Untitled

Discuss this episode in the Muse community

Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter

---

Show notes

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: When I think of real world analogies to this, like supporting a painter or a ceramicist or like glass making that’s kind of handmade, usually those things are more expensive than the Walmart equivalent. But in software, it’s kind of inverse, where the subscription to Microsoft 365 is going to cost you a lot more than your indie text editor.

00:00:24 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Us is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with my colleague Mark Grannigan. Hey Adam, and joined today by Perjean of Kinopio. Howdy. And Peron as knowledge workers and people who sit in front of computers all day long, I think it’s really important to have something physical, get out, move around, do exercise. What do you like to do for that?

00:00:54 - Speaker 1: Well, these days I run, but before COVID, I used to box. We used to go to Gleeson’s boxing gym, which if you ever seen like a cameo or clip of like a boxing gym on TV or movies, you’ve probably seen it. It was a pretty great place to let out steam, but mostly it was a cardio workout where you train and occasionally you’d spar, which was kind of like a very high stress situation, which makes other situations seem less high stress, which is kind of good in its own way.

00:01:21 - Speaker 2: That’s interesting. I remember seeing, maybe it was in the classic surfer documentary that they said one of the reasons surfers are known for being so kind of chill and low key is that when you go up against these incredible primal forces of nature. Than regular human stuff, the volume seems very turned down by comparison. Would you compare the, yeah, I guess, sparring with other humans, even though it’s not like a real fight in the sense that you’re going to get hurt is having some of that quality.

00:01:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I forget who said it. Maybe it was Mike Tyson or something, but there’s this like really famous boxing quote, which is like, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. It’s a life lesson in a way, and I think it applies to a lot more than just boxing.

00:02:02 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Actually, I had a colleague who was doing that for a little while, but his wrist got sore enough. Maybe he was doing it wrong or something, but he ended up basically not being able to type for a week. Ouch. Obviously, as a creator, your hands are second only maybe to your eyes and your brain as being key tools. Do you worry about that at all or do you have any sense of like I’m sort of taking my delicate crafting tools? Using them to pummel a bag of sand or another person.

00:02:30 - Speaker 1: I think there’s something to be said for making your delicate tools a little more durable, but I think for me, actually, like things like yoga stress my wrist a lot more than boxing did. And I think it’s just like different things might stress out different people in different places. And I think like trying all the different types of physical activity and going with what works for you is, it kind of makes sense to do, even though it’s kind of a slog to figure it out.

00:02:55 - Speaker 2: Yeah, when it comes to fitness, and I definitely became a huge believer in the importance of doing something physical, both for the change of pace, but also really because it’s so important for maintaining our health earlier in my life as a kind of tech person.

And I think one of the things that’s important is just to find something you enjoy.

Some people love running, I do. Many people just cannot stand it.

Others like lifting weights, others like riding their bike, others like boxing, climbing, but whatever it is, if the activity itself is enjoyable, not just the result of enhancing your strength and flexibility and endurance and general health and well-being, metabolic well-being maybe, then you’re likely to do it.

And if you’re likely to do it, then that’s sustainable over the long term.

00:03:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. If you don’t enjoy it, you’re not gonna stick with it, right?

00:03:43 - Speaker 2: And so maybe you could tell us a little about your background. You’ve worked at some pretty interesting companies.

00:03:48 - Speaker 1: Sure, so most recently, before working on Canopio, I was working at Fog Creek, which eventually became Glitch, which is a web development tool similar to Hiroku’s web development tool once upon a time, and I was the co-creator of Glitch and did its original design and the editor and stuff like that. I think nowadays things are very different, so the glitch you see now is very different than the glitch of 3 years ago.

00:04:12 - Speaker 2: When you first mentioned that to me, it made perfect sense. The visual style of Glitch, at least as I remember it from a few years back, very much matches what you’re doing now, and I wouldn’t have made that connection, but then you mentioned it, and it instantly made sense.

00:04:26 - Speaker 1: I feel like, yeah, Canopo is kind of an evolution of some of the ideas that I had when I built that interface.

00:04:31 - Speaker 2: And Fog Creek also is interesting to note for maybe some of the younger folks in the audience.

I always like to pull my technology graybeard card here, but one of their principals, Joel Sppoolsky, was really the one who I think defined modern blogging, and we’d probably find His style to be nothing special today, but this idea of a software engineer or a company founder who writes pretty humanistic blog posts about ways of doing things and you know, experiences and whether it’s technology or hiring or something like that. I think he really kicked all that off, and that’s in addition to, I don’t know exactly what the structure is there, but somehow the fog Creek nexus of people produced trello, stack overflow, later stack exchange, and Glitch, which is quite a run. So, yeah, it must have been interesting to be part of that little sphere.

00:05:23 - Speaker 1: Yeah, Fog Creek was interesting cause like it was this kind of technology innovator and it was wild working so close to that.

So for the first two years of me working at Fog Creek, we shared an office with Trello, so like, I got to see how that sausage was made as well.

But also like Fog Creek had a lot of failures too. There was like a thing that was called. I think it was co-pilot where like you could do screen taking over and this was way before other solutions existed. It had kiln, which is like GitHub before GitHub, but based on materials, nobody used it. And yeah, it was just like wild seeing like so many ideas come from this place and Glitch was one of those ideas that just happened to be successful and how those things got incubated, you know, it was pretty unique experience.

00:06:04 - Speaker 3: And didn’t they write a whole programming language? Is that still a thing over there?

00:06:09 - Speaker 1: Well, yeah, so before I started, I don’t remember the details, but basically they couldn’t get what they wanted with like the existing .NET compiler or whatever the Microsoft stack was at the time. So they wrote their own programming language called Wasabi, I want to say it was called. That’s right. And they pulled it away while I was there, a really talented developer basically was part of writing it and then also part of migrating the code base away from it and it was like a really Contentious idea at the time, cause they were trying to do something they couldn’t do conventionally.

00:06:44 - Speaker 2: Well, that is key to being a technology innovator though is you have to take a lot of swings, you got to try a lot of things, and that also implies a lot of failures, and the failures will be more or less forgotten to time and then you’re known for your successes. So, yeah, very interesting firm. And I also understand your educational background is a little different from the conventional computer science path that a lot of folks in the technology world took.

00:07:08 - Speaker 1: Right, yeah, my degrees are in technically biology and urban planning, so I think I might approach things from a slightly different place.

00:07:17 - Speaker 2: And if you’re interested in urban planning, certainly check out our episode with Devon Zugle about cities. We haven’t done a biology episode yet, but I’m not ruling that out.

00:07:27 - Speaker 1: I’m definitely not the one for that. I was really bad at school.

00:07:31 - Speaker 2: And did you find that that different kind of education has fed into the work that you do now, or did you feel that that was more like something you were interested in, but didn’t end up leading to your career or feeding into how you approach your work today?

00:07:45 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I would say like kind of the inverse of what you’d expect, doing a grad degree and urban planning in general.

The main thing I learned was like how to spot bullshit because like you read a lot of academic papers, you have a lot of professors, I don’t really do anything.

There’s a lot of like authority gained by being a professor and How can I put this, didn’t really match the reality of what they were capable of.

And also urban planning was really interesting.

This might be really, really hot take, but the urban planning department was always kind of like mad at or like kind of had an inferiority complex with the architecture department. And I took a lot of architecture courses and like the professors in urban planning like really got on my case about that a lot.

And so that kind of disillusioned me on the whole profession and the whole idea of graduate studies as like this kind of I don’t know, I think I held it in some sort of reverence, and I definitely don’t do that anymore.

I respect speaking plainly more than like, saying a lot, I guess.

00:08:49 - Speaker 2: So I guess the big takeaway there was the academic world didn’t seem like a good fit for you less because of the specific fields, but more because of all of the petty rivalries or status games that frankly exist everywhere, but maybe they take on a different character in the academic world.

00:09:07 - Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of pettiness. That was not something I expected.

00:09:12 - Speaker 2: And then why don’t you tell us about Canopyo.

00:09:15 - Speaker 1: Sure, so Canopo is, well, it’s kind of hard to describe, but it’s like a thinking tool, you know, you could do mind mapping, whiteboarding, note taking, all that sort of thing, but it’s a spatial canvas where the core interaction is clicking, writing down a thought, clicking somewhere else, writing a new thought, and eventually connecting ideas together with lines and with groupings and kind of getting to new ideas or solving problems both personally or professionally or like together with a group collaboratively. So it’s like a thinking canvas.

00:09:45 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and certainly folks in the audience will probably immediately recognize that description as being very similar in a lot of ways to Muse.

You could potentially describe our tools as competitors, although I feel like when you’re so early in a space trying to I guess convince the world that it’s worth thinking with computers in the first place and that we need new kinds of tools to do that, and that the spatial canvas is one that’s kind of under explored at the moment.

From that perspective, I consider us very much allies in the sense that we’re trying to Bring people on board with this model or prove that it can work. But part of what I like is on one hand, what you’re doing is incredibly similar in terms of the core aim and this very basic idea of kind of the spatial canvas, but at the same time, stylistically, it’s completely different. You’re on the web. You’ve got collaboration as a core interaction, less about the tablet, the inking, I don’t know, PDFs are necessarily a big part of it. So there’s the core idea is the same, but you’re exploring a very different branch in the tree, so that makes us, I think, have a natural affinity.

00:10:49 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I also think, correct me if I’m wrong, but the way we kind of arrived at the very different takes that Muse and Canopo have are very different in the sense of, I started with like a core interaction, just trying to make it fun, and that came from an observation that when I was working as I worked as a designer and a developer, but when I was working as a designer, I’d often like write out notes or little thoughts inside of a larger sketch document to myself.

00:11:13 - Speaker 2: And here by sketch you mean uppercase S sketch the sketch the app.

00:11:16 - Speaker 1: OK. Yeah, just kind of trying to like make ideas and mockups make sense to me or like write down the goals and rationale for things and kind of after leaving Glitch thinking about like, how can I kind of make that a thing that other people could do cause like you’d have to know sketch, which is kind of a weird design tool to take advantage of that kind of thinking and something built around that idea just kind of turned into Canopio.

Canopo kind of started from me experimenting based on my own experiences using Sketch, the app. And writing with the text tool notes to myself while doing mockups and kind of trying to bring that experience with the advantages of being able to write anywhere on a page in a more approachable way to more people, as opposed to my impression of Muse is that it started a little bit more academically or rigorously.

I don’t know what the right term is, but it feels pre-planned or well thought out and well fleshed out before, at least from the outside looking in.

00:12:12 - Speaker 2: Well, I’m glad we’ve got you fooled. Joking a little bit there.

Obviously it did come from pretty deep research, but yeah, you’re right, our origin story was more about tablet, tablet and stylus form factor, where do we do our best thinking as well as kind of gestures and the touch screen as being something more intimate and trying to think about what it would take to get a sketchbook or a whiteboard into a digital space, and then maybe one of the missing things is, yeah, being able to use your hands or more directly interact with the ideas.

But I think in a way we have arrived at something similar.

Text has become a bigger and bigger focus for us. We have these text blocks in beta now we have sort of big plans for that. And so we’ll see where that goes. But I think that idea of text and visual thinking together or written thinking and visual thinking together has become sort of core to our idea. So in the end I think we all organically develop towards a vision, right?

00:13:06 - Speaker 1: Totally. I mean, I think it’s interesting that we both kind of met in the middle, as you say, but you started more as like image oriented and I started more as text oriented. And then I guess people want all the things. I think that’s kind of the story that also guides the evolution of both these products.

00:13:25 - Speaker 2: Probably the way I’d put it is symbolic representation of thought and visual representation of thought both have their place.

Computers have always been great at the former, but not at the latter, but then often you do have these more visual oriented environments, something like sketch or Photoshop or whatever, but then text is a trying experience to bring in there. And one thing that always struck me when you look at as part of our user research a few years back, we went through a bunch of photos of whiteboards, just to kind of get a sense of like, OK, when people are using this analog tool, how are they expressing themselves visually? And I was always struck by, like, how much text is up there. It really is at least 50% text in the sense of handwritten text or occasionally a printout that’s been like magneted to it, even though it’s combined with, OK, you wrote the text in columns or you color coded one, or you have a little annotation on the side, so there’s a lot of information that’s contained in the spatial positioning or how things are color coded or where they’re placed on the board, but in the end, the core atoms are often snippets of text.

00:14:31 - Speaker 1: So I used to write a lot of specs and you know, documents and stuff as you do in a large company, and I noticed, I think one of the things that kind of defines like, is it a pleasant experience to work for or with someone versus not is can they kind of share their ideas? Can they get their thoughts out? And I think learning to write is like learning to think and Traditionally we have like linear writing tools and they kind of require a high level of like practice and skill to write well, but the great thing about whiteboarding and spatial writing in general is, I think it takes a lot of that pressure away. Like I don’t have to necessarily have a lead in sentence. I don’t necessarily have to think about how prose flows, it just, here’s an idea, here’s another idea, maybe like lines or some other visual connects some, and yeah, I think it just sort of lowers the bar to communication.

00:15:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. The free form, just get it out, get started, approach versus the dreaded blanking cursor on the start of the blank page and where do I begin? I think that’s a big part of what you can offer with these more sketchy and certainly more spatial tools. So today’s topic is building in public, and I think this is something, another similarity in our approaches, again, not maybe purposeful, but sort of people with similar mindsets working on similar problems often arrive at similar solutions.

And so I think I became aware of your work through these short demo videos you post Twitter, here is some new feature, and here’s how it works, and you can watch this little 5 or 12th interaction and even without having the full context for what the tool is, you see this and it’s, you know, videos are fun, but it doesn’t demand too much of your Time, Canopia certainly has a very interesting visual style, and you see that and you see a few of these and you start to get a sense for what it’s about and it’s quite fun. So tell me what you do there and how you arrived at that, I guess, approach to kind of sharing what you’re working on.

00:16:29 - Speaker 1: Sure, so the way I share things online kind of evolved organically.

I was thinking about it for a while and the great thing about Canopo and drawing tools and spatial tools in general is that they’re very visceral.

They kind of video really well because there’s animation, there’s movement, and a lot of the features I was building kind of also involved movement, which meant conveying what something does easier with video.

The cadence I got into was like build a feature and then make a short video and kind of talk about it, like short tweet length blurb and share it and kind of do that in small iterations and that kind of paralleled how I shipped updates to the product.

My priority was sort of, I wanted to integrate marketing into my process. I’m just one person building the tools, so I don’t really have like a separate marketing department. And so just do the work or do the programming work and then do the marketing work or the communications work of here’s what I built, here’s what I did, and then keep that cycle going and hopefully end up somewhere good is basically my plan. And so the tweets are a reflection of that, like, every tweet usually coincides with a push to master to production.

00:17:42 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense.

And yeah, we’ve arrived at a similar thing as well, which is the short demos, which are pretty informal.

We did find that for the tablet, it’s pretty important to show the hands, and so we film kind of external to the device that works well, but yeah, being short, having some kind of little textual description of what it is.

But not trying to explain everything. It’s not a product manual. It’s not a full top down. It’s just some little snippet of interaction in this product and for existing users there’s a chance to find out about something that’s coming out soon or has come out that they can try maybe a feature they’ve been waiting for they would like to try because it looks useful or interesting.

But then also for the folks who are not current users of the product, if they do come across it through a retweet or Twitter’s algorithm, somehow organically or magically surfacing it to them, and then maybe they see that a few times and they start to get intrigued, and they think, what is this weird looking out? Maybe I want to check it out.

00:18:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah. Oh yeah, I guess I should have also mentioned this before, look my process. Maybe I’ll take this again or maybe this will be fine, but The process for me making these videos is I used the inbuilt Mac screenshot video tool Command shift 5. I record myself doing the things, and then I’ll trim the back and the front edges in quick time, also already on the Mac, and then convert it with handbrake to MP4 format and then throw it on the web. It’s a very like quick streamlined kind of system I’ve got going. I’ve gotten really good at command shift fiving.

00:19:13 - Speaker 2: Indeed, and certainly being a one person shop, it’s important that you not get too hung up on the production, but I also think even for, you know, our team who has a few more people than that, we’re still small, but I find that if it’s sort of quick and low ceremony to do this, then you’re much more likely to do it often and even be able to show, sometimes we show some work in progress and we update a week later and you can see that stuff has changed, even just, you know, minor visual design details.

If you can make it more just fun and quick and low ceremony, then you get these steady stream of it, which I think fits better with the building in public thing, right? I guess we should stop and define that a little bit, cause I think there are some different definitions, but to briefly like kind of look at the far extreme, you could take something like Apple, who does these huge product releases, all this fanfare, and they keep everything totally secret up until the moment when it comes out.

And you know, that obviously works for them. There’s lots of companies that do things that way, but I think of the building in public approach you’re using and that we do and plenty of other folks as well as being more of a bite size, taking folks along on the journey, and there’s plenty of products, even games and things that I follow, largely through Twitter that I actually probably will never use the product to play the game or whatever, but I just like their little videos. I like their sharing their work, cause I like creative process, I like seeing makers do their thing, and if they have an interesting visual flair or what have you, it can be like a source of inspiration, I guess.

00:20:43 - Speaker 1: My theory slash hot take is that the kind of classic way of doing big product releases very much tied to a time where when you really software was on a box, so you kind of had to make sure people knew about this was a new hot box to buy because there’s only like one a year or something. In our case, we’re not necessarily constrained by that old world. I think with social media and stuff, I think there’s just more of an emphasis on frequency and having that ongoing conversation with people. Cause we can like a release for us is relatively easy compared to shipping a box with a CD in it.

00:21:19 - Speaker 2: Yeah, now I guess if we were to define building in public, we sort of already talked about sharing work in progress, short product demo videos, kind of bite size micro videos, but taking a step back from that, Mark, I’d be curious to hear for you what that term evokes.

00:21:36 - Speaker 3: Yeah, well, certainly the core is sharing what you’re doing along the way.

Often there’s this element of engagement with the community where you’re getting feedback, you’re getting ideas, you’re getting reactions and using that to influence more or less how you’re proceeding with the project.

I also think there’s something to sort of priming the social distribution mechanism, to build on your point earlier about a box versus a continuous release. It’s not just a matter of the release mechanism. It’s about how people find out about software.

It used to be whatever PC magazine who had 12 issues a year or something. You need to punch through the editorial calendar so you get on there, whereas now will find out about it through their friends and through influencers on YouTube and stuff. And it takes a long time to get that flywheel going, because you need to have several revolutions of it before people find out from people who find out from people, and you get the exponential growth to go up. I think that’s a big aspect of it as well.

00:22:31 - Speaker 2: One term sometimes used by marketers that I’ve worked with is a drumbeat, a marketing drumbeat, and I think what they mean by that, if I can decode it, is sort of similar to a rhythm in a song.

In general, what makes music pleasing for humans, I think, and engaging is essentially sort of it’s repetition. It’s not just one pleasing note or a few pleasing notes and then it’s over, it’s that it has this kind of repeating, but then with variations thing and then you can be drawn into that almost, yeah, like a story or a journey or something like that.

And so yeah, I think increasingly it’s not that you find out about a product through, yeah, that big review in PC Magazine like you said, and then you decide to buy it and you go to the store and you buy it, or you don’t decide to do that and you never think about it again, and instead it’s more it comes on your awareness through all these aggregators. And social media networks that we operate in nowadays, and you think, oh, that’s kind of cool, and you start to follow it just out of curiosity, and then maybe it builds some kind of mindshare with you, and then either you come across a problem that you think, oh, I need a solution to this. Oh, actually that weird little indie company I’ve been following on Twitter, actually that might be just the thing for this, or just at some point you just get curious enough, you’re like, yeah, I got a little time, I want to check this thing out. It seems cool.

00:23:46 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, you mentioned the phrase marketing drumbeat. When I heard you say that, I was picturing like, you know, the Viking person kind of drumming the beat and everybody’s like rowing the or in unison to it. And to me, I think like from the point of view of a marketer, it’s sort of like we’re rowing every day, you know, this constant rhythm. And it’s like a lot of hard work because the seas are choppy, but if we row enough, long enough to the beat, we’ll arrive on the shore or something, but it’s kind of part of that, like the journey is part of it. Yeah that’s my interpretation.

00:24:20 - Speaker 2: Another interesting thing here is you mentioned that sort of the sharing of work in progress, let’s call it marketing, maybe storytelling is a term I like a little better since it doesn’t have some of that historic baggage, but explaining and sharing what you’re doing, particularly if you do this build in public approach where it’s not about the big bang but rather a continuous stream of here’s what I’m up to kind of updates.

Now, for you as a solo creator, you have the full called vision of any particular feature or thing you’re doing in your mind. And so then you need to translate it to kind of speak to the outside world through a little video or something like that. We’re in a position where sometimes the person kind of making a little demo video is also the same person that worked on the feature or kind of was the driver for it, but other times it’s quite different.

So I’ve often been in the position where I’m the one to make a screenshot or a demo video or add a handbook entry, but I actually don’t, you know, I was working on other things and I wasn’t following closely the feature development, and I need to really sit down and kind of mind meld with the person who had that, so I can understand what’s special about this, why do we do it? Why is this here, why now, that sort of thing.

And I wonder, there’s probably a big benefit to not having to do that mental handoff in the sense of, you know, you don’t have to take the time. But I think there’s also pros to it sometimes, which is the process of getting the product owner, let’s say, to explain what they’re doing to me, and then I try to make a demo about it and I say, well, what I really want to show is X and Y, but that doesn’t work because of this missing feature or this bug or this strange behavior, and then that actually can feed back into how the product is made, or we just get CRISper in our thinking because of that handoff.

00:26:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, in my case, it kind of definitely requires some diligence. Actually, sometimes while making the screencast, I’ll notice that something’s off or like my explanation of the feature is kind of hard to convey, and I’ll actually just like, hold on a second, maybe I’ll go back and update the thing that I just built. So I can explain it better or that it kind of makes more sense. So I feel like the process kind of does have like a little mini cycle unto itself, where if something isn’t easy to explain, then maybe that means the thing that I built just doesn’t make sense or needs a bit of refinement to get it to that last 10th.

00:26:37 - Speaker 3: Yeah, a few reactions here. One is I really agree about this idea of the importance of the mental model.

Often when you can’t explain something, it’s because you don’t understand it or you’ve basically misconceived the world and therefore you’re having this impedance mismatch when you go to try to explain it.

So that’s very viable. Also, there’s this idea of how do you convince a lot of people of a new idea? Well, the answer is one person at a time, so you might as well start with your business partner first, or, you know. rubber duck or whatever, because you’re going to work out some of the kinks that way. And relatedly, I think building public has this element of sharpening the tool. I come back to this example of teaching hospitals a lot where when you’re in this environment of teaching and critique and different levels of expertise and familiarity, it brings out the best in you and it forces you to step up your game. And I think working in public has that same dynamic.

00:27:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I also noticed from having a joby job back in the day that one of the main reasons that like a feature would suck when it was built is because the brief or the spec was like just flawed fundamentally, like maybe there’s an assumption that was wrong or whatever.

And the great thing about building in public is if you’re doing it like really on the bleeding edge where you’re saying, I’m thinking of doing X, where I might not tweet that it might be in the forums or on the Canopbio discourse, but That kind of has like a correcting mechanism or it kind of forces me to be clear, and which also kind of chops off scope in a lot of cases.

So I totally agree with you on that.

00:28:05 - Speaker 2: So basically explaining things is another kind of tool for thought.

00:28:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, totally. It’s the tool for thought.

00:28:13 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and another variant here is doing residence testing with the community where you emit a bunch of different frequencies, each frequency, it’s a different way to think about or explain your product and a subset of those resonate back and then you know that you can iterate towards those ideas and phrases in your future marketing.

00:28:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m not sure if it’s similar to, like, I don’t know if you’ve heard the term paving the cow paths, which is like a landscape architecture term where you know, if people are walking weirdly through your park, then you just kind of pave that as the path, because that’s where people want to go and using words that people are using to describe your own thing back at them, I think it’s really effective.

00:28:51 - Speaker 2: And the other elements of building in public, you know, here we’re talking about demoing product features.

I think when I first encountered the term, it’s in the bootstrapper in the hacker communities, it seems to be a lot of sharing your revenue growth, and I think some of that is a pushback to the conventional wisdom of business is you don’t really share numbers unless they’re really impressive.

If you’re a public company that’s reporting your $100 million in quarter 3, that’s one thing, but if you’re a a developer or two people and you’re making a moderately successful product, you don’t share that you’re making 5000, 10,000 a month or whatever the number is.

You have end users or end customers, and so a lot of the folks, I think even the indie hackers site has some capabilities built in where you can even connect to the stripe API and it builds a dashboard for you where you can see the exact numbers.

And there’s some interesting debate about that in the community because there are people who are maybe less scrupulous would be the right way to put it, but when they see revenue growth of a particular product, that’s motivation to basically create a clone and try to grab some of that revenue for themselves, so that’s not great.

But it does seem to be this culture of we share this as a chance to have your own milestones and sort of accountability from an outside community.

I think is also especially helpful when you’re just one person, you don’t have investors or whatever, but then also it’s a chance to support others when people do reach their milestone that they set out.

Oh, I’ve reached 100 customers, that was my goal for the year and everyone can cheer them on and be supportive, and it’s sort of a small business culture. I think that’s quite interesting.

It’s different from the building public we’re talking about here, but I still think it’s an interesting one.

00:30:27 - Speaker 3: I actually think they’re more related than you might initially think.

I think a lot of the impetus is signaling. So if you go back to when we first started to see this with small software businesses at a time it wasn’t really understood that an individual person can make a lot of money online with a really niche weird software business. And so being able to do that and share it was a very interesting signal. It had a lot of novelty value and it showed that you were a surprisingly accomplished software entrepreneur.

Well, now we know that’s much more feasible and there’s tons of these businesses, and it’s still hard to do, but it’s not novel or unique. And I think in many ways it has become outweighed by this clone risk that you mentioned.

But I also think a lot of the product building in public is about signaling to your community and your potential community that you have good taste and you get it, because this is not the case with most pieces of software and software firms, you know, that’s just the reality.

But if you can do the hard work of putting together not only a really good product, but a piece of media that concisely shows that, that causes people to correctly adjust their priors a lot on the quality of your work. I think as software people were often uncomfortable with this idea of signaling and marketing and information uncertainty, but the reality is there it’s a huge place, most of it isn’t very good, and so you have to do a lot of work towards helping people understand that your product and your company is in fact good and this is gonna be one way to do it.

00:31:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, this is something I think about a lot. I don’t share numbers personally yet, but my thinking is more along the lines of How can I put this? Well, there’s two things, I guess. The first is that I kind of feel weird that people are like analyzing whether a thing is good by how much money it makes when they can just like look at it and like, is it good? But I guess I could see how that would be like human nature.

The other side to it is like, If the number is too low, does it have the reverse effect? And if the number is too high, are you seeing a sort of like sell out or like, oh, you’re not like an indie hacker anymore, now you’ve like made it, you’re not one of us. So maybe I’m a pessimist, but I only kind of see the negatives in that case.

00:32:35 - Speaker 3: I tend to agree on the financial numbers side, and I think most people have, which is why we don’t see them very much anymore. But yeah, and I think there’s still interesting signaling value on the product itself.

00:32:45 - Speaker 2: Another spin on that that I like for individuals is just talking about their transition from either being full-time employed or a contractor and then the kind of percentage of their sort of life earning needs which are covered by their product or their business that they’re trying to get started versus a more conventional source of income. And I think we’ve all made that.

Transition or anyone that’s tried to go off and do their own thing, whether it’s being indie or even as a freelancer or starting a business, you know, I certainly went through that lots of kind of, you know, moonlighting, I guess is the the term for it, because you end up working on it at night.

But yeah, when I started my first business, there was a good long period of kind of working on it on the side while I worked my day job, and then trying to do the calculation of, OK, do I have enough saved up? I’m not quite earning enough from my side gig yet, but I know if I can focus on that, I think I can get it across the line in 6 months or a year.

If I cut down the basics in life, can I make it there? It’s this really huge and important life transition and honestly a pretty intimidating, even scary one for a lot of people. I think that approach of sharing. Of I’ve reached personal break even where I’ve made the full transition, you know, I’ve basically like finished my last client project and from here forward I can be full time on this product that I’m working on.

That sort of thing I think is really good. Pure, I don’t know what the word for it is not quite role modeling, but a chance to exactly said mark show that you can do it, and it’s not about the number and whether it’s low or high, it’s about. Starting something from scratch, and being able to take that very hard road that takes you to that basic sustainability.

00:34:25 - Speaker 1: Would you be more interested in like that hearing that story from the perspective of, I’ve made it, here’s the things that I did, or I’m in the struggle right now and it sucks. It doesn’t end on a happy note cause it’s pending, right?

00:34:41 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s interesting. I think that hearing from inside the struggle, and this I think does connect to the build in public, you’re not getting the finished and polished story where you can go back and kind of like adjust the little details probably subconsciously to make it all add up and end in that happy ending.

But instead that you get the raw unfinished thoughts that may be even conflicting day to day.

I think of a good example of this, an incredible log of sort of creative process is the book The Making of Prince of Persia, where the author of this absolutely now iconic and classic video game, the Prince of Persia, had been keeping personal daily journals the whole time, and it’s a wild roller coaster, and he is questioning every month, is this worth my Time is the video game industry a dead end? Should I even be doing this? And in hindsight, you look back and you go, not only did this make this person’s career, but you know, if you’re someone that grew up with gaming in that era, you think of this as just a seminal thing. How could he have been questioning that he was doing something worthwhile? But of course any artist, any creator, you got your struggles, anything worth doing has its struggles, and being able to see that kind of in real time, if that’s the right word for it, is a really powerful thing.

00:35:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, Jordan Meckner, right?

00:35:54 - Speaker 3: That sounds right, yeah.

00:35:55 - Speaker 2: That’s the 10 wow, what a legend.

00:35:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, folks, if you haven’t read this book, you have to, it’s absolutely incredible, and it’s almost totally unique as far as I know in terms of having the actual day to day source materials, just incredibly valuable.

To your original question, I think there’s two dimensions here.

One is, do you see all the details day to day, which could be either because you have basically a journal, which is quite rare, or because you’re just talking about on Twitter as it happens, which is more common, and then there’s the question of who do you hear from, and you can get all kinds of weird selection bias depending on if you only hear the success stories. So for both of those reasons, I think it’s interesting to hear it as it happens, which of course is congruent with our choice of building a public podcast episode.

00:36:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s definitely rare, which I also agree kind of makes it more valuable.

00:36:41 - Speaker 2: Yeah, certainly that’s part of what we do here in this podcast.

I wanted to document our thinking almost as a sort of journal for my own purposes later on.

And I think in maybe in some of the early episodes, I’m thinking of where we talked about like our partnership model, which is a bit unique and you know has certain risks to it, and I think we basically left it with, well, we’re hopeful this is going to work, but it’s got all these risks, no one really knows. Let’s check back in 3 years, maybe we did that episode a year and a half ago, so, you know, we’re not too far away from, you know, checking in and being able to. retrospect, and I can only imagine that some of the things that we talked about early on later on, I’ll be able to look back either years from now or even sooner than that and go, ah, this whole idea we had, it sounded nice at the time, it made sense, but it actually didn’t work, you know, in the laboratory of the world where you put your ideas to the test, not all of them are going to stand up.

00:37:35 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I want to check out that book. The part of it that really kind of sounds like it resonates with me is a sort of emotional struggle. I’m kind of an emo guy. Like you don’t necessarily hear that side of it. I think there’s numbers and if the numbers are good, then there’s posturing, but you’re in the middle and I’m not so sure in real time is very interesting to me.

00:37:55 - Speaker 2: Yeah, posturing is one thing that I have sort of a personal cringe from and when I have been inside companies where it seems like maybe this is more old school business advice, maybe this is changing now and being more honest and human and authentic and vulnerable is hopefully becoming more in fashion because those are things I’m more interested in, but I don’t know, man, posturing, life’s too short, you know.

00:38:22 - Speaker 3: Yeah, well, this does remind me of the issue of individuals versus small companies versus large companies.

I think we’ve mostly been talking realistically about individual creators and entrepreneurs and very small ventures like Muse in terms of number of staff. I think actually a big advantage for these people, these individuals and small firms, I think it becomes much harder to have a really open, transparent working in public process when you’re a large company.

It’s not impossible, but there are all kinds of dynamics working against you, and we need to go into all the reasons, but basically. It’s because a firm has this incredibly valuable capital, you know, goodwill that you’re potentially playing with. And so you could burn that down, or people could be very jealous of it, or it could be hard to get access to it, to basically be able to publish under the company’s name and so on and so forth. So for all these reasons, it’s potentially a unique advantage that small ventures have.

00:39:12 - Speaker 1: I think the bigger the company, the more it’s seen as like this is a high risk thing with low reward and like nobody wants to be the first mover on that kind of initiative.

00:39:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, do you think the personality element of it is really important. We do talk about brands as having personalities.

Yeah, there’s certainly big brands that are playful and fun, and there’s others that are sleek and futuristic, and there’s others that are maybe emotional and rustic, for example, but those are pretty I don’t wanna say manufactured exactly, but they don’t really come from any one human or small set of humans other than maybe the founders.

The founders had a particular set of personality traits and that created the beginning of the brand, culture or the brand personality, but then you go on 10 years, 20 years, the company is big, and all of that gets, I don’t know, homogenized or more distant.

Yeah, and maybe that’s as it should be actually, as you get bigger, you should be kind of more accessible, less.

Peculiar, maybe one way to put it, whereas when you’re at a small scale, yeah, bringing your own personality into the brand, the business, you are the company, right? And that’s true even at uses company size, but certainly for a one person shop like you have, that is there, how do you think about personality as being part of the work you’re doing?

00:40:32 - Speaker 1: I think it’s a big part of it. I think it’s one of those things that set us apart from other companies that kind of have to compete on these are featured checklists, these are like, you know, enterprise ready things.

There are more choices in software, it’s becoming less of a commodity and like, There are markets that are already kind of evolved in this direction, like to do lists and stuff where you’re not choosing the thing that has all the features because you don’t need the features, you’re choosing the tool that resonates with you, and it’s kind of like buying a camera or buying like a good where there’s a low end version, a high-end version, and lots of variations in between choosing based on vibes.

00:41:09 - Speaker 1: Exactly. I think there’s like a floor of capabilities you need, but beyond that, it’s sort of like which tool makes me feel the best. To use and, you know, to tell people about and all the rest of that.

00:41:21 - Speaker 3: Yeah, totally, we’ve talked about this on the podcast before on how creative work is this incredibly difficult, emotional, highly unnatural endeavor, and you need the right