#281 – Seth Godin on Indie Hacking, Doing Hard Things, and Finding Significance in a Changing World
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Hey, what's up, dude? Hey, what's going on? We are having a very special guest today, Seth Godin, who I gotta say, I'm pretty excited to talk to. He's a pretty famous dude. I think this is going to be the first person, one of the first people I've ever talked to where I've read at least three of their books. Yeah, that's a lot. What have you read? So I read The Icarus Deception. I've read This Is Marketing, which is amazing. And I read The Dip. What about you? Cool.

I've read This Is Marketing. It's the only Seth Godin book that I've read, but he's done a ton. I feel like I've encountered him everywhere. I subscribed to his newsletter, read his blog for years. I've watched a few of his talks. I think he's given three TED Talks. He's written 20 bestselling books. He's like

the modern day David Ogilvie. He's like the, like the most popular marketer of our time. Besides maybe like Gary Vaynerchuk, like the two of them seem to be making the most waves as like famous internet marketers. Yeah, it's insane. In fact, the,

I think the first viral post that was ever on IndieHackers, we used to have a lot of interviews, founder interviews. But the first non-founder interview that was like huge on Hacker News, etc., was some guy had Seth on his podcast and then turned that into an article and was like, if I only had $1,000, I asked Seth Godin, if you only had $1,000, what would you do? He posted that to IndieHackers, that shit went ballistic.

Yeah. Maybe we should do the same thing. It was if you only have $1,000, you don't have your name, nobody knows who you are, what business would you start today? Which I think is a cool question for somebody who's successful because somebody like Seth is so well-known. I mean, if you've given one TED Talk, you're well-known. I think he's given three or four TED Talks.

Like anything he starts, it's almost like he isn't... And like TED Talks, not TEDx. Yeah, not TEDx. Not like this bullshit, like my aunt invited me to this thing to give a talk down the road at my local school. Like really on the main TED stage with Bill Gates and the audience. If you're like that, then anything you do, there's kind of an asterisk by it, which is like, can someone learn from what you did? Because your name and your existing distribution channels are a huge part of your success. Yeah.

And so I like that question for somebody like Seth, because it's like he'll be able to dispense wisdom and like how to advice for somebody like

like all the rest of us who don't necessarily have that privileged position. I wonder how conscious he is about being everywhere all the time. Have you heard of the 7-11-4 marketing rule? I read this in this marketing book recently. It's this idea that if you want to get your brand out there, you want people to be exposed to you. And so the 7-11-4 rule is you want someone, someone's going to be really into you if they see seven hours of your content

on 11 different occasions like times and in four different like digital locations so like you have a youtube video you have some stuff on that's a lot they see you on like podcast it's a ton but like uh it's like you know if i bet fucking seth would see that and be like oh that's child's play only a 7 11 4 he's like yeah add two zeros to all of them and there you have seth godin he i mean he is everywhere his terms are everywhere too like uh i know patio 11 patrick mckenzie

I was very fond of saying like Purple Cow, right? You want to do marketing, you got to make sure what you do stands out. It's got to be a Purple Cow. Well, that's like literally a Seth Godin book that just became like common marketing parlance or permission marketing. That's another thing that Seth Godin came up with, which is just like a common term of art, but it's like traceable back to Seth Godin. Like this guy has created...

of terms and concepts that everybody uses. And so even if you don't see him for seven hours in 11 different places or whatever, you see his words and you Google them and look them up, that's what you find. Right. And I think the thing that's so cool about Seth, in my opinion, is it's not just talk. He's not just someone that's on Twitter trying to coin terms and get a lot of exposure. He's one of the OGs, right? He's...

like, you know, back in the, in the, in the zero zeros. He's not just a teacher. Right. He's not just a teacher. Like he was, he's been around doing, doing startup stuff since before the dot com boom. Yeah. And I, I looked up some stuff on him, like, cause I hear him talk, but I never hear him talk about himself. So I looked up like, okay, who is Seth Godin? Like, where did he come from? Um,

I think his first real success was this company called Yo-Yo Dine. I looked up the story. It's kind of hard to find anything about it because it was like a very early internet company. He started it in 1995. He was 35 years old. So he was already like well into his career, but he hadn't done anything big yet. And then three years later, he sold it for $30 million. $30 million in Yahoo stock. This is back in like the... Yeah, Yahoo stock. Not worth a lot today. Yeah.

But like in 1998, like that was huge. I mean, by the way, 1998, that's when Yahoo is like the search engine. Like they are like the Google of today or whatever, right? Yeah. Yeah. They were like the biggest internet company by far. They were like the all-stars. Their market cap was insane. There were billions and billions of dollars. And like that $30 million of Yahoo stock he got in like 1998 or whatever probably was worth two or three times as much in 1999. Yeah.

And then by 2000, 2001, it was probably worth like 10% of that because of the stock market crash. But Yo-Yo Dine was, I think it was such a smart company. It was right at the heart of like sort of the 90s tech boom. The internet was crazy. Anybody who added .com to their domain name just could instantly IPO and see their stock like shoot up.

And Yo-Yo Dine was a marketing company, which is not surprising for Seth Godin. And so they had a bunch of different things that they would do. Part of it was like they were an agency. So I found like this really cool article from some publication called Chief Marketer. They were in 1999. They were quoting Seth Godin. They said, we brought promotional thinking to online commerce. Seth Godin says that matter factly. It's a big claim, but it's true.

The whole sort of offer-response-reward sequence was common enough to offline businesses. So that's giving customers premium offers and free trials and sample products. But that hadn't really happened on the web. And so Seth Godin kind of brought this to the web. And the article says, with the net still in its infancy, many consumers weren't sure of its security. Many retailers found the technology forbidden. And you can tell this article is from 1999 because they called it the net article.

But basically, this company, Yo-Yo Dime, would work with these companies. They would offer promotions. They'd make banner ads. They worked with MasterCard to create something called Easy Spree, which was this giant online mall. They called it a merchant factory. So it was a search engine where any sort of… It's almost like Shopify. Yeah, it was like Shopify. It was like early Shopify. They said any merchant could come and create an identical online format for their store.

and set it up and start selling products in less than half an hour. So that kind of reminds me also of Paul Graham. Paul Graham also built, he built ViyaWeb in the mid-90s. He also sold it to Yahoo, became Yahoo Stores. It's another sort of early version of Shopify. Back when everybody was scared to put their credit card on the internet, Paul Graham and Seth Green were competing with each other. That's interesting. I've never actually known what Paul Graham did. Like, I knew he did some kind of startup, but I didn't actually look into it. They both did the same thing. They both...

Sold huge e-commerce marketing businesses to Yahoo in the 90s for tens of millions of dollars.

Hopefully they both exited the stock market before it crashed, and then they both became writers. Paul Graham started blogging prolifically. Seth also started blogging. So he has one of the biggest blogs online. He doesn't talk a lot about the numbers, but I found a blog post that said he has over a million subscribers to his blog. And in 2009, he had, I think, 253,000 RSS subscribers too. But he started this blog in 2002.

And since then, he's been sending out a blog post literally every single day. He's written 8,500 blog posts. And sometimes they're just like two sentences or like a paragraph. But sometimes they're like a legitimately huge blog post. Like I've been subscribed for years. I've had to like unsubscribe because it's too much sometimes. And I've resubscribed. But it's like, I mean, can you imagine having a million people on our newsletter? We would crush it and add revenue. And this is just like one guy's blog. It's not like a whole company. It's just one person blog.

blogging about what he thinks every day. Just firing off thoughts. And like some of his posts, it's funny, like you read it, some of his posts, just like you said, are like three sentences, but they're always, they're always sick. Am I in the right place at the right time? Hey, there he is, the guy himself. Hi, Seth. Welcome to the show. Love it when that happens. Thank you both for having me. It's a pleasure to have you. We were just talking about basically your career. Like I've,

I've watched so many of your talks. Channing has read three of your books. I've read one. I've been subscribed to your blog on and off. Sometimes it's too much. I'm like, I hear from Seth every day, unsubscribe. And then like six months later, I'm like, I want to hear what Seth has to say, resubscribe. But most of the time I hear you talking about like other people, internet phenomenon, case studies, like what's going on in the world. I don't hear a lot about like you. And so I want to take a minute if it's cool with you to just like

pick your brain about you and the things that you've done. I do that on purpose. And so I'm not really comfortable making a podcast about me. I'm happy to explain why that is. I would love to hear why. There are two reasons. The first one is when my kid was six, I made a blog post that he was peripherally mentioned in. And someone said to my wife the next day, how's your son feeling? And that was so weird. I was like, never doing that again. And the second thing is,

If I make my stories about me, then I let people off the hook because they can say, well, he had privilege or he had a really cool family or he had this. I don't. And so what I try to do is make them varied enough and generic enough, but still interesting that people put themselves on the hook because I don't want to be a hero. I want to be a teacher.

That's a profound way to look at it. I think that it's like playing on hard mode because probably the easiest source of stories for anybody is their own life, right? You don't have to go out and do any research. You're the expert on your own life. Exactly. So you got to become an expert on other things. What's your process for that? What is the behind-the-scenes machine of Seth? To be so prolific, for example, to write a blog post every single day, I think you've given like a thousand talks. Where does all this come from?

Well, you know, we had a problem with our garbage disposal last year. And when the plumber came over to fix it, I didn't ask him because no one ever asked him, where do you find the inspiration to fix all these drains? Right. Right. He doesn't say, you got any whiskey? I'm having plumber's block because there's no such thing as plumber's block.

So I don't go to meetings. I watch very little television. I don't use social media. I got seven, eight, nine hours a day to do stuff that people could easily do in half that time, but they get distracted with chores instead. And again, it's about being on the hook. I don't view my benefit of the doubt and my privilege lightly. And if someone's willing to listen to what I have to say, I don't want to waste it.

So our community, our podcast is called Indie Hackers. It's all about basically people who quit working for the man to start their own sort of one person online tech company. And it's so common for people to go to work every day, year after year, put in 40 hours, 50 hours a week of work, and then they quit to do their dream and struggle to

to get anything done on the week. I remember Channing, when you quit your job, Channing used to work in sales and he quit his job and I taught him how to code and he wanted to be a programmer. He's like, "Cortland, I can't believe you work from home all day. I get so much done." And then like a month after he quits, he's like, "I'm going to the gym in the middle of the day. I'm doing my laundry. I need to clean my room." Like suddenly life becomes all these other chores and distractions and it's really hard. I don't know what it is about the workplace where we can sit down and focus. Maybe it's accountability to our teammates, but once we're working for ourselves, like you do Seth,

it's hard to, you make it sound easy, but it's hard to put those distractions aside and just create. Well, it's resistance, right? You've read Pressfield. Resistance is the thing that when we stare into the sun, it holds us back. And what I mean by chores is more than Channing's laundry, though Channing probably does an excellent job on his laundry. Chores also include sending out bills. They include maintaining your servers. They include any job where you can write down the spec to get it done. And the reason it's hard as a soloist to do that

is if you start spending cash money to get people to save you time, you are on the hook to have your time be more valuable than the money you just spent to solve the problem. And all those years I was a struggling freelancer, I did so many chores, which was good in the sense that I learned how to do a bunch of stuff.

But it was bad because I only had a couple hours a day to be a productive freelancer. And I was spending the rest of the time being the support staff for that freelancer. And so I don't have any problem with outsourcing. The one thing you can't outsource is the thing you want people to value from you. That has to come from you. How sort of swiftly did you move into that phase? And was there anything you learned that you had to learn to get there?

Okay, so I think it's a two-part process. The first part is getting in the habit of seeking out the hard parts. And at work, there's very little reward for that when you work for somebody else. At the gym, the only people who are fit are the people who sought out the hard parts. That's why they went to the gym. Like,

Back when I would go to the gym, there would be people, you'd see them there for three hours and between going to the drinking fountain and walking over to the towel, they worked out for six minutes, right? Because they were avoiding the hard part. That's me in the gym. But if we think about the creative greats,

You know, I just finished Herbie Hancock's autobiography the other day. If we think about people like Dylan or like Leonard Cohen or writers, they say, the part that I'm trying to avoid is the reason I am here. Let me figure out how to relish that, look forward to that. So then once it becomes a habit, here's the amazing thing. It stops being that hard. So in my case, it took me about 100 blog posts before I wrote a blog post that sounded like me.

And then once I knew what I sounded like, I proposed blog posts all day long to myself. And I regularly reject them, not because they're hard to write, because they don't sound like me. And once you got the groove, then it's just joyful because the thing, you know, and frustrating because now I miss the hard parts because they're not hard. And so I have to go do a new project where I'm incompetent so that I can get that feeling back.

There's this one of your posts that resonated with me was, I think you called it process versus outcomes. And I've seen this idea in a few other places too, where I think the analogy you painted was like certain people, like a sports fan goes to the game thinking about the outcome. I want my team to win. And they've predetermined if my team doesn't win, I'm going to be sad. If they do win, I'm going to be happy. Whereas other professions are a lot more process oriented, like a scientist, you're committed to a very particular process. You trust in that process, whatever the outcome is going to be.

You're going to be able to live with that regardless as long as you put the inputs in. You're not worried about the outcome so much. And that's true to some degree. Of course, every scientist wants to get published in Nature and whatnot. But I think for entrepreneurs, it's really hard.

Because most people who start to become entrepreneurs, they want to get rich or they want to quit their job or they want to work on what they want to work on. They want to be a success. And that's an outcome. And it's really, I think, nerve-wracking for a lot of people to sit down and try not to think about that outcome when it's so hard to achieve. Most entrepreneurs don't succeed. I wonder how you think about this with your career. Are you really process-oriented? Do you really just sit down and not think about outcomes? And to what degree do you think others can think about that? Because it's just so difficult to succeed. Yeah.

So I wrote about this in the practice. I think that there's the, the, the Buddhist idea of attachment is really important. If the three of us wanted to run from here across town and be near each other, if we just kept an eye on each other and stayed about six feet apart, it would be very easy. But if we attached to each other with a long rope, it would be really hard because everybody's movement would jerk us around. And so,

Your team winning is out of your control when you're playing a sport. What's in your control is did you make the pass to that other right winger in a way that they could receive the pass? So you need feedback loops. The scientist needs to see the result of each experiment to find out if their process is any good. And so...

You know, I failed a lot at the beginning because I was ignoring the people I was trying to sell to. I bought into the make it for yourself, be authentic thing, which is completely wrong. I needed to make it for them. I needed to put on a show for them that they wanted to buy. So I need to pay attention to the clues of why things weren't selling. But once I had publishing partners, I needed to ignore whether or not the book sold a lot of copies because that's a somewhat random event.

And being attached to random events takes our eye off the process. And so it's both. You can't drive a car without feel from the steering wheel and the curb, but you also can't drive a car if you need to make sure that there's no traffic chance between here and Toledo. It's never going to happen.

You, maybe you just answered this question, but it's something that I've thought about because I've read a lot of your work and you speak about this tension between everybody wanting to be authentic, but then you're here to serve your audience. And yet you've, I think famously, as much as you blog, you've turned off your comment section.

And you've mentioned that, you know, you don't want to be writing, you don't want to be a hack, right? You don't want to just be writing things just for the sake of getting engagements. And is that connected to, you figured it out for the most part. And now once you figured out how, what you need to do and how to execute everything else is a bit of a distraction. Oh, I didn't figure anything out. I think that,

What I realized that one of my many personality defects is anonymous trolling really gets under my skin. And so what was happening was anonymous trolls were writing comments on my blog and I would read them thinking I was going to be a better blogger as a result. And instead, I just didn't want to blog anymore because why would you invite someone into your living room to dump crap on the floor?

And so the only way I could have a blog is if I had no comments. I don't have to host the trolls. They can go somewhere else. But feedback, advice is different than angry criticism. If someone gives you a book, a one-star review, they're not saying they didn't like the book. They're saying the book wasn't for them. And for the solo software entrepreneur, this could not be a more important idea. You don't need everyone. You will not have everyone. Even WhatsApp didn't have everyone.

You will have the people who it's for. And if someone says this isn't for me, you shouldn't try to explain yourself. You should say thank you. Thank you for telling me it's not for you. Go over there. That might be for you. This is for people who want this. And so I don't seek out new readers. And I got a new blog, a new book coming out. And I want to talk to my existing readers that the song of significance is here. But I'm not trying to get people who have never read my work to go read it because they probably won't get it.

So this is a good point to switch over from exclusively asking you about yourself, which we've been doing even though you don't love it, to talking about your new book. It's called The Song of Significance. When does it come out? It's out Tuesday, May 30th.

And the audio book almost killed me recording it, which is a whole other story. But it's personal and it's urgent. It's a rant about bringing humanity back to our days as opposed to being cogs in a machine. It's about false proxies and it's about the brutality of late stage industrial capitalism.

Yeah, you've come on the right show to discuss these topics because we're literally talking to tens of thousands of people right now who are

Their number one dream is to basically stop working for the man, stop working at these big companies, and do their own thing. And I think your book takes a little bit of a different angle. In the media kit that you sent us, I read the intro, and it says, as we mechanize and routinize and surveil every employee, we haven't already replaced, outsourced, or automated, which is very relevant with all these new AI developments we're having. It's become clear that work isn't what it used to be.

Bosses are letting their employees down just as quickly as employees seem to be letting down their bosses. And so I've seen a lot of stories like this. People are quite quitting. People are getting two and three jobs because they've realized they can phone it in at one job and they're working remote now. And people just don't care, right? It's about what can I get away with? It's not about valuing the work. It's not about valuing the employees. And you said there's a fork in the word. Either we race to the bottom or

And we make work more soul-sucking, innervating, and fungible, or we decide to choose significance instead. And so I think a lot of what your book is about is about for people who run companies or manage people, like how can we make a better world for ourselves? And I think what we're doing at IndieHackers is we're just like, screw all that, just quit. Quit your job. Go start your own thing. Work for yourself. All these same technologies that are automating you out of your job you can use to be more productive as an entrepreneur. Mm-hmm.

What do you say to that? Is that like a dystopian nightmare? Is that where we want to see things going? Or is there a better way? Oh, I think small C market-driven capitalism is the only way that I can see how we're going to make things better. If you are a solo entrepreneur, you have to listen to the market. You cannot command people to do what you say. You cannot seek to buy out your competition. You have to say, I have something of utility.

If you want it, here it is. And if you don't, I better make it better. And as somebody who has been a soloist off and on for 40 years, it's thrilling. It's important, I think, to differentiate between freelancers and entrepreneurs. A lot of freelancers, like me, aren't trying to build an entity that works when they're not there, are not seeking outside investment and then be able to sell an asset. That's what entrepreneurs do.

So freelancers say, I am the star of this particular show. I don't have to put my name on it, but it's me. And I'm going to leverage me to get better clients, to solve more interesting problems and to get paid fairly for doing so.

The danger of being a freelancer who thinks you're an entrepreneur is you will do all the things entrepreneurs do, raise money, scale, et cetera, when you actually have a business that sings when you're a freelancer and stumbles when you're an entrepreneur. So an example that isn't tech at all is if you bake wedding cakes in your home kitchen,

And you from scratch build $4,000 wedding cakes. It would be a mistake for you to take a 6,000 square foot facility, hire 12 people and build Wedding Cakes Incorporated. Because the very thing that made you great is now going to make you not great. That reminds me of, let's call it the McDonald'sification, which is one way that people productize their services is they say, well, let me...

Figure out how to do it myself. Then let me sort of create this, you know, what is it? Taylorism, right? Create the standard operating procedures from head to toe of everything that I do and then have basically people come in and the more robotic they act, the better it is for me.

That's a legitimate way to make money. I don't think it's a legitimate way to live the life you want to be proud of. And most of the mechanized jobs like flying an airplane or getting French fries, people have figured those out. We don't need you to do that.

What we need you to do is bring something special and innovative and flexible to the table because the world is changing so fast that the big people, big companies can't figure out what to do in time, but you can. And the other piece of it, which I just, so many people in this day and age don't understand, the network effect really didn't hit its stride until 20 years ago. The network effect is

Does your product or service work better if other people are using it too? So if I tell people about my financial advisor, my life will not get better. If I tell people about my Dr. Scholl's insoles, my life will not get better. But if I tell people I'm using this social network and they should join me, my life will get better because they're there too. And the network effect built the world we are in right now.

And if I was starting from scratch today, I wouldn't do what I did 40 years ago. I would build communities. I would use tech. I would use discourse. I would use tools like that to say, here are 3,000 or 5,000 or 20,000 people who will pay to be part of this circle of people. And I, as the ringleader, organizer, and creative culture, will get paid more than fairly to do that.

So do you think of community as more squarely entrepreneurship or freelancing? Because to some degree, being the community organizer, like you're bringing yourself to this. A lot of communities just die outright when the leader leaves. It's almost like a tribe or just a group of people that follows a particular vision. And everyone's similar, but there has to be someone at the core uniting that vision. But also people get a lot of value from each other because that's the network effect. Yeah.

And so on one hand, like maybe you are a freelancer, right? You're trading your time to bring value to this community, to connect people. But on the other hand, there's so many tools and products that people can code now. You can build something that does work when you're not there. When Channing and I go to sleep, there are people on ND Hackers posting, meeting co-founders, meeting partners, exchanging ideas, reviewing each other's websites, et cetera. So like which camp does this fall into or are we squished right in between? No, it's a brilliant example of how it could transition.

So nobody knows who runs Alcoholics Anonymous because it's anonymous. And nobody cares who owns Weight Watchers. So yeah, it begins with a freelancer who's using tools.

But you don't have to say, this is the place to come hang out with so-and-so. You can say, this is a place to hang out with each other. And just like the person who starts a bar, that person may start out as the soloist, but if the bar is working, they don't have to go to work every day. And the same thing is now amplified by tech, that the community should be bigger and more vibrant than the founder. And if,

We don't have all the communities we need yet. And we're not even close to filling that void. There's...

ridiculous number of like 10 person, 100 person, 1000 person communities that could exist that don't exist. And because the internet allows people from all over the world to connect, like if I wanted to start a community in my town, it'd be hard, right? Well, I live in Seattle, it's pretty big, so maybe not that hard, but you can start like the most niche enthusiast communities on the internet. Like people don't even, aren't even aware of just how niche you can get. And you can connect people who like would never in a million years think they can meet somebody else who's also into jazz.

Japanese dolls that have orange hair and can breathe underwater or whatever it is. And you connect them and then suddenly they'll pay to be together. So I totally agree with you. I think community is underrated. And I also think to your point, one of the big questions you ask in your book is what if we created the best job we ever had? We have this world where people are being like,

squished into these gig worker jobs and personalize them and take away from what makes them human. They're treated like a resource or like a number. I think community is one of the best jobs slash businesses almost anyone can participate in because it's kind of positive for everybody. It's relationships. It's shared interests. It's a human connection. It's not

or community without people is, I mean, I'm sure somebody out there has made some sort of AI community that's just a bunch of AIs talking to each other. But excluding that, community without people is not a thing. And so I guess my question for you is like, how do you expand this principle, this realization? Like, what does it mean to create the best job you ever had? Or if you're an entrepreneur, what does it mean to create the business that's good? How do you design a life? So it feels to me, Cortland, like folks like you and I,

would get great satisfaction from organizing a community. There are other people who aren't going to find anything positive in that at all. They might want to write a piece of code like OSEN Audio, which I use almost all the time, that is the best editor for sound files. But I don't know these people's names and they don't interact with anybody, right? So there's all these, this whole range of things that would be the best job you ever had. But let's at least think

find enough confidence to describe what that is, right? Do you want a day where your inbox is full or do you want a day where your inbox is empty? Do you want to have anonymity or do you want to be in front of people? What kind of interaction? Some people really like talking to trolls. Some people don't, right? So you can figure out what would light you up that you could commit to for years at a time and go build that work. And the one thing you're not allowed to do is say,

I want to do my hobby. I want to get paid really well. And I don't want to interact with customers. You're just not going to be able to make a living doing that. No, it doesn't work.

Do you think it's possible for society to change as a whole in this direction? I think like a lot of the trends that are making work less personal and less enjoyable, I think, aren't trends that any one person is deciding on. Like if anything, I feel like our culture is becoming like more human. Like 50 years ago, every business owner would have said profits all that matters, right? Whereas like today, like, I mean, you have a B Corp, right? Like you're literally certified to care about other stakeholders or customers or partners or employees. And there's like hundreds of people who've signed contracts

I forget what the name of it was. There was like a business roundtable thing a few years back where it was like people said, you know, hey, capitalism isn't just about profits, it's about these other things. I think there's more people, consumers holding businesses accountable today than there were in the past. So I think culturally it feels like we're like going in the right direction. Like we want to be more human. We want to care more. You know, people in my generation, I'm a millennial, are a lot more focused on purpose and enjoyment of their work than like my parents' generation, for example.

And yet, like, the technological forces that we have, like artificial intelligence, the internet, programming in general, are, like, driving things in the opposite direction where it's, like, harder to find purpose for a lot of people. My question here is, like, how do we – what do we do? It feels like we're trying to fight and trying to push in the right direction. But, like, is this even a thing that, like, we as people can do? Like, if we start a company that follows the advice in your book?

you know, what effect will that have? And will we not just be squashed by these bigger companies that are just like, ah, we're going to be much more economically efficient than you and use AI for everything? Okay. So it's a couple of parts to this question. The first one is don't underestimate the indoctrination of 12 or more years of school, of parents with a sticker on their car, of people being pushed to ask, will this be on the test?

So if you walk into one of those big box stores that are still in business, if you look in the corner, there's a kiosk and it's not an ATM machine. It's actually how you apply for a job. Type in your social security number, your name. It looks you up and then it hires you on the spot. Pays you a minimum wage. Easy in, easy out. There are people who want that job. They want that job because they don't want to be on the hook. They don't want to bring their full self to work. They don't want, because they have been brainwashed into believing that it is not possible to get more than that out of work.

And so there's a lot of brutalized, traumatized people who aren't going to show up the way you two have, the way your community has. And say, no, no, no, I demand more. So that's the first part. The second part is, you know, I invented email marketing. And then the industry came and turned it from a $0 billion industry to a $20 billion industry. And I had to leave because once it catches on, this is not room for folks like us.

And that's probably going to happen to everybody who's listening to this who's successful. And when the time comes, you should sell and go do the next thing because you're not looking for a sinecure. You're looking to make a difference. I like that idea. There's been a lot of people, a lot of indie hackers have been building, um,

just cool AI tools. And there's been a lot of pushback about like, well, what you're doing is not going to last. It's not going to be here forever. But some of the people I see building these tools, like they're like the tinkerer's tinkerer, you know, like they just like playing with new stuff and they're not concerned that this is going to last for 25 years. Like I had a moment, this was fun. I made some money. I made people's lives happy. I made myself happy. And now I'm on to the next thing. And I think being nimble and quick like that is not only underrated, but probably is going to become more and more important as technology speeds up.

Which is like to your first point, also troubling for me personally, because it's like I don't want half of humanity to be left aside. Right. And to be forced into these meaningless cog and a giant machine jobs. And it's not my responsibility nor would I even know where to begin to stop that from happening. But like it would be nice if everybody was an indie hacker, creative creator, whatever they like, but in some way found what they wanted to do.

I don't want our society to turn into like the haves and the have-nots, to turn into the people who are fulfilled and the people who are being used by the people who are fulfilled to be cocks. To turn into, by the way, one of the fathers of this mechanized way of working, Frederick Winslow Taylor, the quote that he had, his grand vision was,

In the past, the man has been first. In the future, the system will be first. And he didn't say that like the science fiction, this is going to be a fun thing. He was dreaming. And then here we are. Yeah. So if we talk about something as different as obesity, we see the system's problem. That people made a lot of money persuading a significant portion of the population to become obese.

even though it's not healthy, even though some of those people don't want to be that way. And other people tried to figure out how to insulate themselves from those systems so that it wouldn't afflict them. And we see this in any free market economy around the world in so many ways. That doesn't mean we have to accept

that it happens. We have to start building guardrails so it doesn't happen. Who gets to build the guardrails? Community organizers do. People who connect the others, set the agenda, and amplify the ideas. And we believe it's top-down. It's never top-down. It's from the foundations up. We get what we tolerate.

And so when we start addressing what kids are taught when they're five years old, when we start addressing what people are paid when they go to work and everything in between, the systems begin to change. And they're changing too slowly. There's way too much trauma, but they only change because we persist.

And so you saying it is so valuable. And then the question is, how do we do it and do it and do it and do it again? Because we're not going to save the world by speculating with Bitcoin, but we might save the world if we can create a resilient, open database that keeps track of things so that people can own actual assets going forward. So they're near each other, but they're not the same thing. Right. Well, I think this is like essentially your book. When I look at the description of it, it's kind of like a

Save the world book. I'm not sure I would love to know like your perspective on like what why are you writing this book? What do you want to happen? Essentially, it seems like that's the goal like hey Let's all come together and realize like we have the power to make things better and here is maybe an outline of how we do it all my books so far have rhymed and If you pick up survival is not enough a book I wrote in 2001 if you pick up the Icarus deception a book I wrote ten years after that many of the same themes keep coming up So I haven't saved the world yet

Because I can't save the world, but what I can do is activate people who are looking for shared vocabulary. And you never know when the right time and the right places to have the conversation. So I persist. But I'm not alone in persisting.

It used to be much lonelier to have these conversations. You know, I got kicked out of the direct marketing association in 1997 for arguing against spam. They're like, we're direct marketers. Spam is a good thing. You're out of here. Who argues for spam? That's crazy. And like, this was at the U S Senate. I was testifying and there were other people from my industry saying I was an idiot. Um,

So you just speak up. And the beauty of all of this is everyone has a microphone now. You don't need authority. You don't need a license. You don't need a huge track record. You just need to organize some people, which is exactly the same thing that the indie hackers have to do to make a living. Which kind of customers are you going to organize in a way that the ratchet moves forward? So another thing that I could imagine doing if I was a software person today is build a simple app

that let me, if I worked for any big company, find out the difference between what I'm getting paid and what I should get paid.

And I could imagine plenty of people who would happily pay $50 for that report, particularly if they could walk into their boss with that report and get a $5,000 raise, right? Many tens of thousands of people are writing, scribbling, you know, aggressively. You know, you get the idea is that you don't have to just come up with a different way to make a Google Doc. You have to come up with a problem that can be solved that isn't interesting enough for a giant company to solve right now, but is useful enough

that a customer wants to connect with other humans or their data in a way that they're willing to pay for. To make this slightly personal again, you just mentioned you were in email marketing until it wasn't cool anymore, until it didn't align with your values, then you're on to the next thing. And that has happened a lot of times. You're an extremely prolific, not just writer, but I mean, you have so many workshops and online courses that sometimes it makes my head spin.

How do you figure out once the, you know, Seth Godin, by the way, is it, is it Godin or Godin? That was another question I had. My grandfather made it up. So you can say any way you want, but he always said Godin. So that's fine with me. Godin. When you are tapped out on, on one thing, do you have a process? Do you, you know, do you go into the woods for, for a month and just meditate? How do you come up with the next thing to, to work on?

So the great Derek Sivers, and I'm sure a lot of people listening know who he is, reached out to me when someone offered to buy CD Baby. And I said, if you care about the project, you need to sell. And he was sort of stunned at that because everyone else had told him, you know, this is your lifetime thing, blah, blah, blah. I said, by the time a big company is coming in and willing to buy what you've done, what they're saying to you is you have higher leverage somewhere else.

And so whenever I start a project, I am very clear with myself where the dip is. Where's the hard part? Where's the part where most people quit? And then I also have to think about, well, but when will I stop? Because I am not going to be running this thing in 40 years for sure. So what is that like? So with Yo-Yo Dine, which I sold to Yahoo, it was there was a moment in time.

when we needed to raise more money. But the noise in VC world was so loud that our competitors were selling what we sold for a quarter of a million dollars for a dollar just to get big. And they had raised $80 million and we had raised five or four or five. And so for me to raise a new round, there would have been so much dilution for me and my partners that it would have taken us six years of hard work just to catch up from that round.

So when one of the people we were approaching for funding said, we'll just buy you. I was like, yeah, fine. Done. Done. Because it was a really long 10 year slog to get here. And this is not my family and this is not me. This is a thing we built and my friends will still be my friends and the people we serve, we can serve again. And that,

was one of the most difficult things I ever did. It dislocated a lot of people I cared about, but I learned from that. You can't have it both ways, right? You can't launch a new record album and also keep touring with that album forever. Sooner or later, you got to say, I'm making a new record album.

Well, you're also not doing one thing at a time and then sort of boxcar of consecutive projects where you're only doing one thing. The blog is an unstoppable force. The books are an unstoppable force. You released a hit book when you were doing Yo-Yo Dime. So one thing that a lot of, especially indie hackers who don't necessarily have to please their VCs and boards, that they like to do is think about

All of their activities as a flywheel where, you know, one part is adding to another part. And is that something that you do? And if you do it, are you deliberate about it? Is it something that I've heard you say where you kind of think about things as blowing on a dandelion? You're like, let's let the petals fall where they may.

Wait, let's explain flywheels a little bit more because I love flywheels. Go for it, Cortland. It's good to see you back. Tell us what a flywheel is. Sorry, my mic dropped. I was gone for a few minutes. I have no idea what you guys said, but I jumped in on a good part. A flywheel, you can think of like a waterfall as like a straight line. You do A, then B, then C, then you're done. And you look back and you say, well, that was cool.

But a flywheel kind of feeds step C back into step A. It's a circle. So everything you do with your business sort of pushes on a lever that makes another part of your business easier or better or more effective. And it's hopefully an infinite loop. So you can just kind of push on different parts. So the classic example is Amazon. They sell things for cheap. Customers love them. Customers love them. There's more customers. If there's more customers, there's more vendors you want to sell. If there's more vendors you want to sell, then Amazon can sell stuff for cheaper. And it just feeds around in this infinite circle of

And what a lot of people don't realize is that as an entrepreneur, even as a freelancer, you can have a flywheel too. You don't have to, but you can. And so, yeah, I'm curious, Seth, to see if you have a flywheel and you think about producing stuff. So I had a record album for a couple of years. And one of the groups that I produced lived in a van. There were two of them. They were a couple. And they would drive into a town and find the coffee shop that would book anybody if you just walked in.

It wasn't open mic, but it was close. And they might make 40 bucks. And then they would get in the van and drive to the next town and do it again. And I turned to them and I said, you need to stay in one town and go from the $40 to the $80 to the $200 to the $1,000 gig because this driving around isn't getting you where you want to go. You're just doing the easy one. So the two things that I would say are one,

The flywheel that I have found is the most useful, is the one that earns you the benefit of the doubt, which gets you more benefit of the doubt, which gets you more benefit of the doubt. So when I was in the book business, I had nothing for a year. And then people started returning my calls and then they would go to lunch with me because I kept showing up.

And so by the time I did the Stanley Kaplan test prep books, they paid a silly amount of money for them because they trusted me because I'd been showing up for four years. Whereas when I briefly showed up in the film industry, they're like, we got people fly by here all the time. Check back in after you've failed 40 times. Like, all right, I'm done with this. And so that's the first thing. And then the second thing is resistance is real and you need to write down on a piece of paper

What is the very, very hard thing that if it happened, your project would work better? Go figure out now. What are the steps to make that hard thing happen? So when I used to run the podcasting workshop with Alex DePalma, people say, well, my podcast will go great as soon as I can get Michelle Obama on the podcast. I'm like, yeah, but if you call Michelle Obama, she's not going to say yes. So who would you have to have had as a guest before that

So that she would say, yes. Oh, Madeline Albright. Okay. What do you have to get to get Madeline Albright? Oh, war criminal Henry Kissinger. Okay. And you work your way back until my next door neighbor. My next door neighbor is the first guest and the 12th guest is, or the hundredth guest. Right. And people hated to write this down. They hated it because they wanted to just believe in lightning. And so what makes the flywheel useful is the beginning of Amazon is

My mom, who died shortly after he started it, ran a bookstore in Buffalo. And she gets a call from someone at Amazon. They probably had 30 people at the time. And they said, we see here that you sell this book, blah, blah, blah, for $100. It's an art book. Can you mail it to one of our customers, please? We will send you $150 to cover the book and the shipping.

Now, there's no way Amazon could have made money selling that book that way. Right. But they needed to be able to say, we have every book in the world and we will sell it to you. So they made 100 people that day really happy. And then a month later, 400 people. The flywheel before AWS was, do people trust Amazon?

How do we do that every day? Because once I had bought 400 things from Amazon, if they screwed up the 401st order, I was fine. Cognitive dissonance. It was an error. But they had to get to the point with their flywheel where they could pull that off. Which is funny because it's almost the same as the flywheel you were talking about using for yourself. It's the benefit of the doubt flywheel. What they're doing is they're building more trust, basically a brand that says,

you can trust us to come through. We're here for you. And I don't know. I mean, that's the same flywheel

That we're trying to do for any hackers I got a paper here somewhere where I've drawn this fly to look a hundred times and Channing probably hates me because I keep showing it to him every day But essentially the best component in there is like two people trust us to do what we say we're gonna do Seth we're out of time. We've just hit the limit of your time. So I want to respect it Thanks a ton for coming on the show Can I ask you one more question before you can't ask me a question until I point out that you're superstars and

that I am in awe of what you're building. And this was such a great conversation. So thank you. Thank you for having me. The question I ask at the end of the show is, you've got a long career. You've obviously dispensed probably 10,000 different pieces of advice over your career. What's something you think you'd like indie hackers to hear today, something that could take away from your journey, your learnings, your career, maybe something related to the book that you're putting out next week? The shortest blog post I ever wrote. You ready? Yeah.

It's also one of the most popular blog posts I ever wrote back when I used to check my stats. You don't need more time. You just need to decide. Love it. Channing, this applies to us. Yeah. We're talking all the time about how we don't have any time. Seth, thanks a ton. You're a superstar. Hopefully we're going to have you back when your next book's coming out. Even before that, put it in your calendar. I can't wait to come back. We'll talk soon. Love to you.