Things You Learn from Starting 23 Businesses with "Parallel Founder" Danielle Baskin

Courtland Allen 8s

What's up, everybody? This is Courtland, from IndieHackers.com and you are 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 here is always so that the rest of us can learn from their experiences and go on to build our own successful internet businesses.

Today I have with me the impressively multitalented Danielle Baskin. Danielle is an artist, a designer, an engineer, and an entrepreneur. She has built products for pretty much everybody including NASA, Nickelodeon, Amazon AWS, Mozilla, Salesforce, etc. Danielle, I'm excited to have you on the show. Welcome.

Danielle Baskin 50s

Thank you for having me.

Courtland Allen 52s

So that was part one of my introduction. You’re a hard person to introduce so I have two parts.

Danielle Baskin 55s

OK.

Courtland Allen 56s

The second part of the introduction is that you are the creator of a voice chat app called Dialup.

Danielle Baskin 1m 0s

Yes.

Courtland Allen 1m 1s

You are the founder of a conference swag company--

Danielle Baskin 1m 4s

Yes.

Courtland Allen 1m 5s

--called Branded Fruit. You're the founder of a company called Peddler Pop-ups. You are the creator of Inkwell Helmets etc. and so on and so forth. And what's fascinating about this is you are running these companies all at the same time, like these are not - there's not a succession of companies. You're simultaneously running all of these companies

Danielle Baskin 1m 24s

Parallel entrepreneur.

Courtland Allen 1m 25s

A parallel entrepreneur, that’s what you are. How many did I leave out? I think I named five.

Danielle Baskin 1m 28s

I have a lot of small businesses so I have like 23 distinct products that I sell on the internet.

Courtland Allen 1m 35s

Twenty-three?

Danielle Baskin 1m 35s

Yes.

Courtland Allen 1m 36s

And how long have you been creating these?

Danielle Baskin 1m 37s

I've been creating businesses I guess since 2008.

Courtland Allen 1m 45s

Wow. Twenty-three businesses.

Danielle Baskin 1m 47s

I mean it's slow. I mean like for 2008 to 2011 it was just one and then. -It’s easy.

Courtland Allen 1m 55s

I mean I’ve [crosstalk] businesses since 2002 and I’m nowhere near 23 active businesses right now.

Danielle Baskin 2m 0s

I mean some are just single products - and they're not like entire business or a service - but some are some are businesses and I have like nine employees for Branded Fruit. Yeah.

Courtland Allen 2m 9s

OK, walk me through the mindset of somebody who chooses to live their life this way. Why run this many products simultaneously?

Danielle Baskin 2m 16s

I mean it is it is problematic. I have a lot of ideas and I am very restless unless I execute upon them like I just need to create them, and it's very easy to put a product on the internet - like create a landing page, take photos of something, just put an idea out there.

It's very easy, and I think most of my ideas were kind of accidental like I just threw it on the internet to see what would happen and then people want that thing and so it's a surprise. But I haven't had to shut any down.

So, what I do right now is I sort of toggle businesses on and off or I work on what's most exciting to me at that time.

Courtland Allen 2m 53s

So, you've never had a job. You never actually worked a full-time job for somebody else.

Danielle Baskin 2m 58s

I've had weird jobs. Yeah. OK, I was I was a philosopher's assistant for five years but that was like twice a week. And I also was a scenic painter for an opera house. Those were my job jobs - and a set designer. But I always throughout that period of my life I was also worked on my own businesses. So no, I've never had like a 9 to 5 job.

Courtland Allen 3m 16s

And right now are you full time on your own businesses? Do they fully support you?

Danielle Baskin 3m 21s

Yes.

Courtland Allen 3m 22s

What is it that drives you to create all these things and be an entrepreneur and work for yourself? Why not go get a full-time job with all the skills that you have? I’m sure you can make a lot of money somewhere.

Danielle Baskin 3m 30s

What’s really weird - I've done contract jobs before and then when I have that job I think of a product that I can sell to the company. It's weird, I'm like deeply entrepreneurial I'm trying to look for things that people are searching for and then I feel like I'm only one will that'll create this solution for this.

Courtland Allen 3m 51s

Yeah there's really a lot of things you've created that I don't think anyone else would.

Danielle Baskin 3m 55s

Well I accidentally created a tricycle rental service in New York when there was no way to just rent a cargo tricycle so I ended up finding -- and the goal was to have it be just a tricycle for me to sell my own helmets, but I realized like oh actually no one's doing tricycle rental. I could sell this to other people and then people were actually looking for that thing and strangers on the internet contacted me.

Courtland Allen 4m 15s

I love how in your mind, the gap in the market is that nobody is doing tricycle rentals. Is that a real problem? Should people be doing tricycle rentals?

Danielle Baskin 4m 22s

Yeah, but there's a lot of - so yeah, I started Peddler Pop-ups kind of because there's a lot of pop up shops in New York but super expensive to rent out a space and all these shops were reaching out to me, too, to bring my helmets there and I thought well what if could just kind of ride - put my helmets in the bike lane where most of the cyclists are. I was actually walking around with a cart selling helmets in the street when Citi Bike launched and my neighbor was like, “Hey, I have this like old cargo trike that's locked up in my basement. Do you want it?”

And I bought it from him and then, yeah.

Courtland Allen 4m 57s

You're just like sure. So, I often tell founders that one of the best ways to come up with ideas is just start something and in the course of running that thing you will come up totally more ideas. It seems like that's what happened with your helmets leading to this tricycle business.

Danielle Baskin 5m 10s

Yeah.

Courtland Allen 5m 11s

So maybe the best place to start is at the very beginning of your story. Is your helmets business sort of the first of your many projects that turned into businesses?

Danielle Baskin 5m 17s

Yeah, I mean I was the first that was the first business that like within a few days of creating hand painted helmets, I immediately set up a website and tried to sell them mostly because people on the street asked me where I got that thing.

Courtland Allen 5m 32s

So, take me back to like the origin of that. This is 2008. I think you were in college.

Danielle Baskin 5m 34s

It was like 2007 when I painted my first helmet. Yeah.

Courtland Allen 5m 39s

Why did you paint a helmet?

Danielle Baskin 5m 40s

I didn't wear a helmet because I thought it was really dorky to wear a helmet. And I just hated all the helmet options and then I forced myself to. Actually, there weren't bike lanes. In 2007 they were just putting in bike lanes and my commute was on a like on Bowery - it was a crowded street with lots of traffic and I had some close calls with some cars where I'm like OK I should really wear a helmet.

Courtland Allen 6m 1s

In New York City?

Danielle Baskin 5m 40s

Yeah, and I bought one and I didn't like the way it looked so I thought it'd be funny to camouflage it in a way.

So, I painted it to look like the sky even though it's not really camouflage. I just painted it to look like clouds and just like a blue sky with clouds and I varnished it and the varnish had this illusion of the sun and then I thought oh I need a nighttime sky and a sunset sky. So, I have like my helmets for different times of day and this was just like a weird project I had, but it wasn't supposed to be a business.

And then once I painted three, I thought like, “Oh I kind of want like 10 helmets. There's so many designs I could do.” But almost immediately when I went outside in the street just at an intersection, cyclists would ask me, “Oh that's a really cool helmet” and my immediate response was, “Do you want one, too?”

And I would like give them my email address and then eventually I set up like a very basic website with pictures and a PayPal link. This was kind of - I mean there were so many e-commerce options then, so.

Courtland Allen 6m 59s

I know a lot of people who I would call makers, tinkerers, people who love to do things like paint helmets and build things. Not very many of them are entrepreneurial, not very many of them when somebody asked, “Where did you get that?” would say, “Hey, let me make you one of these.”

Where did that drive come from?

Danielle Baskin 7m 15s

It is problematic that when someone asks like, “Oh, I want that, too” I'm like, “I can do that.” I don't know. I mean also like I - as a 19-year-old being able to sell artwork for - I was charging, when I first started was charging like $50 or $60 a helmet.

This seemed to like so much money to me and like would be a great income if you're able to make something and you find it fun and you're doing it anyway and someone wants to think from you and you simultaneously have to pay rent. It's natural to just be an entrepreneur, I think.

Courtland Allen 7m 48s

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So, people are asking you on the street, “Hey can I get these helmets.” You said, “Yes.”

Danielle Baskin 7m 56s

I said yes. And then I think like within I created a very basic website so I could direct people to a website. It was coolhelmets.org. That was my first website name. It was kind of a joke website, but there were images - I made 12 helmets for myself and for some people in my college dorm and then I had like a little gallery.

I think my first helmets for people on my floor, they gave me like beer in exchange for a helmet. But then I had a portfolio.

Courtland Allen 8m 24s

A trade.

Danielle Baskin 8m 25s

Yeah. And then what I think what was really exciting is once I put this online, I reached out to local bike blogs and they blogged about it and strangers in other cities wanted the helmets from me.

And this was fascinating to be able to sell something I made to someone that doesn't know me or like didn't run into me it was just so cool. Like someone in Florida is like I want flamingos on my helmet. And I just was so excited about strangers contacting me at that time. Yeah.

Courtland Allen 8m 52s

So, at this point are you thinking you know you've got dollar signs in your eyes, you're going to grow this into some sort of massive helmet business? Why not?

Danielle Baskin 8m 58s

I think I was excited about the possibilities of designs on helmets more than I was motivated by money.

I was like wow there's thousands of designs I could make. I didn't think so much about like how that would equate to revenue immediately. But I was just thinking like, “Wow, I want this idea to exist. No one's doing custom helmets. Cycling is getting more popular. This needs to exist.”

So, I have a notebook where I just give myself deadlines and random challenges. And I wrote like, “You need to you need to paint 100 helmets in the next year.” Not necessarily to sell them. They just need to exist in the world. But yeah, I mean simultaneously - I also like wasn't making that much money on the helmets because my pricing was awful.

Courtland Allen 9m 40s

How much did they cost?

Danielle Baskin 9m 44s

I was doing like custom -- if people were like I can't afford – I’d be like no problem what can you pay? And I was just so excited to sell my artwork and I think this is a problem for lots of painters it's that they don't actually keep track of how much time they're spending painting and just think it's like oh this is a meditative thing for me and like whatever you want to pay I'm just glad my artwork is out there.

So, I was charging, I don't know, sometimes a ballpark around $50 for a helmet when the helmet itself was costing me $20, and I was making like $30 on a painting that would sometimes take like five hours or—

Courtland Allen 10m 20s

Not a great deal.

Danielle Baskin 10m 22s

Right. Plus, like not charging them for shipping or offering to deliver it in person because I wanted to meet the people buying the things and what I learned after two years, how to increase my pricing, I mean I'm still learning about that.

Courtland Allen 10m 38s

Yeah, it's an art not a science.

OK, so your first foray into business, you don't charge enough. How does the helmet thing end and how does the next thing begin?

Danielle Baskin 10m 45s

My next thing after the helmets was other bike related stuff. I created this system to mount a phone to Citi Bike when bike share first emerged. There wasn't a way to use GPS while on the bike. So, I created – I needed to come up with some company name and I landed on Trillobox because it sounded like - I don't know it sounded like an established phone case.

Courtland Allen 11m 12s

Yeah, I’d buy one of those.

Danielle Baskin 11m 13s

Yeah, Trillobox, like I use a Trillobox. And that was like my second company where I was able to like sell things immediately to strangers on the internet and I was sewing these leather cases. They were like fake leather and I had had like bungee cord and I was leaving notes on Citi Bikes to purchase one.

Then people contacted me, but also people were searching for that thing anyway, which was really interesting. I could see that a lot of my web traffic was just for people looking for like smartphone on Citi Bike.

Courtland Allen 11m 52s

So, people Googling and ending up—

Danielle Baskin 11m 53s

People were looking for a way to attach their phone to the Citi Bike because the handlebars were – oh, I guess I'll explain this. The handlebars for the bike share bikes then were wide and all phone mounts were cylindrical so there's no way to attach all the existing mounts, so it had to be a system with like this bungee cord that wraps around and this product didn't exist and I thought it'd be useful because no one knows - you don't know if the dock is available so you need to be looking at your phone and there'd be all these people riding Citi Bikes like stopped in the intersection just messing up.

Courtland Allen 12m 25s

How did you notice this problem yourself? Was it like you wanted to attach your a case to a bike and you couldn't?

Danielle Baskin 12m 29s

Yeah, I wanted to see a lot of the docks were totally full so you would bike to what you thought was - I'd want to see availability in real time. Otherwise I'd end up at a dock and then I'd have to like pull out my phone and go to another dock and people would like honk at me because I'm like stuck in the bike lane. Like why can't I just look at my phone while I'm on the bike? It doesn't make sense that I can't attach a phone to this bike and I could like Velcro it but like I could also design a case for other people. Yeah.

Courtland Allen 12m 57s

Probably the oldest startup advice in the book is solve your own problems. You seem to consistently solve your own problems. Everybody's got problems. Why isn't everybody else as good as you are at actually solving them?

Danielle Baskin 13m 10s

At solving them or solving them for other or getting other people to buy your solution? Or—

Courtland Allen 13m 16s

Well, both, because when you run into this it's like number one, this is a problem and you recognize that it has some value then you solve it and you get to use it.

Danielle Baskin 13m 25s

It's probably like I worked for many years in theater and film making props and I had a ton of budget restraints and things I needed to procure and produce within 24 hours, and so I’d gotten into this habit of making things really fast as though there was a deadline when there wasn't and making things out of whatever was around me spending as little as possible just because I worked on so many low budget short films.

That's probably from that, but I also, I get very excited about like figuring out how to make something.

Courtland Allen 14m 1s

How would you, let's say, make Trillobox from conception to construction?

Danielle Baskin 14m 8s

Oh yeah, how did I buy the materials and stuff?

Courtland Allen 14m 9s

Yeah, exactly. How does that work?

Danielle Baskin 14m 10s

The first thing I did was I made a prototype of whatever I had. I think I put a nail in some wood and a rubber band and then moved it around the Citi Bike and then like another nail and then sealed my phone in with a piece of clear plastic which I had lying around, like OK well this is way too big. I need to make this out of some materials. So I went to a fabric store and saw this nice like fake leather stuff and I got a small amount of that and I also needed nice hemming.

I had a sewing machine, anyway, but I didn't spend much on it. And then I decided to sell them for $24.99 because that was like a comparable price to the other ones. But I ended up manufacturing them in Bangladesh later on.

Courtland Allen 14m 54s

And what about the selling part of this? You said you were going from Citi Bike to Citi Bike.

Danielle Baskin 14m 58s

I was leaving - yeah I was going to crowded docks and I had printed a card that said you can attach your phone to your bike, go to Trillobox.com and I would leave them taped to the bike itself which is like kind of spammy.

Courtland Allen 15m 14s

A little bit. Real world spam.

Danielle Baskin 15m 16s

Yeah, but like it's solving a useful problem. It wasn't like come check out my comedy clubs.

Courtland Allen 15m 22s

Come check out my band. Donate to my GoFundMe.

OK, so you are this combination of this intense hacker slash hustler slash parallel entrepreneur. How did the Trillobox thing work out?

Danielle Baskin 15m 35s

I actually got pretty overwhelmed with orders and I was trying to figure out how to manufacture them and someone - I was in a coworking space and someone in my coworking space, his cousin in Bangladesh had a small shoe factory and he was visiting and he's like, “What if I brought a sample and we can test out making them?” So, I did a run of them in Bangladesh and then for the next year just sold that. But I never I never remade them because I got busy with other stuff. I had like my cloud storage sculpture company.

Courtland Allen 16m 8s

One business interrupted by another business. A lot of people have this issue where we start building something that we never actually finish building. You're like a whole step further than that where you start building something. You finish building it, but you don't take it to like scale. I get interrupted at that phase.

Danielle Baskin 16m 25s

Yeah, I'm trying to work - I think the solution is to delegate, to fire yourself from your own company and then delegate all those tasks to something else which is something I've learned in the last two years.

When you reach a point where you kind of understand how to run the business and you're really excited about working on your next idea and just the day to day of your previous business is doesn't seem like it's dependent on your mind specifically and you find someone really excited about that idea, you could hire someone if you have the revenue for it.

And it's scary if you're used to doing projects all by yourself to give up that much control but you've already figured it out and someone else might join and work on it and have their own ideas of how to do things better than you and it's like a good experiment to try and that would enable you to work on something else.

Courtland Allen 17m 12s

Let's talk about some of these lessons that you've learned. Delegating - something you've learned recently in the last couple years. I'm curious what are some of the lessons that you've learned from your first three businesses. We talked about not charging enough. What else?

Danielle Baskin 17m 24s

OK, here's a very simple thing - make sure your forms work on your website.

I've launched a few things and I didn't check to see if like all the different forms or ways you can contact me on every single page is working. And actually, missed out on 200 e-mails for my company from when I when I launched like helmets for your corporation, like I will do a batch of 100 helmets. I missed out on really great opportunities because I didn't check to see whether or not the JavaScript thing was working. Yeah, very small details.

I think something that is super important is to always launch your idea with an MVP where you're not spending much money or time at all, just to see what people want and showing your idea to people you know before launching it and gauging reactions from that has been super helpful for choosing what to actually pursue.

Because I once wanted to start this huge platform for sourcing props throughout New York for art directors and spent weeks working on this, but I never even went up to a prop shop and asked if they'd be interested in putting their inventory on this website. And like what a waste of time. I also ended up asking art directors and set designers, “Would you pay if you could like use this platform to search for a 1920s telephone?” And they're like, I don't know Craigslist is fine and I like go to prop shops and it's OK. And I couldn't find -- and maybe that changes depending on what's going on that year.

But it’s really important because I could have done other things with my time. It's important to immediately start asking who your end user is or who your customer is, if they would actually buy that thing before put time and money into building it.

Courtland Allen 19m 12s

So, you've been creating and selling physical goods in the real world for a long time. You've also got some digital businesses, apps and websites and stuff like that, we're going to get into those.

But I'm curious about how the process of selling physical goods has changed over time. Has that gotten any easier since you first started back in 2008?

Danielle Baskin 19m 29s

Oh, totally.

I mean it's fairly easy to set up an e-commerce website right now and to make it look beautiful. There's so many websites and templates and it's easy to have good photography. When I was starting out with my business in 2008, I had to buy a digital camera and then I had to like sharpen it and I had to make it look like a professional camera. And it's just kind of easy to seem like a large business online as an as an e-commerce company.

Also, you can sell things directly through Instagram and other sorts of channels like things could just go viral on Instagram and as long as there's a checkout link, you don't need an elaborate web site. You do single page websites with checkout links.

Courtland Allen 20m 7s

Do you know a lot of other people who you could describe as I guess using the same terms you describe yourself as a parallel entrepreneur making these physical habits and competing with you? Like, who are the other Danielle Baskins?

Danielle Baskin 20m 16s

I would love to meet if you're listening to this. I would love to meet people that are working on multiple businesses simultaneously because people always tell me not to do this, like all the advice I get is to focus on one thing. But I know people working on lots of projects, but not multiple projects involving customers yet.

Courtland Allen 20m 40s

Yeah, I do too. I know a lot of people making stuff. They're just not – they’re usually not that passionate. It's like if you're a singer. Most singers aren't that passionate about also marketing their music and distributing it to customers and selling it to them. Yeah same with people that I know who are sort of physical makers like most of you guys aren't actually selling stuff.

Danielle Baskin 20m 57s

I try to encourage people to sell stuff, but I think it's -- I mean some people my friends who are artists and make a lot of stuff I often tell them to sell things. They’re like, no capitalism sucks.

Courtland Allen 21m 8s

It’ll ruin it.

Danielle Baskin 21m 9s

And it's like, not really. I guess that's an ideology that I mean - there's still participating in a capitalist world. And it’s not awful to charge, it's like great to charge people for services and things. I mean it’d be cool if you could just pay people all the time for weird performances.

If someone says a beautiful sentence, like you just tip them.

Courtland Allen 21m 32s

Micro payment, here you go. [crosstalk]

Danielle Baskin 21m 36s

I think often people get uncomfortable with charging for something that they thought was a fun problem to solve, especially engineers that are used to getting paid to have a full-time job and so their side projects they always consider side projects they never consider that to be a source of revenue. Like with me, I haven't had a full-time job so I'm like, “What can I sell today?” I wake up and look around me. What objects do I have? What can I sell today? And I think that if you're in a certain profession where there are just tons of jobs available - there aren't tons of jobs available for painters and sculptors so you have to be like what limited resources do I have and how can I convert that into money so I can pay rent?

Courtland Allen 22m 18s

It's cool looking at the - I guess like the aesthetic differences between different types of people and makers.

I was just at MicroConf a couple weeks ago and everybody at MicroConf is kind of like an indie hacker. They're usually developers who want to make some sort of software as a service business and sell that. You’re a physical tinkerer and maker. You've got like you know this drive to look around your house and sell things. I think people in L.A., I was talking to my buddy Julian. They're really into e-commerce in L.A., like almost all the big startups coming out of L.A. are e-commerce-focused.

I go to a conference in Boise, Idaho, every year called Craft Plus Commerce and everybody there is a blogger. They all have blogs about Amazon shopping addictions and food interests etc., and they're all different ways to sort of make money online.

But people don't really cross over and then people sort of – I don’t want to say look down on the other groups - but there's kind of these invisible boundaries. People are like, well that's not the real way to do it.

So that's why I'm curious like how you see yourself fitting into any of these groups or you're just sort of like a free-floating person entity. Do you look up to anybody? Are you inspired by anybody? Is there anyone that you're trying to be? Or is there anything you’re trying to do?

Danielle Baskin 23m 31s

No. I have a list of things I want to create, I guess. I'm very driven by ideas not thinking about myself as a person that like has- I'm just excited about ideas existing so I don't think like I need to be a person with all these businesses. It's more like I want this thing to exist. Oh, I guess it's a business. Sometimes it's not a project I'm really excited about. This is not - I don't just do e-commerce stuff, but I do a lot of exploration of abandoned buildings.

I'm very interested in just exploring spaces. So, I have with lots of planning have gone to interesting places that it's difficult for the public to go to.

And so I started this service called Last Chance Tours where I actually borrowed a Matterport camera and so I could create VR scans of places so people could access these abandoned spaces and get a tour of it. And I've been pitching this to cities to have me do historical documentation, but no one really will pay me to do it, but I'm just really excited about this thing to exist. I don’t know. I think I have lots of hobbies and interests and then I try to think like, OK how do I turn this into some sort of product that will like support this hobby?

Courtland Allen 24m 43s

Do you think that the business side of things ever sucks the joy out of any of your hobbies or projects?

Danielle Baskin 24m 47s

Oh yeah, totally. I used to love painting and after painting - I've painted I don't know 5,000 helmets - like a crazy- I don't know exactly how many helmets I've painted. Lots of hours painting. I’ve painted for over 10,000 hours or something.

After four years, I hated painting. Or, like I had a complicated relationship with it. It was no longer - it was like work. It's like I was thinking like as I'm painting it's just my mundane office job is painting and I would not look forward to it but I’d force myself to do it.

And I liked coming up with new images. I was excited about the whole project in a conceptual way, like the possibilities are endless for helmets. When I stopped enjoying painting, I started researching ways to automate it which I'm still working on and I’m like partway there.

But then I stopped drawing and I stopped sketching drawing and I kind of like lost my whole like visual art drive. So, then a year ago I stopped painting helmets entirely and then it sort of has come back. Right now, I have an impulse to paint again.

So I think you could totally get burnt out once you start getting paid for what your creative hobby is when you start getting paid you associate that with money. It's not fun anymore and it's good to like quit it and then come back to it.

Courtland Allen 26m 7s

Yeah, I guess that's the good part of never really fully shutting down your business. You can always come back to it. It's always there. You said that you are more passionate about ideas themselves than any particular outcome. You're not like I need to be Danielle Baskin, owner of 50 companies.

Danielle Baskin 26m 21s

Yeah. I don't need to be the CEO of a startup, even though I am.

Courtland Allen 26m 28s

Maybe that explains why your ideas sort of interrupt each other. If you don't have a particular outcome you're going for and then you get a new idea you're excited to build, then why not switch and start working on this other idea.

Danielle Baskin 26m 38s

Totally. And I mean that could be a problem because I think if I were to stick with one thing, if I was like I want to run with Branded Fruit and I want to like not only do Branded Fruit but figure out a new system for PLU codes and I want to be like Danielle Baskin of the produce industry. I could do a lot with that, but like I'm not - I'm conflicted because I have all these other identities I guess.

Courtland Allen 27m 4s

Yeah, I mean you're pretty close to Danielle Baskin of the fruit industry. You came in here, I don't know what you said, you're having a fruit day.

Danielle Baskin 27m 12s

Yeah. So today was a fruit day. That’s why I’m late because I had a fruit assembly line.

Courtland Allen 27m 16s

OK, we're going to get to that. Let’s go to like the middle of your history before we go to the fruit phase of your life. When did you move to California and why did you make that decision?

Danielle Baskin 27m 26s

I moved three years ago, a little over three years ago. I was in this weird live-work space above a bar in the East Village, a cool space. I lived with a neon sign maker and we had a wood shop in our kitchen, and it was great but I ran out of space for - like my floor was just covered in boxes with helmets.

I had clients come over, which some of them were entertained by my place but it was not that professional.

So, I was looking for a new place to move to in New York. I didn't imagine living in California and my friends in San Francisco said like hey we're like actually going to be leaving our apartment for three months if you want to come here for the winter, you can stay with us. You can stay in our place. It's not like, oh what if I just like lived in San Francisco for three months. And then I moved out and I never left.

Courtland Allen 28m 20s

Welcome to the club. Every single year I think I've got two years left and I've been saying that for eight years.

Danielle Baskin 28m 26s

I was in New York for 10 years. I think it's difficult. You can get kind of locked into living in a city when you're not aware that you might enjoy a different place. So, I think it's good to force yourself to just live somewhere else because you might end up moving.

Courtland Allen 28m 40s

Agreed. I haven't pulled the plug yet, but one day. OK, so you moved from New York. You’re living here with your friends. Did you start a new business once you moved here?

Danielle Baskin 28m 46s

Yes. Many of them within a few months of moving here, actually.

I mean this was just like a one-week business - was like Pokemon Go craze. And I created a battery that looks like a Poke ball which went viral on the internet and I sold lots of them and hired 25 people and we had an assembly line and made them for like three weeks and then I only did this for a short amount of time.

But I had my helmet business. I brought my tricycle. I brought one. I had three tricycles in New York and just brought one over.

I also was doing my cloud storage units that were like these clouds you can store things in. I started doing custom avocados when I moved here because the avocados were - I could get better deals on avocados in San Francisco and more people are interested in avocados here. A lot of my companies are sort of Bay Area jokes, too, like I started selling sweaters for drones and—

Courtland Allen 29m 47s

Walk me through the idea behind sweaters for a drone.

Danielle Baskin 29m 49s

Yeah, I made a sweater for my drone just like one would have a dog sweater and-

Courtland Allen 29m 57s

You knitted a sweater?

Danielle Baskin 29m 58s

No. It seems like I knit the sweater. I wanted to spend as very little time as possible on this. So, I found some knit socks and cut up the socks and reset them together.

Courtland Allen 30m 10s

And attached them to your drone?

Danielle Baskin 30m 13s

Yeah. I mean I made like a buttoned up and I attached it to a drone that was broken because I thought of the idea and I didn't even have a drone, but just put a message out into the world, “Hey can I borrow someone's drone?” and someone gave me their like sort of broken drone.

But this went viral on the internet and [inaudible] drone companies started sending me their drones for sweaters. Then I had a pile of drones with sweaters and yeah I get inquiries about this a lot. I kind of don't sell them anymore because I don't think it's something anyone needs.

I can't justify I can't justify spending time on drone sweaters. There is actually a use case for it if I wanted to work with companies to figure out like sleek ways to conserve drone battery life when it’s cold weather outside because batteries drain faster. There could be like this stylish solution with like a heated drone sweater. But I haven't really - I don't care that much.

Courtland Allen 31m 18s

So, a lot of people are trying to start companies and come up with ideas and they're very serious about this. You're starting companies as basically jokes sometimes.

Danielle Baskin 31m 29s

I mean yeah, it's fun for me. I love launching ideas and setting up landing pages like this is a hobby is to like set up landing pages for stuff. So I launched this as a joke and then people thought it was serious and then I thought no one would want to buy it but people do. People -- and this has happened for a few products – where I think oh everyone will hate this and they'll understand that I'm making fun of the Bay Area, but yet they want the thing. OK So this is my VC trading cards which I sort of kept anonymous.

Courtland Allen 32m 3s

VC trading cards. Sweaters for drones. Why do people want these things? And I guess what I'm getting at is how do you make something go viral? What is the sort of common thread between what makes something blow up? Is it because they're jokes or is there something else that you're doing to really get people interested in the things that you're building?

Danielle Baskin 32m 19s

I mean I think a percentage of the stuff that is a joke gets media attention and people want to be part of that joke and they want to be part of the story that they are the person buying that thing. That this joke speaks to them. They are the recipient of the joke and they want it, too, but often it's totally unexpected.

Like I put something online like the VC trading cards actually were super popular in Japan because there's both trading card culture is so strong there and there's also a sort of obsession with Silicon Valley there and so I sold a lot to people in Japan but I didn't realize that. But, I don't know why people impulse purchase things. I don't understand it either.

I don't really buy things on the Internet when I find something funny. I think it's very easy to be on Twitter and you find something at 1 a.m. and you just, ugh I want that shit to me in three days. Cool.

Courtland Allen 33m 21s

Yeah, I see some things on the internet, I just laugh and then click the next thing. I don't buy either. I saw there's a community online. I think it’s called the cloud appreciation society and it's a community of people who appreciate clouds.

Danielle Baskin 33m 34s

Oh, I'd love to learn more.

Courtland Allen 33m 37s

Yeah, so would I. I think they charge like $25 or $50 for membership and they've got like 30,000 members.

Danielle Baskin 33m 43s

What does the membership include?

Courtland Allen 33m 46s

A plaque to prove you appreciate clouds.

Danielle Baskin 33m 47s

Oh, you get a physical thing. Yeah, people really love being part of special clubs. I think that's it, especially with I think like a lot of brands have sort of this whole lifestyle. Like if you buy our shirt, you are now a person that is part of our whole Instagram lifestyle

Courtland Allen 34m 5s

I’ve got a whole box of Indie Hacker shirts right here if you want one and you can be part of the crew, Danielle. This is interesting because maybe it's an under looked marketing tactic at least in the circles that I travel in where like being novel and funny and having personality and, I don’t know, just doing something different than everybody else is doing can get you media attention beyond just building something that's super useful.

Danielle Baskin 34m 26s

That's the thing, right.

I mean, I like building useful things and can justify my jokes as useful like the swag produce - putting logos on oranges and avocados seems really silly but it’s actually kind of useful because there's a lot of waste when you get your fidget spinners and your stress balls and it's actually solving a problem of not wasting as much plastic if you want to promote something.

And it also solves this problem of like oh nobody's taking pictures of the water bottle they get but they'll take a picture of an orange because it's novel, so there's like some utility in it. I'd rather only make useful things. I just think of a lot of dumb jokes. If you have a useful product it's so hard to get press about it. Journalists love weird controversial like funny stories and so it's a challenge if you do have a useful thing, like how do you spin a weird surrealist angle on it so that you get some sort of press?

Courtland Allen 34m 32s

There’s a new task manager that's making people 5 percent more productive. No one wants to write a story on that.

Let's talk about your branded produce. Branded Fruit is the name of your company. What is this exactly? Who's buying it? How did you come up with the idea?

Danielle Baskin 35m 49s

Yeah. Branded Fruit. I started as the company customavocados.com and I did this before I even had a website. My friend was having a barbecue and her company had recently been acquired and I thought it'd be sort of funny if I brought swag from the new company name to the barbecue as though their life was like now owned by their new company. Like your life has been acquired, your barbecue has been acquired. 
I brought these avocados. I made four avocados and just like left them on the table and I noticed like all these people were taking pictures of them and they were just looking at them and they're fascinated, like “How did you do it?”

And they were putting them on Instagram like oh actually this is like great marketing. This company who didn't even buy these is now getting mentions on Twitter and so I thought OK well I think I could probably turn this into a company and sell these.

I set up and it took all it took some time to actually - I think this was in New York, I moved to San Francisco. I set it up. I actually launched the idea for the Stupid Ideas Hackathon which is a great conference that happens once a year where your goal is to build something that is useless which is a challenge and I think the avocados, they're not useless, but I launched it there. People tweeted about it and so companies actually saw this and I actually got an order with Salesforce. They wanted 500 avocados.

Courtland Allen 37m 12s

So, an inbound request out of the blue? Salesforce. Make us 500 avocados.

Danielle Baskin 37m 14s

They're like oh this would be great for Cinco de Mayo party for our team and they wanted 500 and then other companies wanted smaller amounts and that was fine. Some people wanted them just as inside jokes. I did a marriage proposal on a series of avocados that this person left throughout their apartment. And I did this for like a year, I mean just like I don't know, a few times a month.

Courtland Allen 37m 37s

By yourself?

Danielle Baskin 37m 38s

Yeah.

Courtland Allen 37m 38s

How long does it take one person to carve—

Danielle Baskin 37m 41s

Well, it’s not carved. It's applied to the surface. I mean it's constantly getting faster because I'm using new technology. It was like I was doing a very slow process, going to the store and finding the perfect avocado that is the perfect level of an unripenness is like that takes time. But then I found farms and I had like an avocado supplier and I ended up expanding this.

I did avocados for like two years and I thought because in my spare time I make landing pages and buy domain names I was like what about all fruit? Why not carrots? Why not peppers? Why not pineapples?

And I just bought the domain name brandedfruit.com because it's available and it's sort of like fake acquired custom avocados and the new direction of the company. I think I did on Facebook but I was sort of a joke and the new direction of the company was like all produce, like brands on everything.

It's really a surrealist dystopian way, just printed a bunch of brands like I put Airbnb on a piece of broccoli and I made all these samples and put them on my site and it ended up getting press in Fast Company.

This was my own fault. I did tip it to them, but it got press and it made its way into marketing or promotional items, trade publications as this is the newest swag and I talked to people who had been in the industry for 20 years and they're like I've never seen logos on fruit before.

And it's to me it's such an obvious idea. I guess, yeah this hasn't existed in 20 years of weird promotional items and so companies, yeah pretty large companies are reaching out to me and they want 1,000 oranges to give out for an event or 5,000 oranges or avocados or clementines, pineapples. I don't do bananas anymore but at one point I did.

Courtland Allen 39m 44s

So, when you when you tip off Fast Company, you get some press. You’re expecting there to be inbound interest. You have a plan at that point for exactly what your business is going to look like?

Danielle Baskin 39m 53s

No. I wasn't a direct tip to Fast Company. Basically, there was an article about how wasteful the swag industry was and I just emailed the journalist who wrote about it that this is why all swag should be avocados or something silly.

But I told her I was doing this waste-free alternative to swag and she wanted to hop on the phone and learn more and we had a long conversation about manufacturing and the wastefulness of swag like I’ve manufactured things in China before so I know like if the logo is off center they throw out the whole product and it's crazy how much stuff is wasted and how no one even cares about the thing, like it's just incredible that so much time - so many labor hours are going into things that no one wants.

But we had this long conversation and then she ended up writing an article about it, but I didn't know that I was going to be featured in Fast Company. So, one day at 5:30 a.m. my phone starts ringing and it's someone who wants Branded Fruit. I’m like oh that's interesting. And then like two minutes later my phone rings again and open up my email and I have tons of requests. I mean within the first three days I had like 150 requests for fruit.

Courtland Allen 41m 8s

And this is just you by yourself at this point?

Danielle Baskin 41m 11s

I was, yes. Well, I was home and then my co-founder for my voice chat app was on the couch at the time and he observed this whole thing happen. And then the two of us sorted through all my emails and set up an Airtable, and organized everything. I didn't even have my website. There was no way to purchase it. It was just a form and I just within a day switched everything to Shopify and changed my photography and set up a nicer form and had a whole way of tagging inbound orders and set this whole thing up in a day which I should have done in advance, but I didn't know.

Courtland Allen 41m 44s

Well, that's crazy. You're actually getting paying customers or people who want to pay you for what you're building. You’ve built absolutely nothing besides a landing page.

Danielle Baskin 41m 55s

I mean I had done some fruit, right? Not much though. I mean I had done probably under 1,500 pieces of fruit in my lifetime, which I guess seems low. The whole branded fruit business was pretty new and no one had ever purchased something from that domain name, they had purchased stuff from Custom Avocados. But yeah and I didn't spend like I mean I set up a whole website in just an afternoon, bought a bunch of fruit put logos on it and used some of my earlier client work.

Courtland Allen 42m 22s

That's what's amazing to me because I know so many people who will work on something for like a year and not get a single paying customer.

Danielle Baskin 42m 28s

Well right then that's why you should test ideas without spending any time and money on them. Make your thing better as people are paying. I sort of freaked out when I first started getting so many orders I was like there's no way I could make this much fruit. I don't have a van. I don't have - where do I get my fruit wholesale? I had to figure this all out and I was thinking like, oh maybe I should have an investor. And then I was like oh wait I could just like charge people and then figure it out incrementally and do what I can and I guess if my first like five orders are not perfect that's OK.

Courtland Allen 43m 2s

At what point did you start hiring people and scaling up your operation?

Danielle Baskin 43m 8s

Within three days I hired a full-time assistant because my inbox was just crazy and I was also working on my other company and so I didn't want to spend 100 percent of my time on fruit. I also couldn't handle the fruit alone.

A friend of mine really wanted to work on Branded Fruit. She is excited about the business. I was like yeah come over and we'll sort of work on random stuff together and we'll see and she's been my full-time assistant for I guess over three months.

Courtland Allen 43m 43s

And now you've got what, how many people did you say you had working?

Danielle Baskin 43m 45s

There's nine people working at the fruit factory today. Yeah it's rolling I mean some days it's one person, some days it's three. It depends on the order because we have to ship out same day so.

Courtland Allen 43m 58s

Describe to listeners this process of having a fruit factory.

Danielle Baskin 44m 2s

Having a fruit factory? It’s an assembly line. I call it the fruit force but fruit force or fruit factory. It's an assembly line. Imagine 2,000 oranges on a table and everyone's doing a part and the oranges are coming off the table into boxes and there's someone like preparing all the boxes so that they have the right – they’re packaged in the right way so they don't bruise in the mail.

There's someone putting the perishable stickers. It's like you divide everything into a micro task. I've done factories before and I learn each time how to set up a system and then try to make it fun like I'm actually really interested in the social aspect of factories, like what people are coming in today and what is their dynamic like?

And do these people distract each other? What is the conversation going to be about? And so I try to curate—

Courtland Allen 44m 52s

Socially engineering.

Danielle Baskin 44m 54s

Things happen organically. I also don't know I feel some people who are in the factory and I haven't met them before. I actually have a waitlist to work on my factory. People say they’re a lot of fun.

I kind of want to have a separate ticketed factory for all the people that are on the waitlist and just start selling tickets to work on an assembly line as a weird theater piece joke. I basically have an email list and then just well if I need help for something we'll just e-blast everyone and see who's available.

I mean it's a mix of who is available that day because I only do it last minute. I don't I can't plan in advance for hours for stuff like fruit.

Courtland Allen 45m 42s

Yeah, you’ve got a perishable product.

So, I want to talk about your last company - the one you're most excited Dialup. Before that, I want to give listeners a snapshot of how well Branded Fruit is doing because you said you’d be OK sharing some revenue numbers, right?

Danielle Baskin 45m 56s

So, the Fast Company article launched mid-December, then took me like a week to set everything up to charge people. Since January 1, I have sold $59,000 in fruit but that includes shipping and stuff. But I've transacted $59,000 through my Shopify in just fruit alone in like bananas and oranges and avocados which is crazy. It's a lot of fruit.

Courtland Allen 46m 31s

But no longer bananas.

Danielle Baskin 46m 32s

No, bananas don't ship well. I talked to the director of the International Banana Association through my app like we got connected and in a way and it's shipping bananas is very difficult.

I have ideas for how to improve banana shipping but it's just easier to say no. The temperature changes and they just bruise easily.

Courtland Allen 46m 59s

Let’s talk about your app that connected you to this banana expert. What is Dialup?

Danielle Baskin 47m 5s

OK, Dialup is a voice chat app that calls your phone at specific intervals like let's say Tuesday at 7 p.m., your phone rings and it connects you with a random person in a specific line that you've signed up to.

So if you and 10 friends want to always stay connected with each other through phone calls it just calls you and connects you and this could be a group of people with similar interests like there's a - we have a line for farming and by line I mean a channel.

But yeah, there's a line for farming and so people that are interested in ag tech will on Sundays at 4 p.m., their phones will ring and they'll get connected and they'll be matched with a random person and they’ll have a one-on-one. And you can do this with us with just one person.

So you'd always match with them or you can do it with like 300 people for your conference or 1,000 people and continue having these meaningful conversations pretty frequently.

Courtland Allen 48m 10s

Is this another idea that came out of you solving one of your own problems?

Danielle Baskin 48m 13s

Totally.

It's both like my problems and Max, my co-founder’s problems. Years ago, Max created this art project called “Call in the Night” that was a library of people discussing their dreams and it would call people in the middle of the night between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. at random days and they'd pick up, they'd be connected to a stranger. They’d discuss their dreams that would be recorded and so there's a library and 5,000 people were on this. There's a library of people talking about their dreams—

Courtland Allen 48m 45s

Five thousand people voluntarily signed up to be called between 2 and 5 a.m.—

Danielle Baskin 48m 48s

Yes, all over the world. But it wasn't just about dreams. People would talk about all these different things. And he showed me the archives. I was very interested in this. I've always been interested in voice conversations, kind of from being a painter.

When my when my day job was painting. I actually couldn't really spend much time on the internet. So, I’d listen lots of podcasts and I’d have people call me as a way to communicate with me because I couldn't check Twitter. I also have been making audio recordings for many years. I learned about this and like kind of around the same time I was getting a lot of emails from entrepreneurs that wanted advice and I thought that OK.

It's kind of like someone wants to talk to me for advice but they kind of just want to verbalize what's on their mind. And this is like this helpful therapy sort of thing. And what I noticed also like with “Call in the Night” that it's very therapeutic and people have all these realizations when they're just talking to someone over the phone.

And I thought OK well what if I connected all the people that are reaching out to me with each other so that an entrepreneur could talk to another entrepreneur and Max and I were discussing this and thought OK let's try it just with us and a small group of friends.

We are all self-employed. We are all calling each other. Then it sort of seemed like we were each other's bosses and we created an app called, “Your Boss.” And it was like role play as a boss for a stranger, if you're self-employed freelance remote.

We worked on this for a few months, launched it and the App Store. A few hundred people joined all over the world. It is interesting, there are a lot of people on it that were not self-employed or freelance.

There were significant amount people that were self-employed and working on all these interesting projects like a shoemaker in England and a set designer in Mumbai and all these people working on their thing.

But there are a lot of people that just - they had a full time job. They were just really interested in having a conversation with someone and then we had all these people say I want this, but I want to choose who I talk to. I really liked the person I just met on the phone. How do I get reconnected?

So, then we decided to just be a voice chat app, not just for people pretend to be the other's boss, but for any sort of interest or group of people you want to stay in touch with.

It's relevant now because I have so many friends that are leaving Facebook and Twitter and I'm just like oh just join my Dialup line and we can stay in touch because I otherwise I’ll have no awareness of what's going on. If I don't plan to like get lunch with you, I will never know what's going on in your life and it's really sad that I'd be dependent on Facebook or Twitter to have an awareness of another person, so I’m like, “Oh join my dialup line” and I will get connected to you over the phone at a specific interval.

Courtland Allen 51m 43s

Like you say Thursday at 5 p.m. and connect me to this specific person and then it calls them?

Danielle Baskin 51m 50s

Or what I do with my Dialup line is it calls a random person. Right. So, I get connect to a random friend.

Courtland Allen 51m 57s

Oh, OK. So, you don't even know who it's going to be. They don't even know if a call is going to come.

Danielle Baskin 52m 3s

Yeah, they don't know that if they're going to get called or not. But I could set up a one-on-one with someone and say that yes, once a month on a Thursday at 4 p.m. our phones will ring and we will have a conversation.

And there's also this prompt at the beginning of the conversation that I like. I make my prompts weird but there's prompts like if you want to ask a specific question like, “What are you up to right now?” Or say, “Go look at the moon and tell me what's on your mind.” I don’t know.

Courtland Allen 52m 32s

Is it like you reading these prompts to people? Or is there a voice?

Danielle Baskin 52m 33s

Yeah, I've recorded for all of the lines we have that are like Dialups lines because when you join the app there's like 12 different line you could join. It's me and Max that recorded all the intros with different music. That’s like 30 second clips then it's like for the boss line, it's like this 80s-synth music and I'm like when's your next deadline? And then people talk to each other and try to answer that question. There’s a line where you just like talk about weather and nature and I ask questions about insects or it's random stuff but it it's - having a very detailed question inspires a whole conversation.

Courtland Allen 53m 16s

So, out of all the things we’ve talked about.

First of all, how are we doing on time?

Danielle Baskin 53m 22s

Oh, I'm good, I'm getting. One of the calls was just triggered from the app is calling me right now. I signed up for the Immersive Design Summit. So every Thursday at 5:15 p.m., the phone rings and I can see a call coming in. Oh, I should have picked it up actually. That’d be funny if I was recording a podcast.

Courtland Allen 53m 47s

So, what happens if you don't pick it up? They get connected to someone else?

Danielle Baskin 53m 50s

Yes, they get connected to someone else. So, if I don't pick up it's like you'll still get a match. Yeah.

Courtland Allen 53m 56s

Out of all the things we talked about, this is the only business we've covered so far that's 100 percent pure app. Everything else is had some sort of physical e-commerce physical good component to it. In your experience what are some of the differences? How is this different than building a physical product? Is it harder? Is it easier?

Danielle Baskin 54m 11s

Oh, I mean it's so nice. Dealing with shipping physical things is so limiting as to how many people you could reach. And also you're dealing with the forces of lost packages and there's just so many issues with physical goods.

And this idea I'm very excited about. But it works for thousands of people. If we build it well, thousands of people can use it and more and this is such a different project because this is about human relationships and connections and stuff versus decorative whimsical things which is most of the other stuff I've done. It’s totally different. I'm doing UX design for this and it's totally different.

I've had to design things in very different ways. It's like oh how my designing people creating their username versus how am I designing a tapestry contraption thing for someone's wall is very different.

I'm really excited about this idea. It's kind of awesome that if we're building this technology that all these people can use it and it's one project versus - make something ship it out and it's gone remake the thing, that's gone

Courtland Allen 55m 31s

Yeah, there’s kind of a natural ending point if you're doing physical goods where you've made all the things you're going to make and now you have to order more or you can just not order more. Whereas with your digital app—

Danielle Baskin 55m 40s

The app is like this giant evolving thing.

Courtland Allen 55m 48s

It’s never gone.

Danielle Baskin 55m 49s

It will never die.

Well there's no end. Right. I mean there's constant - the more the more users you have, the more feature requests there will be, when your technology works the more possible directions you can go in. And it's sort of like yeah it's this massive sculpture - not a sculpture. Yeah it is sort of like a sculpture.

Courtland Allen 56m 12s

You're talking about these different directions you can go in and you're talking about OK well you've got your boss which is—

Danielle Baskin 56m 18s

It’s now a line, yeah.

Courtland Allen 56m 19s

You've got lines. Basically, you can create a line for anything. You've got business users. You've got consumers. How do you make money from this? Where do you go as a business?

Danielle Baskin 56m 28s

If your line’s under 20. This is like our basic pricing structure: if your line is under 20 people, it's free. And if it's over 20 people you're going to pay like $10 a month. And if it's over 100 people and you’re a conference then it would be a different price.

So, this way, we're not going to charge you if you want to connect to your family in a monthly call. That's something that people are not used to paying for and also I want to facilitate these conversations. But if it's some Meetup group that has a budget and has over 20 people in it then that will be a monthly payment.

Courtland Allen 57m 9s

Sounds like you've kind of naturally settled on being B2B, charging businesses and letting consumers—

Danielle Baskin 57m 13s

Uh, no. I think that some people would want to pay $10 a month for a large group, right? It's not necessarily a business.

I think there's also all these features that will build later on. I mean this is just the pricing structure we're doing for the next few months while we build out the lines feature but I think that there could be all these other features like more frequent calls and all these sort of micro payments that people could do.

Courtland Allen 57m 37s

Have you found that it's any more difficult to grow and get press for a digital app which there are many millions compared to like very unique you know branded fruit product or sweater drones.

Danielle Baskin 57m 48s

No, I'm not worried about this at all because I have a bunch of tricks. So, if you're launching an app focus on -- and I won't reveal what my stunts are -- but I have good stories about this app that I'll release in the next few months. But focus on one very small detail of the technology you're creating that's a really good story.

Courtland Allen 58m 18s

You have a whole repertoire of tricks. You’ve got to give us at least like a half of a trick.

Danielle Baskin 58m 24s

A half trick related to this? Well, here’s how I've had a lot of success telling people about my app by pulling out a floppy disk which unfortunately I didn't bring.

But I have tons of floppy disks that give people the link to sign up for the app and explain what it is but it looks like a retro disk. For the Immersive Design Summit, I left a few hundred floppy disks lying around the whole conference that all look like retro video games and stuff and some just looked like weird save like save files.

I made a whole spectrum of floppy disks. People were like, “What is this?” And then they went to the website. I'm planning on doing like a mass mailing of floppy disks, kind of like AOL.

Courtland Allen 59m 8s

How about anyone else who’s advertising their app by mailing stuff.

Danielle Baskin 59m 10s

Oh yeah. People love artifacts and things. I think people enjoy - and maybe I'm biased because I enjoy this but I think people enjoy game elements to technology, right, to signing up for something. It should be fun and exciting as opposed to - I would never want to purchase a Facebook ad to tell people about connect with your friends and then we're spending like $1.13 per click.

I never want to give Facebook money to get people to sign up for our app but if I am giving someone this interesting story - I got a mysterious floppy disk in the mail and then it led me to this site where I wasn't sure if it was real or not and then I read it and I was like oh actually I do want this.

I think that's a good way to get people to sign up. Also, it's I think it's super important to not take – I’m very worried now that I have this app that I'll sound like a startup when I'm like sign up for my app. I run into an old friend, I'm like, “Are you on my app yet?” And I don't like this about myself.

I don't want to take this idea too seriously even though I do. I don’t want to come across as though I take it too seriously.

So, I think if it's playful and the way that I'm sharing it is it is both revealing what the product is but is also playful and like a game and also doesn't seem too much like a startup trying to disrupt how people communicate. That's a good way to market something.

Courtland Allen 1h 0m 42s

You're trying your hardest to not be like every other person in San Francisco.

Danielle Baskin 1h 0m 46s

Yeah, our landing page is really weird. You can see it. We have Dialup.com and it looks like a retro website. I'm going for like I think Craigslist is beautifully designed and I could make a landing page that has the flat humans and the three bullet points with icons and test.

I mean there's a whole formula for like being a startup but this isn't that interesting to me because I think so much of it is noise because they're just way too many startups that do the same aesthetic and a lot of these work because it's like oh you trust this format, but I'd rather people think like oh I don't know if this is an art project or a company.

It's very much a company, but I think I don't want to come across as we're an app.

Courtland Allen 1h 1m 39s

You have this drive almost to just not fit in any particular box, to not be part of a group which is really cool because it makes you so different. And that novelty makes you way more interesting to the press, to users, to customers.

It's hard to do because I think when you're starting a company there's a lot of uncertainty. There's a lot of should I make this decision, should I go that direction? And you don't know, and I think part of being human is when you're uncertain, you just ask other people, you copy other people and you feel good about that.

Danielle Baskin 1h 2m 7s

Yeah, it's cool this app. When it was your boss I connected to users all the time so I had a phone conversation with someone in Norway and I could ask anyone I was connected to, “Hey, would you want this phone feature for anything else in your life?” And got tons of feedback and because I'm able to talk to people using the app it's like there's a constant connection to the end user, for me.

I think it's easy for a lot of companies to sort of build things in a vacuum and they have this idea like here's the market. I know about the market and then they have this hypothesis and they're pretty sure it'll work, but they're not even talking to the person.

Or I have a personal understanding of who the end user is. So I think that would also be demotivating for me if I didn't think I was building anything that was valuable for anyone and then continued to stick with my hypothesis because I didn't want to be wrong. I would not enjoy that.

For Max and I, we want to design the best way for people to have a have a meaningful conversation in the year 2019 with the thing that they have on them, which is their phone.

Courtland Allen 1h 3m 19s

I think that's such a great hack to building valuable products to being able to talk to people kind of using your product is a natural extension of building it.

You kind of have to use it and talk to people.

The other half of Indie Hackers is an online community and it's the same thing. Whether or not I want to talk to people, I have to every day. They will let me know what they need to see in the product itself. Even if I don't ask. It's sort of an unfair advantage.

We talked about focus a little bit earlier on and how hard it is to focus. I was actually on a call to a couple friends and one of them, she was asking how do I focus. You know I feel like I jump from feature to feature, idea to idea. The other two of us on the call were like we do the exact same thing we have no idea.

Danielle Baskin 1h 3m 56s

It's difficult. I always feel like I'm not productive and focused, constantly. I mean that's helpful to feel that way because if I felt too comfortable then I would not make new things.

It's important to have a percentage of the time work on things that win and then another percentage of the time, do really boring stuff repetitively. I mean just force yourself to I. I think it is important to allow yourself to explore distractions and I think another thing that is important to do without losing focus is to think about what your mission is and then align your decisions with the mission.

For a lot of my other companies, I mean from my helmet company like I had this grand vision to alter graphics on all helmets and I ended up manufacturing my own molds and made all these steps towards doing mass production of customized unique designs.

I needed to spend more time on that but what I was doing was I was just responding to the clients that were ready to pay me. They're like I need five helmets by Tuesday, will you do it? Yes, because that is my job I should be working on this company and fulfilling orders when it would be in my best interest to ignore the immediate pile of cash and work on the longer-term vision even though I wasn't getting paid. It gets really difficult, too.

I mean it's easy to be swayed by what you're working on by immediate positive outcomes as opposed to what your larger vision is it would be better for you to reject a lot of things that bring you money or bring you some value if they don't align with what you want the larger thing to be like two years from that point.

Courtland Allen 1h 5m 48s

What would you say is your mission for yourself as an entrepreneur?

You talked earlier about how you really like making new ideas. Is that what you want to do for the rest of your life? Or do you want to work on Dialup and turn it into something huge?

Danielle Baskin 1h 5m 58s

I do want to work on Dialup because Dialup itself feels infinite to me. If it was just a single product, like if we were a simple like SAS tool for scheduling phone calls, I would not want to work on that from for many years.

This feels infinite because just based on all the people that are joining and requesting new lines and they’re things I haven't thought of before and also the technology we have to connect people through phone calls. It feels like there's many companies within the company so I'm excited about it.

I look for these like fractal infinite ideas that I want to work on. I definitely want to run this for the next few years.

I think for a lifetime vision of mine I don't doubt that I won't have more just based on what I know about myself from the last 30 years, I will probably continuously think of stuff. I think a challenge I face is that I have to put things on the shelf, not act upon things immediately especially as multiple companies of mine are scaling and require my attention.

I can't just at whim on a Sunday create a new landing page because people might want the thing for me [crosstalk] and it's like I've learned my lesson enough times that like oh I could launch something and people might want to buy it. Even though the first few times it seems like luck and it seems magical it's like OK I actually probably shouldn't put myself in a position where I have to fulfill a bunch of orders from my dumb joke.

So, I have to be more strict with myself launching ideas or figure out how to hire people.

Courtland Allen 1h 7m 45s

Well there are 30-40,000 people listening to this thing who themselves would love to have the magical ability of creating ideas and having people actually want them. What's your advice after years of building business after business for people who want to learn to do what you do?

Danielle Baskin 1h 7m 57s

I think it's super important to launch things when you're kind of nervous about it and you don't think it's polished and maybe only a few people told you it was a good idea. But it's really important to just as simple as you can make it, launch the thing and see whether or not you should kill it or continue to do it because there's a few projects of mine that I feel like I wasted time on and that's valuable time that you could be spending on lots of other things.

But there's also things that if I had waited to launch, it would never have any reach. It would never have done anything and I just tried to launch things as quick as possible.

Also, you don't necessarily need money and resources to do something even if it's a huge idea. How can you reduce that thing to a very simple version even if it's just collecting someone's email address to actually know whether or not your idea is worth pursuing? And then how can you incrementally take steps to make that thing real and figure out if it's even worth it?

Courtland Allen 1h 9m 16s

It's great advice. Channel your inner scrappy set prop designer to get an early version out there.

Danielle Baskin 1h 9m 20s

The set designer I was working for, before she became a set designer she worked at a Ford factory and so the combination of working for a set designer whose background is assembly line, she’d come back with a pile of trash to the studio and then we had to form an assembly line and turn the trash into flowers.

It's a good philosophy to pretend you're on an assembly line to actually make yourself do the work. Even when you're making a landing page and you're like oh I have to like make sure there's a way to email me on every page.

A lot of the work I do is kind of boring when I'm actually sitting down and doing it, but it's important to do boring work, pretend you're on an assembly line and also is very limited resources.

Courtland Allen 1h 10m 8s

Well I’m going to have to get you on an Indie Hackers AMA or an office hours or something as I would love to see actual people from the Indie Hackers community try to interact with you [inaudible/crosstalk]. But Danielle, thank you so much for coming on.

Danielle Baskin 1h 10m 20s

Oh yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me. This was fun.

Courtland Allen 1h 10m 24s

Yeah, it's been a joy having you over. Where can listeners go to find out more about you and the 23 things that you're working on?

Danielle Baskin 1h 10m 30s

You can go to daniellebaskin.com which is just my name or you can go to Dialup.com and maybe I'll create a line for the people listening to this podcast and we can all connect with each other.

Courtland Allen 1h 10m 48s

Oh god, I’m going to get so many random phone calls. I can’t wait. All right. Thank you so much Danielle.

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