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Josh is a senior software developer from Montreal. He’s worked at organizations like Khan Academy, DigitalOcean, and Gatsby, and is now working as an independent course creator. He recently released CSS for JavaScript Developers, an interactive learning experience designed to help JavaScript developers become confident with CSS.
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CSS for JavaScript Developers
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Gonto is a software engineer turned marketer who is a strong proponent of the “engineering approach to marketing”. He spent seven years at Auth0 where he led marketing and helped grow the company to 9 figures before it’s sale to Okta for $6.5b. Gonto is now running his own company as co-founder of Hypergrowth Partners, a sweat equity advisor that invests time and knowledge into startups to help them achieve Hypergrowth.
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Hypergrowth
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Monica Lent is a software engineer and former engineering manager who has been coding since the age of 10. Her main focus now is Affilimate, a SaaS product which provides a unified dashboard and content analytics for affiliates. Monica also writes a weekly newsletter called Blogging for Devs which teaches developers about blogging and SEO.
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Blogging for Devs
Affilimate
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Arvid is a software engineer, entrepreneur, and writer. He co-founded and bootstrapped FeedbackPanda, an online teacher productivity SaaS company with his partner Danielle Simpson. They sold the business for a life-changing amount of money in 2019, two years after founding the company.
He writes on TheBootstrappedFounder.com to share his experience with bootstrapping as a desirable, value- and wealth-generating way of running a company.
Arvid's LinksThe Bootstrapped Founder
Zero to Sold
The Embedded Entrepreneur
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Michael is a developer and blogger who has worked as a software engineer at Microsoft and Google. He left Microsoft in 2018 to try building his own businesses.
His current business is TinyPilot, where he makes $15,000/month selling an open source server administration device. He recently created his first first-ever video course, entitled Hit the Front Page of Hacker News, which describes the writing techniques that have helped him reach the front page of Hacker News 18 times in the past four years.
Michael's Links
Hit the Front Page of Hacker News
Michael's Website
Michael on Twitter
TinyPilot -
Hassan is a two-time startup founder, consultant, and final year student majoring in Computer Engineering. He founded UltraShock Gaming, a game marketing startup with a community of 500,000 members on Steam, and ran it for five years before selling it. He's passionate about startups and solving problems using software.
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Kyle Mathews is the founder and CEO of Gatsby, one of the most popular frameworks around for creating websites with React. After authoring Gatsby as an open source project in 2015, he later started a company of the same name to take it even further. He's fascinated by technology, open source, and making the web better.
Kyle's Links
Gatsby
Kyle and Twitter
Kyle's WebsiteTranscript
[0:00] [music]Ryan Chenkie: [0:07] My guest today is Kyle Mathews. Kyle is the founder and CEO of Gatsby one of the most popular frameworks around for creating websites with React. After offering Gatsby as an open source project in 2015, he later started a company of the same name to take it even further.
[0:22] He's fascinated by technology, open source, and making the Web better. Kyle, welcome to the show.
Kyle Mathews: [0:28] Yeah, thanks. Glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Ryan: [0:31] Absolutely. I have been following your work for quite some time. I've been seeing the great things that have been going on in the Gatsby world. We did some interview stuff a couple years back, which was a lot of fun. I'm excited to chat to you today about startups more in general.
[0:47] One thing that piqued my curiosity was a tweet that you had recently where it sounded like you had done a talk at your college perhaps, and you mentioned in the tweet that you were giving the advice or wanting to give the advice that may be startups aren't a great idea for everybody. Maybe it's not everyone that should go out and start a startup.
[1:11] I was hoping to chat with you on that. Give me some of the background around that sentiment. Why is it the case do you think that maybe not everyone should be looking to do a startup?
Kyle: [1:25] The scenario was that there was a technology club at my college that's part of the major I did. They invited me like, "Hey, Kyle. You created Gatsby. Come talk about it. Gatsby is cool." I guess the person inviting me has been using it recently. That was fun, and a weird trip, like, "Oh, college. I remember that. That was fun." Then like, "Why y'all look younger than I used to," sort of thing.
[1:52] [laughter]
Kyle: [1:54] Been just long enough that all these weird like, "I'm getting old" feelings are coming into play. Anyways, they had some question about Gatsby, but a lot of people in the Q&A started asking about startups. They were like, "How did you come up with the idea," on and on?
[2:13] It was funny because I had this thought a lot, but it just afterwards, I don't know. Talking about startups is weird because there's this really strong glamour field around doing the startup that is not...The lived reality of doing a startup is not actually how it's perceived a lot of the time from the outside.
[2:44] Anyway, I always have this feeling when people are asking about startups because I downplay it a lot and discourage people more because, startups are absolutely right. Doing a startup, having a startup, absolutely the right decision for some people. For a lot of people, if they get into it, it'd be actually a very difficult, dispiriting, unpleasant experience for them. That was an interesting reaction.
[3:14] Having all these people like, "Oh," fascinated by the idea of startups, and me, cringing a little bit like, "I don't know. You're probably better off getting a nice job and going home and having fun with your friends and family, and doing side projects and stuff like that."
[3:34] The actual lived reality of a startup is, it's hard. It's emotionally super intense. Intellectually, it's very challenging. It depends, of course, but there's often very difficult challenges that you have to figure out immediately or the whole thing goes kaput.
[4:02] There's tons of uncertainty. That's the emotional stuff. It takes a lot of courage to do anything in a startup because there's a lot of pressure to make the right decision. You just don't know enough to figure that out. There's a whole bunch of things that...Unless you sort of weirdly tuned to enjoy that.
[4:23] [laughter]
Kyle: [4:25] You're going to have an unpleasant time. There's really no point.
Ryan: [4:29] That makes a lot of sense. I wonder, in your experience, are those things that you had in mind going into founding Gatsby as a company? You're working on the open source projects, decided to build a company around it. Did you have those things in mind when you entered this venture, or are these things they have become apparent to you over the course of time?
Kyle: [4:52] I've done startup pretty much my whole career. I started my first startup in college. I moved out to SF and joined an early-stage startup there. Did another startup before Gatsby. I knew I liked startups and enjoyed that space before going into Gatsby, for sure. No new discoveries per se, just all the same.
Ryan: [5:20] Got it. A lot of people who listen to this podcast, they are the indie hacker types. They're people that want to do stuff. Business wise, they want to create products and release products. They are people that might want to do startups, or maybe they're doing startups or whatever.
[5:37] For those people who have it in mind, in the future they would like to do a startup around whatever, what would you say is the best way to assess whether or not it would be a good fit for you?
[5:50] It's possible that you've got these lofty goals of like, "Yeah, I'm going to do a start up. Maybe it'll be a little tough, but it'll be awesome eventually." Then, of course, reality hits when you settle into the thing. Any advice you'd give for people that are trying to make that assessment now?
Kyle: [6:11] A lot of it's knowing yourself and learning about what makes you tick. To me, life should be lived to the fullest. What is the answer to living your life to the fullest? It depends on who you are. The first question's like, "What should I do with my life? What do I enjoy? What matters to me?"
[6:36] The answer's very different for every person. There's no one right answer. You shouldn't make decisions based on, that's what I was saying, like the glamour field. People are like, "Ooh, doing a stripe looks glamorous." It's not actually what it is.
[6:49] You have to understand what makes you tick. You have to understand where to put yourself so that you're going to be enjoying your life.
[6:57] I would say the type of person that enjoys a startup, and there's a few types, but a lot of it boils down to a desire for adventure, for intense experience, for life being interesting, and prioritizing that over comfort and security.
[7:28] When I was a kid, I read a lot of kid adventure novels. I loved them. I devoured them and read them over and over again. All these stories about trudging through jungles and exploring outer space and inventing rockets and whatever, I don't know.
[7:46] Tom Swift, I don't know if there's anyone out there that's read that, I loved those books. The idea of adventure and inventing things and doing things is really fun.
[8:02] Another good clue for me was I've had one normal job-ish. It was even at an early-stage startup, and I still found it kind of boring. I would go in, fix an issue or two, write a new component. It was like, "Man, this is boring and predictable."
[8:25] It was a great job. It was a super-good company. The founders are awesome, really cool product. Everything could have, should have been perfect, maybe, but I was still dissatisfied with the whole thing. I wanted more.
[8:41] If that's what you want and you're comfortable with the risk associated with it, but your soul might be crushed by doing a startup. It really can. It can impact you in a way that nothing else can.
[9:01] Financially, it's a really dumb decision most of the time, to do a startup. Even if you succeed, you're going to break even, maybe. There's a slim chance you get rich or something, but it's pretty slim. There are extremely smart people, very talented who don't go anywhere with a startup.
[9:19] There's a lot of things outside of your control. There is very high, inherent uncertainty in doing something. Nobody knows enough to predict the future. Nobody is talented enough to outrun some big wave of something.
[9:36] There's all these things outside of your control and that is impossible to know and predict. There is no way of ensuring success in a startup. You kind of get lucky.
[9:48] You got to be talented enough and hardworking enough, etc., but a lot of it is really just luck. You happen to be in the right place at the right time and a number of things go your way.
[9:59] What you can guarantee from a startup is it is going to be intense. It is going to be an adventure. It is going to be interesting. It might crush you. You might come out of it poor and a lot of other things.
[10:11] As long as you go in knowing those things and being OK with the risk and uncertainty, and not really setting your heart on being rich, which is a terrible motivation to do a startup, then it's a perfect place.
[10:26] Having all these caveats. The group of people that it is a good fit, it shrinks down to a 100th of a percent or something at that point.
Ryan: [10:38] One thing that strikes me here is that the caveats, you list them well, even though they're daunting, you seem pretty OK with it. You seem to know that there's this risk associated, that it may go nowhere, that the things might not go the way that would be good on paper.
[10:58] What I suppose motivates you to keep going and keep trudging through, especially with these, you mentioned, there's pressure constantly. That's something that I'd like to dig into a bit more. There's lots of pressure all the time. What is it that makes you want to keep doing it, I suppose?
Kyle: [11:21] Yeah. It's interesting. I know every day is different. Every day, there's, something new and it's personal challenge. Can I figure this out? Can I understand my emotions? Can I understand this problem? Can I learn how to collaborate well with this person?
[11:53] There's just a lot of things that are, interesting. It's like the adventure motif. You're wandering through the jungle, and you're like, "Oh, there's a beautiful mountain over there. Let's go climb it and see what's on top of it." What's there? What are we capable of? What's out there? Discovering new things.
[12:18] The thrill of discovery, the thrill of this is going to work out but the varied experiences is more important than avoiding negative things if that makes sense. Pressure, disappointments. We're often trained. They are unpleasant. We're trained to avoid unpleasant things. You can do little mind trick where unpleasant doesn't kill you, my wife did a DVT, this type of therapy thing.
[13:06] A lot of super useful stuff, one of the things that they really drill on is that emotional pain, you shouldn't be afraid of it. It's not real. Yeah, in the same way that physical pain is. Because a lot of people get petrified by relationship problems or other stuff and they just won't do things because it feels painful inside.
[13:28] But the point they make is, if it's not threatening your life, why do you care? It's not the same degree of problem anywhere close. Being afraid of emotional disappointment is just doesn't make as much sense as being afraid of physical problems.
[13:55] It takes a bit of training and practice, but it really is true. You can get over emotional problems way faster than physical problems. If you break your leg, it's going to be months of healing but with practice, if you break your soul, you can get over it in a week or two, which is not too bad.
Ryan: [14:16] Yeah. One thing that conjures up for me is that sense going through the startup process, maybe inherently you need to do this, it just happens as a by-product, but you develop some mental toughness as you go. You start to be able to handle emotional situations that are tough in ways that you're not as responsive to them as you would be outside of the startup context.
[14:41] It makes me wonder about the various emotional pressures that you might see in a startup and at least in your experience, where do you feel that the most? is it coming from investors wanting you to grow at a certain rate and wanting to meet their expectations, does it come from staff and the needs that they have. Is there any in particular direction that it comes from the most?
Kyle: [15:06] It depends, you only feel pressure if you are getting more force that you don't expect. For me, some people go take investment. Then there's this scenario that happens sometimes with startups, people take investment, and then are surprised when investors then pressure them to make decisions to grow quickly.
[15:50] That's just mismatch expectation, because that's the only reason you take money is if you expect to grow fast. Our investors grow fast but we knew that going in, it was the bargain, it was the expectation. I don't feel pressure per se, from that. That's part of the situation.
[16:11] I always I think, for me, it's mostly internal. I just have very high expectations for myself, and for our products in the company, and so on. By far, the hardest experiences is when I don't match those expectations, or the company doesn't match those expectations.
[16:32] I deal with a lot of other stuff but it's coming up short on what I expect to be able to do is definitely how it is. Yeah, startups are interesting way to learn about yourself, in a funny way because whatever you think you're capable of doing a startup will expose you to things that you are not capable of. [laughs] They really teach you your limitations.
Ryan: [17:13] Do you have any examples of that where maybe you ran into something like that, where you came up against something that you were incapable of, as you put it or maybe that you just weren't well-matched for within that context.
Kyle: [17:27] One recurrent theme is management. I've never been a manager before. I was either an IC or founding stuff, which is very different context. I knew managers did important stuff, but I didn't realize how difficult it was. It sounds naive now, it wasn't naive but it's like you're managing people and then following that up pretty consistently, that was difficult.
Ryan: [18:08] Got you. I had an experience like that myself, actually. It was a different context. This was before I got into tech and I was doing like GIs mapping stuff and I became the manager of a team of six in a government setting. [laughs] I found out very quickly as they will vouch for it.
[18:25] I did really well in the interview, which is why I got the job. It was not a good fit for me. I was much better suited to be in ICU or at least founding stuff myself, doing projects, [laughs] with that big expectation that I would be this super-skilled manager of people. I hear you there. That's a common one with programmers, especially with you coming from technical fields.
Kyle: [18:50] I could read a book. No, actually this takes years of practice to get good at. It's a general idea. The general problem is the startup needs something from you, and when you can deliver it, that's awesome because you feel great. You're like, "Yeah. I'm the hero of the hour. I'm making this better."
[19:14] A startup will often ask things of you that you can't actually deliver on. As a founder, then it's hard. Startups are funny too because it starts with you and your co-founders. You have this outsized presence. Like, "I am 25 percent of this company, or I'm 50 percent of this company."
[19:42] The emotional arc is more and more things are removed from your sphere of influence. You give them away, or whatever. The point though is, over time, you just become, relatively speaking, smaller and smaller.
Ryan: [19:58] Right on.
Kyle: [20:00] More and more things that the company needs, you can't do. Making that shift from, "I'm doing most of the important things that are happening," to "I'm trying to convince somebody with the right skills to join, even though I don't really know much about it and can't really explain it to them."
[20:21] I'm like, "Hey, it'll be fun. I can't entirely manage you because I don't totally understand this, but this is really complex and hard. The company needs it. Please join, and do it." You call it in the center. It teaches your limits.
[20:41] For the company to succeed, it needs all these sophisticated skill sets that you don't have. You're not going to be able to learn them fast enough to be able to do it, and you have to give them away bit by bit.
Ryan: [21:00] Got you. That makes a lot of sense. I'm curious. Gatsby, all told of you, a unique approach to it being a startup because it started as an open-source project. There is many companies that do this. They will sell it open source, or be mainly open-sourced, but have a paid product behind it.
[21:21] I've always wondered this. What are some of the challenges and maybe opportunities that come with that? Is it easier to do a startup if you start with an open-source thing that people can contribute to and get excited about without paying for anything upfront, or is it harder because you have different expectations?
[21:40] Maybe people when they are then presented with something they can buy. Maybe they don't want to buy it because they expect it to be an open-source free thing. You know what I mean? Is there anything that's challenging or, is that a good opportunity I suppose as well to be an open-source startup?
Kyle: [21:58] All startups have their different challenges and advantages. Open source is no different. People like free things. [laughs] I open source it, gets a lot of attention because it's freely available. It's free to hack on. That's what makes open source so wonderful. It is this shared, wonderful resource that we're all contributing to making better, more valuable.
[22:27] It's like this gold mine that has infinite gold and everyone can just bring more gold to it, and it gets bigger and bigger pile. It's extremely weird thing, if you zoom out to see the historical context. Open source is a magical, amazing, beautiful thing.
[22:53] Open source haven't been tied open source, being built off open source, it gives...Yeah, there's a lot of nice things about it. There is this impedance between both like, "Why is some things free and then why are some things paid? That can be a difficult line to walk.
[23:21] We've seen lots of that over the past few years, especially the last, most recently, the Elastic and AWS. AWS makes more money from Elastic, even though they contribute extremely little to the project. Maybe that's fine. Does it matter who knows whatever...?
[23:43] Open source again and is magical thing. It's not actually hurting Elastic, like Elastic idea. They're making a few hundred million dollars a year. It's just difficult. It definitely leads to difficult conversations. It's hard to figure out exactly where to draw the line.
[24:14] As a commercial open source company, we made the decision, we have to have a business model around this, we have to be able to continue to fund the development of Gatsby. We try to draw the line in a way that makes the most sense. For Gatsby, it's a decision we made.
[24:34] Things that are cloud are proprietary, things that are running in your machine is open source. That feels like a pretty fair thing because someone building a Gatsby site is also interested in running the [inaudible] cluster.
[24:51] That's typically a very different type of job. If you're an agency or freelancing, you just want to build your site, hand it off to some infrastructure and move on to the next site. That's your thing.
[25:04] That's a division of labor. Anything you're running on your laptop, open source, and then once it rolls over into the building deploying type stuff, we're going to do a kickass job of that, provided for everyone for a fair price, but it's been proprietary.
[25:24] There's definitely people who are like, "Well, anything that's open source should be open source." They're never going to be happy with that compromise.
[25:30] For us, it feels like a good balance. It's like you can hack on the things that you want to hack on, it is all free, open source. You do whatever you want on your machine in order for it to run super well and get the cloud, then you can hand it off to us and live within the constraints that we put on it.
Ryan: [25:47] What do you think with this? Would Gatsby have been able to get off the ground if it went direct to paid like if there wasn't an open-source product to begin with?
[26:01] You see things with Remix. Ryan and Michael making a Remix, you pay for it before you can even see the code essentially. I'm not super familiar with it, but I think that's how it works. Is that a viable play, do you think, or do you need to start with the open-source angle?
Kyle: [26:23] It is about just a different play. I would say, my guess is that they'll do very well as a small company, but not being open source does shrink down the potential market a lot.
[26:44] We're open sources, it's everywhere. Gatsby is mind-boggling to even think about how many sites there are where people are running at. We have some anonymous telemetry and so we can see it a broad stroke, where it is. We have an internal map of the world and it's lit up the whole thing. The whole world is lit up with Gatsby.
[27:13] That only happens because of open source, it's free, anybody can touch it without asking us permission or something and run on their own servers, going to do whatever they want.
[27:23] Once you put up a paywall upfront, it cuts out most of that. You're limited to the very small subset of people who are willing to take that risk and have the financial ability to take that risk or want to pay for it.
[27:38] In my mind, it makes sense for a small company for a VC-backed company where we want to be very large, it might be running a significant percentage of the Web on Gatsby. You need the broad reach of open source, I'd say. I don't know. I mean things are changing now because it's proprietary. Cloud changes things in a lot of ways. Open source is changing dramatically because of the cloud.
Ryan: [28:18] How so? What are the changes?
Kyle: [28:28] There's two things basically. You're pulling together work with other people so that, if 20 companies all made the same thing, they can work together on it loosely and build it together. You get the same thing for a lot cheaper. That's the economic rationale behind open source, plus there's the freedom of friction.
[28:54] If you see a bug, you just fix it and move on versus if it's a proprietary thing, then you can't. It's like, "Well, you can submit issue." Maybe six months later somebody will respond. Then 12 months later PM will decide to prioritize it.
Ryan: [29:09] [laughs]
Kyle: [29:09] In the meantime, you're all just dead or something. That was a lot of the motivation. For engineers, "I can hack this together with my buddies of these internally into the other companies, make something better than some unresponsive proprietary company can do. That's right.
[29:28] Open source has created a lot of stuff like fibers and infrastructure pieces that are better and have taken over the industry. Cloud changes it because cloud is inherently centralizing. You just don't run as many things. 15, 20 years ago you're setting up servers. You're running a whole bunch of stuff. You're maintaining them and all those things.
[29:55] Now development has moved from all this maintenance stuff to you're just plugging together a few things. Open source in this world is like, "Do you care about fixing bugs in S3?" It's like "Well, no because S3 doesn't have bugs because it has millions and millions of users and hundreds of engineers." It is a force of nature because it is so good.
[30:24] It's so good because of that centralization. It's because AWS can spend millions of dollars a year developing it. The R&D budgets and whatever on S3 are dramatically higher than stuff in the past. They have way more users, way more customers, way more usage, way more people working on it. It's just many, many times better than stuff was in the past.
[30:50] Open source is like, "Hey, we could have something better for cheaper because we can hack on it." With cloud it's like, "Well, actually the cloud pieces are super good. Do you care if they're open source as much?" You're like, "Well, I don't know. No, it just works." It's like, "I just write files to it. I don't want to have my open source S3. Why would I do that?" That would be pain.
[31:18] I guess where I'm going in all that is that is open source is changing. Then, also, what makes sense to proprietary? The fact that we're even asking, "Should Remix be proprietary or open source?" is just a sign of the times because 15 years ago I'd say, "Of course, it would be proprietary," like why should this be open source?
[31:44] The pendulum has swung so far the other way towards open source that there's now...The pendulum swung a ways. Then also the environment has changed a lot. Maybe proprietary software makes a lot more sense than it did. With Remix, they're cloud-native. Everything is assumed that you're going to be deploying to these things. Their piece of the puzzle is relatively small.
[32:14] They can just make it really, really good. If something's good enough and cheap enough, you don't care about hacking at it per se. You just need a nice API to do what you needed done. You just want the freedom to do what you want to do. The hackability or whatever aspect or the price aspect doesn't matter if the price is fine, and you trust that it's going to stay fine.
[32:41] That it's hackable in the ways that you care about being hackable. That's the same as with cloud. Again, you don't care about hacking S3's code because it has a nice API, and it's super robust. I'm sure the customers of Remix don't care about modifying the source code of Remix or something because it does what they need it to do. It's good enough, and the price is reasonable.
[33:04] On they go because, at the end of the day, we're just trying to do stuff. Everyone's like, "I'm trying to do something." Open source is a means to the end. Also, buying software is a means to the end as well. I'm very curious watching just how cloud is impacting all these discussions and dynamics. I think it's going to continue. I don't think it's played out all the way. I think there's a lot more changes still coming.
Ryan: [33:43] It's going to be interesting to see for sure. I'd love to talk about the topic of funding. Looking at the Crunchbase for Gatsby, it looks like 46.8 million total funding.
Kyle: [33:56] Sounds about right.
Ryan: [33:58] Series B? It says Series B.
Kyle: [33:59] Mm-hmm.
Ryan: [34:00] I'm curious about a couple things. One would be, and this might benefit those who are in the position where they've got startup ideas, they maybe built something proof to dot. They want to go seek fundraising. That may be a small subset of listeners. I'm curious about the topic of fundraising initially.
[34:18] Also, with that amount of funding that you've got at Gatsby, how is that deployed? What's the plan for it, essentially, and I suppose what's after? Maybe we can start with fundraising in general. Do you have any recommendations for how to think about fundraising or how to get started looking for investors if you're wanting to do a startup?
Kyle: [34:47] In general, the right way to think about investors is not that you're convincing them to give you money because they want to give you money. That's their whole job, is to give away money. Not give away, of course. They're investing it. They're buying part of your company for part of future returns. It's not users up. They have to invest the money. They don't have an option to invest the money.
[35:18] Your only job is to convince them that you're the right ones to invest in. Finding investors and all that takes care of itself if you're worth investing in. If there's traction, there's a clear pathway towards being a viable business. In 2017 was when I released v1 of Gatsby, and it started taking off in a much bigger way.
[35:54] Investors just come out of the woodwork. They're watching all the signals. If they see you getting traction, they'll call you. You don't have to call them.
[36:02] I never fundraised before. I bootstrapped previous stuff. I didn't know anything, but the learning curve is not that difficult. It's kind of a absurd process.
[36:22] [laughter]
Kyle: [36:22] It's so simple and casual at the end of the day, because you just chat with an investor, they bring in another investor for the company, you chat again. It's not very formal, you can do some slides, but a lot of it is they'll ask questions and you answer them and you have a conversation.
[36:42] If they like it, then they would like you present to the whole board, they have Monday partner meetings, and you'll present to all the partners, and then you'll get an offer or not get an offer after that. It literally can take a week. It can be extremely fast.
[37:01] The hard part is all about getting traction, you have to create something that people care about and you don't have to have a business to raise money, of course, seed rounds. Even Series A is all around getting you to the point that you have a viable business but you have to articulate how you're going to draw the dots from here to where you're an actual business and people are paying you.
[37:32] Those are really two things you need to be able to demonstrate that you've created something that's valuable, and then be able to draw the dotted line from here we are right now and this is where we're going to be $100 million business type of thing. You do those two things and then they're like, "Sweet, there's money."
[37:52] [crosstalk]
Ryan: [37:53] It's simple as that. [laughs] OK. For Gatsby in particular, maybe the open-source aspect colors it in a certain way, but how did you draw the dotted line between the value provided and "You should give us money" kind of thing. What would something like that look like when you were doing your fundraising?
Kyle: [38:14] Yeah. Investors are watching. Different investors have different specialties. For whatever reason, interest experience, previous companies, pre-investing experience or experience they've gained from investing in similar types of companies, those are just no parts of the market, like types of companies, types of products, types of technology.
[38:43] Those people, their whole job is just to watch what's going on and then try to detect, like "Oh, something in the world is changing. I'm going to invest in this change," because if there's a company that has a product, and people like it, there's no opportunity to do a startup there. Opportunities only come where something's changing, because it's novel, it's new, there's not already a good company there.
[39:13] Once a good company is in a space, it's done, they're just going to be there and everyone else is going to buy from them, because it's a good company offering a good product.
[39:23] The trick is, for real startups and for investing is where something going to change. It's like something new is going to emerge, or something about the world is going to make the old thing not make sense anymore. New thing can replace it. Those are basically your only two options.
[39:39] Investors are watching for things changing and new opportunities. Then they look for companies in that space. That's what I was saying. If you fit into that, they'll just start calling you because they're like, look, "What you're doing is awesome. I believe the same things you are about what's happening in this world. Maybe we do business together."
[40:08] In the right place, right time the right idea, you make some noise, you get people using it, get people excited about it. Then getting investment takes care of itself.
Ryan: [40:25] Makes sense. Yeah. With the investment that you've gotten now, I assume you do the typical things that you do at a start up with it, you hire people, that's probably one of the biggest expenses and biggest activities that you would do with your funding.
[40:39] Do you have given special ways that you're thinking about that though, I wonder or maybe there's other things you're also using the money for but anything in particular in your scenario at Gatsby that is like, we need money to do this kind of thing.
Kyle: [40:55] No, it's pretty normal stuff. There's a number of engineers working on open source, fixing issues, fixing bugs, creating new features, performance optimizations, pretty much as you'd expect there.
[41:15] We have people working on our cloud platform. That's a lot of work. That's the main reason probably we need investment is it's a pretty specialized skill set. You need pretty sophisticated engineers in order to build a robust platform for doing stuff.
[41:38] The other major investment, integrations, because the main value prop for Gatsby is like, "Hey, React, great way to build a site, static, super fast, easy, hosting, scales, secure." The third part is integrations. It's Gatsby plus WordPress, Gatsby plus Shopify, Gatsby plus Contempo, Gatsby plus Sanity.
[42:04] If you're building sites, you want to just have a well-designed, well-built, debugged, fast connection to the different pieces that you're plugging together. Gatsby gives you that out of the box. You don't have to build it yourself. You install a plugin, and bam, it's working.
[42:20] Then you do a design, implement it, add some content, ship it. We invest really heavily in continually improving those integrations for people to use, and then all the other normal stuff. We have HR and engineering managers, product managers make the whole thing go.
Ryan: [42:50] Makes sense. You must have the long view in mind. I would certainly hope so. What's your prediction if you had one? I don't even know if it's kosher to say, though. What do you think in terms of years out from Gatsby, going public or selling or having some event like that?
[43:09] Here's the first question. Do you think about that much? If so, do you put any kind of hopes on the time frame for it?
Kyle: [43:19] You can, but it's very dangerous. Thinking about the future doesn't actually solve the problems of today much. You want to know where you're going. Why are we doing this? Where are we going? You want that to be clear and simple. Everyone's like, "Yeah, we know where we're going and why we're doing this."
[43:45] The only way to get there is take it step by step. Being too distracted from the day to day is really dangerous because, A, the work that is done today is not getting done. What else you learn at a startup, I guess I didn't have to unlearn this, but people who come from larger companies, they have this weird, magical thinking about stuff. They're like "I don't know. Things just happen."
[44:09] [laughter]
Kyle: [44:10] I don't know, stuff gets cleaned and product plans get written up." You don't know the people doing things. You had no part of it. They just happen, and you do your bit. You're part of this weird, large organization.
[44:26] At a startup, if you don't do something, nothing happens. Literally nothing happens. A week could go by and nothing at all would happen unless you do it. You don't want to get distracted too much by what could be when you need to do something today.
[44:44] Danger, too, is believing your own hype. If you're not grounded in the root reality of what is things today, you can lose track of what actually needs done today. That's a pretty easy thing to slip into. Sometimes as a startup founder, you are spending a lot of time talking about the future and thinking about the future. Investing is a prime time for that.
[45:23] [laughs] At some point I told a friend, the only thing you need to do to raise money is turn the switch in your head to be a grandiose megalomaniac or something like that.
Ryan: [45:37] [laughs]
Kyle: [45:39] You have to come and be very confident and say, "We are going to be this huge company that's going to change the world." You have to say it with 100 percent confidence and no hesitation.
[45:53] It's sort of a game because investors, they know you're not 100 percent confident. It's this funny thing, but you do have to believe it enough to even try, I guess. They have to believe it enough to even try.
[46:11] You can all be like, "We think it's 5 percent likely or something." That's fine because not all investments have to work out and whatever, on we go. You have to be able to switch off that and you have to ignore.
[46:24] Because sometimes, also, you'll have very lauding fans. They'll be like, "Oh my gosh. This is going to change everything." You're like, "Wow. They think we're awesome," whatever.
[46:34] You have to be able to switch between that and what actually is happening now. What do we need to do today and tomorrow and this week and this month to move the flame forward? A journey only happens step by step, so be able to switch gears like that is critical.
Ryan: [46:55] Well put. I like it. It's just about time to start wrapping up. We're almost at time. One thing that I was worrying about before we go, though, I think you're in SF, still, are you?
Kyle: [47:07] Berkeley, to be precise, Berkeley area.
Ryan: [47:08] With everything that's going on in the world now and people are migrating out, any plans to move elsewhere, another hot startup scene maybe?
Kyle: [47:18] I don't know. My wife and I talk about it sometimes. Bay Area's a really pleasant place to live, so we haven't gotten too motivated to do anything. Also, we just had a baby last year. Having a baby makes you want to just not do anything. [laughs] The idea of moving right now sounds utterly exhausting.
Ryan: [47:46] [laughs]
Kyle: [47:47] We have a little house, and it's all set up. I walk to a little office where I work at. All those things make me not want to change anything.
[48:02] It's also like a startup. You want to keep the rest of your life boring when you're doing a startup so that you can be very un-boring in the startup. Conserving your energies for the startup is also helpful.
[48:21] I grew up in the Northwest, in Oregon. I love it there. We have family in north Utah. There's interesting options, but not right now.
Ryan: [48:42] Awesome. Kyle, thank you so much for taking the time today to chat through this stuff. It's certainly been educational for me. The listeners will get a lot of value out of this, too.
[48:53] Thank you so much for taking some time out of your busy schedule. Thinking of your dad, of course, presents a whole other set of reasons to be busy. Thanks again. Where can people find you online?
Kyle: [49:04] Twitter's probably the easiest place twitter.com/kylemathews. Beyond that, I have a blog that I haven't updated in a while, [laughs] as usual, it seems these days. Twitter's great.
Ryan: [49:20] We will link all of that up in the show notes. Kyle, thank you once again. We'll talk to you soon.
[49:26] [music]
Ryan: [49:36] Thank you so much for tuning in to "The Entrepreneurial Coder Podcast" today. This has been Episode 40, with Kyle Mathews. You can find the links to all the resources that Kyle mentioned over at ecpodcast.io, and there you can also subscribe. Head over to ecpodcast.io/subscribe.
[49:53] If you would like to leave a rating and review, that would be awesome. Check us out on Twitter at twitter.com/coderpodcast.
[49:58] [music]
-
Shawn Wang (aka swyx) is an Infinite Builder passionate about Developer Tooling and Developer Communities. He currently works as a Senior Developer Advocate for AWS Amplify and recently published the Coding Career Handbook for Junior to Senior developer careers. In his free time he teaches React, TypeScript, Storybook and Node.js CLI's at Egghead.io, and helps run the Svelte Society community of meetups.
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Peter (PieCarChick) Piekarczyk is the co-founder and CTO of Draftbit, a platform that helps teams build React Native and Expo apps visually. He's been an entrepreneur his whole life but still has trouble spelling the word. Peter's built and maintained projects for React Native, React Navigation, Apollo GraphQL and now ReasonML. He strongly believes in self-reflection and meditation.
Peter's Links
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Greg is a veteran software developer, a consultant, and is the author of Code Your Way Up, a guide for junior developers to rise to the challenge of team leadership roles. When not coding, Greg can be found coaching his kid’s sports or fixing up his cottage.
Greg has two free coupons for his book for the first two to get in touch with him. To get a copy of the book, email Greg at [email protected].
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Joe is the CEO of Thinkster.io where he works to improve online learning for developers. He also organizes ng-conf, React Conf, and the Framework Summit. He gives a lot of talks and workshops, is a Google Developer Expert, and loves board games, Dungeons and Dragons, and Star Wars.
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Noah is the CTO and cofounder of Veryable and the founder and CEO of Touchtap, a digital solutions studio. A tech veteran himself, he’s intimately familiar with the challenges, risks and rewards of introducing new tech into the world. Noah is also the host of CodeStory, a podcast featuring tech leaders, reflecting on their human story in creating world changing, disruptive digital products.
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Helen is a full time project manager and helps out with support for MakerPad and TransistorFM. She’s the founder of NamesAce, PodWords and OfficeHourCards. Helen is a strong proponent of side-projects and helps makers understand how they can benefit from creating and selling their own side hustle.
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Scott is the Senior Web Strategy Manager at Netlify and the bootstrapped founder of Plink. Plink makes smart podcast links that podcasters love and listeners deserve. Scott has been working remotely full-time in software and tech for over a decade, previously with Auth0 and onXmaps.
With a background in woodworking, audio production, songwriting, and far beyond, Scott's always creating and has been developing side projects, doing agency and consulting work, and much more throughout his career. He happily calls western Montana home with his wife, and they enjoy exploring/traveling around the Pacific Northwest and plan to eventually move to the Seattle area.
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Randall is a senior software engineer and published O’Reilly author and has worked at companies such as Eventbrite and Pandora in the past. She’s currently finishing up her second book, a guide on helping developers land jobs.
Randall's Links
The Standout Developer
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Zeno Rocha is the Chief Product Officer at Liferay Cloud, a newly created Liferay, Inc division.
His lifelong appreciation for building software and sharing knowledge led him to speak in over 110 conferences all over the world. He’s now focused on bringing the cloud revolution to the enterprise market while also building and selling digital products on the side.
When he's not working, Zeno likes running, watching movies, and eating cheese. For this last one he even created an app for it.
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Philip is a developer, writer, and entrepreneur who focuses on where code and words intersect. He has written for the likes of CSS tricks, Smashing Magazine, and Twilio. He’s a very recent college grad and is the author of Writing for Software Developers which is available now.
Philip's Links
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Philip on YouTubeTranscript
[0:00] [background music]Ryan Chenkie: [0:08] Hello, and welcome back to "The Entrepreneurial Coder Podcast." This is a show where I talk to you developers who are in business of one form or another and I try to get a sense of how they got to where they are and how they do the things they do.
[0:21] If you're a developer and you want to get into business, or maybe if you're already into business and you want to see where to go next, then hopefully this show is of value to you.
[0:29] This is Episode 30 with Philip Kiely.
[0:42] Quick announcement. I have just launched my latest teaching focus, which is going to be on "Security for React Applications." You can find it at reactsecurity.io. If you're a React developer and you want to find out how to do things like add authentication and authorization to your app, if you want to find out how to harden your frontend react code, then I got some courses that will show you how to do just that.
[1:03] There are some free course offerings, there are some pro courses. Hopefully, you can find something that is useful for you. Head over to reactsecurity.io to check it out.
[1:21] My guest today is Philip Kiely. Philip is a developer, writer, and entrepreneur who focuses on where code and words intersect. He has written for the likes of CSS-Tricks, Smashing Magazine, and Twilio.
[1:33] He's a very recent college grad and is the author of "Writing for Software Developers" which is available now.
[1:39] Philip, welcome to the show.
Philip Kiely: [1:40] Hi, Ryan, thanks for having me on today.
Ryan: [1:43] It's a pleasure to have you here. I was really intrigued to talk to you because you recently launched a book called Writing for Software Developers. This is something that's super interesting to me because I've done a lot of writing, and I'm a software developer. I'm very fascinated about how these two things coincide and why it's important to be a good writer as a software developer.
[2:08] Maybe that's where we could even start. I'd love to get your thoughts on why you think it's important to be good with words when you are also good with codes. Maybe give us just a breakdown of why is that you think that's important to be a good writer as a software developer.
Philip: [2:25] Sure. Imagine you went and sat down in front of your computer and said, "Hey, Siri, make a website." It's not really going to do anything because you haven't been specific enough.
[2:36] [Siri speaks]
Siri: [2:38] I found this on the web for "Make a website..."
Ryan: [2:40] There goes Siri. [laughs]
Philip: [2:41] Sorry about that.
Ryan: [2:41] [laughs] That's OK.
Philip: [2:42] You instruct your computer to make a website and it's not going to do anything because it doesn't know what you want. You have to use the actual language, you have to use HTML, CSS, use some frontend, some backend. Writing is kind of the same way. If you just tell someone, "Hey, make a website," they're not going to really know what to do.
[3:05] You need to practice communicating with the same level of specificity and technical detail in a way that's readable to humans as you do when you're programming.
[3:18] Studying writing in this context, the book doesn't really talk about grammar, syntax, that sort of stuff. It's more about how you can define your audience, like, if I'm writing against the Python interpreter, I'm going to need to write Python 3 code.
[3:34] Similarly, I'm writing for an English-speaking audience, I'm going to need to write in English. My audience has a couple years of background in these topics, so I'm allowed to make certain assumptions about what they're already going to know coming to the article.
[3:48] It's taking the same approach to technical communication that you take with your computer and just translating it to a new language that happens to be, instead of a programming language, whatever human language you're writing in.
Ryan: [4:02] That makes sense. Have you found, in your experience, that software developers in particular aren't generally great writers at the same time? I sense that perhaps you found a need here with this book you've written, "Writing for Software Developers."
[4:23] Have you found it the case that -- and I've heard this from various people that I've spoken with, that if you got a really great software developer, chances are...Maybe not chances are, but there is a chance that they won't be that great of a writer at the same time. They may not know how to communicate with words to quite the same skill level that they can communicate with code.
[4:45] Have you found that to be true at all?
Philip: [4:48] I think that that can be true for a lot of people, but for the industry as a whole, I think that as more and more people are getting into software development, we are getting a broader range of backgrounds in the field, and thus a lot of people are coming in with more pre-existing communication skills.
Ryan: [5:07] Right.
Philip: [5:08] I think that there are a lot of reasons why this perception that software developers are inherently bad at writing exists. I've definitely seen some of my friends coming into college as international students struggling with writing, just due to having to write in their second or third language, and many of them gravitate towards software development.
[5:29] There are plenty of people who get into software development because they don't like writing. I think that overall, there's no inherent reason that someone who is good at programming can't also be good at writing.
[5:42] When people talk about, "You can be the best in the world at one thing or it's a lot easier to become really good at two things, find that intersection and be really effective operating there," I think that when you take two, especially disconnected things or apparently disconnected things, like writing code and writing words, and find that intersection, that's a very powerful place to operate.
Ryan: [6:09] If someone's out there and they're thinking, "Maybe my writing skills are all right. Maybe I don't even know if they're OK or not."
[6:16] If you were trying to convince them that they should take a look at the skills that they got, writing-wise right now, and try to improve upon them, and you were to try to give them some reasons why that's beneficial to do, what would you say? What are the benefits of being a better writer as a software developer?
Philip: [6:35] Being a writer can help you develop your expertise in anything. The first thing I would do is I would ask them what their goals were because I'm sure that writing could help them reach their goals. In order to tell them a specific path or give them specific reasons, I'd have to know exactly what they wanted.
[6:56] For me, I knew that I wanted to be able to teach a bunch of people the same stuff that I had struggled to learn myself. For me, practicing my writing was for the purpose of gaining access to large publications that would be able to magnify and amplify my voice to the far corners of the Internet.
[7:17] It was also about finding a flexible job that I could do part-time while in college and would pay a lot more than working at the dining hall and give me a chance to grow my skills and pad my resume.
Ryan: [7:29] Yeah. Totally. Maybe that's something we could go into. What are the opportunities that you've happened upon now that you've focused on writing?
[7:38] We've mentioned some in the intro, which is you've written for CSS-Tricks, Smashing Magazine, and Twilio. Tell me about that. How did you come upon those opportunities? Was that a direct result of focusing more on your writing skills in particular?
Philip: [7:55] Imagine that I'd woken up one morning and I'd said, "OK. I'm going to write the headline story for 'The New York Times' today. I'm a college journalist with basically no experience but I really think that I can get this done." That would go nowhere, and I'd get laughed out of whatever room I presented that idea in.
[8:15] One of the great things about writing in the software development space is that all of the biggest names in publication are constantly looking for new ideas, and new voices, and new authors.
[8:28] Even with very little technical background...Let me rephrase that. Even with very little on-paper experience -- you still need a strong technical background -- and no previous publications under your belt, if you can write a compelling pitch, they're not going to care who you are, what pre-existing audience you might have. They don't care about any of that. They care, can you develop a really great article that our readers are going to enjoy and learn from?
[8:58] Once you do that in just one place, whatever other barriers might have existed really fall away. When I pitch in places, I can just say, "Hey, I work for this other place. It's very similar to yours," then they're going to be willing to entertain my ideas without caring that I'm sending the pitch from my dorm room.
Ryan: [9:15] Absolutely. It's been really interesting to see a lot of folks that I've been interacting within the industry who weren't focused on writing so much in previous parts of their career but have really started to focus.
[9:29] Recently, I'm thinking of some people who I knew were great software developers who have more recently started to write for publications, maybe not to the same size and scope as some of these we've listed here but have started to write.
[9:44] It's been really cool to see the opportunities that have opened up as a result. You'll write a piece for publication and then there are a bunch of possible effects that can happen as a result of it that you may not even be aware of as possibilities going into it, and they may happen as you are sleeping.
[10:03] I'm just thinking of some examples that are very real, where someone will write a post. It will get shared around. Someone who needs a developer who specializes in that topic will reach out to the author, hire them for a small contract, whatever. That's a very real, tangible way that writing can have downstream affects.
[10:28] Also just opening up the network of people that are in your audience. You can grow that and compound it. I've seen, for sure, for myself and then also for others around me, the real benefits of it.
[10:42] Perhaps we could chat about the book itself, Writing for Software Developers. This is a recent launch of yours, very successful launch from what I'm seeing on Twitter. You've been posting some things about it, some of your numbers. Maybe we can even dive into that.
[10:58] Before we get there, maybe let's chat about the book itself. What's in the book? What are people going to learn from it?
Philip: [11:04] Sure. The book is composed of three acts. It's acts because it has a Shakespearean metaphor, motif throughout the book. Shakespeare is on the cover. Some of the example articles in the book use his sonnets.
[11:24] Anyway, in the first act, it walks the readers through step-by-step the process of crafting a technical tutorial. Something that's 2,000 or 3,000 words and you could sell right away to a client.
[11:36] Now the reason that I chose this as the thing to walk people through is, first off, it's really achievable for new writers to get through 2,000 or 3,000 words, scope out an idea, flesh it out, and present it. Second, there's just a ton of demand from publishers for this stuff.
[11:52] I actually have put up a website. It's called whopaystechnicalwriters.com. Right now, it's listing 43 different publications that pay for technical content. There's lots of demand out there. Even with the increase in people writing. There's the third thing...
Ryan: [12:09] What's the URL again? I'll just put in the show notes. What was the URL really quickly? Who...
Philip: [12:12] Sure. It's whopaystechnicalwriters.com.
Ryan: [12:16] Cool. Thank you.
Philip: [12:19] The third thing is that if you're writing anything else -- a book, some documentation, API docs, a README -- the process of coming up with an idea, figuring out your publisher and your audience, doing some research, then actually sitting down and doing an iterated writing and editing process, all of that is going to be the same, just probably at a larger scale for these larger projects.
[12:48] That's why Act 1 covers writing technical tutorials, but the book is called Writing for Software Developers because the skills are more general. The second section, Act 2, has three examples -- two of technical tutorials, one of a technical article. It breaks down exactly the choices I made in writing them.
[13:08] The third act is called "The Business of Writing." It's about pricing your work. It's about IP, copyright, competition. It's about how publishers monetize the work -- talking about advertising, sales and sponsorships, content marketing. It also talks about promoting your work and pursuing longer-term projects.
[13:28] You've got all this. Throughout it are interview quotes from 11 prominent and successful members of the field who are known to be good writers. We have Patrick McKenzie, Matt Levine, Cassidy Williams, Jeff Atwood, tons of people who volunteered their time to talk to me about their experience. I block quote those interviews throughout the book, and then stick the full transcripts at the end.
Ryan: [13:52] Very nice, that's excellent. That's a very intriguing theme for a book. I think that's really cool how you're working on...The book operates on a theme, the Shakespearean theme, but also gives you the technical aspects that you're looking for.
[14:10] I'm looking on the book website right now. You do have a ton of great interviews, including one with my good pal Chris from Scotch. There's Chris. That's excellent.
[14:21] Tell me about the marketing story behind this. What's the way that you found your audience for it and started to get the word out about it? You've had a great launch. One of the most recent tweets that I'm seeing here from you is almost at 20,000 in sales. That's huge.
Philip: [14:41] Yeah, and I'm past that now.
Ryan: [14:43] You passed that now? That's huge. One thing that I hear quite often from people who are interested in getting into selling a product is their worry that because they may not have a huge audience, it may just be a flop.
[14:58] It looks like you're newer on Twitter. You joined in December, 2018. You've got sub-1,000 for followers, but here you are. You've made a great product, you've had a huge launch, and it's gone very well.
[15:11] Tell me about your marketing strategy. How would you coach people if they're saying like, "I don't have very many people following me on Twitter. Is it even worthwhile to launch something?"
Philip: [15:24] Absolutely. Imagine this. You wake up one morning. You're about to turn 21. You have 13 Twitter followers and 2 of them are your dad. [laughs] You're sitting at home in the middle of the worst economic situation you've ever seen in your life, hopefully will ever see in my life, and you decide, "I really want to sell 100 copies of my work during the launch week."
[15:51] What did I do to exceed that goal? I think right now I'm at 582 copies sold in the first 14 days. I had a very many-pronged strategy. I won't get into all the things that I tried that didn't work, but just a few who did.
[16:10] First off, I launched on Hacker News. I've been a member of Hacker News for a long time. I've been reading it for years. I know the community very well. I know exactly what they respond to, and what they don't like.
[16:21] I created a Show HN post. I wrote this a week in advance and spent a week tweaking and editing it. I made the post at exactly 8:00 AM my time, and then I left a really long comment below it explaining a lot about the book.
[16:35] Because it was a Show HN, it had a lot of sticking power. It got to stay around on that separate tab for a while, which meant within a couple hours people had up-voted it a little bit. It was afternoon in Europe, so they bought it up.
[16:50] The Eastern Seaboard woke up, looked at it, voted it all the way to the top just in time for California to wake up and me to get a huge influx of traffic because it was at the top of Hacker News.
Ryan: [17:00] Interesting. Timing was very key there.
Philip: [17:01] That's why I sold the most...Yeah, I think the timing was key. That's why I sold most of my books on launch day, or at least in that first half of launch.
[17:11] From there, I'm really grateful to the people who did interviews with me, not only because their interviews make the book 10 times better than it could be on its own, but because they were willing to lend some of their credibility to my project.
[17:28] When I say lend, I really mean invest. Because I think that by creating a great product, and finding a large audience with it, I gave them a positive return on investment for attaching their name and staking a little bit of their reputation on the quality of this product, which is a big risk for them to take.
[17:48] You can't just go around throwing your name on everything. You have to protect your, I think it's called, the right to publicity.
[17:56] Ultimately, by keeping in close contact with them throughout the process of creating this book, and especially coming up to launch, I was able to give everyone a contributor copy so that they knew they were supporting a professional-looking product. I was able to let them know exactly what my launch strategy was and how I hoped they would play into that.
[18:19] Every single person who I interviewed in one way or another helped me out with launching the book. In particular, Patrick McKenzie and Daniel Vassallo both wrote very successful original tweet threads about it. That got me a ton of traffic and a ton of sales, so I'm very grateful for that.
[18:37] The second aspect of my marketing strategy was leveraging the interview subjects' massive Twitter audiences, as compared to my literally 13 followers, and then using that to boost my signal.
[18:52] The final thing that I did was, I've been working in this field for over a year now, the field being technical content. I have a long list of people who are clients, potential clients, people who I've just run into from writing, so I just sent literally everyone I know individualized emails about the book.
[19:15] It's not like I had a big email list or anything that I was sending out to. It was just me from my personal email account writing individualized emails all morning to people. That generated even more traffic, people posting on social media about it, and people bought the book. That was the third successful strategy that I used.
[19:34] Since then, I've been leveraging my new audience. You said sub-1,000, but I'm really excited about having 823 Twitter followers. I've had a good amount of success posting tweet threads, posting content, and continuing to keep the momentum rolling in terms of sales.
Ryan: [19:55] Yeah, totally. Certainly, I'm sure the followers will continue to roll in. The leveraging the audience part that you just spoke about, where you're getting interviews from people in the industry that are well-known who have large audiences and trying to maybe get some attention from what they are going to be saying about your book, I think that's so smart.
[20:23] One thing I wonder about that is, these people that you have as interview subjects for the book, are these all people that you had a pre-established relationship with in some way? Are they people that you reached out to cold? Was it a mix? How did you establish this idea with these people to do interviews?
Ryan: [20:48] I had basically no pre-existing relationship with anyone who I interviewed for the book. I'd never worked with them, never been their client, never been their employee. None of that.
[21:02] For a couple of them, we had maybe done email exchanges before. That email exchange in the past was initiated the exact same way that I initiated getting everyone interested in the project. That was just lots of cold email.
[21:18] I sent out almost a hundred cold emails asking for interviews to get the 11 that I did. There's no point in getting into who didn't respond or say yes. I queried basically everyone who you would expect to appear on a list next to these people. These are the ones who had the time in their day to do it. I'm very grateful for that.
[21:41] In terms of the exact emails that I sent, they tended to be, A, very short and, B, very personalized. I would say, "Hey, I'm a college student. I'm working on this book project. I'd like to interview you for these particular reasons related to your work. Here's my schedule."
[21:59] For the people in foreign countries, I said, "If the only time that works for you is 3:00 AM my time, I would rather wake up at 3:00 AM, call you, and do an interview than not have you in the book." I made it very clear that I'm willing to accommodate whatever their schedules are and make this a minimally difficult process for them to do.
[22:19] It turns out that a lot of people are willing to give you 30 or 60 minutes when you create a good value proposition like that.
[22:29] Once they had agreed to the interview, the thing that I did to make the interviews good and to make them invested in the project is I just went and looked at everything they've done before.
[22:39] The example that I gave in the last podcast that I did is that Patrick McKenzie has written more than 500 articles on his site. I'm pretty sure I read about 200 of them coming into the interview. Some of those were reviewing things that I'd read in the past. I read Daniel Vassallo's book. I read Cassidy Williams' newsletter.
[22:59] I just read all of this stuff that people have written. Because of that, I was able to ask questions that other people hadn't asked them before. That's the key aspect of my interview strategy is coming up with original questions to get original answers.
Philip: [23:13] Yeah, that's so smart. The interviews themselves, I would assume you're asking them questions that are very particular to the topic of the book, right? These people are all writers, so you're asking them things like, "What's your strategy for writing in XYZ scenario?" Is that the idea?
Philip: [23:33] Exactly. I think that a lot of the people in the book are better known for something they do other than their writing, but they wouldn't necessarily be known for that if they hadn't written so much, or if not written, created content somewhere else.
[23:52] I didn't just talk about writing because there's only so much you can say in terms of, "Yes, I sit down at the keyboard and I type words until they are good."
Ryan: [24:01] [laughs]
Philip: [24:01] I talked about all those things tangential to the process of writing. Many of these people publish other people's writing, and so I asked a lot about that because I have experience on one side of the table.
[24:12] I was trying to get the perspective of the people who are reading my work, commenting on it, giving me feedback, and ultimately deciding whether or not it gets published and whether or not I get paid. I was trying to bring these perspectives into the book through the interviews.
Ryan: [24:29] That's very cool. You mentioned those three prongs of the marketing approach that were really successful. Was there anything you tried that didn't work so well for this launch, anything you might recommend against if folks are interested in doing a product? Any experience there?
Philip: [24:48] Yeah. You know the saying, "50 percent of your advertising budget is wasted, you just don't know which 50 percent."
Ryan: [24:55] Yes.
Philip: [24:56] My advertising budget was $ and plenty of hours of my time. I did a lot of things. I made a Facebook post, made a LinkedIn post, made a Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, just a ton of different platforms. None of those were particularly successful or drove a ton of traffic.
[25:19] Afterwards, I went on Reddit, and while I got a ton of traffic through that post, I don't think I necessarily made very many sales. I think that you ultimately have to try everything, and then once you figure out what works, and for me what worked was Twitter and Hacker News, just double down on that, but it might be different for different products. The other thing is...
[25:40] [crosstalk]
Ryan: [25:40] Go ahead.
Philip: [25:42] The other thing is that there are definitely things that I should have done. The conventional wisdom is you have to grow your audience first, you have to make a landing page, make an email list, provide a lot of valuable content for free, and then launch your book.
[25:58] The fact that I was able to succeed without that doesn't mean that that stuff isn't useful. I imagine I could've sold a lot more if I'd been able to put the time in with that. But ultimately, this book already took me almost six months to write, and I didn't have the time to get a massive content marketing operation underway as well while also trying to hit my goal of publishing before graduation.
Ryan: [26:22] Absolutely. Something that I was thinking about is that is the conventional product launch wisdom. You have to spend a lot of time building up the audience, building up your email list. Giving your best stuff away for free is the tip that I often hear, and gain that trust with people before you actually launch a product to them.
[26:49] This is not always necessary, as you have proven here. I guess if you've got the time to do that, perhaps it's a good idea, but if you're trying to get something done in short order, there is still a possibility if you use wise marketing strategies like you have to make it a success without that.
[27:11] One of those strategies that I wanted to zoom in on is Hacker News because Hacker News...I don't know, Hacker News is a bit of a mystery to me. I don't spend much time there, that's probably why it's a mystery. It sounds like that's where you have spent a lot of time, so you know the community very well.
[27:30] What are the characteristics of a product that is going to do well in a Hacker News post versus one that's going to be laughed out of the Y combinator domain?
[27:45] You know what I mean?
Philip: [27:49] Yeah.
Ryan: [27:49] Many of us in the industry know of Hacker News to be this ruthless place of [laughs] the worst comments you might happen upon about a product if it's posted there that you'd ever see. Why did a book like yours resonate with the kinds of people, perhaps, that are on Hacker News versus many other things that are not so welcome?
Philip: [28:19] I've made some big mistakes on Hacker News before. This is going to be a your podcast exclusive and I'm a little nervous to talk about it on the air, so I'm going to preface this by reminding the audience that, at the time, I was a particularly dumb college students.
Ryan: [28:36] [laughs]
Philip: [28:37] I created this site called milliondollarjobs.com that my friends are still making fun of me for.
Ryan: [28:44] [laughs]
Philip: [28:44] I intended it as this harmless parody of some of these sites out there that are promising a lot and not really delivering anything, especially in the career space. I thought that I had done a very clear job of showing that this site was not a serious thing.
[29:05] Unfortunately, I'd totally misjudged the audience and people were taking it kind of seriously and getting their hopes up, which was not what I wanted. I got a ton of traffic through this post from Hacker News. A lot of people left justifiably mean comments.
Ryan: [29:21] [laughs]
Philip: [29:23] I freaked out, emailed the moderator, and said, "Hey, could you do one of those super tanky downvotes to my post, please?" and deleted the site from my personal website because it just wasn't a good look. It was an entirely failed experiment.
Ryan: [29:41] Interesting.
Philip: [29:42] Fortunately, Hacker News doesn't seem to have a particularly long memory, because you can make these very big public mistakes on there, what ultimately they're going to respond to is genuine effort, creating something that's legitimately good and interesting.
[30:03] One thing Cassidy Williams says in the interview for the book based on her experience with developer evangelism is that developers don't like being sold to. The Hacker News audience also does not like being sold to.
[30:16] It's about creating something that spends a lot of time demonstrating its own value, in my case, through a lot of social proof, but also through a free chapter, for example, posting in the comments section a huge excerpt from the book about Hacker News itself, and really taking the time to show the community that you care a lot about the thing that you have made.
[30:40] In this case, having made a genuine product and a real effort, I was correspondingly rewarded with positive attention, for the most part.
[30:49] That said, you can't show something to 20,000 people without a couple of them hating you just for making it. There were, of course, a few comments. Someone went through and found a typo...
Ryan: [31:01] [laughs]
Philip: [31:01] Not a typo, but an awkwardly phrased sentence in a blog post that I'd written six months ago and said, "Well, if this guy can't even write proper English like this terrible sentence, why should we listen to anything he has to say?"
Ryan: [31:15] [laughs]
Philip: [31:16] You just have to not feed the trolls and trust that the community at large is going to respect the work that you've done.
Ryan: [31:23] Yeah. Man, that's interesting. I always have this picture of the Hacker News readership or the members of Hacker News being [laughs] these people that just sit around waiting for something to bash all day long. That person who [laughs] found the awkwardly phrased sentence is who I have in my mind when I picture Hacker News sometimes.
Philip: [31:46] That exists, but for the most part, if that's what these people did all day, they wouldn't be buying my book. Most people on Hacker News are busy professionals who are looking to keep a thumb on the pulse of the industry.
[32:02] If you make something bad like I did that one time that wastes everyone's time, then sure, you're going to get yelled out of the room, very justifiably. But, every time I've made a genuine effort on hacker news, it's been rewarded with positivity.
Ryan: [32:19] That's really cool. Thank you for telling that story about the failed experiment. That's an interesting story and one, I think, that people can take a lot of lessons from. Aside from that, though, in your mind, from what you've seen on Hacker News, is there a particular kind of product...?
[32:39] Let's think of courses, books, this kind of thing, that are in the software development space. Are there certain topics that just wouldn't do well on Hacker News, do you think? I'll give you an example from my own work, is that I just released a free course that's about securing React applications. It's a top-to-bottom, how to secure your React app. It gets into lots of aspects of security on the web.
[33:08] I didn't post it to Hacker News and I don't know that I will. First of all, I suppose it's because I don't really spend any time there in the first place. I don't have the feel for the audience there. I don't know what they respond to and I'm learning a lot from you as we're talking.
[33:27] Also, from what I do know of Hacker News, it seems like a topic that wouldn't really be of interest there for some reason. I see Hacker News as being a place where certain topics like how to make more money doing something in software development, that might be one topic that is of interest there.
[33:51] Very focused, particular niche topics around certain aspects of different frameworks and libraries, etc., don't seem like they would resonate that well. Anyway, what are your thoughts on that? Are there certain kinds of content in that regard that wouldn't do well?
Philip: [34:07] Yeah, it's complicated because on the one hand, the more technical the content is, the better it tends to do. On the other hand, the more niche the content is, the more it's a high-risk, high-payoff situation. 90 percent of the time, if you post something really, really niche, it's going to get just ignored.
[34:30] 10 percent of the time -- and these are very rough and probably inaccurate percentages -- a ton of people are going to see it and say, "Hey, this is awesome. That is my niche. I connect super deeply with this thing that has been created and posted here," and they're going to comment and they're going to upvote and they're going to tell people about it.
[34:49] When you can do something like my book, which is at the same time very, very general, it's writing for all software developers, and also very, very specifically technical.
Ryan: [34:59] Yeah, that's what I was thinking.
Philip: [35:00] This is a book not designed for 99 percent of the people out there in the world who want to write anything. I think that's where you meet the sweet spot.
[35:13] The worst thing that can happen if you post something is that it gets ignored, and that's fine. Then all you're out is the five minutes it took you to type in the headline, the URL, and make sure everything works.
[35:27] Ultimately, while certain topics do better, you can never predict everything fully ahead of time. I think that it's always just worth taking the shot and seeing if there are people on that platform who like it. That's true for Hacker News and that's true for every platform.
Ryan: [35:44] Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, cool, that's really helpful. I was just thinking that. Your book is both very broadly applicable, but also very niche, at the same time.
[35:55] It's an interesting sweet spot, like you said, that you fit, which is, I'm sure, to do well into the future. Speaking about your future, you have just recently graduated.
[36:07] Huge congratulations to you. I think you said, just a week ago, you've graduated from college. That's awesome.
[36:12] You've got your CS degree now, with honors. What's your plan for the future?
Philip: [36:17] Last summer, I interned at a company that I'm really excited to return to as a full-time software engineer, because I really believe in the company. They make great stuff, and I learned a lot while I'm working there.
[36:30] That said, I do intend to continue promoting my book for sure. But also, I get a little...I don't like it when people on the Internet are selling courses about how to sell courses, or, "I'm going to teach you how to make money teaching people how to make money."
Ryan: [36:49] [laughs]
Philip: [36:49] There's a certain level of meta that I just find disingenuous. I think that while I was writing this book, I made a very deliberate effort to stay below that level, to stay at the level where I am teaching a genuine skill rather than teaching about teaching, or teaching about teaching about teaching, or just getting into a ridiculous level of abstraction.
[37:14] In order to support that, I have to continue to do the thing that I've been doing for the past more than a year while I was learning all this stuff and then writing this book. That's writing technical tutorials for clients. It's something that I love to do, and it's something that I hope I'm going to continue to do, even with a full-time job, in the nights and weekends sort of time.
[37:37] Now that I've written the book, I'm getting a lot of inbound interest, and a lot of cool opportunities to write for places whose previous work I think is really interesting. I definitely intend to pursue those and keep reading technical content so that I can keep teaching more people, both through the content itself, and then just one level, just the acceptable level of meta above that, with this book.
Ryan: [38:02] Yeah, totally. That's probably a good place to start wrapping up. One thing that I do wonder if you can speak to before we go, though, is if there are folks out there who want to start thinking about writing a book, if they want to start thinking about doing a course, hopefully [laughs] not too many levels of abstraction meta above the actual topic itself...
[38:26] If they do want to start thinking about that sort of thing, what do you recommend? What's a good way to start to explore topics that would both be of interest to some audience out there, and also achievable in terms of being able to write a book about it or create a screencast course about it?
Philip: [38:48] I love Jengo, and let's say I wanted to write a book about Jengo, even though there's plenty of competition out there. The first thing I'd do is go ahead and find a few publishers, pitch them articles on something very specific implemented in Jengo, write those, get the feedback from the editors, get comfortable with my voice, and publish those...
[39:10] Making sure that if I want to write a book about how to make APIs with Jengo, maybe the things that I'm going to do with publishers are very front-end focused so I'm not stealing content away from myself.
[39:22] After doing this two or three times, I'm sure you'd have some understanding of what people are looking for, some understanding of your own writing process, your own knowledge and abilities. Then it would be pretty straightforward to sit down and outline the book. Instead of outlining it as a book, outline it as a series of 20 related articles on the same topic.
[39:48] Write a few of those articles, send them out for feedback among your friends and professional network, and just continue to iteratively create the book.
[39:58] By the time you've written those 20 articles, you can just glue them together and boom, you have an entire book.
[40:05] That's the process I would recommend. Start with some public-facing work, then figure out exactly what your outline's going to look like, and just write it a piece at a time, get feedback along the way. Then when you're done, really invest the time...
[40:22] I finished the content of the book about a month before actually publishing it, but I went through several rounds of first developmental copy editing and then proofreading, beta reading, with both a network of my friends, and then also my mother, who's a professional proofreader and copyeditor.
[40:41] I'd say it's definitely worth the time to make that investment in making a really high-quality product, and that's one thing that would help your book stand out from the crowd. That's the approach that I would suggest to writing a technical book.
Ryan: [40:54] Nice, love it. That's that. That's a unique approach that I haven't heard, be advised before, but one that makes a lot of sense. That's awesome. Thank you for that.
[41:03] Great, well, where can people find you online? We're going to link up some of these spots that you've already talked about the book, of course, which is at writingforsoftwaredevelopers.com. Whopaystechnicalwriters.com is another great resource for those who want to get paid to write articles.
[41:19] Where else can people go to? Where can they find you online?
Philip: [41:23] My central hub on the Internet is philipkiely.com, which is just my own personal website. That links to literally everywhere that I am. I think that if you want to get up-to-date updates on what I'm working on, Twitter's the best place for that because I'm posting daily about tips from my own work, and then on YouTube.
[41:44] I'm definitely planning on creating some more videos about...for example, the one I'm planning on working on this week is doing a complete video walkthrough of the first week analytics on sales, both looking at the sales themselves, my Google Analytics and then also stuff like Twitter to figure out exactly how all of these people came and found my book and bought it. That's where you should find me.
Ryan: [42:11] Sounds good. Twitter, it's twitter.com/philip_kiely, and then YouTube. What's your YouTube channel?
Philip: [42:19] If you just go to YouTube.kiely.xyz, it'll redirect you though.
Ryan: [42:24] Oh, interesting. OK.
Philip: [42:27] It's also just at my name Phillip Kiely.
Ryan: [42:30] We'll link that up. That's great. Thank you so much for being on the show today. This was a lot of fun. I am very happy to hear that your launches...It was a great success. I wish you much more success in the future. Congrats again on your recent graduation.
Philip: [42:46] Thank you, Ryan. This was a lot of fun.
[42:48] [background music]
Ryan: [43:00] Thank you so much once again for tuning in to the "Entrepreneurial Coder Podcast" today. This has been Episode 30 with Philip Kiely.
[43:07] You can find show notes with links to all the resources that Philip mentioned at ecpodcast.io. If you'd like to follow along on Twitter, it's twitter.com/coderpodcast. If you'd like to subscribe, you can go to ecpodcast.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed this episode, it would be awesome if you could leave a rating and review. Until next time, happy hacking.
-
Christopher is an entrepreneur and investor and is the co-founder of Snappa, a self-funded SaaS app that helps non-designers create online graphics. Christopher left his day job in 2014 to work on startups full-time and has been focusing on business and investing ever since.
Christopher's Links
Snappa
Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
Lean Customer Development
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Saron is a developer, international tech speaker, and podcaster, and is the founder of the recently acquired CodeNewbie, the most supportive community around for people learning to code. She’s the host of the Command Line Heros podcast and you can find her online at saron.io.
Saron's Links
Codeland
Saron's Website
Saron on Twitter -
Dan founded Wahlin Consulting which provides training and architecture services on front-end and back-end web technologies, Docker/Kubernetes, and Cloud technologies. He’s published multiple courses on Pluralsight.com and is a Docker Captain, Microsoft MVP/Regional Director, and Google GDE. Dan speaks at multiple conferences and runs the Code with Dan development newsletter.
Dan's Links
Code With Dan
Dan on Pluralsight
Pluralsight Author Programming
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