I feel like there's something in the water of being an indie hacker where you feel like you need to be really friendly. Like everyone's a community. Everyone helps out so people don't think about like having rivalries when that really is. I mean, if you take Danny's, Danny and Peter's situation, like they aren't enemies. Like there, you know, there's no bad blood and they're rivalries. You can be a rival and be friendly. Yeah, you can be a rival and be friendly. And then on top of all that, there's also like, Cortland, you probably have seen like
I mean, I think I've counted no fewer than 10 individual posts on IndieHackers complaining about copycats. Like, people just have this idea that you can't copy. Like, if someone else is doing something, like, that's their lane. You got to stay in your lane. And, like, there's no bigger bullshit in the world of business than the idea that, like, you can't have the same features. It'd be like playing basketball and somebody steals the ball from you. And then you complain, like, hey, that's not...
That shouldn't be allowed. Actually, that's part of the rules of the game. One of the rules of business is that if somebody innovates, you can do a similar innovation. Someone does a slam dunk and you're like, well, I can't do a slam dunk. That's Michael's move. I got to do the crossover. I can't do that same thing. Speaking of Danny, Danny, what's up? What's up, guys? Thanks for having me. Thanks for joining. We were just talking about you and your sort of AI rival, Peter Levels. Do you think it's healthy to have a rivalry? What do you call it, a rivalry?
I wouldn't call it a rivalry because we've been in Telegram chats for 24-7 just literally sharing all the information we had together when we launched the Provo Picture apps. And then on Twitter, we had like this little rivalry, I guess. There it is. For me, personally, for me, I went from 50k followers, 1.5 to 60 because Peter was tweeting about me all the time, right? So it feels like we had this little YouTube collaboration where some people put like another YouTuber on the video and then...
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They have like cross-followings and stuff. So it really helped me out. Rivalry on the outside and it's warm and fuzzy teddy bears on the inside. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. There's 37 Signals and their book Rework. They have a chapter called Pick a Fight. And one of the things that they talk about is intentionally going out of your way to have a rival. And they have like one constraint for that. They say always punch up. Everybody loves an underdog. You never want to be the most popular person ever.
picking like somebody who is less you know far along to be your rival and in a way like I think like like you said like I think Peter Levels is like over 100,000 followers on Twitter and you're at what like 15 and so like because the two of your rivals like oh he's at 270 geez he's like blown he's way up there he just kind of like brought you along with him right like you were like in many people's eyes probably the underdog and so like
at whatever point you can like Channing who's our rival we don't really have you could rival with with Sam in this what is his company called again who is this so he has like this whole fancy you need to pay a shit ton of money you guys can do it for like the underdogs that can eventually like move into Hampton his club yeah Sam Parr could be our rival like in a way like
Y Combinator is like an aspirational rival. They used to just do funding, but now they're doing all this inspirational founder content. They're doing content, man. They moved into our lane. They're on YouTube. They got their podcast. They got their blog. They're doing founder interviews. And so it's like, that's punching up for us. You know, if we're their rival and if they tweet about us or say anything back to us, like that helps us. So Danny, the reason you're rivals at the people level is because you're both doing these AI tools.
I don't know how to describe you as an indie hacker. You've been working on a lot of stuff for a long time. You had, I think, a seven-figure exit. You have been working with AI in particular for three years now, I think. I saw you tweeting about stuff back in 2020. Yeah.
And now you've got this suite of AI photo editing tools, for a lack of a better word. The way that I would describe your portfolio of apps is that they all pick some vertical. Photography is a probably $10, $100 billion industry. And it looks like you've just gone down the list of what makes a lot of money and photocopies.
photography headshots okay I'm doing an AI headshot thing like hiring models okay I'm doing AI modeling agency you don't need to hire models we'll create a model for you in AI and put that person's face all over your website team headshots got that on lock like you're just going down the list of what makes money and doing it with AI
I think Peter is doing it all in one tool. He's trying to make the SaaS one agency model. And I'm trying to do all these different protocols, trying to do all the SEO research. And what he said is headshots, team headshots, profile pictures, modeling, trying to figure out what is the next step on it. Because I can just use the same tech. And I just have to make a new landing page, do some SEO keywords for that, and then just drop into that protocol and just keep repeating it.
I'm actually planning on making one backend system so I don't have to rebuild that anymore. So you can just like snipe into one lane two weeks. And I think the great thing is I'm competing with the photographers. And I mean, they don't know how to develop, right?
So you're also competing with other people like you and Peter. Like I did kind of a Google search and it's not just like you and Peter, right? If I look for like AI headshot apps, there's Headshot Pro, which is you. There's Headshot AI. There's Headshots by AI.com. There's like 15 others. So anyone who's actually searching for like, hey, I want Headshots by AI, which is probably like
1% of the population. Probably most people don't even think that AI could do this right now. It's you versus a lot of people. Yeah, there's a lot of competitors. I'm doing quite well for some reason, I think, probably because I have a high conversion rate, so I can out-compete them on Google Ads and stuff like that. Yeah. But I think I'm lucky here because I built my own tech, my own models. So this is harder to copy because I've been spending like three, four weeks really
Coming up with my own AI, writing Python, training my own models. So this is not just like I'm going to hook up to an API and then get the results out. Yeah. How well are you doing? I know on Headshot Pro, I looked and you said that you've got
You've got the numbers literally on your website. And so you say, okay, you've got 10,000- You can reverse engineer it. 10,423 happy customers paying $29 a person. And that's where your rates start. So some people are paying more than that. For example, if you do headshots for your team, it's 40 bucks per person for your whole team, which is a pretty good deal compared to a traditional photographer.
Do you share your total revenue numbers or should I just do some math here? Yeah, I quit doing it after Alliance Hedgehog Pro because I felt, okay, A, it's going to get so many competitors and B, I feel bad about sharing it right now. It's like these numbers are not...
that's share-friendly anymore. Right. But you can do the muff. Yeah, sure, it's public. I feel like we're going to just do some arithmetic real quick here. It's over $300,000. No public math, though. Yeah. I got a calculator up. You've got other products, too. It's not just Headshot Pro. So you're making hundreds of thousands of dollars in a very short period of time. When did you launch Headshot Pro? I think that's now five weeks ago. Yeah, five weeks. ProvoPicture was November, so that's...
Three, five months? I mean, official AI didn't exist six months ago. Yeah, it's crazy. You have this tweet that I think encapsulates kind of the opportunity here because sometimes people get upset. One of the most popular tweets that I see on Twitter nowadays is, God, I've muted everything to do with AI. Everything is just a clone, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. People are so tired of seeing AI stuff. And then I look at you and you're like, killing it, made $300,000 in the last five weeks. Yeah.
I think I got lucky though because I sold my company back in 2020, right? And I got a non-compete on ChatGPT, OpenAI. I cannot do that stuff for three years. So I'm like forced to not do any of the fancy hype stuff on Twitter that everyone's doing. So I need to find something else to do. Wait, wait, wait. So what exactly is your non-compete? Like what are you not allowed to do? I'm not allowed to do any text generation for three years, which ends next year. Wow. Wow.
And this is because of your acquisition? Yeah, by Jasper. The company that you sold? So I sold my copyright generator to Jasper back in the days. And like, obviously, they don't want me to compete anymore because the founder said like, you ship too fast. I don't want anything to do with you anymore.
Wow. Okay. So that's like severely handicapped you, but like you said, constraints, creativity. Dude, I feel like that doesn't, yeah, I feel like that doesn't even handicap him because what that does, if you have constraints, then you end up doing things that are new. And in this particular case, like,
We're in a situation where all you see today is basically chat GPT stuff. You see a bunch of text generation. All you saw five months ago was like image generation, right? So because you're handcuffed from doing the thing that is like the hot thing that everyone is like constantly bored by, you have this like built-in forcing function to like, okay, what else can I do, right? Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing is like you move really fast, right? That's why this like company that acquired your last product, like,
doesn't want to compete with you. And guess what's also moving fast? Like the state of AI. Things that were cutting edge six months ago, nine months ago, now look like crap and they're yesterday's news. And if you're still doing that stuff, like you're behind. So you have to constantly innovate. I think this is one of the reasons why people, especially sort of like the more stuffy tried and true business theoretical crowd are like, oh, you know, you need to build a business that can last. But like,
Do you? Is there anything wrong with building a business that makes a bunch of money in a short period of time and it becomes obsolete, but by that time you're on to the next thing? I see no problem doing that. And that might be the way the world is going considering the pace of technological advancement right now.
Like look at Linktree, for example. They are trying to build a sustainable product, right? And then last week, I think Instagram suddenly decided, hey guys, you can add five links and suddenly your sustainable feature business is gone. It's the same with TikTok. TikTok just added the avatars that they did with Provo Pictures. So if I was building Provo Pictures as a sustainable business, it's still sustainable, right? But if you build on a hype and you build on a feature, you want to get the cash out as soon as possible, right? Because someone that ships slower than you, six months,
Donut Drain that has like a mass audience, they're just going to take your audience. The incumbents. My sales are already down. Like you can already notice it. So...
All of these huge companies employ tens of thousands of really smart programmers, and they are getting better and better at building things quickly. And like you said, if you don't release, you know, capture as much money as you can now, like, okay, maybe they move slower than you. Maybe it takes them six months to get to where you are, but like, then they have the distribution advantage. And it turns out that having a distribution advantage is worth more than six months, right?
You know, like they can way more. It's worth so much. And so you've got to be like super fast. So I like what you're doing. I mean, there's haters. There's people who say like, okay, these businesses aren't going to last. They're just clones of each other. I guess it depends on your personality type, right? Like I have this little ADD personality type where after three months, I'm absolutely bored with a product. I don't want to work on it anymore. Like I don't even want to touch it.
So for me, it's perfect. But for other people, if you like more slowly building, getting out, getting a stable life, you have children, whatever, then probably you absolutely hate this because you can't put any stability on top of it. Right.
If you didn't bring up the ADHD thing, I was looking at your list of products here. I'm just scrolling through. You've got Parity Bar, Discontinued, Headline, Acquired, Rare Blocks, Discontinued, this one 2021, this one 2023. And I'm like, this is a timeline of your products, but it's also a timeline of your mental focus and the shiny objects. Yeah. Postcrafts.com, 19 different products. 19 startups by Danny Postcrafts. Oh, it's 19. Jesus Christ.
You're not just shipping product. You're shipping product and you're tweeting about it.
it you're talking about your revenue you're talking about your decisions you're talking about the disputes you're dealing with the customers like you're doing all the juicy behind the scenes stuff that makes people want to follow along because it's just far more interesting to like to follow somebody like you and somebody who doesn't who doesn't ever tweet for me for me it's for me it's also diary because i read back tweets i did a year ago if i needed to solve something because i remember i had the same issue at that time and i would be reading it back and then like i'm kind of always doing it for myself just to as like cross-referencing
I like this sort of like 12 startups in 12 months approach. Also something that like Peter came up with a long time ago where you basically say, screw trying to work on one thing. I'm going to do a ton of things in the course of a year. I'm going to learn a lot and I'm going to see what sticks. You said you built like, you know, a dozen products or tons of products in 2020. What were they and what stuck? So the first one was Lending Folio, which I did for four years, which is an inspiration gallery after that.
I took a little feature from that website and turned it into a drag and drop inspiration builder so you could make a landing page based on examples of other websites. So that was another one. So I like to take a little feature of another product and iterate on top of it. How much money did these products make?
2K tops, I think, per month. Inspire Frame, maybe 400 at a time. Not to survive if you're living in Bali. But not what you're hoping for. Yeah, for many, many years. Right. For a long time. Okay. Yeah, and then I got lucky with the headline. Yeah, so that's like your fifth product on your list. This is the one that got acquired. It started in 2020, and it was an AI...
based copywriting thing. The headline on the website now says, writing copy has never been easier. The automated copywriter for busy designers, anti-hackers, marketing agencies, business owners. How did you come up with an idea that you were able to sell?
Also, let me point out something that I noticed before you even say that. There were four products that happened before that. You had the landing page design. You have this pop-up library for JavaScript. You have mock-ups. So you have all of these products that have to do with helping people code. And then, boom, you just have AI. And that's the one that got acquired.
So, and there's a really nice bridge going from that programming to the actual AI content. So, Atlantic Folio, I have marketers coming there. So, we wrote an e-book with headline templates because that's the hardest way to come up for the Atlantic base. So, we sold an e-book with copies like get blank in blank hours. And then people could fill in the variables in the e-book.
And then I was thinking, okay, I just learned to program. I was like, you can sell an e-book for $19, $19, right? Like not much. But if you sell a SaaS tool, you can suddenly increase the price over that. So I was like, maybe if I could tell, like if I could put those templates into a SaaS tool and you can sell it for $89. So that one exploded when I sold it. I got like 60K revenue, I think, in two weeks. That was my first example. Wow. And that was Pushfolio, right? No, that was Headline, actually, before it went AI. Okay.
Wow. Headline pre-AI. Pre-AI. So I was working on that product and then a friend of mine, he showed me GPT-3. And I was like, all right, I'm going to DM, I'm going to email Greg, the CTO of OpenAI. Can I get access? So I got access as like one of the first batch. And I let it write the templates for my SaaS for headline with AI. I was like, wait. Oh, that's awesome. Wait, this fucking AI can write copy for me.
What if I turn this tool into a copywriting tool instead of just using templates? Right. So I was lucky to be working on a copywriting tool by accident when a copywriting AI came out. Wow. I think I have a screenshot that I'm one of the first people to go live with GPT-3 actually in production together with Copy.ai and three tools at the same time. Copy.ai is valued at whatever, hundreds of millions of dollars now.
I interviewed somebody back in the day who was doing AI copywriting, and I've never gotten so many negative responses to an interview that I've done. People hated that guy. They were so upset.
People don't like low quality content. They don't like spam content. And I think the idea, and this was back in 2020, the idea that like we might be heading toward a world where the internet is just gunked up with nothing but low quality AI spam content and people are creating this at the click of a button, just like enraged a lot of people who are listening.
The full circle on that is that the first AI feature that we built for IndieHackers was your AI spam block or spam moderator that is going in and zapping members of its own race, basically people who are doing AI spam on the IndieHackers forum. Yeah. Yeah.
So the fears weren't exactly completely unfounded. I just want to say that. Yeah. Well, back in 2020, this was a very different landscape. Nobody knew this was possible. And Danny, you said you just happened to be doing a copywriting tool at the same time that AI came out that could write copy. How did you get it into the hands of people? Because I imagine this time you had five followers on Twitter. Nobody knew who you were. You didn't have a giant email list. How did anybody even find out about Headline? I think I got lucky that...
Same with Hedgehog Pro and Provo Pictures. It is so novelty. It's so new that it's magic to people. So I was just tweeting out tweets using the tool, and it was new to people. I had 200 followers back in the day, I think. And people just started retweeting it. People went mental. They were like, what the fuck's going on? This tool is writing copy? Like, what? Because we live in a bubble, right? It's like a 0.1% bubble. But once you go outside a little bit of it, it's magic to people. It was magic to me.
I was like so amazed by it. So I grew from, I think, 200 followers in that day to 10K before I sold Headline, I guess. And that was the only marketing I did. Only on Twitter. Just word of mouth. That's how I grew to 25K MRR before I sold it. Yeah, it was only word of mouth. No SEO, no marketing, just Twitter. Just Twitter. But I feel like Twitter is like...
If you are an indie hacker, if you're sort of a small startup founder, that's where we hang out. That's like your people, our people. But I want to say one thing about you being in the right place at the right time. You're supposed to say IndieHackers is where we hang out, Channing. IndieHackers.com. But what I was going to say is like, dude, it's so easy to sort of see the narrative as you were doing the right kind of product at the right time. And like, you know, the wind was in the air and it just so happened to be that, you know, the AI stuff...
um, you know, became an option, but like, dude, you did something in that story that like, you know, 999 out of a thousand people would not do, which is you heard about it and you were like, oh, this thing is sick. I'm going to just reach out to the founder of
and like, you know, ask for favors, right? Like, that is not a really, that's not a minor play that you made, right? Number one, you notice that this thing was awesome. And then the second thing is like, you had the balls or whatever, right? I don't like, you know, most people don't even think of that as an option. Like, I'm just gonna reach out to the guy who made this at the very top. And then, but for that decision, none of this would have happened. Yeah.
Yeah. It's crazy how many little small life decisions escalate into something big in your life, to be honest. There's also this piece of advice that's super common, which is don't build a solution in search of a problem. This is foundational startup wisdom that has been around for 30 years.
It's the most stereotypical thing in the world to be just a tech nerd or someone who loves, like somebody with ADHD, who just loves fritting about and a new opportunity comes along and you're like, oh, how do I take this crypto, AI, whatever thing and just slap it onto something that exists? And most people say, don't do that. But there are times when that is absolutely the right thing to do. When the new technology, I think, is so revolutionary that when it comes out, if you just apply it to existing problems, it makes them...
10 times better than the previous solutions. And like, that's exactly what you did. So it makes me kind of skeptical of some of this advice that's like tried and true advice when there's such clear exceptions. Same thing with like the birth of the internet, right? Anyone who didn't slap the internet onto their newspaper in the 90s, like their newspaper is dead. They did not make it. And so sometimes like you just like, I kind of feel like we're in that moment right now with AI where it's like, hey, this is like so foundationally different.
and better than hiring a bunch of people to do things manually if like with this keystroke you can do it automatically like it's easy to be a curmudgeon and be like no it's just a trend it's just a trend it's just a fad it's not it's not just a fad like it's
Seriously good. The crazy thing I realized, and I haven't been able to put it in words, but AI can, like you can go into industries that normally take so much human labor and you can basically just, as a one person business, and this is why I think this is a golden time for indie hackers. Like the photo studio, for example, I'm competing with people probably have, and it's also a negative thing, right? But it's positive for the consumer because no one wants to take headshots. All right, $500 worth of it.
So I see it as like, I do it for the customers. I can basically by myself scale unlimited times if I have the GPU power and just do photography.
by myself because I have an AI that's just doing the work for me. I have all these job works, all these other AIs filtering, blah, blah, blah. The only thing I need to manually do is, yeah, do the programming and the customer support. And thank God for my wife who helps me out with that because that's a lot of work. And if you apply AI to solving real problems that are done by real humans, I think there's a lot of markets you can get into in that way.
Yeah. Channing hinted at this a second ago. So we've had like a spam problem on IndieHackers forever. And a lot of the people who are spammers, like it's not just robots, it's actual people sometimes who come on and I'll implement spam fighting stuff, you know, add a captcha or I'll change like all the classes in my CSS so like the robots can't find it and people just figure it out and they just do it differently. I'll ban certain words. They'll just start using different words. If I ban links, they start putting a space in front of the dot com. They try everything, right? It's like real people fighting.
And two or three weeks ago, I was like, okay, should we hire another community moderator? It's expensive. It's hard to manage community moderator. You don't really necessarily want to outsource all that community work to somebody else. So we should really be doing a lot of this ourselves. But mostly it's just expensive. We're independent now. We can't afford that kind of thing. Congratulations, by the way. Awesome. Thanks. It's nice to be Andy. So I'm like, okay, what can I do? Well, I could just take...
a solution that exists, AI, and just slap it onto this problem and say, okay, what can GPT-4 do? And so in the span of a couple days, I just played around with GPT-4 and it wasn't really even a couple days, it was like a few hours. And now I have a spam fighting bot
who is just like dispensing justice on the forum i call him bot man and he will message me in telegram every time he sees a spammer he will give them a spam score from zero to one he'll give me a confidence score how confident is he from zero to one he will give me a reason and actual pros will tell me oh this person their account is really new and it seems like this blah blah blah and i think this is definitely a spammer and i just sent him today to autoban people
And dude, I think it's all hits and no misses. I've just been trolling that channel. It is never wrong. It is right every single time. Every time it finds a speaker. Did you just train a really long text in chat GPT where you put examples inside and then it learns from it? Or are you using a vector database and it finds the distance? I'm doing the simplest, dumbest few-shot learning in GPT-4. I've given it like 10 examples. And GPT-4's context is like, how many tokens is it? It's like 12,000 or something.
crazy amount of tokens which Channing a token is basically like three or four letters
And so it can handle a gigantic wall of text of examples. Plus, it's already been trained on basically the entire internet. So it knows what spam is. It knows what moderating a forum is. And it's like, OK, well, that just wiped out the job of policing spam on the forum. I not only don't have to hire anyone, but I also don't need to go pay some other business that's built a tool. People have pitched me tools for this for years. Hey, we've got some spam-fighting algorithms we train. Sorry, GPT-4 is better than everything you've been working on for years. And I just rigged it up in an afternoon.
Like, I'm going to do this. It's basically free. Goodbye. Right. And it's like entertaining. I can tell it to be funny. I can tell it to be humorous. It'll send me interesting, funny messages and abandon spammers. And so it's like, I don't see how people can look at this technology and say like, this is a passing fad, just like crypto or something. I know. It's not. That's like head in the sand. There's so much more use case to it. Like, this is not a fad. This is completely industry changing, I think, even for the better and for the worse, right? Yeah. Yeah.
To me, I think that the sign of it is like,
I said this a few weeks ago, where it's like the difference between, you know, you feeling like there might be an opportunity, like there's new technology and you're like, oh, there's an opportunity. Maybe we should do some like R&D and like maybe there's something there. But this is not, it doesn't feel like an opportunity. We got that spam fighting bot going. And now I'm almost like, dude, it's a liability that like there's almost certainly other parts of our stack, whether it's our technology stack or like our process stack, like how we do things where we're currently wasting tons of time.
And, like, I'm almost like, I want to, like, you know, sort of do this. Like an audit. Like an internal audit. Like, what are we doing? What are we doing manually that we should be using AI for? Not just, like, as a distraction to mess around, but as, like, a real time-saving technique. Like, we can't afford not to do that.
And the amazing thing is like, you don't have the code anymore. Like what OpenAI did basically is they turned the written English word or whatever word into a programming language. So anyone can do this. Like some people listening to this podcast are probably like, yeah, you know, these guys are all programmers, only they can do it. No, man, you can just send text to it, tell it what to do, and it sends you text back. And if you tell it to send it back,
as like a one or a zero or a true or a false. Like this is spam, yes or no. And you can just read it out. Like you don't need to know program. So I think people don't fully comprehend what you're saying. Because this is something that I was telling my friend about when I was coding my spam bot. Like, oh, you're coding this thing. I'm like,
I'm literally writing text. There's some code involved, right? Like if I tried to fight spam a year ago or a month ago, I would be like doing nothing but coding. Now I wrote a tiny amount of code that basically just says like, hey, ban this person. But the vast majority of what I'm doing is tweaking a single sentence that says,
You are a forum moderator for the indie hackers community. You're reviewing comments made by users on the forum and assigning a spam score ranging from zero to one. Zero means it's unlikely to be spam. One means it's very likely to be spam. Blah, blah, blah. I just keep writing all this stuff and I end up with a couple paragraphs of instructions and then it does it. So coding is literally me just...
giving instructions as if I was talking to a human. It's like the highest level of abstraction of no code. It's like no code with just like, okay, the interface for coding here, the syntax is, do you know English? Okay, so just like use English and then talk to it. Like that's the syntax for this code. So does your computer, it turns out.
If you think about it, programming is such a bug. Why would we have to talk in a way that a computer understands if we made a computer? We should just be able to write in English to a computer. Yeah. And that's getting possible now. So everyone is becoming a programmer. I guess people hate that. I know. And by the way, I've seen this in practice. So Cortland, I told Dave, a buddy of ours that works at Lyft...
I share all this stuff with him. I share all the new tech stuff. Maybe he's so interested because he works at Lyft and jobs are getting sliced left and right at these kind of companies. So he's looking for his escape hatch. But the first thing that he said when I showed him our bot was he said two things. He goes, number one, that's awesome. And then number two, bummer, it's pointless for me to know about this. I'm not a developer. So I guess I'll just wait three years until somehow I can do something like this.
And I'm like, dude, no, like, you know, there are some limitations. You have to be a little bit technical for some aspects of this. But like, you really should look into tools and ways that you can implement these kinds of things with your own workflows. And I don't know if you listen to the All In podcast, but it's got a few investors on it. And one of them is Jason Calacanis. And like the next...
There was an episode where Jason Calacanis, who's not really a developer, he was a podcast host, was like, oh, what I do these days is I have my... Whenever I open a new tab in my browser, it is set to go to auto GPT. Like,
I'm sort of creating this forcing function where I automatically just have to sort of go through auto GPT. So no matter what I'm doing, I'm constantly like reminding myself like, oh, this thing, could that be done better with auto GPT? Could this be done better with auto GPT? And it just sort of, he's like, I'm just training myself because no matter what, the thing I just said, like that idea that
100%, there are liabilities in the way that you're doing whatever it is that you're doing. Some AI tool or feature could do it better. There's all sorts of apps that are basically like glue. So the no-code community has been really into apps like Zapier for years and years and years and years. And it's like, you can't code, but you need your Gmail to talk to your Telegram to talk to Slack to talk to Google Docs or something. Okay, whenever I get a new email that is this subject...
you know, sending me this message in Telegram. You could hook that up without code in like five seconds. It was zappier, right? And now all these apps are adding chat GPT and AI. So, you know, if I type this query in, have it go here. So you really, really don't need to learn how to code. Like it's, if you know the right apps, you could just sign up and start like hooking stuff up
Everyone should spend like probably take a few days off and just try to automate some of their most repetitive things in their life. And they will just save so much more time. I want to talk about like, I want to so much. I want to talk to you about like, what are you automating in your life? But like, first I want to finish the story about headline because you started it. It blew up. It's making money. It's just like, let's get the story out of the way. We did a really big detour. Huge detour. Uh,
How did you sell it? And how much money did you make from selling it? Twitter, dude. This is all Twitter again. I get reached out by the guys of Jasper.ai and Unbounce. Unbounce.com, the landing page builder. They both reach out via Twitter. Dave from Jasper was just like super upfront. Like you just said like, yeah, I want to buy you guys.
And they were a team of three people. So I was hopping on calls with them to talk about it. They just dropped the number. I was like, double it. And they were like, okay. So we just started negotiating. This was like super fast.
And I was getting burned out because I was doing customer support, development, marketing, everything myself. I was done. I was talking with my wife about it and she was like, just sell it, dude. Get rid of it. So I was also entertaining offers from Unbounce, but they were this obviously massive corporation. So you have to go through procurement. They have to wait two weeks to set up a meeting with the whole board. I was like, yeah.
I have like an offer here. I should just go to it. I told them I don't want to work for them. They were like, after two weeks, if you do the program, like the switch over, you're done with us. They asked me for equity. I was like, nah, I don't need it. It's fucking stupid. Oh, man. Yeah. And then, yeah, I think it went through in four weeks. I got 33% of the money in the bank, 66% over 12 months. Two weeks in, I was done.
I was getting depressed afterwards because I went from working 16 hours a day to nothing. I had nothing anymore. Right. Yeah. It was odd. A lot of people think they're going to quit and retire and go live on a beach. But it's just like this grass is greener thing. When you go from being somebody who does stuff constantly to being somebody who's like, well, you got money, but you're doing nothing. The number one thing you want to do is start doing stuff again.
Well, but if your personality is built around you learning and doing things and suddenly you don't have anything like that, like your whole purpose in life, you're like, you're doing like, what is my purpose in life? Yeah. Was it to sell your company and make money and then do nothing? Like, yeah, clearly not. So what's going to happen? Let's talk about this AI stuff because like I'm thinking like,
It just feels like there's a huge elephant in the room. Half the stuff I build or consider building now, I'm like, but isn't AI just going to make this obsolete in six months? We're building landing pages for indie hackers, basically a little profile. And it's like, why would anybody ever use my website builder six months from now or literally last week or two months ago? They could find some AI tool that will build them a landing page. And they just have to type it. You've got to build AI into it. Right? It's like, we have to sort of upgrade our stuff. Yeah.
We have to or we're just going to be toast. And it's like it's so hard to wrap my mind around that. Like to some degree, I feel like a dinosaur. I'm like, no, the old way of doing things is still here. The tried and true business fundamentals still apply. But like the technologist in me is like, no, it's it's all different. Right. Like even like just things in my life, like I want to spend a weekend just building an AI assistant for my own life.
I want it to text me. I want it to email me. I want it to call me. I want it to remind me. I want it to ask me questions about what I'm doing and then think and then tell me what I should do. A year ago, this would have been extremely difficult to conceive of how it could even be like, it would be huge, require a huge team to do something right. Well, now it's like I can hook this up this weekend myself. And like, I don't need a friend or a colleague or an expensive coach to motivate me or ask me what's going on. Like, hey, I can do it extremely reliably.
it's the age of the entrepreneur right like every repetitive job everything that can be automated will be automated right so what what stays right and i think it's like the creativity in launching businesses like good luck trying to get that away with ai i don't think you can automate like and this is why i love ai like i don't like to do all these manual boring stuff i don't want to make my own landing pages i don't want to write my own copy i don't want to do
any of that. I just want to build businesses, automate it and move on to the next one. So I think that's why as an entrepreneur, as an indie hacker, it's going to be an amazing time. Agreed. But if you do a repetitive job like financials, I think EBM just announced that they're going to fire 10% of their staff. And they said it's because of AI. Their back office. Yeah. Yeah.
Which I don't believe. I don't think it's really because of it. I think that they needed to do layoffs. I'm so curious what's going to happen to the S&P. We're going into a recession, but all these companies are probably going to save so much money in this. What is it going to do to the economy in a stock market versus normal people way? And I think we are enthusiastic about it, right? But yeah, if you have an old job, yeah, I understand why you hate it.
So there's this kind of hilarious book by this, I think he was like an anthropologist, he just died a couple of years ago, whatever, cognitive scientists, and it's called bullshit jobs. And he's very like left wing. So he's not coming at this from a perspective of like, you know, caring a lot about certain economic developments. He really is just looking at our society. And he's like, hey, they're like capitalism creates a bunch of jobs that are that are horseshit. They're like, they aren't very meaningful, etc.
And his list of the jobs, I'll name a couple of them in a second, are the exact kinds of jobs that I think are in a lot of danger from AI. And it makes me feel like there's going to be a lot of short-term pain and sort of a lot of job security is going to be gone. This is going to be a very unstable place. But like,
Like in the long term, these types of jobs, like repetitive jobs, aren't the ones that I really imagine being that much love lost for. His book says over half of societal work is pointless and becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth.
And so, like, that's, like, I'm just looking this up now. I haven't read this book. But, like, his thesis of his book is that half the jobs we already have, we shouldn't even have. And then he has a list of, like, okay, what are these crappy jobs? And so, yeah, and for context, this is, like, 2018. So...
He might have seen AI on the horizon, but he hadn't heard the term GPT before. So flunkies, people that serve to make their superiors feel important, goons who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer, for example, lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, duct tapers who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, programmers repairing shoddy code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive, etc., etc., etc.
And when I look at this list, I'm just like, oh, that is just the first on the victims that are going to get lined up against the wall from AI. I disagree. And it's like –
to feel better, right? Or like flunkies. He said that being a receptionist or being a door attendant or a store greeter that just serves to make other people feel important, people will pay money to feel important and feel good. I mean, there's some stuff in the AI landscape, like replica, like have an AI friend that you can talk to that is making some people feel good. But I think that generally speaking, for a while, people are mostly going to rely on other people to feel good. And that's something AI is not going to be able to do, even when it can do everything else.
I'm pretty sure if an AI is going to be nice to you and tell you, oh, you're back, we'll be back, people would fucking hate it to be called by an AI in such a position. I guess anyone who doesn't have a startup idea, they should get this book and just browse through it and be like, hmm, which one of these can I just get a little piece of the pie on and automate out of it? What are you doing for yourself? Do you have any...
Behind the scenes, Danny Postma AI tools that are making you more efficient and allowing you not to do repetitive tasks? Mostly just rewriting my tweets, rewriting my content because I'm not native English and I'm horrible in writing cohesant sentences for some reason. So I will just write garbage in, like just do a brain fart of like 500 words for my tweets. Put it in Typefully. Shout out to typefully.com.
tell the AI to rewrite it in a cohesant way. And then if the AI doesn't understand what I say, I know, okay, like if the AI doesn't understand what I say, no one is going to understand what I say. Then I tell it to summarize it and then I tell it to make it a little bit more poppy and then I edit it for like 10 minutes. So mostly those kinds of things. We should be doing this on Undehackers, Shannon, because like we have a site where essentially people have to come in and write a lot. They have to write posts, they have to write updates, they have to write comments. We should be helping them write better content
I bet Microacquire already does this, for example. If you go to microacquire.com, I think all their posts are written in the same way. I wouldn't be surprised if they just put all this content in and then have an AI to generate it for them and then probably one reviewer that makes some manual changes towards it.
I did this for Headline back in the day. The first customers, they told me the output was garbage. And you just look at the input and it's like, yeah, you input garbage. It's the same with Hedgehog Pro right now. We refund 20% of the people because they upload garbage. So for Headline, I was actually rewriting their inputs in the backend without them seeing it just to make it better.
So, like, stuff like that is... Yeah. Well, this is one of the things that's, like, already getting better. Like, the difference between GPT 3.5... So, GPT is, like, you know, OpenAI's family of, like, text-based AIs. And...
You can use chat GPT to interface with it or you can use the API. But like as technology gets better, you don't have to be as good of a prompt whiz kid. Like right now, like the people who are the best at AI are just really good at understanding how the AI thinks, what kinds of things they should put in their prompt and their questions and their conversations with the AI to get it to do what they want. But like as it gets smarter, like it gets more and more human-esque. Like you could imagine five or ten years from now.
maybe even a year from now, like you could write absolute garbage. Midjourney does it right now. You can just type in and Midjourney actually optimizes your prompt and adds all the specification to it so the AI better understands what you mean. Boom. There it is. So yeah. Yeah. Are you guys using any tools? I should know of because it's actually quite stupid. I only use one AI tool. It's hard because I think like being a builder and being an indie hacker, like I would always get stuck in these like creative black holes.
where I would just be spending so much of my time creating that I would just get really behind on like using, right? And I think I see like, like Peter levels is like this too. He's like, I'm using PHP, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, it doesn't care how his code looks, right? He's just like trying to create stuff. He's not trying to be like up to date with the latest technology and build systems and whatever as an engineer. And I feel like that too, as an indie hacker, I'm like, I'm trying to like create value for other people. So I'm not like sitting around like,
you know, licking my finger and sticking in the air and like trying to figure out what toys I should be playing with. Like I'm building and that's kind of how you are too. But like, in a way it's like, we kind of need to strike this balance between like becoming more efficient builders and continuing to build. I would say that that is something that like basically sort of, you know, what balance do you strike between like building in the ways that you know and exploring, right? Like basically sort of having almost like a skunk works, uh,
built into your own way of working, basically what you should do is you should look at the times. I think three or four years ago, hey, this is the big... The crypto wave is coming. I think that some of the other waves that have come, no code, et cetera. I think you can poke your head out of the hole and go, ah, that's not really for me. That's not revolutionary. It's not a huge change. I don't necessarily need to divide my time away from the things that I know are working and
None of those made you more productive. Maybe the creator economy thing where it's like, oh, hey, you can make money without writing any code. You could just basically show your work, build in public, have an additional revenue channel that's lighter weight than building a full-fledged SaaS app. Maybe that was like, it's not really making you more productive. It's just like, there's easier ways to make money. But now it's like, oh, the new sort of technological wave is actually making you more productive.
To me, it's AI and then the gig economy. The gig economy becomes way easier, for example, to quickly hire a contractor or quickly get someone to whip you up a quick design, like a quick logo, that kind of thing. It's like, hey, you need to jump on that bus, right? Take a long weekend and just figure this out because it's going to, I don't know, that was 0.3x your productivity. Now AI is here and it's like, dude, you might
0.5, you know, 1x, 2x your productivity, right? Easily. I wonder when someone is going to launch Fiverr with an extra A&E site, like AI Fiverr, and it's just going to get all the jobs that are listed on their copywriting, checking, translating. It's basically just going to have the same UI on it.
Half the gig work has been done by an AI, so it doesn't feel like an AI is doing it anymore. I've seen at least five or six AI landing page generator tools out there right now. It's like people are already doing this. 100%, by the way, when this episode ends, I'll give it two days, and then there's going to be someone who launches, and it's going to be called OneR. Because Fiverr is about $5. Now there's going to be an AI tool. It's going to be five times less the operating cost, so they're going to call it OneR.
But I think that's what people are doing wrong. For example, a friend of my, Mark, they have this landing page generator, but they price it at $19. But you need to understand, like, you are removing the value of a landing page designer that's $5,000. Like, you don't have to price it cheap just because it is cheap. Like, for HeadShield Pro, for example, like, it cost me a few dollars to do it, but I'm not going to price it at $10 because you're competing with a photo shoot. Exactly.
Right. And as long as they're not competitors and you're not going like as long as you're like a fancy tool and you know what content you're doing and you're good, like you can charge a high price now while it's still new. Like probably in five years yet this doesn't work anymore but for now
be expensive. This is the exact point. This is the callback to the point about the benefit of being fast. If the ultimate cost of whatever it is, a headshot builder for AI or whatever, say it's 0.5 or it's five times less expensive to create it, in the fullness of time, a bunch of competitors are going to enter into the space and drive down the cost. But if you're fast,
then the pricing theory just becomes, right, what's the alternative to this, right? What is the incumbent or whatever it is? This is what Peter did when he launched the Avatar AI. He charged $50 and he was the only one doing it. So he could just charge whatever the fuck he wants because everyone wants to use it. And then gradually I came in, we had to like lower a little bit of a price. And then of course, Lanzac came out and we had to slash our price to 80% down. I think we were at $40 and we had to go down to 10 bucks.
But most of our revenue, I think Peter got like 90% of his revenue in the first weeks because he could charge so much money and then everyone had to go down. So yeah, this is coming back again to your point and what I said. If it's a hype, get the most money out immediately because you can charge that. You're not sure how long it's going to last. There's so many reasons that right now the best strategy is to have small products that you move fast with.
Because, number one, you have no idea when you're going to be disrupted. These incumbents might come by and crush you, and whatever money you were able to make for six weeks or six months, that's now gone. You might be disrupted not only by incumbents, but by technology itself. What you're building might become completely obsolete. One of the things I see right now that's happening is everybody's taking existing applications and slapping AI on top of it and getting this 5x boost of, hey, this is five times better than what I had in the past, which is awesome. But...
Like, okay, we're still waiting for the wave of companies to come that are building products from the ground up with this AI in mind. And that's going to be much better. Like a community forum, for example, that helps you occasionally, you know, use AI or like a social product like Twitter that helps you occasionally use AI to like write better tweets. It's not going to be as good as a social network that was built from the ground up with AI in mind. And that stuff is coming, right? Like that stuff's going to stand the test of time. And that's going to lead to another second order effect where a world full of all these AI products is going to create
a whole bunch of new problems that we can't even imagine right now that are hard to imagine. And there's going to be startups that solve those problems. And so like, if you're building something that's going to take 10 years or five years to slowly come to fruition, like I think you're dead. Yeah. This is why as indie hacker, I think don't compete with the big companies. Like I see so many people, I made the same mistake. Like the first AI thing I made was like a stock photo, AI stock photo website.
But it's fucking dumb because Adobe has all the photos and libraries. Why would I compete with it? You have three months of time and then someone else will come out. And I see other people, they make this AI generator where you can generate pictures. It's like an editor. But Adobe just launched the Firefly thing and you're done for. There's no way you can compete with it. You should find a niche, ship really fast in that niche. Because a big company is not going to out-compete a niche in that sense. Nope.
It's not worth it to them. And I think this raises an interesting question, which is like every time there's a technological shift, some percentage of it goes to the incumbents, the big players. Some percentage of it goes to, you know, the startups and some percentage of it goes like even a lovable ally, like the indie hackers. I'm trying to make some money online right now. Right. Like with something like crypto, for example, the incumbents didn't make very much money from crypto. All the biggest crypto companies were kind of startups.
because they moved really fast and it was like kind of niche enough that big companies were like, I don't know about this. Whereas something like mobile, for example, all the incumbents took all the money, right? Like Apple and Google created the phones, every big website made its own mobile app and like very few startups like got in there and disrupted things. I'm curious what it's going to be like with AI. Like you were saying, like Adobe, like they can just slap AI into Photoshop and have a giant gallery of images and AI effects and they're just going to kill everything because everybody already has Photoshop.
But from the bottom up, indie hackers can do what you're saying and target these super tiny niches that no incumbent's going to target. And I think what's really cool is the fact that it's so fast and easy to build these AI apps now because you're basically writing prompts. You're not writing a ton of code that there's no reason not to have super specialized apps for tons of little niches, which I think is going to make it harder for anyone to get a bigger foothold with a bigger, broader company that's targeting more people.
Like to your idea of like a Fiverr powered by AI, I can imagine 100 different profiles of AI copywriters, but they all have their own little different flavor because they all have a different prompt. And essentially you could pick a different one. Like there isn't just going to be one AI copywriter to rule them all. Why would there be if you can make a specialized AI that could be super duper good at each individual task? Yeah, I think what I was shocked with on my Twitter is like it feels like almost no indie hackers is doing SEO.
Well, SEO, like we Indiakers, we hate marketing, right? And this is the easiest way to A, find a product idea, B, launch a niche product, and then C, don't have to do any marketing for it because it just stands there. So that was like the lucky part I had with the Provo picture website. Like there was no competition on it. So I would just launch my website, get a backlink, and then just rank instantly. So
So you can find like hyper-specific niches. You don't have to compete. You don't have to do marketing. And you will just keep it because why would any other big company go down on that keyword for you?
By the way, I was going to ask you that. You mentioned at the beginning of this call, actually, that you spend a lot of time on Google looking at keywords in relation to a lot of these, like the latest of your products on Postcrafts. And then you also, you don't, you know, sort of, you're not building cool AI to help you with your own processes. Like you're not necessarily like scratching your own itch. Like is Google is like, you know, keyword search and SEO, the thing that you use to find ideas? Yeah.
Yeah. Well, to find ideas, kind of so last year I started trying to do this with programmatic SEO, like fit components, tail bits. These were just completely based on SEO research. I was just searching all day, all week for ideas, what I could build next without AI because AI generation didn't exist yet and I had an on-copy. So what am I going to do? So yeah, I built based on that. And this time, so we
with the avatar race, everyone chose the avatar warp, right? But there's no searches on it. So I chose profile picture specifically. So I got the idea before as in like something I want to explore. But then when I want to launch something, I also check which keyword is underrepresented, which is on the keyboard difficulty of 10. And then use that in your domain name, in your titles. And this is like, if you put my website in Ahrefs, like
I have a shit ton of traffic on all those profile picture. Well, I know, and this is why levels, why Peter went down, for example, because there are no searches on avatar. So once the hype is gone, there is nothing sustainable in it. And the same with headshot right now, right? I get hype on TikTok, I get backlinks, but there is a lot of search on headshot. So you take advantage of the hype
And then you build for the longevity of it based on the keywords. What do you think about the future of being like a founder? It's cool because it's kind of like a golden era for indie hackers. We're going to be much more efficient. We can build much more. But also the competition is ramped up. Way more people now can build apps that do very impressive things. Any idea that's basic, there's going to be 10 million versions of it in like two days.
And so you're going to have to be super creative. But even then, people can copy you super duper quickly. So like where is the defensibility? Where are the moats? Is it all just going to be these fast cash grabs? Are there businesses that are going to be immune to this and that can stand the test of time?
Well, the thing is, I have a lot of competition with Headshot Pro and ProvoPix, right? But I think I have a mode, like all my competitors with Headshot, they have a lower quality because I figured out how to make my own custom model that looks more real life using some other techniques. Like it's not just one AI, it's like 10, 20 AI stacked on top of each other. So you have like, that is a mode. Yeah.
On the other side, if you don't want competition, don't tweet too much about it. Just keep your revenue numbers quiet. Pick a niche that's really boring that no one wants to jump into and just be cashing. Yeah. Don't come on the Andy Hackers podcast. I mean, you've been through a lot, Danny. You sold a company. You have your launch and products, it seems like, every other week. You're at the forefront of these new AI image generation photo editing tools. What's something you've learned that you think other Andy Hackers who are just getting started
People listen to the show. Some of them don't know how to code. Many have never built anything. Some people are two years into a product that's not making any money. What do you think they can take away from your story? Ship fast. Build a lot of different things to find what works. And do SEO for marketing if you don't like marketing. I think those are the three things to get you out of the slum. Love it. Danny, thanks again for coming on the show. Can you tell people...
Where they can find your stuff? Is it just postcrafts.com?
Yeah, you can. Mostly on my Twitter. So if you go to twitter.com slash Danny Postma with two A's in the end because the other one wasn't available. I post there with everything that I learned. Yeah. I actually own the other handle. I just cannot get access to it. It sucks. Nice. Yeah, just follow me there. And there's like a bunch of links to all my latest projects, what I'm working on. I'm sharing all my struggles, my learnings. Yeah. All right. We'll put you in the show notes too. Thanks again, Danny. Cheers, guys.