Today, I’m talking to KP — the build-in-public guy. KP has been a pillar of the indie hacker community, and we talk about how to involve yourself, empower others, and eventually build a community around your personal brand and the things you care about. Here’s KP.
Arvid Kahl
Hello everyone and welcome to The Bootstrapped Founder. Today, I’m talking to KP, the building public guy. KP has been a pillar of the indie hacker community. And we talk about how to involve yourself, empower others, and eventually build a community around your personal brand, and the things that you actually care about. Here’s KP. Here’s something that I’ve been wanting to ask you for quite a while because you have done this Founder Hotline thing, right?
KP
Yeah
Arvid Kahl
That’s been one of your Twitter projects, where you’re, essentially you’re just present and listening and giving advice and having people on to give advice. How did that happen? Because that’s such a nice thing. It probably super draining. And it probably takes a lot of energy from the people being asked because you essentially doing a help hotline there. That is such a cool project. Tell me more about it.
KP
Thank you! thank you! I’m super happy to hear that it caught your attention. And like this is how you feel about it. Sometimes it feels like it’s hard because you, like I feel like I operate with so many people at your level at my level where we are doing so much on a weekly, monthly basis that it’s hard to keep up with what’s the current focus for, you know, any of us and it feels heartening to hear that about Founder Hotline. Anyways, I mean, the idea generally came from finding that I’m getting the same seven to eight questions on my DMs or my email. Or when I talk about like when I go on a podcast from the hosts around some topics, where the knowledge is obvious and the knowledge exists on the internet. But it’s seems like the application of that knowledge or that insight in that specific customized scenario seems to be the missing part or some combination of not having someone believe in you that this is okay. What you’re going through was all right, that kind of validation. And the information of that step of the journey of a founder seems to be missing. The way I knew that was from lots of phone conversations. Most of them come to me and they’re asking me the questions that I think they know the answers for. And sometimes I ask them, you really know the answer for this, why are you asking me this? And so they just want to hear it from my mouth. And I’ve been in those shoes where, you know, before joining on deck and before, you know, working with some other, you know, bigger sort of, you know, leverage people. I just wanted them to tell me exactly what I already know. But wanted them to confirm how it played out in their life. So that I don’t feel so alone walking that path. And I think that’s one of the greatest gifts you can give an up and coming founder, you know. You do that all the time with your content Arvid, is to tell them it’s okay to stumble and to show your skin, our skin a little bit. Because what happens after a while is that people put us on pedestals. And there’s a lot of hero worship going on out there on the world right now, as we know. And I think vulnerability is a very valuable asset to exhibit and it’s a virtue to practice. So which means you have to show them how you failed, how it sucked for you during a phase. And so I saw a lot of this happening. And I thought, what if there was a weekly ritual where I practice this with other founders and held myself accountable to show up and do this. And so I started this founderhotline.com and, you know, it blew up and frankly, before, there’s another nugget here, which I wanted to kind of touch on is that I did this for two and a half months, and didn’t have that much of like a runaway success that I had for my other projects. It was fun. I was having a lot of fun with it. I was giving value to the 8 to 10 to 20 people. We would have a wide swing of attendance. Some events, we had seven levenger show up as one of the guests for Gumroad. And he had I think there were 450 people live listening. But then there were some episodes where it was eight people and me, there were like four people and me. And I was so proud of the fact that I didn’t care for those individual milestones. I just kept going. And three months later, fricking Gary Vee showed up as one of the guests who broke our records. We had 25,000 listeners, but nobody could have told me. I couldn’t have even predicted that three months later, we would have Gary Vee, you know. So I think the biggest takeaway from it was that figure out what you want to do and where you feel like it’s a service to somebody else and just do it. And great things will happen in the long run.
Yeah and particularly when you focus not just on people’s, like clear, visible success, right? But also the struggle beneath it, which is
Yes
Arvid Kahl
That’s something I mean, in the world where only a few people have success and most people struggle, it’s not the success that people can resonate with. It’s the struggle. It’s quite obvious that the struggle is something people can relate to much more than these kinds of moments of, I always call this the highlight reel, right? Like nobody wants to see everybody’s highlight. What they wanna see like everybody’s real real, that the thing that they actually go through, which is something that you’ve been doing stellarly. I think the Founder Hotline is great. You’re working in the communities you’re in, you’re working with like. And I wanna talk about all of this today, like, you know. You know code work and you’re working, just empowering founders and you’re building public stuff. But I just, I find it very exciting because it’s also obviously the thing that I do a lot and that I care a lot about. So I can very much resonate not just with what you do but also why you do it. And I feel this focus on fundamental health on leveling the playing field, like normalizing struggle and not normalizing hustle. Like, there’s this difference there, right? Like hustle to me is often this kind of aimless work. That is just done because it fills your time and it feels like you’re getting somewhere but the struggle is the part that kind of motivates it. And I think it’s more important to talk about the struggle and the underlying unease of being a founder than just the kind of take action now and do this, do this, do this. Maybe that’s something we should talk about. Because it sounds like in all of these different episodes of the founder hotline and all these other Twitter spaces that you’ve been into, and there have been plenty, you have this very reasonable way of getting advice to people without it feeling like it’s something that they have to do. And I wanna talk about advice, in a sense of how can we even take advice? Because both of us are kind of indie advice giving game, at least when you judge us from our very thoughtful tweets that we post all the time, right? Like we try to help people through the medium of text based or audio based advice. And often, people will ask, well, how can you trust advice? Like, isn’t that all just anecdote? Isn’t that all just like an intent to sell something else? What is your opinion on the power and the dangers of advice?
KP
Yeah, no, that’s the immediate topic. I mean, I think at the core of it, I keep asking myself a lot of these questions like I do so many, like disparate, seemingly disconnected projects. Because when I was On Deck, was doing the No-Code thing around the fellowship. What does it mean to fellowship, right? So then I had to sell the meaning of fellowship, the purpose of fellowship. And I joined, then I did a lot of content projects that had newsletters, and I did like my own No-Code projects, about 15 of them. And each of them were very disparate. There’s like, not a lot of commonality in some of the projects that I did, like a lot of it are much more focused than I am. And I’ve just been, to me, the metric that matters to me is creating, being able to create stuff with the building in public podcast, you know, 42, 43 episodes now, being able to create that, right? Being able to connect with people and playing to my strengths. And so the overarching theme of all of this, along with founder hotline and founder advice and everything, I’ve just realized Arvid that at the core of my waking hours, I enjoy like guiding people. You know, the very like, tangible example I can give is like in my past life, I was probably a tour guide in like Greece or some like India or someplace like that. And I just enjoy. I just enjoy taking people from point A to point B. And especially if I’ve been around point B, you know, a couple of times on my own. Then I really enjoy someone who’s just stepped into point A and they’re struggling at point A. And I walk to them and say, hey, I see that you’re struggling. Is there something I can do? And then they usually will tell me they wanna get to point B. And I’m like, I’ve been there. I’ve just been there. I’m coming back or I know three people who have been there. I’d love to help you to get there, right? And whether they pay me or whether they wanna compensate my work or my advice, after they get to point B is almost in the long scheme of things are relevant. The joy of taking them on this journey is exceeding my expectation and anticipation of reward. I don’t care. My reward is my intrinsic joy that I get when I see someone who almost give up as a founder, almost went back to their nine to five job almost went back. You know and maybe entrepreneurship is not for me. There’s a sense of joy that I get when I see in their eyes, when I say something use words, somehow as magical spells like in Harry Potter and get them to do the thing that they were supposed to do or wanted to do. How powerful is that? I feel like a little wizard. If eight words that come from my mouth can inspire you to go do the thing, like what a freakin’ power it is, in a good way, right? Like it’s what a crazy, powerful, honorable place to be for me for that scenario. So now when they get to be usually they wanna somehow pay back or they wanna compensate or whatever, that’s fine. But for two, three years when I was, earlier in my No-Code journey and like earlier Twitter journey I had like foreigner followers and stuff. I was so hesitant to even ask for anything in return. And partly that was my own lack mindset, my own sort of insecure mindset that I had growing up around asking people for money or doing sales because I felt that that was so not for me, like a sort of forbidden kind of thing. And now I’m embracing the abundance mindset saying, I’m not asking for something where there is no value exchange, you know. And so I embrace more of a abundant mindset and said, like, I’m offering them a chance to do X if they wish to, if they can afford to. If they can’t, I will treat them just as well you know. And I’ll probably spend more time with the folks who offer you know, who can take the offer. So it’s become weirdly empowering for me too, to go through this journey. And so that’s how I view advice, you know. And I think most advice, the challenge when you said, like, we’re gonna jump on a space or jump on a podcast or interview, a lot of these people who are trying to give advice are so desperate to prove to the world and to the audience that they’re right. They’re right and they will pitch the advice like they’re pitching something pedantic. And I think my stance and my approach is very different. I’m offering them almost like a curious approach to, here’s how I’m seeing it. I’m curious to hear your take on this. And I’m willing to refine my mental model as you speak to me because maybe it’s not a perfect mental model yet. So there’s so much courage in saying and signaling that I don’t know all the answers yet. However, here’s what I know so far, maybe that will help you enough. So the greatest taekwondo masters, the greatest karate masters, the greatest Jedi in the Star Wars units are the ones who are willing to lose the battle to learn something new. So there’s a sense of humility that they have. And that’s way more magnetic in a world where everyone’s walking around plays like no adults. And that’s why people resonate with me and with you, and like people who approach that philosophy.
Arvid Kahl
Yeah, you put connection at the center, right? You don’t put the pure transfer of knowledge or the accomplishing of a certain particular goal. That’s not the goal. The goal is to connect and facilitate, right? It’s nice because in a way, that’s a very selfish approach like obviously this is about connection between you and them. But it’s also super selfless because it empowers them to do it on their own because you just guiding them there. It’s like the teacher-mentor fish kind of parable, right? That’s kind of what you do. But you’re right there. You’re teaching them. You’re not just giving them a guidebook, like, I’ve been trying to learn how to fish because I don’t really have many people who know what it is, it’s quite literally about fishing now. I don’t have many people around me who know how to fish. I’ve been trying to learn it from books, super hard, super hard. Even YouTube videos, it’s not the same. And it’s just it comes through experimentation you get there, but it’s just if somebody were to just hand me the right configuration or to show me the moves like that would have been 10 minute and ever. And I would know how to do it at least you know, the basics. But having tried to learn this from literature, horrible experience because there’s nothing hands on about this. So the connection between the teacher and the student is such an important part. And I completely agree with you on the fact that like through teaching, you’re learn like that this whole learn teach loop, which is to me a cyclical never ending thing. That is I see this at the core of your work. I’m trying to put it at the core of mine as well. So
KP
I’ll say something that’s a little interesting here. As you mentioned this, the fishing analogy. You know what came to mind was, is this like notion around teaching through playbooks, teaching through oral stuff. Sorry, teaching through some documentation. Actually, if you really think about it from a pure evolution perspective and just like history of mankind, most teaching, you know, teaching goes back all the way to the existence of humans, right? Like all the way back, even before there was Gumroad or Teachable or any of these platforms or books, right? It goes all the way back. I feel it’s one of the original, you know, human endeavors is to teach your next generation something you’ve learned through the hard way. There’s something about it that’s so deep in all of us that we want, even with our kids. Like I have an 18 month old Neil, which I who I tweet about all the time. There’s something so genetic and in evolution wise that I feel this need to pass some lessons to him. There’s a sense of wishing well for him and I don’t want him to suffer as much as I suffered for whatever reasons. So what I’m trying to get to is this fact that fundamentally if you go all the way back, teaching was done through sharing what I know and showing the work. For example, if you and I were like whirling statues and we’re like we’re 1567 AD, I would have to literally show you how to whittle the statue. There was no books. Because there was no Gutenberg Printing Press. You couldn’t, we couldn’t even find a textbook because there was no textbooks at the time. And there was no tape recorders or any of these things so you can listen to podcasts. So the only way you would get knowledge from my head to your head would be either asking me pointed specific questions like a curious beginner and me being humble enough and curious enough to see, to share my lessons and update my models as I teach you. So the relationship between a teacher and a student is so prehistoric that I think that’s why, like I feel I’m always complaining about, oh, this will be outdated because there’s Google. Oh, no, I don’t think so. I don’t think so. These are all modern tools came about to facilitate teaching and get faster. But there will always be scenarios where documentation, guides, docs, all these things can’t help. You need that teacher to say the right words to you particularly in the scenario that you need them to say for you to thrive. And I’ve had so many kind teachers, like a year ago, including you, who’ve helped me in this journey. And I’m always thinking about that like, I’m nothing without my teachers, you know, so.
Arvid Kahl
I feel the same way. Like my whole entrepreneurial journey is built on the shoulders of giants in the industry. Or like if without the podcast, without the indie hackers podcast, without all the blogs and the forums, the Twittersphere, like where would I be? I wouldn’t even know what a SaaS is at that point. I wouldn’t even know that you could create an ebook or make a course or whatever. Like, just with the tools you have at home, like I would think, oh, Netflix production level, right? That kind of stuff. You only know what you know. And if people don’t introduce it and that’s the thing, that’s kind of why I’m doing what I’m doing right now as well. And I think you could talk about this too, like what your intrinsic motivation is to be a teacher at this point. But I feel like I have to give this back. Like these people were doing this while they were running businesses. Like five years ago, they were going on podcasts. They were recording things, recording their own stuff. They were writing like 1000s of words a week just to you know, like instruct people they didn’t even know and I got the benefit from this for free too, right? And now that’s kind of the motivation why I’m writing and recording and doing this too, like talking to experts like you. It’s kind of, I just want an opportunity unselfishly too, for myself to be able to share it with as many people as possible, right? It’s always, is it as your motivation too like this never ending feeling of gratitude and kind of being responsible to share more?
KP
Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a version of that, right? For sure. Like as I, you know, as I embrace more and more successes, as I try new things and get more successful. Like so much of all of the last 4, 5, 6, 7 years of my career, Arvid has been really like other people’s kindness. And you know, other people give me a shot, right? When like Gary Vee showed up in my episode number four with the Building in Public podcast, like that’s a shot. Nobody has, like, no one who was at that level will show up on your episode number four, you know, he did it. It was genuinely out of his own kindness. There’s no reason to simply with Alexis Ohanian, simply with Eric Thornburg, everybody who I talked about Rob Walling, the other day. I was asking something about I forgot, like, something was investing in small SaaS companies, indie SaaS companies and like he chimed in, in one of the threads. Like he didn’t need to. I’m constantly shocked at like actually telling this. So many people like Steph Smith. I’m constantly shocked at the openness in our industry, in tech industry. I mean, probably other industries, too. Especially there are the combination of people who know, who’ve tried a lot of ambitious things and people who are willing to give back. That blend of people are my favorite. They’re just my favorite. I don’t need yeah, I don’t need them to, like, you know, like compliment me or I don’t need them to like you know, praise me. I think their existence is a compliment, in my view, because we are learning a lot just by following them.
Arvid Kahl
I think all the people you just mentioned, I think they all understood how and why community works. Like every single one of them because they’re all involved in community in some capacity. And all, every single person in this list is somebody who’s playing the long game, is playing this infinite game of staying in the community, right? Because like for Tyler running the Fund for Rob, running the fund and the conference for staff with with the courses and the teaching and like for every single person in there, there is value not just monetary but just like real felt perceived growth and wealth and value in staying in this community and making it better. All of them benefit from this in some capacity. So they all know that a community can only grow stronger if you contribute to the community, every single person, right? That’s what makes a community strong and active is contribution by every single member. I think that’s why they’re so open about it. And every single one of them I’ve talked to at some point. I was on Rob’s podcast. I am working with Tyler on something right now. There’s all these little things that in this community happened because everybody contributes, in some way. And I think you do the same, obviously, you’re part of the community just as much as they are. And I think they benefit from your kindness, just as much as you benefit from theirs, which is such a cool thing, right? That’s also something that is for me, very noticeable. It’s not unique to our community, but is extremely strongly expressed and very clear in the indie founder, indie hacker, like Creator and Maker community, stronger than many other communities probably because we need it. Like we don’t have much support outside of our little community, right?
KP
I think the funny thing about entrepreneurship is like, I feel like we, if you take any other field, like medicine, like you could be a heart surgeon, you could be a cardiologist. And like, you know, there’s a level of certainty you can have about the outcome. Like, you know, if you’ve done 18 bypass surgeries in the last month, you know, the 19th one is pretty much certain. Like you, actually a lot of patients expect that certainty. But in business, the challenge is, there’s no such certainty with the market and the customers because that’s why I feel like a lot of the greats and a lot of people that, you know, I look up to, a lot of times what I tend to do is like, you know, you just really have to be okay with being humbled by the markets decision, you know. And being flexible, extremely agile to react and be flexible enough to adapt to what they’re looking and asking for. And you cannot ever, like there’s no sense of like not stability, but like no sense of like taking it for granted. So when you don’t take it for granted, you know, anything’s about life. Like if you don’t take your child for granted, if you don’t take your dog for granted. If you don’t take your spouse for granted, they’re much more likely to appreciate you because they feel heard, they feel special, they feel seen. And they’re like, wow, you’re essentially cool. And a lot of my following, a lot of your following, they’re shocked, surprised when they’re like, wow! KP remembers my last name. KP remembers my and I’m ike, what do you think? Of course! Of course, I remember
Arvid Kahl
Why else would I follow you, right?
KP
Right! Like, why would and so they’re like, wow! And I think maybe their expectation coming from maybe other industries is that, oh, you can just be an expert on like, almost like building stealth or like, kinda like, live under the rock and win. You know, maybe yes, if you’re a writer like Stephen King, like some old school stuff. But in our generation, in our current zeitgeist, like it’s very, very hard to win solo. Because most entrepreneurship is not like golf. You know, it is very much like a team sport, you know. So I think a lot of these people are just, you know, just grateful to this community. And they’re trying their best to give back including me, you know.
Arvid Kahl
Now, we have pretty flat hierarchies, too, right? It’s just
KP
Yeah
Arvid Kahl
Everybody, there isn’t really much of a difference between somebody who’s just like started that business and somebody who just successfully sold there. Like this could happen within a couple weeks, a couple months, or it could never happen, you never know. So might just as well have a pretty, pretty flat hierarchy here. Because everything is kind of up in the air. I love your kind of the comparison with a doctor performing the same thing over and over. There’s really no repetition in entrepreneurship, like even if you do something well.
KP
Exactly. So hypothetically, if you started the next ad tech, SaaS Arvid, like, there’s no guarantee that it’s gonna, you know, succeed at the first run, you know. Like, you don’t have to pivot a lot. You might have to, like, you know, do a lot of changes, but there’s no guarantees in business.
Yeah and that’s kind of why so many serial founders are kinda constantly looking for problems while they solve another problem. My own example, I guess, would be like when I wrote the book, I figured out I needed links and then I build permanent link. And in building permanent link, I figured out who might need this kind of thing. And then I might be working on the next thing just from being exposed to new problems along the way. Or Rob Fitzpatrick, like he wrote a book The Mom Test, pretty famous in our little community. And in writing the book, he was trying to figure out beta reading. And then in his next project, he’s now offering a tool for writers who want beta reading in their community. So he’s just figuring out one problem at a time and in figuring that out, new problems arise. And I think that’s the safer way of building a business compared to, I run one business of this kind. And now I shall repeat the exact same thing again. It’s not the same, like you haven’t found the same level of intense problem. You might just think that you’re good at solving this particular kind of problem in this industry. But maybe there’s a whole different problem that you understand much better that you figured out along the way. I think serial entrepreneurship is severely misunderstood in many ways. And because if you hire a CEO for your company, you probably have a big enterprise company. You probably want them to have been a CEO in enterprise companies before. But in entrepreneurship and coming up with a business that may or may not succeed at all, this has no quality, right? Like, having run this before doesn’t mean anything at all.
You may have just some social capital. You may have some network, but like, what, like I’ve been the other thing that I’ve seen, you know, the last four years is that I’ve seen some of the greats, you know, get humbled very quick by the market. And so it also made me, to be honest. Like, you know, ever since we first connected, I remember Arvid, our first ever touch point was, I think an interview I did of you and Danielle. You know, like I think you were coming fresh off of the exit. And I can’t remember it was, which some newsletter that I had at the time. It was definitely not my current one, some other newsletter I had. I think I did a long form interview. And I thought that was the first time I at the time. I was you know, I was I always had ambition. You know, as a kid, I always thought I was like a, you know, I had a little bit of ambition. But the other experience that I wanna share with some of the listeners here is that your ambition is not fixed, it can grow. And that’s why it’s important to associate yourself with other people whose ambition can rub off on you. So when I read your story and I read the way it grew, the way you did the exit and the way you know, it was life changing meaningful outcome. There’s two things I thought one was, wow, I can’t believe this is the thing. I can’t believe you can actually exit a SaaS. At the time, I don’t even know the words exit and SaaS. And I was like, wow. And of course now it’s a joke because now both of us we are constantly looking at MicroAcquire tweets and replying. Like exit’s like a middle name, like it’s like very, very common in my day to day now. But for them, for that part of that KP who was like working nine to five at Delta Airlines and surrounded by other IT employees. Like that kid had no clue what exit meant. I thought it was like, exit door like leaving the building, right? Anyway, and so from that, I’ve realized that oh, this is a possibility, wow! And then, but then I realized, the other thing I took from that interview of you was how the way you narrated the thing. And you know, the way you write generally too is that you make it approachable, you make it relatable. And you make it seem like that’s the power of empowering, it’s like somebody else could do this too. And I think a lot of people don’t intentionally make that choice. Or maybe you do that intentionally. And I think I do that intentionally, too, is that I start to separate myself from like I tried to say that I have done some extraordinary things, but I’m an ordinary person. That is far more empowering than saying I’m a genius. I was gifted. I’m talented. And hence, you know, unfortunately, we’re seeing some of that, you know, on Twitter. Thanks to Elon Musk and stuff. I feel like that attitude is so disheartening at the receiving end because if you just came off in that interview, as a know it all or someone who was just meant and born for greatness, and like you just knew this, I would have been like closing that window and like being like, okay, well, not for me. Clearly this guy is born with some crazy IQ or whatever. But it seems so empowering that I had this inclination and curiosity to explore this and say, maybe I could be a bootstrap founder too one day, you know. So I updated my ambition level just by 10 points and then by 10 points and then by 10. And so the last four or five years now I’m like, wow, it’s so different compared to what I was five, four years ago. And so many things that were impossible at the time for me now are day to day. Like, I have friends who are doing this day to day, like, you know, Andrew Gazdecki and people like we’re building billion dollar unicorns. And they’re just like you and me. And I’m like, that is actually wild. And when you write about this stuff, when you post about this content, when you tweet about it, I try my best to make it seem like this is doable for you too, for the audience.
Arvid Kahl
Yeah. And that is noticeable because it’s approachable. It’s relatable. It’s the kind of that’s the whole thing why I talked about the Founder Hotline in the beginning is like people need help. You want to be the person helping them. Of course that resonates, right? Because it connects two things that want to be connected. I love your description of how you kind of this iteration that you have and just constantly increasing your ambition because that shows one thing like the person you were a month ago, a year ago, 5 years, 10 years ago, is the same person as you are. It’s just at a different level having experienced different things. And I think that’s so important to understand when it comes to communicating with people. Because I hear I see so many founders out there who would like to build in public, who would like to just share what they know and teach other people, but they think I have nothing to teach because everybody knows this kind of stuff. And when I think about this kind of stair stepping right, this iterative approach to learning and to knowing new things, just climb down one stair and teach for those people teach for the people who didn’t learn the thing that you learned this week just yet and teach that one thing, that’s what we do constantly. That’s why I write the way I write. I write for myself five years ago. I don’t write for anybody else just for what would I like to read without the knowledge that I have about the knowledge that I have right now. And you do it too. You have to have this way of communicating. And I think that may be unintentional or subconscious. But in having understood, I think having this fun, foundational framework of, okay, it’s an iteration anyway. You’ll never be done. That also means like, you’re never the same person really as you were before but you can always teach to people just a couple of weeks behind you. And you’ve been doing that for fantastically over a long time in many different cohorts like but the whole No-Code situation and they won. Can you talk to me a little bit about like how you do this in a more concerted effort?
KP
Yeah, yeah. Thank you. I mean, I think I’ve been approaching, you know, each project with a sense of curiosity of how can I make this helpful for others. And in the beginning, I used to be insecure that I couldn’t just simply say it’s meant for X niche and not for others. And the insecurity just wanted to say, oh, sorry, everybody. Because it’s always easy to say that. Because when you say it’s for everybody, you can just hide under their, you know, under the curtain of like, oh, it’s meant for everybody. But really, both of us know that the more niche and tight you know, you are with your communication about who it is meant for, what value they will they find, how is it better than the alternatives, the better for you because then you’re facing the ultimate choice of, you know, whether they are in or out. So, the last two, three years since since I first interface with you Arvid, I feel like we have had maybe 500, 600 rejections. And what you’ve walked by our audience have seen are maybe like the five or six highlight reels we talked about, like you said. I’ve had a fair share of like to shoot my shot things where I did from a podcast where I would shoot my shot about, you know, Gary Vee showed up like that and said, yes. But I’ve had a fair share of people who didn’t say yes and I left the tweets like, just like that. And those tweets are also, if you notice, my intent is the same. My ask is the same. My value prop is the same. It’s just that they said no. Early on, this used to crush me, debilitate me, would never make me come back and like, do anything after this because I’m like, oh, my God, they don’t like me. Now, I’ve learned I mean, not now. But like, in the journey, I’ve learned that they don’t owe me nothing. Nobody owes you shit. It’s actually an act of kindness, which is one step above decency, that is coming in doing something favorable for you. So if they don’t do it, that’s a okay. Like, it’s no imperative. And maybe they’re busy. Maybe they have other 15,000 things to do on that. So removing myself and my ego from the equation and just viewing those individual asks as just asks. And sometimes being objective and refining the asks, wondering, did I miss something in the ask? Like is the ask all about me, me, me, me, me? Is there a win-win? So if you’re not able to detach yourself from your ask/sales emails/whatever you wanna put in there, you will never be able to refine it and iterate on it. So once you do this, you get to a refined pitch or refined ask of some sort. And then you just reuse this over and over again. And so when I started On Deck, the first ever fellowship I did, there was the On Deck, No-Code. And we had I remember the first cohort was 130 people. And I went on 350 phone calls, 350 Zoom calls with them. And it was literally sales because I was trying to go on a call with them, understand their needs, and see if this is a good fit or not. But one takeaway from me there was it’s one that number one sales is all about volume, especially those kinds of sales. It’s not a SaaS product, it is very clearly an education program. So it’s all about volume. If you want X leads, you have to do X calls. The second thing is, subconsciously, I went on those calls not to sell them. And this is another lesson that I learned, which I’m using every day now. I went on these calls to really understand where they are in their journey. And myself, in my head, figure out if this is even a good fit for them or not. And there were times where I would tell them, you’re not ready for this yet, or this might be not the best use of your money yet. There are some folks from Nigeria that joined. I remember one specific phone call. There was a guy who was in some part of Nigeria, joined. It was like late in the night for him. He got on the call. This is supposed to be one of the audience see interviews with him. And he was so excited. He wrote an essay in my like, signup form. He wrote, like he was very clearly wanted to be a part of it. But he joined and then they were like, it looks like a little bit of a hot in the background. And then there was not any lights, except there was a little candle in front of his. And somehow he has electricity to run this audio meeting because the video was also no bandwidth. And he said, he’s using it through his phone data plan. And I was like, there’s no way this person can afford the price tag that we have. But I wanted to do on that call. And first assure him that he belongs too. He belongs too. That’s another very important thing because a lot of people count themselves out. Because they feel like I’m not even, I don’t belong there yet. And here I am representing a Silicon Valley hotshot startup and telling him you’re on the right path too. You know, you’re no less than someone who is in freakin’ in Atlanta like me, or someone who’s in like somewhere else. And I just told him, I appreciate your hustle. Like, this is some next level shit. I’ve never seen anyone with like a candle, like someone’s looking like you don’t have electricity. And you’re using all the power just to run this meeting, right? And I gave him a scholarship. And I batted my ass off at the company to get these scholarships going because it was like I had a little 10% or whatever hand in, how many scholarships came out. Basically 10% the cohort were scholarships that I could choose. And I made sure that he got in and but off tangent there. But the 300 calls are, all the calls I was there, I was trying to just learn what they’re up to point A and ask them if they wanted point B. What is their aspiration to get to point B. And I would mentally think if the program would be a good use of their time and money to get from point A to point B. If the answer is no, you’re not ready yet. And I’ll be honest and blunt, that costs me some “revenue”. But most of them came back in second and third and fourth quarters. And then they did the program anyway if they wanted to. So I operated from trust. And of course, I winged it. I didn’t have any lessons about. I didn’t take any sales course. I just put myself in their shoes, Arvid just like how you were saying earlier. What would I want to hear from this guy who’s calling me from this company called On Deck? I would want absolute honesty. And I would want trust and I would want them to tell me if this is good fit or not, like honestly. And in our current world that is very missing. I was shocked. I’ve been shocked about that. And if you just execute that playbook, you may lose some sales. But in the long run, you’re gonna be a category winner in whatever you do, in whatever SaaS you are in because there’s that trust is so high. And so I think those 300 calls taught me so much about how sales works. And I think I lost my fear of rejection. And from there on, you know, with Day One, it’s even more fun. I just leveled up and I thought, okay, in this case, we’re not just serving No-Code founders. We’re serving Bootstrap, No-Code. We did see a lot of E-commerce founders. And I just showed up on these calls. And I would just ask about their business and see if it’s a good fit or not, same playbook, really you know. And I’m doing this for everything, including my content now, my newsletter sponsorships. Everything that I’m doing now has a version of, is this a good fit for you or not?
Arvid Kahl
Do you think this can work outside of communities like ours because or feels like ours for community is such a strong thing? Because honestly, all you’re saying is like very trust centric, right? The trust that you know what’s good for them, that they understand that if it’s not good for them, they can trust you to not sell it to them. All of this is very much trust based. And I’m thinking of our communities where there’s a lot of beacons of trust, like people who facilitate trust in the community. And then there are industries that are like, I don’t even know a word that describes it adequately. But shady is probably a good way of describing it where, you know, just following the most recent like, crypto world developments and you see lots of industries. Crypto’s just one of them were some people, many people are not really trustworthy. And you know, the community itself was kind of skeptical if everybody, like it doesn’t work.
KP
You know what’s going on there, though. I think it was such a sad thing to watch because there was a step function upgrade in technology evolution within that industry. I agree, I’m sure you agree as a technologist that there was a step function upgrade, you know, when in technology purely from an infrastructure technology perspective. However, every use case, most of the use cases seem like scam because the people around that step function upgrade of the technology are trying to get their bag a next quarter. And I think this is something I’ve learned. And you know, everybody that I respect, their advice somehow boils down to the same thing, Arvid. Play the decades game not the nowadays game. Like why are you so in a rush to make so much money in the next quarter, next day, next few days? When really, you build like Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger built their brand over 5, 6, 7 decades. There’s no overnight success story, you know. And no overnight shortcut that can get you to the top of the mountain, even if somebody sells you on that that’s mostly bogus. Or also, you’re not gonna enjoy your transformation, if suddenly I could wave a magic wand and turn my kid who’s 18 months into 18 year old. Am I doing a service to him? Just by turning him like that 18 years old? Or am I doing a disservice? I think I’m doing a disservice. If you’re accelerating transformation, if you’re accelerating growth by hacking it, I think you’re doing a disservice to your own confidence, to your own understanding and perspective of life, wisdom, so many other things. So I think the challenge with that industry and there’s a couple of industries like that is that there’s a lot of actors who’ve surfaced out of nowhere. And they’ve surrounded this score technology with these bullshit use cases. And they’re trying to very quickly skim everything. And the biggest thing, the challenge, the most frustrating to me is that they’ve taken a word that I respect so much. And I know you respect it so much called community and then they water it down in that industry. I’m like, oh my God, right? It’s like
Arvid Kahl
Yeah, the whole like discords NFT communities that are just like bloated MLM systems, unfortunately, right? Because there’s always this art component or sometimes there’s actual art beneath these kinds of projects. And then all of a sudden, you see the greed seeping into these groups of people, communities, it’s bizarre. I wanna pick up on something you just said, like about the whole long term thinking, infinite thinking and thinking decades kind of approach that you mentioned. I very much agree with this. And I actually asked on Twitter or said something along those lines like play the infinite game, if you wanna see eventual success. Again, one of my very thinky tweets sent out earlier this week. But I got a reply from somebody. And I found that very interesting. And they said, I’m scared that my industry is gonna just evaporate and I’m left with nothing. And that did get me thinking because that is a very primal fear, right? The thing I’m doing is gonna be gone. It’s like if you were raising horses and then car factories appear. Like how people who are building carriages must have felt when cars came out. It’s like, I devoted my whole life to building the finest carriages in the land. And now nobody shall buy them anymore from me. It’s like very sad, but it’s also just a normal progression of things. And I was thinking, this person is afraid of change, what would be the advice that you would give this person that is afraid of losing their market and everything?
KP
I mean, I think, you know, to an extent that fear has validity. So I think we should start by acknowledging that we all feel that way sometimes. And it’s okay to feel that way sometimes. I was terrified the last 10, 15 days. I’ll be honest and admit here that Elon Musk and whatever the heck is doing with Twitter would wipe out my 35,000, 36,000 friends and people that I really admired, right? And I’m not against him, like I don’t hate him. Like hate like, it was a waste of my time and everyone’s time but I think he’s running about this in a very sort of haphazardly, like a foolish way and you know, whatever. And so for a while, I wonder like, man, like, how close are we to bankruptcy? I’m no less shocked. I mean, like, if you saw like what happened to SPF and the whole FTX thing, like, there’s a if the person was at the top doesn’t have a board, doesn’t trust anybody else to give advice, doesn’t take critical, constructive feedback. You’re really at the mercy of that person waking up and feeling benevolent towards you, literally like that’s it. Like if Elon Musk woke up one day and doesn’t feel benevolent towards us, he can wipe out the platform or like fire 80% or like, you know, create a lock. I still don’t get like I’m sure you know this, like, since the last week, my notification count has sort of evaporated. There’s a bug going on right now on the app, iOS app, where you just see the red icon like, do you feel this too? Or is it just me? I don’t
Arvid Kahl
The backend servers, backend service that has been deploying these notifications, that has been not working for a couple of days now.
KP
Right. So it’s not ungodly or unimaginable to think that whoever are following me or have been following those counts, or those names and accounts would be mismatched or mishandled or whatever. They could be any version of production bugs. So what I’m trying to say is that that primal fear is real. However, I’m of the firm belief that the locus of control of your destiny lies within you. So you get to decide the next step at every, you know, chapter of your life. So sure, something like this happened, it does sucks. The industry has operated, whatever. What are you gonna do about it? Do you feel like you have the locus of control? Or do you feel like some external agent, whether it’s government, whether it’s an industry, whether it’s Elon Musk, or some, you know, CEO, wherever has it, you know. The more you think that you have the locus of control within your hands, the better decisions you’re gonna take that will lay the path for you to never fall into the trap ever again, right? That’s why I think bootstrap being a bootstrap founder, being a founder or being someone who is a self funded or even like founder who was running his own or her own business with their own knowledge and insights, I think is so smart. Because I was fired from Delta in March 2020 because of pandemic. It happened. The whole department was fired because the stock fell by 30%. And they clearly couldn’t see a way for, you know, the stock to rise back up quickly. So they let us go. I came home and I started my biggest No-Code project of that year called Cuppa. Because I was like, alright, looks like I have 15 days of free time here. Let me do something fun. And then again, I had to be at the receiving end of it and unfortunately use On Deck where, you know, there were some restructuring that happened. And I was the highest ranked NPS employee in the company. And I was given the word about, okay, you know, we can’t afford you long enough. We have to think about the future. I mean, they didn’t fire me like, but it was something on the same result. So then I have to start over again. So every two years, my wife and I will joke about this, like, she’s been a stable job as a school teacher for 11 years. And I think I’ve changed jobs like eight times in the last four years. What do you do about it? You know, what do you do? Like, I think the point is this never. That’s what I think in business and entrepreneurship Arvid, you have to make friendship with risk and uncertainty. Nobody I know is immune to that. Nobody I know. Like anybody like Horton Allen, anyone you take has accepted the reality, it’s realistic to think that but I think it’s practical, that, hey, tomorrow, you wake up the market decides they don’t want your product anymore, that could happen. What are you gonna do about it? I hope that you have some other avenue of intrinsic joy, where you can play an infinite game. And there are enough people who are happy to learn from you. And then some portion of that comes back as revenue, you know. And both of us know that once learning that skill is the metagame, it’s not the skill. It’s learning the ability to learn the mechanics of what we’ve just learned is the real skill. It’s not fishing. It’s the fact that Arvid Kahl can channel his innate curiosity about a topic in this case fishing and go to whatever lands it can go, he can go to learn all that there is through asking people to reading online and then through applying immediately, very quickly, reading on the fly and within five years, he’s the best fisherman in Canada, right? So it’s like, that is the real game.
Arvid Kahl
That’s what that is. That’s, yes. No, yes. Please go on.
KP
I was gonna say like, I mean, that’s what my last five years have revealed to me is that I’m not the No-Code guy. I’m not the Building in Public guy. I’m not the Twitter guy. I’m not the podcast guy. I am the KP guy. And the KP guy has this mindset, where he’s constantly learning things and challenging himself to push and facing rejection, and leveling up and leveling up and leveling up and at every turn, I’m trying my best to make it about others in some way, like, how can I give value to others? You know, how can we help somebody else? You know, maybe directly, maybe indirectly? And I think that’s the infinite game, as you know.
Arvid Kahl
Yep. And that’s the stuff you take with you, right? I was thinking when I was looking at that message that person sent me is like, yeah, that’s right. And then the industry breaks away, and then you’re left with nothing, but you’re still you. Like you lost only the things outside of yourself, right? The business may not work, you may have financial hardship, but the learnings that led you to even have like remote levels of success in that industry, they’re all within you. Now go forth and apply them somewhere else, right? Your capacity to solve problems, that’s still with you. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be an entrepreneur. I think that that is exactly what it is. Your capacity to learn, your capacity to solve problems beyond the one you’re currently solving. That’s within your case, your personal brand, being that person showing that to others and being available for them to learn from you and to be guided by you to whatever ends they may have. That will never leave you no matter which platform you may fall off from. And we shouldn’t be talking about platform dependency here, right? Because obviously, the big elephant in the room is where’s what are going but you know.
KP
I wanna talk about that. And I wanna give you a massive shout out because you were one of the few people, probably you are the only person but maybe like one of the few who’ve gotten me serious about writing my newsletter. And I think I remember asking you in my podcast and you showed up maybe a year ago, because I was so fascinated about all these people who would write newsletters every week, Arvid. I’m like, how the heck are you guys doing this? What is your writing regimen? I also, I think, again, going back to my earlier theory of the things that you’re not doing daily in a weekly basis, the thing that you don’t interface with weekly, you somehow have a fantasy view of them, you know. Not in a negative way, but I just think that you think that there’s some magical thing that they’re doing, they’re not doing nothing. And I’ve learned to, I’ve started my Substack, again, maybe two weeks, two months ago. And I’ve written 10 back to back weekly additions in 10 weeks consecutively. And you know what my magic hack is: nothing. Literally writing and literally lowering my expectations. My magic hack like is lowering my expectations that any one of them will be viral, or any one of them will take off, or any one of them will be something that I will be like remembered for. And I just thought I’m gonna spend 25 minutes on a certain day. And I’m gonna write the outline. And then 25 minutes on the next day and finish the outline. 25 minutes on the third day and review and rewrite and whatever unfinished job should publish. That’s all I did. And the moment I did this, I did this for 10 weeks and the user is growing. There’s about 7000 people, kp.substack.com. But then the landmass thing happened, Twitter thing is happening. And I was like, I gotta say thank you to Arvid for getting me on this because this is clearly diversifying your platform dependency.
Arvid Kahl
Yep. Yep. Yep. And it happens because you just are consistently working on it, right? It wouldn’t happen if you didn’t do that. There’s a saying I’m part of a couple writer communities and there’s butt in seat, hands on keyboard. That’s how you’re a writer.
KP
That’s it. Yeah.
Arvid Kahl
Right? That’s how you consistently churn out your pages. That’s how you get anywhere.
KP
And you know and I think the limiting belief that I want some of the people who are probably walking around or listening to this thing and thinking I could never write or I could never sing, I could never, I actually genuinely I admittedly, I told Arvid with my podcast. And you guys go back and listen to the archives. I hate long form writing. Actually, I haven’t changed my stance on it. I still hate long form writing. I just hate it. So what I’ve done is I’ve turned my long form writing into three short form writing pieces. That’s it. So hence, I can tolerate it. But something about, there will be a time for anyone who’s listening. There’s something about your day to day, your week to week calls you on a certain adventure or a certain pursuit of like, I gotta do this, this month. I got to get on this. I know I’ve been saying this for I’ve said that I wanted to start a podcast for two years. And then I finally started one in 2021. But there must be some version of that in your head for the listeners. And you’re wondering and you’re curious and you’re asking the experts some curious questions. My best advice I have for you and Arvid will agree here. I’m curious what your stan is. When you are thinking about it, if you’re wondering about it just start it, just start it. Literally just start it and humble yourself and have very little expectations of it. And just it’s all about iterations from there. All about iterations from there. Nobody is a God. Nobody wakes up with a newsletter, who is born with a newsletter. You start a newsletter.
Arvid Kahl
Yeah, right, right, the world’s worst newsletter or second world’s worst newsletter, that’s maybe all you need to do, or record your podcast into your potato, it does not matter, right? As long as there’s any trace of what you had to share. Because really, that’s that, like most podcasts like if you listen to the first episode of this podcast, oh, boy, you’re in for a treat. Because I used the shittiest microphone I could find. I had like the most echo going on and production quality is really bad. However, people still listen to it because it starts the podcast and then they listened to the last one. And they noticed oh, yeah, there is a noticeable improvement in quality. This person must have understood how to learn to get better at stuff. I wanna get better at stuff. I’m gonna keep listening, that alone is valuable. Like having a shitty first issue, having a shitty first episode. And then having something better later, that alone is a signal that you can send to the people that are interested in what you have to say, right?
KP
It is a service to the community, like the fact that you are willing, you’re willing to ship that thing, right? Because that’s why it’s important to ship it, despite of its imperfections.
Arvid Kahl
Yeah, absolutely. That’s like getting it out the door and seeing where it goes. I think that’s how most of us actually get anywhere. I started the blog, really just writing about anything, just seeing which resonated, which, like topics resonated. And then I just wrote more about that and turned into books. It turned into this. I turned into essentially a media company that I’m now running, coming from a SaaS background, right? It never intended that to happen. But it did, because I just followed a trail of whatever was jumping in front of me. And that was the interest of the community that I was serving. So talking about communities that we are serving people from our community, where can they find you? And where can you serve them? And how will you serve them?
KP
Oh, that’s the question. I feel like I do maybe a portfolio of things, a buffet of sort of services and offerings. And a lot of them, free. A lot of them, there’s a few that are paid. But you folks can find me at on, my website is thisiskp.com. And my Twitter account is @thisiskp_, underscore is important because I couldn’t get the real one. And I mean, if you go to thisiskp, you’ll see like I have a series of things. I have free resources for founders. I’ve been collecting and curating a lot of No-Code resources, or building in public resources. Check it out. And the thing that I’m most proud of recently, and the one that I touched on earlier with Arvid is my newsletter. It’s called KP’s Column. And the address is kp.substack.com. I’ve been loving it. It’s been 10 weeks now. This week will be 11th week. There’s so much intrinsic joy in putting your butt on the seat and turning your ideas and sort of vague ideas into like a distilled post. You know and hitting publish, and seeing other people react to it. That’s my joy. That’s I mean, I know, this is probably how you felt for years because you’ve been writing for years. And then subscriber counts. And all these other things are bells and whistles. They’re good. I mean, I get some dopamine from them. But genuinely I have forgotten about them. I’m more worried about, okay, what am I writing this week? What can I distill this week? So
Arvid Kahl
Yeah, I very much relate to that. Like whenever I write, I feel like, I just hope any person, any one person out there reads this and get something out of it, then my mission is accomplished. It doesn’t matter if it’s 1000s of them or hundreds or just one, as long as there’s something meaningful coming from this, that may instruct somebody just a little bit, maybe just give them a thought from which then spring something else. It’s all I wanna do. And it makes writing fascinating because you know how easy it is to convey a novel thought in a sentence. It may take you a while to get it, you know, get the writing right and stuff. But once you have it, and once you’ve published it, it’s out there forever. It’s out there for anyone to see, particularly if you have your own homepage and your own blog and stuff. It’s just gonna be there for people to find and learn at their own pace. And I’m glad you’re doing this. I’m also glad. Yeah, it’s really good. I’m glad you’re doing this on social media too where it’s more femoral, but it’s very present for people. And I would highly recommend following KP on Twitter and all the other fancy platforms that we will be on in the future, because who knows, right? How Twitterverse we’re gonna be the next couple. Thank you so much for being on today. That was a wonderful and extremely deep and kind and just warm hearted conversation. I’m so grateful for you.
KP
Thank you, Arvid. It means a lot honor to be here.
Arvid Kahl
And that’s it for today. Thank you for listening to The Bootstrapped Founder. You can find me on Twitter @arvidkahl. You’ll find my books and my Twitter course there as well. If you wanna support me and the show, please subscribe to my YouTube channel. Get to the podcast in the podcast player of choice, and leave a rating and a review by going to (http://ratethispodcast.com/founder). Any of this will help the show. So thank you very much for listening and have a wonderful day. Bye bye
What We Talk About
00:00:00 KP’s founder hotline
00:04:32 The struggle beneath success
00:12:11 The connection between teacher and student
00:16:26 Sharing what you know
00:19:18 The importance of staying in the community
00:23:28 Serial entrepreneurship is severely misunderstood
00:29:46 An iterative approach to learning
00:33:38 Removing yourself from your ask
00:37:14 Sales and trust
00:42:21 The fear of losing your market
00:49:23 The importance of having a mindset of “I’m not the XYZ guy”
00:55:12 Quality doesn’t matter as much as we think
