Inventing the Company That's Right for You with Natalie Nagele of Wildbit

Courtland Allen 7s

What's up everyone? This is Courtland from IndieHackers.com and you're listening to the Indie Hackers Podcast. On this show I talk to the founders of profitable internet businesses and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they get to where they are today? How do they make decisions at their companies and in their personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick?

And the goal is, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own successful internet businesses. Join me today as Natalie Nagele, CEO of a company called Wildbit. A lot of people talk about building a sustainable business nowadays, but Natalie is one of the few who has already done it. Wildbit is an 18-year-old software company. It's been around for a long time. It shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.

They have 30 employees, they're very profitable, generating many millions of dollars per year in revenue, and the best part is that it is completely bootstrapped. Natalie has never raised a dime from investors, which means that she and her co-founder/husband Chris, control everything. They get to run their company however they want.

Nobody can tell them not to do something. And as a result, they made a lot of very interesting choices that I'm excited to talk about. So, Natalie, welcome to the Indie Hackers podcast and thank you so much for coming on the show.

Natalie Nagele 1m 19s

Thanks, Courtland. I'm so excited to be here.

Courtland Allen 1m 21s

I am excited to have you here. There's so much to talk about with Wildbit. You guys have transitioned from being a consulting company to a product company. You've released multiple products, not just one. Some of your products have grown to millions of dollars in revenue.

Some of your products have failed and you pulled the plug on them and shut them down. And you even spun off a product and sold it to another company. You've hired. I'm sure you’ve fired. The list just goes on. You're running this company as a husband and wife team, which is fascinating to me. You're doing the whole remote work thing and you've been doing it since 2000. Way before it was cool. You have a 32-hour work week. You guys have done pretty much everything.

Natalie Nagele 1m 56s

You make it sound so good.

Courtland Allen 1m 58s

It is good. It's great. This is all great stuff. It's so hard for me to even know where to start. What's something that you guys haven't done as a company these past 18 years that you'd be excited to do at some point in the future?

Natalie Nagele 2m 10s

Oh, there's so much. Man, one of the things that I'm super excited -- we're a small company and we are really limited and resources to some degree. And one thing I think we can get much better at is providing opportunities for individual growth inside the organization. And not necessarily -- encouraging, to some degree, people to find jobs elsewhere because we don't have those opportunities inside.

So we have this crazy idea that what I'm calling Wildbit 3.0, which is to re-envision the purpose of our profits, to really be focused on how can Wildbit's profits help grow every individual in the organization, whether that's in their current careers or why do we have to only build software? Why can't we build something else?

So, we have crazy ideas but that's -- I really want to figure out a way -- and this is where we're moving towards -- is becoming a little bit bigger just so that we have more opportunities for people to grow, and having leadership opportunities, and that kind of thing. That's a big one on the radar right now that I'm super excited about.

Courtland Allen 3m 15s

Oh, that's so cool. I love hearing about founders and companies like you who are doing this wild experimentation with your businesses because I think we haven't reached any sort of peak in terms of what a company can look like and how it functions.

There's still a lot of discovery left to go and people like you are blazing this trail that I think others are afraid to do because it just seems risky. And that's not a dig on them. I think it's because you've built something that's truly self-sustaining and so you've created almost a safe space for you guys to do this kind of experimentation.

Natalie Nagele 3m 45s

Yeah, I think there should be as many unique businesses as there are unique people, right, who run them. Because in all honesty, entrepreneurs are doing it or should be doing it for themselves. Right? Because they have some crazy itch. Chris and I have always looked at it and said, "How do we want to run this business?" Because I don't think there should be rules.

We're not in medicine or accounting where there's real rules to follow. There is no rules here. And so, we get to invent them however we want, starting from, "How big do we want to grow, and how fast do we want to grow?" And reaching all the way into, "What does that mean in terms of what we build and for how long?"

All that stuff. I think that's the whole point of being an entrepreneur is getting to be really thoughtful around the whys, around everything, not just the products and how they grow, but how you build an organization.

Courtland Allen 4m 36s

So let's take this to an extreme. Imagine you're in some sort of dreamworld, Natalie, where pretty much everything you try works out. You can just go to town making changes to your company and its culture and processes, totally risk free. What are some of the unconventional changes that you'd make?

Natalie Nagele 4m 53s

I really want to be able to create a space inside of Wildbit where people can play in areas that aren't necessarily just around their craft, like software development, design, that kind of thing. I would love to make Wildbit a home where our team gets to spend that time that they're working and getting paid, pushing themselves past their comfort zones in various ways.

And I know that that's not for everyone, but there's a lot of people especially, they get attracted to Wildbit as a company, who are creatives. They're deep thinkers, they're interested in a lot of things, interested in exploring a lot of things. And maybe it's because the older I get, the more I realize our time is limited and valuable. And a lot of times if you're working all the time on one thing, by the time you get home, your free time doesn't really support some of those hobbies and creative things.

And so, I'd love to be able to experiment and also see, what can I do for Wildbit? Maybe Wildbit, what if we made soap? Why not? I don't know. Why not? Or what I told the team was Chris and I always dreamed of running a hotel one day. Why can't it be a Wildbit hotel? I don't know. I mean some of this stuff is probably bat shit crazy. I don't know. I would love for us to be so profitable and have created the systems in place to support our customers so well that we have the extra space.

That's what it comes down to. Our customers are first. In terms of, well, that's our job is to support them to make sure that they are provided the service that they have come to love from us and that we are delivering on our promises. But how can I grow that in a way that we can be overly profitable, so to speak? Is that a thing? But have enough fat in the profits so that we can experiment and play.

My dream, I think, for Chris and I is that Wildbit is just a creative space for people. We have to be profitable for that to happen. Because you've got to pay with it somehow, but I want it to be a creative space. I want to be able to give people opportunities to explore themselves and what they're capable of and how big they can make themselves. Really push people. I think that would be really great.

Courtland Allen 7m 10s

This is so cool. It's like you've created your own playground really -- slash I don't know.

Natalie Nagele 7m 15s

That's it.

Courtland Allen 7m 15s

Utopian society.

Natalie Nagele 7m 17s

No, It's not utopia. Come on. It's not utopia. I'm much better at this stuff than I am as a business person, which is a problem. I've been mulling on this thing where the difference between an entrepreneur and a business person. I'm not the first person to call that out, obviously, but it's just been weighing on me because the entrepreneur stuff comes easy to me.

Being crazy and doing whatever the hell I want and really pushing ourselves to think, why. Some of the business person stuff I envy. There's some brilliant business people out there that I know or that we all know that I'm just like, "Wow, you totally get it," and I wish I was better at that.

Courtland Allen 7m 54s

You've built a company that is, by all definitions, super successful. The vast majority of entrepreneurs and business people on earth will look up to what you've done and see you as an example that they want to follow. Do you feel like an expert?

Natalie Nagele 8m 9s

There are certain things I think I'm definitely an expert on. I think I feel pretty confident with what we've learned and what we've discovered and how we build team and build culture. Really just intentionally supporting human beings who work in an organization. I think I'm really confident in that.

If you came and asked me, "Hey, help me figure out how to grow another business from scratch," I would not, I still look at that stuff as a series of really fortunate events that kind of got pieced together.

Truthfully, no. I'm surrounded by brilliant people who support me and Chris in building something great. We provide as much as we can of ourselves to them. And then in return we built brilliant products.

That I can replicate, but if you asked me for marketing tactics or how to best monetize, or any of that stuff, man, it is so over my head and I'm trying to get better at it. I hired my first director of finance and she's brilliant.

I don't know how I lived without her and she's helping me learn that stuff. But I just think that our skill set, we build great product. Chris is an incredibly smart technologist who really understands the product and all that stuff, but me personally, man, I'm just not a business person from that perspective.

Courtland Allen 9m 29s

Well, I've got good news and bad news for you. The good news is that we're definitely going to talk about a lot of the culture, people, that realm that you're comfortable in. The bad news is, I'm still going to ask you marketing and growth and early stage strategy questions.

Natalie Nagele 9m 42s

I know, I know. No, you should. Make me think about it. You should. No, I actually I think about that all the time cause that's my, that's my soft spot or my weak spot. Right?

Courtland Allen 9m 51s

So you can divide up Wildbit as a company into two phases, the consulting phase of your business and then about ten-ish years ago you transitioned into being a product-focused business. Is that accurate?

Natalie Nagele 10m 3s

Yes.

Courtland Allen 10m 4s

I don't know very much about the first phase of Wildbit. What's the story there? How did you guys get started and eventually become a product business?

Natalie Nagele 10m 14s

Yeah, so Chris and I run the business together. It's an 18-year-old company that he started when he was like 19, 20 years old. And we've been doing it together for 15 years. And so, he started it as brochureware -- nightlife, clubs, bars, restaurants, kind of business, lots of flash. I don't know if people still know what flash is. I don't know. You have young listeners who don't know that anymore.

Courtland Allen 10m 38s

They might not.

Natalie Nagele 10m 38s

I know. Look it up. It's brilliant. And so doing a lot of that kind of work, that slowly transitioned in -- and then we started working. So the first couple of years he was doing that, we met, started dating very quickly. I started to run whatever part of the business I could to help him. So, QuickBooks, invoicing, looking through RFPs, that kind of thing. I was in college.

Then we started transitioning into more robust client services work. We actually ended up doing a lot of social networks. And we're pretty big on that. And had a reputation for building -- designing really great social networks with our customers. In that time, we built our very first product, which was called Newsberry. It was an email marketing service.

And the idea was -- this was 2004 where there really wasn't anything. And our customers at the time needed to send emails and Chris had this great idea. He was like, "We can build something that they can use." So he went to a couple of customers and said, "Could you 'invest' in this product.?" I forget what it was, the amount, I don't want to lie. It was a few thousand bucks, I think.

And you can use it for free forever and we'll build it, but we'll be able to sell it for other customers. And that was how Newsberry was born. I still think that was so smart. So he had this idea, so we built Newsberry. And it was always a side project. All our money came from client services. And so we ran Newsberry on the side. It actually made money. When we shut it down it was profitable and making a few hundred thousand dollars a year, I think. It wasn't insignificant. And then we just continued to do client service work.

So, we got into kind of these bigger projects. And at that time, Chris was managing our subversion servers -- subversion is pre-git. And so, he's managing our subversion servers and they were all self-hosted and all this stuff and he was like, "Well why can't we build something that'll run this instead? That can host it, that we can run so that we can manage a lot of things, like user permissions and just collaboration and all that kind of stuff.

So, he had the idea for Beanstalk. And he went to a bunch of our friends and he was like, "Would you guys let me store your source code and you can get this great UI and be able to --" and they were like, "You're crazy. I would never give you my source code. That's ridiculous." And he didn't listen to them. And he built it anyway. And we built it in a way where it was -- we had a small team doing client services work and we said, "Let's throw a couple of weeks at it."

So we were billing in weekly iterations. So every time we didn't bill and worked on Beanstalk or every time we worked on Beanstalk, we weren't billing. So these were significant amounts of money for us. So eventually we built Beanstalk. It picked up, people really loved it. We launched it in Beta and committed a full-time person to it.

And that's the only way we actually got out of consulting. That's my only one recommendation. Every time somebody asks, "How did you make the transition?" It was, "Commit the resource." Because once it costs you money, you're going to push yourself to really make it a success.

So we committed a full-time person and it picked up. This was 2007, 2008. The world was a very different place back then. Apps were launching weekly, monthly, maybe. Not hourly, by the minute. We had no Product Hunt back then. It got picked up.

There was a lot of traction on it. And so, we got really addicted to the product life and committed to being a product company. But to do that we knew we didn't want to fire anybody. So, we said, "All right." We had some recurring revenues, so we had a view of where we were going to get at a certain point.

And we said, "All right, we are not going to stop client services until we can cover everybody's salary." And so, we waited about a year, maybe a little bit less than that until Beanstalk was making enough money to cover all the revenue, all the salaries of the rest of the team who was doing consulting work, and we shut it down.

I borrowed 40 grand from Chris's dad. I think it was 40. Basically, to just sit in a bank account for my worst-case scenario. Something happens and I have to pay salary. And I paid him back very quickly on that. And then we just, we closed off our biggest project and that was it.

And then, you know, fast forward we shut down these Newsberry and we can talk about that if you want, but we shut down Newsberry because we wanted to focus and we realized that we were not good at -- we were not good marketers, so we didn't really understand the audience and it was just a huge distraction. We shut it down and then became kind of a product company from there. And ever since, been doing the same thing.

Courtland Allen 14m 58s

You mentioned that you got addicted to the product life. What are some of the biggest day-to-day differences in your life as a founder between running a product company and running a consulting company? And did you anticipate those differences? Is that what drove you to make the transition?

Natalie Nagele 15m 14s

Yeah, I think there's a lot. We were extremely lucky with clients who we adored and work that was very challenging and very interesting, but yet it's not your work.

And so, when you do client work, it's tricky when you fall in love with something and then it gets taken away from you. Or, on the flip side, you see it differently. You might not be right. We've been wrong, but you see it differently and you really want to push for that change, but you can't, because that's not your risk.

It's somebody else's risk. And so, I think in running Beanstalk in parallel with doing client work, we really just got addicted to being able to take those risks, to experiment on our own, and to fail, because they were our decisions. I think that was a really big one. And the other obvious one is control over our time, our revenue to some degree.

Because we weren't chasing our fees in the next project, in the next project. I'll always say that early on there were days when I was like, "I really want more money. I got to grow faster and there's no way to do it." Where when it was client work, I could be like, "All right, let's go. Let's go drum up some work, let's go find a project." And you know, it's stressful, but you can almost always find a project. You can't really be like, "Hey, this month and in SaaS, I'd like to grow an extra $30,000." So, thanks. It's just not how it works.

Courtland Allen 16m 40s

You mentioned that you shut down Newsberry in part because you wanted to focus, but in part because you guys had this realization that marketing is not your strong suit. Yet at the same time, you were running Beanstalk and it seems that was successful from the early days. What's the story behind how you launched Beanstalk and got your first users with it?

Natalie Nagele 16m 58s

So, 2008 was a very different time to launch product and it was all word of mouth. And to this day, I'm telling you that the only good marketing that we do is word of mouth. It's just built a great product and that's where we're always trying to get better at it. It's not in our DNA, Chris and I.

We launched Beanstalk to a bunch of friends who -- Twitter was new -- who could tweet, and people would hear, and we did integrations with other apps. We did an integration with Basecamp and they blogged about it, because it was valuable to their customers and there was a nice, reciprocal relationship there.

That Basecamp blog post was a huge driver of traffic for us for years to come. It's just a very different ecosystem. I could never replicate, ever again. It was just -- the timing was different. There wasn't -- there was nothing else out there to even compete with. There was CVS Dude, which was for CVS, which is even older than the subversion.

So it was just a really natural, "Hey, have you seen this thing? I'm using this thing called Beanstalk," and people just kept talking about it and sharing and talking and sharing. And it grew really fast for what it was and our price point, it grew super-fast.

Courtland Allen 18m 14s

So what is Beanstalk, exactly, and who are these people using it and talking about it?

Natalie Nagele 18m 19s

Beanstalk is a collaboration platform for software developer teams. It's hosted git with deployments and project management built in. It was what today is mostly GitHub. We were doing that in 2008. But it was subversion which was the earlier version controls, system of choice.

And those first customers were software developers. People building for the web but in 2008. So, it's early web apps, lots of rails, lots of rails projects, some of the most beloved projects, back then were all using Beanstalk because it was a hosted, elegant way of collaborating on code together, and working together. You didn't really have a lot of options back then.

Courtland Allen 19m 3s

It's funny you're talking about rails, you're talking about Beanstalk, being featured on Basecamp's, blog back in 2007- 2008 I don't exactly remember that post, but I guarantee you I read it because back then I was reading everything on Basecamp's blog. Those guys were so inspirational to me. Were they inspirational to you? They sort of had the same model you had, of going from a consulting company to a product company.

Natalie Nagele 19m 25s

Oh, absolutely. That's the dream, right? Everything that they, Jason Fried and DHH wrote about back then was gospel. They showed a way for introverted engineers to build a successful business. I'm not saying they are, but I'm saying as an alternative, to build a business that required no sales, no marketing, theoretically. You didn't really have to talk to your customers. You can build great software. You could run the show and do it in a way that was meaningful.

Today a lot of us take it for granted. Back then we would tell people what we were doing and they thought that was insane. "You got people to put their credit cards in and they pay you every month and you don't even know who they are? You've never talked to them?" "Yep." "You've no sales team?" "None." "Do you even know who they are?" I said, "I have no idea." We've all these huge brands using us. I mean huge. There's a point where we had like some of the most beloved brands using us and we didn't even have a lawyer to sign a separate agreement. It was a terms of service, click check box.

It was tremendous what 37 Signals, at the time, showed the way. To grab onto that and really run with it was -- we owe them everything. We would not have built a business had it not been for them. And to some degree that's probably not -- we probably follow them for too long because Jason Fried is an incredible marketer and we aren't that.

So had we known that sooner, we would've have had to adjust our strategy a little bit and be like, "Oh, there's this other piece of it, too." It's not just happening by accident? You have to do some other work. And we only picked up on the parts that we wanted to, not the other parts.

Courtland Allen 21m 8s

When you're talking about not really talking to your customers, not being good at the marketing stuff, and your product spreading via word of mouth, which really is the dream if people are just talking about your product and sort of spreading it for you.

Natalie Nagele 21m 18s

Yeah.

Courtland Allen 21m 19s

Is that still the case with Beanstalk today?

Natalie Nagele 21m 22s

No, no. So we're building a new product. If you build it, they will come, is a very tricky strategy nowadays. And we got to a point with being stuck where we were starting to compete on features or with marketing dollars. Because we got to a point where GitHub was huge. Bitbucket and GitLab, and it's the four of us and we're the tiniest of the tiny.

And it's all fault of our own, right. We didn't innovate, we didn't pay attention to the market. There's all kinds of things. And so, about four years ago, we actually sat down and said, "What do we want to do? Because we have thousands and thousands and thousands of users and it's very profitable and it makes us a lot of money, but we want to do something different and how do we want to compete? What do we want to do? Do we want to compete on adding new features? Do we want to compete on marketing dollars? Should we get a loan and just try to get the brand out there more? What do you want to do?"

And we decided that we wanted to have a chance to rethink the problem we were solving at that point. We had been running Beanstalk for, I guess, eight years. And we really just sat down and said, "If we started over, knowing what we know today, what would we build?" Because the value proposition changed drastically from what we built. And we had this existing product used by so many people, we couldn't really just rip the rug from under them. We really wanted to rethink the problem. And so we decided to build something completely from scratch. And that's Conveyor, which we launched, actually, to the public, two weeks ago, I guess, which is crazy.

Courtland Allen 23m 0s

Congratulations.

Natalie Nagele 23m 2s

Thanks. Four years to a minimally viable product. It's pretty great. It's been an incredibly humbling journey to launch another product. But we just, Beanstalk is supported and maintain, but we are not doing active development on it because everybody's focused on that team on Conveyor. It's a totally reimagined -- it's actually a desktop client with the hosting, lots of project management built in.

I think it's a really special, really, really special product. We have a ton of work to do. The feedback has been like, "This is great and please do all of these 35 things." We're really focused on -- which is what we wanted. We wanted that feedback so we can really just figure out which direction we need to go in with actual humans, not ourselves in a vacuum. And you know, this has got a lot of work to do, but I think it's going to be really special. And that's what we hope will be the next version of Beanstalk.

Courtland Allen 23m 53s

So between Beanstalk and your new product, Conveyor, you also launched a couple of other products which did very well.

Natalie Nagele 23m 59s

Yes.

Courtland Allen 23m 59s

Do you feel like having multiple successes under your belt made you more nervous or worried about building a totally new thing?

Natalie Nagele 24m 7s

It's like you know what I've been writing for the last three days. Yeah. It took us four years to launch Conveyor. So, we have Postmark, right, which is hugely successful, growing really fast. Most of our team is on that. And when you have this mature -- you've been running mature products for so long, you really lose the sense of scrappiness.

We pushed forward so hard, but we're just not used to being scrappy anymore. We're still scrappy a lot of ways, but our polish, our fine detail, our QA process, all of that is just really geared towards sophisticated products with customers. And when you're building something new, you kind of need to be a little rough around the edges.

I'm not saying minimally viable. I'm not saying that the thing barely works, but we wanted something that was fast and we had definitely had some nonstarters. But I think it took us a while because we really nitpicked probably the wrong things just because of what we're used to.

That's so hard. It's so, so hard to look at something and say, "Are we overthinking this? Should we have scaled back three revisions ago? Should we have focused, do we need to be that fast? Do we need to be that available? Do we need to fix all of these bugs?" Really narrowing in on what a true first version of something is, was really hard for us.

Courtland Allen 25m 31s

I see a lot of this difference between being small and scrappy and being a little bit more refined and mature with my job, because I run Indie Hackers. It's a two person 'company'. Just me and my brother inside of Stripe, which is this behemoth with 1600 people.

And the differences are just astounding. Is there a certain inflection point with all of these products with Postmark and Beanstalk where you lose the scrappiness and become more refined? Is it a revenue milestone? Is it the number of team members? What causes that transition?

Natalie Nagele 26m 5s

Yeah, I think for us, I don't know. It's definitely not revenue. I think for us -- well, everybody defines that differently, in terms of what scrappy means. We've always felt like our promise to the customer was that they will not test our code. So that was always a very big -- once you have paying customers, you deliver on the promise.

That's always been our thing. And so we've always had QA as part of our process. We don't ship anything without QA. We have new people starting on the team and support and they're always shocked by how few bugs we have. We have plenty of bugs, but how few bugs we have compared to other apps because we over-test everything.

But that's definitely a philosophical thing, where I want our customers to feel like we've done all the due diligence and by the time it's in their hands, it's pretty polished. The part where I wished we had done it differently, and what we did with DeployBot and other things, was we really had a better sense of what the core thing was. The core value proposition was.

And because web apps are just so much easier to build than desktop apps, especially for an inexperienced team, who has never built a desktop app. It was hard to really figure out how to stop that process. How to really say, "This is the thing that we're building, and this is all we need to be building for now. Let's get some feedback in."

And I think the other part, truly Courtland, if I'm honest, it's like we had too big of a team on Conveyor for a while. You know, some of these things, most of the time you start one or two people, three people hacking away on stuff. I think that's a big one. I think once your team probably gets bigger, you have more experts, so to speak, and less generalists.

And all these things, you can start to refine the process as you go. Conveyor has always had a large team. It started with like two people, but it kind of kept ballooning and then shrinking and the ballooning again and shrinking. And so the more people you have, the more overhead you have, the more opinions -- and they're all good opinions.

And who picks, and how do you make decisions, and all that stuff. So, I think it's probably some combination of both. I don't know if I answered that in a in a distinct enough way, but I don't know that I have like a specific, "You hit $1 million, you just stop being scrappy," milestone there.

Courtland Allen 28m 20s

Yeah. I don't know that there is a distinctive answer -- a distinctive point between being scrappy and not being scrappy anymore. I just get to ask bullshit questions like that as a podcaster.

Natalie Nagele 28m 29s

No, I think about it all the time because it took us four years to get here. And I'm telling you here -- I keep telling the team, we literally just got to the starting line. We have so much work to do, which is okay, I'm excited and we're thankfully, profitable and I don't have anybody to answer to. I definitely struggle with that. Should we have shipped it a year ago?

Courtland Allen 28m 53s

Well, you guys never really struck me as a company that's been in any sort of extreme rush. For example, you have a 32-hour work week at Wildbit. That's crazy. What's the story behind making that decision? You've been doing it for almost two years now, I think.

Natalie Nagele 29m 8s

Yeah. May of 2017, we started this experiment with a four day, 32-hour work week based on a book on Deep Work by Cal Newport, in which Cal Newport talks about the brain's capacity for meaningful work. Your unique ability work, the thing that we all get paid to do.

The capacity that they're saying when they studied the brain is four hours a day. Well then, what are we doing for 40 hours a week, if four times five is 20, what's the rest of the time being taken up with? And Wildbit has always been a place that's obsessed with understanding how to maximize focus work.

Because we just truly believe that in order to achieve fulfillment in your career, you need to be able to actually do the thing that you're supposed to do. We've always had closed offices, private offices. We'd have all these rules around Slack and how you use asynchronous communication. All these things just focused on focus. It was just an opportunity to experiment a little more and say, "Okay, well if we can do four hours a day, then we could probably cut that down to four days a week. And let's see what we can get rid of. Look what's going to fall apart." And we do that a lot. We'll go deep into something and just see what falls, what falls down. What are we missing?

And so, we experimented as a summer experiment and we just said, "Let's figure out what we're -- what are we wasting time on? What are we not doing?" And it turned out to be this super awesome opportunity to explore our own productivity as individuals. How we work collaboratively on the team.

What communication needs to be asynchronous? Which communication needs to be in person? Where are we wasting time or why are we having these meetings? My favorite thing is to cut out meetings. I love meetings, but I hate useless meetings, right? So, I love cutting out meetings. And really starting to dissect why. Why are we building this thing that we're doing? Why are we working on this feature? Why are we having this meeting?

Why are we doing this thing? Why are these people in the same project together? Really, really pushing on ourselves to be more thoughtful. It's been super successful. I don't know that I'm convinced that a four-day work week is the way to go. I don't know that you can pull off four, eight-hour days successfully. We're going to go on retreat in May and I want to experiment with some other ways.

I still believe in the 32-hour work week. I just don't quite know what the next iteration of the experiment is and whether it's shorter days and there's a short part of Friday. Whether it's seasonal, you know like in the summers versus the winters. But we're completely committed to shorter workdays. The quality of work has gone up. The ability to think has gone up. The satisfaction in your personal life has gone up. People are able to do things that they can't do on the weekends.

Everybody's a weekend warrior, especially if you have kids and, and this gives you an extra day and it's been pretty spectacular for the team. But I will say that the Conveyor team frequently shies away from that because they are so committed to shipping Conveyor, and I didn't yell at them for that.

And there's times when we work longer hours, when they're pushing a deadline or dealing with some things. Our customers still come first. We have to make sure that we're supporting them, but as a whole, the push is very much towards the 32-hour work week and how can we do more with less.

Courtland Allen 32m 40s

This is something that I struggle with personally. I work a lot and it's not that I feel a ton of external pressure to work. A lot of it is I just really get out of bed in the morning and enjoy going to work on Indie Hackers because there's so many cool things to do.

And I end up, I don't want to say burning out, but definitely pushing myself to the limit. Way more than four hours of work a day. Did you find when you made this change that you're really becoming more effective? Do you think that you could have done something like this from the early days or is this something that you have to do as a mature company and it's more of like a lifestyle decision?

Natalie Nagele 33m 11s

Your drive to work on Indie Hackers is the drive of an entrepreneur and I don't think that that's ever -- we worked really hard when we were starting out. Chris missed one of my best friends' weddings because we were working on stuff. I am fully transparent on the fact that I think entrepreneurs wake up thinking about their business and go to sleep thinking about their project and there's just no in-between.

But at a certain point, you grow where you realize that you're not as effective when you're working this hard, right? Your brain isn't as clear, but also your responsibility shifts so dramatically. My job is no longer doing support after I've talked to product. My job is now to think, for the most part. And I can't think clearly if I'm not -- if I'm overworked and my brain's tired. We all know that the brain's a muscle. It has capacity, finite capacity, and you need to recharge it, and you need to do all these things.

The role has shifted dramatically. When I had to work -- when we worked crazy hours, weekends, nights. I used to remember like we'd go out to dinner, have a glass of wine, I'd come home and do support. There's some customers who have gotten some really interesting support responses from me back in the day.

All positive, it's just very lovie dovie for an app that hosts your source code. We did that because I spent the whole rest of the day doing all the other parts of the business, right? QuickBooks in the morning, customer support, talking to the developers, all these things. And there's just more and more work.

Today I have an incredible team who does all of that. So, of course, I have now the capacity to think more because that's my job, to think more. So, I think it changes. I also have two kids and I don't really want to work all day. I want to be with them, too. So, I think that changes. I do think it's the responsibility of the employer to preserve a sane work environment.

I think there's a big difference between the hours an entrepreneur works. And I would never tell a founder to work less. I don't think that's fair, but I would absolutely tell a founder to not -- that it is not okay to push your team to work the same hours that you do. I don't think that's fair.

Courtland Allen 35m 21s

That makes perfect sense.

Natalie Nagele 35m 22s

Those are two very different -- I think they get conflated on the Internet a lot. My job is to protect my team at all costs. But I'm thinking about my business all day long, all weekend, all night, before I go to sleep, when I wake up, in the shower, when I'm working out, always. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Courtland Allen 35m 39s

So I am just now getting started hiring and managing my own team and I will be the first to admit that I'm new to this. I'm strangely kind of resistant to it. I like working alone and I suck at hiring and I'm probably a terrible manager.

There's a ton of advice out there about hiring and managing people and when you're new to it, like I am, I think it's a little tough to discern which advice is sort of tried and true and universal and you should resist the urge to buck the trends, and which of it is totally up in the air and it depends on you and how to run your business. You can really do whatever you want. What are your thoughts on this, Natalie, having grown a team to 30 plus people?

Natalie Nagele 36m 14s

Just this morning I was having a call with Chris and I said, "We really need to get better at hiring." I don't know, honestly, Courtland. I think the most important thing I've learned is to have empathy and to really just try to understand people. I think all the sage advice, "Hire slow, fire fast," is probably accurate.

I definitely think hire slow would have served me well in previous situations. I think fire fast will never be on my agenda because I don't believe in leaving people out to dry. So that's just not me. I think one of the things that I really learned, and this was hard for me to understand. We used to get a lot of referrals, internal referrals, when we had an open position. And I always thought that was incredible because I didn't have to go out and hire anybody. I didn't have to use a recruiter.

If somebody I really loved and respected, said like, "Hey, I have a friend, he'd be great," awesome. And I turned around one day and realized that I hired a bunch of the same exact people. I had somebody who told me once, "If you keep only hiring friends of people who work for you, you're going to end up with the same -- a very homogenous team."

That was really hard for me to realize. And that's still something we're trying to get out of. But I definitely think that there's much smarter people with more experience in hiring who have talked a lot about how to really make sure you're thoughtful about the way you hire, the types of folks you hire and to make sure you create a diverse environment. But I've always seen tremendous success when we've hired people who came from different backgrounds.

And I want as much of that as possible. And so, we really stopped pushing the internal referrals. We still really love when our team refers people, but they go through the same process as all other applicants. So, we do applicants blind for the most part. We try not to see anything until after the test project, any identifying information, so that we can really put our biases aside. That's been really tricky on a small team, to be really intentional.

Courtland Allen 38m 19s

We've got another one for you. Experience -- hiring somebody who's got a lot of experience, knows what they're doing, and they've proven that they're good at the job versus hiring somebody who is potentially not as experienced, but they're hungry and driven and smart and eager to learn. What's been your experience here with how that works out either way?

Natalie Nagele 38m 36s

I think that depends on you and how much time you have. I've seen it both ways. I've realized that I can hire people with -- who are hungry with less experience and you still have to provide them some support. You have to give them something -- they're not going to learn everything you want them to learn just by osmosis, right. They need to experience certain things. They need your time and mentorship.

They need feedback, they need to know they're on the right track and if you can't provide that then that's a problem. I also think -- Jason Cohen from WP Engine said something to me a long time -- I think he said at a conference too, he has this whole thing like, "A players hire A players, B players, hire B players, you know, that whole thing. But one of the things that I thought was so interesting was I felt this way and I know a lot of people do. You want to really understand the skill before you hire somebody for it.

And Jason will say like, "But you're only going to be able to hire somebody as good as you are in the three months you took this to study the skill." Take sales for example. If I tried to hire somebody based on what I believe sales to be that's probably a problem. So, if you're going to hire a salesperson, hire the best sales person you can afford. An experienced, thoughtful person so that they can teach you.

And it's not going to be, I think, a really great experience to find somebody who's just hungry because who's going to mentor them to get better at that skill if you don't have that skill yourself? So either commit to finding people to help that person, to creating the space for them, to creating the feedback loop internally. But if you're not going to do that, you're just setting them up for failure. Because they need that.

Even if you had the smartest person who is so motivated and so driven. They can go find mentors on their own. Fine. I know there'll be some argument that people have to do it on their own. We can talk about that separately, but let's say they found all the greatest mentors in the world, it still has to be your way. To some degree, your personality and your acceptance, your approval is really important for them to know they're on the right track. If you don't have the time to give them for that, they're going to fail.

They're not going to meet your expectations. So, in some roles, I think it's great, in others, I think it's best to follow Jason's advice and hire the best person you can afford so that they can teach you. And there are roles like that right now that we're hiring. Where we're like, "You know what? I know nothing about this, and I really want to hire somebody to come in." And during the interview process I'm like, "Did I learn something? What did I learn from this person that I didn't know before?"

Courtland Allen 40m 56s

Yeah. One second. I'm just over here taking notes, Natalie. I didn't tell you before you came on here, but this podcast is just a secret way for me to get advice, personalized from all my guests.

Natalie Nagele 41m 6s

(Laughs.)

Courtland Allen 41m 6s

Let's talk about Postmark. We've talked a little bit about Beanstalk. We've talked about Conveyor. In between those two, you launched a different product called Postmark. What's the story there?

Natalie Nagele 41m 16s

Well, we were sending a lot of transactional email in Beanstalk, user invites. Our product, Beanstalk, was used by teams who were inviting their customers or their colleagues. And so, there was a lot of email commit notifications, a lot of emails flying around and we'd get support requests saying, "Hey, I invited my client and they haven't accepted the invitation. Any idea what's up?" And we were like, "Well, we have no idea, because it's just going through an internal mail server and we'd have to cut out, look through the logs and see if we can dig up. Did it bounce, did it go to spam? We have no idea."

And so Chris, once again, had an idea and he was like, "Well why don't we just build an app where you can have visibility?" And actually the original tagline for Postmark was "Because you're blind." Because back then, again, maybe this is a trend for us. Back then there wasn't really a lot of services out there like this. We launched, it's an API-based service for sending -- for web apps to send their transactional email.

And we're focused on the importance of that communication with your customers. So, we don't really focus on marketing for marketing sake. Right now, we're transactional only even to the degree where like we don't let you send any marketing emails. But really, the focus has been like those communications with your customer are critical and they need to get there quickly.

And they're much more important than any other email you send. And so, we focus all our attention on making sure that communication with the end users as effective as possible. So, we have the best deliverability rates in the industry, which is fine. That's not even that exciting. What's much more exciting to me is that we're the fastest. So, people switch to us and they see noticeable improvement in the engagement with their customer.

And like that transactional email engagement actually matters. Because if you, you know, if you're waiting for your GAP newsletter and it doesn't show up at 4:00, it shows up at 4:30 you're not emailing GAP and saying, "Hey, where's my newsletter?" But if you go to reset your password as you're about to buy a product and that password email doesn't come in from the first time you refresh Gmail, the second time you refresh Gmail, the third time you're like, "Forget it," you move on to the next thing. You didn't buy the product. That business lost the sale.

Those emails have to get there very quickly, not just to the inbox but fast. And so that's what we focus on. We focus on optimizing to make sure that your emails get there really fast and that's what we do. We're the fastest to the inbox, the most consistent and it's growing because people realize the importance of that and the brand and us.

And so that's been a really fun project and most of my team is focused on that product because it's growing and a lot of our future rides on Postmark being super successful. And it's a lot of fun. It's such a great product. We have so much fun on it.

Courtland Allen 43m 50s

One thing that's interesting to me about Postmark is that it's not in the most innovative, newest area. There are other companies doing something similar to Postmark and right now you're competing with them. You're describing how you're faster or you're better, you're more reliable. How do you grow when you build a product that has so many competitors?

Natalie Nagele 44m 9s

Big, 500-pound gorillas. I did a talk once a bunch of years ago that somehow Chris and I just only get into competing with these massive companies with way more money than we do. It's back to product. I think we just really try to focus on who do we build this for? Are we authentic? Like I really think honesty and authenticity truly matter. And we are an extremely authentic company.

One of our values for the entire company is transparent communication. We will never say something like, "We apologize for the inconvenience," if we were down. What a horrible thing to say. You're down. Of course, you're inconvenienced. Don't say that. We'll be honest when we have issues. We are honest in directions we take. We're just a very transparent company because we look at our customers as partners, as equals.

We're all software developers, we're all in this together. And so, I think that's really made a difference. And we just really focus the product on being great. And we're stubborn, stubborn as shit. The transaction only thing, for the whole time we've been running it, we're still the only ones to do it. I think eventually we're going to expand the definition of that, but we have focused on it for so long because we truly believe that this is what's in the best interest of the customer.

And it's making us a lot less money than the competitors because all the money's in marketing in bulk, right? For every 10,000 transactional emails an app sends, they probably send half a million marketing emails. But we've just really committed to being the best for our customer and that's just been the most exciting part about it. There's nothing more rewarding than somebody switching and saying, "Wow, why didn't I do this sooner? Why did I fight it? Oh my goodness, my open rates are up and my customers are happier and my support goes down."

I think that's one of the most interesting pieces. That's what I get most excited about is, "Wait, you're actually saving me money cause my support is going down?" I'm like, "Yeah, because your emails are getting there. And people actually send support requests for these emails. You know, they're looking for them. They're not just like waiting around for them. They need them right now.

And if they don't get them, they will email your support and ask them." And so, I think it's fun solving real problems and really, really improving the experience. And so, we just get excited about that. And that's where we focus our time. No, we don't do enterprise sales. We don't have a sales team. We don't do any of that stuff. And it makes it feel good.

Courtland Allen 46m 27s

So when you talk about being authentic and sort of baking that into your product, how do you communicate that to customers, especially as an early entrepreneur? Let's say you're building your first product. Should you be writing authentic blog posts or should it be the copy on your landing page? Or should it be an obsessive focus on making your product expertly crafted? How do you actually get customers to feel this authenticity?

Natalie Nagele 46m 50s

I think being vulnerable and transparent is really everything. There are some great examples of companies that became wildly successful from their transparency. Buffer, Joel would write all the time. He still does share all his numbers, Nathan with ConvertKit, you know, shares all his ups and downs and we weren't actually ever even that transparent. I think just because Chris and I don't write as much as other people do, but those are great examples of just being honest.

This is who we are. This is how much money we make, and our competitor probably makes more. But who cares? Come join our team and fight for us. You're not going to win every customer, but if you're super focused, which you have to be when you're small -- is super focused on, "I just need this one type of customer," then it'll work.

I really believe that it all just eventually balloons. If enough people trust you and believe in you, that the bigger companies will come. They always do. And they'll come in and the funniest ways. You'll see, all of a sudden, enough people are using your product on their own side projects or on smaller teams and talking about it, and all of a sudden, the big guys come. And they're like, "Hey, can we sign a separate agreement?"

And I'm like, "Nope, don't have lawyers, don't have the money. Your contract is not going to be nearly expensive enough for me to do this." And they come back two weeks later and say, "We figured it out. We still want to use the product and we'll just go with your standard terms." I mean that's amazing.

And it's not, I'm not being stubborn for stubborn sake. It really is way too expensive and complicated for me to run separate agreements. But it's amazing, because enough people, you build enough traction, you build enough support, build enough trust by being your authentic, honest self. And I think it just balloons from there.

Courtland Allen 48m 29s

So you guys have built a ton of products. We talked a little bit about Newsberry, Beanstalk, Conveyor, Postmark. I don't think we even have time to go into the DeployBot, but I don't know very many people who've built this many products, especially under the umbrella of a single company.

So, I want to ask you some questions about it. Sort of tease out things that you've learned. They're all going to be false dichotomies, but you got to pick one over the other one, anyway. So here it goes.

First one is idea versus execution. Is it more important to choose the right idea for a product to work on or is it more important to subsequently execute really well on whatever it is that you chose?

Natalie Nagele 49m 5s

I want to say execution. I'll say execution because that's the right thing to say. Although there's some terribly executed apps who just had a good idea and have been successful. But for us it's execution. Yeah, for us it's definitely execution.

Courtland Allen 49m 21s

What about automation versus hiring? You guys have built a ton of stuff. You have to maintain it, upgrade it, keep it up to date. How do you manage all of that? Do you automate or do you prefer to hire more people?

Natalie Nagele 49m 33s

Automation because we're small and profitable. We can't hire a million people. But I will say process more than anything else. We're just super focused on, "How do we solve problems together so that they're most effective?"

So working in small teams as an example. You hire more people and then all of a sudden, you're wasting all this time in meetings, or worse. I think just trying to get consensus and so we like cut things down to where people work in really siloed, tiny teams.

We strategize together, but then people go down and work in a really tiny silo teams. Their output triples. We might make a few mistakes along the way. It might not be perfect like everybody wants it, but we do much better work.

Courtland Allen 50m 10s

Last one, building something totally innovative. It solves a brand-new problem versus building something in an already proven but maybe crowded industry.

Natalie Nagele 50m 20s

Building something unique in a crowded industry, for sure. I think Conveyor is a great example. We're basically saying, "Hey, you don't need GitHub, you don't need Jira, come hang out with us. (Laughs.)

But we're hoping that we're solving -- making the process 10,000 times better so that it's worth the switch for a small group of people. So that's definitely -- it's a different process. It's hopefully valuable for others, but it's definitely in a crowded space.

Courtland Allen 50m 50s

I like that answer because the crowded spaces have already proven that there's a business model.

Natalie Nagele 50m 55s

Yep.

Courtland Allen 50m 55s

You’re not rediscovering, what do people find valuable here? And then the unique product is how you differentiate, and it makes it relevant that it's crowded because you're different than the other solutions.

Natalie Nagele 51m 5s

Yeah, some of the most admirable things are when people go into -- what was the Steve Jobs quote? I forget, I don't know the exact quote, but it was, "Find the audience that has had a horrible experience and make it better." Right. Sometimes you focus and that's probably one of the biggest risks with Conveyor.

There's some pretty solid processes out there already. I'm hoping that we can solve it for a unique group of people. People who go into FinTech or medical or industries that are just so archaic and nothing moves. And those people are miserable playing in software that sucks for work. And make it better.

People who have the money want to pay and they're miserable but there's a crowded market, big 500-pound gorillas who feel real comfortable where they are, feel no competition, no pressure. And then you slowly start chipping away at it. I think those are the companies you look at and you're like, "Wow,” so smart when you can solve -- you're solving real pain for people."

People who are struggling with waste of time or energy or just ugly software. I hate ugly software. I think there's some real opportunity there to go into a market that's proven itself and just do something radically different. Make it better. Ten thousand times better and it will be really successful.

Courtland Allen 52m 22s

You guys build gorgeous apps and software, which is not easy to do. It's very time consuming. And so, it's not hard to believe that you hate ugly software.

Natalie Nagele 52m 30s

I hope so. I really do. I hate using ugly software. We have this whole discussion on retreats and the team will want to use something. I'm not going to name names, I'm going to be like, "I'm not logging in there, so you better find a better way for me." I'm so stubborn sometimes, but we'll have these philosophical moments.

I'm like, "This has to be a value. We should not, we should not use ugly software." And they're like, "Natalie, this is really -- this is gonna make us work faster, better," or whatever. And I'm like, "I don't care. I hate it. I don't want to use it." And they appease me sometimes and they'll basically say, "Fine, we'll just send you reports so you don't have to log in."

Courtland Allen 53m 4s

You spent a lot of time focused on building a great culture and setting these values for your company, building a company that I think really exists to improve your employees' lives and their experiences in this world. What are some of the keys to building a good culture that you've learned over time and setting these values that some of us who've never done this can learn from?

Natalie Nagele 53m 25s

I think really coming back to understanding why the business exists. And we really lose sight of that. I refer to it as the beast where you build an insatiable beast. The business is this insatiable beast. And what happens is you used to understand the why, but the beast is just so hungry all the time and just wants to get bigger and fatter and bigger and fatter.

And so as you gone walking this path with it, you start to forget the why it existed. And so, for us, it was a lot of soul searching. Why are we here? Why are we pushing growth and what's the point of it? Why do we want to grow and why do we want to be bigger and why all these things.

And when you start to understand the why, well for us, we started to understand the why, which is like actually the only reason a business exists is for the people. It doesn't exist in and of itself. It shouldn't exist for itself. That doesn't make sense. We've invented it. It's not real, right? It just, it's a thing that we've invented to serve a purpose for the human beings around it.

And then you get to then decide who are the human beings and how do you want it to be how do you want it to react to those human beings? And so for us, it's like this concept, you know, the difference between stakeholders and shareholders. We look at it and said, "Okay, well while it exists for humans and those humans are Chris and I as founders, my team, our customers, and the community, and how are we impacting all four of those?

In an ideal world, the goal is that we're impacting, we're spending an equal amount of time looking at all of those. So, it's not mostly focused on me and Chris. It's not completely focused on the customer. It's really trying to aim towards this idea that, “Can we build a culture where we are equally balanced,” to say, "How does the business feed all four of these constituents?" All four of these stakeholders.

Courtland Allen 55m 11s

Did something happen to trigger you guys beginning to ask why, or is this something you guys have always asked from the early days?

Natalie Nagele 55m 18s

We hit a really rough spot -- no, definitely not from the early days, early days were like "Just run." You don't know why you're running and you're -- just run. No, we hit a plateau in Beanstalk's growth somewhere in 2010, 2012, I don't remember. And it was just a pretty dark time because at the moment, at that point in our business life, Chris and I really couldn't have told you how we got to where we got. We really thought growth happened to us.

And so, when we hit this plateau, we had no idea what to do. And we started to really follow what other people did, which is not -- here's a lesson. Don't do what they tell you to do on the internet because every industry is different. And it doesn't matter if we all run software companies, if you sell to marketers and I sell to developers, I can't do what you do. It doesn't matter.

So, we didn't realize that at the time. And we just went hardcore and all the knob turning we could think of. They say charge more. Charge more. Thirty-day trial, thirty-day trial. We just did all kinds of shit. Unsurprising, it is not a fun way to run a business when you're an entrepreneur and just want to play and be creative. Chris was pretty unhappy. He took a month off and went to hike Futon (ph) with his dad.

We were not in a great place. And so, the way out of that was a lot of deep soul searching and a lot of, "What are we chasing and why?" And then that conversation -- and it still happens. Those conversations still come up, but the why. Why are we doing this personally? Why are we doing this as entrepreneurs, as parents, as individuals? That was really important to understand and then once that kind of got solidified, all the other pieces fall in place.

Well, we like to play and be creative. Then let's focus on products. Let's not focus on the knobs. Let's focus on getting the right mentors. Let's focus on getting in the right advisors. Let’s think about things with a clear head. And a foggy head is not a very useful tool. So, when you're in this place where you're like, "The sky is falling and I don't know how to stop it and now I have to solve really complicated, difficult problems." Those solutions are not good at all. I think really just clarifying the why, I saved us, genuinely.

We did a lot of stuff. We have, we got a really great advisor. We started going on retreats with some other folks who run really successful SaaS products and doing these Founder Retreats and getting the mentorship and the guidance that we, Chris and I, needed to hear and see to start shaping what we think Wildbit needed to be at the time.

And that's investing. We've spent a couple of years investing ahead of growth and Postmark. We've never done that before, but it was important because we knew the trajectory of where we wanted to go. It's really -- Simon Sinek, Get Started with Why and it really set the direction of where we are currently taking the business.

And it's like an exercise we do frequently. Chris and I, at least once a year go away, just the two of us, on a Founder's Retreat and map out why we want to do this and for how long, what the goal is for all these different projects that are going on. And can we map out 10 years from now? What should that look like for us to still be excited and engaged, for the team to be healthy and fulfilled? We go through these exercises pretty frequently.

Courtland Allen 58m 39s

You mentioned that in the beginning of the company you guys weren't really thinking about why, you're just running as fast as you can. Most of the people listening to this show are at that phase of their company, or maybe they haven't even started yet.

Let's say I was to take everything away from you, Natalie. Wildbit disappears and you are now a brand-new founder again and you've got to start a new business. Are you going to just run as fast as you can or are you going to start thinking about why from the get-go? And if the latter, what does that process look like?

Natalie Nagele 59m 6s

Well, I'd have to start with why, because I know better than not to start with why. I think for me it would be a lot of soul searching around what do I want the business to enable me and my life and in the life of the team? It would be -- if we have to start over, I don't know that I would start a software company. I have no idea. I'm definitely not a serial entrepreneur that way. So, I don't have like another idea brewing, another idea brewing.

And it would be a lot of, "Well what is the lifestyle that this a type of business will provide, both financially and a time consideration? How fast can we get there? And then what kind of business does that need to grow? Is it going to be a sales heavy organization just because of the market it's in or can I innovate?”

It's going to be a lot of those questions, but I would have to start with why because I have two kids and life is very different than it was 15 years ago when it was just the two of us. I was waitressing and we were using that money to live off of while all the money was going back into the business and all those things. We can't really pull that off anymore. I don't think my kids would like that.

It would absolutely have to start with why. But I think in hindsight everybody should start somewhere around there because I think it create -- the choices become much clearer. If you really want to start a business where you're in control and you can keep it small and what you want us to be able to travel and all these things that you can map that out. All of a sudden you have a number to chase.

You know exactly how much that costs. You also understand what the time requirement will be on you. So, let's say you want to be able to travel the world and only work a couple of days a week and all these things, and you probably aren't gonna also chase a billion-dollar business.

You of want to start in that space that you could say, "Here's the lifestyle I want to build." And if you want to build a billion-dollar business, then you better know that early so that you don't go into a market that's capped at 100 million bucks or 50 million bucks. I think those things are really important.

Courtland Allen 1h 1m 5s

Let's talk about some of these letters because, for a lot of people who are new to this, it's not obvious at all what their early decisions result in, in terms of their lifestyle later on.

They're not sure what will cause them to have a sales-driven business, what will cause them to have to work 80-hour weeks later on. How do you look at that? What are some of the decisions you made early on in Wildbit that have shaped how your life is now?

Natalie Nagele 1h 1m 28s

Yes. I think early on, Chris and I knew we didn't want a big company, so we never chased the billion. It's not in our DNA, to be honest with you. And so that was a really nice realization because knowing that meant that we could focus on small, individual customers. A business built mostly on customers that -- a lot of small customers. We didn't have to go enterprise, we didn't have to go up market, we didn't have to have custom software.

That was the other one. We didn't want ever built custom software for a bunch of different customers. So, knowing all of that defined the market we were chasing and also help us stay level. I'm not chasing my biggest competitors at all because that's not where I want to be. And so, it's instead this clarity around, "Okay, well how big do I want to get? What does that look like? How big the market is that and what does -- can I get there with my kind of my rules?"

We also always wanted to be profitable because we didn't want to raise money. Mostly because I wanted to be able to do things like a 32-hour work week without having to answer to anybody. It's not that I think VC is evil, I just don't think it was necessary for us. And so, knowing that also sets the stage for like, "Okay, well if I don't raise money then I'm on my own in a lot of ways.” All of my competitors have raised money and so they have a lot of the connections and the bigger clients that are all in the fund that now use their services.

Natalie Nagele 1h 2m 52s

So you kind of scratch them off your list. I'm not going to do that. So, then I'm going to target a lot of the smaller accounts. And what does that mean? How do I -- what attracts them? And the same, I think, with lifestyle. There's a lot of people who make a fantastic living as solopreneurs. A spectacular living and that's really admirable. So, if that's a thing for you, you've got to target that.

But me personally and Chris, I think together, we really enjoy working with other people and I've always wanted to have a team that I can help develop. That's been a big part of who I was. So we knew we weren't going to be solopreneurs. We knew we were going to have a business and how big it becomes as a factor of what do we like to do. Chris likes to dabble in product.

He does not want to get so big that he's no longer necessary for product development. That's a thing. We know that and we're making sure we don't shy away from that or chase too big of a growth spurt that he would no longer be touching a product. I think those are the decisions for us. But I'll say, genuinely, some of those you develop as you get older and as you experience more.

Maybe older isn't even the word. I'm not that -- I'm 33 years old, so it's not like I'm that old. But I think as you experience more and you start to really develop your own self, now I know that I'm terrible at project management and so I shouldn't be running a project. But I can be involved on a project and I can provide a lot of input and saying like I really need enough time to do other things than other than Wildbit.

But I, I do a lot of volunteer work and I'm on a board of a preschool and do all these things and I know that I needed to grow a business that would enable me to have that time and that flexibility. And so, those are the kinds of things that I couldn't have told you that five years ago or ten years ago that I would want to do that. It evolved as I moved through life.

Courtland Allen 1h 4m 35s

Well, I think what you guys have build Wildbit is amazing. I really appreciate you coming on the show, Natalie. Before I let you get out of here, I'll ask you one more question.

You've already given so much advice to listeners, but for the last time I will ask you to give a little bit more advice. People here are trying to start a company. There's a minefield of mistakes that they might make. There's also a huge array of really good decisions that they might make.

What's your advice to someone who's considering starting a company? What can they take away from the lessons that you've learned?

Natalie Nagele 1h 5m 5s

I wish that I had made connections earlier on. That Chris and I had made connections earlier on with people that we admired who were experiencing a lot of the things that we had experienced. And I think we really stayed underground and kind of introverted for a really long time and lost opportunities to collaborate and just learn from other people.

And I will say that the internet is full of really terrible advice. And it's not until you get really inside these businesses that you realize that they all have terrible problems. The stuff they write about is best case scenario, their one thing that's going really well right now while everything else is exploding and this is even in large companies.

And so it's really when you get down into the nuance and the experience share that you can find valuable, I think, perspective, not advice. I don't really look for advice. I look for experiences that then I can apply in my own way to how they fit my experiences. That was a big transformation for us and it happened late in the game when we really made really personal connections with folks who are in businesses and got really intimate with their experience.

Things that they would not write about on the internet. If I started over, in any industry, I would seek out as much as possible to build those connections early on because it really makes a difference. It kills me when I read things on the Internet, like “Fifteen Ways I Got to X.”. And it's like, I love that you got to x. But those 15 ways literally only apply to you.

Because it's just -- all of it is so nuanced. There's a lot of time wasted and a lot of heartbreak following other people's footsteps instead of looking at it and saying, "All right, that's cool. How does it apply to me now? My market, my customer, my specific experience, how I run the business? How my product is built? What resources I have? “All of those things that matter. You should read those experiences as experience share, not as advice. I think that really, really made an impact on us.

Courtland Allen 1h 7m 2s

Ironically., that is great advice, Natalie. Thank you so much for coming on the Indie Hackers podcast, sharing your story with listeners. Can you tell people where they can go to find out more about what you're up to you and what you're doing with Wildbit?

Natalie Nagele 1h 7m 16s

Yeah, I'm Natalie Nagele on Twitter. We write about stuff on the Wildbit blog, wildbit.com/blog. The products that are all linked there as well. Sometimes we write a lot. Sometimes we stop writing. I think this year we're going to write some more so there's more stuff, but there's a lot of great stuff out there just about our experience share, not advice. Just our experiences that maybe will help others.

Courtland Allen 1h 7m 37s

Thanks so much, Natalie.

Natalie Nagele 1h 7m 38s

Of course. Thanks for having me.

Courtland Allen 1h 7m 46s

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