#277 – Addictive Products, Embracing A.I., and Crossing $26k/mo with Lane Wagner of Boot.dev
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We might as well jump into it. We're here with Lane Wagner. What's up, Lane? Hey, how's it going? Doing great. Yeah, same here. You are the founder of boot.dev, where basically anybody can go to learn back-end development, what you call the addictive way. So you've got over 34,000 students who've

Basically signed up to start learning modern back-end development skills like Python and Go. And it takes, what, six months, you said? Just working on this part-time to get to the point where people have completed your coursework and they are now at what level of back-end developer? Entry level. Six months is the aggressive estimate, right? That's the marketing estimate. Yeah, exactly. It's the marketing estimate. Only for the real addicts.

Yeah, the ones that are spending 20 hours a week, you know, really grinding at it. And that's kind of one of the ways that I think we differentiate in the space. Like so many people are marketing like, you know, 12 weeks, six weeks, like crazy, you know, we'll get you through this program really quickly. I think it takes a little longer. I have a blog post that is like linked, you know, with the asterisk on the six months. We're looking at six months. We're looking at 12 months. It's going to take longer. You have to work hard.

I saw that you had a post on IndieHackers. I think it was in July of 2020, where, correct me if I'm wrong, was it QVault Classroom? You were like, hey, how I'm launching a product in an overcrowded industry. And it was called QVault Classroom. I wasn't even sure if this is the same product, but based on your description, it sounds like it. You renamed it to boot.dev.

You dredged up the horrors that were the old product. Yeah. And it struggled for a long time, as I'm sure many indie hackers have this story, right? Yeah, launched it as QVault Classroom. And the reason for naming it QVault is awful. It's just because I owned the domain name.

I didn't want to buy another one. So it was QVault Classroom. That was July 2020, right in the beginning of the pandemic. And now the new better named boot.dev is what I saw is that it's up to 26,000 in revenue a month. Is that still accurate? Yeah, we did 26,000 last month.

And we've kind of been on this insane growth curve for the last about eight months. Um, actually you could even look back farther than that. When we really started to grow was the very beginning of, Oh my gosh, it's 2023 already. Yeah. 2022 was when things started to get good. 2020, 2021 were uber rough. We can talk about all those struggles, but it started to grow in 2020. And the, the rebranding was part of that. We rebranded in March of 2022. Um,

and really niched down. And right when we like niche down and stopped trying to just be generic online coding classroom was when everything started to grow. Who is we? When you say we, who all is running boot.dev? Yeah. So QVAL classroom started out as a side project. I was an engineering manager managing a go team of developers at very large company. So side project until roughly the middle of 2021 when I brought on a partner from the UK.

Um, we struggled for six months together. I then bought him out, went back to owning it myself, hired an employee with the employee. We grew for the first half of 2022. And then I brought on, um, some investment. So small angel funding, a third of a million dollars. And then we've really grown since then, because that was also when I was able to go full time.

Okay, so it's basically you and one employee then? Yep. And a small amount of angel investing. We just talked to Wes Cow recently on the podcast a couple weeks ago. She runs Maven.com. In some respects, Maven is like the same as you. It's like online education. But in other respects, it couldn't be...

more different, right? Like you raised like a very small angel round and you mostly bootstrapped before that. Wes raised like $25 million from investors. You have like this very cool, we'll talk about it, like gamified user interface where anyone can just pop in and start learning to code immediately. On Maven, it's like cohort-based courses. You know, you pick an instructor, there's a time and a place you've got to be there. Yours is cheap. It's like 40 bucks a month, you know, 19 bucks a month if you have the yearly plan.

Um, Bavin is like a thousand dollars a course, sometimes even more.

I think what Maven is doing represents like the other half of kind of the good side of like where I see education going. The idea of cohort based learning is super valuable to like a big subset of people. It's like you could argue the reason people spend like insane amounts of money on college isn't because the material is that much better or even because you get like one on one learning with your professor. A lot of times it's an auditorium, right? It's more the like

social pressure of I have to like meet deadlines. I have friends that are depending on me. So I think there's a ton of value there. The big downside to like the idea of cohort-based learning is expense, right? So I feel like there's kind of two ways that education will go hopefully over the next two years. And like on one side, it's like this amazing opportunity

like self-paced experience where we do everything we can to like artificially give you like a dopamine hits to keep you going and getting through it. Because that's like the big struggle, right? With anyone who's learning, generally speaking, 30 bucks a month or like price down for PPP isn't what's stopping you from breaking into an industry. It's like giving up.

four weeks in. And then on the other hand, I think that cohort-based learning is going to work for a lot of people. It's almost like the bootcamp model, but I guess stretched out over a longer period of time, maybe. So if these are the good halves of where education is going, what's the bad side of where education is going? Well, the whole reason I started this thing was I got a CS degree and I'm really not happy with that experience. Same here, man. I feel like I learned very little that was actually of practical use for me.

Yeah, I liked a lot of my professors, like not really any issues there, but it's insanely expensive. And I say that as someone who basically paid zero for college, like I got scholarships all the way through, but still working, you know, on the side, trying to like pay for living expenses, that sort of thing.

It took four years. I had to take an acting class at one point, like to get an elective credit, just like totally insane stuff. You mean, you mean you got to take an acting class? I had the privilege of taking an acting class. I was Stanley in a streetcar named desire. Oh man. So like there's this,

societal thing where like, I love studying philosophy on my own. I like listen to podcasts and stuff, but like when I'm trying to get a job, right. When I'm working as a bank teller and I really want to level up my career, like now is not the time to pitch me an acting class. One of my favorite quotes from this guy, Naval on Twitter, Naval Ravikant, he posted this right when the pandemic was in full bore. He says, schools aren't about learning. Offices aren't about working. Churches aren't about praying. Restaurants aren't about eating. Obvious now,

And that cuts right to the core of this idea that's at the core of cohort-based learning and what Cortland often says, which is like... Of the bad learning. Right, where Cortland's often like, yeah, college was a scam, but I found all my best friends there. I still love these guys, but for MIT, I wouldn't know them. And it's hard to bake that in if you have basically a cohort class or an online course where you're just distilling it down to the pure functional part.

But still, I have a question. Why so cheap? Like you're...

Boot.dev is $39 a month, or $19 a month if you take the yearly package. And I give a blog post where you talk about aligning your incentives and you talk about pricing. And you said that one of your two goals, besides aligning your incentives, is that you want the overall cost to the student to be extremely low, as low as possible, like less than 1% the price of college. But what you've built is awesome. It's amazing. I went through the early tutorials and it's like,

A very useful product that took a ton of effort and time. Why not charge more money? So to quickly answer your question, I think our price will go up a little bit. There's definitely a cap. I don't think we'll ever realistically be having our lifetime value for a student over $1,000. So the value that Boot Dev provides today versus a year ago is way higher because we have so many new courses and features and all these things. So it'll creep up.

But yeah, this problem of incentives is like very prescient in education. And I think people very rightfully are quick to like sniff out scams in education. Like if you publish a course and it's not very good and you charge a lot of money, like people will get upset, right? Rightfully so. But it's amazing how much college has gotten away with.

Like, I don't know why college gets this special pass of like, we're going to charge you $100,000, give you, you know, some degree that doesn't like directly help you with your job. And for some reason, like we don't care.

So it's really important to me to get these incentives aligned. And I think the basic model of like charging a low amount and providing a ton of value is the lowest risk thing until something better comes along. Obviously, like in the blog post that you're talking about, Cortland, I talk about ISAs and this kind of stuff. And I think that that stuff can work. But like now we've seen like the last four years of that. And there was a pretty big blow up with companies doing ISAs.

And so like it turned out not to be the silver bullet that we thought it would be. As for listeners, ISA is an income share agreement. So these are basically companies that will say, oh, come, we'll teach you the code for free. And then, you know, you give us a percentage of your salary, your first year on the job. Yeah.

Yeah. And so like, there's kind of two things. My understanding of the problem is like twofold. One is that you just have to get a job making like a not super great income. So like you could land a job after one of these boot camps making 50 or 60 K, but now you're on the hook for 50 or $60,000 to back pay your education, even though the job you happen to land isn't that great.

And I think the marginal cost of most of this stuff can just be near zero. You know, I add a new student on boot dev. I pay zero dollars. The biggest cost I have is acquisition, right? Getting the word out. So by having something awesome, by coming on podcasts or doing a course on free code camp on their YouTube channel, like I can bring those costs way, way down. But that is the challenge is getting in front of people.

I'm kind of curious what it took you to get in front of people in the beginning, because to learn how to code, I built a code game called Flexbox Defense. It teaches you CSS styles and things like that. And

I feel like it was a huge missed opportunity for me. You can correct me if I'm wrong, because at the time I wasn't all that entrepreneurial. I just wanted to get like a cushy gig doing consulting work. So I'm like, Oh, well this will be remarkable, right? It's a game. It'll teach people. And that thing blew up on day one. Like I still, I think I had like a donation for PayPal. I probably get, you know, $20 a week, five or six years later, seven years later,

And it just spread. So what was it like for you? I mean, first off, was the V1 of your product even this sort of gamified learning experience? Or how did the early growth pings work for you? Yeah. So I had a bunch of problems in the beginning. One problem was the idea for the platform was way too broad. It was like, we're going to teach you to code. And the genesis for the idea was like,

okay, we have all these bootcamps that are like rushing people through HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in three months. I want to teach you like the stuff you learn in a CS degree that's actually applicable to a job because there are parts of a CS degree that are super important. Other parts, not so much. But I want to teach you that stuff that like bootcamps seem to be skipping over. And I interviewed a lot of bootcamp grads. There were a couple kind of prominent bootcamps here where I live in Utah. And it's like, well, this stuff is like obviously missing and you just need a little bit longer to teach it. So like that was the idea.

But that idea is so generic and broad that I just struggled to find any traction because I'm like releasing a go course and then like an object-oriented programming course and just all this stuff. And where were you trying to advertise? Like when you say you were struggling, like you put it on Product Hunt or something or you tweet about it and then it's crickets? Yeah, we had like a crickets product hunt thing. Where was I trying to advertise? That was the other problem was like I've learned so much in the last two and a half years. Even though I was putting in the effort...

When you're bad at UI design and marketing, you have to put in 10 times the effort that someone experienced has to put in to get the same result. Because you don't know. You're in the wrong places saying the wrong things. Yeah. So I had like 300 followers on Twitter. I'm tweeting about it. Nobody cares. Blogging was how we initially started to get traction.

So I was an okay writer. I'm a much better writer now, but I was a decent writer and I got some traction on Medium and some of these other blogging platforms, which in hindsight was definitely not the best way to do it. I probably should have gone the video route with YouTube, but it did work. I did get some traction. We started ranking for some SEO terms and that's kind of like what creeped us up to that first like $1,000 MRR. Right.

Honestly, that's even a pain with me and Cortland with IndieHackers is like, you know, if you're closely like, you know, sort of running out of money on your runway and you're getting started, SEO is a long term play, even if you do it well. Right. So you basically didn't start to see anything until the SEO started to take off.

launched the platform, I guess in March of 2020, like right as the pandemic broke. And it was like a nothing burger for like a good three or four months. I mean, I'm like doing the classic thing, just kind of like head down, working on it nights and weekends, right? I had a full-time job, so I'm not like, there's no concept of runway at this point. But like, I'm working on it. I put out the first course. There was, it was like a whole platform that I built with just one course on it. Again, probably a mistake. Yeah.

Could have done that a different way. It was like the middle of 2021 when we made like our first thousand dollars in a single month. So just like really long, slow burn. I love blogging. So like it wasn't hard to just do that once a week.

But it was not the growth play. And we can talk about how we grew a lot faster after that by doing more than just blogging. How do you get good at writing? Because this is something I see a lot of people improve at over the course of their career online. They start off as like kind of crappy writers and then they kind of find their own in terms of like what actually resonates with readers, what makes something good versus something bad. What's your philosophy after having written lots of blog posts for years?

I've looked at my early blog posts and the blog posts of like inexperienced writers people have just started and I feel like there's this fake writer in everyone where like you have this fake voice that you expect to be Like the writer voice and you need to write in that voice Yeah, and that was one of the biggest things to like overcome be like no actually it's much better if you just write in your own voice and have you know unique hot takes of

Slightly controversial stuff is the best. Anytime I wrote an article that had a hot take that I knew about 50% of the people who read the article would disagree with, I knew that was a banger and it's going to the top of Hacker News. So that's the other thing. You actually want to rip out the nuance from your thoughts and put it towards the bottom of your article. Yeah.

and put all your controversial stuff right at the top to get people's attention. That's honestly one of the best pieces of advice I think I could give. I think that's amazing advice. Literally, Channing and I were just looking at your blog and I was saying this. I was like, look at Lane's blog. Every single post he has is an interesting discussion topic that you could kind of argue with. And now I know exactly why. You've intentionally done it that way. That's good. It generates discussion. It generates engagement. People want to read stuff that's not very milquetoast.

And then to your point, like, on the opposite, like, the worst thing ever is when someone's writing and they're equivocating about every point, you know? They show you both sides of the issue and they never say anything that's, like, extreme and it just gets boring. Yeah, so I actually fell into this trap pretty hard because...

weird side note. So I grew up LDS, Mormon here in Utah. I've since left the church. I'm like pretty atheist at this point, but I've watched a lot of like religious discussion and what's really valued in like academic, like,

like, you know, kind of philosophical debate is tons of nuance, tons of equivocating. You're always couching everything you say in like, but it depends. And that's actually a terrible strategy for writing online.

It's a terrible strategy for doing anything that's supposed to be interesting. Yeah. Nobody wants to hear the both lukewarm sides of an issue. People want to hear an actual strong opinion that they can hold on to and say something about. Yeah, which has bad ramifications for society, but it is a good way to get people to listen to you online. What do you mean? Like Twitter? One of the things that I think is really beautiful and honestly reassuring about communication

communicating in that way is if you have a product and it's just you, you're a small team, you can say the prose to the poetry, like the really simplified, interesting thing. And then once you get people in the door and they come to your website or they see your product, then you can give them like an extra layer, right? You're kind of going down the pyramid. You start with just the top, they go, that's interesting. And then you give them a little bit more of the

is needed to get them to the next step. And so by the time it really matters, people know what you're about.

Yeah, exactly. People will give you the benefit of the doubt once they've, you know, in the context of a blog, read down the page or in the context of your product, like signed up and done a few things. So you can like, yeah, you can save the nuance for later. Okay. So you're a better writer, but SEO is still slow. What actually started moving the needle? You said you started blowing up, growth started really, you know, jumping to another level of growth, like in early 2022, I think you said. What worked? Yeah.

How did you switch from QVault to Boot.dev? How did you make that transformation?

Well, I always knew it needed like we needed to change our name. I was like this. This name doesn't make any sense. It has nothing to do with education. It's like I always knew it was going to change at some point. I was just too lazy to change it. So I guess I was taking it more seriously and wanted to rebrand at that point. But I don't think the rebranding like was was it was a part. It was like a part of the greater idea, which helped our growth, which was niching down the product, being way more obvious about what we're about.

So I actually ended up deleting some courses, which sounds insane to a content creator because you spend all this time building these courses and this educational material. So the pitch of QVault back in 2021 was come learn computer science online.

And ranking for those search terms is the worst. Because you're ranking against the colleges that started the internet. Like their domains are like the most powerful domains. And you can't rank for those terms. But you can rank for terms like backend developer. So it just so happened that everyone coming to my website, even though it was about computer science, like pretty much had the goal of becoming a backend developer. Those are like quite tightly aligned, right? There's a ton of resources online.

on the internet for learning front-end development on your own. But backend's kind of unique in that, like, there's just not many platforms, like, dedicated to backend development. You can find something that, like, talks about Java or something that talks about C++, but, like, a career path for backend developers doesn't really exist. And I think there's several reasons why that is, but that niching down helped. And so when we did that, I, like, went and deleted, like,

Anything on the product that distracted from that. So like we had a graphics course. I'm like, I don't know. Graphics, like throw it away. It was, it was awful. But like we immediately started growing because people were now landing on the site and they're like, oh, this is where I can learn backend development. Like I was searching around. There's nowhere else that does that, but all your messaging talks about it.

So that was the product side of it for sure. So it's kind of a rare product-led growth change where usually when people tinker around with their product, it doesn't really change their ability to grow. But you capture marketing the same. You're still blogging. You're still working on SEO. But you just pared down your product to change what you're working on and it made your messaging much more specific, much more valuable, and quite frankly, easier to rank for. And that's what kickstarted your growth.

So when we were making $1,000 a month at the beginning of 2022, we had about the same amount of organic traffic. Actually, we might have even had more than we have right now because when I rebranded the site, we lost a bunch of rankings, even though I did everything perfectly, but Google's the worst, like from a technical perspective, like all the redirects are there. But we got like, we lost like half of our organic traffic. So we had this like funnel of people coming in. At the time, it was almost 100,000 people hitting our blog every month.

Um, it was just, we had awful, like truly awful conversion rates. Uh, so getting that up and changing what we were writing about, like everything we're writing about now is, is backend and go and Python. And, um,

tightening that up has been a game changer so i'm gonna i'm gonna go back in the in the vault and embarrass you again or actually this time i'm not gonna embarrass you because you mentioned it was right at the beginning of 2022 where you started to to see some more growth you started to kind of niche down and sure enough here's a post from what is it july 2022 where you said got 10 super users and it's unlocking growth even faster than i expected and

And so that seems like it aligns perfectly with this idea of instead of being mediocre to a lot of people, you're like stellar to a small number of people. But like, tell me what happened here. Yes, I'm not going to fanboy too hard, but I have listened to like every indie hacker podcast. I've also listened to a lot of the Y Combinator stuff.

And one of these ideas that I think is really, really important is it's much better to be great to a small number of people than like lukewarm to a lot of people. And so that was what I was like really taking to heart at that point. And so, yeah, I just went and like one by one started interviewing people who were actually using the site.

Why are you here? Why are you here? Why do you care about these courses? Why aren't you over on, you know, some competitor site? And like the story started to get pretty consistent. Like I'm here to learn back in development. This is my background. Turns out a lot of them had a common background in like IT ops, but like hadn't really written a lot of codes, like learning what they were about and then building just for them, you

started to grow and this industry like the learn to x industry is like so powerfully fueled by word of mouth so you start getting some super users who really like you you can start growing kind of organically in that way what do you think the y combinator podcast is doing that we should be doing speaking of of uh fights and disagreements what's good about their podcast

Because I never listened to it. They did a series of lectures at Stanford and published it as a podcast on Spotify. It's like 20 episodes from like, I don't know, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, like all the... They all like took a lecture. We should be lecturing at Stanford. And those were great, those 20 episodes. That's all I've listened to from them. What do you think we should be doing on this podcast? If you've listened to like every episode, what do you like? What do you not like?

The best episodes that have had the most impact on boot dev are like, I mean, I could just start naming them. I guess I don't know exactly what the pattern are, but it was like Nir Eyal, the hooked stuff was awesome. The mom test. The people who have come on and really drilled into these very specific ideas. The authors. People who've written books. Because they're subject matter experts and they're like, here's what you need to know. Here's valuable information. Boom, bam. And you walk away having learned something.

Now, I will say the stories are great too because it's like you hear the advice from the people with the books and then you hear the stories of how people implemented it. So I don't know if one works without the other, but the authors explaining in depth, like, okay, here's how you're going to do a customer interview was immensely helpful. It's fascinating to hear that because they ask other people the same question. And it feels like the people who have not yet

built anything like the stories and the people like you who are like okay i'm at twenty six thousand dollars a month like you want like the real hard facts of how you're going to build an actual business you're beyond the stories a little bit like you're already inspired and motivated you just want to build something how do i solve very specific problems yeah i guess like if your struggle and i mean you guys know this better than me if your struggle is motivation then yeah i'm sure the stories are more helpful but like i didn't really struggle with motivation i just like

Struggled with sucking at building a business? Yeah, that simplifies things. That's where I always was too in my 20s and even now. It's not hard to sit down and work. It's hard to succeed because there's a hundred million other people out there working on a bunch, even in your niche. You are teaching people how to code online. There's been five people on this podcast who've been teaching people how to code online. It's hard to cut through the noise and figure out

how you're going to win. So I agree with you. I think even if you've got the motivation, it's not easy to build something. You need to get Seth Godin on. The Purple Cow, I think, was one of the best books. I'm a huge fan. I would love to have him on.

Yeah. So like this new, I am not like a good UI UX person. I'm a backend developer, surprise. But like the early versions of the site were truly awful in terms of how they looked and felt. It's gotten a lot better now. And I think a good cheat code there was reading the purple cow and realizing like, okay, this industry is crowded. There's a ton of people,

teaching people how to code online. We need to be remarkable and different. And there's nothing wrong with that. Like we need to stop trying to make our site look like the big players. Yeah, that's exactly it. I think standing out. I mean, we do this for any hackers in a way for us. It's like really simple. Somebody was complaining yesterday on Twitter. They're like at CSL. And when are you going to make the website white so they can read it? And I'm like,

Probably never. Just going to be this weird, hard to read, dark blue website because you know what? Every time somebody comes to IndieHackers a second time, they remember that they've been here before. And I think just standing yourself out apart from the crowd is worth its weight in gold.

Yeah, we recently changed our font probably four months ago. It is the open source version, I don't know, of the font from Dota 2. Yeah, it's very video game-y. Yeah, and I initially had a bunch of complaints like, oh, it's a little harder to read. And so I actually did...

take that into account because you do a lot of reading on the site. So we like made some tweaks. So it was a little easier to read, but at the end of the day we kept it and people land on it and they're like, this is weird. Like this is a weird feel. Yeah. Um, but they remember it. Right. Uh, and, and that helps like so much more than you'd think. And it also, also just puts you into like game mindset. So the Coraline and I played a lot of world of Warcraft growing up and I'm obsessed with gamifying my life. I'm obsessed with gaming products. Um,

But I'm also kind of curious because I mean even your pitch it might have been on your might have been on the site might be on Twitter is like hey make learning addictive and you also just mentioned near I all where he wrote this book called hooked which is all about basically getting people hooked on games and then he wrote a book after that that's called indestructible which is like how do I unwind how do I teach people how to like not get hooked on stuff so

How do you think about striking the balance there where you're hooking people, but trying to make sure that it's like in a way that aligns with their values? Yeah, great question. I mean, the best cheat code is the fact that like,

we're teaching you useful things so like getting addicted to like learning useful things is like already inherently a good thing rather than like strolling on facebook's like just out of the gate we're like in a pretty good spot now there is one pitfall that we definitely ran into which is like you can't incentivize the wrong things in your product because we do have a lot of users who love the game system like they love the achievements and the quests and

And if you incentivize the wrong things, then you get people like beating your game, but not learning as effectively as they can. So we've had to like retweak a bunch of times, like how, how we award achievements. Like, let me give you an example. So in the early version of boot dev, you had one button after you wrote your code in the browser and it was the run button. And when you run your code, you could see afterwards if you got it correct or not. And we had an achievement that would,

incentivize you to never get it wrong. So you get it right the first time, then you go on the next one, you get it right the next time, you have this streak building up. That is terrible practice for real-life coding because in real life, you're sitting there with a debugger. You're getting it wrong over and over and over again.

There's no value in getting it right the first time. So we had to tweak that. So now there's two buttons. You basically have a debug and, like, a submit. And so you can sit there and test with the debug as much as you want. And then once you think you have it right, you can submit. And, like, that changed a ton. Now, like, people are, you know, cheating way less. Like, all that kind of stuff. Right, right, right.

I mean, the way you've got it set up, like, the gamification is it's actually, like, a quest. And the quest is basically, like, to become a developer. And so you've got these little missions you go on, which are, like, you know, in any other coding course would be called, like, courses. But at the end of it, like, are people graduating and getting hired?

Yeah, so I know pretty much everyone who's gone through the course like all the way. It's huge. There's like 20 courses on the platform and they're all kind of lined up in a linear fashion. So it takes people, you know, six to 12 months to actually get through it all. So there's a lot of content. So I pretty much know everyone who's been through all of it. And at this point, I'm pretty sure all of them are employed. Right.

A couple of them were employed before switching into like a new tech stack, but some of them weren't. In fact, I think the top two on our leaderboard like came to the platform learning to code, never been employed. Like now they have jobs as developers. So like success has been awesome, but it is like, like I said, our approach is like take your time and go deeper on this stuff. We don't want to produce people who like have a very shallow understanding of JavaScript who are then out struggling in the market.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I've been thinking a lot about AI and its role on basically coding. I was using ChatGPT the other day to help me code. Have you used it yet?

Yeah, absolutely. We actually, so we have a new mascot for the site. His name is Boots. He's a cute little wizard bear who helps you learn to code. He's like your mentor as you like go through these assignments. And basically the way he works is you can highlight any code snippet in the courses and click explain. And then Boots uses the, you know, GPT-4 AI or API to explain like what that code is doing.

So I'm a huge fan of that assisted learning. I've been using it every once in a while to convert data from one format to another. I've actually found GitHub Copilot to be more helpful when it comes to efficiency just because it's baked into my editor. It will just auto-complete your code for you while you're writing code, which is amazing. And it's like right 99% of the time in my case. It's amazing. Actually, I was struggling to come up with a good...

This is going to be a little tangential. I was struggling to come up with a good challenge yesterday for our Go course. And we have this unique problem where Go is a highly, it's meant to be run on multiple CPU cores. And when we run it in the browser, we're running in WebAssembly, which is single-threaded. So I needed a challenge that would get you to understand the idea of concurrency, even though you're working in a single-threaded environment.

And ChatGPT came up with, like, the formula for the challenge that I'd been, like, struggling to come up with for quite a while. Good. So good. Yeah. So we'll be using it a lot. Do you think this is going to change the way that people code in the long run? Like, obviously, it's early days, right? Like, ChatGPT for ChatGPT has only been out for, like, I mean, it feels like it's been an eternity, but it's, like, a month. You know? Like, it's, like, not that long.

Once people start building actual tooling on it, like you've built, you know, you've got your wizard bear in there and it's kind of helpful, but like you can also imagine like something that's helping you write the code and kind of talking about what you should do next, et cetera. And these aren't like improvements to the underlying technology. The underlying technology is already out. These are just improvements to the user interface that allow you to sort of corral the AI to help people write a lot more effective code.

And you have people like Amjad Massad from Repl.it and other people who are predicting that every developer is going to be a quote-unquote 10x developer. And every 10x developer is going to be a 100x developer, which sounds fanciful, but at this point I believe almost anything. What do you think? Do you think this is actually the future, that it's going to revolutionize how people code? Or is it just going to be a little bit of a co-pilot, a little bit of a helper on the side?

So I think like an order of magnitude improvement for developers is probably an exaggeration. In my experience, like,

co-pilot and chat GPT maybe make me like two times, like at most two times more productive, depending on the situation. Like there have been situations where I like got me unstuck. And so you could argue that's like amazing, right? Save me a ton of time. But then like in the normal case, it's, it's not quite as helpful. Um, but yeah, I think it's, it's pretty accurate to say, um, for people learning, like people who are like very junior, um,

chat GPT and like AI code generation is going to be super helpful for kind of getting you unstuck, especially in the sense of like, it can write the code and then explain what it does. Right. Because that's what you really need when you're learning. We already had, like, this is the thing we already had the ability to like, Oh, I need a binary tree. Let me go copy paste that from online. Like we already had that problem. The fact that chat GPT can code a binary tree is like not,

not super interesting. The fact that it can explain to you what every line does without you having to like interact with another human, like that's pretty interesting to me. So I think it's fair to say that it'll make the more productive people even more productive. And I think it'll also help at the bottom end of the curve. I think the takeaway is that because people are getting more productive, like you just need to get better because

Because as you get better, you can use these tools to kind of magnify your impact in whatever you're doing. There's something that I really like when I think about the disruptive potential of chat GPT. Because a lot of people are really worried.

But probably the best take that I've heard is from this guy Cal Newport You may have read his book or heard of it deep work his whole like brand is We all are doing way too much like running around hair on fire like shallow work And like we should be spending more time doing things that are more difficult and he did a deep dive He's a computer scientist on chat GPT and he's like, hey look I

This is going to be disruptive, but it's going to be disrupting a lot of the work that none of us really want to do. Just like you said, hey, you can already go look up code snippets on Google. This thing just kind of makes it happen in a couple of clicks, right? There are a lot of admin type, sort of communication overhead type jobs that this thing is going to make go away. When we think about ChatGPT and its ability to do writing work, it's like,

you know, it does good listicles that are kind of superficial. It gives you ideas, but if you're a really, really good, insightful, you know, writer saying surprise, the kind of surprising shit that we talked about, right. Um, chat GPT, at least at the moment, isn't making that go away. So I like the idea of having this thing that makes the shallow work go away and gives me more space for deep work. Yeah. I think like generally speaking, job displacement is a good thing as long as it doesn't happen too fast.

Right? Like, you want this advancement. Like, you want people not doing data entry. Like, data entry is awful. It is soul-sucking work. But you also don't want to, like, tomorrow put, you know, 4 million people out of a job. Right. So as long as it happens at, like, a reasonable pace, I think it's fantastic. Well, it's interesting because I think we also, like,

especially as software engineers, have been living in an environment where we... It's kind of a matter of course that we have to update our skills. For example, if you're a front-end developer, it's like every two years you gotta forget everything you know. There's another framework out that's completely different. And I think most careers in the history of the world have not been that way. If you're making horseshoes in 1835, you're making them the same way in 1865. It wasn't a big difference. And so if you're out of a job, you're screwed. You just haven't

really had to learn anything. Whereas now it's like, okay, like you see a lot of programmers who are like, okay, how do I learn like all this AI stuff? Right. And it's not that bad. And so I think as like you get a workforce that's more adept at changing, it's kind of like better than it was in the past to have really rapid disruption and put more people out of work because those people can adapt much more quickly or so I hope. Yeah. The idea that like,

We teach you from the time that you're five until the time that you're 22. And then after that, you just stop work is, I think, terribly outdated. It makes way more sense to me, especially with like how fast things are moving, to just expect that all of your working years, you'll be to some degree learning new stuff. And we need to get comfortable with that idea and figure out the right ways to do it.

Yeah. And it's kind of hard as a founder. I think like when you're starting companies, it's like you've got this like this pool in one direction. It's like, hey, I want to make money and like have this actually work. Right. I want to just keep bailing for years. But on the other side, you have all these like

tempting things that can like maybe you move a little bit slower but they're better like for example like I failed at like four or five companies in my 20s but I learned something new every time and not just like fluffy stuff but like hard skills like it became like a much better writer a much better visual designer a much better back-end and front-end programmer and sysadmin like all these skills so that like by the time I was 30 I was like this badass who accumulated all these skills even though I hadn't had any like real wins and business and I think it's worthwhile for founders to essentially

Slow down a little bit. Worry a little bit less about succeeding with the current thing. And accumulate skills because that's something that's guaranteed that you can always take with you no matter whether or not your business succeeds.

Yeah, I was actually just thinking about this yesterday. The whole idea of like an MVP is like super subjective. Like my first MVP, QVALT Classroom, was truly terrible. Like it was not good, but like not because I needed to put in an extra month of effort. That probably wasn't the right call either.

I just was really bad at UI UX design. And like, it took me a while to figure it out. So yeah, I I'm with you. It's like, you have to figure out the right amount of effort to put in, but just expect that it's going to get better. If you keep doing it, like the next product or the next iteration of the product, it's,

is going to get better. So figuring out that right amount of effort to put in upfront is actually super challenging because it's hard to like figure out what minimum is. Like minimum for me right now is a much higher bar than it was back then. Even though, I don't know, the amount of time is like pretty much the same that I'm putting in. That's such a fascinating topic to me because

I think that it takes that falling on your face and like the error correcting forward to get good at literally any of the skills that go into being an entrepreneur, right? To be just a backend developer or a front end developer. A front end developer took me many years, right? I was in sales. It took me a while to get good at sales, but you have to do all of these things all at once. And yet a lot of the narrative with entrepreneurs,

making a company work, I think of like a lot of the Mark Zuckerberg being a college genius and having this thing that works right out of the gate. Like you often don't hear about

Cortland, what he just mentioned, his four big failed projects that taught him here, he just sort of shows up like the tip of the iceberg with indie hackers doing really well and you don't see the 10 years of compounded growth and learning. I think it's really hard and scary to branch off and learn something new. Let's say you're a founder right now, you don't know how to code, right? On one hand, you're like, okay, well, I can just use all these no-code tools and AI and I can just be a writer. I can make money next month, right?

But like, at what point do you decide like, hey, maybe I just should learn how to code. And I know that if I do that, I will not be making money next month. Like my company will not be off the ground because like I'm investing in my skills. Striking the right balance there, I think is hard. But as I've gotten older, I've leaned more on like, err on the side of learn. Like it's not as big of a rush as you think it is to get to the point where your company's successful. Like that time is going to pass anyway. But if you become more of a badass over time, it's just worth it.

I'm a big Age of Empires StarCraft 2 fan. And like, there's an analogy here. So I'm going to throw it down. I think like erring on the side of investing is like you're building more worker units. You're investing in the economy. It's your economy. It's your macro. Yeah, it's your macro. Exactly. Taking the shortcut and like deploying next month, that can work. But like, it's the rush build. And if it doesn't work, then you're not any farther forward. Yeah, you lose. You got to play another game.

There's a niche of 10 now super fans of this show, like just hardcore StarCraft fans who are like geeking out. Like they're driving, listening to this podcast. They pulled over to the side of the road. And then the other 90% of our audience is like me. They can go take a hike. I'm here for the 10%. There was another lifetime where StarCraft was all I did. I was a Grandmaster StarCraft 2 player. All I did was play StarCraft nonstop. The game is amazing.

So, Lan, I'm glad you're a fan. We haven't made a better game since StarCraft II. Why isn't it the case that learning how to code online and gamified versions of learning haven't reached the levels of fun that a game like StarCraft has?

When you're making a gamified coding thing, it's fun. I signed into it. I did the demo. For your homepage, the sign-up button is not even sign-up. It's like, do this three-minute demo, immediately jump in. It's fun. It's not bad. But nothing I've ever seen is at the point where I'm like, this is actually the same level as a real game.

That's a really good question. I think it's because when you're designing a game, you have one, you have like one goal in mind, and that is just to make it as addictive as possible and as fun as possible. When you're designing something like boot dev, you're okay, how can I make this as fun as addicting as possible? While while the North Star is getting you through all of this content?

right and some of that content is like well here's the thing coding actually is inherently fun and has a game loop built into it yeah right like you write some code you get some feedback i can throw some confetti in your face like maybe that helps but like the actual game loop of write code get feedback solve a puzzle is there like it is in diablo where you're like you know running around monsters exploding and like that's the core game loop um

it just takes so much more effort. Like, it's funny, like on the topic of StarCraft, that is a hard game. And I have friends that won't play it because it's hard. And so they go to other games that are like lower effort. I think coding is like a even harder game. Like it is a game, but the effort bar is much higher. So it's like,

just taxing to like do it for long, long periods of time. Well, it's also, it's also kind of a catch 22 for you, right? Where you, if you somehow theoretically, if you were able to make your, your,

product as fun as StarCraft, then in a lot of ways it would defeat the purpose. Like you said, you don't necessarily want people to be kind of stuck and playing the learning game over and over again. You want them to get to the end. Like their entire philosophy books written about like, how do you distinguish like, you know, what a game is from other types of pursuits. And one of the big distinctions is like, look, if you...

in a way we have a game of hiking of like trying to climb a mountain and you know it's a game because if you were given the option of getting helicoptered to the top of the mountain you'd be like why would i do that right it's like well the process on the album yeah it's like isn't the point to get to the top it's like the point is to climb to the top like that's what starcraft is right you want you want to get there but you want to like have the process you want to see that you know you want to feel you know your heart pounding and all that stuff but

You have to somehow make the game fun, but also have people want to graduate and go do something else. That's a great comparison. Whereas if you could snap your fingers and know how to be a great back-end engineer tomorrow, let's just do that. What's this boot dev bullshit? Maybe we should be doing this for indie hackers. Maybe having a podcast in a community forum is the wrong approach. Maybe we should have a game

that turns you into a good founder, almost like the Sims or something where you're sort of controlling this virtual company, but you're making all these decisions that... You know that exists, right? Like there is, I don't, I think number one, there's a VR game that's like, I think it's like, you know, start whatever, business, right? But it's like, it's such bullshit. It's like, it basically is all of the, like the process of it, all the stress that

But if being a founder is so intrinsically not that fun, that like, it's just, you know, you're sitting in a cube and like you're watching these numbers go up and down. Pretty sure it's not like flying off the shelves.

Well, I think part of being a founder is that there's no prescribed path. There are no railroad tracks, right? Like if you're playing Starcraft, like there's a tech tree. You do this, you do that, you do this, and you unlock this building, you unlock this unit. Whereas being a founder, like there might be paths that get carved out, but like due to the competitive nature of markets, they get a little bit like saturated by the competition. And so essentially, if you really want to like be a step ahead and like actually be able to market your product or come up with new ideas, you

you have to abandon the existing path to some degree. You can't just make the same thing and market it the same way as everybody else and actually build a successful company. With BootDev, maybe you've got to change your font to a video game font and niche down in some way. Andy Hacker's like, maybe we needed a blue website and we had to have revenue numbers. And so it's kind of hard to think of how you would have a game

That even enables this because a huge part of it is trying to explore and figure out like, what isn't part of the default user interface, the default path that I can do to make my company successful?

The interesting thing is like being an entrepreneur, like learning to code is kind of inherently a game in the sense that there is a feedback loop. Like I log into Stripe, there is like no greater dopamine hit than like having a good day on Stripe, right? Where the revenue hits and you see that. In fact, I had to uninstall the Stripe mobile app on my phone because I was checking too often at one point. Like when we started to grow, it was bad. I was like compulsively checking. Um,

It's like the dopamine hits are there. And like, I guess the social aspect, there's like a, there's something amazing about like, you know, your company's doing well, you're sharing with the community and all that stuff. That stuff, I think you guys are doing a great job with. And like, but like, those are like really the only things, at least in my experience, that are like part of the game loop. Like I'm growing this thing. Like people are seeing me growing it. That's, that's encouraging me.

Number go up, money go up. That's it. The final part of the game loop that's actually harder to recognize is something that we talked about before, which is self-growth. I'm convinced that

our brains are made for games. Like there's a reason why we like games and it's that the brain has evolved to like take in these signals from the environment. Like, Oh, Hey, I had this goal and it was hard. And I like overcame the challenge and I did it because it just so highly correlates with you becoming smarter, right? With you become like, you know, sort of being, I don't know, more articulate or better able to write something if that's what your challenge is.

And in those rare moments where you recognize, I mean, Hey, with me with coding, like, Hey, I really struggled to like get a webpage up really fast. And then I struggled in these ways. And I had these, you know, vanity metrics come my way. And at the end of that, it was actually really easy for me to whip things up. Or I used to fucking have an email phobia where I really didn't like opening emails, like back in college, because it was just, you know, such a slam. It was a point where I like got over that. And then just opening an email was fun for me. I think that

There's nothing like entrepreneurship for having like a million of those types of experiences every single year. Yeah, I don't know what you do there. It's like I have struggled so much to put gamification stuff into boot dev. Like the problem of gamifying entrepreneurship in like an online platform, I think is like

two or three x like it is a much greater challenge uh at least just like thinking as a user of indie hackers like uh do i care about yeah i don't know if it should be done i don't know i don't know if it if it even should be done i mean but like i mean just basic stuff right like the sort of feedback loop of like okay stripe you get like a little ding you see you've made money that's an addictive reward um but there's also social rewards like people want status they want to compare themselves to others like one of the biggest things in any game is

a leaderboard. Like I play a ton of Beat Saber on my VR headset and it's like partly exercise. It's partly fun. But like what drives me is like I beat a song that I'd never beaten before. Then I look at the leaderboard and it's like, you're a number, you know, 13,000, you know, 12,999 people have like beat this song harder than you beat it. What are you gonna do about that? And it's just fun to come back and like get sucked into like, okay, I'll play it again. I'll do the exact same thing again just to see my name go up that chart.

And we could do that with indie hackers. We have a ton of products. We have a ton of revenue. We could show who's growing faster, who's doing what. And that's just one more motivational factor, especially in the early days when the dollar amounts aren't that high. Just comparing yourself to others is...

Or it could be demotivational. That's the challenge. That's why it might not be a thing we want to do. Right when you said it, I was like, that's the thing. Because we have a leaderboard on BootDev, and it's arguably our most effective gamification thing. And I would definitely check the IndieHackers leaderboard after a good month. Am I at the top? Yeah, where am I? What's going on? We have this really fun dichotomy where

Any comparison like signals that we have on the site? Cause we we've had not necessarily leaderboards, but we have featured sections. You know, we, we used to have people that had like the most popular milestone posts. Everything's a feed. It's all a ranking. Everything is a feed. And there are two types of people. There are people who see these competitive dashboards and they go, I'm going to be number one. And then you have the people who are like,

Fuck all those, you know, sort of posers. It's all fake anyway. It's all vanity. Like, this isn't, you know, healthy for the community. Yeah, this is not what you should be doing. Yeah, but they suck. Yeah. Yeah.

It's like the people who don't like StarCraft. That is not a winner's coping strategy, but... Well, I think if you're making a product, you got to have opinions, right? Like there's room in the world for multiple indie hackers. If we decided we want to do all this gamification stuff, like we could do it. Somebody could build the other super nice non-competitive indie hackers. Like same with boot.dev, right? Like you've taken a stand. You want to have a leaderboard. This is what's great and allows for multiple people in any industry to win. This is part of why you can't enter...

a crowded marketplace where people are already doing stuff and still make a business that's doing $26,000 a month in revenue because you can have your own opinions. And in fact, not having opinions and not taking a stand is probably as detrimental for building a product as it is for writing because you have this lukewarm, boring thing that nobody knows why they should read it or use it compared to what's already out there. Where we've positioned ourselves today at BootDev, I've found that we have very few competitors.

A lot of our users use other sites. Like we'll, we'll, you know, they'll learn back in on boot dev. They're interested in HTML. They'll go learn it somewhere else. There's like a hundred sites where you can go learn HTML and CSS. Like the last thing I'm worried about is another person starting another site where you can learn HTML and CSS by watching videos. Right.

And yeah, the more you can lean into that, like you enter a crowded marketplace and you think of it as this huge thing. But once you start to figure out what you're about, like you take the intersection of like, you know, gamification and backend and the programming language go like all of a sudden your market starts to get really small and you can do really well in that in that small market.

So what's next for you? I mean, you're profitable now, which is a really cool place to be. Everything beyond this is kind of just great. You can try to grow and get more and more employees.

It's kind of like you're playing a game with your life and you get to design what you want your life to be, right? Do you want to be the wizard or do you want to be the warrior, right? Do you want to be a bootstrap scrappy indie hacker who just like has fun tinkering on the coolest things you want to build? Or do you go hard, build a huge team somewhere in between something on a different axis? Like what do you want to do in the future? So we raised a third of a million dollars and we...

we just had a profitable Q1. Our biggest expenses are my salary and my employee's salary, like by far as tech companies go. But I'm taking half the salary that I was taking as actually less than half as an engineering manager. So the goal is to stay profitable whilst growing my salary back up to a reasonable level. That's like this year's goal. After that, like I,

My investors, I actually knew them from a previous company. So I had a really easy and fast raise. It took like a week to get it closed and done, which was awesome. They were the only investors I talked to. But I was upfront with them like, I probably don't want to raise again. Like I want to do this the like slow growth profitable way. I think it'll be a much healthier ed tech business. There's been a lot of ed tech companies in the last 10 years that have like blown up and then like died because they grew on the back of like, I don't know, Facebook ads that weren't profitable or something like that.

So no, the plan is to keep growing profitably, maybe even 37 signal style. I agree with maybe 20 of the 37 signals, something like that. That's the plan.

What inspires you? I mean, obviously getting to the point of paying yourself. What you are making at your normal job is tremendously inspirational. I think there's almost like this sort of ladder of what inspires indie hackers. Getting to quit your job is usually the first one. Getting to the point of profitability is the second one. Getting to the point where you can actually make a living wage that's great is the third one. What is after that for you?

Yeah. So I have expenses. I'm married with two children. My youngest was just born two months ago. Nice. Congratulations. Thank you. Yeah. The plan is like, okay, I want to get back to making a good amount of money. And like, I actually kind of just have tunnel vision to that point. But I guess like the dream after that is like, how can I just work less so that when my kids are, you know, five, 10 years old, I just have a ton of time to do stuff with them. That's kind of the thing.

I almost have the opposite of that. I like having a full plate, but there's something about the nature of that full plate that I want to get better at, which is... It would be very odd if somebody with no kids chanting your dream was to have enough time to spend all your time with somebody. So here's the thing. We're actually the same, I think, um...

I hate boredom, like more than anything in the world. Like summer days as a child when like all my friends were out of town were the worst days of my entire existence. So like when I didn't have kids a few years ago, I filled like all my time with side projects. Like that's what this like whole thing, that's how this whole thing started. Like I can't not be working on stuff.

But man, kids like they really like the definition of a full plate is so fundamentally different with two kids. Yeah, I'm talking about having a full plate. You're like, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. So like a full plate for like in 10 years, if I'm if I don't have to work, like just waking up with a few kids is already like so much of a full plate that it's it's fine.

Well, listen, Lane, appreciate you coming on. Hope your life with kids doesn't get too full and you still have time to keep working on boot.dev. What would you say is one takeaway, something that you've learned from your journey that Indie hackers might not have heard from somebody else that you think people would benefit from hearing? What's your philosophy? Yeah, we've covered a lot of the important stuff. I guess the one thing I have in my notes that we didn't really talk about that I think is super critical is the idea that like,

All of the worst ideas that are going to like stop you from growing. So like all the stuff I was working on in those first, like that first year and a half, they sound like good ideas and almost objectively they are. So like, for example, the idea that, you know, oh, maybe we should do a hackathon. There's like no world in which doing a hackathon like hurts the business, right? It'll either help a little or help a lot, but it can be a giant waste of time.

And you could be doing something so much more like focused on what you're trying to do. So like avoiding the shiny ideas as they come up has been so helpful. Just trying to be as focused as you can on your niche, on your customer and avoiding all the shiny stuff I think is one of the best things that's helped in the last 12 months with boot dev. Niche down, focus, avoid the shiny stuff. Lane Wagner, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me guys.