Pieter Levels — The Indie Hacker’s Guide to AI Startups
Summary
TLDR在这段对话中,独立创业者Pieter Levels和主持人探讨了独立黑客文化的现状,以及AI初创公司所面临的挑战。Pieter分享了他对于独立黑客运动已死的看法,认为尽管独立黑客文化已经变得主流,竞争更加激烈,但机会仍然存在。他讨论了自己如何通过Twitter建立观众群体,以及在AI领域创业的经历,包括如何处理平台风险和与大型科技公司的竞争。此外,Pieter还提到了他对于远程工作和数字游民生活方式的看法,以及他如何在不断变化的技术和社交媒体环境中适应和创新。整个对话提供了对于独立创业、AI技术发展和社交媒体影响力构建的深刻见解。
Takeaways
- 🌐 独立黑客并未消亡,只是与过去有所不同,现在更加竞争激烈和饱和。
- 💡 AI 初创公司的兴起带来了新的挑战,如缺乏独特性和高成本。
- 🚀 利用现有技术进行创新仍然是可行的,即使在 AI 时代。
- 🛠️ 技术的选择并不比使用它们解决问题更重要,简单和快速的执行往往比使用最佳工具更关键。
- 🔄 创业初期,重要的是快速验证想法,而不是过分关注代码的完美。
- 📈 创业项目的成功往往取决于市场需求和验证,而不仅仅是产品的外观。
- 🌐 社交媒体平台的变化对内容创作者提出了新的挑战,需要适应新的传播方式。
- 🤖 AI 作为工具,可以帮助人们更有效地完成任务,但也可能取代某些工作。
- 🌍 数字游民生活方式依然活跃,但可能逐渐转向在特定季节前往特定地区。
- 💭 社交媒体上的争议性言论可以吸引关注,但也可能导致负面反应。
- 🔄 经济和社会文化周期的变化带来了新的机遇和挑战,重要的是适应和重塑自己。
Q & A
独立黑客(Indie hacking)的概念在Pieter Levels看来已经发生了怎样的变化?
-Pieter Levels认为独立黑客的概念已经从2014年左右开始流行,当时很多人通过Product Hunt这样的平台进行创业。但现在,这个概念已经被大型科技公司所关注,变得主流化,竞争也变得更加激烈。因此,他认为独立黑客不再是一个边缘的、亚文化的事物,而是变成了一种标准的创业方式。
为什么Pieter Levels认为在当前环境下,独立黑客的创业方式变得更加困难?
-Levels指出,现在不仅是独立黑客之间的竞争,还要面对大型科技公司的竞争。这些大公司有资源快速复制独立开发者的创意。此外,随着AI技术的兴起,即使是小规模的独立AI创业公司也需要面对那些已经筹集了数亿美元资金的大型AI创业公司的竞争。
Pieter Levels提到了哪些因素导致了AI创业公司面临的挑战?
-Levels提到了多个因素,包括高成本的GPU服务器、平台依赖性、技术缺乏独占性(如使用相同的AI模型和框架)、以及AI创业公司的高流失率和缺乏防御性。他还提到了经济衰退对融资的影响,以及AI技术发展迅速导致的快速饱和市场。
在讨论中,Levels提到了他如何通过手动工作来验证他的AI创业想法,这是怎样的一个过程?
-Levels描述了他最初是如何手动处理订单的,包括下载客户的照片、使用AI平台进行图像处理,然后将结果照片发送回客户。这个过程非常耗时,但他通过这种方式验证了市场需求,并在一周内实现了流程的自动化。
Levels如何看待社交媒体平台,如Twitter,对于独立黑客和AI创业公司的作用?
-Levels认为Twitter是一个重要的平台,可以用来建立观众群体和社交证明。他提到了自己如何通过Twitter来推广他的产品,并且观察到有机营销和SEO对于初创公司的重要性。他还提到了TikTok作为一个新兴平台,可能对年轻一代的AI创业公司更具吸引力。
在讨论中,Levels提到了他对于AI技术未来的乐观态度,他的理由是什么?
-Levels认为AI技术将带来积极的变化,他强调了AI的益处,并认为应该关注如何利用AI技术使人类未来更好。他还提到了政府应该提供基本收入,以保护人们不受技术发展带来的负面影响。
Levels在讨论中提到了他对于使用老旧技术的看法,他是如何看待技术的Lindy效应的?
-Levels提到了Nassim Taleb的Lindy效应,即技术之所以经得起时间的考验,是因为它老旧且可靠。他认为,尽管新技术可能看起来很吸引人,但它们往往更复杂,而且不够稳定。他倾向于使用那些经过时间考验的技术,因为它们简单、有效且可靠。
Levels在讨论中提到了他对于独立黑客和AI创业公司的看法,那么他对于想要进入这个领域的人有什么建议?
-Levels建议新入行的独立黑客应该尝试使用新技术,并且要快速行动以抓住技术浪潮。他还建议创业者应该寻找市场上未被充分服务的领域,避免与大众随波逐流,并且要准备好长期投入和不断学习。
在讨论中,Levels提到了他对于社交媒体平台变化的适应,他是如何调整自己的策略的?
-Levels观察到Twitter的算法变化使得某些类型的内容更容易获得关注,比如长篇文章和视频。因此,他开始在Twitter上发布更长的文章,以此来适应平台的变化,并保持与观众的互动。
Levels在讨论中提到了他对于AI创业公司的盈利模式和成本控制的看法,他如何看待AI创业公司的盈利前景?
-Levels认为AI创业公司的盈利前景与其能够多快地削减成本有关。他提到了AI创业公司的估值通常很高,但是如果不能有效控制成本,那么高估值就没有意义。他还提到了需要在达到一定盈利水平后考虑出售公司。
Levels在讨论中提到了他对于远程工作和数字游民生活方式的看法,他如何看待这种生活方式的未来?
-Levels认为远程工作和数字游民生活方式将继续存在,但他也提到了这种生活方式可能对个人心理健康的挑战。他预测人们可能会选择在几个固定的地方之间移动,而不是不断地更换地点,特别是当他们有家庭和孩子的时候。
Levels在讨论中提到了他对于社交媒体上争议性话题的处理方式,他是如何应对社交媒体上的批评和争议的?
-Levels认为社交媒体上的争议性话题是一种游戏,他选择保持真实和诚实,即使这可能导致争议。他提到了如何处理社交媒体上的批评,包括不让人们的意见影响自己的真实想法,并从反馈中学习和调整自己的观点。
Outlines
😀 独立黑客的兴衰与AI创业的挑战
Pieter Levels作为嘉宾,讨论了独立黑客文化的现状,以及AI创业的挑战。他提到独立黑客已经从小众文化变成了主流,竞争更加激烈,也更加困难。同时,他分享了自己在AI领域的创业经历,包括如何面对大科技公司的竞争,以及处理平台风险的策略。
🚀 AI创业的商业现实与成本挑战
Pieter讨论了AI创业的商业现实,特别是成本问题。他指出,尽管AI技术的普及使得进入门槛降低,但同时也导致了利润率的下降。他还提到了GPU成本的上升对AI创业的影响,以及如何通过更换供应商来应对成本上升的问题。
🤔 独立创业者的技术与市场适应
在这一段落中,Pieter反思了自己作为独立创业者的局限性,特别是在技术领域。他讨论了如何通过外包和雇佣AI开发者来弥补自己在技术方面的不足,并强调了快速执行和市场适应能力的重要性。
🌐 社交媒体营销与影响力的力量
Pieter分享了他在社交媒体营销方面的经验,特别是如何通过TikTok影响者来推广自己的AI照片创业项目。他讨论了传统新闻媒体与社交媒体影响力在产品推广上的差异,并强调了建立团队和利用数据驱动方法的重要性。
💡 技术选择与创业精神的哲学
Pieter探讨了技术选择对创业成功的影响,他用自己使用PHP和jQuery作为技术栈的例子,来说明技术的选择并不是创业成功的唯一决定因素。他强调了创业精神中的实用主义,以及如何避免过度工程化,专注于快速上市和客户获取。
🛠️ 创业初期的实践与自动化
Pieter分享了他在创业初期的做法,包括如何通过手动处理订单来验证业务模式,然后逐步自动化流程。他讨论了自动化的时机和成本效益,以及如何通过快速迭代来适应市场变化。
🌟 创业项目的社会证明与市场接受度
在这部分,Pieter讨论了创业项目如何获得社会证明和市场接受度。他提到了作为独立创业者如何通过建立公众形象和信任来推广产品,以及如何通过社交媒体平台来建立这种信任。
🧳 数字游民文化与远程工作的兴起
Pieter分享了他对数字游民文化的看法,以及远程工作的兴起如何改变了人们的生活方式。他讨论了数字游民在不同国家和地区的分布情况,以及这种生活方式对个人和社会的影响。
🤝 合作与竞争中的创业精神
Pieter讨论了他与其他创业者的合作关系,以及如何在竞争激烈的市场中保持创新和独特性。他分享了自己如何通过与他人合作来互补技能,并利用各自的优势来推动业务发展。
📈 AI技术的未来发展与创业机会
在这部分,Pieter对AI技术的未来发展进行了展望,并讨论了它为创业者带来的新机会。他分享了自己如何利用AI技术来创造新产品,并探讨了AI如何改变传统行业和工作方式。
🌍 长期项目与持续创新的重要性
Pieter强调了长期项目的重要性,并分享了他如何持续改进自己的项目,如Nomad List。他讨论了长期持有项目的价值,并分享了他对项目未来的看法,以及如何保持创新和适应市场变化。
📱 社交媒体平台的变化与内容创造者的适应
Pieter讨论了社交媒体平台,特别是Twitter的变化,以及这些变化如何影响内容创造者。他分享了自己如何在新的算法和平台规则下调整内容策略,并保持与观众的互动。
🔄 经济周期与创业机会的循环
Pieter探讨了经济周期的概念,并讨论了不同经济周期如何影响创业机会。他分享了自己对当前经济周期的看法,以及创业者如何适应这些变化来寻找新的商业机会。
🎙️ 社交媒体的真实性与个人品牌的建立
在这部分,Pieter讨论了在社交媒体上保持真实性的重要性,以及如何通过分享真实想法和经历来建立个人品牌。他分享了自己如何处理争议和批评,并保持与观众的诚实对话。
📞 社交媒体互动的挑战与应对策略
Pieter分享了他在社交媒体上与观众互动的经验,包括如何处理负面反馈和批评。他讨论了社交媒体对个人心态的影响,并提供了一些应对社交媒体压力的策略。
📝 内容创造与多平台分发的策略
Pieter讨论了他在不同平台上创造和分发内容的策略,强调了根据每个平台的特点来调整内容形式的重要性。他分享了自己如何在Twitter、YouTube和播客等不同平台上分享内容,并建立观众群。
📈 AI技术的影响与未来的工作
Pieter分享了他对AI技术对工作影响的看法,讨论了AI如何改变某些职业,如摄影和室内设计。他探讨了AI技术的进步如何使某些工作变得更加高效,同时也可能导致某些工作的减少。
🌟 社交媒体的表演性与个人表达
Pieter讨论了社交媒体的表演性质,以及如何在保持个人表达的同时,适应社交媒体的特点。他分享了自己如何在Twitter上保持真实性,同时吸引和保持观众的兴趣。
🔄 社交媒体平台的变化与创业者的适应
Pieter讨论了社交媒体平台,尤其是Twitter的变化,以及这些变化对创业者的影响。他分享了自己如何适应这些变化,并继续在平台上有效地分享自己的想法和产品。
🎉 结语与对听众的感谢
在节目的最后,主持人感谢Pieter的参与,并总结了他们讨论的要点。同时,主持人也感谢了听众的收听,并鼓励听众在社交媒体上关注他,以及对他的播客进行评价和订阅。
Mindmap
Keywords
💡独立黑客(Indie Hacking)
💡AI创业公司(AI Startups)
💡平台风险(Platform Risks)
💡推特(Twitter)
💡远程工作(Remote Work)
💡内容创作(Content Creation)
💡经济衰退(Economic Recession)
💡产品开发(Product Development)
💡多平台运营(Multi-Platform Operation)
💡基本收入(Basic Income)
💡社会证明(Social Proof)
Highlights
独立黑客(Indie hacking)并非消亡,而是随着时间发展而变化。
Pieter Levels认为,独立黑客的概念在2014年左右随着Product Hunt的兴起而流行起来。
大科技公司开始关注独立制造者,使得独立黑客变得更加主流和竞争激烈。
AI初创公司面临的挑战包括与大型科技公司竞争和缺乏技术壁垒。
Pieter Levels通过Twitter建立观众群体,利用影响力营销提高产品知名度。
独立黑客现在更像是一种创业方式,而不仅仅是黑客文化。
经济衰退时期,精益创业和独立黑客成为必要,因为资金变得难以获得。
Pieter Levels讨论了AI初创公司的平台依赖性问题,如GPU成本和API服务的不稳定性。
他分享了自己如何通过快速迭代和手动工作来验证创业想法,然后再自动化流程。
Pieter强调了在技术选择上不必过分追求最新技术,应更注重实际效果和快速上市。
他提倡使用PHP和jQuery等成熟技术栈,而不是追求最新的框架。
Pieter认为,开发者应该关注解决问题和满足客户需求,而不是过分沉迷于工具和技术。
他分享了自己的产品Nomad List的成功经验,强调了长期坚持和逐步改进的重要性。
Pieter讨论了TikTok作为新兴社交媒体平台对年轻一代的影响力,以及它在创业中的应用潜力。
他提出了关于AI对人类未来的积极看法,并批评了对AI的无端恐惧和悲观态度。
Pieter分享了他对远程工作和数字游民生活方式的看法,以及这对个人和社会的潜在影响。
他讨论了社交媒体平台变化对内容创作者的影响,以及如何在这些平台上保持影响力。
Pieter提到了他对于Twitter新算法的看法,以及它是如何改变用户互动和内容传播的。
Transcripts
Indie hacking is dead. At least that's something that my guest
today, Pieter Levels once tweeted about. Of course, it's
not dead but it is different now. And just how different and
why it's different, that we will figure out today on The
Bootstrapped Founder. Pieter and I chat about AI startups,
dealing with platform risks, and why indie hacking isn't even
hacking anymore, and how to build audiences on Twitter in
2023. A big shout out to the sponsor of today's episode:
acquire.com. More on that later. Now, here's Pieter.
Pieter, thanks so much for being on the show. I only have one
question here. Why is indie hacking dead? Can you tell me
more about that?
Man, so I tweeted that indie hacking was dead. But my point
was more like I think, because it's like a long tweet and the
first message is like indie hacking is dead. And then I
tried to explain, but nobody reads the second line. Like
TikTok, you know, people only watch 10 seconds. So what I
meant was, like indie hacking started I think, like 2016
because the kind of big, maybe 2014 with Product Hunt. Because
before a lot of people would do the VC route of doing startups,
right? Everybody knows this story. So I feel like this year
kind of like became very popular and a lot of people are indie
hacking. And I think also now, what you see, what I see on my
Twitter is that big companies, big tech companies, they follow
me and they follow other indie makers, to see what indie makers
are doing. Like it's become finally on the radar of tech,
you know, a lot of people in San Francisco. I saw a tweet by
Louis, he's making AI startup in San Francisco and he lives in
some parts of sleeping path. And he said, I'm in the sleeping
path, like a hostel in San Francisco for $600 per month,
full of indie hackers trying to ship AI startups. And I'm like,
why? Is this because it's San Francisco? It's usually the
place where you raise VC and these indie hackers. So it feels
like it's a mainstream term now. And that's what it means. So it
means it has become more competitive, more saturated and
more difficult because you're competing not just with a lot of
indie hackers. Now a lot of people are doing, it's becoming
like the standard route. You're also competing with big tech
companies now. And I see this with AI startups I do. I'm
competing with companies that raised $500 million, you know,
like these big AI startups and they follow me on Twitter, you
know and they see what I'm doing. So if I launch a feature,
they ask their developers to make the same feature. And maybe
vice versa, of course, but that's what it means. So it's
dead in a way that like, if remote work was called remote
hacking, you know and then COVID happens and remote work became
normal. It would also be dead because it's not hacking
anymore, just normal now. So it's more like
Yeah, that is exactly the difference. Right? Like it used
to be hacking. It used to be hacking. It used to be kind of a
subculture thing.
Yeah
And now it's just the way people approach entrepreneurship.
Yeah
Indie hacking is just indie business or entrepreneurship,
I think so. And people reply to me like, oh, you're in a bubble
right?
because you're like in the indie hacker bubble, it's not
mainstream at all. But I do think startups, it's very
present on the radar for a lot of people. And a lot of people
prefer like, man, I have a lot of VC funded founder friends.
And they say their next startup is preferably indie. And they
will do it because they can have a lot of people are burned out
from the VCs, you know?
Yeah. Well, good. I think that's a good thing because there's a
lot of speculation happening there that maybe coupled with an
economic recession is not the best idea.
Yeah, yeah, yeah
For people to put their whole life energy into something very
That's a very good point. Like the economic recession is a very
good point because you want to do more lean. Lean startup indie
hacking becomes a necessity because there is no money. It's
hard to get funding. It's hard to get seriously be funding, you
Yeah, that's right. That series A or even seed funding, just
know, maybe
money has dried up in many ways and people are much more
selective in what they fund. It's funny that you mentioned
like AI startups because there's a lot of them going on. And you
recently tweeted something about your own recently, just a couple
hours ago
Yeah
You did about like how you found something that you haven't felt
before with other startups now that you are doing AI startups.
It's kind of the lack of a moat.
It's a big problem. Yeah, I said the F word. But this is a big
problem. Everybody talks about it even like other AI founders,
VC funded AI founders. We DM and everybody does separate
retention, which is the churn is very high. And defensibility,
like you make something and immediately you have a lot of
clones because everybody's working with the same stuff.
Everybody's using GPT-4 for tech stuff almost or the Facebook LM
but or people use stable efficient for image stuff.
Everybody uses the same so it's not proprietary tech, like the
stuff you do around is proprietary, like the way you
combine all the models and everything in your website. But
everybody can figure this out. I would say if you're smart within
three months, if you're less smart, maybe six months to a
year. So it's very difficult to make a startup AI startup now
Right?
Yeah. Yeah, that's an issue. I guess it's both a benefit and a
curse, right?
Yeah
The curse is everybody can do it. The benefit is everybody can
It's really good for customers, right? If you have a lot of
do it. There is a lot of variety and you can build a lot of things.
people making these apps and you get a big pressure on the price
to go down but difficult for business owners because if the
price goes down like this pure economics the profit margin goes
to zero. And man, my profit margins for these AI start ups
is not high like this week I've been charting it and it's like,
you know, with the cost of GPU the profit margin gets really
really low very quickly. So
Yeah, I was wondering about this like I was looking into your
your startups, the whole list of them and you have several,
right? Some are going on, Nomad List is still around, Remote OK
is still there. And then you have these two AI startups that
have pretty significant MRR. They have a lot of costs
compared to the others, right?
Yeah, that's the problem. That's the big problem. And man,
honestly, GPU costs go down. It's a difficult business and we
were thinking GPU costs would go down. But then Nvidia said,
like, there's a kind of bottleneck, they cannot produce
enough chips, it's so popular now AI. They cannot produce
enough chips. And the stock of Nvidia, of course, went through
the roof because of this. So people are fighting over GPUs,
it's insane. It's like you need a GPU for it's like a processor
for people who don't know, it's like a CPU, like a computer
processor, but it's for graphics. And somehow it's it's
very, let's not go too deep. But it's very useful, very fast for
AI stuff, you need a GPU for AI pretty much. Otherwise, it's
very slow. So there's not enough GPUs being built like Nvidia
makes almost all of them. So that makes the cost of these
servers very high.
It's crazy to think about just how much platform dependencies
back there, right? You have the processor that needs to be done.
And you need those for machine learning systems that also are
run by somebody else. And then there's an API that is run by a
company and you build on top of that.
Yeah
So you depend on all these layers.
Yeah
How do you deal with this? Because I don't think Nomad List
is that much dependent.
No, not at all. No, it's like, Nomad List use API to collect
data for about cities, right. So I use a lot of different
sources. But it's like 100 robots that collect that scrape
kind of information. And some is paid API's, but it's not
dependent at all. But with GPUs, man, this is a great story. Like
I cannot name too many names. But for example, when so like,
last year, I started with avatars AI avatar AI because I
was making in theory AI because I started doing AI stuff. And I
was typing stuff like everybody in these prompts like to
generate images. And I found out that I could build like, houses
very beautiful design houses. So I made a site called
thishousedoesnotexist.org, I think and it generates random
houses random design, like house born kind of beautiful. And then
I saw it also made very beautiful interior. So I started
making interior AI, where you can generate interiors. And then
afterwards, you can upload your own home interior with image to
image technology. And it's kind of modified and it worked. And I
made in theory AI and then I tried to see if I could fine
tune and fine tuning is where you take the AI model and you
make it more focused towards a specific goal. So for example,
you want to make interiors because they believe fusion,
this image model can make any image, right? You can make
houses but also plans, people, anything. So if you want to
focus in interior and get better results. So I trained with
interior photos and it gets better results. And then I tried
training with my own photos because see what happens and it
works. And you get like these photos of yourself in every
style. And I was like, wow, this is very cool. So I tweeted it.
And it went viral. Then the next day, I was like I need to really
quickly make a start up for this. So I made avatar AI. And
it was I think the first big AI avatar startup. And then these
big companies were following me. So they quickly within a month,
they did the same and they got way bigger, say VC funded and
they made I think $40 million. I think I made like, maybe half a
million dollars or $400,000, lots within a month or so I'm
getting two months is insane. But the funny part, what I want
to say is that the service I used to do this fine tuning. The
cost of funding was $3. And then when they saw my tweets, where I
was sharing my revenue, that it was making so much money with
this. They said sorry, we need to increase the price to $20 for
training. And I was selling them for like $25 or $3. So for like
a month, they got all the money. And I couldn't switch and they
said as difficult. Maybe they were telling the truth. They had
problems with like getting GPUs also. But they increased the
price and I felt kind of like scammed, you know. And so this
is a good example. You're dependent on a supplier who can
when they see you're successful, they increase the price. This
happens to people who have co workers phase too. There's a co
working space famous who was very successful, very cheap
brands and then when they were successful after the one year
lease and say oh, now it's like five times the rent and 10 times
the rent is what landlords do. So these dependencies are not
nice. So I switched out to a new provider. They're much like,
replicate.com They're very nice. They're super helpful. They
don't change price, they don't increase price, they only
decrease prices. It's amazing. So how do you deal with this?
Man, it's a real problem.
Well, if there's one thing that you can learn from this
experience is just to think about alternatives from the
start, right? If you have a service that you're building on,
like, you have to find a way to abstract it enough so you can
have another service to plug into your system.
Exactly. So you have to go one level higher. So you have to get
your own feet virtual private server with GPUs, you know, but
then you need to learn to code Python and do all this stuff.
And man, this Python is too much for me. These GPUs it's too
difficult. So I hired an AI developer for this to help me
with these models because it's just too difficult for me. I
cannot like Danny Postma is my friend and he makes
headshotpro.com. And he did it himself first. I think now he
hired more people, but he's smarter than me. And he can do
like Python stuff. And yeah, I tried so much, but it's like my
heads, you know.
Well, it's kind of one of these things that is so specific that
you know, as a solopreneur, kinda dev who just wants to
build stuff. Like you don't want to dive into something that
takes you three years of university to understand, right?
Man, I think it would take me six months of understanding this
package manager does not be five, just too much. I can't get
it working. It's so difficult. But it shows my limits. This
year, I see my limits. I'm not so good at this stuff, you know.
Did you have a hard time hiring for that? Because that's my
experience when I founded my business and I kind of ran it,
ran it, ran it. I thought I could do it all, right? Like,
you know, the solo tech kind of person. Is that the same for
Yeah, cuz I thought I could do everything until this year. I
I had Danny on the show a couple episodes ago. And it was really
you?
thought I could. Man, I was like, complacent. And I was
arrogant. And I thought because Nomad List and all these start
ups just work, almost everything myself, except customer support
and like jet moderators and stuff. And I have a server guy.
If the server was on, but that's the opposite. And I thought I
can do everything myself. I can do front end, backends,
everything and I could. And the sides always look a little
interesting. Like his focus on SEO, that's just something that
clunky because I do everything myself. But that's like
something you take for granted. It's just where you accept and
not so bad. But this year, I was like, man, there's so many
things I cannot do like marketing. I always rely on
organic marketing, organic SEO stuff. And you get I think,
Danny Postma made me very fresh because man, he's insane SEO
guy. He's like insane. He makes startups just based on the
keywords like he discovered his LinkedIn hashtags worked so
well. That was most of the searches. So he makes this
service, specifically this niche. Because he was also
making like, advertisers, very smart. So I learned about SEO
more. Now I'm learning about TikTok marketing. So I hired a
guy to help me with man, because TikTok is insane. I talked to
one influencer, he posted about photoai.com, my AI photo startup
and MRR went from 12k to like 40 or 50k. Insane, right? And it
stayed that way. And of course, it was sharing. And so I also
worked in but this shows you have a really big effect of
these influence. And it's way bigger effect than press. Like I
also got a lot of press for these AI startups. And this
press does almost nothing, you can put the logos on your site,
but nobody links and clicks on these links. It's insane.
I personally have never done. Like it's just something, I had
word of mouth marketing and my things and that was fine. But he
just diving into the data and like pulling out the things and
building businesses on top of that. That's like domaining,
right? Like finding a domain, building a domain on top of or
business on top of that domain name. That's just such a smart
data driven approach, really like that. And Danny too, is
building a team. He's building a studio, right?
Yeah, yeah
Building something out there. So I guess you're kind of in
parallel with that, trying to expand your capacity beyond just
yourself.
100%. And like we always do like tech swap because he sees my
photos that suddenly look much better on Twitter, my AI photos
and he asked me man, what are you doing now? And we give each
other hands. So they say like, man, maybe look at this feature
and try this, you know, but we're not competing because he's
doing head shots and I don't want to do headshots. It says
like niche. I'm doing more general photo studio kind of
thing.
Have you ever considered actually working together like
building a business together?
Yeah, Ithink we both would because I think I respect him a
lot. He respects me a lot. I think it's good in the future.
The man found his technology because my code, he doesn't
trust my code because they'll PHP. And he writes I think
proper, like JavaScript, you know, but in general, like, man,
most of the code is Python in the background anyway. Like
that's where the real stuff happens. It's just front end. So
I think could happen in the future. I think it will be fun.
For example, to if I ever sell to try sell, like together or
something would be good because it's something like that. But I
have a lot of respect. And I think it's very cool what he's
doing. And he shake me up a lot because he showed me that
because first I was making more money with avatars. And then I
think at some point, he was making more money with his
profile pictures and then headshots. I was like, damn! And
I was like, what's going on? Like, I don't like this, you
know, because you want to win, you know? And then it was very
good for me. It was like, okay, you need to do a lot of stuff
like SEO, like marketing, like, look at what keywords people
searching, makes up pages, all this stuff I wasn't doing and
yeah, it's very cool. Yeah.
Sounds like you have a little mastermind group going on there
with Danny. Nice.
Yeah. Well, man not every day. But like, once every few weeks
we message. Yeah
That's awesome. Yeah. I love that you just talked about your
code because to me, like your PHP code and all the stuff
around it and your use of jQuery instead of like fancy frameworks
and all that, that has become almost a meme in the community.
And I mean, it's in the best sense, right? Like people think
it's really funny that somebody is still coding, like, it's the
90s. But also, people think, oh, wow, crazy, you can still do
this and still be successful. I love that about how you approach
technology. Because if I think about your tech stack, it's just
PHP and a little bit of JavaScript. That's it.
Yeah
Yeah
Right? Do you do you ever consider like actually changing
Like, if you ever sell your business, have you ever thought
that up? Because you just said that, like, if you work with
somebody else, they don't trust your code.
about that? Like, how complicated that might actually
make selling the business?
Yeah. Look, the thing with this meme is I exaggerated the meme
for viral effects. So I'd make it look like my code is really
bad. But it's much better, like people really think it's really
bad. And I'm not saying it's great. But it's, I mean, it's
pretty good. It's, it's like very clear. Now, it's highly
commented. It's very, like I write in multiple files now, you
know, this index of PHP was in the beginning, you know. I use
GitHub. There's a very structural pattern that I made
myself, like folder structure and files. And like, as workers,
this, like scheduled work is as robust as new stuff. There's
app. There's a data file with a database and stuff. And it all
uses like SQLite. So it's very structured. So I think PHP
developer can get into and they have, like, I had developers for
small things come on. It's pretty, they can find what they
want to find. So it does work, but at least more about a meme.
It's more it's not about PHP jQuery, it's more about the
point that it doesn't matter that you have these developers
who work in enterprise in agencies. And there's this
agency, MLM I feel like where you have a company who doesn't
know anything about tech. They come to the web agency and they
want like a website or app and stuff. And these web agencies
need to sell like the best stuff. So they say we use the
newest technology, like we use some big framework and they need
to, they use as a sales thing. And then these developers need
to update the skills to use this technology. And this is like a
cycle. And it's a whole economy because you have this ecosystem
of like frameworks now gets funded. And they have
evangelists and like, become like versal. I like versal but
they are very, that's a big example. They have evangelist
who make developers promote the stuff all the time and the work
for them. That's the whole thing. And they're VC funde, and
they need growth and all good. But this makes new developers
think that they need all this technology to make stuff. And
this technology is nice, but in many ways, a lot of the new
technology makes things more complicated often. And there's a
thing called I think Taleb, Nassim Taleb always talks about
Lindy effect, where all technology is proven because it
just works because it's old, right? Like PHP is very old just
works. New technology, you need to be a little bit distrustful
of because it's often breaks like, man, I have this when you
buy like smart home stuff. Like I go into Airbnb and there's
some smart TV or something, you know and it's so difficult to
watch TV now. This kind of Lindy effect, like old TV just works.
It shows it to me and it's tested, you know?
Yeah
So I think that's my whole point of this, like, doesn't matter
what you use. There's no need for this cultism with
developers. If you are entrepreneur, you know, it's all
about like if you're developer, easy share. But if you're an
entrepreneur and the problem is a lot of these developers that
work as freelancers they want to be an entrepreneur. So they
bring this whole bogash, this baggage of having to use this
stack and over engineering. And while this code is so elegant
and stuff, to something where the priority should be getting
customers and getting people to pay money because then you
survive. You know, you pay your rent.
Yeah, developers and I think we both kind of are developers,
right? We're so tool focused, we so we look at the things and we
want it to be optimal. We want it to be the best thing for that
solution. I'm kind of glad that you're showing that you can just
stick to one tool and just make it happen, right? There probably
is some framework out there that is like 2.7% faster in some
regard. But it doesn't matter, right? If you're fast enough to
bring a thing to market, that's when you monetize, not when you
use the best tool possible. And I think you talked about this in
the beginning, too, it's like or that's kind of the tweet that I
was referring to when you were talking about having to deal
with the lack of moat. And just as an AI startup, right? When
you kind of have to imagine that the competitors, just a couple
of months around the corner, like your execution speed is so
much more important than the request speed of the web
framework that you use, right?
Yeah, 100%. And man, most developers pretty slow to be
honest. Like, man, I'm not good developer. But I'm really fast.
One skill I have because I don't make things too complicated.
Man, I repeat myself all the time. And then I repeat myself
10 times like, you know, don't repeat yourself as the mentor
then I write a function, but I don't. Like people try
immediately write a function for something you repeat twice. It's
like, man, you know, like this kind of stuff. And I think
especially in beginning when you make a startup or when you make
something new, it's very important to not obsess over
this because you're trying to validate something, you have an
idea, right? Like, when I was on this avatar AI. And this was
man, it wasn't even code. It was just a index of HTML, like it
was just a page. We have examples of the avatars you
could generate and the input photos and then a link to type
form, Stripe checkout, Stripe payment link, that was it, went
to get your avatars Stripe payment link and there was
nothing else. And then I would go to Stripe and check the
email. And on Stripe checkout, I had the link after payments is a
type form. So I went to a type form where it collected all the
photos with file uploads and then I would manually so I
immediately had like, 100 orders. So manually I did the
thing is 100 or 200 orders myself. So I would download the
photos and then I would go to this platform to do this fine
tuning. I would upload their photos. And then I would
download the resulting photos. Man, it was horrible work,
manual work. I'd spent like all night doing this. And then I
started automated the second day. And after a week, it was a
lot of work. After a week, it finally was automatic.
Wow.
So that's an example where there wasn't even code, it was just a
landing page and a tweet.
That's so cool
And a payment link. And thenwhen it work, you can make the codes,
you know.
Right. Yeah, you have a process that you can actually implement.
Right? You have steps that you can then automate.
Yeah, because you prove that it works, that there's a business
maybe and then you can invest the time to code something. But
coding takes a lot of time. There's this, you know, the
cartoon, the XSCD or something.
XKCD. Yeah
Yeah. Yeah, you know they have this cartoon like, how much does
a chart like how much time it takes to automate something and
how much time the thing itself takes? And often the time it
takes to automate something is hired and the time everything
takes. So if that's true, just do it yourself manually until,
you know, obviously, if you spent all night uploading
downloading photos, it takes too much time. You can automate it
faster, right?
Yeah, for sure. I mean, if that was one night's work and how
much did you charge per photo at that point?
$30
You know, that's like that's $3,000 for a night's work.
That's not too bad, right?
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great!
I mean, some people would do that for life if they could
just, you know, it's so pretty cool to do this. I really,
really enjoy that this particular way of doing this.
Particularly with AI, right? A tool that is probably hard to
automate when there is a lot of manual figuring things out,
right? As well with the whole fine tuning kind of stuff. So
it's really cool that you did this for a day or a week, until
you had it all figured out. I think that's an indie hacking
approach to kind of what Paul Graham calls the concierge
approach, right? The idea of doing stuff with the white glove
treatment. I do this for you instead of having everything
automated. A lot of people want to build software from day one.
They want to build a tool, they want login, they want to stripe
integration, they want all kinds of things. And then they want to
make money. But you made money by just doing the thing, which
is really
Yeah, I think it's also because I did it so much wrong. I did it
I spent man, it took so much about I spent like a year on
some YouTube Analytics startup in like 2014 or something. 14, I
think and nobody paid for it. Nobody wanted to be customer.
And it was just everything was amazing, interface was amazing.
But nobody, you know, so I'm so traumatized by this. It's just,
I'm not going to build anything until there's customers, you
know, generally.
Whenever I go to Product Hunt and I see all these tools there,
you know, you have the top five that are really interesting. And
I have a couple more that have been on, you know, a few
upvotes. And then you have the 400 things that are launched
that day that have no upvotes between all these 400. Behind
every single one of them is a developer who spent six months
building the perfect product.
Man, exactly!
That's what I always think about. It's so sad.
Like it's so sad. And like they all look really good like the
landing page is, like beautiful design is like a red flag for
me, you know. This beautiful gradients and these borders that
move.
It's fancy.
It's so fancy. If it's too fancy, means you spent too much
time on design or it's some VC startup that spent too much
money on designers. If it's the beginning, if it's not validated
yet, you know and I prefer a very ugly webpage in the
beginning, that just. Man, look at Google, look at the beginning
it was very ugly. Look at Facebook first page was very
ugly. You need to have a very ugly, basic beginning page, I
think to validate something first.
Yeah. That's kind of also what the whole discussion about indie
hacking being dead or different. I think different is just a
better phrase, right? It's not dead. It's still there. But it's
not the same as what it used to be like seven years ago, right?
Seven years ago, it was a movement. Today, it's just how
things are done. It has arrived, right? It's kind of what it is.
But I think that's what indie hacking is also doing. And I
think Danny posted about this, like indie hacking is the new
drop shipping. That's what he kind of called it or there were
people that in the replies to your tweet saying, well, yeah,
people have just higher expectations of products now. So
indie hacking now looks different and all that. And I
think that's important too, right? Like for us hackers, we
can deal with a, you know, with a really shitty page that has
barely any CSS in there. No automation, you know, exactly
that there is a manual component, doesn't matter, you
still want to use it because you're an early adopter. But
with indie hacking going into mainstream, I think you crossed
the chasm as well. And you now have all these normal people,
let's just call them that. That one products that are kind of
proven that have that need social proof already. And you
did this pretty well because you are your own social proof, like
your history of products and you're building in public, like
whatever you launch, you have social proof already. Right?
Like, that's something that stands out in particular, in
your case, now that you're reaching like 340,000 followers
on Twitter, you bring this with you, but how would you? If
somebody were to start any hacking today, what would you
tell them to get to this point? What would you tell them to have
the social proof that they need to launch products?
Man, honestly, this is like very controversial. I think you
should always do the opposite everybody else is doing. So now
if enacting is mentioned, you should probably like do
something completely different. You know, I mean, like, you
should go where nobody's going because when I started, man, it
was almost nobody. It was only patio11 Patrick McKenzie was
bootstrapping startups. And everybody else was raising VC,
it was not normal to bootstrap start ups. It was very, very,
very not normal. And now it's normal. So I don't know I always
feel you need to run away from the herd you know, the sheep.
You need to go somewhere else where no, like, look for part of
the grass where nobody is and go there. If you believe in this,
you know and then spend a lot of time spend years on this. But
about social proof, I don't know. I think maybe it's not
important. Maybe it's just it's important you make something
that's like a problem that's out there like you know, look at all
the sub Reddits. There's a lot of problems there like every sub
Reddit has like a goal and you can go see this app or startup
you can make around that. Like somebody does this mean but
Craigslist, right? Every category has become a startup.
You can do same with subreddits. Again now maybe the reddit of
the day is TikTok, right? Go to TikTok, see what's going on on
TikTok and see what people want and make startups around there.
Maybe this answer start doing TikTok. I tell everybody this
for a year. I don't even do it myself a lot myself but it
should. But do go to TikTok and see what's going on there and
document your journey not on Twitter, maybe but on TikTok and
so hey, I'm Pieter. I just starting out, I want to serve,
want to make some money and pay my rent. And everyday I'm going
to make a video about this and what I'm doing and this new
feature. That would be how I would approach it in 2023. I
wouldn't probably be on Twitter X at all.
Interesting. Yeah, that definitely a building in public
where those people that you want to serve actually are, right?
That is something that I really wanted to ask you because we
talked a lot about AI startups and that kind of stuff. And it
feels to me that the demographic for them is a younger crowd,
right? And then like people who they have no problem with AI. I
don't know if you've seen the same but in our community, a lot
of people are very afraid of AI. Right? So there seems to be a
generational divide there and saying TikTok is the new place
to do this in front of people who are willing to accept that
this is the way to go. Probably a good idea. What do you think
about this whole like AI is the end of humanity kind of
conversation? What's your stand?
First of all, this generation thing is right like Gen Z
doesn't care. They just use it like man, I work now with I know
the guy from Jenni AI David Park, I think and he uses TikTok
and all these students use this app Jenni AI and I think it
writes papers for you or it helps you with writing papers
and everybody uses this like 150k MRR, it's insane. Man,
you're right. Nobody says like, is this good or bad? Man is this
good or bad thing comes I think from millennials, like we're
millennials, right?
Yeah
And journalists are also millennials. And people that
want to, you know, maybe it's our culture to like challenge
everything, which kind of good and make a problem out of
everything. And there is, of course, fundamental
philosophical things you can talk about. But I don't think
it's very useful to constantly complain in every reply, you
know, about the problems with AI and how it's going to destroy
humanity. I don't know, I think look at the good sides. And look
how it can benefit everybody. Of course, our great leader, Elon
Musk, you know, is also complaining about AI. Right?
He's like, it's gotta be the end of humanity. So what am I
saying, you know?
But he's also like, from a much older generation, right?
Yeah, you're right. You're right. You're right. No, but of
course, there's risk. But man, I get kind of tired of his whole
like, negative scene on Twitter that started like 2016. And I
feel died off like when Elon Musk bought Twitter and it's a
very politically engaged scene and they're very, like, angry.
And I don't see them a lot anymore. I think they moved to
Macedon. But this is New Zealand, Twitter. I don't know
you've saw the E/ACC. Like it's like, about acceleration. Like
people are kind of philosophical. And they also
want to they are positive about the future of humanity and
technology, how we can use technology to make the future of
humanity better. And it's E/ACC and people have this in their
nickname and I follow up few people like Beth Jezos, like
Jeff Bezos, he's like the leader or something. It's a very
distinct group of people, very positive. And I feel that's man,
I think positive in general works better, you know. I mean,
I say this after complaining about Sony headphones for three
days straight. But no, but I still believe in the future of
Sony headphones if they fix some stuff, but I think positivity
works better than complaining. I feel okay, let's be honest. I
think there's some powerlessness if you cannot code and you see
this AI stuff happening and you're not making money with it.
And your income is not increasing because incomes are
stagnant now and the government is not providing basic income,
which is like free money for people because technology
replacing a lot of stuff. I understand completely that you
feel bad about this and you're gonna complain, like people
complain about foreigners in Portugal, you know or people
complain about AI. You know, in journalism, we are the writer
strike in America, right? It's a big thing. Like the people who
write the TV shows and the movies, they're on strike all
the time because they think GPT-4 replaced them. Man, maybe
will so I understand the problem. As always, I think the
government should provide basic income to most people. And I
think, I don't know if there will be a lot of new jobs
created actually. I generally people believe in that. I don't
really believe in that.
It's a whole philosophical or societal conversation about
like, should we even want everybody to have to work to
feel that they're participating in society. Right? That's a
thing. Like the whole, like, full employment of a country, is
that even something we need as humans? Or could we just?
I don't think so.
Yeah, I agree with you there. And I think I'm a big Star Trek
fan. I've always been a very optimistic sci fi future kind of
person. But it's just recently I watched the Terminator movies
because for some reason, I needed to go back to the 80s and
90s and watch some really, really interesting movies. And I
honestly, I do understand that the fear in the 80s and 90s of
what technology is going to do, which is what Terminator is all
about, right? What if AI computers take over? That fear
is very present in those movies. And I think if you're socialized
with this, if this is how you approach a technology, then
everything you look at is potentially something that
destroys everything around you, right? So the fear that it just
destroys society, that destroys your habitat and all that and we
do see some of this, right? What you just said is extremely,
wonderfully phrased like the people who are not able to code,
who are not able to control the machine, they are afraid of the
machine. That is very, very
And we are on like podcasts, we have AI started with like, wow,
it's so good. Let's make money with it, you know.
Of course, I'm positive about it. No, I 100% agree. But I feel
That's right
like, as always, I feel like people shouldn't blame the
scapegoat, like, every technology has the same amount
of bad and good it brings, you know an AI too, internet too,
right? It's brought a lot of scams and man people died, you
know, because of internet and people were born because of
internet. So it's both. AI is the same thing. And but I think
governments should somehow and governments are not so
efficient, you know, in general, but they should. They should. I
think again, they should provide basic income. And I think people
can do voluntary work, for example. There's a lot of social
stuff that has to be done like kids need to be raised in more
like communities, I feel like there's a lot of stuff that can
be voluntary work and
In all paid work too, right? Like just having a basic income
doesn't mean that people don't make money from work. It just
means that they don't have to work to survive. That's the only
difference, right?
Yeah, exactly. So I think it should be protected, people
should be protected so that technology doesn't destroy their
income, the basic, you know, level of like, having a nice
house, being able to just buy nice, good food and live. I
think live a good life should be the goal for everybody in
humanity. And but I'm Dutch, you know, I'm a little bit
socialist.
I'm also a little bit socialist because I'm from East Germany,
man. I'm like socialist by birth.
Marxian communists.
That's exactly what it is. But yeah, I do see a need for this.
I see a need for people feeling safe from this kind of
technology because they have no agency over making it work for
them. It works at them, it doesn't work for them. It kind
of it's attacking them, aggressing them in the way. And
in a funny way, this kind of fear of not knowing what's going
to happen with the technology it also exists for us as founders,
right? As entrepreneurs, this is what you said this tweet of
yours from earlier. I'm just gonna get back to it and back to
it. Like there is no way for us to protect our technology
because it's not our technology to protect, like we only built
on top of these things. So is building an AI startup,
something you would suggest to somebody who just starting out
as an indie hacker?
Man, it's so difficult question. Right? I think so. I think you
should always try stuff with technology because you can
combine technology in new ways, unique ways that work for you. I
think you should always like try like you could always say that
you're always too late with everything, right? You're always
too late. Like people said in 2013-14, I'm too late to do
startups now because already Dropbox, Airbnb became big and
it's too late now. Of course, not too late. It's never too
late. You just start and you never know what's next. Like now
it's AI. There'll be always something next and jump away.
But man, but this is the reason last year when this AI stuff
started booming, like around like I think ChatGPT launched
and then Stable Diffusion launched or vice versa. It's a
month and it's suddenly people like oh shit, this really works
now. And then I started like scrambling. I'm like, man, now's
the time to build a lot of stuff and see what sticks because if I
wait six months, I'm not going to, you know, it's not going to
stick. Like everybody already did everything. So I spent
insane time making a lot of stuff to just catch this wave.
Now we're like, what? One years in, one half years in or
something. I mean, now it's quite late in that sense. It's
never too late, right? But I think you have some kind of
first mover advantage doesn't always work but you have some
kind of advantage if you catch a wave you know. A new technology
logical wave because people want to use technology and the
technology is always very brutal like it's very hard to use for
people's if you add a front end to a new technology, you can
start using it. I mean nomadism was the same, people were
already nomadic but it was very hard to find out where to go,
what the internet was, what these basic things. It was all
separated on different blogs, blog posts, like oh, you should
come to Thailand. No, you should come to Mexico. It was like
travel bloggers. So collecting all that together made it, you
know, user friendly to become a nomad, same thing. You catch a
wave, make technology easier to use and make money.
Do you still invest a lot of time in your old businesses, you
know, the ones that are pre AI?
Yeah, Nomad List is still a lot like I'm improving it like every
week and I think soon once the other AI startup kind of all the
stuff I wanted to do still on the my to do list with AI stuff
is finished, I will probably go back to Nomad list and improve
it. Like I've been working on 3d globe like Nomad List for the
last two months like because this globe was a map before and
I was like this 3d globe with like lines of like, I went to
Thailand and to Qatar and Holland and Brazil, for example.
And that kind of stuff. So that's my most favorite project
I think in terms of like, I feel it's really like my baby and
it's you can work on this project forever. Like I said,
just so you can work on this until you're 80 because there's
always a different way to figure out what's the best place to
live like for you personally, it's such a difficult problem.
So you know.
It's funny how this reminds me of what you said earlier with
the Lindy effect, right? Things that have been around for a long
time they will be around for an equally long time. It's kind of
what that means to me. Nomad List is something like this too.
You've been doing this for a while and it's still around and
you're still improving it and it's still finding customers.
That's very interesting. And particularly
It's very stable
Contrasted against your AI startup set, like up and down
and super expensive and complicated platform risk, an
interesting lesson to be drawn from that, I think, right? The
long term kind of
Yeah, I'd never expect to stay so long. It's like nine years
now. And I always expect this because I had a YouTube channel
before, electronic music mixes and they went up really fast,
like 8k per month and then it went down also very fast. So I
thought every business like probably hype, so I was always
traumatized, like, okay, this is just for one or two years, need
to make a lot of money. But it keeps going. And it makes man,
it's average, usually, like 40 or 50 or 60k per month, a lot of
money. So, just Nomad List, so not a lot of costs. So it's very
nice business.
Yeah, definitely. It definitely sounds calmer, right? Like less
crazy than the AI stuff.
Man! Yeah, I tweet about today, like this AI stuff is so
stressful because you always need to stay ahead of the game
and of competitors. And when a new technology comes out, like
now, it's a little bit slower. But last year, every week, it
was some new thing, new breakthrough and you need to
implement this very fast. And it's stressful for sure. Like,
it fucks with your sleep, you know, like
Would you sell them? Would you sell your AI businesses?
Yeah, I think I'll get it to a certain level, like maybe 100k
MRR for photo AI and interior and then like, I got them valued
recently. And the multiples for start ups are very good. Like
they are very quite high. Like, normally for like any start ups,
you get, like 2-3x or something, right? For AI, it can be like
five or six or even eight because it's kind of hype now.
So I think, again, the problem is profit, like the multiples
are based on profits. So you need to cut these costs rapidly.
And then you need to go to broker and then you need to sell
for like, good amount of money. But man, I don't know, it's hard
to sell. It's always like a nice challenge this AI stuff and but
it is stressful, you know, probably gives you a heart
disease.
Yeah, I mean, if not like mental health issues, right? With
anxiety and dealing with like all these unforeseen changes in
the platforms, that dependency on open AI and all their
platforms, right? If they decided to do the Elon Musk for
$2,000 a month kind of move. I mean, you could probably handle
it maybe but you know, like, it would be such a bastard move
really.
Yeah, yeah. Well, the good thing with AI is it's very open. So
when one company will raise the prices very fast, you can
probably easily back then not really, but now you can easily
switch to another provider. There's so many providers now.
So there's no less platform dependency now than a year ago,
you know, because there's a lot of API providers now. But yeah,
but it is stressful, you know. But I go gym, I go deadlift, and
you know, overhead press and squats and then it's good for my
mind. I don't have anxiety a lot. And but still, it's
stressful.
Yeah, I bet. Yeah, that's the thing with these kinds of hype
startups, right? You really have to push. And then you have to
make as much as you can and then go to the next thing. And that
feels, it doesn't feel like very sustainable.
Such an interesting way of thinking about photography. Like
Not my vibe, you know, I like building long term businesses.
And that's what I had with avatars. It felt so skitchy to
me, so gimmicky. Like, it's not really my vibe, like, it's kinda
it completely removes the act of photography
like too short term, you know and this photo AI feels more
like a photo studio for long term. Like it can have
potentially long but who knows, because AI. You don't know how
Like the act is gone, right? You don't need to go anywhere
long but the intention is to have a long term product that
can stay even if you sell it can stay for like 5 years or 10
years, you know, because the philosophy is that you can have
photography without needing a camera, you know. Like, you can
just train yourself and you can make unlimited AI photos
anywhere in the world from your computer, you know, you're on
the beach or you're in the office, you're anywhere.
anymore.
Yeah, it's such a cool idea. And I kind of love that. It's like
you and I kinda also hate it from a sense of somebody who
likes to take photos, right? It's weird. I'm torn on both
sides and I love the fact that it makes money. I hate the fact
that it's so easy to build so everybody built it.
It's like Photoshop. Photoshop at the same, when I was a kid
Photoshop came out and the newspapers are full of
Photoshop, like this is gonna destroy photography, everything
is fake now and it didn't. Like all it did was the people use it
for touching up or for art and stuff. So it's become a tool and
I feel with all this stuff it becomes a tool for like I
mentioned, you have a wedding photographer. He makes a lot of
photos and then there's not a single good one. Okay, maybe you
can use AI to train this person and you can make some renders
and then stitch them back into the photo, you know.
That is really cool. That makes sense.
That can be a mix of reality and AI, you know, like, that's
probably the future. So
I was gonna ask you what do you think of AI being the future,
but I kind of hear the sentiment of AI as tools that make actual
things easier. That is always going to be the future, right?
It's not that the AI is going to do everything for us, you know,
AI's gonna help us do the things better. That's how I see it, at
least.
Yeah. But I do think that it replaces people like I do think
it can replace photographers. So it's like, it is a tool, but you
will probably need one photographer instead of 10
photographers, you know. You need one person who can control
the AIs. So yeah, it's interesting. It's interesting.
But also for interior designers like interiorai.com, it tries
to, a lot of interior designers use it for ideation. So you have
a client who wants to get an idea for like because clients
don't know what they want. You take a photo of the interior.
And then you give them a lot of different styles. And do you
want this and you can kind of move through ideation together
to find the style that the customer wants and show them how
it looks and but this also removes a lot of jobs again
because you you need less like. Like I was looking at real
estate agencies, a lot of them use already people who make
these renders, especially new construction. They use beautiful
interior renders, so fake and this easily you can do with AI
in man, it takes 10 seconds to render a whole beautiful render.
Normally, it takes what like two days for people to make this. So
that's a real thing. But these people can use these tools also.
It's going to shortcut a lot of processes that are established
already and have like people working on them. But that's like
you said Photoshop is that too, right? There used to be other
tools to manipulate images before and it used to be like a
more physical, it's like editing, editing video, right?
People used to actually cut like, physically cut the stuff
My dad did that
It got digitized. All of a sudden, you do in a second what
took hours to get done. Right?
Exactly. Now you can edit with your iPhone, you know, like, my
dad is a big, his favorite thing is film editing. And he did this
with, he has classic film tapes and he caught and glues
everything before. And then he had this video, instead of
professional video, like betacom and stuff. And now it's like
Final Cut Pro. But then I'm like, look at my iPhone. Like I
make videos on my iPhone now. In TikTok you can edit even faster
and it is high quality. So you know, it's all changing fast.
And yeah, we'll keep changing. AI is part of that, so.
Yeah, I find it so interesting that you get to see both sides,
you get the boring project. I'm not gonna call Nomad List as
boring, but it kinda is like in terms of the, you know, the hype
around it. It's just used by the people that need it. And that's
it.
Yeah
And you get the hype ish projects that get the headlines
that get like, coverage in the press and that kind of stuff.
Yeah, but this was Nomad List before of course. Nine years ago
no, Nomad List got a lot of like, it was in New York Times,
it was in all articles. I was like, oh my God, Nomad's gonna
go everywhere. So it was hype and then hype ends, it becomes
normal. It becomes mainstream.
Do you think like, being a nomad is still something like,
obviously I see you traveling around the world. My question,
but it's not like it's still around, obviously. Nomadism
isn't dead, right? But is it still something that you
personally do? Or do you want to do this forever? Same like with
your business, do you want to keep being an indie hacker
forever? Do you still want to travel?
Man, like this problem, this idea of the unknown. It's like
most of them are slow mads and they start out very fast. They
go like, you know, sometimes week to week, two different
place that kind of like backpacking, then it becomes
month to month and then it becomes like three months
usually or six months in one place. And I feel and I also
slowed down a lot like with COVID I just stopped. Everybody
stopped traveling, right? This year was kind of crazy with
travel. But before I was, you know, I tried to like keep it to
like two countries. And I think for mental health also like, I
think you do go crazy if you keep traveling so much. I
personally do. I did, you know? Because you don't know where you
are anymore. Like there was literally things with nomads,
you wake up and there's a thing like they don't know, like where
am I? You look outside. Oh, okay. I'm in Croatia or you know
this stuff?
Yeah
Man, it's probably not so good. But it's very interesting
lifestyle. But I think long term like man, if you have a
relationship and if you have kids later all this stuff. I
still think you can move. But you probably want to limit to a
few places, you know and I think we just become the same as what
people like retirees do. They are like in America, right? What
are they called? Like birds like winter birds or something like
Snow birds
Snowbirds, in the winter, they go to Florida and in the summer,
they go to New York or something. This is the setup. So
it's just it's gonna go to the same thing. And I do it already
like Europe in the South. It gets cold in the winter. I try
to go to Asia, Southeast Asia where it's warm. I try and mix
like the big city Asia with small village, Southern Europe
on the beach. I think this works for me. Of course personal works
here. But yeah, nomadism is still very active and lively and
there's real like spots like Bali is still a very big spot
and Thailand also and Mexico. With the Americas now coming in
because they can work remotely a lot of them are by default
nomads and they live in Mexico. But yeah, nomads a lot, probably
less. You know, but a lot of people are living in not their
original countries now because of remote work. And it's kind of
called digital nomading, right?
I guess. Yeah. And in a way anybody working from a computer
is a digital nomad, right?
In another country, like in another country, in their home
country and that's become very normal. So I think it's still
like, I think it's still very cool lifestyle. Like, if I was
20, I would not go probably to university anymore. I would just
go travel with my laptop and try little startups and stuff. And
travel is such a, especially solo travel, you have to
survive, you have to meet people like so, everybody has social
anxiety these days. So you have to go out there and talk to
people and you learn how to talk to strangers. And you know, I
was very probably shy before now I'm not because I learned how to
talk. I learned to go out of my room and you know and survive.
And I think this stuff you learn from traveling. Every city you
go, you can be a new personality, you can test your
personalities, you know, sounds a little psychopathic. But you
know, your AB test, yeah. You know in your hometown, you're
this certain Arvid. But then you go out of your country, you
become international Arvid. You're like, very different. And
you try this, you know, you try to be very extrovert and you
can, a lot of people test this and I think that's very cool
benefit of nomading.
That sounds awesome. And it also sounds like kind of sounds like
Twitter to me, where you can also be the person that you want
to be, right? Like you project like the best parts, hopefully,
or the worst parts of your personality on to social media.
How do you deal with that? Like you have a pretty sizable
following now. And with all the changes that have been recently
made to Twitter or X, as we call it, right? There's a lot of
difference in how we approach engagement and what gets views,
what gets like retweeted, what gets actually pushed by the
algorithm. How do you deal with this? Because you have a lot of
reach.
Man. So I think the algorithm has changed with Elon changing
it and the team because before everything would kind of get
views and likes, right? It would take with everything would get
like you know, get exposure. A lot of people would see your
tweets anyway, whatever you wrote and some would go viral a
little bit. I think they changed it more to like, where if
something goes viral in the beginning, it becomes pumped
maximum. So it goes like before I would get like 100 retweets.
Now if something viral it gets 1000 retweets, goes very far.
But on the other side, often many tweets get like two likes.
Yes
You know and I have 300,000 followers
So bizarre. It's weird, right?
So I think they test in the beginning. Once you tweet a
Yeah, it's really bad. It's kind of disappointing, right? Because
test, does this feed work or not? Do people care about it?
And I think how they test it, they check how many seconds you
if you just tweet something honest, that is just you know,
watch the tweets, the people who watch your tweets, you scroll
through and they they count now the numbers, the seconds and
Elon Musk said this, you know. And when this tweet doesn't
something that comes from a place that is not extreme, but
perform well, they just don't show it anymore a lot. So it
become more extreme. And this of course, creates even more
extreme Twitter because you get tweets that have to go really
far, really extreme to get, you know, like. And then they get a
lot of retweets or nothing.
it's still important. And it gets just like washed away and
buried beneath all the outrage things, kind of makes Twitter a
less enjoyable platform, at least for me.
Yeah, I think so like product updates. They don't really like
I used to always, I always do product updates, like I made
this new feature. And they used to get like, you know, like, a
lot of views. They get less, much less now because it's not
that interesting. It's kind of like yeah, it's kind of nice,
you know, so the long term kind of vibe of Twitter changed a
little bit. But I do have faith in our great leader, Elon Musk,
you know. He can improve it. I think it's a survival thing.
Like they need to get more monthly active users. They need
to become more like TikTok. TikTok is maximus algorithm.
Like they check every video they see if it works or not. And then
they pump it also. I think he's on TikTok a lot and checking
this and he wants to make Twitter very similar. And all of
the vidoes, of texts, but then with the TikTok algorithm. So
you know, you have OKRs like the metric target, which is like
more users and now I think Twitter has a record use like
500 million active users, monthly active users, so it does
work but it changes the vibe a little bit. But I ignored I just
still tried tweet whatever I think and man, if nobody cares
anymore, I'll keep tweeting because I was tweeting and
nobody cared 10 years ago. I'll just keep tweeting, you know.
That's exactly right
It's about your own, you know, your own. You should enjoy. You
shouldn't do it for the audience maybe
Yeah. And the people who enjoy what you do, they will find you,
right? Like if you're just consistent enough
They'll go to your profile and they read your stuff, right?
They will maybe not seen in the time now, they will go to there
so I think man, like don't be tread boy, you know, like don't
do like the five things you need the five AI tools you needed to
verse 24.
Number three will surprise you, right?
Number 3 will shock you. Yeah, it's bullshit. Man, what I loved
one thing interesting. He also increased these long posts like
now you can write blog posts.
Yes
These blog posts by definition get a lot of view time because
of seconds. Right? These do work really well. So it's almost like
a blog platform. So man, a lot of times I've just started
writing blog posts now on Twitter.
Yeah, I've seen this too. And video too, right? Like any kind
of medium to long form video really does well, like if people
just keep watching it a couple seconds because it's so
interesting. But that's the interesting thing about Twitter.
Now you need to take YouTube ideas, the idea of YouTube intro
For a seconds, right? You won't believe what's next, go!
Mr. Beast style and you need thumbnails and all that stuff
now on Twitter as well if you want to professionalize. It just
feels it's different. And maybe that's the exact same sentiment
as we had earlier, indie hacking dead, nomadism dead, Twitter
dead. We all that kind of the old ones, at least. It's all
new. Right? It's all just different at this point.
Yeah, it feels like it's but you have these time schisms?
You know, where a lot of things change suddenly, for this is
Yes
definitely COVID, of course. This COVID years and maybe
effects was more 2021, big schism, like we're in a new
cycle. Now look at the recession, also and man
honestly, the cycles are usually seven years. That's why I always
say seven year cycle, you can search on Wikipedia, economic
cycles usually seven years
Contracting economic cycles?
I don't know. Is that the same?
I think it has name
Yeah. But also like economic cycles are social cultural
cycles, too.
Yeah
Like when there was a recession in 2008, you would see these
hipster coffee shops pop up in Amsterdam, I remember this
vividly. It changed the culture to kind of scrappy and hipster
and it changes fashion. You know, it changes everything. So
there's definitely big cycles and we're in a new cycle now. AI
is part of this new cycle, right? So in seven years, it's
all gonna go full again and something new come. So but I
think yeah, again, don't be angry about the changes, just
embrace and reinvent yourself for this new time. And you
always need to reinvent yourself, right?
Yeah, I think you're right. It is an attention economy. Right?
Now, everybody has very limited attention because everybody's
pulling at it from all sides. I talked to Aprilynne Alter about
this YouTube thing too, right? Because she knows how to do a
good YouTube video. It was funny, I had her on the show.
And the day after that, she published a video that went
viral, it's now had like 200,000 views or something. She knows
what she's doing. It was really cool. And, like, I watched her
video on how to do an intro to YouTube video. And the whole
idea is to make it absolutely clear what the promise is of the
video, what you're going to do and then surprise people and
give a bit more than they expected. It's really just
trying to get people to feel confident in giving you their
attention for a longer time.
But that's like a tweet, right? The problem I have, so I thought
about it and I did this and then I solved the problem. Here's how
to do it yourself. You know, it is a formula.
Yeah. And it's required because you need to be able to stand out
amongst other people who are also interested in getting
attention. It's just a new way to communicate. We used to, we
had a time where we wrote letters all the time. And then
email came along. And then social media came along. And now
we have this. And this is I guess, just what we have to deal
with.
But the attention economy has always become it's always become
less attention. Like you used to have long movies and then it
became TV shows. And it became YouTube videos. Now TikToks.
Next will be like, just one second video or something, you
know, like, I don't know. But it's always been by this. But
now I feels both because you have long podcasts like Joe
Rogan has three hour podcasts and I listen to the whole
things. And it might take me days because I listen a little
bit here. And next I listen to it here. And then you also have
the clips, you have TikTok clips of podcasts. So it works both.
You have this outlier, you know, like, what do you call the
economy of both sides. So
Yeah, that makes that makes a lot of sense. Like it's kind of
the you should be zigging when everybody else is zagging,
right? That kind of thing. Now you can do long form content for
the people who really care about it. And everybody else needs to
short term stuff and even for the short form content, you can
still do the clips so you get your long form but in short
Exactly!
Yeah, it's the more I do like of podcasts and YouTube and writing
and newsletter, whatever I do. I do a lot of things, but they're
all on based on the same material. I just use different
ways of distributing the same material. And maybe that is the
lesson here, right? That's depending on the media,
depending on the medium, like the social media platform or
YouTube or whatever, you just have to shape it the right way
for people to consume it.
Yeah, I think you can learn a lot from these big, big famous
influencers even if you don't like them. Man, they will say
like, outrageous stuff. Like, I don't like this guy, Andew Tate,
for example. They, he says, really radical stuff that's very
controversial and too much, you know and then the long form
parts is quite balanced. Like he kind of softens down. He's like,
what actually what I think. Man, I don't think he's very honest
but there's something to be learned there where if you say
things that are quite packable into shorts, like answers, that
person that can package their answer in the first sentence
probably well and then go for long form, this will get clipped
and this person will get more views than a person who cannot
make a proper sentence first to summarize, you know. So becoming
good at writing tweets and even talking now in a short sentence
is becoming like an integral. Man, it can make you rich or
not, right? Because if your video goes viral, you become
famous and you sell products. So, man, that's like a skill,
you know? I don't know if I'm good at it because I ramble.
Well, me too, but we're both trying our best, right? At least
we're trying, we're in the arena and not on the sidelines. Right?
Yeah, exactly.
A lot of the things you say, a lot of people have opinions
about like, just, you know, you can get a lot of trolls and you
get a lot of people to turn your stuff into memes. How do you
feel about that, like in particular?
Man, it's great. It's like, it's amazing. Like, these memes are
amazing. And, man, what do you expect? Like you tweet like, you
know, controversial stuff
Right
Yeah, for sure.
To a lot of people and of course, people going to, people
get like, even like, you know, friends of friends, they message
and chat like, man, what you tweeted now it's too much,
unacceptable. I'm unfollowing you. I can't do it. You can't
say this about this framework, you know, because I use it.
People get really triggered. Man, I don't know. I think it's
really funny. It's like, but you need to see it as kind of like a
game. You know, man, it sounds psychopathic sociopathic, but
it's you cannot take seriously like it. It's impossible to see
it as a normal conversation because we have a normal
But people who are smart, they understand, okay, this guy is on
conversation. But if you have now you add 300,000 people on
the other side is just shouting. It's like lynch mob. So and this
changes you I think and you have to watch out doesn't change your
personality in real life, you know, because you become but it
does a little bit of course. But I think the benefits generally
outweigh the negatives. You made a lot of cool people like you.
Like most of my friends, I met via Twitter, you know and we met
on Twitter. A lot of famous people also like people that do
really cool stuff. They DM me and we talk and stuff and it's
like wow, super cool. Like, man, like I talk with DJ Fresh
because when I used to make music, drum and bass music, DJ
Fresh was very important figure in music. Now he makes AI
startup tool called voice-swap.ai, plug it. And we
DM and we talk about a lot of stuff. And I'm like talking to
my drum, bass idol. You know, it's the same. It's like, every
time I'm still shocked. So and I think the more you can even if
you read controversial stuff because it's your real being,
you get a lot of attention and via this, people understand it's
Twitter, we don't understand. It's like a stage. You know,
a platform and he's doing a show thing. And you have to take
it's a show kinda
everything with a grain of salt, you know and but at true, I try
to say things honestly. I don't say things just to bullshit, you
Yeah, I guess, if you have controversial opinions, the
authentic representation is just to talk to people about those
things, right? To share these opinions. Like you don't hide
them. You just you don't become like the person that is happy
know.
with every single thing or is like really, really appreciative
of every opinion. You just say what you say.
And you try to be honest and apparently that's like
controversial, but of course it becomes controversial because
there's so many people. They don't have to be will disagree
with you. So then it becomes by definition controversial, but
it's not really controversial, you know and the problem is if
you get scared and most people get scared of these and then
they start tweeting like basic normal stuff and it's not
interesting anymore. And I think the reason a lot of people
follow me is because they know I'm honest and I'm not perfect.
And I write whatever I think and it's usually crazy. But I also I
like this yeah, but I like to say opinions and then like about
frameworks or something and I say something and then I like to
hear what people like when people reply. I learned from
that and I changed my opinions. Like I have strong opinions
weekly held. I do change my opinions all the time. And but
it's a stage it's like a podium, it's a show kind of. It's
inevitable that it becomes a show. It's very difficult not to
make it and you have people like Lex Fridman, for example. He's
very cool. And he gets a lot of hate also. And he chooses to
talk more about like, love, like, we're all connected one
world and everybody loves each other. And I liked that too. But
it's not really my personal style. My first thought was just
saying what I think. I want to keep being true to myself. I
don't want to become fake, you know. And that seems fake. But
he chooses love. I choose more like, what's on my heart, it's
on my tongue. Like it's a German Dutch expression, I think. And I
put that on Twitter, I tried to keep it in all in sync, you
know. I don't like to be different offline, you know?
Yeah, that's perfectly fine. And that's why I appreciate your
tweets. I know that when you tweet something, even if it's
controversial, it comes from an honest, truthful place. And that
is the way you think about it. And that is the way you will
talk about it. And I know what I get, right? That's the thing.
It's very, authentically you. And I think that is a really,
really smart way to building an audience or whatever you might
want to call it, or just have a Twitter presence or social media
presence, is just to not hide who you are. And kind of stand
behind the things you say.
That's so difficult because people are getting really angry
and they hate you for your opinions. And people, yeah, you
see these breakdowns on Twitter, right? People just have a
meltdown because they get so much hate. I get this every day.
Me too. Yeah, I think we both follow many, many people through
lists and followers. And I think over the last three days, I saw
like four people saying, I'm gonna need a break from Twitter.
This is enough, right? And it's unfortunate that when it comes
to that because people and I'm the same way, like I post
something 30 people say, this is really cool. One person says,
this sucks. And all I focus on is this one person and not the
30 other people that really enjoyed what I said, right?
That's typical. Yeah
Yeah, it's really bad. But hey, let's end this on a high note. I
think your Twitter account is awesome. I think you're sharing
just your honesty, sharing things that you encounter in
your daily coder entrepreneurial life. And I think that is
absolutely worth sometimes getting into controversial
fights with other people who have no skin in the game
whatsoever, but a lot of opinions. So where would you
like people to go to follow you if they don't already? But where
would you like people to go to look at what you do, how you do
it, and the projects that you're building?
I think Twitter, X now you know, x.com/levelsio. Yeah. Thank you
for having me. And I'm big fan of your Twitter account, too.
I'm a big fan of you, man. It's so nice. It's taken a couple of
Thank you, man! It's an honor to hear, man! Very nice!
years for us to have a chat finally. But I'm super happy to
be got to talk about all of this today. I'm really, really
looking forward to seeing like where you're indie hacker
journey, if that is still what you consider yourself to be
It's been a pleasure. Thanks for being on the show.
takes you in the future. And thanks for building all of these
things in public. You're a role model to a lot of us. So thanks
so much.
Thank you for having me.
And that's it for today. Pieter mentioned that he'd be open to
sell his AI businesses eventually. And I know just the
right place for him to list those businesses. I will now
briefly thank my sponsor for today: acquire.com. Imagine this
and it's not gonna be hard because Pieter just talked about
this the whole time. You're a founder who's built a really
solid SaaS product, you acquired massive amounts of customers,
you're getting consistent monthly recurring revenue.
That's the SaaS dream, as explained and evidenced by
Pieter's AI tools. The problem is you're not growing for
whatever reason, maybe lack of focus, lack of skill, lack of
interest, and you just feel stuck in your business and with
your business. In Pieter's case, it's really unawareness of where
things are gonna go, right? Is the stuff still going to be
around in a couple months? Can I still run this business by
myself? Or should somebody take over? Well, the story here at
this point, in many cases, is that people would love to hear
that you buckled down, reignited the fire. You worked on the
business, not just in the business, you build an audience
and you marked a new sales and outreach growing team and
whatever. Six months down the road, people would love to hear
that you made all that money, right? You've tripled your
revenue, you've built this hyper successful business, but reality
is unfortunately not as simple as this. And the situation that
you might find yourself in might be very different. And every
founder is facing this crossroad in a different way. But too many
times, the story that follows is the same. It ends up being one
of inaction and stagnation until your business itself becomes
less and less valuable over time or worse, completely worthless.
So if you find yourself here already or you think that your
personal story is likely headed down a similar road, I would
consider a third option. And that's selling your business on
acquire.com. Because capitalizing on the value of
your time today is a pretty smart move. It's the only time
you have. 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 and your
business right now.
Thank you so much for listening to The Bootstrapped Founder
today. You can find me on Twitter @arvidkahl. You find my
books and my twitter course there too. And if you want to
support me and the show, please subscribe to my YouTube channel,
that would be really appreciated. Just get and rate
the podcast in your podcast player of choice and leave a
rating and a review by going to (http://ratethispodcast.com/founder).
It really makes a massive difference for me. Because if
you show up there, can rate and review, then the podcast will
show up in other people's feeds. And that just means more people
get to learn from people like Pieter today. Any of this will
help the show. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful
day and bye bye.
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