all right everybody imagine having a job where you have freedom in where you work what you work on and have monetary Freedom as well well this may sound too good to be true this a career and lifestyle approach that Indie hackers have been experimenting with and succeeding at for quite some time today I talked to Anthony Castro who describes a story and how he got started with entrepreneurship took the leap towards Building Products in the open his approach for marketing and what you can start doing if you want to become an indie hacker yourself it's gonna be fun so let's get started Anthony great to meet with you so for the audience please introduce yourself

hello audience my name is Anthony Castrio I'm a digital Nomad Indie hacker and newsletter writer most recently

so I've been following your work for quite some time now and it's always really been fascinating because the idea of someone being a digital Nomad going traveling around the world and also being able to create really interesting content get others excited about it and really a community and a company around all these you know very nice topics is really interesting and that's part one of the things I want to dive deeper into you with so at the very beginning let's get started so do you see yourself as a developer a computer programmer entrepreneur like if you had to Buck yourself in like you know one you know tag what would it be

I think entrepreneur is probably the best fit I'm definitely coming from a programming background but um nothing in my business right now uses code so I haven't actually really coded anything in the last six to nine months hoping to change that again soon so I actually went through a big process at the beginning of last year and the year before of getting rid of code throwing out things that I'd custom coded that I didn't turns out weren't like core to my business and getting it everything as much as possible over to no code um and then now that I've freed up so much of my time from doing that because now I don't have to maintain all these things that I was before I want to build new projects that do use

code again to flex those muscles that are starting to perhaps atrophy I hope not but perhaps

you always want Google search entrepreneur I guess from having the answer chat GPT and other AI basic solutions could maybe even help you we either jog your memory for sure

it's kind of funny because my little brother is learning to code now and he's like I can't code I have to Google everything and I'm like no you're doing it right that's actually that's exactly what you should do but he has like paper tests and things because he's still in college so he's like when I'm just working on a project I can get it done I just Google my way through it and then in school um I can't like remember exactly the thing that I need to write so I get like Dr random syntax errors but actually once you get to the professional level you're just right back to Googling so exactly this is artificial hump that we all have to cross through where you're

doing these things because you think that this is the way you have to get your brain to remember things basically memorizing in many ways and then once you cross over that hurdle you're back doing exactly the way you do it it's like I know the big Concepts knowing what to Google like what keywords to string together is like the most important part I think of like any software developer's job these days is that yeah I remember all these things entrepreneurship in part is it's like outcome based right not example based so you only really the only person judging you at the end of the day is your customer if they're happy and paying you you're doing it right

exactly you know you cross through all those hurdles and it's funny how few people fully recognize that you know you see people who are like working in companies or working in software development and so on like why are you a line of code that go really deep into why you're doing every single activity the chances are that at the end of the long line of how your input contributes to your business success it's a customer they have a problem you're solving it how you're solving It Is by what you're providing here that customer does not care that you remember that you memorize how to reverse a linked list or like sort some numbers or so on or that you went to Google and copied and pasted it

or you asked an AI assistant for you all they care about is is helping me solve my business problems that I can you know grow my customer base and help my customers be happy and have my you know lifestyle be maintained and so on so let's get back to the very beginning you know you mentioned as an entrepreneur so what sport how you know most people don't wake up every day going like I want to do entrepreneurial things so what sparked that in you

well it's kind of related like I always wanted to to kind of break it down past the like what is my job description to like why are we doing this thing and you don't get that kind of um leeway usually as an employee usually hired to do a specific thing like get hired to be a programmer and you kind of need to stay in the programmer box you can't just jump out of that box willy-nilly based on like oh what this customer actually needs is uh for us to delete everything we've done and just it's now it's just a spreadsheet and we just kind of collect their information and send them a link once a week or whatever it is you know but um as an entrepreneur

you can make that call and you can especially as a solo entrepreneur you can throw out half your business if you need to in order to make the customer happy would it like probably the customer and as more of like an abstract entity versus Just One customer right you don't want to throw out half your business for just one customer uh but so I got I had some internships I had one full-time job um but pretty much pretty soon after college like within six months I was freelancing and um just like finding my own clients and working for them so that was when I kind of my first life real foray into entrepreneurship at that point where I'm making my own way through the world

finding clients um almost kind of went The Agency Route had some bigger projects and then decided uh this is not really for me started looking for like a potential SAS idea a some kind of software product that I could bring to Market never found one what I did instead is while I was trying to figure out what to build and how to build it I started organizing Indie hackers meetups because I really like for the same reason that I kind of reject the whole system of like having a job and that really didn't speak to me neither did raising money because it kind of felt like jumping through the same Hoops once again like if I want a job I have to like go apply

for it and convince someone that they should hire me if I want to raise money I have to like go apply at the all these VC firms and convince them to fund me I didn't want to do either of those things so the Indie hacker method of bootstrapping your business is what really appealed to me so I started organizing these meetups where because I was already nomadding at this point as soon as I had remote freelance work I immediately left the country and started traveling and I was organizing meetups wherever I was or I organized one in Medellin Colombia helped organize one in Mexico City I was helping out in like Montreal and Boston like wherever I was Indie hacker Meetup was there um but after you know three or four of

these I was like uh this kind of sucks actually because I keep leaving my friends behind I make friends create this whole community and then leave and then that Community probably doesn't survive because lost I wasn't there long enough to like um Mentor new leadership so I keep it going so just kind of dies when I leave and that was a bummer so I started a virtual community so we had like any hackers medicine Indie hackers Boston Indie hackers Mexico City Indie hackers worldwide that's where I take on of Life of its own and just became Indie worldwide which is a community I still run like four years later

was it freedom to do your own thing that person that made you pursue not working for a you know a formal company and just doing your own thing

yeah Freedom um it's definitely a driving force and I found from talking to like a lot of entrepreneurs like that's the main thing I do it's like talk to Founders for this community uh almost all of them are motivated by freedom and um if it's like there's I'm finding there's like multiple axes of Freedom that people are seeking in their life and being a Founder especially a bootstrapped one satisfies almost all of them right so it's like Freedom like Financial Freedom obviously but freedom to choose what you're working on just like artistic Freedom like freedom of expression and then there's like where where can I live so like Mobility Freedom and if you're if you're a nomadic Indie hacker you're you're at the intersection of almost

every possible axes of Freedom that you could come up with so I think it's a very um um aspirational place to be in a lot so a lot of people that our Founders are coming from one of those axes if not all of them of freedom and this is where they end up

isn't there a fear of you know leaving a stable well-paying you know job to then go on your own how did you overcome that

so I've always been more scared of getting stuck in a um cliche life I guess like that idea of doing something that's been done before fill me with Terror of like just what is the point of my existence if I'm going to do something that's you know millions of people are already doing and don't seem to be all that happy about uh so that was the stick poking me and then how I kind of so there was a little bit of uh okay I am leaving a lot of tape money on the table um by doing this and not getting a more traditional job where I can like Bank six figures a year or whatever guaranteed um so to overcome that like my heuristic is did I end this year with

at least a dollar more net worth than last year so I just don't wanna I wanna at least not be losing money and so as long as I do that I feel good and I did um just six months of being an engineer in San Francisco was enough to give me enough Runway to to give it a shot I think by the time I left I'd um covered my student loan debt and then had like another 20 K in the bank or something I feel like okay that's enough as long as I can end next year with two twenty thousand and one dollars then uh at least I'm not going backwards so at least I'm covering my expenses and growing I figured as long as that's true

eventually I'll figure it out and and I cover all my expenses but I kept freelancing as well and so that was that was pretty lucrative as well and it's kind of like I see freelancing is like a stepping stone to building a bigger business um and so I call it the uh the uh bootstrapper seed round is part-time freelancing

do you think the skills you learn as a freelancer in being able to Market your services Market yourself be able to learn the the ins and outs of working with clients does it play a big role in helping you be bootstrapping your own

companies yeah a huge role because um and I think freelancing is a great first business for people who want to be entrepreneurs to do because you learn how to run a business like how to set up um legal entity how to do your banking potentially um and most importantly you learn how to solve yourself and you learn hopefully how to sell yourself at like a high level like if you're a software engineer then as a freelancer you might be doing deals in the five to six figures which is great practice because hopefully when you're building a SAS especially as a bootstrapper we often want to go more towards like B2B it can be really helpful to kind of understand how companies think about spending money

and what they what where their budgets come from and what they'll spend money on and how to convince them to spend it with you really good skill behalf

you mentioned B2B in SAS a few times was it your goal to ultimately find a way to sustain your hobbies and your interests and apply that in the B2B staff space or was it more of just an area that you want to get into because there is the stability that a recurring large company provides even and while allowing you to maintain the many degrees of freedom that you also called

out earlier yeah I think like entrepreneurship itself has been my hobby since I was a kid it's like always what I was reading about what I was interested in which is probably how I ended up in such a meta business of like a community for entrepreneurs just because like entrepreneurship itself has always been so fascinating to me like probably from well actually I remember um in preschool they were like what job you want to be and so at four years old I said entrepreneur the answer never changed

that's actually pretty impressive that you had an inkling of what you want to do early on and then you imagine I think it's a good thing it was early on because I don't think I'm naturally good at it I had to like trial in there or if I needed all 20 years you know to figure it out yeah yeah which is which is what is often a Cornerstone of success is actually just repeating a process and iterating and learning from all of that that's actually pretty pretty impressive and so that you have you know Indie worldwide your your business is all about you know you created you go to all these places you travel you meet create meetups and you you know interact with all these individuals and then because

you're essentially communities are often built around central individuals and because you're no longer there you've moved to a different place for example and at that point because it sent to a person is no longer there the community slowly just starts to kind of you know go away and so you had the idea of like let me make this a virtual kind of a setup so that no matter where you are you're still able to interact with all the people you met and are able to do how we're able to you know go from that's the idea that I'm going to solve for to make it monetizable for now you're you know actually people are paying you for the privilege of being able to have you be their Central

Community leader yeah this is a good example of how I have had no idea what I was doing because for the first year and a half it was free and I explicitly did not want to charge any money for it because I was still searching for my real idea whatever that was going to be and I didn't want to my I felt like I can't be an entrepreneur and my business is an entrepreneurship Community like how will people why would someone join a community where the guy's only business is the community itself right like there's no um so the whole time I was working on other startup ideas like freelancing still building and launching other small stuff but in the end the only thing that

survived was the community itself and so about two years to end um I was I like At first we were just a monthly Zoom call event at some point we added the slack group and so I was just trying to think of like how can I get more of these members to meet each other because like there's a big difference between an audience which is like everyone knows you and a community where people might not even know you you know they know they're there for each other and I really wanted to build the second thing in community um in order to get those kind of network effects so I was just thinking like what is on a straightforward way I can get uh two Founders who are in this

community to meet and talk to each other and become friends so what I started to do is um you remember if you remember lunch Club um when we launched I was calling it artisanal lunch Club so we were a lunch Club just for startup Founders and Indie worldwide and once a week so you tell me some stuff about you and then once a week I introduce you to somebody else in the community based on mostly based on how much money you're making in like what industry um and that took off right away like um like 100 people signed up for it but it was still free still free and but a couple members are like hey buddy have you thought about uh charging money for

this one I would pay you I would pay you money for it I would pay you you know 40 bucks or whatever to for this to to make sure this keeps existing um so I decided okay sure I'll charge money so then I charge like 40 bucks to sign up for it one time uh first year we made I think like 10 grand and so I still freelancing that definitely didn't cover my expenses um but that's when we had uh that's when we started making money we needed uh itself stayed free for like another year I think before I started charging a membership fee to join and uh didn't even really set up recurring payments until I think early last year it took me it took me a while to figure

it out so we put somehow um I've kind of stumbled my way into it I think just the fact that I've kept doing it it just has had time to slowly grow it's never been exponential it's been linear if anything so the first year we did like 10 grand last year 20 grand this year we'll probably do like 50 Grand

so we mentioned that you're doing all this on the side or searching for a real idea at what point were you like you know what my real idea is actually this this is the thing I'm going to be spending my time on I'm no longer focusing on trying to find my real idea

yeah it's after I started um charging membership fees for the community itself and people were still were willing to pay and I was like oh I guess I could have just done this years ago and this could have been my business so it might as well go all in and then it took me another month still to actually stop freelancing and just dedicate myself full time to trying to grow the Indie worldwide business and make money from from memberships

yeah so what does your day look like you know you wake up you know what do you you know entrepreneurship like you know your business itself like what are the things you do on a typical day

yeah it's uh it's fairly hectic at the moment uh because I just moved to New York so my expenses are up and uh so I need to kind of catch up on the revenue side and make more money so it's been I've been hustling lately it's like up at uh before nine um at least an hour probably just spent answering messages so like games on Twitter and in the Indie worldwide slack and like posting things in there to keep that Lively then um there's like setting up events and stuff because we'll do usually some kind of Meetup every week at this point um so like it would be like a mastermind or a q a with some kind of founder maybe an interview like this

um and then uh we do these group challenges so last year we ran one that was get 100 users in 100 days and everyone race to do that this this year we're doing shorter challenges so we just had a 30-day challenge and last month which was based around growing newsletter subscribers then now and now it's a no coding is no longer a big part of my day because I managed to uncode everything so it used to be like oh I want to make an update to the website like I have to edit the HTML and then deploy that change and that was a bummer so I switched over to Noco tools now that that transition is done most of my day is writing so I'm writing uh the Indie

worldwide newsletter which goes out once a week and it's going to be twice a week starting next week and now I'm writing a newsletter about AI called uh it's like robots eating your brain so bot to eatbrain.com is my new AI newsletter that's a daily newsletter so I'm writing pretty much every day for that and then I'm writing a ton on Twitter as well because Twitter has always been like a really probably my number one marketing channel across everything I do so like over the last last year I really focused a lot on Twitter growth and managed to grow my account uh by about 10 000 subscribers or followers so it's like 13k now which has been really good for distribution um so just writing a lot on on Twitter

now on to two newsletters somehow I went from programming to to writer and I'm not sure exactly when it when it happened because most of my marketing is somehow writing whether it's like making a post on indiehackers.com or Reddit or Hacker News or wherever it's like a lot of a lot of words it's a good thing I'm a fast typer

I mean if you subscribe to theory that programming is Art and that writing is also art so it all comes from the same part of your brain that is responsible for creativity then that you went from being a programmer to being a writer I think is uh makes a lot of State an artist I would argue uh entrepreneurship especially the Indie hacker style definitely qualifies as art as well correct you know any you know outside of the ignorative textbook definitions any kind of a thing that you do or you're defining your own path forward you know it's as opposed to following a predefined path which means that a different part of your brain is doing exercise that clearly does fall under art so it makes a lot of sense in

that in that regard and so I'm curious no code tools you know use it to replace all the coding you should do which tools are you using

um a ton probably too many so this is something I've been thinking about lately I feel like to be a good salesperson you kind of have to be like easy to sell to as well and so I've guess I've gotten better at selling I get easier and easier to sell to so I pay for like duplicates of tools just in order to try them all and because they all sound cool and if and my community is like full of entrepreneurs and so they all have something to pitch me and I want to buy I want to support them all and buy all their tools so at any given time I'm often using like two or three things um to do the same thing like uh newsletters

for example one of my newsletters is on convertkit the other's on beehive uh I have a sub stack too and then um so for the like my website itself is currently hosted on card for the landing page but everything every other page is hosted on feather which uh one of our members Banu builds and my payments uh like uh system is on uh through outseta which is built by Jeff and uh which then uses stripe in the back end and uh my I'm I used to manage sponsorship inquiries by like a a Google sheet but recently I was able to switch to another member's Pro another Indie worldwide members product passion fruit which is run by Jens and his team in Berlin um what else do we use zapier a lot of glue

Google Sheets is always my go-to when I need a database or I'll use airtable if I need other people to input data because I can like type the columns which makes it easier to like hire someone to fill that out notion is a big one so like feather sits on top of notion notion is also no code tool that's where all my notes go but that's also then where I'm writing like a blog post that goes on the webs on the Indie worldwide website will go on there um then there's like video tools so like we host our meetings on usually either at butter we started to use or another tool built by any worldwide member which is called up me that's built by Reese

so as much as possible I like to use my members products um even I think when I send you my scheduling link get scheduler.com that's about by Ricky it's also an indie World web number so that's not like full stack

Indie worldwide Founders yeah no you're fully yeah no it's great because of all the tools you listed except for like maybe one or two many of them were ones that you know qualified as like having come from people that book it which is actually really impressive because when we look back at like let's imagine that 10 years ago that someone wanted to be an indie hacker and you know travel and do all these kind of things the lack of tooling may have hindered a lot of the scale at least they're able to get you know this even imagining for example that you go to one city create a Meetup Group find people make connections and then maintain that going to another city because you have like

very simple tools for being able to manage the community like slack for example or even set up video calls and things like that the cost and the ability to even do that in a technically feasible Way by just one person would have been so difficult that you're able to do all the now I think it's partially right idea at the right time because you have personal Advantage I think you know in terms of like having started this process and others can come in later but they're going to be writing the the wave of the path you've already placed

I hope so that sounds nice I want to have a note

so you mentioned you're doing a lot of writing these days how do you come with your ideas

um so for the Indie worldwide newsletter the most of the content is just here's what's going on in the community like here's what's up um and so my ideas for what we should do in the community almost always come back to how do I get more Founders to meet each other like how do I get more of my members to be friends with each other ideally every person in the worldwide would know at least like four other people because then that's that's really a community uh then you know that at our size which is about 200 active Founders in the community right now if everyone knows like five people then um you're pretty much only one step away from anyone else in the community which

it's pretty tight um that that feels like because people call a lot of things community that aren't actually communities um like if you've ever joined um a slack group before chances are is probably dead or it felt dead at some point you never actually made friends with anybody uh but they're like several of the people I would call my among my best friends like if I got married I'd invite them to my wedding I met through Indie worldwide and some of them I've never met in person some of whom I've only met during the worldwide and I don't think I'm the only member who can say that which is kind of the goal there so that's where my ideas for Indie worldwide stuff comes from body brain

which is about AI uh that's just I just um maybe spend half an hour an hour a day when I'm when I'm done with everything else just going through like I've got like a list of like a dozen different sources of potential news so I'm looking for like new product launches breaking research like the latest paper um any kind of anything that I think is interesting because I started this newsletter mostly to learn about AI like I took some classes in college but that was a while ago now and I'm trying to like catch up and learn and hopefully build some Cool Tools with AI but I figured hey if I'm learning anyway uh maybe I can turn the thing I want to do into a business and

so I figured it well what is like getting paid to learn look like probably it looks a lot like a newsletter so I just started writing this body brain newsletter and um yeah the conscience just comes from the news basically I just see what's what's new and right about it

it's your monetization strategy for body brain to be just subscription based or

do you have other plans uh it's a free newsletter and we make money from ads

okay so and advertisers reach you because they know you from like the read your newsletter get so it's a you know

it's itself yeah almost hopefully soon so far um all my uh sponsors minus one or two have come through Twitter so that comes back to like the value of writing on Twitter is that that's basically like I did a promo a couple weeks ago where I I wanted to enforce some more consistency on myself because it's supposed to be a daily newsletter it was more like a monthly newsletter uh so not great consistency I needed some kind of forcing function to like actually make sure that I had to do the thing I said I wanted to do and so I figured well I if people pay me like I almost never let them down because then it's not for me it's for them so I'm gonna just try

to sell out all of my ads at least like three per week um then I'll have to write and so luckily um by that point I'd found passion fruit which made it really easy to do this I was able to drop my prices to from they were pretty cheap already but I dropped them the dirt cheap so at first I was selling ads for like only five bucks a an ad which is very very cheap um so I was able to sell out all of February all of March we've got like one slot left in April um I just kept asked for each month sold out I just doubled the prices so um the price the price will be like 40 bucks a shout out now that April sells

out and then um so that was good because that was money in the door and then also forced me to write and I forget actually what the question was I was answering but that's that was the answer to it I hope no it was

basically what your strategy was for monetizing the news yeah yeah

so they I was able to sell it out just just through uh just do tweeting um as we get a little bit bigger I'll have to start doing uh Outreach which is

fine yeah you know because it seems like you know you're an indie hacker we have two big projects essentially you know Indie worldwide and also the body brain which started off as the you learning and trying things out but by having advertisers and adding that extra layer of I guess you know pressure to make sure that you know you keep them happy now you have two things that are really going into to make this all work

yeah yeah body brain is um I guess it's not profitable yet because I'm like experimenting with paid ads I'm like experimenting with um like hiring researchers and things in order to scale it faster it took me a while like I started it last year kind of as I said like put it down for a bit picked it back up um but finally kind of figured out a format that works really good that people like to read that people are sharing and a pitch that gets people to sign up so now it's growing fast so last week we passed 1 000 subscribers I think by the end of next sequel of past 2000 it was like really growing quickly now um and so I'm investing money to try to

get it to go as fast as possible so we can get to like 10 20K because at that point we can actually start reaching out to bigger sponsors um and it'll be much more profitable and I want to get there as quickly as possible but bootstrapped way

yeah no it got it you know start small and then go bigger from there you mentioned marketing a few times what you mentioned Twitter has been pretty effective in terms of marketing but I also know I think in one of your tweets you mentioned that you also tried like a Facebook ad and you saw the results were quite good on that as well you know what is what do you think is the most effective for our marketing that you've found so far for what your both your products

um so for body grain it's a little bit more straightforward because I'm just trying to acquire subscribers for less money than they're worth as a subscriber so a free subscriber for a newsletter is usually you can charge about thirty dollars per thousand subscribers per at and so for a daily newsletter that works out to about uh one dollar per subscriber per month so if I can acquire them for uh less than two dollars basically then they it should pay back within two months eventually once I'm able to charge that much for the ads because right now I'm under like I said I'm under charging for the ads so they're not actually worth that much but I'm assuming that they will be so as long as

I can acquire a subscriber for like less than two dollars then it should be profitable to pay for that subscriber whether through Facebook ads or um through buying ad slots and other newsletters or what I was able to do for most of my growth so far is trade shout outs with other newsletters because I already have one big newsletter that has because Indie worldwide is over the years grown into like a 5000 reader um newsletter as well and so uh at the beginning what I would do is like trade a shout out in my existing big newsletter for a similarly science newsletter and each one of those might bring me you know 10 to sometimes 50 subscribers uh in the worldwide a lot of Twitter

um usually what I'll do is uh so whatever I'm thinking about goes on Twitter trying to make it writing in a way that's like fun to read and it's interesting and like tells a story and then every now and then I'll find an idea that really hits and then I'll expand on that into an article and then I'll find ways to use that article and like on different websites I'll post it to like Indie hackers and Reddit and all these other places uh in order to get the most um legs that I can out of the the idea and uh that usually does pretty well um occasionally I'll do um like product marketing like build some kind of product related to what I'm building like a free product people can sign up

for that is inbound because products are really easy to Market when they're new because you do like product beta list um Twitter itself uh there's all even in the worldwide you can launch products in so there's all these different ways to get um eyeballs on a new product so like when we do these challenges I'll Market it as a product like speedrun 1000 Challenge 100 100 when I started to do the introductions the one-on-ones for a while I was calling that that was under a separate brand of first called Founders Club so each of these things it's like a product launch that itself brings in brings in new indie worldwide members

you mentioned that you know Twitter has been a pretty effective source for marketing you know they're repeating myself a little bit here but I also heard from so many people that the Twitter algorithm makes it very difficult to you know drive people to using things that take you away from their site itself if you're going to be posting more content there that keeps people there great but if you're going to be linking to your own newsletter your own Services you're at a disadvantage how do you work around that

yeah um so the first you kind of have to get good at Twitter itself um which has helped a lot by having good Analytics and so like the native Twitter analytics aren't that great but there's a bunch of third-party services out there that will help you analyze your tweets and see what performs well personally the one I use is called typefully built by Fabrizio and that one is great because I can I can sort by whatever engagement metric I'm optimizing for uh if you want the biggest reach go for comments if you want um but if you want followers then you want to optimize your profile clicks and so as I was writing a lot on Twitter I was analyzing my tweets to see like what style of tweet was

leading to the outcome I wanted and finding out ways to give Twitter more and more of that so that's how I built my my following and I kind of optimized that and learned what worked uh and then um in order to get people to sign up for your thing on mass you wanna it's just like you gotta figure out some way to turn it into a story especially with Indie hackers we're usually like finding some way to tell our own entrepreneurial Journey in an interesting way as a story so that people start to buy into what we're trying to do and hopefully we're doing something valuable for them that they can then sign up for and that's the way to turn your like off-site links into like engaging

content um but even if you're a small account even if you don't want to like really invest in building up the big prisons I think it's still useful to like make a nice profile and like tweet a little bit and like make some friends on Twitter just because the DMS itself can give you access to like really direct access to a lot of um people that you want to talk to people you might not be able to get um to even read your message on other platforms we'll see your Twitter DM as long as you're not spamming them like you don't want to like in your cold DM send the link ever you just want to like say like hey like this is me this is

what I'm about or like this is why I think you're cool uh and that can open up a lot of doors it gets it's I've noticed um response rates are probably higher now that my following is higher but I think that's a function of not the numbers so much it's just people have seen my face before at this point because of all the Impressions I've had on the platform so people kind of know who I am there but it worked just fine when I was like around a thousand subscribers as well just reaching out and sounding like a human goes a really long way and the access it gives you is is really good but you could probably say the same thing for a good cold email or like a

LinkedIn VM as well if you just learn what like um how to behave on those platforms you can do well there too yep you think like

every platform has its own like Unwritten rules on what successful content there looks like so you know I think have you look into like LinkedIn the only reason I bring it up is that you think you know your arguments is Founders and entrepreneurs and Linkedin often likes to be the central source for all kinds of activities like that

yeah it's um I've been trying to post more LinkedIn it's really hard for me because it can be so cringy there and uh it's like Twitter is definitely a sort of performance as well but um people are usually more casual and especially like the message the DMS and stuff you get or either spam or just like um casual like heartfelt messages like they actually feel like people are just trying to be friends on Twitter LinkedIn everything is always like this long-winded story where like you know you're walking down the street and you trip over a dog and you pet it and you give it food and then you finally get to your job interview and who is the interviewer it's the dog the dog was the hiring manager and that's

how I got my job at Google and became a six figure per month uh engineer and uh um it turns my stomach a little bit but I'm learning to participate on LinkedIn and hopefully trying to bring a little bit of Twitter culture over there where it's uh yeah there's there's a great article about I don't know if you follow him I think it's trunk fan he's a pretty you know famous poster of like memes and all these things yeah

I think so and he wrote a great article why LinkedIn is so cringe I need like now summarize all the points about what makes it you know less appealing you know as a person who wants to just share good content when you're competing against so much of the noise and so much of the just that typical influencer kind of content which is like cookie cutter in many ways so no I I think you're saying the same thing about Tick Tock too where a lot of it's really quite quite cringy and I think the cringe from that comes from sort of the same place where it's like people are copying the um the style but not the substance

yeah and uh that's what makes it feel crunchy and I'm sure I'm guilty of doing the same at some point on Twitter but eventually I learned how to how to um give my own take and like actually add something

have you ever paid for Twitter's promotional tools like you can boost the post you can you know and choose do you want to increase engagement increase subscribers have you experimented with that

um not on my personal account I tried it recently for the first time on the body brain account but um I didn't find it to be worthwhile at least the ones I ran um maybe if you're just trying to like because like I tried to use that to see if it would be an effective way to get relevant followers for the account but they um they were very low quality follows like it was Anonymous accounts and things that looked like Bots to me so I only did a couple days of it and I was like nah not worth it and then I wouldn't recommend ever doing it on the on a personal account um because you'll just probably I think the same reason you'll just end up with a

bunch of low quality followers yeah

no no that was my first experience as well is that I tried experimenting with like advertising on Twitter with you know using the you know boost my post but you know feature or whatever same thing like the followers were far more lower quality anyone even though I think the accounts might even be real people you know like I don't know if that's like yeah so it's this really bizarre and saying all that so you mentioned quality of followers and there's always a tension though because you know I used to do advertising heavily on my blog and on my newsletter I I removed all that a short while ago I'm almost eight nine years ago actually mostly because you know the hassle wasn't really worth it

to a certain extent and it was almost attention because I still do every every year or so I go through my follower accounts and look at like how many of them actually read an email engaged with any of the content I've done and if they haven't I just remove them completely from the from the platform you're making that quality advertisers though they care about that of course but they also care about the quantity of followers have you encountered that tension and what do you do about it yeah

so I would love to just remove every because you can track who opens and clicks but a lot of my users are really tech savvy so they Block open and click tracking and so I want to remove like batch remove um people but I'm afraid of losing the ones who are real readers so I convertkit has a nice article showing you like how you can create um at least on their platform like your your cold subs and then you can like send out an email with a link that people click to remove them from the cold sub list and then you can hopefully just remove the people who actually don't care but I haven't done it yet because there is some tension there of like yeah but

that 5000 sounds a lot better than 4400 so maybe I'll wait until removing the cold sub still keeps me above 5000 or something just because it is like a psychological thing like people there's like a number psychology where people just like certain numbers and five sounds so much bigger than four and a half

yeah until I can stay above the round number it's tough and especially if you've been doing something for a very long time you evolve your content evolves and the content might be writing right now may not be relevant to the person who signed up to your content you know five years ago four years ago or even even a year ago actually if you look at that speed at which AI has moved from like being more academic to now being commercialized and every startup can do something really cool and solve a problem by just wrapping existing ai ai models and it's always attention I get into and then it also gets into the the algorithms as well because they often look at like you have X number of

followers what percent of them actually engage with your content if you have a lot of followers but very few of them actually engage the content maybe you're not posting interesting things anymore so we're not gonna keep showing you and so I don't know what the answer is but it is a tension that I recognize all the time

I had a I had a friend who had a um an old Twitter account that they were trying to like Revitalize and there's like tools I think there's one from like sparktoro you can use that will analyze your followers and tell you how many of them are like Bots or like um likely to be real active people versus not and the older your account is the more likely that the people that were following you are no longer active and so he noticed I think like he had like a very he had a high percentage of uh like inactive followers so I ended up going through and just removing a bunch of them um it went from like six thousand to like 3000 or something in the end and uh

it didn't hurt I don't think it heard its reach at all you know because they weren't active followers yeah yeah and then he didn't have that tension in the back of his head anymore of like is this a real number is it like a hollow number

yeah no that is definitely the Big Challenge here in terms of it and so what's next for you you know you seem to have been doing all these various activities you you know you're doing two things right now it's our third one on the way that you might emerge into something or you know create something new from scratch

um I want to keep doing like product marketing so like as I said when I started this newsletter like a lot of the intention of the newsletters for me Anthony to learn about Ai and so I want to use all these apis and things that I'm learning about and start like building mini projects and the justification for me spending that time will be ah it'll get more people to sign up to the newsletter but then I don't know maybe one of them will turn out to be cool and useful and it'll become its own thing but for now I'm just gonna try to not put too much pressure on and think of them as marketing projects and do that and if I'm that way um

my energy is still going towards the uh the Breadwinners which is my newsletter and and the Indie Wildwood community

perfect so last question if someone wants to follow in your footsteps what should they do

um so the main thing you need to do is not run out of money so as long as you're not running out of money you're doing good and there's like three ways-ish you can do that so like one is you build up a nest egg maybe a four ways so like once you live at home with your parents and they pay for your food and stuff assuming you have like that kind of support system and can actually get work done in that environment right so then two is you work for a bit save up some money I think this is more or less the first ride I chose um build up enough of a nest egg that you can give yourself at least a year of

like Runway time before you'll run out of money then third is like part-time work so freelance a few hours a week like see especially if you're an engineer there's probably a lot of like freelance opportunities out there that can help you subsidize this and then four is just get a normal job um the chillest job you can get and then use your extra time and energy to start working on your project nights and weekends and you usually don't want to go all in until you've made at least made once sale online at least like end to end build something advertised it got someone to pay you money collected that money uh because people often get stuck at one stage or another that stops them from from making money so with

developers it's usually they get stuck building and never learn to charge money which I mean that was my problem too for a long time is I was making I was learning to charge people money as a freelancer but charging people money for a product like or access to a community that was like a big mental hurdle and a lot of people go through that so you want to make sure you pass those hurdles before you quit by making at least some money and then that proves the idea itself hopefully has enough potential to get you through so combine them all if you can you know give yourself as much sleepy as you can and um you can cut your expenses down a lot too by moving

out of High Cost of Living cities while you're figuring these things out

that's a perfect answer Anthony thank you so much for taking the time to share all about Indie hacking the nomadic lifestyle and how to scale and build products

yeah thanks thanks for inviting me on it's fun