#208 – How this Indie Hacker Blew Past $10K MRR with Jon Yongfook of Bannerbear
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What's up, everybody? This is courtlandt andi hacker's to com and you're listening to the ni hackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process.

And on this show, I sit down with these and the hackers to discuss the idea that s the opportunities and these strategies they're taking adventure ge of so the rest of us can do the same. All right, i'm here with john. Young foot, the founder of Better bear, has to go to john.

Happy to be here.

Every now and then I get someone like you on the show. You're not like a prototypical nd hacker. You are a solo founder, you are a coder. You you're also a designer, I think you do on .

your design yeah.

I do my design. yes. And your APP Better bear is software as a service APP. And you're also like transparently about everything you're basically building in public, posting on ny hackers all the time and posting on twitter and your blog. How well would you say banner bears doing today in terms of revenue or whatever of the metric you think are important to measure your success?

It's exactly where I wanted IT to be. So I mean, my initial goal when I kind of became an any hacker was to at least kind of replaced my old corporate salary. I thought if I could do that, then that would be my kind of main so of success metric.

And yeah, happy to say that just last month actually is out of went over that point. So it's currently on sixteen K M R R. And here I passed 4k last month。 So that was the was like the cut off point.

super exciting. So 6 thousand dollars the revenue， it's going prety rapidly. I mean, right now to me, I think you are at ten thousand dollars a month and revenue in january. And what other expenses look like as a one person started? How much of this sixteen thousand dollars among this profit?

It's funny. People always asked me that you know very cynically when you know they hear that you're making x amount of mr. And the next question will be you well, you but how much of that is actual profit?

It's a typical SaaS product. So I have hero costs and I have A W S costs. And all in all, IT adds up to a few hundred dollars a month. And I think in terms of the running cost then in terms of my time, it's pretty much a full time job at this point.

So and that's a dream of SATA. It's super scalable. You can add more and more customers, but you're not really adding much to your costs. And so theoretically, they can grow in the moon without having to build a huge team or without necessarily having to pay a lot of expenses or its scales, unlike YSL businesses where you you're actually have to pay more money for every additional cookie that you sell or every additional of widget that you create in your factory. And so that's kind of why I think you're live in the ini hacker dream. You're a product typical ini hacker because you are a coder and because you are leveraging your skills, it's become a little bit more involved recently to not to regress, but almost like take a step back and like do content based businesses where, for example, you are writing a blog or a news letter making money that way, but not as many people and twenty to twenty one building SaaS apps as i've seen in the past.

It's not as popular that used to beat seems i've noticed that. I've noticed that it's there's nothing wrong with IT. I think it's great that there's new ways that different types of people can create scalable businesses.

Now I think that's really cool. But as as a developer, as a designer, yeah I get a kick out of building SaaS apps and i'd like to see other people also building SaaS APP. So yeah, it's been strange for me to see kind of the community diversify over the last year, mostly in the last year or two years. But I think there's still a core of people who are looking to build SaaS apps and looking to live there. Any have a dream of building something that can scale hugely without too much cost scaling as well.

Yeah, before we like jump into things, what is banner bear exactly who's using in and what .

do they get out of IT banner bear is an image and video generation API and IT helps businesses automate creative tasks such as, but not limited to, banner air generation. Um so the way that works is a you or your design team comes into banana AR and designs a template that can be then reused multiple times, thousands of times, millions of times badaber then takes that template and turns IT into a rest API.

So then your develop a team can push data to the rest API and they get images back. So there's two types of customers. There's like kind of low volume and high volume customers.

So the low volume customers are social media managers who are looking to a kind of like automate some of their daily repetitive tasks. So they've got kind of like social media posts of a certain design that they have to do regularly and beneath. I will just help them produce those images on a daily basis.

And then on the high volume scale, i've got customers like digital agencies who are using benefit to generate tens of thousands of ad variations for various products that they manage for their clients. So yeah, what's been interesting growing banner veris seeing those to use cases that like opposite ends of the scale and there's like nothing really in between those two things as well. So figuring out how to market to both of those and users, IT has been pretty chAllenging actually.

And there's always been this thing in my mind of like should I be focusing on one or should I be kind of like trying to target both of them at the same time? No right or wrong answer to that. I think at the moment, i'm trying to target both and that seems to be going OK. But yeah, who knows how things will evolve?

I mean, a sense you like quote, quote, figured that out or you figured that out enough to be able to get to close to two hundred thousand thousand year in revenue.

And like maybe you haven't hit on the perfectly no optimized answer yet, but it's good enough for you've gone to this point and you actually wrote a blog post last year, we talked about basically growing banner bear to ten thousand dollars a month in revenue, which you have sent eclipse by quite bit. And that's kind of like a flagship number for any hackers. Ten thousand dollars month revenue was the point where most people can start to see this eclipsing how much money they're making from their Normal job.

You know, sudenly becomes worth IT. I want to talk about how you ve got there because that's the point that almost every fledged andy hacker wants to get to. And every year it's think like the past, people will take to get there a little bit different. You mentioned that you did have a corporate job and that benefits now making more money than your corporate job was. What what are you doing before even started on this path?

So previously, I was working for a company called aviva, which is a british insurance company, and they sell, you know, all sorts of insurance products for home, for motor, for life, that kind thing. I was part of the digital team, and this is a big company. I think thirty thousand employees. So yeah, I was kind of responsible for mobile apps and websites and things like that in asia for avia.

Pretty early on, I realized that are, you know, this is probably like the last corporate job i'm never gonna be able to get, or this is like the best one that i'm never onna be able to get because I just IT was very obvious to me that like the people who were more senior than me, I just like did not understand their job. Like there was no way that I was going to be able to do what they did because their job way more about sort of relationship building and internal influence and all of these skills that I know nothing about. Like, I know how to build things.

You know, you give me a design and i'll build the APP, or you give me an APP and i'll do the design. You know, I know how to do this things. And the role that I was in at aviva was sort of like the peak point of that kind of role where you where you're a senior executor kind of thing. Anything beyond that and you're in much more of a kind of like a corporate political role, and I just I just not built for that.

I really know like easy, clear cut path to get there. But that's also like where a lot of the money is in the corporate world. Being in those sort of like hard to define, there is no real school to train you for that job and it's just supplying the man market dynamics safe if your job has a very clear and obvious title that like many other millions of people could saw themselves into.

And that means that there's basically a lot of supply for hire ing people for your job. And no, maybe not as much demand. And so it's like harder to get paid as much.

But if you are like some sort of weird executive who got all these relationships that you're super hard to replace the reason rayas, because it's hard to do that job and it's hard for others didn't learn and get to where you are. So can he always be frustrating to not be able to get there? Is you want na be able to do that or was just you need to care about that?

I mean, I am forty one years old, so like, I knew that you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Basically, I knew that I was too late for me to learn all those skills and and be good at them enough to sort of advances my career in that direction. So pretty early on, I realized, well, okay, this is probably like the last corporate job i'm never gna get, or the best corporate job I never going to get. So what do I do? I mean, I can either just stay at this position forever and hope that, do you know, they never sort of fire me or something, or I can start thinking about doing something for myself.

And how did you get inspired to do something for yourself? Because I think a lot of all the people might might take the first option. And I say what they're really isn't, you know, a way for me to do something for myself and in a way, talking about not be able to teach an old dog new tricks like that is kind of any trick going out. Being being an any hacker is not an easy thing to do.

Uh, okay. So I I cheated a little bit because I had actually done IT before about when was IT maybe six or seven years ago. Now I started, I built my first kind of sass APP and made a bit of money from IT IT got up to like three thousand us.

dollars. mr. R, so that experience taught me that, yeah, I can. I can do that.

I've got IT in me to, I can get to three thousand. I can get to six thousand. I can get to nine thousand. ecr.

Tell me about that APP because it's it's a lot of money .

why I wake with that. yes. So that was called be tricks. And IT was a social media, social media management sort of scheduling APP, of which there are now many, many very similar to buffet.

But my b trick is, focus at the time was more about content suggestion. So I had like a big library of content, and you could sort of pick and choose to schedule content instead of having to sort of go out and find content yourself to schedule. So yeah, I launched that sort of right around the same time that buffalo launched.

And I think also maybe who sweep launched, buffer started to do really well. As I said, I got up to three thousand us. As M.

R. R. But I just kind of like ran out of steam a little bit. I think IT just IT wasn't going beyond three thousand and I saw that buffer was doing really well and kind of like every feature they launched, I was like men, I was going to do that or either I was gonna that or or I should have done that. So eventually I think they have, they just wall me down and in a bit. And I thought, okay, they've won this battle and I not I shut down, but I put the APP into kind of maintenance mode and just can let IT, let IT run in the .

end of every start up. I think, is when you lose team as a founder because because you can run out of money and then say, like OK, i'm going to keep this going and find other ways to make money, work a job and work cafe week or something or compete, you can crush you. You can say, OK, i'm going to pik IT and go on a different direction and try something different, right? Like no matter what happens, you can always keep going. But when like you decide, like I know what like my heart just not in IT anymore, that's a true moment that your .

company's dead. That's why I always say now to anyone asking me about validating ideas or you know, is this idea good or or whatever I always say, the number one thing that I think is most important is, like, are you passionate about this idea?

Because IT doesn't matter if it's a good business idea, because if someone else comes along with the with the same good business idea and they are more passionate about IT, they will win because they will that last you you they when you're tired, they're going to be still working. So that's why I think I think that's been quite fundamental to why i've stuck with benefit and why I think i'm still really anusia tic about bad berries because IT IT comes from like a personal pain point that i've experienced in the past. And I just love the idea of automated design.

That's always something i've been interested in. Whereas if I compared that to my previous sss at b tricks, I wasn't like super passionate about social media scheduling. It's not really something that I could go deep into and and feel like i'm like changing the world by helping people to schedule their their social media calendars. There are other people who will be super passionate about that.

But but I wasn't back to the corporate job to the corporate world until eventually you get the ceiling and you realized, you know why? Like, this is not the delight for you. What did that transition look like? Leave in a corporate job? Or did you state to a corporate job and work on benny on the side?

no. So I really envy people who are able to do that. Um and I think that's a great way to stop your india ckd journey is by doing IT alongside your copper job if number one, your contract allows IT and number two, you have the energy to do IT. So I didn't have either of those things of viva had a very strict policy about I mean, IT, I think also because I was at kind of like a senior management level, so they don't want you working on anything else basically other than aviva stuff.

So that was in my contract, but also even if he wasn't in my contract, I just didn't not have the energy like every day I was working until kind of seven P M, eight A M to 3PMH， and there was no place for me to fit in like a side project. So I would have like to do that, but unfortunate I couldn't. So I had to, uh, begin after I fully sort of left aviva and then I just had this glorious black slate in front of me with like literally like a blank.

I didn't even plan anything beforehand because I thought or even that would be a bit risky if i'm like planning a business before I leave my job. They might you know, that might come back to bite me in the, in the, but like ten years later. So I deliberately started with the with the complete blank slate, as you may may not know, I try try to do the twelve startups chAllenge at that point. So I started right away doing like kind of like launching a product every single month.

Does not that black slate period feel feel so good where you can basically do anything you want? You quit your job, you've got some savings. How much time and savings do you have?

I manage to save up quite a bit of what you call IT like a runway. yeah. And I had about two hundred thousand dollars in the bank.

And I I also say to people like you need to be realistic about what your burn rate is and how much time you're going to give yourself. You can't do this if you've got like three months of runway, right? I don't think you can do IT if you have six months of way.

I think even that's a bit tight. So I had a bel. I think that would have given me like comfortably three years of of runway of earning nothing to try and build a business from scratch, which I thought I was doable.

It's super smart that you decided to do like the twelve startups and twelve months chAllenge. This is something that was kind of pioneer by Peter levels, literally exactly like that sounds. You do twelve different start up from twelve different months.

And I think one of the the chAllenges that people run in to when they quit their job and they have all this runway, they've got two, three, four years, just like live and do whatever they want, is parkin since law, right? Like the work you have experiences to fill, fill the time a lot is so you like, oh, i've got multiple years to work on something and then you work on something and that takes you like eight months to get your prototype out. But you have like the seal, like i'm going to have my business launched, built and launched and marketed and ready and under you know a couple weeks because the next months I was sort of completely new in. And then that's kind of a time limit that keeps you honest and prevent you from just taking years and years and years to figure out what you want to do.

what what some people expect from the twelve start up chAllenge. By the way, I didn't launch twelve. I only managed to launch seven. And then I got kind like a bit burned out. But seven still pretty good. I think I don't think anyone's got to twelve so far, but everyone, I was that the the reason or the number one thing that you get out of the twelve starts chAllenge is all one of the things is going to turn into a massive business. But I don't think that's realistic to expect that.

I think the number one thing I can teach you is, yes, you said to to keep yourself honest and to learn how to time box yourself and to just to know how to draw a line and ship something and get IT into customers hands. I think that's the true sort of number one learning you get from that exercise. And I think that that really has built a foundation for how I you work with benefit.

Now i'm very strict about time boxing. I'm very I ship very frequently. I don't go in the sort of you know weeks and weeks and weeks of of development without shipping something so that that kind of built up a foundation for I work.

I think the other lesson or learning that you can hope for from the twelve starts of chAllenge is kind of giving you a company bearing of what your passionate about. If you do the twelve start up chAllenge and you try a bunch of different things, you're gonna which of the areas that you're actually really interested in. You're going to have some ideas that you think are just good ideas.

And you think of that's gonna million dollars. But there IT turns out to not be, and IT also turns out that you're not interested in IT, but then theyll be other things that you're like, oh, I want to pull on this thread a little bit more, and those are the things I think that you should be pursuing. So one of those areas for me was automated image generation.

So I was doing kind of like a image generation related product in in, in the start of chAllenge. And that was a space that I was interested. And I was like, okay, could I make this like, ten times faster? Could I make this ten times more useful? Can I make this ten times? whatever. So that was the thread that I was pulling on. And then eventually I kind of had the idea of benbecula.

It's kind of facing to hear about you going to this process because so many people don't get started, because they find IT difficult come up with just one idea. I would starts only, but I have no idea what to build, right? We're if you're doing a different startup every month, you are routinely coming up with ideas is probably ideas that you had you didn't even have time to build.

And um you kind of face the opposite problem, which is like this choice, prowl, sustain. Where in the modern world, especially if you an andy hacker trying to decide what business to build, you've got an overwhelming number of choices. Even if you pick a particular business idea, there's an overwhelming number of ways that you could take that you can make a mobile, you can make a desktop, you can make a web, you can make a red and a lue. You could do what everyone, what is your process like if you remember fully coming up with these ideas and figuring out which ones were worth working on, at which ones to so of live on the backward.

I actually had A, I had an excel sheet or a google dog just full of ideas. And I had the ideas on the left hand side. I had various columns of criteria that I was scoring these ideas on.

And there were things like, you know, how hot IT is to build, how defensible is IT, how easy is gonna be to get my first customers. Kind of like based on you do I have access to those markets already? In retrospect, I don't think that was the best way to do things.

It's one way to do things. And if you have an analysis, analysis, then just do that just to sign a score and and pick them and be done with IT. But if I had to go back into IT all again, as I said, I think I would add a sort of a passion score that I would wait that a more strongly above everything else, which I wasn't doing.

I think I was more focused on at that time. I was more focused on i'm gonna D A million dollar idea. And it's going to be it's going to be so clever and it's going to be, you know, so defensible. And all other things are a bit unrealistic. I think when your first starting out the the best camp bearing is just what are you passionate about?

And IT turned out that you are passionate about basically automated image generation, probably not something many people would predict that they going to be passionate about. What was IT that stood out to you about that was like the worst style or the revenue or like the .

business prospects in the market? I'd worked to the company previously where we would have desperately needed this product, uh, and IT didn't exist at the time. So I used to work in e commerce company a long time ago where we were a pretty typically commerce company.

We every day we would have some new products to put on the store and those products would get photographed and then those photographs would go onto the website. But then after that, we would have to turn those photographs into banner ads for various different platforms, different sizes, different aspect ratio and different words in the banners, because, you know, the marketing team would want to test this message. This is that that message.

And at the time, we did all of this manually. So I was running the design team at that time, and we had this kind of little convenable style process every day, where we would get the images in from this side and out that side. We would spit you a dozen, also banners for each product.

And IT was so labor intensive and we were all just kind of drained at the end of every single day, is really repetitive. And there was no kind of automated solution for this at the time. Now there is there is like these kind of big enterprise products you can plug g into. But I thought I would be so cool if there was just A A self serve SaaS product that I could just sign up for, get an A P, I K, and then boom, I can just automate this.

So this point you're probably White, like eight to twelve months into your journey, you have been to die for any your projects. I don't think we're any these projects making money.

So actually had not built a business model into any of these twelve start up uh products, which is probably dumb. I think going back to the the topic of runway, I think I had a bit too much runway. It's parkins a lot again because I felt, well, i've got three years to you know figure this stuff out. So I don't really need to make money in year one, which I think is a stupid thing to think. But that how my brain was sort .

of processing IT, yeah, which is a pain because having like that revenue incentives like having like to make money from your products are trying to charge money for your products be kind of a signal in the right direction. What people might say, i'll pay you ten box a month for this, but I want to pay you thirty year. People say, you know, I like the product, but I went to pay for.

And you find out OK, well, what am I going to build? The people actually will pay for. And it's really hard to figure that out or iterate your way there if you don't have a Price tag on IT.

I think I was just also afraid because the moment you put a Price tag on something and people don't want to pay, then it's like, it's like a personal rejection and IT hurts. And I think I was just kind of subconsciously avoiding that. And after the after the seven products that I launched, I had a bit of a break.

I was a IT burned out. And then I launched one more thing, which was like A A video conference tool for remote companies, which I thought was a good yes, but again, wasn't super passionate about IT and that I put a Price tag on and and nobody paid for IT. And that was really painful. That was my rude awakening into OK. Now i'm seeing how difficult is actually to get people to pay for something.

Well, at this point, you got a bunch of different projects. Some of them were dead, some of them were shut red, some of them were probably still running. One of my favorite ece of device for hackers.

Generally speaking, you should be trying lots of different things. And if any given idea doesn't work, you should probably drop IT because it's a waste your time. It's not working like you don't want to find yourself oh, stop digg.

But if your journey isn't working, you know, overall things aren't working, don't quit your journey. Keep going right. You want to keep sorting new ideas. You want to respect the ideas that seem to have promise. What did you do when you look back? You figured out that you know all of your different ideas hadn't really worked out the way that you wanted them to do.

yes. So this was probably around August, september two thousand nineteen, where my seven products from the twelve start up chAllenge, they were basically all gone. And then I kind of went back to, went back to the roots and just thought, okay, what am I actually really interested in? I spent two months working on something that are not really interested in, and that was just organizing.

I ended up launching something not called beneath AR. But IT was a similar ish product. IT was a image generation tool for your website, so would help you generate instagram posts from your website pages.

And basically, IT would to scan your website and take your cover images or your article titles, that kind of thing. And then I would generate a whole bunch of instagram posts so that I put a Price on that. I was really interested in, you know, personally interested in the actual problem that I was solving.

And some people paid for IT. So that was a good A A little IT of reassurance, a little bit of, you know, things. We're heading in the right direction. But I made the classic and hac mistake of charging nine dollars a month for IT. And obviously, revenue grow for super slow because IT is excruciating ly slow to grow business of nine dollars subscriptions.

you need something like gum s two thousand people basically to get to the revenue year today, you need almost two thousand customers. And like that is a ridiculous number.

IT takes years. If you if you're nAiling IT, if you're not nAiling IT, it'll take you a decade to get the two thousand customers.

So people don't realize that conversion rates on the internet usually around like one percent. And so two thousand customers means like two hundred thousand users, you have a premium product or something.

And like that means you have to be like you said, get to be nearly IT to be like a ridiculous ly good marketer, probably a team of marketers working for years and years and months and months and months, which is why IT makes way more sense to charge way more. So you don't need to get two thousand customers to get to your revenue goals. So you don't need to get to like two hundred customers or twenty customers or something, this way easier to .

get to the the only companies I know, the only sort of small india gata companies I know who are getting to two thousand customers with kind of nine dollar fish subscriptions. They're killing IT on their marketing. And one of those is plausible, think they do an amazing job of their marketing there.

Everywhere I see them pop up on hat and news, I see them pop up on my twitter feed. If you're not them, then you're not gonna to two thousand customers at nine dollars a months. So yeah, Better to change more and aim for a lower volume of customers, I think unless you're a marketing god.

So yeah, that's exactly what I did. I started charging more and the revenue went up a little bit a but then I think I just realized that a point like the youth case that I was targeting at that time was way to there was too many criteria basically to be my target customer. So I feel okay.

What's what's the way of massively expanding the use cases and having a few more types of target customer? And then the idea for an API basically just turning the whole thing into an API so that you can do whatever you want to do with Better, Better and just the provider of the technology, right? And then the the actual kind of cases up to you very quickly, that idea made a lot of sense because I realized that of the companies that I look up to uh or a big fans of are also API products like strike, for example.

There is a good fit, I think, between the hackers and being an API product provider because IT keeps the product simple and IT keeps your scope of work simple. You're just the technology provider. You do the hard work in the background.

And then what the customer uses IT for is, is kind of up to them. I think I always say that the hackers are a good fit for building A P. I products.

Yeah, I think have several advantages to IT in addition of what you're saying, like one of the good things also for people don't know what an API is as an application programme in your face is just a way for one program to talk to another. And so the fact that you have an API company means that instead of people coming to your website and having to like drag and drop and fill out forms to make an image, they can write code that talks to your website and you'll give him an image back.

And what's call about this is that you using them who will write code to talk to an API, like write the code and then they've done with IT, they go on and do other things and they they might take years to turn that code off for said they don't need you anymore, which made you have a very low turn business. Most of our customers keep generating images automatically in the background. Isn't that a little bit scary to like make that transition though? Because if you're building A P, I company and now means that your users have to be soft engineers.

And not only that, they have to be probably a bunch of guides and documentation to learn how a user product. And then like code something, just like the process of somebody using rapid product, is so much harder and so much longer. And then learning how to use a dragon and drop face or feel out a form on your website.

I think what helped was I I love the sound of all of that. So I thought I okay. So my, my, my new goal now as a company is i've got to have the best documentation.

I've a right some cool like A P I console in the what i've got to have all these things. And all of that sounded like, that all sounded magical to me. I was like, I really want to build that.

This is the product that I want to build. Tally, different direction, different chAllenges. But as I found out later on you, the target was not just developers. IT was also this whole new no code space, which at the time of building barbar, I had like zero inclined that you know, IT was growing so fast that no code space. I mean, I have never touched the pier. I think at the you know, when I first launch Better bear, but after a few months, IT became really obvious that that was A A massively growing space that I needed to tap into.

So what was your trade as you like for, you know, you're doing all this building. Are you doing all this coding? How are you actually getting people in the door? I mean, there are these big waves, like no code.

And sources of users were like people who might be interested in what you're doing. Well, how do you like let them know? Like, Y I have this APP, I have this API and IT solve this problem that you have. Please come sign up.

My whole strategy has just been to create momentum and create a sense of gravity. So I do that through you. I post on twitter pretty frequently. I have an open start up page.

I have a news letter that like clock work I send every two weeks, even when I don't want to, even when i'm like super busy, I still send IT every two weeks and I have a full update. And it's not like copy paste from anywhere else. It's like me sitting down writing this thing, usually with some kind of like helpful uh you know get of story at the end.

And I know I get a lot of people saying that they like the news that there and they're not even my target customers. They are just people who would like content that i'm writing. So all of these things and a bunch of other things, you add IT altogether and yet the right people will find you IT.

Maybe IT sounds like a messy way to do IT. Um it's not very kind of like targeted uh, it's maybe not very efficient either, but is the only way I know how to do things. So that's that's been my my strategy and and creating things like a flagship content where, yes, I do my by weekly newsletter and I do regular blog post.

But every now then I also create some kind of piece of flagship content that I want people to share. So that was the ten thousand mr. r.

Post, which was like this big, timely of telling the story from the beginning to end. I think that got put on hacking news. And that, you know, went a little bit sort of viral, quote unquote. So all of these things added together, you creates the audience around you. And again, the important point is it's not like those people are your exact target customers, but they can help to connect you with your target customers.

They have a friend who, so I need to generate images, like have been following this guy, john, on twitter.

You should check out exactly. And then also, very often i'll see in my twitter mansions someone who I don't know at all is saying, I am trying to do this thing and then someone who follows me is replying, oh, you should check out act Young folk at benedet H Q, right? Because I think IT does what you want.

I am like a, well, okay, that's cool. Start exactly. This whole thing is working.

So in a way, like all of these marketing efforts are almost like little starts and of themselves. Like just because you write a blog post doesn't mean anybody who's going to read IT, just because you have a news letter doesn't mean anybody's going to subscribe or just because you're reading does not mean anybody d's going to follow you. What a strategy been, uh, for making these channels succeeded because so many other in the act are trying all of these things and they just would of like tweet or writing or blogging into the went.

You do have to do IT well so you can just write a newsletter you do have to think about, you know, am I trying to teach people something? Am I trying to get people excited? Am I trying to, you know, there needs to be of a fundamental goal of of h.

Any of the content you create, like to give you an example, the the ten k mr. R timeline that I made, my my fundamental goal for that was not really to tell the story and not really to be informative. The fundamental goal was I want you to look cool because I want people to look at this and then say, oh, i'm not gna read, but this looks really cool.

And I want to share IT with my friends that that was the the main goal. If you do read the content, IT is actually informative and IT does tell the story. But the primary goal was, I just want you to look cool than that. People, within ten seconds, I like H, I ve got to share this .

with someone and to get shared you to literally right stuff. That's remarkable as, and people want to remark on IT to their friends, people generally only tell their friends about things that are really interesting or surprising or new. And so if you ve made this blog post look like every other andy hacker who's gotten to some revenue milestone, and I was just like you, black text on like a White medium page blog post to background or something that we complete with unremarkable, you know why would anybody share this is already to been shared of million times, but years so different that even if people to read the content right, like it's worth sharing because it's like a look at the school thing.

Yeah I think understanding a little bit about basic human psychology is, is, is really helpful. If you're going to learn one thing or if you're gonna have one assumption, just assume that everyone has incredibly tension span. So if you have if you hold that assumption in your head as you're creating content or as you're writing a blog post, I think that's a really helpful belief to have, even if it's not true for everyone, but it's quite true for most people.

Yeah, you're fun. Size in this world. Post is like thirty pixel tall and it's only like you know either bullet point so just like one sentence at a time and the next paragraph was like one sentence. So it's a written for people who are like just briefly scrolling. And i'll admit the first time I saw this black post like I didn't read IT, I came through like it's prety cool, you know, a few of the points because people just like when you're on twitter, you're not really in a state where you want to sit down and read ten thousand words are the same.

So yeah IT IT was created with that intent, like all of the sentence is a super shirt, you know, I wrote them, and then I took out a bunch of words. All of the the bullet points have little emerges because if people don't read the content, at least they can look at the picture and get a what you're talking about yeah but this kind of stuff also, you know there's a way to write on twitter as well. You know you don't if you write all in one sort of paragraph as a single block of text, people will just skip over IT. But if you write in, I think that is called brief like.

and every single sentence is a different line.

Yeah, every every sentence is a different line. But if you write like that IT IT makes people stop in their fee because they think all these guys saying something important, or this guys, or this tweet is easier to read. Or you so now what smart is like.

you are learning these tricks and practicing them because you built in into your schedule to do marketing every other week. I think i'd read this in your journey to to ten thousand dollars a blog post that do a week of coding and building features and then a week of marketing and then a week of coding than a week of marketing. And you just never got off of that that track.

You always made sort of force ourself to sort of batch the marketing work, which is really smart because most people who are coats and designers never get to the marketing stuff. They don't put on the calendar. It's at the very best mother to do list. They got one more feature. They gonna and and eventually they'll do all this other .

stuff going to ride back to the start. Your initial question was like how I get up to this, the ten k milestone, if I have one kind of lesson to give or one big takeaway from the journey from like one thousand to ten thousand M R R IT was consistency of balancing fifty, fifty product and marketing. I did that for basically like seven months.

strange. And you can see on the timely, the ten k mr. R, timely, the point where I start doing that. It's just this almost this straight line going up. There's no like up and down or not a lot of IT. It's just all going up because i'm building new things, but i'm also telling people about them and they're telling other people about them, and there's just this constant cycle of that. So I think that was probably the most important thing I did from one k to ten k mr, was just keep that really consistent.

What do you feel like to actually hit that ten thousand dollars a months goal? I mean, like that's the promising we really want to get.

It's funny. IT was sad because there's also turn as well, right, so you can reach a revenue maston. But then a few days later, you could go back under IT because people have turned or whatever.

I actually I never really celebrate revenue max stones that much these days anymore because I know that it's going to be super embarrassing if I say H, I got to ten camera and then like a few days later, it's like back to nine hundred and eighty and one thousand eight hundred or something. So the when I do celebrate a revenue, my stone, it's because i've gone I blown way past IT, like i've got to ten point five or ten point six. But then by that time, the euphoria has already gone. So it's like this weird. I don't know now it's just number is basically.

How do you feel about IT if you think about like mo logical perspective, not the emotions, but like what what can you now do now that you have the stable company and then have your plans changed, if at all?

Initially, I thought I would run this thing so low until the very end, but ah especially after hitting fifteen K M R R, i'm like really, really busy. This as I said, it's it's a full time job for me, more than a full time job by pretty much start at like A M and then finish IT kind of like six P M, seven pm. It's pretty full on after fifteen k hours like I GTA get someone to help me.

I can't do all of this by myself. I've got like way too much on my backlog. And also by that point, the business had reached a point where I knew, okay, that I can delegate, that I can delegate this I can keep for myself kind of thing, which wasn't so obviously the beginning. So yeah, that's the next step really is just kind of bringing some help on board initially just kind of like part time, but if they can grow into full time roles.

that would be great. Yeah, I saw your post on andy hackers last week says i'm finally hiring a year, get you Better, Better this point. But finally, as you just said, you you're getting over one with work, but you know what you can delegate and you have got enough cash help you hire.

What's your strategy? I mean, how did this hack age post to go? Where do you think you going to find the people that you want to hire?

I had had to check with one of my india c of friends, Adrian, from simple analytics, and he's gone through this process. So I asked him how he did IT. And i'm basically copying what he did.

So he did the exact same thing. Application process, homework assignment, I think maybe had one more step and then an interview and you basically just kind of whittling down the number of candidates at each stage. And then he said the purpose of the interview was really just like, who do I click with because it's thought about personality by that point. So and he he said for this role that he was hiring, he had two or three applicants and then one was like an instant connection. So that's the one he had.

Very cool. Well, you've come to not the end of your journey, but definitely a turning point. What do you think the future looks like for Better bear?

Do you for see yourself staying interested in Better bear? Do you think of which other projects in the future? What do you do as an ni acr making more money than you're making at your Normal job?

Yeah, this is like the india cki existential question. I don't know. I I think you would be awesome to try and grow beneath a to to a million dollars in A R.

So I got a long way to go. But I think that that's the next goal in terms of in terms of the financial goals. And honestly, like going back to what I said about my corporate life previously, I miss working in a team.

You know, there are some indie hackers who want who want to always work so low. And that's fine, I think I did to in the beginning. But now I think the next goal would be in terms of the kind of company that I wanna build, I actually wouldn't mind growing benefit into a small company of, say, maybe ten people, for example, fully, fully remote.

That would be really cool. They especially because now I can see like, okay, there are very different specializations that I could have a whole little team of ten plate designers and then I can have A A small development team of like the the API guys who make sure the is running incorrectly that kind of thing. Who knows if he will change. But I think I from the very beginning, i've always had that feeling that I would be called to have to work in a team again.

million dollars revenue and a ten person squad. It's like the perfect team size is for like the lee crew of the people that you really want to hang out with, who had a Spark to your day and who are sort of pushing in the same direction as you and they are good at their jobs. And why not if you going to start a company, why not use your company to basically hack your way and surrounding yourself for the people that you actually want to spend .

time with everyday? Yeah, absolutely.

Listen to joe. We've walk through the entire beneficed story. I know earlier you said that if you gave one piece of advice, andy, hackers, you trying to get from zero to ten thousand dollars month, the revenue would be to to do this fifty fifty split between coating and marketing. I think that sage advice and hopefully will take IT to heart and learn more than just a thing you're too from your story. John hang hook, thank you so much for come on the show and tell us about the story behind banner bear.

Thank you very much. Cotton has been awesome.

You let people know where to go to learn more about what are writing, about what building, how to stand up for your news letter, and maybe where to find you on twitter.

Yeah ah, so on twitter you can follow me at Young folk. Y O N G F O O K ban bear is that banner? Bear dog com. And if you want to sign up for the news letter is at the bottom of my open page, so you can to, beneath AR dot com.

slash open. right? Thanks to get on.