In the hacking is dead. At least that's something that my guests today Peter levels once tweeted about of course. It's not bad, but it is different now and just how different and why it's different that we will figure out today on the would start founder Peter and I chat about a I start herbs dealing with platform risks and why in the hacking isn't even hacking anymore and how to build audiences on Twitter in 2023 a big shout out to the sponsor of today's episode acquired a calm morning.
That later now here's Peter Peter. Thanks so much for being on the show. I only have one question here. Why is in the hacking dead? Can you tell me more about that man?
So I tweeted that enacting was that but my point was more like I think because it's like a long tweet in the first message is like India king is dead. And then the I try to explain but nobody reads the second line these things like Tick-Tock, you know, people only watch 10 seconds. So what I meant was like this in yakking started I think like
Because we had a big maybe 2014 with product Collins because before a lot of people would do the VC route of doing startups, right? Everybody knows this story. So I feel like this year it kind of like became very became very popular. A lot of people are in yakking. And I think also now what you see what I see on my Twitter is that big companies big tech companies, they follow me and you follow all your other any makers to see what any makers are doing like it's big it's it's become now finally on the radar of tech, you know, a lot of people in San Francisco. I saw a tweet by Lewis
He's making a I start up in San Francisco and he lives in some pots and sleeping path. And he said I mean the sleeping pod like hostel in San Francisco for $600 per month full of India hackers trying to ship a I start ups and I'm like, what is this thing? Because it's the same Francisco's it is usually the place where you raise VC and it's in your hackers. So it feels like it's a mainstream turnout terminal and that's what I mean. So it means that it's become more competitive more saturated than more difficult because you're competing not just with a lot of India hackers now a lot of people doing it.
Becoming like the standard route. You're also competing with big tech companies now and I see this if the AI startups that do I'm competing with companies that raise 500 million dollars, you know, like these big AI startups and and they follow me on Twitter, you know, and they see what I'm doing. So if I launched a feature they asked their developers to make the same feature and maybe vice versa of course, but that's what I mean. So it's dead in a way that
Like if a remote work was called remote hacking, you know, and then go over it happens and remote work became normal. It will also be dead because it's not hacking was just normal now, so it's more like yeah, that
is exactly the difference right? Like it used to be hacking and used to be hacking. It used to be kind of a subculture Thea and now it's just the way people approach entrepreneurship. It's an indie hacking. It's just Indie business or I think so,
I think so and people reply to me like I you're in a bubble because you're like in yeah Kebab. Oh, it's not mainstream at all. But I do think it's
Adams it's very present on the radar of a lot of people and a lot of people prefer like man. I have a lot of VC funded found her friends and they say their next starter is preferably in D and they will do it because they're kind of a lot of people are burned out from the feces,
you know? Yeah. Well good. I think that's a good thing because I think there's a lot of speculation happening there that may be coupled with a an economic recession is not the best idea. Yeah people to put their whole life energy into something very good boy may not
the
economic recession is a very good point because you want to do more lean. So Lean Startup in the hacking becomes more because of necessity because there is no money. It's hard to get funding. Yeah, it's hard to get seriously
funding, you know, maybe yeah, that's right that was series a or even seed fund. I'd just money has dried up in many ways and people are much more selective in what they fund. It's funny that you mentioned like AI startups because there's a lot of them going on and you recently tweeted something about your own they've recently it just a couple hours ago. Yeah it about like how
You found something that you haven't felt before with other startups that now that you are doing a start-up that's kind of the lack of a
moat is a big problem. Yeah. I said the f word but this is big problem. It's written everybody talks about it. Even like other AI Founders VC funded are founders. We DM and every that separates retention, which is the turn is very high and defensibility like you make something and immediately have a lot of clones because everybody's working with the same stuff everybody's using GPT for for Tech stuff.
Almost or Lama the Facebook at a lamb but or people you stable Fusion for image stuff. Everybody is the same. So it's not proprietary Tech like the stuff you do around this proprietary like the way you combine all the models and everything in your website, but everybody can figure this out within I would say if you're smart within three months with if you're less smart, maybe six months to a year. So it's very difficult to make a start up a I started now, right? Okay. Yeah.
Yeah. That's that's a that's an issue. I guess it's both a benefit and and the
So yeah, the curse is everybody can do it. The benefit is everybody can do it. There is a lot of variety and you can build a lot of things
really good for customers. Right? If you have a lot of people making these apps and you get you get a big pressure on the price to go down but difficult for business owners because if the price goes down like this pure economics the profit margin goes to 0 and man my profit margins for these AI star is not high like this is this week. I've been charting it and it's like, you know with the cost of GPU the profit margin.
Gets really really low very quickly. So
yeah, I was wondering about this. Like I was I was looking into your your startup's to whole list of them and you have several rights and will going on Nomad list is still around remote. Okay is still there. And then you have these two AI startups that have pretty significant mrr. More. They also have they have a lot of cost compared to the other. Yeah,
that's the problem. That's the big problem and man honestly GPO Costco down. It's a difficult business and
And we were thinking GPU calls would go down but then Nvidia said like there's all kind of bottleneck. They cannot produce enough chips. So popular now II they cannot produce enough chips and the stock of a video of course went through the roof because of this so people are fighting over gpus. It's insane. It's like it's because you need a GPU for it's like a processor for people don't know it's like a CPU like a good computer processor, but it's for graphics and somehow it's a very let's not go to the birds.
Very useful very fast for AI stuff. You need a GPU for a I pretty much all rise is very slow. So and there's not enough gpus being built like Nvidia makes almost all of them. So that makes the cost of these servers very high
because it's it's great crazy to think about just how much platform dependency is back there. Right? You have the processor that needs to be done and you need those for machine learning systems that also are run by somebody else and then there's an API that is run by a company and you build on top of that. So you depend
on all these layers. How do you deal with this? Because I don't think Nomad list is that not all and the No No
No, it's like this use API to collect data for about cities. Right? So I use a lot of different sorts, but it's like it's 100 robots that collect that scrape kind information and some is paid apis, but it's not dependent at all. But with gpus man, this is a great story. Like I cannot name too many names but for example when so like last year I started with avatars aif Atari I
Because I was I was making in teary-eyed because I started doing AI stuff and I was typing stuff like everybody in these problems like to generate images and I found out that I could build like house is very beautiful design houses. So I made a site called this house does not exist dot orc I think and it's Generations random house has random design like House born kind of beautiful and then I saw it also made very beautiful interior. So I started making interior AI where you can generate interiors and then I thought what if you can upload your own
home interior with image to image technology and it's got a modified and it worked and I made in theory I and then I tried to see if I could find you in and fine-tuning is where you take the AI model and you make it more focused towards a specific goal for so for example, you want to make Interiors because they believe Fusion is image model can make any image right can make houses but also plans people anything. So you want to focus it interior and gets better results. So I trained of interior photos and gets better results and then I trained with my own photos because
Happens and it works and you get like this these photos of yourself in every style and I was like, wow, that's very cool. So I tweeted it and it went viral then the next day. I was like, I need to really quickly make a start up for this. So I met David REI and it was was the first one of the I think the first big Alpha 2 a II Avatar startup and then these big companies are following me. So they quickly within a month. They did the same and they got way bigger because they receive on it and they made I think 40 million dollars. I think I made like maybe half a million.
Dollars of it or four hundred thousand dollars lot within a month or so I'm going to Mom's is insane. But the funny part what I want to say is that the service I used to do this to do this fine-tuning the cost of engine was three dollars and then when they saw my tweet swear, I was sharing my Revenue that was making so much money with this. They said sorry we need to increase the price to $20 per training and I was selling them for like $25 or $30. So for like a month they got all the money.
And I couldn't switch and they said there's difficult. Maybe they were telling the truth. They had problems with like getting gpus also, but they increase the price and I felt kind of like scammed, you know.
And so this is a good example you're dependent on a supplier. Who can when they see your successful increase the price this happens to people who have co-working spaces to there's a bali co-working space famous who was very successful very cheap rent and then when they go to a successful after the 1-year leases they are now it's like five times the rent. Then you 10 times the rent that's what landlords do so these dependencies are not nice. So I switched out to a new provider there much like replicate replica.com the very nice.
The super helpful, they don't change Pride they do increase price. They only decrease prices. It's amazing. So, how do you deal with this man? It's a real problem.
Well, if there's one thing that that you can learn from this experience is just think about Alternatives from the start right? If you have a service that you building on like you have to find a way to abstract it enough so you can have another service to plug into your
system exactly. So you have to go one level higher so you have to get your own feet virtual private server with GPU.
Use you know, but then you need to learn to code Python and do all this stuff and man in this python is too much for me this gpus it's too difficult. So I hired a i developer for this to help me with these models because it's just too difficult for me. I cannot like Danny postma is my friend and he makes headshot pros.com headshots pro has shop Pro and he he he did it himself first thing now, I hired more people but he's smarter than me and he can do like python stuff. And yeah, it's
I tried so much but it's like my head's you
know what it's kind of one of these things. That is so specific that as yeah, you know as a solopreneur kind of Dev generally build stuff and you don't want to dive into something that takes you three years of University to understand
right man. I think that's it would take me six months of understanding this package manager does not need by Piper. It's just too much eye and I can't get it working. It's just so difficult and it's really it's called but it shows my limits this year. I see Mike Williams. I'm not so good at this stuff. You know,
did you have a hard?
Time hiring for that because that's that's my experience when I founded my business and I kind of ran it random Brandon. I thought I can do it. All right, like you know the so low Tech kind of personally, it's the same for you.
Yeah, because I thought I could do everything until this year. I thought I could man I was like complacent and I was arrogant and I thought because there's no Melissa Monica and all these stories were just work. I did almost everything myself except customer support and like Chad moderators and stuff and I have a surfer guy the sir.
Was on but that was it and I thought I can do every myself. I could be refunded back and everything and I could and decides always look a little bit clunky because I do everything myself, but that's like something you take for granted. It's just for you you accept and not so bad. But this year I'm like man, there's so many things. I cannot do like marketing. I always relied on organic marketing organic SEO stuff and you get I think Danny pause my God made me very fresh because he's a man. He's insane SEO guy. He's like insane. It's all he makes startups just based on.
The keywords like he discovered his LinkedIn headshot worked. So well that was most of the searches. So you makes this service specifically this Niche because he was also making like avatars were very smart. So I learn about SEO more now. I'm learning about Tick-Tock marketing. So I hired a guy to help me with man because Tick Tock is saying I talked to one influencer. He posted about photo a i.com my a iPhoto startup and mrr. Went from 12K to like 40 or
The case that's that's right. It
stayed that way and of course, I was sure and so I also work in the but this shows you have a really big effect of these influence and it's way bigger effect than press. Like I also got a lot of press for these AI stirrups and just press does almost nothing you can put the logos on your side, but nobody links and click on these links. It's insane.
I had Danny on the show a couple episodes ago, and it was yea it's awesome like his focus on SEO. That's just something that
I personally have never done I guess just something I had Word of Mouth Marketing in my things and that was fine, but he just diving into the data and like pulling out the things and building businesses on top of that. That's like do meaning right but that finding a domain building a domain on top of the our business on top of that domain name. There's just such a smart data-driven approach really like that. And then he too is building a team. He's building a studio right and something out there. So I guess you're kind of in parallel with that trying to expand your capacity behave yourself
100% And we
We always do like text swap because he sees my photos that suddenly look much better on Twitter my eye photos and Ashley man. What are you doing now? And I we give each other hands. So we say like man, maybe look at this feature and try this with you know, but we're not competing because he's our head shots and I don't want to do headshots. It is like Niche I'm doing more General photo studio kind of thing.
Have you ever considered like actually working together like building a business together? Yeah,
that's not I think we both would because I think
we've I think I respect him a lot. They respect me a lot. I think it's good in the future demand for almost technology because my code he doesn't trust my code because so PHP like seriously and he writes I think proper like JavaScript, you know, but in general like men most of the code is python in the background anyway, like that's where the real stuff happens is its front end. So I think could happen in the future. I think it will be fun for example to if I ever sell to try cell like together or something would be good.
It's something like that, but I have a lot of respect and I think it's very cool what he's doing and he shake me up a lot because he showed me that because first I was making my money of avatars and I think at some point he was making more money this profile pictures and then head shots and stuff and I was like damn and I was like what's going on? Like I don't like this, you know, because you want to win, you know, and then it was very good for me. It was good. Like okay you need to do a lot of stuff like SEO like marketing like look at what keywords people are searching.
Being makes up Pages all the stuff I wasn't doing and yeah, it's very cool.
Yeah sounds sounds like a little Mastermind group going on there with Danny. Nice.
Yeah. Well every month not every day but like once every few weeks We messaged. Yeah,
that's awesome. Yeah, I love it. I love this just talked about your code because to me like your PHP code and that all the stuff around it and your use of jQuery instead of like fancy Frameworks and all that that has become almost a meme in the community. And I mean this in the best sense.
It like people people think it's really funny that somebody is still coding like it's the 90s but also people think oh, wow crazy, you can still do this and still be successful. I love that about how you approach technology because if I think about your Tech stack, it's just PHP and a little bit of JavaScript. That's it. Yeah, right. Do you ever consider like actually changing that up? Because you just said that like if you work with somebody else they don't trust your coat. Yeah, like if you ever sell your business, have you ever thought about that? Like how God
Complicated that might actually make selling the business. Yeah. Look the thing with
his meme is I exaggerate the meme for firewall effects. Therefore I make it look like my coach is really bad, but it's much better that people really think is really bad and I'm not saying it's great but it's man it's pretty good. It's like very clear now. It's highly common to it. It's very like I write a multiple files now, you know, this index.php was in the beginning, you know, I use GitHub. It's pretty there's a very strict structural.
And I made myself like folder structure and files and like as workers. It's like scheduled work. Is it robot to do stuff? There's app. There's a data file for the database and stuff and it all uses like SQL light so it's very structured. So I think it'd be HP developer can get into and they have like I had Developers for small things come on and it's pretty they can find what they want to find so it does work but I think it's more about a mean it's it's more it's not about PHP Educators more about the point that it doesn't matter that you have these
Rappers who work in Enterprise in agencies and there's this agency MLM. I feel like where you have a you have a company that doesn't know anything about tech they come to web agency and I want like a website or app is tough and these webpages need to sell like the best soft. So they say we use the newest technology like we use some big framework new and they need to they used as a serious thing. And then these developers need to update their skills to use this technology.
And this is like a cycle and it's a whole economy because you have this ecosystem of like Frameworks now gets funded and they have evangelists and like become like versal. I like Versa, but they are very that's a big example. They they have evangelist to make developers promote the stuff all the time and the work for them. That's the whole thing and the VC fund and they need growth and all good. But this makes new developers think that they need all this technology to make stuff and
this technology is nice. But in many ways a lot of the new technology is makes things more complicated often and there's a thing called I think taleb Nassim taleb always talks about Lindy effect where all technology is proven because it just works because all right. The PHP is very old. It just works new technology. You need to be a little distrustful of because it's often breaks like man. I have this when you buy like smart home stuff like I go and are being there some smart TV or something, you know, and it's so difficult to watch.
V now this kind of linear effect like a OT week just works it shows you to be and is tested. You know, yeah, so I think that's my whole point of this like doesn't matter what you use there's no need for this cultism with developers. If you are an entrepreneur, you know, it's all about like if your developer a sister but if you're an entrepreneur and a problem is a lot of these developers that work as Freelancers, they want to be an entrepreneur so they bring this whole bug us is baggage of having to use the stack and
Earring and wow, this code is so elegant and stuff to something where the priority should be getting customers and getting people to pay money because they you survive, you know, you pay your rent
car developers and I think we both kind of our developers are we so tool focused we so we look at the things and we wanted to be optimal you wanted to be the best thing for that solution. I'm kind of glad that you're showing that you can just stick to one tool and just make it happen right there. Probably is some framework out there. That is like two points.
7% faster in some regard but it doesn't matter right if you're fast enough to bring a thing to Market. That's when you monetize not when you use the best tool possible and I think you talked about this in the beginning to is like or that's kind of the tweet that I was referring to when you were talking about having to deal with the lack of mode and just as an AI start up right? When you you kind of have to imagine that the competitors just a couple months around the corner like your execution speed is so much more important than the request.
I understand speed of the the web framework that you use,
right? Yeah, 100% And man most developers pretty slow to be honest like man. I'm not good developer, but I'm really fast notice one skill I have I because I don't make things too complicated. May I repeat myself all the time and I never repeat myself ten times like, you know, don't repeat yourself as a mantra then I write a function, but I don't like people try melee write a function for some of you repeat twice. It's like man just tweet repeated what you know like this.
My stuff and I think especially in beginning where you make a starter when you make someone new it's very important to not obsess over this because you're trying to validate something you're trying to you have an idea right? Like I'm gonna have this Avatar really and this was meant it wasn't even called. It was just a index.html actually was it's a page with examples of the avatars. You could generate an input photos and then a link to type form not a stripe check out stripe payment link there was it went to get your avatars stripe him.
E-link and there was nothing else and then I would go to stripe and check the email and on stripe check out. I had the link after payments is a type form. So they went to a type form where it collected all the photos with file uploads. And then I would manually so I immediately had 100 order so manually I did a thing these hundred or two hundred orders myself. So with download the photos and then I would go to this this platform to do this fine-tuning and upload their photos. And then I would download the resulting Force man. It was horrible work man. You work I'd spend like old.
I do miss and then I started automated second day. And after week was a lot of work after we could find was automatic. Wow, so that's example where you it wasn't even called. It was just landing page and a tweet. So from payment link and then when I work you can make the codes,
you know, right? Yeah, you have a process that you can actually Implement right? You have steps that you can then automate.
Yeah, because you prove that it works that there's a business maybe and then you can invest the time to code something.
But coding takes lot of time. There's this, you know, the cartoon the Essex CD or something
XKCD. Yeah, me too.
Yeah, they know they have this cartoon. Like how much does a chart like how much time it takes to automate something and how much time the thing itself takes and often the time that takes automate something is higher than the time of the thing take so if that's true just do it yourself manually until you know, obviously if you spend all night uploading downloading photos it takes too much time. You can automate it faster, right? So,
yeah for sure I mean
If that was one night's work. And how much did you charge for a photo at $30 this you know, that's like that's three thousand dollars for a night's work. That's not too bad. Right? Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean some people would do that for life if they could just you know, it's still pretty cool to do this. I really really enjoy that this particular way of doing this like particular with a I write to all has probably hard to automate when there is a lot of manual figuring things out, right?
Uh as well as the whole tuning fine-tuning kind of stuff. So it's really cool that you did this for a day or a week until you had it all figured out. I think that's that's an India hacking approach to that kind of what Paul Graham cost the concierge approach right the the idea of doing stuff with the white glove treatment. I do this for you instead of having everything automated a lot of people want to build software from day one. They want to build a tool that one log in they want to stripe integration. They want all kinds of things and then they want to make money but you made money by just doing the thing which is
Yeah, but I think it's also because I did so much wrong. I did it. I spent like man I talk so much about the I spent like a year on some YouTube analytics startup in like 2013 14 or something 40 nothing and and nobody paid for it. Nobody want to be customer and it was just everything was amazing in face was amazing, but nobody you know, so I'm so traumatized by this dike it's just I'm not going to build anything until this customers, you know, like Janet generally
whenever I go to product
hunt and I see all these tools there, you know, you have the top five that are really interesting and I have a couple more that have been, you know a few up votes and then you have the four hundred things that are launched that day that have no up votes between all these 400 behind every single one of them is a developer who spent six months building the perfect product. That's very always think about is
so sad. It's like it's so sad and like they all look really good like the landing page attribute, like beautiful design is like a red flag for me, you know, this beautiful gradients and he's like,
If these borders that move love fancy, it's so fancy. If it's too fancy, it's means you spend too much time on design or you it's on VC started at spent too much money on designers if it's the beginning if it's not valid yet, you know, and I prefer a very ugly web base in the beginning that just because men look at Google look at the beginning was very ugly. Look at Facebook. First page was very ugly. You need to have a very ugly basic beginning page. I think to validate something first.
Yeah.
That's kind of also what the whole discussion about India hacking being dead or different I think different is just a better phrase. Right? It's not it's not that it's still there, but it's not the same as it what it used to be like seven years ago. All right seven years ago. It was a movement today. It's just how things are done is it has arrived right? It's kind of what it is. But I think that's what India hacking was also doing and I think Danny posted about this like India Kingston You Drop Shipping that's what he kind of called it or there were people then in the replies to your tweets saying well, yeah people have just
Your expectations of products now, so India hacking now looks different and all that. It's important to write like for us hackers we can deal with a you know with a really shitty page that has barely any serious as in there no automation. You know exactly that there is a manual component doesn't matter. You still want to use it because you're an early adopter, but with India hacking going into mainstream, I think you cross the chasm as well and you now have all these these normal people. It's just call them that that one products that are kind of proven that have that.
Need social proof already and you that is pretty well because you are your own social proof like your your history of products and you're building in public like whatever you launch you have social proof already like that. That's that's something that stands out in particular in your case that now that you're reaching like 340 thousand followers on Twitter you bring this with you, but how would you if somebody were to start in the hacking today? What would you tell them to get to this point to get what would you tell them to to have the social proof that they need to Launch?
Man, honestly, this is like very controversial. I think you should always do the opposite everybody else is doing so now if in egg is enacting his message to me, she's probably like do something completely different. You know, I mean like you should go where nobody is going because when I started my nose almost nobody was only patio 11 Patrick Mackenzie was bootstrapping startups and everybody else was Raising fees. It was it was not normal to boot steps are as was very very very not normal and now it's normal so
So I don't know. I always feel you need to run away from the herd, you know the sheep and need to go somewhere else. Where know like look for the part of the grass where nobody is and go there if you believe in this, you know, and then spend a lot of time spent years on this but about social proof. I don't know I think maybe it's not important. Maybe she's it's it's important you make something that's like a problem. That's out there like yeah, look at all the subreddits. There's a lot of problems there like every celebrated as I could go and you can go see this apps.
Starters you can make around that like somebody this is mean but Craigslist, right? Every category is become a start-up you could do some subreddits. Okay. Now maybe the rest of the day's Tick Tock right go to tick tock see what's going on and Tick-Tock and see what people want and make stars around there. Maybe this answer start doing tick-tocks. I tell everybody this four-year. I don't even do it myself a lot myself, but I'd shoot but do go to tick tock and see what's going on there and document.
Your journey not on Twitter, maybe but don't Tick-Tock and so hey, I'm Peter I just starting out. I want to make sorry, but when I make some money and pay my rent and every day, I'm going to make a video about this and what I'm doing and this new feature, that would be how I would approach it in 2023. Yeah, I wouldn't probably be on Twitter X at all.
Yeah, interesting. Yeah that definitely a building in public where those people that you want to serve actually are and that's if this then that that is something that I really wanted to ask you because we talked a lot about
I would say I start ups and that kind of stuff and it feels to me that the demographic for them is a younger crowd right and like people who they have no problem with a I like I don't know if you've seen the same but in our community a lot of people are very afraid of AI right. So there seems to be a generational divide there and saying Tick Tock is the new place to do this in front of people who are willing to accept that. This is the way to go probably a good idea. What do you think about this whole in like AI is the end of humanity kind of
Ation, what's yours?
Well, first of all, this generation thing is home soon, right like gen Z doesn't care if they're just use it like Jen I work now with I know the guy from Jen AI David park, I think and he uses Tick Tock and all these students use this app Jenny and I forget to write papers for you or to help you with writing papers and everybody uses. This is like 150 k Mr. R. It's insane man. They nobody you're right. Nobody says like is this good or bad man? This is
Good or bad thing comes for a thing for Millennials. Like we're Millennials, right and journalists were also Millennials and people that want to you know, maybe our culture to like challenge everything which kind of goods and make make a problem out of everything and there is of course fundamental philosophical things you can talk about but I don't think it's very useful to constantly complain in every reply, you know about the problems with AI and I was going to destroy Humanity.
I don't know. I I think look at the look at the good sides and look how it can benefit everybody. Of course our great leader Elon Musk, you know is also complaining about a I write these like it's going to be the end of humanity. So what am I saying, you know, but
he's also like a much older generation, right? Yeah. You're right. You're right. You're right.
No, but of course, there's there's risk, but man, I I get kind of tired of his whole like - seen on.
The start like 2016 and I feel died off like when Elon Musk about Twitter and the Very politically engaged scene and they're very like angry and I don't see them a lot anymore. I think they moved the monster dome. But this is New Zealand Twitter. I don't know if you saw the E / ACC like it's like about acceleration. It's like people who are kind of philosophical and they also want to they are positive about the future of humanity and our technology. Can you how we can use technology to make the future of unity better?
R and C / ACC and people have this in their nickname and I follow a few people like Beth J. Zil's like Jeff Bezos Bev. Jatos. He's like the leader or something. It's very distinct group of people very positive. And I feel that's man. I think positively generally works better, you know.
I mean I say this after complaining about Sony headphones for three days straight, but but past no, but I still believe in the future of Sony headphones if they fix some stuff but I think positively works better than complaining. I feel okay. Let's be honest. I think there's some powerlessness if you cannot code and you see this is happening and you're not making money with it and your income is not increasing because incomes are stagnant now and the government is not providing basic income which is like free money for people because technology replacing a lot of stuff. I understand completely.
That you feel is you feel bad about this and you're going to complain like people complain about foreigners in Portugal, you know, or people complain about a I you know with in journalism or the writers strike in America writes a big thing like this the people who were at the TV shows and the movies they're on strike all the time because they think it's GPT for or place them man. Maybe we'll so I understand that the problem as always. I think the government should provide basic income to most people and I think
I don't know if there will be a lot of new jobs created. Actually, I generally people believe in that. I don't really believe in that.
It's a it's a whole philosophical or societal conversation about like should we even want everybody to have to work to feel that they're participating in society it is that's that's a thing like the whole like full employment of a country. Is that even something we need as humans or could we justify cell? Yeah, I agree with you there and I think I'm a big Star Trek fan of always been.
Optimistic sci-fi future kind of person but it's just recently I watched the Terminator movies because for some reason I needed to go back to the 80s and 90s and watch them some really really interesting movies. And I honestly, I do understand that the fear and the 80s and 90s of what technology is going to do, which is what Terminator is all about. Right? What if AI computers take over that fear is very present in those movies and I think if you're socialized with this if this is how you approach technology then everything you look at
that is potentially something that destroys everything around you right? So the fear just destroy a society that destroys your habitat and all that and we do see some of this right that what you just said is extremely wonderfully phrased like the people who are not able to code who are not able to control the machine. They are afraid of the machine that is that is
very very and we are unlike podcast. We have a i stars are like, wow so good. Yes make money with it. You know, it's right. Of course. I'm positive about, you know, understand agree.
But I feel like as always I feel people shouldn't blame the scapegoat like the technology can be very every technology has the same amount of bad and good it brings, you know an AI to internet to write. It's brought a lot of scams and many people died because internet and people were born because of Internet so it's both a eyes the same thing and but I think governments should somehow governments are not so efficient, you know in general, but they should
They should I think again this should provide basic income and I think people can do voluntary work. For example, it's a lot of social stuff that has to be done. Like people need to kids need to be raised in more like communities. I feel like there's a lot of stuff that can be voluntary work and
in or paint or to write like just having a base Eduardo. Yeah doesn't mean that people don't make money from work. It just means they don't have to work to survive. That's the only
yeah exactly. So I think the technology
It should be protective should be protected. So technology doesn't destroy their income the basic, you know level of like having a nice house being able to just buy nice good food and live and live a bit. I think live a good life should be the goal for everybody in humanity. And yeah, but I'm Dutch, you know, I'm a little socialist.
I'm also a little bit socialist cuz I'm from East Germany man. I'm like social market economy maximum communist. That's exactly what it is. But yeah, I do see a need for this.
So I see a need for people feeling safe from this kind of Technology because they have no agency over making it work for them. Right? It works at them. It doesn't work for them. It kind of it's attacking them aggressing them in the way and in a funny way this kind of fear of not knowing what's going to happen with the technology. It also exists for us as Founders right as entrepreneurs. This is what you said at this tweet of yours from earlier age. I'm just going to get back to it back to it like it there is there is no way for us.
To protect our technology because it's not our technology to protect like we only built on top of these things. So is building an AI start up something you would suggest to somebody who just is starting out as an India hacker
man. It's a difficult question. Right? Right, I think so at least you should always try stuff in technology because you can combine technology and new ways unique ways that work for you. I think you should always try like try like you could always say that you're always too late with a
Irving right, you're always too late that people said in 2013-14. I'm too late to do startups now because already Dropbox Airbnb became big and it's too late. Now, of course not too late. It's never too late. You just start and you never know. What's next like now, it's AI there will be always something next and jump jump away, but man but this is the reason last year when this AI stuff started booming like around like a fake GPT chechi pretty large and then stable diffusion lost or
First a say Mom and it's only people like oh shit this really works now and then I started like scrambling I'm like man now is the time to build a lot of stuff and see what sticks because if I if I weighed six months, it's I'm not going to you know, it's not going to stick like everybody already did everything. So I spent is saying time making a lot of stuff to just catch this wave now. We're like What want to have one years in 1/2 years in or something, maybe when you're and now it's quite
Late in that sense, but it's never too late. Right, but I think you have some kind of.
First mover Advantage doesn't always work. But you have some kind of advantage of you if you catch a wave, you know a new technology logical way because people want to use the technology and the technology is always very brutal. Like it's very hard to use for people's if you add a front-end to new technology, you can start using it. I mean no medicine was the same people are already know Madam, but it's very hard to find out where to go what the internet was with the these basic things was all separated on different blogs blog post like oh you should come too.
Thailand I should come to Mexico was like travel bloggers so collecting all that together made it, you know, user-friendly to go no to become a nomad same thing. So you catch a wave make technology easier to use
and you still invest a lot of time and you are old businesses, you know, the ones that are pre AI
ya normal is still a lot like I'm improving it like every every week and I think soon once all the AI stuff is
Kind of all the stuff I wanted to do still on the road to do this with AI stuff is finished. I will probably go back to normal this and make it make him prove it. Like I've been working on 3D Globe like for anomalous for the last two months like because there's a globe was with Matt before and I was like this treaty globe with like lines of like I went to Thailand and then to Qatar and Holland and Brazil for example, and that kind of stuff. So I that's my most favorite project. I think in terms of like I feel
It's really like my baby and it's you cannot you can work on this project forever. Like I said just that you can work on this until you're 80 because there's always a different way to figure out what's the best place to live like for you personally. It's such a difficult problem. It's so you know,
yeah, it's funny how this this reminds me of what you said earlier with the Lindy effect, right things that have been around for a long time. They will be around for an equally long time. It's kind of what that means to me. No, my list is something like this to you've been doing this for a while and it's still around.
You still improving it and it's still finding customers. That's very interesting particularly, very stable contrasted against your a I started off selling up and down and super expensive and complicated platform risk in an interesting lesson to be drawn from that. I think right the yeah long-term kind of
yeah, I never expect to stay so long. It's like nine years now and I always expected because I had to YouTube channel before electronic music mixes and they went up really fast like 8K per month and then I went down also very fast, so I thought
A business like probably hype so you was always traumatized like okay. This is just for one or two years need to make a lot of money, but it keeps it keeps going and it makes men its average users like 40 or 50 or 60 K per month a lot of money. So just know I'm at least so a lot of costs is very nice business.
Yeah. Definitely. It definitely sounds calmer right like less less crazy than the a iced
man. Yeah tweet about stay like this is AI stuff is so stressful because you
You always need to stay ahead of the game and of competitors and when a new technology comes out, like now it's little bit slower. But last year every week. It was some new thing new breakthrough and you need to implement this very fast and it's it's stressful for sure. Like it's it fucks of your sleep, you know, like better the stuff he
did you sell them what you saw what you saw I businesses.
Yeah. I think I think I'll get it to a certain level like maybe honored km R R4 photo Ai and interior and then like,
I got them valued recently and the multiples for I stars are very good. Like they're very quite high like normally for like this any stars. You get like to 3x or something right for a I can be like 5 or 6 or even 8 because it's kind of hype now. So I think again the promised Prophet like the multiples are based on profits. Yeah. So you need to make you need to cut these costs rapidly and then you need to go to broker and I need to sell for like a good amount of money, but
Man, it's I don't know it's hard to sell is always like a nice challenge to say I stuff and but it's stressful, you know, probably gives you heart
disease. Yeah, I mean if not like and it mental health issues right with anxiety and dealing with like all these unforeseen changes in the platform's you like that dependency on open on opening II in all their platforms, right? If they decided to do the Elon Musk forty two thousand dollars a month kinda move. I mean, you could probably handle it maybe but you know like that it would be
Such a such a bastard movie two boys. Yeah.
Well, the pretty good thing for AI is very open. So when one can when one company will raise the price is very fast, you can probably easily back then I really but now you can easily switch to another provider. There's so many providers now, so there's no less platform dependency now than a year ago, you know because there's a lot of API providers now, but yeah, but it is stressful, you know, but I go Jim I go deadlift and you know over press and squats and then
Is good for my mind? I don't have anxiety a lot and but still stressful.
Yeah, I bet. Yeah, that's that's the thing with with these kind of hype startups, right? You really have to push and then you have to make as much as you can and then go to the next thing and that feels it doesn't feel like very sustainable now my
vibe, you know, yeah, I like building long-term businesses and that's what I had with this avatars. It felt so good. She to me so gimmicky like it's not really my vibe. Like it's kind of like to Stew short terminal and
As photo I feels more like a photo studio for long-term. Like it can have potentially lot about how who knows because AI you don't know how long but the intention is to have a long-term product can stay even if you saw the can stay for like 5 years or 10 years, you know, because the philosophy is that you can have photography without needing a camera, you know, like you can just train yourself and you can make unlimited AI photos anywhere in the world from your computer, you know, you're on the beach or you're in the office you're anywhere
such.
An interesting way of thinking about photography like yeah, it completely removes the act of Photography access God. I need to go anywhere anymore. Just a resort works. Yeah. It's such a cool idea and I kind of love that. It's like you and I kind of also hated from a sense of somebody who likes to take photos, right? It's a weird. I'm torn on on both sides and I love the fact that it makes money. I hate the fact that it's so easy to build so everybody built it.
It is man. It's
like Photoshop Photoshop at the same when I was a kid Photoshop came out and had the newspapers are full of Photoshop. Like this is gonna destroy photography every steak now and it didn't like all it did was it the people use it for touching up or for art and stuff? So it's become a tool and I feel with all this stuff is B becomes a tool for like imagine you have a wedding photographer. It makes a lot of photos and then there's not a single good one. Okay, maybe you can use AI to train this person and you can make some renters and then
Step back into the photo, you know
like that that is really cool. That makes
sense. That can be can be it can be mix of reality and they I know like that's probably the future.
So that's that I was going to ask you what you think of it. I being the future but I kind of hear the sentiment of AI is tools that make actual things easier that is always going to be the future. It's not that the AI is going to do everything for us. He's going to help us do the things better. That's how I see it at least yeah see it, but I do think it replaces
people like I do think it can replace yourself.
Photographer so it's like it is a tool but you'll probably need one photographer instead of ten photographers. You know, you need one person who can control the eyes. So we have interesting interesting but also for interior design is like interior a i.com it it tries to a lot of you interior design and use it for ideation. So you have a client who wants to get an idea of what like because clients don't know what they want to take a photo of the interior and then you give them a lot of different styles and look do you want this and you can kind of move through it.
Asian together to find a style that the customer wants and make them show them how it looks and but this also removes a lot of jobs again because you need less like like I was looking at real estate agents A lot of them use or the people who make these renders officially new construction. They used to beautiful interior Anders. It's all fake. And this easily you can do AI in man. It takes 10 seconds to render of a whole beautiful running normally takes what like two days for people to make this so
so that's a real thing. But these people can use these tools.
Also it's going to shortcut a lot of processes that are established already and have like people working on them, but that's that's like you said Photoshop is that to right there used to be other tools to manipulate images before and it used to be like a more physical is like editing editing video right people used to actually cut like physically cut the stuff my dad. That's it could digitize all of a sudden you do in a second. What took ours?
To get done,
right? Exactly. And now you can either your iPhone, you know, like yeah. My dad is a big he's favorite thing is film editing. Yeah, and he did this with he has classic films and he caught and lose everything before and then he had this video set up a professional video like that the common stuff and now it's like Final Cut Pro, but then I'm like look at my iPhone like I make videos on my iPhone now and take their genes at it's even faster and it is high-quality. So, you know, it's all changing fast and
Yeah, we'll keep changing and he is part of that. So
yeah, I find it. So interesting that you have you get to see both sides you get the boring project. Let's I'm not going to call normal is boring but it kinda is like in terms of the you know, the hype around it. It's just used by the people that need it and that's it and you get the hype ich projects that the get the headlines that get like coverage in the press and that kind of stuff.
Yeah, but this was normal this before, of course that years ago normal. This was what got a lot of like it was a New York Times wasn't all the Articles was like, oh my God.
The anomaly's gonna go everywhere. So it was high but then it happens. It becomes normal becomes
mainstream. Do you think like being a nomad is still something? Like obviously, I see you traveling around the world my question what is not like it's still around obviously nomadism isn't dead. Right? But the it is it still something that you personally do you want to do this forever. It seemed like with your business. Do you want to keep being an indie hacker forever if you still want to travel also
man like this is the problem with this idea of do, you know myself?
Most of them are slow mats and they start out very fast. They go like, you know, sometimes week to week two different place. I kind of like backpacking that I'm against Mom to Mom and then it becomes like three months usually were six months in one place and I feel and I also slowed down a lot like with covert. I just stopped everybody. Stop traveling. Right? Right. This year was kind of crazy of travel. But before I was you know, I tried to like keep it to like two countries and I think for mental health also like
Think you do go crazy if you keep traveling so much. I personally do I did you know, because you don't know where you are anymore, you let those little things known as you wake up and there's a thing like they don't know like where am I and you look outside? Oh, okay, I mean Croatia or you know this stuff. Yeah, that's probably not so good but it's very interesting lifestyle, but I think long-term like man if you have a relationship and if you have kids later all the stuff, I still think you can move.
But you probably want to limit to a few places, you know, and I think we just become the same as what people like retirees do they are like like in America right there. What are they called? Like birds like winter birds or something like they've seen oh, where did they go snow bears in the winter? They go to Florida and in the summer, they go to New York or something. This is the setup. So it's just it's going to go to the same thing and I do it is already like in Europe in the South it gets cold in the winter. I try go to Asia southeast Asia where it's warm, I tried mixed up.
Big city Asia with small village in southern Europe on the beach. I think this works for me. Of course personal Works your butt. Yeah. Nobody's very still very active and Lively and there's real like spots like Bali is still a very big spot and Thailand also and Mexico with the Americas now coming in because they can work remotely a lot of them are by default Nomads and they live in Mexico.
But ye are known as la la no Manning a lot probably less, you know, it's there but a lot of people living in not their original countries now because of remote work and it's kind of called did you know Manning
right? I guess. Yeah in a way anybody working from a computer is a digital Nomad night. No matter if
you're in there in another country like it's not a contest in their home country and that's become very normal. So I think it's still like I think my epic is still very cool lifestyle. Like if I'm if I was 20, I would not go probably universe.
Tomorrow just go travel with my laptop and try a little startups and stuff and it's such a travel such a especially solo travel. You have to survive. You have to meet people like so if everybody has social anxiety these days so you have to go out there and talk to people and you learn how to talk to strangers and you know, I was very probably shy before now. I'm not because I learned how to talk about learn to go out of my room and you know and survive and I think this stuff you learn from job and every city you go you can be a new person.
If you can test your personalities, you know, yeah sounds little Psychopathic but it's not over yet. You know, you're always on your baby test. Yeah, but you know your hometown your it is this certain arvit including you go out of your country. You become International arvid's you're you're like very different and you try this, you know, you try to be very extroverted and you can a lot of people test this and I think that's very cool benefit of no Manning
and doesn't awesome. And it also sounds like kind of sounds like Twitter to me we can also be the person that you want to be right.
Like your project like the best parts, hopefully or the worst parts of your personality on to social media. How do you deal with that? Like you have a pretty sizable following now and with all the changes that have been recently made to Twitter or X as we call it, right? There's a lot of lot of lot of difference in how we how we approach engagement and what gets views what gets like retweeted. What gets actually pushed by the algorithm. How do you deal with this? Because you have a lot of
reach mad at so I think that our interchanged with along changing it
And a team because before before everything would kind of get views and likes right and would take like a to go out everything with get like, you know, get exposure. You would a lot of people see your tweets. Anyway, whatever you wrote and some would go viral a little bit. I think they changed it more to like where if something goes viral in the beginning. It becomes pumped maximum. So it goes like before I would get like 100 reaiise now if something viral gets 1,000 retweets goes very far but on the other
Sides often main tweets good luck to likes. Yes, you know and I have 300,000 followers. So bizarre today. They really think they test in the beginning. Once you tweeted test. Does it work or not do people care about it? And I think how to test it. They check how many seconds you watch the tweets the people who watch your tweets you scroll through and they count now the numbers the S and Elon Musk told said this, you know, and when it destroy it doesn't perform. Well, they just don't show
So it anymore a lot so it become more extreme. And this is of course creates even more extreme Twitter because you get tweets that have to go really far really extreme to get you know, like dunks kind of and then they get a lot of retweets or
nothing. Yeah. Yeah. It's really bad. It's it's kind of disappointing right? Because if you just tweet something honest that is just, you know sand that comes from a place that is not extreme, but it's still
Important and it gets just like a washed away and buried beneath all the outrageous things kind of makes makes Twitter a less less enjoyable platform at least from for me.
Yeah, I think so like product updates. They don't really like I used to always I always do product updates like I made this new feature and I they used to get like, you know, like a lot of use they get less much less now because it's not that interesting. It's kind of like, yeah, it's kind of nice, you know, so the long-term kind of vibe of Twitter changed a little bit, but I do have faith in our great leader Elon Musk.
No, he can improve it. I think it's all survival thing. Like they need to get more monthly active users. They need to become more like Tik Tok Tik Tok is Maxim is algorithm. Like they check every video to see if it works or not. And then they pump it also I think he's on Tick-Tock a lot and checking this and he wants to make Twitter very similar. And also the video will also have text but then with The Tick-Tock algorithm, so, you know, you have okrs like the metric Target which is like more users users and now I think
Has a record used like 500 million active users on fact uses so it does work but it changes the vibe a little bit but I ignored I just still tried to eat whatever I think and man have nobody cares anymore. I'll keep tweeting because I was treating and nobody cared 10 years ago. I'll just keep clean exactly right. It's about your own, you know your own you should enjoy it. You shouldn't do it for the audience. Maybe. Yeah.
Yeah, and the people who enjoy what you do they will find you right? Like if you're if you're just consistent
enough no go
To your profile and their read your stuff right they want maybe not ceding the time now, but they will go to their so I think man like don't beat red boy, you know, like don't you like the 5 things you need to 5 AI tools you needed two of us 24 like this shit
number three will surprise you right now.
I'm curious. Yeah those kids just man what I loved one thing interesting. He also increased this long posts. Like now you can write blog posts. Yes these blog posts by definition get a lot of view time because of s right
Do work really well. So it's almost like a Blog platform. So man A lot of times I just start writing blog posts now on Twitter.
Yeah. I've seen this too and video to write like any kind of medium to long form video. That really does. Well, like if people just keep watching a couple seconds because it's so interesting, but that's that's the interesting thing about Twitter. Now, you need to take YouTube ideas the idea of YouTube intro for a s rights transported as I won't believe
what's next go and
take you mr. Beast stuff.
Aisle and you need some nails and all that stuff now on Twitter as well, if you want to professionalize its just feels it's different and maybe that's that's the exact same sentiment as we had earlier in the hacking dead. Nomad doesn't dead Twitter dead. We all that kind of the old ones at least it's all new. Right? It's all just different at this
point. Yeah. I feel like I said, but you have these time schisms. Yes, you know where a lot of things changed suddenly. So this is definitely covered of course disk over the years and I may be affects us more 2021 to
Thank you. It's big Schism. Like we're the new cycle. Now. Look at the recession. Also, a man honestly disciples are usually seven years. That's why I always say seven year cycle. You can search on Wikipedia economic Cycles using seven years
with a number of cycles and try to social psych Cycles. I don't know. Is that his name? I think I think it has. Yeah.
Those are like economic Cycles are social cultural Cycles to yeah, and when I was a recession in 2008, you would see these hipster coffee shops pop up in Amsterdam. I remember this.
Vividly it change the culture to kind of Scrappy and hipster and it changes fashion. You know, it changed everything. So it's definitely big cycles and we're in a new cycle now ai is part of this new cycle, right? So in seven years is all going to go again and something new
something so
but I think yeah again don't be angry about the changes just Embrace and reinvent yourself for these new time and you always need to reinvent yourself, right? Like no not a constant.
I think I think you're right. It is an attention economy right now. Everybody has very limited attention because everybody's pulling at it from all sides. I talked to her too. April an altar about this YouTube thing to write because she knows how to do a good YouTube videos funny. I had her on the show and the day after that she published a video that went viral is now with like 200,000 views or something. She knows what she's doing was really cool and like I watched a video on how to do an intro to a YouTube video and the whole idea is to make it absolutely clear what the promise
This is of the video what you're going to do and then surprise people and give a bit more than they expected. It's really just trying to get people to feel confident in giving you their attention for a longer time. But
that's like a tweet right? We need me right after he was like, yeah problem I have so I thought about it and I did this and then I solved the problem. Here's to do it yourself, you know, like it is
a Formula. Yeah, and and it is it's required because you need to be able to stand out amongst other people who are also
Interested in getting attention. It's just a new way to communicate we used to we had a time where we wrote letters all the time and then email came along and then social media came along and now we have this and this is I guess just how what we have to deal with
but the attention economy is always become it's always become less attention like you used to have long movies and then it became this TV shows and became YouTube videos now thick stalks. Yeah. Max will be like one second video or something, you know, like I don't know but it's
it's always been by this but now I feels both because you have long podcast like Joe Rogan is tree our podcast and I listened to the whole things and it might take me days because I listen a little bit here and next I listened number here. And and then you also have the clips you have to take the clips of podcast. So it works both you have this outlier, you know, like what he called economy of both sides. So
that makes the makes a lot of sense like you and it's kind of the you should be zigging when I everybody else is zagging right that kind of thing. Now you can do long form content for the people who really care about it.
Everybody else needs to short-term stuff. And even for the short form content, you can still do the Clips. So you get to long form, but in short that's that's yeah it the more I do like of podcasts and YouTube and writing a newsletter and whatever I do. I do a lot of things that but they're all on based on the same material. I just use different ways of Distributing the same material and maybe that is the lesson here. Is that depending on the media depending on the medium like the social media platform or YouTube or whatever you just have to shape it the right way for people to consume it.
Yeah, you
could I think you can learn a lot from these big big famous influences. Even if you don't like them man, they will say like outrageous stuff. Like I don't like this guy but and rotate for example, they he says really radical stuff. That's very controversial and too much, you know, and then the long form Parts is quite balanced like he kind of stuff is down. He's like what actually what I think man, I don't think it's very honest strategy, but I do something to be learned.
Where if you say things that are quite back Isabel into shorts like answers that person that can package their answer in the first sentence probably well and then go for long form. They will see this will get clipped and this person will get more views than a person who cannot make a proper sentence first summarize it, you know, so becoming good at writing tweets and even talking now in a short sentence is becoming like a integral
man, it can make you rich or not. Right? Because if your video goes viral you become famous and you sell products so man, that's like a skill, you know, yeah, and I
don't regret it because I ramble let me too but we're both trying our best, right? Yeah, at least we're trying we're in the arena and not on the sidelines, right exactly. A lot of the things you say a lot of people have opinions about like just you know, you can get a lot of trolls and you get a lot of people that turn your stuff into me.
How do you feel about that in
particular man is great. It's like it's amazing. Like the means are amazing and man is just this part. What do you expect like you tweet like, you know controversial stuff right to a lot of people and of course people going to bad people get like even like, you know friends are friends. They message in chat like man, what you tweeted now is too much remants unacceptable. I'm unfollowing you can't do it. You can't say this about this framework, you know, because I use it.
It people get ready triggered man. I don't know. It's a
I think it's really funny. It's like but you need to see it as kind of like a game, you know.
Man, it sounds like a psychopathic social but it's you cannot take seriously like the it's impossible to see it as a normal conversation because we have a normal conversation. But if you have now you add three hundred thousand people on the other side is just shouting is like Lynch Mob. It's so and this change is you I think and you have to watch out doesn't change your personality real life, you know, because you become but it does a little bit of course, but but I think the benefits generally out.
A the negatives she meet a lot of cool people like you like most of my friends. I met via Twitter, you know, yep, and we met on Twitter a lot of like like a lot of famous people also, like people are the really cool stuff. They DME and they we talked and stuff and it's like wow super cool like man, like I talk of DJ Fresh because when I used to make music with a drum and bass music DJ Fresh, very,
Important figure in music and now he makes a I start of to called voice that I swapped out a I okay plug it and with the m and we talked about a lot of stuff and I'm like talking to my drum bass idle, you know, it's insane. It's like every time I'm still shocked so it's a and I think the more you can even if you write controversial stuff, but it's your real being you get a lot of attention and Via this people understand is Twitter people people. They get angry. We don't understand it's like
Like a stage, you know, it's a show kind of yeah for sure but people who are smart. They understand. Okay. This guy's on a platform and it's doing a show thing and and you you have to take everything with a grain of salt, you know, and but a true I try say things honestly, I don't say things to bullshit, you know.
Yeah, that's I guess if you have controversial opinions, the authentic representation is just to talk to people about those things right to share these opinions like you don't hide them you just you don't become like the person that is
Happy with every single thing or it's like really really appreciative of every opinion. You just say what you say
and you have your honest and and and apparently there's like controversial but of course it becomes controversial because there's so many people in there have to be will disagree with you. So then it becomes by definition controversial but it's not really controversial, you know, and the problem is if you get scared mostly gets here this and then you start tweeting like basic normal stuff and it's not interesting anymore. And I think the reason a lot of people follow me is because they know I'm honest and I'm not perfect and I write whatever I think and it's usually crazy but I also
I like this. Yeah, but I like to say obese and then like about Frameworks or something. I say something and I like to hear what people like what people reply I learned from that and I change my opinions like I have strong opinions weakly held I do change my opinions all the time and but it's the stage. It's like a Podium. It's a show kind of it's inevitable that becomes a show. It's very difficult not to make it and you have people like Alex Friedman for example is very cool and he gets a lot of hate also.
Oh and he chooses to talk more about like love like we're all connected one world and everybody loves each other and I like that too, but it's not really my personal style. My personality is saying what I think I want to keep being true to myself. I don't want to become fake, you know and nothing like she was fake but he chooses a lobster. I choose more like what's on my in my heart. It's on my tongue. Like I said German Dutch expression of thing and I put that on Twitter. I try keep it in all in sync, you know, yeah like to review are different.
And you know,
yeah, that's that and that's that's perfectly fine. And that's why I appreciate your tweets. I know that when you treat something even if it's controversial it comes from an honest truthful place and that is the way you think about it. And that is the way you will talk about it. And I know what I get right? That's the thing. Yeah, very authentically you and I think that is a really really smart way to building an audience or whatever. You might want to call it. There. Just have a Twitter presence or social media presence is just to not hide.
Hide who you are and kind of stand behind the things you say but
so difficult because people are getting really angry and they hit you for your opinions and and people yeah, you see these breakdowns on Twitter right people just have a meltdown because they get so much hate I get this everyday
you me to yeah, I think we both follow many many people through lists and follows and I think over the last three days I saw like four people saying I'm going to need a break from Twitter. This is enough, right and I just
Unfortunate that when it comes to that because people and I'm the same way. Like I post something 30 people say this is really cool. One person says this sucks and I all I focus on is this one person and not the 30 other people that really enjoyed what I said. Hey,
yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. It's very rare. But hey, let's end this on a high note. I think your Twitter account is awesome. I think you're sharing on just your honesty sharing things that you encounter in your daily coder entrepreneurial life. And I think that is absolutely
Earth sometimes getting into controversial fights with other people who have no no skin in the game whatsoever, but the lot of opinions. So, where would you like people to go to follow you if they don't already but where would you like people to go to look at what you do how you do it and the projects that you're building?
I think Twitter but was X now, you know x.com / levels iOS is level-2 like level si0. That was I oh, yeah. Thank you for having me and I'm a big fan of your Twitter.
To I remembered fan of you man. It's so nice. It's taken a couple of years for us to have a chat finally, but I'm I'm super happy to be got to talk about all of this today. I'm really really looking forward to seeing like where you're in the hacker Journey if that is still what you consider yourself to be takes you in the future and thanks for building all of these things in public. You're a role model to a lot of us.
So thank you man. It's an honor to hear man. Frank's
been a pleasure. Thanks for being on the
show. Thank you for having me.
And that's it for today. Peter mentioned that he'd be open to sell his AI businesses eventually and I know just the right place for him to list those businesses. I will now briefly thank my sponsor for today acquired a calm imagine this and it's not going to be hard because Peter just talked about this the whole time your father who's built a really solid SAS product you acquired massive amount of customers you getting consistent monthly recurring Revenue. That's the SAS dream as explained and evidenced by Peters.
I tools the problem is you're not growing for whatever reason maybe lack of focus lack of skill lack of interest and you just feel stuck in your business and with your business in Peters case. It's really an awareness of where things are going to go right is the stuff still going to be around in a couple months it can I still run this business by myself or should somebody take over while the story here at this point in many cases is that people would love to hear that you buckle down reignited the fire you work.
On the business not just in the business you build an audience and you market and do sales and Outreach growing team in whatever six months down the road people would love to hear that. You made all that money, right? You triple your Revenue, you've built this hyper successful business, but reality is unfortunately not as simple as this and the situation that you might find yourself in might be very different and every founder is facing this crossword in a different way, but too many times the story that follows is the same it ends up being one of inaction and
Nation until your business itself becomes less and less valuable over time or Worse completely worthless. So if you find yourself here already, you think that your personal story is likely headed down a similar Road. I would consider a third option and that selling your business on acquired at calm because capitalizing on the value of your time today. Is it pretty smart move? It's the only time you have quiet calm is free to list. They've helped hundreds of farmers already. So go to try not acquire.com / orbit and see for yourself.
If if this is the right option for you and your business right now, thank you so much for listening to the boots of founder today. You can find me on Twitter at David Kerley. Ibid KHL if I'm a boxer might Watercourse there too. And if you want to support me and the show, please subscribe to my YouTube channel, that would be really appreciated just get and read the podcast in your podcast player of choice and even rating and review by going to rate this podcast.com slash founder. It really makes a massive difference for me because if you
Show up there and rate and review then the podcast will show up in other people's feeds and that just means more people get to learn from people like Peter today any of this will help to show. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day and bye. Bye.
