00:30:56 Courtland Allen: And like, I know behind the scenes, like you are really thoughtful on whatever, but I think like, you know, for someone who's just getting started, like, the approach that you've taken of try a lot of stuff, be okay with the fact that some of it's not going to work out, a lot of it's not going to work out, but keep trying to let that discourage you. And hey, you don't have to be some sort of mad scientist genius. I think that's just probably the most approachable thing for most people. And I think that's why it's really inspirational.

00:31:23 (someone): I have to be like that because when I started, I was looking up to all these people and they looked like gods to me. They knew everything and they could make these websites and these startups and these building teams and hiring people and raising money and all this stuff seemed like magic to me. And I was like, I can never, ever get to that skill level. ever. I barely can code. I didn't know how databases work and stuff. So I think the nicest thing to do is to show that I still don't really know what I'm doing, because it makes it accessible, like you say, and it brings more people into it. Because the worst thing I see with developers, and especially developers, engineers, is the gatekeeping, right? Like where it's like, oh, you need to code things in a certain way, and you need to do this in a certain way, or, you know, But there is no certain way, of course. You can just do whatever you want, as long as it's legal.

00:06:13 Courtland Allen: You said only four out of 70 plus projects that you ever did made any money and grew, which means that you have something like a 95% failure rate and a hit rate of only about like 5%, which is crazy in a way. Yeah. Like how much of your success with all the projects do you think comes from like just being this relentless shipper, which almost no one is like almost no one has like 70 projects they've really tried to ship. Um, and how much of it comes from being like a strategic mastermind? having the right business strategy, because you have a pretty solid business background and education too.

00:06:45 (someone): Well, this is obviously biased, but I do get tired from the, it's like the current side guys in America where it's like, everything is luck. If you're successful, it's luck. It's completely your upbringing and your background. And I do think that's a part of it. It's like definitely like some percentages, like maybe 40 or 50 or something. But what you see from this example, when you need to keep trying for loads of times, like 70 times or more, a hundred times, and you might get a few successes. And if you try once, it's not probably not going to work because you, the odds are not there. I mean, I'm not a mathematician or a statistician, but I do believe that if you keep trying something, you can somehow, you don't change the odds, but you keep playing the odds. And there must be a statistical fallacy in this, but I do think your rate of maybe getting success gets higher, I think, when you keep trying.

00:37:24 (someone): Right.

00:37:25 Courtland Allen: Yeah. And I bet you're making like a decent amount of money from this because it's like, okay, if you're getting 500 people a month signing up, you know, and these aren't like, this is not like a $5 a month to do list app that you're selling to people. It's like, you know, over 200, it's, it's a, it's a giant move people are making with their life. Like they're used to paying a lot of money for this kind of stuff. And so it's like hundreds of dollars, you know, that you're making per person who joins.

00:37:46 (someone): I think right now it's something like 30, 40, 50k. The problem actually is that there was too many, like this lawyer was used to getting like, I don't know, like 50 customers a month. And suddenly I brought him like 400. It's a huge bottleneck. So I needed to email these people like, okay, it's going to take a little bit longer because it's been going viral and too many people signed up. I closed the sign up for a few times as well. And now they've been hiring more people. They've been hiring five more people. They need to train them now for the back office and stuff. So they're also growing now. So it's kind of cool. Yeah.

00:38:20 Courtland Allen: Also, since I guess the last time we talked, you hadn't even started Remote OK.

00:39:18 (someone): So like 2014, 2015. I remember Buffer was pushing remote work really hard. A few other companies, I think Automatic from WordPress were pushing it, yeah. And so those were the ones hiring, Zapier too. But it wasn't a big thing at all. And so I built this job board, Nomad Jobs, and then I spun it off as Remote OK, because I realized quickly, like I said before, that most remote jobs are not for nomads. Most people are not nomads. 95% of the remote job market is not nomads. It's just normal people that want to work from home, for example. So I started off as RemoteOK and the first year I didn't even make money, I think. I was aggregating a lot of jobs from non-remote job boards, because there was not really a lot of remote job boards except mine. But there were classic job boards which had remote jobs. And they would be located in remote Oregon. So remote is a city in Oregon or a village. So I would just take those jobs and then put them in on my site. There was a real big problem back then. And this kind of started growing. I started charging like $1 for a job post. So companies started directly posting on my site as well. After a few years, like it made okay money. But then when COVID happened, like everything changed. It was like, like if you look at the revenue chart, it's like on remoteokay.com slash open.

00:23:26 (someone): It's kind of a competitor to Indieacres a little bit. WIP.co. And it's kind of like a tracking system for your to-dos for indie makers kind of, made by my friend Mark. I think you should buy the websites. I think you should acquire, Indieacres should acquire WIP. I've always tell you, but I think they would work really well together. But you can just log your to-dos on Telegram, this chat app, and also on the website and It's a very easy way for me to I also log like my life stuff like sometimes even food logs and stuff Yeah, so I just do like slash done fix bug join button on nomad list doesn't work hashtag nomad list and then that show at a screenshot sometimes a video and that's it and that gives me like a really accountable public log of what I'm doing and And yeah, it's really nice. I think Jerry Seinfeld talked about this chart where you cross on the calendar, you do a cross and you don't want to break the chain when you want to learn something or something. And I think that's the same when you want to do the streak, you don't want to break the chain. But even without that, it kind of just happens where I wake up and I check the errors I receive. My robots send me errors on Telegram, like what happens when I sleep, for example. And I kind of check like, okay, this is a problem I need to fix. And so my robots kind of control me and manage me and give me instructions what to work on the next day.

00:05:20 (someone): If you have them, you're like, okay, this was nice. And then you open your laptop again. you're like let's let's go make something right or uh i don't know if you're a painter you start painting so i think because of the the frame of the problem keeps changing and it's like perpetual it never bores generally because the problem never ends which is also the tiring part of it you're like You know, when is this business going to end? Like, when is it, when I do I reach the goal? Because, you know, musicians, they always finish an album and then they're done. They can do the tour and they're done. And it feels really nice. Like I used to do that. And with a startup, with business, you keep going. Like, when does it end? And when you sell, right? When you exit, but.

00:06:02 Courtland Allen: Well, you've done like what? Like, I think you had another tweet where you're talking about like how many projects that you shipped. And you said that. Yeah, I calculated.

00:06:09 (someone): It was like 70 or something.

00:06:11 Courtland Allen: Yeah, more than 70 projects. You said only four out of 70 plus projects that you ever did made any money and grew, which means that you have something like a 95% failure rate and a hit rate of only about like 5%, which is crazy in a way. Yeah.

00:08:14 (someone): That also helps, right?

00:08:15 Courtland Allen: Yeah, you just keep accruing advantages. And so I guess maybe the thing to do is to try to figure out how to put yourself in a position where you can do 70 plus projects. Because I don't think everyone can do that. Maybe they don't have the motivation or they don't have the financial freedom and independence to do that. But if you can keep doing that, eventually you will have one or two wins.

00:08:36 (someone): Yeah, I think if you're in university, that's like, that was for me, the main time where I did like so many projects. And that was a great time because in Holland, you get like $250 a month for free from the, from the government back then. I think like they call it study financing and you don't have to pay it back. And you can borrow some money from the government too, for really low rates. And, uh, and you're pretty much just doing lectures, right? You're going to university and all the time you have, apart from that, I think it's same in American college. Like you can work on, you know, side projects.

00:09:04 Courtland Allen: I think I probably spent my college years partying mostly the first couple of years. Yeah, me too. I'm going to do startups. I'm just trying to do random startups. Because you have so much time. It was a big mix. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:30:56 Courtland Allen: And like, I know behind the scenes, like you are really thoughtful on whatever, but I think like, you know, for someone who's just getting started, like, the approach that you've taken of try a lot of stuff, be okay with the fact that some of it's not going to work out, a lot of it's not going to work out, but keep trying to let that discourage you. And hey, you don't have to be some sort of mad scientist genius. I think that's just probably the most approachable thing for most people. And I think that's why it's really inspirational.

00:31:23 (someone): I have to be like that because when I started, I was looking up to all these people and they looked like gods to me. They knew everything and they could make these websites and these startups and these building teams and hiring people and raising money and all this stuff seemed like magic to me. And I was like, I can never, ever get to that skill level. ever. I barely can code. I didn't know how databases work and stuff. So I think the nicest thing to do is to show that I still don't really know what I'm doing, because it makes it accessible, like you say, and it brings more people into it. Because the worst thing I see with developers, and especially developers, engineers, is the gatekeeping, right? Like where it's like, oh, you need to code things in a certain way, and you need to do this in a certain way, or, you know, But there is no certain way, of course. You can just do whatever you want, as long as it's legal.

00:37:24 (someone): Right.

00:37:25 Courtland Allen: Yeah. And I bet you're making like a decent amount of money from this because it's like, okay, if you're getting 500 people a month signing up, you know, and these aren't like, this is not like a $5 a month to do list app that you're selling to people. It's like, you know, over 200, it's, it's a, it's a giant move people are making with their life. Like they're used to paying a lot of money for this kind of stuff. And so it's like hundreds of dollars, you know, that you're making per person who joins.

00:37:46 (someone): I think right now it's something like 30, 40, 50k. The problem actually is that there was too many, like this lawyer was used to getting like, I don't know, like 50 customers a month. And suddenly I brought him like 400. It's a huge bottleneck. So I needed to email these people like, okay, it's going to take a little bit longer because it's been going viral and too many people signed up. I closed the sign up for a few times as well. And now they've been hiring more people. They've been hiring five more people. They need to train them now for the back office and stuff. So they're also growing now. So it's kind of cool. Yeah.

00:38:20 Courtland Allen: Also, since I guess the last time we talked, you hadn't even started Remote OK.

00:48:23 (someone): And the reason I didn't quit was because I was in music before I was in drum and bass, electronic music. And I quit after like five years. And then I remember the people that started at the same time as me, they continued and they went for like a whole decade, like for ten years, they became world famous. They became like in that scene, in the music scene, they became world famous DJs. And I gave up, so I gave up too fast, I think, with music, and I didn't want to do that again. So I'm like, I'm just gonna do this for 10 years, at least, and see where it ends up. And I think it's a 10-year rule or something, like 10,000-hour rule, right? Like you need to do something for a very long time to get good at it. I think 10 years is a really long time, but it's a good time to see if you can get something somewhere because you've done it over and over and over and over and over. And yeah, you really understand the industry kind of after that time, I think.

00:49:20 Courtland Allen: What do you think you understand about like launching these products and building startups that you sort of accrued from probably spending at least 10,000 hours on the stuff over the past decade?

00:49:30 (someone): I think the biggest mistake that people make is that the only focus should be your user and the customer and how you make them happy. And it doesn't have to be like very special. It has to do a basic function like really, really well. Like Nomad List tells you if you have specific preferences where to live, like I want to live in a warm place in January in Europe.

00:37:56 Courtland Allen: But with that, you get scams, and you get pump and dump, and people who are like, oh, there's average people investing now? I can fool them much easier than I can fool the VCs.

00:38:08 (someone): I mean it's exactly and like I went here football golfing there's this football golf place here and I talked to the owner and he said he invests a lot in crypto projects and stuff and I was like that's really cool because it's like kind of older guy and he puts a lot of his money from his business into crypto price and I'm like that's cool but I really hope that it works out for you because You know, you got to pick the right ones to, it's kind of scary and it's all positive. Like we're all going to go to the moon and it's all like going up and stuff. Like, but that's, I mean, that's not always how it goes. Like a lot of people can lose money. And I know there's a libertarian streak in the world, especially in the U S of like, well, it's your own responsibility, you know? And it's like, yeah, but I mean, yeah, but it's, it's really sad to see people lose a lot of their money, and you know what I mean? And maybe it's because I'm Dutch, but in Holland we grew up where you don't want to see your neighbor go bankrupt, you want everybody to be kind of like happy and financially happy. And man, if you go look in history of the stock market in I think 1900 or 1890 or 1910, where there wasn't a lot of regulation, a lot of regulation was created to

00:33:49 (someone): Everybody knows how it works by now. I think what I really don't like about it is that a really big percentage of the projects are pump and dump, how they feel, like they're pre-mined, then given off to VC investors to buy into. And then they end up, like, I know people in this crypto world and they go to the big crypto exchanges, they pay money, like I think it's 150k to get listed. And then this coin, once it gets listed, everybody who knows it's going to get listed already bought in, which is insider trading, but it's legal because it's crypto. And then it pumps 10Xs. And if you invest 100 million, you just made a billion dollars. So, I mean, this is legal, but is it, maybe we would be doing the same thing if we had all that money. But all I'm saying is that I don't, man, it's so difficult to criticize because I don't really, I'm not very well debated with all this stuff. I don't have all the data, I think the technology is very promising. I don't like all the pumping and the we're all gonna get rich because I don't think that's not possible. That's not how it works. And you need to get in now, this FOMO stuff. It has all of the red flags of every internet bubble and tulip bubble and this stuff. And I don't think that's interesting stuff. Like I bought an NFT too. I bought the Pool Suite NFT by Poolside. Pool Suite they're called now.

00:06:13 Courtland Allen: You said only four out of 70 plus projects that you ever did made any money and grew, which means that you have something like a 95% failure rate and a hit rate of only about like 5%, which is crazy in a way. Yeah. Like how much of your success with all the projects do you think comes from like just being this relentless shipper, which almost no one is like almost no one has like 70 projects they've really tried to ship. Um, and how much of it comes from being like a strategic mastermind? having the right business strategy, because you have a pretty solid business background and education too.

00:06:45 (someone): Well, this is obviously biased, but I do get tired from the, it's like the current side guys in America where it's like, everything is luck. If you're successful, it's luck. It's completely your upbringing and your background. And I do think that's a part of it. It's like definitely like some percentages, like maybe 40 or 50 or something. But what you see from this example, when you need to keep trying for loads of times, like 70 times or more, a hundred times, and you might get a few successes. And if you try once, it's not probably not going to work because you, the odds are not there. I mean, I'm not a mathematician or a statistician, but I do believe that if you keep trying something, you can somehow, you don't change the odds, but you keep playing the odds. And there must be a statistical fallacy in this, but I do think your rate of maybe getting success gets higher, I think, when you keep trying.

00:38:56 (someone): And maybe it's because I'm Dutch, but in Holland we grew up where you don't want to see your neighbor go bankrupt, you want everybody to be kind of like happy and financially happy. And man, if you go look in history of the stock market in I think 1900 or 1890 or 1910, where there wasn't a lot of regulation, a lot of regulation was created to I mean, also to protect investors, and also in a bad way, because now you need to be accredited and you need to be rich to invest in startups and stuff, so that's not good. But a lot of stuff is to protect people, and this is political territory again, and I don't know if you need to protect people, but I do know that a lot of people can lose their life savings, and how do you, what do you do with that? Sorry, you made the wrong mistake.

00:39:41 Courtland Allen: We're all trying to figure this out. The world's changing so fast, like a year or two ago, fraction of people were talking about this stuff that are talking about it now and like no one knows where the future is gonna be but like there are these ideas like you were saying like universal basic income you know like or like the broader idea that appeals to me is like creating a floor below which people can't fall like you don't want to see your neighbors go bankrupt like you don't want people to be like struggling to eat you know and like ideally as a society they can keep raising that floor higher and higher and higher like I don't know if universal basic income will be like the thing but like There are things that once we create, people don't fall. Once we invent technology, that technology exists, and it spreads, and we don't tend to revert.

00:48:23 (someone): And the reason I didn't quit was because I was in music before I was in drum and bass, electronic music. And I quit after like five years. And then I remember the people that started at the same time as me, they continued and they went for like a whole decade, like for ten years, they became world famous. They became like in that scene, in the music scene, they became world famous DJs. And I gave up, so I gave up too fast, I think, with music, and I didn't want to do that again. So I'm like, I'm just gonna do this for 10 years, at least, and see where it ends up. And I think it's a 10-year rule or something, like 10,000-hour rule, right? Like you need to do something for a very long time to get good at it. I think 10 years is a really long time, but it's a good time to see if you can get something somewhere because you've done it over and over and over and over and over. And yeah, you really understand the industry kind of after that time, I think.

00:49:20 Courtland Allen: What do you think you understand about like launching these products and building startups that you sort of accrued from probably spending at least 10,000 hours on the stuff over the past decade?

00:49:30 (someone): I think the biggest mistake that people make is that the only focus should be your user and the customer and how you make them happy. And it doesn't have to be like very special. It has to do a basic function like really, really well. Like Nomad List tells you if you have specific preferences where to live, like I want to live in a warm place in January in Europe.

00:08:14 (someone): That also helps, right?

00:08:15 Courtland Allen: Yeah, you just keep accruing advantages. And so I guess maybe the thing to do is to try to figure out how to put yourself in a position where you can do 70 plus projects. Because I don't think everyone can do that. Maybe they don't have the motivation or they don't have the financial freedom and independence to do that. But if you can keep doing that, eventually you will have one or two wins.

00:08:36 (someone): Yeah, I think if you're in university, that's like, that was for me, the main time where I did like so many projects. And that was a great time because in Holland, you get like $250 a month for free from the, from the government back then. I think like they call it study financing and you don't have to pay it back. And you can borrow some money from the government too, for really low rates. And, uh, and you're pretty much just doing lectures, right? You're going to university and all the time you have, apart from that, I think it's same in American college. Like you can work on, you know, side projects.

00:09:04 Courtland Allen: I think I probably spent my college years partying mostly the first couple of years. Yeah, me too. I'm going to do startups. I'm just trying to do random startups. Because you have so much time. It was a big mix. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:07:29 Courtland Allen: I read a book recently, it was by Anderson Cooper. He was a journalist, a reporter, but he also comes from this Vanderbilt family. His dad's last name was Cooper, but his mom's last name was Vanderbilt, and she was the sixth generation of the Vanderbilts. And they were, at some point, the richest family in America in the 1800s and the late 1800s. And it got to the point where it was the third generation of kids, and they just had a ton of money that they had inherited from the previous generations of people who were building this empire, Cornelius Vanderbilt, But the kids, at that point, what did they care about? They didn't have any business savvy. They didn't have any ambition. They didn't have any acumen in that area. They just cared about being part of high society and status signaling. squandered the greatest fortune in America by doing nothing but building giant elaborate houses and throwing these crazy balls and just showing off as much as they could to try to like cling on to this status they had of like the richest of the rich people. And it's like you said, like in these houses cost like hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just to maintain. And by the time it was like 30s or 40s, like they were all broke, the kids were all broke, like it all disappeared and there's nothing left of it. And like that's what I think of when I think of like old money and I think of like new money.

00:03:14 Courtland Allen: becoming famous, because you have so many projects that are so successful, that make millions of dollars, that you have tons of fans, you're tweeting constantly. Is that the point?

00:03:23 (someone): Yeah, I think it's a really good question and I think we're in a very similar situation where you probably don't do it as much for the money anymore because you probably, we're quite financially stable and you generally want to do it for, because you like the process, you like to do something with your day, like you like to wake up for something and you like to have this daily challenge where like something doesn't work and, or there's like a competitor who's trying to take over, who's getting better than you. You want to have a goal in each day and that goal can span for weeks and months, right? But you want to have something you're working towards too. And I feel like I've spoken to a lot of people that are also that are not in startups and don't have their own business and stuff. And a lot of them are really happy. Some of them tell me that they miss that kind of, that thing we have, like this meaningful, like pursuits, this probably unhealthy, it's not completely healthy. I think it's a mentally unhealthy pursuit because a lot of people want to do it, right? They want to get into business or startups, but it's really mentally taxing, I think. And you need to be a little bit strange to do it. It's an obsession. Like, I mean, if you want to win, you need to be obsessed. Like look at Elon Musk, right? He's completely obsessed.

00:08:31 (someone): And there's a global leaderboard as well as regional leaderboards. And so you can kind of get a sense where you stand amongst all of the other children of the internet As well as people in particular countries you know where you stand amongst you know if you're safe from africa everyone from africa from. from europe and so forth and the way you get points is predominantly by taking part in these little quests the system sets up for you it's like a role playing game you got different questions you can do the primary questions to submit kind of status updates on the progress you're making alongside your goal and then what happens. Everyone else who applied is reviewing and rating your status update and this accomplishes two things one is it enables us to quickly figure out kind of. who's making progress and who isn't. And two, very importantly, it enables people to read the progress other people are doing, which hopefully inspires them in turn. I think this is the really important psychological effect that you experience when you arrive within a network of elites or pros. So this could be the Ivy League or when you start working at say McKinsey or Stripe, you suddenly realize, wow, Other people who are really good and that causes you to punch above your weight and kind of operationalize that concept in software. There are some side quests you can do to get some additional points, but the big needle mover is submitting these progress updates in a way where the community says, boy, you are moving quickly. You have a plan of attack and you are executing on it.

00:10:01 Courtland Allen: This is fascinating to me, the way that you've structured Pioneer such that the community itself is what powers the program.

00:35:01 Courtland Allen: It's cool. How does the product actually work? Like, so I click the start now button.

00:35:06 (someone): So you enter this form with all your legal data and stuff, income sources, I think. And so I, essentially what it is, because I'm not a legal firm, it's like legally sensitive territory. You're, you cannot, like, I'm not a lawyer, so I shouldn't do law stuff, but I can resell, I can refer legal services. So I have lawyers that I refer you to that are good and they know how to deal with the types of people that I attract like remote workers and they help you through the process and I get a commission on the amount of money that you spend. But I'm not a legal firm, I just resell. I think Stripe Atlas, like I talked to the Stripe Atlas head of product, I think, and he said they do something similar. Because I was always thinking, ah, you must hire all these lawyers and stuff. And actually, I don't think they do. They do kind of similar, but I think they do it non-profit because they're just doing it to, like Stripe wants to increase the amount of businesses on the internet, right? It's like the mission. But I think they operate in a similar way. You just resell to high quality lawyers that are trusted. So it's a very strange business model.

00:36:13 Courtland Allen: So at any point, do you collect payment? Is there a Stripe payment form on your website?

00:23:26 (someone): It's kind of a competitor to Indieacres a little bit. WIP.co. And it's kind of like a tracking system for your to-dos for indie makers kind of, made by my friend Mark. I think you should buy the websites. I think you should acquire, Indieacres should acquire WIP. I've always tell you, but I think they would work really well together. But you can just log your to-dos on Telegram, this chat app, and also on the website and It's a very easy way for me to I also log like my life stuff like sometimes even food logs and stuff Yeah, so I just do like slash done fix bug join button on nomad list doesn't work hashtag nomad list and then that show at a screenshot sometimes a video and that's it and that gives me like a really accountable public log of what I'm doing and And yeah, it's really nice. I think Jerry Seinfeld talked about this chart where you cross on the calendar, you do a cross and you don't want to break the chain when you want to learn something or something. And I think that's the same when you want to do the streak, you don't want to break the chain. But even without that, it kind of just happens where I wake up and I check the errors I receive. My robots send me errors on Telegram, like what happens when I sleep, for example. And I kind of check like, okay, this is a problem I need to fix. And so my robots kind of control me and manage me and give me instructions what to work on the next day.