large part of how successful I am now is contributed to that kind of life. So in Europe and America, I cannot talk for America. But for Europe, it's very normal. You do everything yourself, right? Cooking, cleaning, groceries, this, that, that, that. Community to work, so let's say you already and this might be a highly opinionated, but I will explain why it's not in a sense, like, you spent like four hours I think in Europe, just like supporting your life

in that sense. Here in Asia, I wake up, I order my food, gets delivered to my house, house gets cleaned. I have a gardener in that sense. So the things you don't want to do, you can outsource to someone else. A lot of people are going to say yeah, that's bad. You hire someone else. But in this, like, everyone gets a part of the country. And this is how everyone lives in Indonesia. Like my wife, for example. They

also order food like as locals because why does it happen? You suddenly have three people have a job as a cook because there's no social security here, right? So everyone needs to have a job. Everyone, like the whole economy, I think gets like stimulated in that sense. And this is very Asian. Like it's more of an Asia thing like you outsource in that sense, right? Yeah, Mark got canceled once on Twitter for saying these things. So I think

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

I remember that. That was fun.

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

But it's so normal here like everyone does it. It's like the way in Asia different than Europe and Europe I think, people call it Calvinistic. Everything needs to be done by yourself and in Asia they believe more like everyone gets a part in the community to do whatever they're good in. Like I've read a cook of bucky Nasi Goreng from someone that loves to cook that makes a good meal than me making a garbage Nasi Goreng. That's how everyone thinks. That's how everyone

works in this. Like, that's how it works over here. So I get to say four hours a day, I think, in that sense, so I can focus more on my company instead of having to cook which I don't like, having to drive to work, which I don't like. Like it makes life a little bit easier in that sense. And it's also like, yeah, I think the sun helps a lot getting to walk out sides. Good weather.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Yeah, not so much here in Canada. I can tell you that like there is some sun, but not much of it.

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

I do miss that though. I miss like hiking outside. I would love to go to Canada. I don't know where you are, British Columbia maybe, Vancouver

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Ontario

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

Ontario? Yeah, Ontario

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Toronto, the area. If you ever come over, feel free to stop by.

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

I've actually been four times there and my family lives there. Yeah, I like it. It's such a nice area.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Yeah, it's a beautiful place. I like it too, obviously. Having space is wonderful because I can just sit outside and look beyond, right? And just think, that's really cool. I used to live in big cities and cities are great too. And you have a lot to do. But there's something about being like close to nature. For somebody like us who works in technology, right? Where it kind of gives you this sense of, there are bigger things than the latest version of JavaScript or

whatever. It's kind of nice. That is very cool. Thanks for

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

Every area has their own fate like in Asia, in sharing it.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

It's funny, we have a dog here too, like a year and Bali, it's harder to go out because it's really busy with a car. So we don't go out that much that far away. I went back to Europe, we got a car, we drove around road trips. So a half old. And that is already a reason for me not to move that's really missing those kinds of things. So everything has an upside. Everything has a downside. But while I was Indonesia, I have a dog here. So yeah, I'm living life here.

Maybe we move back to Europe. Maybe we go somewhere else. anywhere else because she likes it here. This is her house. The We'll see what life brings us, not stuck. dog owns this house, right? This is her place. I don't want to go It's bizarre that it's so much easier to fly with anywhere else.

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

Trying to move or fly with a dog like it's not a child or a group of children than it is with a dog, right? going to happen. You're gonna have to settle down with it. But this, I guess it's tribal problems. I guess these are just things that come with these choices that we make. I'm glad you've been making the choices that you made and also for talking about them here with me today. Let's tie this up with a

bow. If people want to follow your journey and see what you're building and see just how your cool idea of hiring people comes along, where do you want them to go? Wherever you want them to follow you? Follow me on Twitter, @dannypostmaa is where I share all my journeys, everything I do. I don't share revenue anymore. Sorry. But all the other learnings are there on Twitter. And if you need a new headshot, go to headshotpro.com.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Good pitch, I like it. Thanks so much, Danny for being on the show and sharing all that stuff with me today. That was a wonderful discussion. Thank you so much.

Danny PostmaDanny Postma

It's good to me being here.

Arvid KahlArvid Kahl

Absolutely! And that's it for today. Now, Danny mentioned earlier that he had acquired a business at some point that was extremely well aligned with his existing portfolio from another indie hacker, really, that's how it happened. And that's Danny's perspective here. But this also means that somewhere out there, there is now a founder, an indie hacker just like us, I guess, who is significantly more wealthy after having sold their app to Danny. And that's what acquire.com, the sponsor of this

episode can do for you. Imagine this, you're a founder who has built a solid SaaS product. It works, you have customers, you acquired them over a long period of time and it's generating consistent monthly recurring revenue. People are interested in your product. And the problem now is that you're not growing for whatever reason, there may be a lack of focus or lack of skill, lack of plain interest or something. I don't know. You

just feel stuck. What should you do? Well, the story that you would like to hear is that you would buckle down and somehow reignited the fire. And that's what it is. You get past yourself and the cliches and you start working on the business instead of just in the business. You built this audience you always wanted to build and you move out of your comfort zone, do sales and marketing. And half a year later, you tripled your revenue. While reality is not that simple. That's just wishful

thinking. Situations may be different for every single founder who's at that particular point in time. But too many times the story ends up being one of inaction and stagnation until the business becomes less valuable or even worse, worthless. If you find yourself there where your story is likely headed down a similar road, I can offer you a third option here and that's consider selling your business on acquire.com. Capitalizing on the value of your time is a smart move, don't

waste it. Acquire.com is free to list. They've helped hundreds of founders already. So go to try.acquire.com/arvid and see for yourself if this is the right option for you at this point in time. Thank you so much for listening to The Bootstrapped founder today. You can find me on Twitter @arvidkahl. And you'll find my books and my Twitter course there too. If you want to support me and this show, please subscribe to my YouTube channel.

Really appreciate that. Get the podcast in your podcast player of choice and leave a rating and a review by going to (http://ratethispodcast.com/founder). That's the best way you can help me in the show. Any of this will really help the show, just a good rating, a good review, best you can do would really appreciate it. So thank you so much for listening today. Have a wonderful day. Bye bye

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