Quick Chat with Mubashar Iqbal of Pod Hunt

Courtland Allen: 7s

Hello, hello. I am Courtland Allen 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 both in their companies and in their personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? The goal here, as always, is so the rest of us can learn from their example and go on to build our own profitable internet businesses.

Today, I am talking to Mubashar Iqbal. Mubs, welcome back to the Indie Hackers podcast.

Mubashar Iqbal: 36s

Thanks for having me on.

Courtland Allen: 37s

I looked it up, it's been two years since the last time you were on the podcast. How crazy is that?

Mubashar Iqbal: 42s

It feels like it was longer than that because I think the Indie Hackers spaces evolved so fast.

Courtland Allen: 52s

I know, it's really blown up since then. That was August of 2017. Here we are in 2019, it feels like a whole new decade. Not there yet, though.

Mubashar Iqbal: 1m 0s

It's awesome though because it does mean that a lot more people are interested in being Indie Hackers and a lot more people are interested in boot strapping their start-ups and stuff like that, too, instead of all chasing the venture capital investment, instead. I think that's really awesome.

Courtland Allen: 1m 14s

Exactly. The last time we talked, I described you as more of a maker than an Indie Hacker. You were all about the different projects that you were working on. You were jumping from project to project. You didn't really care about generating revenue. Is that still the case for you today?

Mubashar Iqbal: 1m 30s

I'd say it's still about 50%. I still want to do cool stuff. I still want to make cool stuff. It's still not 100% like, "I got to make money from it," but I do see myself now when I evaluate whether I want to work on something, think about, "Actually, can this make money? Do I want this to make money?"

Even if it's not money, per se, it's, "What's the reward?" Whether it's some way to feed my network or some way to feed myself somehow. I do think about that a little bit more.

Courtland Allen: 2m 7s

Yes, because in the past, it was just building the thing was its own reward. You're just excited to make it and now that's not enough. You need some other benefit.

Mubashar Iqbal: 2m 15s

It's funny, I was talking to somebody else recently and we were talking about my side project. Now that I've got 80 side projects under my belt—

Courtland Allen: 2m 23s

80?

Mubashar Iqbal: 2m 26s

Over 80, actually. Exactly, so now I'm like, "Maybe I should be a little bit more selective about the things that I'm working on."

Courtland Allen: 2m 33s

One of the cool things about not being selective is that it's easier to just jump into something. For me, I'm very meticulous. I like to plan. A lot of the Indie Hackers that I talk to the same way because they're trying to start a profitable business. They have to connect all the dots. It has to work.

They have to solve a valuable problem that people would pay for. They have to go after a good market. They have to have their distribution channels mapped out and all that stuff. With you, at least in the past and your pure-maker phase, you don't have to do any of this stuff.

You could just start building. I wonder how that's changed for you now that you're working on Pod Hunt. How much planning went into that?

Mubashar Iqbal: 3m 5s

Here's the funny thing. One reason I'm able to jump into a lot of things is I really think founder-product fit is really important, more important than product-market fit.

A lot of the reasons that I've just jumped into ideas in the past was, "That's the perfect founder-product fit for me because that's the product I want to make, that's the thing I want to work on for as long as it takes to launch it and I'm very excited about it."

With Pod Hunt, it was the same thing. It's actually been an idea that's been percolating between me and some friends who've talked about it for probably two years now. The idea for Pod Hunt actually came when Product Hunt use to have a podcast category on their site and after a while, they shut down all of the other categories that they had.

They used to have books and video games and a few other categories as well as the application stuff that they do. They shut it down, I think it's been about two years ago now, and ever since then, the idea's been, "We should probably build something that's a little bit more focused on podcasting but has the same features of Product Hunt.

I listened to some interviews with Ryan Hoover about why they shut down all of those other categories and it was mainly that they tried to shoe horn all those other categories into the way that Product Hunt worked exclusively and so they didn't really want to change the submission process and all those other things.

It never really felt like those things were 100% the way that they were supposed to.

Courtland Allen: 4m 51s

I think it's really easy as a founder, especially when your product is working to think "Okay, this is working. I'm just going to copy and paste what I have here that's working for one area and I'm going to expand into these other adjacencies. I'm going to take Product Hunt, which works for products, but I'm also going to make it work for podcasts and make it work for video games and other stuff.”

You try it and it turns out that all these different areas have their own little idiosyncrasies and if you really want to do a good job, you can't just copy and paste what you have on to them. You have to actually tailor your features from the ground up to work like that and Pod Hunt's podcasts features and stuff, to the best of my memory, didn't do that.

Mubashar Iqbal: 5m 25s

Right, it was just, "Here's a link", you just submitted it and was the same thing. As I built Pod Hunt, it was like, "We do want to focus on the episodes related to the podcasts," and so having that hierarchical information flow to be able to get from an episode back to the podcast, but see all the other episodes that were submitted and things like that.

Those were the things that I looked at and said, "How can I make sure that the experience around Pod Hunt really focuses the industry that it's in rather than try and make it fit into the same old "Submit a link" and then upvote the link kind of idea?”

That was really important for me. The idea existed probably about two years ago since they shut it down. I always felt like it was a good idea, but I never felt like I was in the right place to move forward with the idea. I didn't think me, as a founder, was in the right place to build that.

Eventually, about six weeks ago, I was talking to some friends about it again and it was like, "You know what? Now feels like the right time in terms of where I'm at, in terms of what I want to do, a market I want to attack."

I think podcasting, it’s been on a steady climb for years and years, but I think it's reached a certain level now where it actually makes it an attractive market as well. That was why it was founder-product-market fit, all lined up. It was like, "Okay, let's see what we can make happen."

Courtland Allen: 6m 51s

Okay, I got so many questions to ask you about this. First, let's talk about founder-product-fit, which is what you're so enthusiastic about. I think a lot of people have not built 80 side projects.

They don't really know what kind of product is going to fit their personality. How do you determine what's going to fit your personality having built so many projects?

Mubashar Iqbal: 7m 9s

A lot of people are just out there finding product-market fit in terms of "What's a heart industry? What's a heart business model to build something in?" You focus a lot on, "Is it a growing market? Is it an interestable market?" and all those kind of things. But they forget about, "If I'm going to do this successfully, I need to work on this thing for the next three, five, ten years."

If it's in an industry that you really don't like, are you going to be able to wake up every day at six o'clock in the morning or whatever time you want to wake up, but for the next ten, twelve hours a day, are you going to be able to think about that thing? Are you going to be able to work on that thing for the next five years?

Even if it's an awesome industry and it's an awesome idea, but it's something that you don't have the passion for, it's going to be a struggle. For me, I've been listening to podcasts for nine years. I've been interested in content curation, probably, my whole career.

If you look back at my side projects, the first two, three, four, five, ten, even, all focus on content curation and so, it just felt like it was a good fit for me because it matched my interests and I think it's also a problem I can actually do.

It's an application I can build, and I have the information in my head that I can turn into code and hopefully other people will actually like what I output, as well.

Courtland Allen: 8m 47s

The cool thing about founder-product fit is that, you said, it's more important than product-market fit, and I totally agree. In fact, for me when you said that, it was weird. I was like, "Is it? I haven't thought about it."

Then, I'm like, "You know what? It is because I don't even take that as something that's a variable.” I'm like, "The thing you should do is pick an idea that you're actually interested in and then, with that constraint, then you look at all the other stuff."

You should never work on something that you're not interested in because, like you said, if you do, you're going to be bored of it. I think it's really easy for people to slip into this mindset, where they think, "It's just so hard to come up with a good idea, I can't limit myself to only the ideas that I'm interested in."

It's this scarcity mentality or it's like, "Ideas are so hard to come by," but I think the reality is that there are, probably, infinitely many good ideas, no matter what constraints you have. You might as well constrain yourself to only ideas that you care about.

Mubashar Iqbal: 9m 37s

I think part of what's happened, recently, is that there's such a heavy emphasis put on, "I got to be able to make revenue immediately", right? There's that big, heavy emphasis put on that, and so people start to narrow down their ideas to just those things that can make money, immediately.

I think that's where they fall into the trap, ignoring the founder-product fit and like, "I can see how I can charge a customer for this right now." And that's fantastic. If you can find an idea that can do that and maybe if you can turn it around fast, you won't reach the point where you're not interested in it anymore, but that's a very rare exception rather than what everybody experiences.

I think a lot of people experience the fact that, yes, they can start the company and yes, it can make a little bit of money and you can see the returns, but then to get out of that crop of sorrow because you don't like the industry, because you don't like what you're making every day, you never actually escape out of that.

Courtland Allen: 10m 39s

Then, there's the other side of the coin, which is actually building something that people in the market want. Obviously, podcasting is huge now. It's getting bigger and bigger every year. It's well beyond what any of us would have guessed five or ten years ago.

I just had Justin Jackson on the podcast. He started Transistor, which is, no insult to Justin, a very straight forward, boring podcast hosting business. He'd be the first person to tell you that. They're not innovating in some crazy way that you've never seen before. They're riding this podcast wave and making money, hand over fist.

You're doing something slightly different, which is that you're in the same growing market, but you're doing something that people haven't really seen in the podcasting space before, at least not in the way that you're doing it, which is a stack ranked, Product Hunt, leader-board type thing.

Every day, there's a new list of the best podcast episodes and you can go upvote the best one and it's like a discovery platform with, "Which episode do I want to listen to today?" How do you think about your particular approach and how it fits into the overall role of podcast market?

Mubashar Iqbal: 11m 39s

I think the main way that Pod Hunt differentiates itself from all of the other leader boards and lists that are out there is they all tend to focus on the actual, entire podcast. If you look at most of the leader boards out there, they'll list sites like Aaron's Podcast, Joe Rogan's podcast, and all that.

It's just a normal leader board and you'll see the same top 100 on almost every site because they're the celebrities. They get the most number of talents and all that kind of stuff. Where I saw the main difference was even if I like Joe Rogan's podcast, he's interviewed 400-500 people now.

Which one of those episodes do I actually want to listen to? Because there's no way I can listen to all 500 episodes. Maybe, he had Barack Obama on, that's a really awesome one. Maybe that's the one I should listen to, but maybe I'm into politics, maybe I'm into sports and there's some athlete that he's had that I should listen to instead.

Actually focusing in on the individual episodes makes a lot more since because, yes, there's a few podcasts that you have to listen to every episode in order and you have to listen to all of them for it to really be enjoyable, but that's more like an audio book and more of the exception, I think.

The majority of podcasts you can listen to in order and find the episodes that really are going to interest you. That's the main thing. Then, the other thing, like you said, is a daily leader board that changes. You're not going to come one day and see the leader board come back the next day and it's the exact same leader board.

Every day, you come, you're going to see something new, something interesting and you may not find something every day that you find interesting, but if you come back and look at the weekly chart or you sign up for the newsletter and you see what was uploaded most throughout the week, you're going to see something that's interesting, I think.

Courtland Allen: 13m 40s

It's pretty meta, but I see you posting about Pod Hunt on the Indie Hackers Milestones feature pretty regularly and that is, itself, a leader board that's also pretty much inspired by Product Hunt, where every day, it's a new set of milestones of people who are hitting with their products.

You'll post things like, "I started developing an MVP for Pod Hunt," or "I switched to a weekly newsletter,” or "I had my two-week anniversary,” or "I just crossed 5,000 page views,” and so we're doing the same thing.

Looking at these leader board mechanics and trying to figure out how it works, what's the right frequency, etc. What attracts you to the whole leader board mechanic and what are some things that you've learned about tweaking things and getting it to work?

Mubashar Iqbal: 14m 18s

Like I said, I've been into content curation of some kind for a really long time, so I think we've been through the cycle of, "We want the experts to curate things, we want the users to curate things,” and now, we're saying, "We want experts to curate things in terms of the ones who submit things,” so even on Product Hunt, not everybody can submit stuff.

It's kind of limited to a sub-set who can make stuff appear on the home page immediately and then you get the Community Mentors who can put stuff on the home page as well. We got this idea that, "We don't want everyone submitting stuff, we want some people submitting stuff,” but then, ultimately, you still want to know what the entire audience thinks is interesting.

You've got this mix of experts saying, "This stuff might be interesting to you, but then let's find out what the crowd is actually saying is actually important to them as well,” so I think that's the hybrid that I think we've arrived at, which I think is really interesting.

You can't rely on just experts because even though they're experts, they can't know everything about everything. You can't just rely on the crowd because if you rely on the crowd entirely, you would just get so much stuff that you're not really curating stuff at all anymore.

I think even though Product Hunt itself was looking at how Reddit was working and Combinator –no sorry, Hacker News was working to how you upload things and things like that, they pioneered the, "Let's reset things at the end of each day".

My problem with Hacker News and Reddit and those kind of things is unless you visit it really regularly, you're not really going to see everything and it's hard to know what you've already seen and stuff like that.

I think it's very easy to go to Product Hunt and say, "Let's look at what's hot today and scroll down to see what was good yesterday and scroll down and see what was good the day before.” On Reddit, with its endless list of things, it's very hard to scan it like that.

Courtland Allen: 16m 22s

There's a whole psychology of "What's the ideal frequency that you want people to come visit your website ad?" and once a day is pretty good.

You don't necessarily need to be coming every hour, every minute like Hacker News advises you to do, or Twitter or something, and if you do burn people out like that, perhaps they're going to stop visiting every day. They're going to come once a month or maybe never. I like the whole once a day reset, as well.

Mubashar Iqbal: 16m 45s

I think for Pod Hunt, specifically, you're going to get the core audience who listen to podcasts all the time, in all their spare time, while they're working, while they're playing, while their doing chores, who are going to come back every day. Then you've got more of the casual podcast listener.

If they come back once a week, I think that's awesome and we can show them what was good once a week, as well, just to show them this overall rank or if they sign up for the newsletter and just receive that once a week, as well, the idea is that you would have a large enough audience that you don't need people to come back every day.

It would be awesome if they did, but if they come back once a week, then I think that's enough as well. I think you always want to keep in mind of who is your audience. I imagine even for Indie Hackers, there's going to be some people who are just working on their side projects and things on the weekend because they have a job during the day.

They don't have much time to spend on other things during the week. Even if they come back to Indie Hackers once a week, that's awesome as well, right?

Courtland Allen: 17m 55s

Yes, exactly. I was just posting about everyone's favorite book on Indie Hackers earlier this week and mine was Hooked by Nir Eyal. It was actually co-authored by Ryan Hoover and he talks about this whole model for people taking action on your website and then the ideal frequency novelty for them to have when they come back and see something that's new.

Then them investing in the platform by following podcasts or getting followers or writing blog posts or something so they come back when you try to get them to come back again. It's this whole algorithm for building a habit-forming app that people find value in coming back to everyday. Have you read this?

Mubashar Iqbal: 18m 31s

Yes, I've definitely read that. I've haven’t read it recently. It's been a little while since I read it. It's definitely something to keep in mind. Obviously, it's hard to understand everybody's psychology, right?

Everybody's going to be slightly different in terms of how they attack those things. Plus, they also think that people are starting to get wise to some of those, as well.

Courtland Allen: 18m 52s

Every marketing trick stops working, eventually. Eventually, people get used to it. If you go back and watch ads from the 1950's that look horribly outdated and it's like, "I can't believe this worked on anybody" but at the time, it was like crack. They couldn't resist it.

Mubashar Iqbal: 19m 4s

Absolutely, so I keep those ideas in mind and I do think about, “What are the features that are going to encourage people to come back on a more regular cycle?” But ultimately, I just want to think about what's the best way to surface the best podcast.

That's really what I want to do and I think if Pod Hunt can do that, then I think people will come back on their own and I don't need to do any special tactics and things like that.

Courtland Allen: 19m 32s

I'm super curious about your road map because I have, selfishly, all these features that I want for Pod Hunt, because I care more about the episode. There’re certain shows that I definitely want to subscribe to, but very rarely do I listen to every single episode of a particular show.

I'm like, "What's the best one? What's the best episode for your product?" I want you to build a podcast player, so it's simultaneously surfacing the right episodes for me that I can play it right there and then I want it to be niche based, because you have tags on there right now I can click-- or I can't really click, but I can see this is a business podcast and this is a tech podcast, but they're not scoped to that.

It's like, "I want to skip everything that's not business or tech." I'm curious, what's on your future road map and are you going to build the exact features I want, Mubs?

Mubashar Iqbal: 20m 17s

Well, if you're my ideal customer, then absolutely. Ultimately, I think you have to be both the player and a discovery at the same time. I think that's the thing that will make sense. The reason it's not up right now is I think to get that right is going to take a lot longer than it took me to build a website.

To iterate on that is going to be a lot faster on the website and to be able to see what works and what people find interesting. I think once I think I've got that right and then to spin up an iOS app and an Android app will be fairly straight forward. A player is on the road map.

I don't know exactly when, but it's on the road map. I think more on the immediate road map is more of some of the things you've talked about in terms of, "How do we surface content that you think is interesting and appealing?" versus, "Yes, I think the leader board will stay as it is."

Because the serendipity of finding something that you didn't even think you found interesting is one of the things I like about Product Hunt. Randomly, I'll visit the home page and there'll be something on there that I didn't know existed, I didn't know I wanted, but when I see it, I'm like, "Wow, this is amazing."

I think, to some degree with podcasts there might just be somebody on there who's talking about a topic that you didn't know that you were already interested in, but maybe some marketing thing or maybe Hooked wasn't something you would've thought you would have found interesting, but had seen a book review for it at some point in the past, you might've been, "This is a really awesome book that I might not have found."

I think the homepage will stay the way that it is, but I do want a way for you to be able to follow a category or to follow a person to say, "If this person is a guest on any podcasts in the future, I want to be made aware of that," or even if it's just a person or a particular topic, eventually, key words as well, I think that one's much further along in the road map instead.

Courtland Allen: 22m 23s

One of the things you posted to your Product page on Indie Hackers is that you crossed $20 in monthly recurring revenue. You said you hadn't planned to monetize Pod Hunt right away, but you wanted to test. Tell me about that. How did you make that $20 and what's it at now?

Mubashar Iqbal: 22m 38s

The idea behind Pod Hunt, I figured that it's one of these community sites that you feel like has to be free and I think ultimately, it will be free forever in some way. There's never going to be a charge to access the core features of it.

As I said earlier, I've been thinking more about, "It's cool to work on these ideas and it's good to launch the ideas, but, at some point, if I want to continue working on the idea, it needs to make some money so that I can pay myself to work on it."

I thought, "How can I make money from something like this?" and so, I came up with the idea of, "What if the podcast hosts themselves can actually become supporters of Pod Hunt?" because the idea is that you're making podcast discovery easier so that listeners can find your podcast.

I figured that was something that podcast hosts would be interested in. They want more people to hear their podcasts, want more people to become subscribers, etc. I just offered a very simple you pay $25 a year as a podcast host and your podcast becomes a supporter on Pod Hunt and honestly, you don't get a lot for it at this point because there's not that many features right now, but it was more of a way to test the model.

And that's why it's also $25 a year because that's not a lot of money, either. Also, since there's 450,000 active podcasts, if I can get a couple percent of those to become supporters, even at $25 a year, that ends up being a pretty significant amount of money, I think.

It's $20 MMR because I took the amount of money that they had paid for the $25 and then divided by 12 to get what the MMR would be. I think I'm actually up to $25 MMR now, instead. It's working out pretty good.

Courtland Allen: 24m 44s

I like that business model a lot. It's definitely something that needs to be free for people who are just going to discover podcasts, listen to them. Maybe if you had an app, you could charge for the app. I think I paid $5 or $10 for Pocket Casts because I like that better than others, but for the website, totally agree.

It should be free and that means that the people you should be charging are people like me, the podcast hosts. I know that if I was, especially, just getting started with the podcasts, I would definitely pay money to try to get to the top or sponsorship or have some sort of badge that helps me stand out on a discovery platform because why not?

Mubashar Iqbal: 25m 13s

Well, even Pocket Cast is free, as well. I think it's becoming a market where it's like the perusal market. People want you to use their app, so to charge for it, you're automatically admitting who's going to use it and you want the audience there so that you can then push them out to other places, so you have to make the app, itself, free.

Like you said, if you look at how even apps like Overcast make money by selling advertising within the player, so when you're listening to something, you might find something else interesting, as well.

Courtland Allen: 25m 50s

You made another post, recently, on your Indie Hackers Product page about Pod Hunt and this milestone was getting to 500 users. You put a bunch of stats at the bottom of it.

One of them was your revenue from supporters is up to $345 now. You've got 366 followers on Twitter, I believe. 500 users, 32,000 page views, 8,000 visitors. Let's dig into your growth strategies here. How are you getting people to find Pod Hunt?

Mubashar Iqbal: 26m 16s

Mostly, it's just been me reaching out to folks in the industry that I know. I'm not spending any money because it's a side project at this point. I don't have any money to spend on marketing or anything like that, but because it's a product that every time I talk to hosts about it on podcasts, they're like, "This is awesome" because it helps them do the one thing they want, which is to get people to hear what they're talking about.

Really, my strategy has just been to talk to as many hosts as I can and then they mention it on air, even. They post the episode and they'll mention the fact that they are going to post it on Pod Hunt so people can upvote it and things like that.

It's really that slow, steady, spread the word about it and people who are going to get value out of it are going to spread the word about it, as well. I think my focus has been on Twitter, initially, because I think that's going to be the easiest growth strategy.

Each of the episodes that get submitted, I keep a track of who's the host and who's the guest of the episode and then when I tweet out that that episode's been submitted, I tag both the host and the guest on it, as well, and that's led to a lot of likes and retweets and things like that.

Courtland Allen: 27m 44s

I think the leader board format is so good for just incentivizing people like me to go on there and upload our episodes and, ideally, when the traffic gets high enough, promote the episodes because we want other people to come upvote it because we know that we'll get a lot of downloads from it.

This is straight out of, also, the book Hooked, exactly aligning all these incentives and it's one of those things that you've got a lot going for you because all this stuff works together.

Mubashar Iqbal: 28m 9s

Ultimately, it's just, like I said, at the end of the day, the one thing that the site is aimed at doing is to get more distribution of episodes, right?

Courtland Allen: 28m 18s

Exactly.

Mubashar Iqbal: 28m 19s

That's what everybody wants right now. This is a standpoint. You would think with so many options that they would already have so many things to listen to, but, just like you said, you probably have a whole bunch of podcasts that you're interested in, but you don't want to keep a track of what each episode is and who's on each episode and stuff.

Courtland Allen: 28m 43s

Every episode could be a hit or miss. You have no idea if one episode's going to be great, even with the Indie Hackers podcast, I've had some not so great episodes. I've had some episodes that skyrocketed to 80 or 90,000 downloads because they were just so much better than the other ones and the person interviewed wasn't even famous, it was just the quality of the episode.

Having a platform like yours where people can actually say, "This episode was super high quality," is exactly what I want as a listener.

Mubashar Iqbal: 29m 4s

Actually, one of the features that we've added recently is when somebody hunts an episode, we actually allow them to upload a 30 second clip of what the episode is about or a special part of the podcast that they thought was really awesome or had some information in it and stuff like that.

That's one of the other things I found when I listened to podcasts, previously, was, "How do I know what this podcast is actually about?" Just because it's the conversation between me and you, what are we talking about?

You could try and scan the transcript and stuff to see what it's about and stuff like that, but if somebody's actually listened to the podcast already, they say, "Look, this 30 second clip will tell you exactly what it's about," or "This 30 second clip is the real highlight part of this episode and if you like this 30 second clip, you're going to love the rest of it, as well."

I think people have been using that a lot now to actually find out if it's a podcast that they actually want to hear, as well, so I think that's helping, as well.

Courtland Allen: 30m 7s

What I've been thinking about a lot is social websites has popularized these micro interactions. 15 years ago, there was no such thing as a 'like'. I guess an upvote has always been around, but not really. They give you some information like, "somebody likes this thing,” but it's not that much information.

At Indie Hackers, I've been thinking like, "What if I had a feature where if you followed somebody, a little text box popped up and it's like, 'why did you follow this person?' and then you would just enter a few words" or if you like a post, it's like, "What did you like about this post?"

I wonder if people would be willing to say a few words about why they liked it or why they followed it and that would be a good signal for others.

Mubashar Iqbal: 30m 38s

Also, when you submit the episode as well, obviously we pull the episode description out of the RSS feed and stuff, but there's a box where you can say why you like that episode as well. As you submit it, you can add some extra information about it.

We do have some commenting features on each episode, as well. If you come and listen to it and you think it's an awesome one, you can say why you thought it was awesome, as well. Thinking about that, obviously, you can't make people do that stuff, but it'd be nice if you could. It's one of those things, hopefully, I'm just thinking, as we get more audience, as we get more traction, that kind of thing would just happen naturally, as well.

I do think one of the things that the site's missing right now, and again, it's on the road map as well, I want to be able to ping you when an episode that you've hosted or you've been a guest on, I want you to be made aware of that so if people are talking about it, that you're aware of that, as well.

Just that interaction, that feedback loop, needs to be closed a little bit, but I'm working on the mechanics of that as we speak.

Courtland Allen: 31m 50s

Listen, Mubs. It's exciting stuff. I'm excited to see where it goes. Why don't you tell listeners what your advice would be for people who are early on, who haven't worked on 80 side projects, who aren't smack-dab in the middle of a successful podcasting website.

What should an early stage Indie Hacker be thinking about and what's your advice for them?

Mubashar Iqbal: 32m 6s

I think I've said all along on these things, is do the things that you want to do. Don't go chasing the hot category or, "I want to build Facebook for this or Uber for that". It sounds fantastic and you think you can catch a hot segment or something like that, but ultimately, even if you get a small amount of success, it's not going to be the big success like everybody wants.

I think if you focus on something that you're really passionate about and you focus on the things that make you happy, I think it's just going to make whatever you do more successful. Maybe not in the short term, maybe you want to see that immediate return, but I think longer term, you'll see that reward comes from your happiness, as well.

Courtland Allen: 32m 53s

Mubs, thanks so much for coming back on the podcast. Can you tell listeners where they can go to learn more about what you're up to with Pod Hunt?

Mubashar Iqbal: 32m 59s

Absolutely, yes. Obviously, on Indie Hackers, I post all of my milestones, as well. Podhunt.ip is the URL. You can follow me on Twitter. My full name Mubashar Iqbal, so twitter.com/mubashariqbal.

Courtland Allen: 33m 18s

All right, thanks so much Mubs.

Mubashar Iqbal: 33m 20s

Thanks. Thanks for having me on.

Courtland Allen: 33m 21s

Listeners, if you're interested in coming onto the podcast, like Mubs, to have a quick chat with me, go to indiehackers.com/milestones and post a milestone about whatever it is that you're working on.

It can be pretty much anything. People have posted milestones about launching or finding their first customer. They've posted about their mailing list or hitting 1,000 followers on Twitter. They've post about getting to $100 or $1,000 or $10,000 a month in revenue. The sky's the limit, so whatever it is you're proud of, whatever milestones you're hitting, come post them on indiehackers.com/milestones and other Indie Hackers will help you celebrate.

We love supporting each other and encouraging each other when we hit these milestones and what I will do at the end of every week is look at the top milestone posted and reach out to people to invite them to come onto the show for a quick chat. Once again, that's indiehackers.com/milestones. I'm looking forward to seeing what you post.