Arvid Kahl 0:00
Welcome to The Bootstrapped Founder. Today, I’m talking to Louis Pereira. He’s the maker behind the audio transcription product, Audio Pen, which recently became very successful after many not so great attempts at building other businesses. Louis shares his insights into how he approached pricing and subscriptions to validate demand early on. And then he dives into the importance of building and launching products in public to grow an audience and gain early traction, the true indie hacker way. And I use his product every week. It’s really cool. And the story of it is even cooler. Before we dive into our chat, a quick thank you to our sponsor, acquire.com. More on that later. Now, here’s Louis.
It rarely happens that an indie hacker makes it into TechCrunch with their product, but you did and your product Audio Pen is seeing massive success at this point. And it looks like you came out of nowhere. It’s really, really cool. Big congratulations on that. And before we dive into how you perform that miracle of getting into TechCrunch and having an amazing product that people really like, let me ask you this. How does it feel to hit it this big? Was it a surprise? Like how are you feeling right now?
Louis Pereira 1:15
Feeling pretty good. Although like, it’s like, I would have expected it to have happened sooner. Like I’ve been at it for a while now. It’s not that it was my first swing and you know, it was a hit. I’ve swung 10 to 15 times maybe more. And it was quite a difficult journey throughout, you know, difficult in the sense like lacking monetary success. It was enjoyable for sure. And I think that’s why sort of managed to make these whatever 10-15 swings until one finally, you know, struck whatever gold. But it feels good. Like, I know that it’s rare because at least for me, it’s rare because I’ve tried so many times and I’ve finally gotten one product that seems to be doing quite well, unexpectedly, that too. So definitely feels good, feels extremely grateful, you know, that it happened. But like having said that, like I feel like if you keep swinging, eventually, like you will hit six, right? Like if you’ve got a dice and you just keep rolling it, it’s gonna hit six at some point. The game is to figure out what dice you want to keep rolling and what dice can you keep rolling without getting bored?
Arvid Kahl 2:25
Yeah, I do wonder because I looked into your previous project. You do list them on your website and everything, which is really cool. You’ve tried a lot of different things, right? You’ve went into, I think niche lists the blogging microblogging platform. You had a like read something great. You had a curated articles. Do nothing for a minute, that’s one of my favorites. So I just encourage people to do nothing. But I feel like with this product, in particular, you have found like what I would call product market fit. There’s a real need for what you’re currently providing with Audio Pen. So I would like to ask you about what do you see being different about this particular product? Or maybe not even the product, but how you approached it that resulted in a much, much bigger kind of audience for and customer base of the product?
Louis Pereira 3:15
Yeah, I mean, I don’t want to take credit for, you know, discovering this untapped need of finding product market fit through some sort of rigorous procedure of feedback and stuff because it. Like it wasn’t very intentional. I’ve said this before. I think most people that follow me will know that I’ve said, Audio Pen was quite an accident. I was just building. I built about five tools that week on my own website, like tiny tools on my own website without any intention of making them standalone tools or commercial tools. I wanted to just learn how to use open API’s. And I was trying to use them in a slightly more novel way rather than you know, try and you know, just use one API and go from A to B. I wanted to see what if I combined a couple, you know, do a couple of interesting things, see what happens. And because I’d been in the space, it was a bunch of factors that came together. Like I’d been in the space building for a few years. I had a relevant sort of Twitter audience, not very large but quite relevant. I had been building publicly for a while. People had used my products before. And while I was doing these experiments, I used to talk about them on Twitter. Like I just tweet about each one of these tiny tools that week. And I managed to hit some sort of a chord with Audio Pen that I didn’t expect, like I got a lot of sudden positive feedback from people in my DMs and not too much of it but enough of it to make me sort of think twice because I personally I’m not an audio you know, notes sort of person. I don’t take voice notes very often. Now I do but before that I didn’t. So I was like okay, a bit taken aback as to like this seems to have hit some sort of a chord with people, struck some sort of a chord with people. Like maybe I should just sort of zoom in and see if I can build something out of this. So I mean, I don’t want to seem like I’m some sort of Steve Jobs that, you know, figure out what the customer wants without the customer knowing it. I stumbled upon it. But I had been playing the game long enough that, you know, it worked in my favor. Stumbled upon it, but it was a function of taking so many swings that, you know, I got lucky in one of them. So yeah, product market fit for me was if I’ve reached it and maybe I have. I don’t know. If I’ve reached it, it’s not for my genius or anything. It’s just a function of playing multiple rounds and hitting one.
Arvid Kahl 5:36
Yeah, that does make sense. It’s a nice and humble perspective on being at the right place at the right time with the right not just idea, but also with the willingness to just execute it to see if it sticks, right? That’s a big difference because everybody has cool ideas, but building it, even if it’s just a prototype, that is too much for most. So just having that and other things that didn’t work. And seeing what the market resonates with is an interesting approach. It is a scattershot approach, though, right? It’s kind of you try all these things and you see what sticks. That tends to waste a lot of energy and time. And but since you did it, the time that you invested and the other things is not wasted. It’s just you know, it’s now being hopefully pulled into the product that is actually working out the bet that is going well. So tell me more about like how well Audio Pen actually is doing if you’re willing to divulge these numbers? How many customers or users do you currently have with the product?
Louis Pereira 6:32
At the moment in terms of registered users about 30,000, including free.
Arvid Kahl 6:38
Right. Okay, well, yeah, it sounds like to me, I’ve been thinking a little bit about this being a user of the product, I obviously want it to keep succeeding and sticking around, right? That’s kind of my interest as well. And I’ve been thinking about it from a developer perspective, from a business owners perspective, too. And I was wondering, like how you deal with platform risk because there is obviously risk in building features and building the wrong features or going onto native platforms and building this and that and whatnot, that that’s one of the features that are one kind of risks that I guess that you have to think about. But the other side is the actual platform that you’re building on, which is open API’s API, how are you protecting your your business or your product from your depending too heavily on that particular API and those with the platform underneath it?
Louis Pereira 7:27
See at the moment, I’m trying to get like backups for it. So for instance, for instead of whisper, which is the voice model, I also have a couple of others that I’ve got access to deep Graham, assembly, etc. They’re not as good in they’re as good in certain respects, but not in others. As a package, I think opening eyes is still the best. But I do have those backups if you know, things change. As far as like GBD photo is concerned. I’m like, I still don’t have a very strong backup I have. I have like I’m on the waitlist for Claude hoping to get that soon. I don’t think any others come close to GBD for yet. But yeah, hopefully that gets sorted. I mean, fingers crossed. Until then, worst case scenario, I’ll just get like another person’s API access or something for a bit. But I mean, so far, I haven’t heard of any cases where, you know, folks who’ve had API keys revoked or whatever.
Arvid Kahl 8:21
Yeah. Well, that’s, that’s kind of, I’m really hoping for these these models to be able to be used on the edge, like on our own self hosted systems eventually, I mean, that is always going to be more expensive, I guess, than just you know, accessing the API, but to be able to run a GPT four model somewhere, right and you know, own on your own datacenter on your own Kubernetes cluster or whatever that would be really cool. A whisper is an is an example of this, I use whisper for my own podcast for this very podcast. In fact, I, I use it to get like a preliminary transcript from which then I generate potential, you know, like descriptions for the video, or tags for the video, all of this stuff comes from whisper that I run over the the actual, you know, the final video files. So and that is local, that is just a local installation of that AI, if you can call it right, which is just a machine learned the system there. So this being available is really cool. And having that as a backup option is an interesting idea. How much of your time do you spend on a front end or you know, like feature work compared to making the business more stable or more resilient against platform risk? And what’s what’s the split there right now for you?
Louis Pereira 9:38
It depends from week to week, man, like I’m looking I’m a solo builder with no team. So like, for instance, this week has been terrible because I wanted to build a bunch of features. A couple of days ago, I just like found out that like audio Ben had been like blacklisted from a couple of by a couple of like antivirus sites, just because there was like a surge in traffic from a couple of countries in the Middle East. That was very unexpected for me. So I don’t know what sort of traffic it was. But I spent the past couple of days just like reaching out to these people and, you know, creating false positive reports. And they’ve just been like, oh, sorry, you know, our bad. Like, here you go. It’s clean. Now. We’re like, I spent the better, half better part of like, what, 48 hours, just frantically responding and trying to clear this thing out, like, it’s almost done now, for no fault of mine, like I can’t, like I didn’t do anything wrong. It just happened. So like on a week to week basis, like, if there’s no crisis to handle, I would prefer spending my time building features because that’s what I genuinely enjoy doing. Of course, sometimes I have to force myself to sort of create content as well, about those features. Like I’ve learned the hard way that if you build too many features, and customers don’t know that the features exist, it’s pointless having built those features. So I spent some time sort of creating videos, you know, text content, FAQs, etc, etc. Some tweets maybe, so that people can sort of get educated about what I’ve what I’ve built for them. But otherwise, if I have the time, and if you left me alone, I would I would just I would just build out build from Warrington, I love it.
Arvid Kahl 11:13
Yeah, that’s that’s the the in the hacker life, right? If you could just like wake up, build cool stuff, go to bed and repeat. That’s fine. I love it. How much? How much customer service? Do you have? How much conversations or how many conversations do you have with, with customers or prospective customers right now?
Louis Pereira 11:28
Mostly with customers. So I don’t have a chatbot. On the website. I almost actually stumbled upon this idea as well. And it worked out quite well for me, where when I launched the MVP, I think soon after, or maybe on that day itself, I didn’t have the time to sort of figure out what chatbot to kind of add to the site and, and stuff. So I just created like a simple little message box with a button. And when somebody sends me in a message, it comes to me as an email along with that person’s email id that they’ve registered with. So you need to be logged in, in order to chat with or not to chat, but to email me. And that’s been great. Like, I don’t, I’m not expected to reply, instantaneously, I get better responses from people, like I get better feedback longer, rather than just a high or, you know, one or two lines. Yeah. It’s not front and center on the app. It’s not like, you know, on the first page, you need to click on the Account tab, and then you see it. So it’s only people that have reached a particular threshold that they feel like, okay, I need to contact this guy that contact me. And of course, besides that people reply to all of the emails, I send them as well. So on a weekly basis, I send emails to to the users, I get a bunch of replies. On average, I would say I reply to maybe 20 people a day, 25 people a day. And that goes up and down. depending on you know, if I’ve sent out an email today, then that number might become you know, 100 for a day or two. But otherwise 2025
Arvid Kahl 12:55
How many of these are feature requests over actual, like bug reports?
Louis Pereira 13:01
5050? That’s really, yeah. Because so the feature requests always come from from Prime users, because they’ve got access to the entire feature set. And then they know what they want. So that’s it’s, it’s sort of limited. If everybody had access to everything, I’d probably get more. And bulk requests usually come from like the free users because they aren’t like sure exactly how to do certain things, or you know, some things at scale, of course, you end up getting more bugs than than what the Prime users experience. But so far, like, yeah, so far, there haven’t been any like crazy bugs, a bunch of minor ones, the start the day, I think I’ve sorted out on a couple of like recurring ones that I know, I can’t sort out until I sort of go native. Those aren’t bugs, those are actually just just features that people think are bugs.
Arvid Kahl 13:52
That’s that’s also a product education thing, right? We have to just teach people how to use the product. Right? That’s, that’s always that’s actually
Louis Pereira 13:59
an interesting, that’s an interesting thing to think about, like I spent the last week trying to think about what sort of content to create for people. And then, you know, I went, I went on this tangent of thinking, Maybe I should create a page of like how tos, you know, and tell people how to do different things on the app, like how to, let’s say, Change Your writing style, how to download a note, etc, etc. And I almost got started on it. And then I was like, you know, if I do this, it’s going to encourage me to create a less intuitive app, then I start, depending on this page, to teach users what to do. That should not be the case, I should be reworking the app to make it intuitive enough for people not to need this page in the first place. Maybe Of course, I can build it at a later date when you have a lot of users and they don’t have time or whatever. But like at this URL in the product, like I should not be needing that page. I should suffer if my product is not intuitive enough. And I should maybe talk to customers directly to explain it to them. So at least to have some sort of interaction with them to understand what they don’t understand. So I’ve held off from that for now.
Arvid Kahl 15:06
That’s great. That is a wonderful perspective. Thanks for sharing it so eloquently. I think the idea of having a usable product is so much stronger than having a good documentation for an unusable product, right? Obviously, it’s just, you know, one level further down the complexity hatch, right doing the you don’t want the things to be so complex that you need documentation. I agree with this, I think that the problem there is usually that the moment you change you, if somebody gets upset, either somebody who’s already used to the old stuff, or somebody who wants it differently, like everybody will get upset about something at some point, which is, it’s not a solution for the for the documentation usability problem, but you that people tend to not want their UI to change once they used to it, which is I think, why most founders add documentation rather than making big changes in the interface. But I guess you’re at a stage where that is still Yeah.
Louis Pereira 16:02
I think I might have made one or two big changes in terms of like moving buttons around and stuff. But so far, like I’ve not received, like, I’ve received maybe a couple of complaints about it being like, Hey, I can’t find this. But but I’m guessing the others have figured it out.
Arvid Kahl 16:17
Yeah, I guess I guess they must have. One thing that really interests me is the subscription level that you have to prime users, right? You You have paying customers, which is great for any any indie hacker that actually makes money off their product that is already quite the accomplishment. When did you integrate the subscription level? Was it there from the start? Or did you add it at a later point?
Louis Pereira 16:40
So I actually built the first version of the product during a hackathon that I organized once every two months, called half day build. And the goal of that Hackathon was is rather to go from idea to revenue within 12 hours. So I was forced to have, you know, a payment link on the website, the day it went live, like the minute it went live. So yeah, I mean, I built it on that. And on that during our hackathon. And it was, in fact, I had invited a bunch of beta users from Twitter. All right, I just tweeted out saying, hey, you know, this product seems like it’s ready to launch. Does anyone want to be a beta tester? So I got like, you know, 1015 people that are like, Yeah, I’ll do it. So I gave them access. And a few of them bought it, like, it wasn’t even live yet. A few of them bought it. And that’s when I was like, Okay, I’m gonna, there’s something here, like, I got to double down on this, and keep making it better.
Arvid Kahl 17:37
That’s cool. Yeah, that’s a great, great way to start, I think, a big lesson here, put put a payment link into even the first prototype of your project, if you want to see if people find it even valuable enough at that point, right? To pay for it. Pricing. How did you deal with pricing? How did you set the prices, and you earlier said that you, you started a bit too cheap, and you made it more expensive. So tell me more about the pricing journey of audio PIN?
Louis Pereira 18:01
Cool. Like, I like keeping things extremely simple. When I started off, I wanted to, like I want I thought I’d do like a whole subscription, you know, monthly thing and stuff. And then I was just I think I just ran out of time to like build a whole subscription thing during that 12 hour. Hackathon. So I said, let me just do a lifetime deal for early users. And I priced it like dirt cheap, it was like $19 for lifetime, with like, GPD for access and stuff, or whatever I would pay for at that time. Maybe it was GPA 3.5. I don’t remember. Service, it is very cheap. But I was basically validating demand. And I know people have this, like there’s this whole debate of like, should you have a lifetime deal if you have recurring costs. And I spent a lot of time thinking about it. Because of course, like I have recurring costs, right? Like every time somebody uses the product, I pay a small amount. And my solution to that was twofold. One is, as I increase the number of features in a product, or increase the amount of ways that a person can use or wants to use this product, and if I have a lifetime deal, I keep increasing the price of that lifetime. So for context, the lifetime deal at once was $19. At the start is now 150. And people are still buying it because I’ve increased the number of features that I offered as compared to what it was at launch. And the second thing I do is I include an annual deal as well. And I play with the pricing with the pricing ratio of the two until I get a split that I’m happy with that is sustainable. So for instance, right now the annual pricing is at $75. And the lifetime deal is at one $50. And I’m happy with the split the number of people picking this over that or that over this. So I want it to be sustainable like at any point of time. I need to be able to service people, at least morally if you’re paying for a lifetime deal that is worth twice as much as an annual deal. I need to be able to assure you that I will give you at least two years if not More at any point of time, if you buy today, I have to guarantee you two years are not I mean, I’m not explicitly guaranteeing it to people. But like, morally, I feel that responsibility. So I make sure that that ratio is correct for my costs to sort of be sustainable. And of course, I’ll probably end the lifetime deal soon, in a couple of months. But until then, I think it’s a great way to get like early supporters on board, get people who, once they’ve bought a lifetime deal for your product become like vocal advocates of it, because they feel like they’re part of the journey. They’re not just here for a month, or a year, or whatever, they’re here for life. They want to see the product get better. So they give you better feedback. They want other people to know that, hey, you know, I was an early believer in this product. And I’m part of his journey. They tell other people about it. So it’s, it’s got a lot of benefits that that I think are worth considering, even if you have recurring costs.
Arvid Kahl 20:52
Yeah. Yeah, great idea. I think the lifetime deals subsidizes the first, you know, the first couple months and years of building this business where you need to you still you have pay, you have to pay your expenses, or anything has to come from somewhere, and you have to be able to invest into it. And at a certain point, you kind of have to either really increase the price, as you said, to make it still valuable, or just turn off the lifetime stuff. Now, now turn it off for people who have it, but turn it off for new potential customers. I do wonder what this lifetime mean to you? Because I think there’s like three or four different lifetimes that we could talk about your lifetime, your products, customers lifetime, which one which one,
Louis Pereira 21:29
if you if you try to buy a lifetime deal on audio panel, very explicitly written in multiple places that you will have access to the product for as long as the product is alive. I don’t know how long I’ll be around. Maybe I’m here for 100 years. I don’t know if the product could be around for 100 years, I don’t know, maybe you will be around for 100 years, I can’t guarantee you to be there for 100 years. If it is great, like you’ll have access throughout. If it isn’t then like, you know it isn’t. But I’ve made made sure that that front and center lifetime is lifetime of the product. But I mean, that’s important. Yeah.
Arvid Kahl 22:02
Do a good job, I think you have, I think a lot of people who run lifetime deals are not that specific. And that leads to a lot of problems, right lifetime, it could also just be of that version of the product. And I’ve seen this a lot recently in the wizard like video and audio tools that, you know, like filmora was one of them. They had a lifetime deal. And for one version up to like version 12 or 14, and they released version 15. And wouldn’t honor lifetime anymore. And there was this whole outcry in the community for a pretty established product, right? It’s a competitor to the DaVinci, or Premiere Adobe product. So you, you have a sizable community, and they were not happy. Like there was this whole YouTube outrage about this. And you don’t want to be on the receiving end of this for as a business, particularly not as an indie hacker. So being very clear with this, that’s, that’s great. I’m really happy you made this very, very clear from the start for our lifetime. Yeah,
Louis Pereira 22:55
I mean, the way I think about it, like not only for this decision, but like for anything I decide with the product, whatever it may be, I really like doing this stuff, right? Like I really like building like, I’ve done a lot of stuff, like I’ve experimented, you know, I’ve played around, I’ve done a few things in life. And I found this one thing that I really liked doing actually like building stuff, you know, like showing it to the world, sharing it to the world on the internet. If given a choice, I want to do this for the rest of my life. Now, if I want to do this for the rest of my life, I cannot afford to lose people’s trust, I cannot just have them say, Hey, this guy is a cheat, right? Like, that’s the last day, if that happens, I stopped being able to do the one thing that I really like to do. So like priority above whatever else, you know, money, whatever is just customer trust. Because I like like, I lose if I lose trust. It’s not only that, you know, I can run away with the money tomorrow. Like, what will I do then? Like, I’m going to do things I don’t enjoy that stupid, why would I want to do that? So that’s like, that’s the lens I look at all of this stuff from so yeah, I mean, just one thing that makes me
Arvid Kahl 24:00
makes me so happy to hear this. Like this is such a such a kind of empowerment focus perspective. And also it’s it’s selfish in the best way you want to do the thing you love. So you will not risk like cheating people. Or the you won’t cheat people just to just to get something short term, you want to do this long term. It’s a it’s the infinite game theory, right? You want to play the infinite game of indie hacking, instead of just getting short term.
Louis Pereira 24:25
It’s very, it’s very difficult. Like I I know this because like I’ve tried a bunch of things in life, right? I’ve tried different types of products, different types of experiments, etc. And it’s not very easy. Like I have friends and you know, family, etc, who haven’t yet they’re still trying, they still haven’t found the one thing they like to do. So I know it’s not easy to stumble upon the thing that you want to do, or to even have the opportunity to try and find it. Like yeah, I’m 30 years old, you know, I’ve spent whatever the past, let’s say 10 years of my career, trying different things. And now I found something maybe you know, a year ago so I found two years So I found something that I really liked doing. The very fact that I was able to do it for two, two and a half years without any, you know, major win or any major income is because I like doing it. Like if if audio pen did work, I would still be building things online, I would still just be building random shit and sharing it, because that’s what I want to do. Like, I don’t want to not be doing that, because it’s not paying, like the fact that it’s paying me is like the cherry on the cake. I’m like, Great, I’m making money from it amazing. But if I wasn’t, I’d still be playing. So yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s, it doesn’t have to be building, it doesn’t have to be, you know, writing, it can be anything, like whatever you like to do, if you find out that you’d like to do it, and you really enjoy it, you should do everything in your power to make sure that you can keep doing that till the day.
Arvid Kahl 25:43
Yeah, and that’s and that’s where community comes in. Right? Because the community is the place where you find prospective customers where you find peers that help you with your business decisions or with your design decisions are your UX decisions, that’s where the other people come in. And that’s the thing, why I’m really really applaud your choice to put trust over anything else over money or fame, over wealth, whatever, that because if the trust does not exist, the community does not exist for you. You are an unknown untrustable entity in the community, and you’re doing the opposite. You’re building in public, you’re sharing everything you do, you’re very, very open like this, this conversation is an example of this. You talk about the things that you enjoy, and how much you enjoy them. And it’s really noticeable. I’m really happy that you’re doing this building and public has just been something that you’ve that you’ve done for a long time, or have you only recently found this to be something useful for your business building efforts.
Louis Pereira 26:38
I think for as long as I’ve been building on the internet, I’ve built in public, mostly influenced by by KP show, you know him. I had actually. So I think back in 2020, during the pandemic, I had just stumbled upon Twitter, I think and you know, see, like seen a couple of things there. And I was like, this was this was a couple of years after I had moved back home from the city. So I now live in a town called Goa, small state in India. And I had moved from Delhi, which is where I studied and worked for a bit. So I had seen like my social circle sort of shrinking, at least I’d seen the interestingness of the conversations I was having also sort of dropped because most of my friends are, you know, all over the place in the cities of the country and the world. And I’d found Twitter as this like one new outlet. That was Oh, interesting. People are talking about interesting stuff. That’s nice. And then I decided in 2020 Have I not decided right? I thought to myself, Okay, let’s let’s try and do something on the internet. Because the offline world I like I work with my family business during the day in the offline world. And I I enjoy building things there. But it’s very high friction, right? Like it’s everything requires permissions and investments. And it’s complicated. You can’t go from idea to revenue in 12 hours like you can on the internet. So I decided in 2020, okay, let me try and do something online. And I decided to start with like writing, because that seemed like the right or the easiest way to enter. Had some moderate success, etc. But then I realized very quickly that, hey, you know, this never gets easier. Like you can have 1000 subscribers, you can have 10,000 subscribers, it doesn’t matter. Like you still have to write for 20 hours a week to put out a good post. And it’s still hard. Like, every time no matter how much of an established writer you are, you will still want to tear your head out your hair out. Every time sure you want to write a post, it’s horrible. It’s good after you’ve done it, you know, after you’ve published something, you feel good, but the process is pretty grueling. And I learned that the hard way. And I you know, I figured that that just wasn’t sustainable for me. Because although I enjoyed, you know, becoming you know, a writer and creating stuff online, I have a full time job, like I don’t have 20 hours a week, every week that I can sit and suffer through. So then the next best thing was to start building. Coming back to my first point, which is why I then joined the ondeck they had a a no code Fellowship, which KP was heading back in, I think 2021 I was part of the first cohort and it gave me like this nice entry point into the indie hacking, or the world of people building things online, and chatting them as well. So that ethos of just sharing things online initially to not much response kind of was born there. But the fact that I had that community around me to make sure that hey, I would at least get some response. It’s not that I was tweeting into the void, like, like three of my friends from my focus group would would like my tweet, or like, share it or something. So it was nice, got started. And then enjoy the process of just building and like building in public like I I don’t take it to, like I don’t I don’t I don’t know what the word is. But like, I don’t try to make it very performative. Right? Like I just say what I’m doing, like, if I’m building something, I just say that I’m building this and like, Hey, here’s what I’m doing. Like here’s how I’m doing it. Here’s my rationale behind Let’s see this decision Oh, that’s that decision. I like, like most of my tweets are just like tweeting off the cuff or like a small screen recording with a some text that’s just off the cuff. But yeah, I try not to make it like another chore. It’s just like, it’s like an update. It’s like a, it’s like a stream of consciousness sort of update. And it seems to work like people seem to like it so far.
Arvid Kahl 30:23
That’s great that you already had a couple of people to interact with around this, that makes it so much easier to write a cohort, if anything, I could be the on deck fellowship, or, you know, another little community just with people that are all building at the same time, right? People who are just sharing their work in progress kind of stuff, that makes such a big difference. And I love your non performative approach to what is always kind of a performance. Because it is a thing you act out in public, right? You write about a thing, like if you just were building and not talking about it to anybody, you would never think about sharing this particular step. So there is this kind of conscious choice about its intentionality. But it’s still not an act, you’re not not changing anything, you’re just sharing the reality of it, which is what building a public is, I’m really happy you’re doing this, you’re a great example of this with the product that you’re building, the products that you have been building, I’m really, really happy to see you do this. And the consequence is you meet a lot of cool people, right? You get a lot of opportunities just from sharing those stories. So is there any particular story about building in public that you want to share? That was really interesting to you?
Louis Pereira 31:26
Well, I don’t know if I have a particular story off the top of my head, but like, I think in general, like the kind of people that you know, I’ve interacted with through Twitter, like you, for example, like, yeah, actually one story like man product on that launch for audio open my mind. Like, I didn’t know what was happening there. Like, I was like, What the hell like, I don’t know why it happened. I think a function of it might have been that, you know, I had been around for long enough that people sort of recognized my, my, you know, profile picture, maybe they sort of knew, Okay, this guy’s around. He’s building stuff. Maybe some people, I don’t know, maybe they’re just nice human beings. Maybe some people just liked the product. Maybe they just felt good on that day. I don’t know what it was. I had no, like I had expectations of let’s say, three 400 upvotes. That was my goal for the day and it crossed 1000. Because like you said it a bunch of other bigger concerto. I was just like, What the hell is happening here? Like, this is mad. Because like, you don’t expect that kind of stuff, right? Like, you go into this stuff, as like a solo guy saying like, Okay, I’m gonna give it my best up against like, funded teams that are putting out their products. And let’s see what happens. You know, like, worst case scenario, I’ll get some traffic on the website, maybe a few people will buy my product and whatever, that’s fine. But yeah, that was definitely like, a big big moment. I don’t I don’t know what how to express it. But like, it was a win very big. Like, it’s something I’ll never forget the fact that people I did not know, people that just saw my stuff on Twitter, not only like upvoted it but like shared it, like, wrote stuff about it. commented on the product and page. Like to that volume with that much like love. Like, yeah, it was, it was wild, like very, very grateful.
Arvid Kahl 33:09
That launch was so cool. I remember it too. And it’s not even my product. It was so cool. Because they you know, that’s the thing. Like we have this established relationship. And I think that’s how many people feel who follow you on Twitter, they see you succeed, and they are invested in you. And a little bit of your success kind of comes back to them because they know they’ve been pushing they’ve been helping they’ve been supporting you wherever they are, whenever you need a like or retweet or just input right? They were there. And I was said to and I saw you saw that being launched. And I saw Wow, product of the day. And then second of the week and fourth of the month like Dude, you just exploded. That was so cool. Yeah, it’s crazy. I was gonna ask you if you had any cool strategy, but apparently the strategy is to just make friends with a lot of people and build cool stuff.
Louis Pereira 33:54
Right? So I did, like I did prepare for the launch in the sense like, you know, I created a nice page, I spent a lot of time on the copy for it. You know, I spent a lot of time creating, like images and stuff. I don’t know if that helped. Maybe did like, I definitely gave it my best before I launched. I spoke to Chris Messina, like he had a conversation with me. He gave me like a few strategies here and there. Which I think like I don’t remember off the top of my head, but I’ve shared them on Twitter somewhere. So I had prepared for it as best I could. But like in no way did I anticipate like that what happened would happen? Like I thought, okay, best case scenario, maybe you know, for 500 votes, not not what happened. But yeah, I think it’s a function of just being like I don’t think that would have happened if I had just joined Twitter that day and said, Hey, guys, as a school product, it wasn’t about the product. It was about the product that people liked and had seen being built for a month and a half. Some of them had used it. And they had maybe seen me around that I can’t see but
Arvid Kahl 34:54
yes, yeah, that is better grateful. Yeah. 100% my my impression of ProductHunt To Product Hunt is not a product display case, it’s an audience amplification machine. Right? If you have an audience already, they will come and applaud. And I think like India plays a big role there, too. I remember both of my launches of the books, and I don’t think they even launched books or product. But I had a strong enough audience. So that my stuff made it there and was not immediately bad, which is really cool. And I think the biggest push that I always had was from my, my friends in India, because they are the ones that are awake the most, when it’s when it’s midnight pm on the west coast in the US, and they’re the first ones and if my Indian people by Indian friends, if they start uploading you shoot up in India is such a pivotal thing. Like it’s most people don’t seem to understand how important India is for Product Hunt, because they are the
Louis Pereira 35:46
12 Noon. Yeah, it’s like 30 or something in the afternoon. That’s exactly right.
Arvid Kahl 35:50
It makes a big difference. That’s something that most people don’t really seem to understand. Because they like wake up at nine in the morning. And then they start like, or eight or six or whatever, and then they activate their existing audience. But that is already six, if not, you know, four or five hours, depending where you live in the States, if you do it into the day, where a lot of people had a lot of opportunity to upload already. So yeah, that’s really cool. That’s important. Yeah, for a long time, it’s
Louis Pereira 36:15
an interesting space, though, I still don’t think it’s a good place to launch a brand new product, I think it’s a good place to find more customers. Once you have a product that you know, works. Like once you have a product that has a monetization model has a set of like core users that like it, and then you go then amplified, it’s not it’s not a place to launch a brand. No, it’s
Arvid Kahl 36:34
and that’s, it’s called, it’s called Product Hunt. It’s not prototype hunt, or idea hunt, or, you know, like this business idea, maybe let’s see where this goes hunt. But it’s really for for things that are established and valuable enough for people to immediately use that are not buggy that are that are bug free, hopefully, or at least they have social proof already around them. Right Product Hunt itself has social proof, but on product and you also need social proof to get anywhere up in the list. So you’re absolutely right. It’s an advanced late stage launch thing.
Louis Pereira 37:07
I learned that the hard way as well. Like, this was my second launch the previous product I launched, which was read something great. I launched it on Twitter on like a Monday and like I think in like 24 hours somebody DM me saying, Hey, I’ve hunted your product on product and and I was like, okay, cool. Like, I don’t know what that is. But like, go for it, man. I’m gonna, I’m gonna see what happens. And a few friends were like, Dude, don’t do it. You know, wait till the products like whatever, more mature. But I was like, hey, like, you know, let it be this guy seems legit. Let’s just do it. It did. Alright, it finished at like number four, after a lot of hustling, but it was like 24 hours old or something like 48 hours maybe. But then like from then I was like, Okay, this is not a place to like, I didn’t have a monetization model or anything. It was just a bunch of traffic that came and then went. So yeah, I learned I learned then that like, okay, don’t do this again, do it when you when you have a more settled product.
Arvid Kahl 37:58
There are also certain things that that won’t perform on Product Hunt that are so niche, so specific to one particular group of people that getting the full attention of the tech community, which is I guess, who goes to Product Hunt. That’s that’s just a lot of attention. That doesn’t really resonate with the product. Do you see this a lot, a lot of if you just scroll down, if you don’t look at the top 10. But if you look at the bottom 500, that’s good launch every day. Most of these are really cool products, just for a really small group of people. That is not necessarily the audience that goes to Product Hunt, right? And that’s also a thing, you have to go where your audience is to launch the thing. And you do this so well on Twitter. How did you launch audio pen? Did you just kind of just throw it out there and see what happens, like after your hackathon? Or was it more of an elaborate launch on Twitter for you.
Louis Pereira 38:44
So I was building those those tiny tools on my website the week before the hackathon. And like every day or so I would launch one of them. And the launch would be like just basically a tweet saying, Hey, I built this thing, you can do this thing with it. Go check it out. So audio pens initial launch, like the one that still lives on my website, which if you go to Luis Pereira dot XYZ you can still find was just a link with like, I think maybe a couple of lines of of what it does. And then after that, the Hackathon was about five days later. So I kept that hype up, where I kept tweeting about like, Hey, okay, I’m going to be building this for half day build, which is the hackathon. And then like a day before the hackathon, I tweeted out a few figma files that I had created with like preliminary designs, saying, Hey, this is what it’s going to look like, I spent some time thinking blah, blah, blah. And then on the day of the hackathon, of course, it helped me because the community of people that were building alongside me like as part of this hackathon, like all of us amplify each other’s work. So like, that’s the purpose of the hackathon. It’s like, give you this short term community that comes together for a day or half a day. And just like booths, each other to build something in public and try and go to revenue. If you don’t go to revenue. It’s fine, but you got to try. Everyone sort of amplify As each other’s tweets or whatever, so that happened as well. And I had that community, I had a bunch of people that had already sort of followed me on Twitter. Prior to, to audio, Ben, and I had been building a little bit of whatever hype or anticipation or whatever you want to call it. And then yeah, and then then on the day of the hackathon, typically, what I tell participants is create like a running Twitter thread of your progress. So like, announce your product into each one. And then as you’re building it, tweet about your progress, where you’ve reached what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, how long it’s going to take you how much time you have left, you know, like ask people if they want to be your beta testers, within that thread, maybe retweet a particular like a particular tweet, and ask people if they would pay for it, etc, etc. So that kind of builds its own hype, because every few hours, you have like an upgrade coming up. And yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s basically what I did for the launch.
Arvid Kahl 40:55
Awesome. How often do you run these hackathons? Do you still run them? Is that still happening?
Louis Pereira 40:59
Yep, yep, every two months. I think the next one is on this. I do the 17th or the ninth of September if you go to half day build.com You’ll see it I can I can check later but yeah,
Arvid Kahl 41:12
link in the show notes this episode at out way before that. So you know, it’s not like it’s not
Louis Pereira 41:17
a very like formal hackathon. It’s just literally a discord 17 September’s when the next one is it’s literally a temporary discord that I create, like three or four days before the hackathon. With a few like resources, you know, a place for people to interact etc. On the day people just help each other either in discord help each other on Twitter by by sharing the link, sharing each other’s tweets. And then two or three days after the hackathon, I delete the discord. So people don’t have like discord bloat. They just it feels like a sprint. They come in, they make friends they build, and then they leave. And if they want to keep friends, you know, they can follow each other on on on Twitter or wherever.
Arvid Kahl 41:55
That’s cool. Like indie hacker speed dating. That’s awesome. That’s really cool. Yeah, it’s really nice. And to, to think that such a revenue generating and attention generating product came out of it. Hmm, isn’t? Isn’t that awesome? What a what a glorious example of what can come? Yeah,
Louis Pereira 42:13
I mean, I went a couple people. I’ve been doing it for what, I don’t know, over a year now, two years, maybe? Every initially it used to be every month, then I switched it to every two months, because like, it just got too hectic. But yeah, like most of the products I built during these half a bills of like all of them have died. Not maybe there’s one that survived. All of the others have died. But yeah, I mean, you gotta enjoy the process of swinging, right? Like, it’s, it shouldn’t feel like hard work. Like, you know, people say grind, grind, grind, and you will finally make it. But like, that’s not the point. Because then even if you make it, you’re still going to be grinding on the thing that you were grinding on. Which, by definition, it means that you don’t enjoy it, you’re grinding because you don’t enjoy it. So you shouldn’t be wanting to grind. Yeah, you shouldn’t be wanting to do that you should want something that’s smooth, like something that you enjoy doing effortlessly.
Arvid Kahl 43:03
That you know what that reminds me of? You recently tweeted about productivity porn, that was something that you were talking about. Because, you know, Peter levels posted this picture of all these books, like the self help books, these are books that founders would read to learn how to be more productive, and you thought about it. And you just want to say what, what you were thinking and maybe the discussion around that, that that came out of it? Yeah.
Louis Pereira 43:28
Yeah. So for context, I mean, there was a, there was a picture of, you know, a very aesthetic picture with a bunch of books that were all white in color, for some reason, most of which was self help books. And the context that was shared by the person who tweeted out was that, you know, you don’t need to be reading. If you you know, you just go and do stuff, like you should just go and build. And I agreed with that. On first glance, I was like, yeah, like, a lot of these books are, you know, just, they should have been a blog post. But there are a couple of reasons why I later sort of went back on my own thoughts, and thought that maybe I was wrong with that initial thought. One was that I believe in this concept of, for I called Bridge books, okay, so it’s very easy for a person who’s who’s not read a particular book. It’s very easy for a person who’s read a particular book to feel that that book was worthless, because he’s already crossed that bridge is reached the other side. But for somebody who’s on the other side, on the on the previous side, that book might still be useful, right? So like, I know, a couple of books like self help books, particularly get a lot of hate saying, Oh, this is, you know, a waste of your time. But you know, what, maybe you were the person who read this. And that made you advance to reading, let’s say, more complex stuff today. Because you read that, you know, five years ago, it’s not fair for you to be to be sort of shitting on someone who’s doing it now. Like, let him go on his own journey. Let him cross that bridge. So that was the first thought I had where I was like, okay, you know, this stuff might seem like child’s play to somebody today. But if that person I To rewind his own life, it might not have been the case back then. That was one. And then there was like a very meta thought I had, which was just like we live in a world of abundance, right? Like we have all of our basic needs met, we’ve got food, we’ve got shelter, etc, at least most of us, at least those of us on the internet, trying to build things. And the purpose of our lives right now are what we’re trying to find is we’re trying to find meaning, meaning, we’re trying to feel good about ourselves, we’re trying to wake up and feel like we’re doing something useful. We’re trying to, you know, in other words, we’re trying to optimize for our emotional states, at any point of time. And if reading a book that is about, say, productivity, helps you feel productive, or helps you feel good, even if you don’t act on it. And you start to say, you don’t end up being productive, or you don’t end up implementing what that book told you to implement. If you felt good during the process of reading that book, and then you just went and picked up another productivity book, and you felt good again, and you repeated this, you know, all the way for the rest of your life, until you died. And you just felt great. You had all of your needs taken care of by default, because you had a day job or whatever. And in your free time, you felt good, because you read these books, you didn’t have to go and start building stuff online. If you didn’t want to, then there’s nothing wrong with that. Like, why what who am I to judge that this person is reading productivity porn and not doing anything? If he’s feeling good, let him feel good. Like, maybe he’s reading productivity porn, and he’s not doing anything but feeling good. It’s probably better than him say, going out and, you know, drinking by himself by a river or something. All right, let him read his books. Like, who cares? Anyway, we’ve, we’re not, we’re not at a point where you have to work. We’re at a point where we want to work where we want to do things, you don’t have to do things for most of us.
Arvid Kahl 46:42
That’s fine. Yeah, it’s, it’s certainly like most of us, I think it’s the important term because there will be people who have to, of course, but those those are not part of this conversation, right? That there are people who really have to work, they’re not thinking about, Oh, should I read my productivity book? No, they, they need a job they need to work. I very much agree with this, I found this such a compelling thought, the idea that in a world of abundance, just even considering or, or simulating productivity is as good as productivity, at least in certain under certain constraints. I really enjoy enjoy the idea because what you’re what you’ve said effectively is an anti gatekeeping argument. That’s kind of what you made, right? Because you shouldn’t read your short work is also gatekeeping. In a way, it’s like, oh, no, don’t read those books. Yeah, better just be, you know, bogged down and work, work, work, work, work, and close yourself off to the potential revelation of that bridge that the book might actually take you, it’s kind of keeping you where you are. I am very much I am a big fan of reading. Like I’m a writer, I kind of want people to read for somewhat selfish reasons, but also for for selfless reasons. I want other people to help themselves. In reading. That’s kind of what reading books is like. And I love the idea of the bridge book. That’s something that I think I had conceptually in my mind, but never put into words. So thank you for giving me this. This idea. It’s kind of Crossing the Chasm by just putting putting like, literally a gigantic book over it. Right, and then walking over the book on the other side, that’s that’s such a cool idea. And the keeping people away from books, that should have been a blog post, I liked that phrase as well. Well, the good thing is, some people love blog posts. And for them, it probably there is a blog post out there summarizing the book. And other people really need it slow and steady. And for them, the blog post would not have been enough for them, the book needs to read the book, right? So there’s, there are all kinds of gatekeeping arguments in this you shouldn’t read but work. So I’m glad
Louis Pereira 48:36
to sort of expand on the last point you’ve made like, like, very often I think, Okay, this book should have been a blog post. But the fact that you spent six hours reading about the same idea over and over again, even if it could have been shortened, has meant that that idea has had more time to kind of, you know, percolate into your brain. So even if you feel like it was, you know, the same idea repeated, you’ve given yourself more time to understand the idea, or to kind of flirt with its, you know, whatever its potential 100%.
Arvid Kahl 49:06
That’s why I love books that are like really thematically focused on one idea, and look at it from all different angles. Because if when I write about something in my own articles, I try to look at it from at least two or three different perspectives, so that anybody who has that perspective, or that other perspective, finds an accessible way into my thinking into my thoughts into the idea that I want to convey, because I know that we are living in a very diverse, diverse world of many people from different backgrounds, some things are just not gonna resonate with certain kinds of people. But if I give myself the space and time to look at it from all these different angles, I can make it easier for people to absorb the knowledge write a blog post will always be opinionated. That’s the kind of idea of a blog to begin with. But a book doesn’t have to be a book can be quite accessible. So in fact, it’s about accessibility.
Louis Pereira 49:54
Yeah, I mean, maybe in the future, you know, like just thinking out loud, like we might have, you know, AI versions of books now. Yeah, but like personalized versions of books, right? Like, for instance, I love if you have five angles that you want to, you want to kind of cover for each of the five different types of people. Maybe you buy a book on your Kindle, and the Kindle knows what angle you deserve to read from what angle is best suited to you. And it just gives you that angle. It doesn’t serve you the other four, and itself someone else differently as well. Maybe that’ll happen. I don’t know. But yeah,
Arvid Kahl 50:24
I mean, if there’s any technology that might make this happen, that’s the one you’re currently working with. Right? That’s, that’s what you GPT for and all these things are doing. They’re like contextually rephrasing things to sound differently, but still say the same thing. That is what this stuff is really good at. Man I’m so I’m so excited about the world of like generative AI. And the tools that have come through it, like audio pen is a great example of this, it’s a to me, just a really small, tiny little step on top of existing steps, but into the absolute right direction. They’re making, making things easier and making things more accessible. I think accessibility, that’s also an important part of taking audio and converting it into text where people who can’t write well or who don’t enjoy writing can still write because what you’re doing is effectively, you allowed me to write with my voice. That’s what a good audio plan is. And this is not an advertising for audio. But although it might just as well be because it’s a good product, and I use it, my affiliate link will be down below. But no, but what I’m, what I’m trying to say is it is it is so empowering. That’s the thing that you build in this half day, Hackathon is opening up writing to people who are not necessarily primarily good writers. That is what this technology can do.
Louis Pereira 51:41
I love this again, through my dad, like he is exactly what you described, like he’s a very deep thinker, but English is not his primary language. So he would always write like, he would always, you know, type on his his Google Keep and send us these long essays. But they will always not be very well framed, right? Like there will be typos, they would be, you know, grammatical errors here or there. And he would still, like share it, he would share it, you know, maybe within the family because it’s like a smaller group. Now with audio, and he just talks to his phone, he gets what he wants. And he’s more confident to be able to share that with anybody. Because it’s grammatically correct. It’s well structured. It’s easy to read, and just ready to share from like, the get go. So he’s probably like power user. Number one, the list of users have the moment where like, every time is every day, creates an order, like shares it to everyone. Well, he was quite proud of you for that. Like that’s, that’s the best gift you could give, right? Yeah, accidental again, but like great, great, concise,
Arvid Kahl 52:39
I guess you’ll take it though. The cool thing about all human let me let me throw this one at is the translation stuff as well. Like you can you can talk to it in any language you want, which is hopefully your your, your native tongue. And the thing that comes out of it can be in any language that you like, which is that’s also what an empowering move this is. Now all of a sudden, you’re turning this into a globally critical communication tool is kind of like the the communicator in Star Trek, that’s what you’re doing. Like, you know, the communicator between,
Louis Pereira 53:08
I’m just facilitating it like GPD for and I’m opening eyes, like, doing most of the work, but like, Yeah, I’m glad to facilitate that. Glad to be a channel for people to be able to. And it’s I mean, it’s, it’s great. It’s great to be building something that like people use that way. And like it impacts them. Like, you know, forget the money but like when when I get like a user telling me hey, you know, you changed my life because of this. I’m like, Oh my God, that’s, that’s crazy. That’s crazy to hear.
Arvid Kahl 53:32
Yeah, my my example here, and I hope this story is something that you like a couple of weeks ago, I was in a just in a thinking mood. And I just wanted to write but I didn’t want to write you know what I mean? So I just I think I dictated 510 15 minutes, ideas into audio pen. And I had had five articles done. I took the transcripts, I put them into my notion documents were headed and like within just a couple hours, not even, I think, what three hours, two hours, it was super, super quick. I had to a month’s worth of writing work. mostly done. And that was so cool. Knowing that oh, now I can focus on all the other things I want to do. I don’t need to sit down for like four days I have done this in a couple hours. That was such a such an amazing thing that I feel I still underpaid for the product. Let me let me just say this. You know, it’s so so worth it to have a tool like this. I’m excited. You know, I’m
Louis Pereira 54:28
still I’ve not spoken about this to people before but like I’m still slightly conflicted about whether making it easier for people to think and to write. Whether it’s a good thing on the whole, like, for instance, writing is difficult work right? Like, should people wrestle their thoughts in order to get them out on the on paper? Should they be fighting that blinking cursor on a blank screen for their thoughts to you know, for the for their own? Whatever structure of that that talks to be to be improved? Or should it be easy for them to do it like, you know, it almost feels like a cheat code, like you talk to a phone or your computer and it creates this stuff for you. I don’t know, like, I’m still, I’m still conflicted about whether it’s, you know, a net
Arvid Kahl 55:16
thing. 100% I very much understand. I think from a from a social philosophy standpoint, you could argue that every kind of technology, it has this problem that the typewriter was effectively a cheat code to writing, because you could argue that the hand eye coordination of long form writing also creates different thinking and different sentence structures and different you know, different texts than if you were just typing it. Or if you were doing it on a computer with like, automatic suggestions of words or grammar, correction, Grammarly, that kind of stuff, all the tools that have come up, I think every technology has the potential to be achieved, in the sense of that it makes something that has a certain connection to your brain slightly different. And I agree with you, I think this in particular, just kind of skips the writing part all in itself. But maybe its purpose is not to be a replacement for writing. That’s kind of what what most AI tools are misunderstood at as our as replacements I don’t think they are I think they’re augmentations to the process. Like in my process. As a writer, I use your tool, or any kind of GPT based tool, not as a final product generator, I use it as a brainstorming tool, I use it for the first step that I would do anyway, in the way I do it by dictating and then taking a transcript and writing out particular parts of it or taking particular parts of that thing and turning them into bullet points or whatever, your tool just facilitates that more easily. And I still write the article from there, I’m not done. Once I’ve dictated this into into audio PIN, I’ve just getting a much better interim result from which to write even better text. So I think the moment we take the notion of tools, replacing processes, and just look into how tools, augment processes, I think this becomes less of a problem, because you’re not replacing writing. And you’re definitely not replacing thinking, because thinking still needs to happen in the process of you know, people talking into their microphones. It’s just a different kind of thinking that happens. It’s a more fluent one, it’s less of a wrestling to type, you know, whether the actual act of typing comes comes in. It’s a it’s a more free version of thinking. It’s different. And I think that’s all right, you’re offering a different way of thinking. I like that.
Louis Pereira 57:30
Yeah, I mean, I’m glad I’m glad you you think that way. Yeah, makes me feel better as well. Because ultimately, I want to make sure that I mean, I want to be creating a net positive impact, right. So yeah, I’m glad you feel that way. I definitely got to stop writing. I mean, I definitely still want to, like build out like some of the features I was mentioning that I you know, I’m thinking of like some of the directions I’m thinking of, I still want to push people to use this as a first draft where they can then edit it within Audio pen as well, and then maybe even share it. So for instance, like the focus mode for writing, where you go into like a full screen mode that’s like very minimal and sleek. I want people to use that to kind of take that first, you know, draft that they get, and then physically sort of sit down and and think through it. And let’s see, maybe I can nudge people in other ways as well to use this as a starting point. And you know, as you said, kind of take it from there.
Arvid Kahl 58:23
Yeah, it’s definitely going to be an interesting journey to watch where this product is going. And let’s maybe close it up right here. Where do people go to follow that journey? Follow your products, your thinking and your cool features that open will get in the future? Where do you want people to go?
Louis Pereira 58:39
I mean, Twitter is the best place I have. I have a website as well. But I would just say Twitter. I’m just at my full name. Louis Pereira. No spaces. No, no dots, no numbers. Yeah, you can find me on Twitter. I’m fairly active.
Arvid Kahl 58:52
Yeah, I’ve used certainly aren’t, I hope you stay that way. I really, really enjoyed our conversation here. Today. I’m gonna put all of this in the show notes, all your projects, all your your Twitter handle, and even your website, which I think is cool. It’s cool that you have one way to just share all the things you’ve done in the past as well, because that’s important for other people to see, too. Man, Louis, thanks so much for being here today and talking to me about your blazing success story and your humble perspective on how this came to be. That was really, really interesting to hear. I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes. And I’m really, really excited for the future of your Indie hacking journey and your products. Thank you so much for being on the show today.
Louis Pereira 59:30
Thanks for having me, man. Like it’s been a it’s been a pleasure. I didn’t think I would be talking to you. You know, if you were to tell me like a few months ago. Yeah, it’s just it’s great to actually be able to speak to I’m very, very grateful for it. So thanks for the opportunity.
Arvid Kahl 59:45
I feel the exact same way. Thanks so much. And that’s it for today. Products like audio pen are incredibly sellable, right? They’re small scope. They don’t need that many employees, if any at all. They’re completely digital and ever Anything is automated. Let’s be honest, most indie hackers want things to stay that way. They don’t want to hire or build multi year sales processes. And often that causes things to slow down. Now imagine this, your founder who’s built a really solid SAS product, you acquired all your customers and you have generated just consistent monthly recurring revenue, things are looking good. But the only problem is you’re not growing for whatever reason, lack of focus, lack of skill, or just plain lack of interest, you feel stuck. And you might not even know where to go next. Because it would change the way that you run the business. It would change your lifestyle business, and you don’t know what to do. Well, the story that I would like to hear at this point is that you buckled down and somehow reignited the fire you got past yourself and your limitations and the cliches and you started working on the business rather than just in the business and you start building this audience and move out of your comfort zone, do sales and marketing all these things that six months down the road have tripled your revenue. Wouldn’t that be great? Well, reality is not that simple. And this situation is different for every founder, it is facing this particular crossroad. Too many times though, this story ends up being one of inaction and often stagnation until the business becomes less valuable or even worse, worthless. And if you find yourself here, or you story is likely headed down a similar road, I offer you a third option, consider selling your business on acquire.com At this point, because this really about your time right you capitalizing on the value of your time is a pretty smart move. And acquire.com will help you with that it’s free to list and they’ve helped hundreds of foreigners already. So go to try.acquire.com/arvid and just see for yourself if this is the right option for you right now.
Thank you for listening to The Bootstrapped Founder today. You can find me on Twitter @arvidkahl provided that Twitter is still around when you listen to this and you’ll find my books and my Twitter course there too. And if you want to support me in the show, please subscribe to my YouTube channel, get the podcast and your player of choice and leave a rating and a review by going to (http://ratethispodcast.com/founder). This really, really helps to show any of this really helps to show so thank you very much for listening, and have a wonderful day. Bye bye
