#279 – Staying Indie vs Raising VC, Getting an MBA, and Disrupting the App Store with Emma Lawler of Velvet
01:00:56 Share

Hey, what's up, Emma? Hey, how's it going? It's been a while since I've seen you. I think I saw you and Philip in London in the fall of 2018. Yes. We went to high tea together. Yeah, what was that? I have this memory of it where we had tea and crumpets, and we had all these little fancy cake bite things, and I was like, this is the fanciest place I've ever been. So this is America? America?

No, this was in London. Oh, London. I expected the queen to walk in. It was like such a fancy event. Yeah, when Philip and I were traveling around a lot, we landed in London for a couple of months. And it was like a fun thing that didn't involve alcohol where you could like sit for three hours with people and have kind of a deep conversation. So...

Sometimes people loved it. Sometimes they hated it, but it was kind of a fun. I thought it was fun. I thought it was fun. Philip was texting me like a week or two ago and he's like, yeah, Channing invited Emma on and she's worried you're not going to remember who she is. And I'm like, there's no way I'm not going to remember Emma. We had high tea together. Who else would I have high tea with? Literally nobody else. Emma, what you just described, I was literally talking to a friend about almost like that value proposition a couple of days ago of like,

I currently am like sort of taking a break from drinking alcohol and I want to like live long and be really healthy. But I live in New York City. And if I want to go out and meet new people or like hang out with friends, like the only real default past 6 p.m. that's not go to someone's house is like go get wasted at a bar or go to a club or like even like maybe go to a show, a music show, but like you're drinking, right? And I'm like, why can't we just do like a tea? Like, why can't we have tea? Why can't we have like...

This might sound weird, but like we went to this vintage shop in Williamsburg and bought this like really old vintage China tea set. And it costs like 50 cents per cup. Like it's not, you can find them in these vintage shops. But it's like an excuse where people will come over and not drink alcohol. And I do, I do drink alcohol. Like I like drinking, but it's like nice to have like a social thing where you don't have to do that. Yeah. Channing, you should just drink non-alcoholic cocktails.

Like you got something in your hand and the bar, you look like you're drinking. It's delicious. You just sip on it. Have you tried Gaia? I think that's how you say it. No, I haven't. No. What is it? It's like I went through a phase during the pandemic where I didn't drink very much either. But it's like a non-alcoholic –

liqueur kind of and it like kind of tastes like alcohol but there's yeah and you can like mix it with stuff and it's really expensive so you feel you also feel like you're buying there you go you get the authentic experience if it doesn't taste good and it costs a lot of money yes exactly well it's good to have you like we interviewed you about

your business, Moonlight, on IndieHackers, I think in May of 2019. And at that time, you were doing $55,000 a month in revenue. And then the next month, or the next year, you ended up selling it. And Moonlight was a platform that matched developers with companies who need

to hire developers. And you and Philip are working on that together. Now you have a new startup called Velvet. It's kind of like, I don't know how to describe it. It's almost like Gumroad. It's almost like a no-code tool where if I really want to sell a product, I use you. You put up a page where I can sell my product. My users can authenticate. They can sign in. I don't have to do any code at all. And now I'm just like...

making money and I get all sorts of charts and graphs telling me optimize that conversion. Is that how you describe Velvet? Yes. Thank you for that really concise description. But yeah, basically every company I've worked at, I've redone onboarding at least three times a year. And so that is that process of authenticating someone, collecting payment, and then keeping them there as long as possible. And most companies do it really poorly. They make you go through 20 steps before you can even use the product. Right.

So, yeah, short term, no code tools for helping people do that as effectively and seamlessly as possible. And then long term, it's more like what is this new world we're living in where like AI tools replace apps and you just need to like onboard and transact in all of these different places online. So it's more about like the authorization layer there of how you go a little deeper. I did a poll actually.

last night who wins bigger from ai and i had huge incumbents funded startups and niche indie hackers and 45 of people chose huge incumbents but 40 of people said niche indie hackers and i think with stuff like velvet that's basically abstracting away like like here's just the best practice for doing this thing that everybody needs everybody needs authentication everybody needs to sell their thing let's just like do it the best possible way and you don't have to worry about it like stripe does the same thing like here's stripe checkout and

Here's how to accept payments. Here's the best way. We've optimized this. You're going to get the highest conversions. Go on and build your actual product. With so many tools like this and now AI, there can't help but be anything but an explosion in the number of indie hackers. You can just build awesome businesses because they don't need to do all this bullshit cruft work repeatedly every single time.

Yeah, that's really interesting because it kind of is taking power away from the really big players who like their advantage was data and being able to do all of this automated stuff for you. I'm curious to see if a lot more businesses can exist for longer, either as like their own companies that are VC backed

or, yeah, just completely independent. And even creators, like, we're kind of debating internally, like, would creators ever be a user? Because they have millions of end users. Like, they can be running really huge businesses that they want to monetize in the same way that an indie hacker has for the past 10 years. And who is your...

ideal user? Our ideal user is like a company that's running a real business, you know, not someone who's just kind of experimenting and getting some things off the ground, but someone who has a million end users or is planning to get there. And so they need this really sophisticated tooling to be able to onboard users, keep them there, be using very secure data practices, have, you know, real payment processing and stuff like that.

And what should they be selling? Is this like for people selling e-commerce stuff? Is this for people selling digital subscriptions? Is it for people selling content? Yeah, so not e-commerce, which is kind of a confusing thing. Like there's a really big difference in my mind between e-commerce and then online digital products. Like an e-book? Yeah, or like Headspace or New York Times. Those are really great examples. Like you need to know who your user is. You need to be able to communicate with them. And then you need to accept payments from them at some point.

But the real value is not in your infrastructure. Like you don't need an entire platform team that's innovating on the best way to get people into your product. Right. You really need to make great content or a great digital product or a great productivity tool. And so that infrastructure layer is really just like wasted resources that should be creating differentiated value inside of your product. Got it. Got it. And in between...

doing all this and between selling Moonlight. By the way, are you in public about how much you sold Moonlight for or what the revenue was? No, we can't talk about that. But I can talk about like the process of getting there and what it was like. I just listened to your podcast about the investment from Stripe and everything. So yeah, yeah. Yeah.

It's fun to talk about numbers, but then you can't sometimes. Yeah, we can't hate on you for not disclosing that, even though we really want it. Nobody who buys a company wants anybody else to know how much they bought it for, unless they got a steal, right? If they're like, oh, man, I just got this company for $5. And of course they would say that. But if they actually paid what it's worth, or you did a good job negotiating, then of course they're going to be like, don't.

Don't tell anybody what happened. But in between that and I think starting Velvet, you did something that I want to talk about almost a little bit more than Moonlight, which is like you got an MBA, which is not something that –

almost any indie hackers. Jenny, have you ever interviewed anybody who's got it? Not that I know of. It's very rare. And I think there's a bunch of reasons that I can think of off the top of my head to not do an MBA as a startup founder or an indie hacker. It costs tons of money. Typically, you have to go into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. It takes years that you are spending getting an MBA, which are years that you're not working on a business. It teaches you skills that I think

don't seem to be like the same skills that you need as a scrappy and like entrepreneur yeah and then it gives you this pedigree like this like certificate that like ultimately like your customers don't care what your pedigree is investors definitely don't care investors don't care either but then again like you're smart emma you've like built and sold companies before you've already been an indie hacker and so like i'm curious like what am i missing because i know that you enjoyed the process of getting an mba what do you think is the most valuable thing that you got from doing this

Yeah. And I wouldn't say I enjoyed it. It was actually a really hard thing walking away from, you know, money. Like think of all the opportunity costs of what you could be doing with your time. But I'm glad that I did it. And I absolutely don't think you need an MBA or even any kind of specific education to be an entrepreneur. Some of the smartest people I've worked with like have no education and are better than I'll ever be. But I think for me, I wanted to learn really specific technical skills first.

I wanted like critical feedback that I wasn't getting any other way. And then also just the most important thing was two years to go really deep on something. Like, so after I sold Moonlight, I had never worked with

any women really like I'd never had a female boss I'd never worked at a company with very many women and so I went and worked at the skim and that was like after being a founder both bootstrapped and VC backed for two years after selling a company and I went back to being just like a normal employee and that was like a really weird reset but learned a ton there and also saw a series c company and kind of the limitations of continuing to be the founding team at that size

So that's why I decided to go back to do my MBA. And then that was like a huge humility check. So going back, having my identity being a student to being an intern at a VC firm where I was like the lowest person on the team. I was like usually on the older end because I did it in my 30s and most people do it when they're like 25 and want to like travel and party. Right, exactly.

So there were just like all these things that weren't quite right and made it really hard. But it forced me to get like so much more technical. I went to Booth, which is a very technical school. So like learning finance, learning accounting, those are things that people say you can do online with like an online MBA. But like I'm never going to spend my mornings and evenings and weekends learning how to do finance and accounting. So I've just gained skills that I think will just serve me for life.

a much longer amount of time to be like a more influential leader and better person to work with and stuff like that. I'm actually really curious about like that MBA process. It's not something that I've done. It's not something that I'm probably ever going to do. And it's also just like, you know, this, uh, this, you know, sort of opaque, you know, sort of crazy process behind curtains that I don't know anything about. So like, what was that like?

So you have to prepare for a really long time. So basically I sold Moonlight, kind of decided I wanted to do it. And then I had to go study for exams. So you have to take either the GRE or the GMAT, which took me like a year to study for. And then you have to get a certain score to be able to get into a good school because it's really more worthwhile if you go to like one of the top schools that's going to have a good brand.

And then you have to write essays, apply to all the schools you're going to apply to, and then go through several rounds of interviews. So even like getting in feels like a full-time job. So it would be a waste of time for like a lot of entrepreneurs that are not at a pausing point in their careers for a lot of reasons.

And then once you get in, there's all these distractions. Like there's so many other aspects of the MBA that have nothing to do with being an entrepreneur. And all I wanted to do was start a company. So I had to like really ignore all of those other factors, especially people like recruiting for these startups.

affluent jobs, like being bankers and consultants with huge bonuses. So I started writing a blog at the beginning of the MBA called Search Founder just to keep myself accountable. So it was kind of like...

Making it so I had to start a company during my MBA. Otherwise, I was going to be embarrassed on the internet that I had like said I was going to do all this stuff and never do it. Were you – like if I were doing that, you mentioned humility. You mentioned like, okay, now you're going back to school. Like you had built and sold a company. Yeah. Right, which I imagine almost nobody else there. Exactly. No one else in my class has done that. Yeah.

that. Yeah. No one else in your class has done that. And like, you know, Booth is like a pretty prestigious business school. Top of the top. Yeah. So I would imagine like the people that are there are all kind of like, you know, a lot of them are pretty high on themselves. Like, hey, I passed the GRE, the GMAT. Like I'm pretty hot shit. And some of them are like, you know, sort of more advanced than you in that, like, you know, in their tenure. But like, I can't imagine not kind of like just like walking around with my chin in the air, like...

Yeah, you've actually done the thing that everyone's studying. It's very flattering. But no, it's like a totally different world that I had never been in because I had been in the startup world where like this is impressive to some people. But like if you're someone who's been in banking your whole life and you're doing like massive M&A transactions at like the international level, it's just like a different world and they're like, oh, that's like the tech person over there that like is going to quote unquote start a business. Yeah.

How quaint. That was funny to like learn how to be around honestly just like like I've never been around like wealthy affluent people before. So that was an education in itself just to like learn what that's like and what is valued which is a lot about like prestige brand name. Right. You know like getting the best salary stuff that like. So different from like tech startup culture.

And it's stuff that doesn't make me happy, but I think it does make some people happy. What's the actual curriculum? Was it two years? How many classes do you take? What does it look like to get a MBA? Yeah, so it's two years. This one is on the quarter system at Chicago Booth. So it's like three to four classes per quarter. And then you can really choose what you want to take. So I was focusing on entrepreneurship and finance. So I got to work at...

At a VC firm for my entire MBA, which that was probably like the biggest education that I got, just like learning from the partners, getting to like understand the other side of the table. And then taking things like entrepreneurial finance of like, how do companies actually get funded? How do bubble cycles come to be? Like, what is banking crisis that we're in?

you know, like really nuanced stuff where I was learning from some of the best economists in the world about like, why did SBB fail? It's hard to get that kind of nuance outside of the academic environment. I've heard that one of the things you do a lot in a business school is basically case studies. You read a lot of examples of companies that did good things, launched new products that failed, et cetera, et cetera. And you learn. I think that's super smart. It's kind of like what we want to do

And part of what this podcast and what the Anti-Hackers website is just like create little biographies of entrepreneurs that other people listening can like read and learn from. So that like when you fuck up or when you do something good, everybody else can just like build this repository of knowledge. And I've started reading a lot of biographies. Channing, I think, has read way more biographies than I have. And when you read biographies, like you notice this cool thing where you're reading about these like awesome people and like what do they spend their time doing? Like also reading biographies and like doing these case studies. Yeah.

Yeah, totally. I think the case method was something I had never learned or found value in before of like you read this really academic like dense case usually written by Harvard because they like sell all of these case studies to the other business schools. Clever, clever. Yeah.

What a great business model. Yes. So you could do like the indie hackers version of that, which would be pretty cool and much more relevant because like learning about FedEx over and over again is not super useful. But yeah, then you like sit in class in this group format and it's like a competition of who can say the smartest thing and impress the professor. And, you know, like

have the most nuanced approach to like why there's a moat around the business or how they should have done it differently, things like that. So I've now learned a lot from that style of learning and I'm going to try and reproduce it for myself.

So, yeah, how do you take that and go from, okay, now you know all this cool stuff about business. You can analyze a ton of stuff that you couldn't before. You've heard all these, I guess, rich people saying very insightful things in response to case studies. And then you go back to being an Eddie Hacker. You quit all this stuff. You're no longer working at a VC. You're no longer at an MBA program. But you're like, the world is your oyster. You can start any company. How do you decide what idea to come up with?

Yeah, so I was like trying to figure out a company for the entire two years, which involved like co-founder dating because I like having a co-founder and then just like putting down all of my ideas that are possible and trying to like vet them in some way.

And so the way I did that, just because I'm a product designer by trade, is I would create Webflow sites with like kind of micro experiences in them and then just try to get as many people to sign up as possible and get feedback that way. And so I did that with like 10-ish different products, just getting closer and closer. But I kept just coming back over and over again to the same problem space, probably just because like I built it so many different times.

And then I kind of got wrapped up in the Web3 world just because that was like such a bubble for a couple of years and wasn't super excited by like the value storage side of things. Although I think there's some super interesting problems in there, but more so like the new

design paradigms that were being invented. So it was like the first time in my whole career that I've seen people going to hackathons again since I was like 23. And they're like excited to be there and like staying up all night and building stuff and designing like these crazy abstract ideas and stuff like that. But I think some really interesting innovation came out of that, like how you authenticate into platforms, how user centered identity can be managed.

things like that so that was like a big deep dive I think that like same thing with working in DC I never could have gone there had I not have just like two years of free time to explore with all of these different like ways of learning and I don't think I would have taken that risk had I not been a student again doing this degree that kind of has some risk aversion aspects to it

I'm curious, you were you were putting up these quick Webflow sites and getting feedback from, you know, how many people converted? Were you mostly just like, putting these on Twitter? You know, were you like, sending these to like an email list of friends and family? Like, how are you even finding people to send to these sites?

Yeah, so this is like one embarrassing thing is LinkedIn is like a really great forum for me. Like I get more engagement on LinkedIn than like anywhere else. So I was using that as like I would post an article about something that I had built and try and get like as many people to use it there as possible. So that was a good acquisition forum. And then, yeah, just like sending it to my friends, getting feedback.

putting it on like literally any forum that I could think of that was relevant to that topic. And then I think the biggest indicator from data perspective was just like how many people actually signed up on the type form. So I'd have like a web flow, a type form and a few other things. And like how many people actually take an action to subscribe. And that was some early data that I used to decide where to focus. But then at some point, I think you also just have to have conviction. Like,

Some, if you do that, like the data might be wrong because it's, you know, hundreds of people, not thousands of people. And then like, is the market big enough? Am I the right person to build this business? Um,

There's so many other factors that go into it. So at the end of the day, I think it was just my personal conviction of like, I'm interested enough in this to devote the next few years of my life and hopefully the next 10 years of my life to this. And then I found someone else to work on it with, which getting to that place with a co-founder was really difficult too. Yeah. And you did something, I think, with Velvet that you also kind of like makes you stick out from other indie hackers. Because like with Moonlight, you didn't raise money, did you?

We were bootstrapped for half the time and then VC backed for half the time. Right. And with Velvet, you just decided to just raise money right out of the gate?

Yes. And it was way easier to raise money the second time. I mean, because I had like a little bit of success behind me. You've got the connections. You've got the story. And you had that fancy MBA. I'm sure that was like 90% of it. No, that does not help you. No. Being an entrepreneur and being and like raising money, that like hurts you, if anything. Yeah, you're just hush-hush about that. Yeah, I just don't talk about that. How much money did you raise and how big does Velvet need to get for you to really pay back your investors?

Yeah. So the reason I was able to raise money so effectively is because I had worked at Chicago Ventures during my MBA, started as on the investment side and then turned it into an entrepreneur in residence role, which was awesome because I got like real feedback from them on whether they thought this would be an interesting business and what they would want to see and all of that. So they were the first institutional investor and they took most of the round and then I filled the rest of the round up to $1.2 million.

So it's like a pretty small pre-seed round that gives – it's just me and a co-founder – yeah, me and one technical co-founder right now. So we have like up to two years or even longer if we're really careful with money depending on who else we hire and like what we pay for. But this is such a big infrastructure technology type business that the goal is to keep raising money and doing something really big rather than do more of like an indie approach. It's going to be worth a billion. Yeah.

some point. Yeah, which is like, yeah, it's crazy to think about. And like my co-founder from my last company, who's also my partner, he went the opposite way. Like he does not like working for a VC-backed company. He doesn't want to be a VC-backed founder anymore. He wants to do very much what you guys did where you like go the other way. Philip is an indie hacker's indie hacker. Yes, yes. Very indie and like likes being like the solo developer, building a product and stuff like that. Whereas I really enjoy

having a boss, to be honest, like having someone else on my team who's going to give me some directionality on like, why is this interesting? What kind of data do we need to see? Like, how can you grow this into something bigger? And then I really like being a manager and like working with other people and collaborating. Like that's one of my favorite parts of being an entrepreneur is, you know, sitting in a room and solving hard problems with other people that will have like a bunch of stakeholders and constraints and stuff like that.

So I also like pitching to investors. So for all these reasons, it's a good fit for me, but I absolutely don't think it's a good fit for everyone. You like pitching to investors? I do. I think it's really fun. And now that I worked at a VC and saw the other side, I'm like not scared of it anymore. I've never heard anybody say that. It feels like a fun game.

Where like most people are going to say no, but like the people who say yes, they really like you and like want to see you succeed. That's like on the short list of the few things that does not ever visit like an indie hacker's mind space. I think I saw Danny Postma, a guy we interviewed in a recent podcast, had on his Twitter, the number of times I've written a business plan, zero. And it's like, it like falls into that short list.

Yeah, and the number of times I've made a pitch deck in the past two years is like once a week. That's another way I was like experimenting is I would just like call up VCs because I had like a pretty good network and I would just pitch them and see what they thought. So that was like more data, I guess. What's the pitch for Velvet? Like how do you turn this into...

a billion dollar company. Do you need to have some sort of master plan that shows how you evolve every step of the way? Yeah, I mean my pitch is pretty high level, my investor pitch. It's much less about like how do you get indie hacker businesses off the ground and much more like long term how do you disrupt the app store and create like a cross platform more ethereal app store where a user has control over their identity, their payments,

their data instead of holding it inside of these platforms.

And a really great parallel business is Shopify. So like what Shopify did for e-commerce, we're trying to do for digital goods. So like it started with the developer tools to be able to sell anywhere. So like you could sell a snowboard on iOS, Android, web, in real life, wherever else. And then more recently, they've gotten into the consumer side of the business. So like it took them 10 years, but now you have the ShopPay app where you can log in in one place and manage all of your different orders.

But no one's really done that in a cross-platform way for digital goods. So places where you just need an account and a payment system to get in. And I mean, Web3 was a really big inspiration for me, like I said, of like once I adopted a wallet, it was just one tap to get in, one tap to sign for a payment, one tap every time you come back. But you can't use a Web3 wallet anywhere. And so that's kind of where the longer term vision came from originally. Yeah.

Yeah, I love this concept of having kind of an identity that follows you around. Like the idea of a wallet was also one of my favorite things in Web3, which is like, oh, you could like log into an app with your wallet and it just carries around a bunch of information with you. So if I sign up for a new app today in the traditional way, that app doesn't know anything about me. Like it's

It's just like I'm a complete stranger. Here we go. What I've done in other apps, what I've done elsewhere on the web is completely opaque and I'm just brand new. But with a wallet, it's like, okay, well, I might have a bunch of NFTs in there or other tokens that just tell every app that I sign up for, here's who I am, here's what I've done, here's what you need to know. And I would love for this to exist for indie hackers because we have people signing up all the time and I have like

Like, no idea who these people are. Like, should I trust this person? Are they a spammer? Yeah. And that's the whole premise. I don't know if you've seen Disco XYZ. But their whole premise is like the data backpack where you can have these verified credentials that you can use to log in anywhere. Yeah.

So I think there was so many cool applications of that in Web3. It was just the interoperability of Web3 was really hard to get past. Is IndieHackers actually going to build on the blockchain and have a token? I know you've talked about a token before, but how do you make that all work? How do you get people onboarded? Probably not. We pretty much realized that it'd be cool to do it that way in a fully distributed manner, but we can just do it with normal databases and make it work for everybody. Yeah.

It turns out Web 3 is not necessary for Web 3. Do you think Web 3 is dead? Like, what's going on with it? Like, I hear AI has just so, like, overshadowed it. Like, obviously, people are still doing things. People are still excited, but, like, not nearly as excited. What do you think is going to happen there? Yeah, so my personal perspective, which is, like,

not popular in the crypto sphere is that like stable coins and governments are going to have to get involved before it becomes like truly something that a bunch of developers can build on top of. And so I think government has to like release central bank digital currency. There has to be a bunch of regulations for how you can build on top of it. You have to have like accounts with financial institutions that allow lending, stuff like that. So I think we're kind of far from that actually existing.

So I think like the fully distributed like self-sovereign individual vision was a pretty huge thing that was like...

an echo field on Twitter, basically. And then when that vision is gone, like a huge amount of the like value prop that excited a lot of nerds about that, like crypto. Which was money. Yeah. Right. Well, yeah, it was privacy and money. Like if you can make a bunch of money flipping tokens, like that's a huge incentive, especially if there's like no interest rates. But yeah, that's what's been interesting about AI is I think it's like a tool that you can just add on to anything.

which is different than crypto where it was like you had to switch your entire tech stack to using it and you had to believe that every consumer in the world was going to do the same thing.

Whereas AI, you can just be like, oh, this is like a feature that I just make my software better with or that just augments human capital or whatever. So I think it's a little more relevant in that sense. Yeah, it was kind of like the Internet, the way that crypto was. It was kind of like in the early days of the Internet, nobody took it that seriously or very few people did because it's like, well, even though the technology is cool, it's not worth anything unless everybody adopts it. You're not going to spend time.

moving your newspaper business to digital if there's not subscribers. And so there's this like chicken and egg problem of like, do enough people use this for it to be worth it for me to invest my time? And the crypto is kind of the same where it's like, okay, am I going to build Web3 features into Andy Hackers if not everybody has like a wallet and they're comfortable authenticating with the wallet? Like, no, it's just not worth my time. I have other more important things. Where it's exactly like you said, AI is useful today, right now.

Yep, totally. I don't know if you guys have looked into some of the systems built in India, for example, but they launched like a true identity for all of their citizens and

Which means that like you can just adopt it on day one. So I think there has to be like a little bit of intervention that goes both ways to make it accessible for people who are not just like technology nerds who can take hours of every day of their life to figure stuff out. So I think for it to be like a solution that actually serves what it was promising of like

making a more equal world where you have control over your own data and money and everything it's just like a very much more complicated path to how you get there speaking of uh of india i don't think you've lived in india but i know you and philip i've visited there but i've never lived there yeah you and philip when you're building moonlight together you're like

digital nomads every time I talked to to Philip you were like you were in Mexico City or you were in Europe or you were just in a different place yeah I think you live in what like eight different cities all told and now you were in what New York City right now I'm in Chicago because I'm almost done with my MBA but I'll be back in New York starting in June and so going back there but yeah why New York

I think after living in so many places, we know what we want, which is like we're looking for a really cosmopolitan city that's very diverse and has ambitious people. And New York is like

I think there are other places that we could live, but it's the one place we agree upon that's like you can get to Europe easily, you can get to Mexico easily, you can get to the US really easily. And then there's a bunch of very ambitious people that are not just in tech. Like San Francisco is another great place to build a business and be an entrepreneur.

Um, but everybody's working on the same set of problems for the most part. And it's like hard to find people who are not working in technology anymore. Um, so New York just feels like it has a little more real life layered on, um, where you can like get that level of ambition of people working super hard, but

Maybe they're an artist. Maybe they work in finance. There's a variety. Yeah, there's like a lot of different things going on. So it feels like you get kind of like the melting pot of a lot of different places around the world and a lot of different people pursuing different ambitious things. Channing, what's your sell? Yeah, well, two things that are really interesting intersections are number one, I think we're neighbors. I'm in Brooklyn as well.

Yes. And honestly, look, my cell is the exact same. So I was in San Francisco, Cortland, maybe five years or so. And my background is literature. I'm an English major. I just signed this commitment contract to finish a novel soon, right? While on the other hand, I'm doing this tech startup, right? So I have zero free time between those two things and making sure that my cat doesn't die. So...

It was such a huge improvement in life for me to go from San Francisco where everyone just wants to talk about like, like what, you know, software are you building that's changing the world? And like, that's the only conversation. And I'm like, that's cool. But like, also like, you know,

let me tell you this cool quote from like James Joyce that I recently read and everyone's eyes glaze over. Whereas in, in New York city, I feel like you can, you can have that dose of tech if like, that's your thing. Or you can like, if you want to like go talk about acting and Broadway, you can go, you can find people that are into that. There's a comedy scene. There's a, there's a literary scene. So it's, it's just like, you know, the entire world of,

ambitious people, right? Like everyone's ambitious, but you know, it's like, you can kind of take the slice that you're interested in. And this just happens, New York city happens to have the two slices that I'm, I'm most interested in.

Yeah, and I think I had heard you talk about being an introvert in New York City is actually great because you can like go hang out at a bar or like go to coffee shops or be around a ton of people and you don't have to be like with a ton of other friends or anything all the time. So I like that aspect of it as well where I can be an extrovert, I can be an introvert, but like I can do whatever I want and nobody really cares. You can be alone together in New York City. Yes, exactly. Yeah.

We were talking about topics before you came on, and one of the things you proposed I thought was really interesting was I guess you've written about the fact that you believe in a life you can't really have it all. This idea of having it all is a fantasy. You can't do everything. You said that you can only really do three things well in each phase of your life. So you have to make tradeoffs between things like work, family, community, health, et cetera. What are your three things right now?

Right now it's very skewed because I'm doing too much at the same time. Like during business school, I was doing business school. I was starting a company. And then it's really important to me to have like a relationship with my pre-existing friends and family. So I definitely prioritize that as well. But I had to cut out a lot of other things to do that. Like there's no way I could have kids right now, for example. There's no way I could like –

be an artist. There's no way I don't even have time to like cook food for myself, to be honest, like Philip cooks my food. So right now it's a little bit skewed. I think normally I'd like to focus more on like physical and mental health because that's something that's dropped off.

Um, but I think it's, it's really important to know that like the people who are exceeding succeeding at something, they're probably making some really hard sacrifices of like not doing other things that they could be doing with their time. Like you only have 12 ish hours every day. And so right now I'm like cutting out sleep and cutting out exercise, which is not good and not sustainable. Um, so I know that I'm doing too much at once. Um,

But yeah, I would like to be socializing more and working out and eating healthier. All right. Shannon, what are your three things? What are your things? Yeah. I mean, look, I'm really into even just the topic. I've noticed that most of the people that I'm impressed by have some list of things. So for me, it's...

It's even alliterative. It's connections with other people, craftsmanship, and contribution. And by contribution, I just mean creating things of value for society. And obviously, having capitalists reward me in a certain way. But just make sure that I'm always creating things for other people. But then always having craftsmanship for me is like having something that I do...

that like, I just really like doing. I think Steven Pressfield, he wrote this book called The War of Art. That's really awesome. And he has this category, he creates those two categories himself. And he's like, you have things that are territorial,

And you have things that are hierarchical. Hierarchical is like, I'm doing this thing because then everyone's going to think I'm the shit. Whereas territorial is like, if you were in, what's that like 28 days later, if you're in this zombie apocalypse and every single person, you know, died and it's just you and your dog and your dog doesn't speak English, what thing would you do? And that's like territorial. So I would still write novels and like, I don't know, read books if every single person died. So you're basically saying, what would you, what do you do for other people or what do you do for yourself?

Yeah. And long-term versus short-term a little bit. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I'm trying to hack it. I'm trying to have it all. I'm not very good at it and I'm trying to hack it all. But like it's like I just try to combine shit, right? So like for example, like family work and community are kind of all one thing for me because we have a community business. There's Indie Hackers meetups all over the world. I get to like meet lots of people and then I like work with Channing. So like Channing is my family. My mom pops onto our call. She's always trying to help.

I kind of like spend like, it's been like an hour and one day and do all three of those things. He used that term really carefully. My mom is trying to help. Yeah. She's, she's got ideas. That's so cute. I love that. Her, her favorite thing lately, like lately is to put whatever we're working on into GPT, chat GPT and have it spit out a list of answers and then a copy paste it to us and say, why don't you guys try these things? That sounds kind of useful. Have there been any good suggestions in there? You know, it's like,

what i find is it's like it creates like these listicles right like i've also seen this on nd hackers where i know somebody's a bot when they respond in this like very structured way with like a list of five items like nobody does that ban uh but it's like the ideas on it are usually good but kind of obvious you know what i mean it's like you should grow with seo like thanks chat gpt like i've never considered that before yeah so i don't know my first bucket is like those

Then friends and relationships. I just kind of try to like introduce people to each other. There's this interesting post on Hacker News a couple weeks ago, and it was like recommending that people hang out in groups. Basically, the thread was called Making Friends as an Adult is Hard. And the title was like, you're not uncool. Making friends as an adult is just hard. But I disagree. Like, I think you just have to have the right strategy for it. And so I introduce all my friends to everybody else. Whenever I go somewhere, I like meet the coolest person. I try to get their number.

And I just don't hang out one-on-one that much. I end up, like, connecting all my friendships in a relationship. So it's, like, instead of having to, like, have all these one-on-one hangs that are super time-consuming, I'll just hang out with, like, five people at once. And, like, it's more valuable for everybody because there's more people that they know there. And it's, like, more efficient, I think, because, like, I get to see so many people at the same time.

And then I think the last thing is like health, which I suck at. I don't sleep very much. I don't like exercising that much. But like, again, if I combine it with friends, like I'll do it. So I have a friend who always wants to go on walks. It's like the only thing she wants to do. So if I want to hang out with her, I have to like walk like four miles. And so I'm like, all right, well, this is like exercise and friend hang time at the same time. And then we'll talk about work a little bit. So we'll like

be doing like business brainstorming too so i don't know i'm trying to have it all by like combining everything into one as much as i can so corlin and i have this have this um this like health tracker called whoop and we're all in a group with it like you know me and him and a couple of our friends and like we can see each other's like sleep metrics and like exercise metrics corlin if you're saying that the way that you get your like exercise in and like all that stuff is by being with your friends then if i just look at my whoop from the last like month

Your sleep is trash lately. Yeah, I suck at sleeping. It's hard, though. I don't know. I think most people that you read about...

Most founders, most people who are on the front page of Forbes, most people who are held up by society as this paragon of the most you can be, most of the people the biographies are written about, they had pretty terrible lives in some form or fashion. You hear about their success. You hear about all the status and prestige and money that they made. They made billions of dollars. But then they have eight ex-wives and their kids they never talked to. And people...

make this really bad trade-off where they say, yeah, but it's worth it to be such a badass, right? But it's like, well, read about these people's perspectives and see what they have to say. Often, it's not worth it. You don't want to die broken and miserable and alone and hated and have every day of your life just be stressed. So I don't think it's the right target to aim for.

And it's hard to not get sucked into that like glory chasing mindset. Yeah. I mean it's a treadmill. You can never get as much as the next person has. Like I'm sure even Elon Musk is like comparing himself to somebody if he's a human. Right. Yeah. So what do you want to do? I mean you're like trying to make this billion-dollar company. Like what's driving you? Why?

Yeah, I mean, I don't think it would be a nice life. I think even like the amount of visibility of just having like a public Instagram profile or a public Twitter can be too much for me sometimes where I'll go on there and just like feel bad about myself because like I don't have enough followers or other people are doing cooler stuff or even just like having to record your entire life to keep a presence there. That's just like too much.

So none of that sounds very attractive or exciting to me. But I think being able to make an impact on the world and leaving it in a better way than where I found it is what drives me. And then also human connection. Like,

I do not like just being by myself and working. And I think some people love that, but I'm really driven by collaborating with other people, figuring out a problem, solving it. Like the end is never very exciting. You launch something and then I'm always in the trough of sorrow being like, okay, did that thing, raise a bunch of money, made this thing, got users, now what? But the exciting part is the process of getting there. And then I think

If you make something that is relevant to people and that creates value, that's how it grows over time. So just raising money to have a company and to pump money in it and hire people and all of that, that's not interesting to me. But creating something of value that other humans use and...

care enough about it to come back over and over again. I think that's a really exciting feeling that goes beyond just ego. It's also, you know, like designing a better version of the world that we want to live in, which is super lofty. But like that, if you're asking like what gets me going, that would be it. I think you got to have a lofty goal. It's hard to be motivated. Like people are like not motivated, right? Like, I don't really know what I want to do. That's like, well, if you don't have a lofty goal, like you don't have very much to be motivated about. Right. But if you're like, I'm going to change like

human happiness. I'm going to affect the world in some way. Then it's like, well, suddenly that's an extremely ambitious goal and it's like you can't even have a goal like that without being motivated because it's like, what are you going to do? It's so hard to get there. So I like having lofty goals. And then you have to break it down because if you just have a lofty goal –

you're working towards, it's really demotivating when like you're not making any progress and no one's using the thing or whatever. So I think the hard part is breaking it down into something that's like way, way less aspirational. And it's just like, here's a no-code tool that like kind of is like something else. And I'm going to try and do enterprise sales manually to get people to use it. So it's hard to tie those things together. But I think the long-term vision is the only way that I can keep myself motivated. Yeah.

What we're doing is we're straddling the line between like, on the one hand, I want balance. On the other hand, I don't want balance. And one of the books that I'm currently reading right now is by David Goggins. Of all people, he's like the king of imbalance, the king of like loving pain. And the line that I recently like that I read right before this interview.

this episode was specifically about balance. And he's like, Hey, listen, uh, you know, if you want to, if you want to maximize your potential, become great in any field, you have to just embrace being in balance, at least for a period of time. Right. And like, he, he kind of talks about that. He's like, if you have a lofty goal,

right? That's, you know, and it's a long range goal. It's going to take you breaking things down. Then, um, you have to make a trade off. You have to make a lot of sacrifices. Does that necessarily mean that you have to, you know, lose sleep or not like basically take care of your, your normal mental health? No, not necessarily, at least not all the time. But like, I think that if you listen to episodes like this, or you like read books and you're like, ah, but I just want to have like a totally well-balanced life and I want to have all the stuff. No

No matter what, like you're going to have to choose some serious pain. Maybe not full Goggins, but you know. Yeah. And I think like a specific example of that is like –

I think for women it's harder. Like, and hopefully this will change over time. But like if you want to have kids and you want to be, do something that's like very intensive career wise, there's just no way to do both of those things. Unless you have a partner that's going to like be more than a part-time caretaker or you're wealthy enough to have. Super rich. You know, like.

a nanny that lives with you. It's just really hard to do. So I think there's some things that like doors close at some point and you can't do that thing anymore. And that's like a really hard trade-off.

And then there's some things that are just ebb and flows. But that goes to the long-term goals thing. I don't know. Maybe, Cortland, you feel differently. I think it's hard to have, like, too many huge long-term goals and actually do them effectively. Yeah. Short-term, maybe it's different where you can get to, like, times where you're, like, way too overexposed and then times when you're not doing anything at all. I think you can have, like, one or two long-term goals. Like, I want to build Andy Hackers into this, like, thing that basically makes the world full of tiny entrepreneurs. Yeah.

That's a huge goal, right? It's massive. It's like, okay, I want to change the world. And then I also want for myself to have an awesome tribe of chosen family, basically friends who I'm really close to, who I love, who love each other, and we're just like we live near each other and just support each other's lives, and I just want to have a cool lifestyle like that. Those are my two long-term goals, and I can't imagine trying to add a third one onto that. It's just too hard.

Let's talk about capitalism and let's talk about technology because I think these two things are really related. You were writing to us earlier. You said that you believe the purpose of technology is to spend more time offline than online and that we should be innovating to try to find ways to have more seamless ways for people to interact and increase each other's satisfaction and connection, which is not necessarily like what you see in society a lot like technology.

Instagram, like, okay, I guess that connects people, but it's taking people from offline and making them online, right? And it's not necessarily optimizing for human health and happiness. It's optimizing for, like, number of likes, you know, engagement, ad dollars, et cetera. So, like, what are your thoughts on this? Do you think capitalism naturally leads to these, like, sort of perverse incentives? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of things there. One is...

Technology innovation leads to growth in capitalism. And so there's something there that like creates the stratification at either end of like fewer wealthier people who don't need labor to make these technology platforms. And then that leaves other people without work on the other end.

And so what you're talking about with like technology taking people offline, I don't think that's inherent to capitalism or technology. Those are just the choices we make of what to do with both of them. So like the world I'm scared of is if like I have to live inside of like a bubble in the metaverse where my body is just like floating in a bubble and I'm like going to work and school and and.

like trading online and I never move my body or mind or like meet people in person. Like I think that would be a scary future. What would be more exciting is that the world is so fluid and digital native that like online and offline, there's not too much of a difference.

So like I can use all of the tools that were created by technology, but I also can be in person at a coffee shop with a group of 10 other people or something like that, or walking on the street and experiencing things in a different way. So I think something that's happened with remote work is that now everyone or a lot of people can work wherever they want to, but that means you're isolated and alone a lot of the time.

And I don't know if that's a good thing. Like my last company was all about enabling remote work. And I think it can be really life changing for the flexibility and the personal independence that you get from it. But there's also downsides of just like, if you can be alone all the time, can you be happy if you're just like sitting in your house on your computer all the time? Right, probably not.

Whenever people talk about ways that they feel capitalism goes rise, they bring up Facebook. They bring up social networks that kind of look at data about what people want and then they kind of trap them in patterns of using it. And so it's like a low level addiction. But I think if you want to see the like pinnacle of that and really get this icky feeling, you should pick up this book called Addiction by Design. And it's about literally the gambling industry, which I think wrote the playbook for all of this stuff.

And the gambling industry is just 100% design. Like it's so sophisticated. And one of the things that casinos have is they literally, the phrase that they use is interior design for interior states of mind.

So every bit of a casino is the way that the carpets are. If you go into a casino, all of the carpets, all of the pathways are slightly round. Like it's like, you know, you're kind of going around, they call it a maze. And they're like, we don't want to ever have a right angle because if someone is walking and they have to take a direct left turn, then you have to sort of like engage your neocortex and think about it for a second. And they have like

atmospherics where they want there to be a certain smell. They want there to be, as you go in the pathway tapers slowly. So you don't even really notice it, but like you're kind of going into this situation where you're like suddenly just trapped among the machines.

They take away windows too, kind of like a mall, right? I think malls were designed the same way. And I feel really bad when I'm in both a mall and a casino, the same way I feel when I'm on Instagram. Yeah. Yeah. I just don't want you to notice a patch of time. These are dark patterns because you see these on websites too. Like if you try to buy an airline ticket,

You know, you see like boxes that are automatically checked for things you don't want and things that are really important or really small print. And they've just taken like dark patterns from the web and applied them to real life. Like you see this with like pretty much any business has the incentive to do this unless you're a reputationally driven business where like your brand matters a lot.

And I think this is one of the upsides of regulation, right? Ideally, we can all come together and say, hey, we don't want these things. Some of these things should be illegal. It should be illegal to get people addicted to something that's bad for them, even if it produces value for them subjectively in the short term. It's bad for society. The real question is like, okay, well, is capitalism overall inevitably going to lead

to these types of things? In my opinion, no. Obviously, a lot of the actors... Yeah, I mean, I think the system and the humans within it define it. And it's going to lead to inequality. It's going to lead to extremes. But I think a lot of it is about what we do within it. And so I think if people can take more control over their actions, like if you are a designer at a company making a dark pattern, move things in a different direction. If you're at a data company mining people's data in an evil way, do something.

thing about it, which is hard once you're in there. But I think... And then I think regulation is hard. Like, I really think we have to have regulation and wealth distribution...

taxes so that you can distribute wealth, but it's hard to do correctly. So like if you're the, like GDPR I think is an example of like, yeah, we do need some regulation there, but just having a pop-up on your screen that's like, do you accept this data mining? And then you're like, yes, I want to use this product. So I'm going to say yes every time. So I think it's really hard to do that effectively. I don't think we have an example of that yet in the tech industry. Yeah.

No. And it moves faster than regulators can even create laws for it or really even understand it. You see these tech CEOs –

you know, go up before Congress and they get grilled by like these like 85 year old dudes who like have never opened a smartphone in their life about like, you know, cookies and stuff. Like they had the CEO of TikTok. He went before Congress on the questions they asked this guy were so stupid. He was just like laughing at the way they didn't know anything. Right. And they're trying to like write laws about how technology should progress. So I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen with AI. Like right now I got a friend proposed the idea the other day that like we should have a label for

on everything that's completely AI generated so you always know. In fact, Yuval Noah Harari, he wrote Sapiens and Homo Deus. He had a quote like a couple weeks ago where he was saying like, oh, we need to like literally start labeling. If I have a conversation with a machine, I need a label that tells me to have a conversation with a machine, which is like, okay, regulation, but like doesn't seem at all realistic when you think about like how...

these things will diffuse because like we've already been having conversations with machines for like a decade and if i'm in the club and they're playing an ai generated song like i don't want to hear a label on that and if i get an email that's sent by like a tool like it's not going to say written by ai and like what percentage of it you know needs to be written by ai before you have a label like that and so i think we're at a place with ai in particular where it's like very difficult to regulate it moves so fast that

But there's also going to be, like, really big societal changes, right? Like, a lot of people are going to be potentially out of work, and job destruction might eclipse job creation by a wide enough margin that, like, we have to do something for people who suddenly don't have jobs. And I hope that doesn't happen. But also, if it does, then, like, what does that say about inequality? And, like, how do we...

Like, how do we deal with that as a society? Because I think the chief output of capitalism is technology. If you have capitalism and you let it run for hundreds of years, what you do is you get millions of people innovating to find ways to make each other's lives better, and you get technology. And that technology makes people more efficient and more productive, which ends up in a situation where, like,

We just don't need that many people doing as much work to get the same output that we had in the past. So I don't know what to do. I know that as an indie hacker or a founder, we are pretty secure because our whole job, so to speak, is to find a job for ourselves. But I think for everybody else, it's a little bit bleaker. I think the entire sort of complex difficulty that we're discussing was captured really brilliantly by this biologist's

named E.O. Wilson a while ago, where he said, the real problem of humanity is that we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. And so he kind of paints this picture where you have these, it's almost like tectonic plates, like these three different geological layers that are all moving at completely different speeds, where like underlyingly our human nature isn't changing, right? We have problems with like memory and attention, and we want the same things. We want to be around each other and be offline, etc.,

Um, but then, yeah, our medieval institutions, we have these old, basically old white guys who aren't tech savvy, who are trying to regulate this really fast moving godlike technology. And I mean, yeah, like you said, Corlin, it's, it's a good time to at least be one of the members of society that's able to be nimble and adjust, but

Yeah, and the people at the top of the distribution will always have jobs and find ways to exist. I think there's a question also with AI. There are jobs that I think should be replaced. Like humans could be more productive doing something else. And I think the whole premise, if you talk to like a free market economist, would be if you disrupt someone's job in the short run, they won't have a job. But in the long run, they'll move somewhere else and do something else.

And in a remote world, maybe that's easier than ever. But the question will be like, are there enough other things for people to be doing? Or like, do we have to do universal basic income or something like that? Right. So that like...

there's a baseline where you can live and then if you want to be more if you want to be an artist if you want to whatever it is you can do that thing well the weird thing is we're disrupting the the jobs that like for years we've imagined that people would want to do in their free time in a utopian society where they don't have to do those pointless jobs we're not like like we're disrupting like creating art you know or disrupting like writing novels which is like something nobody even imagined would happen for many decades if literally forever so i don't know gotta be

Interesting to see it unfold. Again, I think as founders, we're fine. Literally, your goal is to find a niche or find a way to create economic value for yourself and for others. And so as long as you have that path, you're good. But it's a good time to be an indie hacker. It's not so great of a time to be a knowledge worker or a typical employee because I just can't see anything other –

than like wages being driven down by the fact that like we just have super efficient technology and entrepreneurs are spending every hour of their day literally trying right now to create AI driven tools to put other people out of jobs. This whole segment basically has just been one big ad for becoming an indie hacker or an entrepreneur. It's like if you were scared shitless by what we just said, shrug, like become an entrepreneur, right? Like, and then this is just going to be this like gnarly wave that you get to surf.

I mean, look at Emma's – like, your playbook is perfect, right? Raise $1.2 million from VCs, right? Now you're set, right? You didn't hire a gigantic team. You – multiple years of runway. There's a lot of uncertainty, but, like, you're fine. Like, you've got money, and you also have a job that you like, and you have the creative ability to execute on that. Like, I don't think there's anyone who's in a better position. Not a lot of sleep, but everything else is looking pretty up and up. Yeah, not a lot of sleep. Yeah, I'm not worried about any of us in this room or probably anyone who's listening to this podcast. Like –

there's I think like most people we all know are probably like in the top percent of the world like if you just compare the whole world and what's possible like we're all in a very privileged position but yeah I think I think it's an argument for education and constantly learning and like you can't just like stay stagnant in this world there's like a lot of creative disruption that's

native to capitalism and maybe that's the downside of it is you can't just like exist in the forest and survive. No.

I like it. I think it's a good thing. I think humans started off as hunter-gatherers. We wandered. We did new things every week, every day. We're constantly moving from place to place. And we've stagnated into the society where it's like the typical culture from the 50s and 60s. You go work for the man. You have a stable career. You don't change. You don't learn. You don't grow. You get out of college and you just stay the same person for the next 50 years until you die. I don't think that's how we're supposed to be. I think we're supposed to change and adapt and have

The economic landscape is one that forces us all to have a culture of learning new skills every couple of years or every few months. I think that's a better culture for people and more – for lack of a better word, it's more alive than what things have been in the past. So I'm trying to find the silver lining to the fact that a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. One really specific stat kind of related to that that I learned last night in – I'm taking this class called Perspectives in Capitalism, which is why I've been thinking so much about this.

And pre-K education, so like before you go to preschool, so like from ages one to five, that defines how you can learn for the rest of your life.

And the U.S. doesn't fund pre-K education, which is pretty crazy because if you're living in like low income neighborhood, you probably don't have access to pre-K at all. You probably have working parents. So that's like a crazy inequality thing that like we could actually impact. And exactly to that point of like if you have to learn for your entire life, you have to learn how to learn at some point.

Which is just – it's pretty crazy that we aren't even supporting that part of the population. Channing and I went to preschool and Channing is left-handed. And the only thing I remember about preschool is they try to teach him to write with his right hand.

He just fucked up his writing. Those fuckers, and they succeeded. I write, so everything that I do, every civilized thing that I do, I do with my right hand because I was taught those things. Any sport that I play, anything that I just got to pick up naturally, shooting a basketball, throwing a ball, I do it with my left hand. A little bitter over that.

Anyway, Emma, we're way over time. Thanks so much for staying. Is there any parting word of advice you would give for other indie hackers who are listening? I mean, you've started companies, you've sold companies, you've gone to business school. What's one thing they might not have heard that they could take away from your story?

Just don't listen to what anybody else says or thinks about what you're building for the most part. Like all that matters is creating value. So just put something out there, be willing to get the really critical feedback to get better and then evolve from there. And everything else is just fluff. So like whatever your background is, whatever your education is,

Even like where you're focusing or whether your VC are bootstrapped, it doesn't matter unless you're just creating value and continually iterating over time.

Create value, continually iterate. Don't listen to what people have to say. And also, if you are an evil henchman at a big corporation building crappy shit, stop doing that too. Just quit your job and start being an idiot. Emma Lawler, thanks a ton for coming on the pod. Can you let listeners know where they can go to find out more about what's up to you and Velvet? Yes, velvet.cash. And my domain is emmalawler.com if you want to follow future indie hacker type articles.

All right. Thanks again.