From Millions in Revenue to Staring Bankruptcy in the Face with Aline Lerner of Interviewing.io

Courtland Allen: 7s

What’s up, everybody? This is Courtland from IndieHackers.com and you’re listening to the Indie Hackers Podcast. On this show I talk to the founders of profitable internet businesses and I try to get a sense of what it’s like to be in their shoes. How did they get to where they are today? How do they make decisions, both at their companies and in their personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? The goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own profitable internet businesses.

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In today’s episode, I sat down with Aline Lerner, the founder of Interviewing.io. You might remember I spoke with Aline last year about how she turned her idea into a landing page which generated 7,000 signups on its first day and eventually turned that landing page into a full-blown company that generated millions of dollars in revenue.

Then COVID-19 hit and hiring basically stopped for a lot of Aline’s customers, which meant her revenue plummeted to near zero. In this episode Aline and I discuss how exactly that went down, what it feels like to be a founder whose worst fears actually come to fruition and what she’s been doing to cope and build her company back up. Enjoy the episode.

When did you first start taking COVID-19 seriously, not as a founder but just as a human, an ordinary citizen?

Aline Lerner: 1m 29s

I don’t really want to admit this, but I guess I will. I didn’t take it seriously. I hope I don’t regret this, but we were in this unenviable position where we had a new employee starting literally on the day that San Francisco went into quarantine.

He emailed. He’s like, “Hey, did you guys know this is happening? What should we do?” And I remember thinking, “We should just ignore this. This is bullshit, right? Everybody should be at work. Make me money, peons.”

Didn’t actually really think that but thought it for a second and then I intervened in my own bad thoughts. That’s where my head was. I didn’t know whether quarantine was the right thing, I don’t know if it even made sense, and I think I was having a hard time adjusting to it.

I took it seriously outwardly from the day it started happening. One of my employees made a really good point, actually. I was bitching. I was like, “This is awful. Why are they thwarting my ability to do my job?” And he’s like, “Hey, listen, our grandparents were drafted and had to go to war. You just have to stay home.”

Courtland Allen: 2m 46s

We’ve got it easy by comparison.

Aline Lerner: 2m 48s

We’ve got it easy. So when I heard that it was humbling. I was like, “You know what, dude? You’re right. I’m sorry, I’m being an ass. Let’s take this seriously.”

Courtland Allen: 2m 57s

I think there just wasn’t very much information early on to even know how seriously to take it, especially January, February. I remember being pretty concerned about it just reading, OK, there’s this disease ravaging China. They tried to contain it but now it’s out and it’s going to spread and it’s coming for us.

I was just sitting there thinking, “I’m horrible at being sick. I’m the most pathetic sick person ever. I really don’t want this to happen. Maybe I should take it seriously.” But it was hard to predict what the effects should be like. What should you be afraid of? We just didn’t know.

Is it going to get into the food supply? Am I going to have to start my own garden and grow my own vegetables or should I move to a house in the woods? Are hospitals going to be safe? Should I get medical supplies? You just didn’t really know how to react.

Aline Lerner: 3m 42s

My boyfriend is much more – you know, there is this continuum of preparedness. On one extreme side you just don’t do anything, and you actively lick doorknobs. On the other end is people who are on Doomsday Preppers which is this amazing show on National Geographic if you haven’t seen it.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, you should watch it. It’s amazing. He’s more toward that. I felt a little bit relaxed about the whole thing because I knew somebody else in the household was doing some of the worrying and that freed me up to be more of a doorknob licker, although of course I wasn’t actively licking doorknobs.

I think one of the way I felt it more – the stress for me wasn’t – for some reason I wasn’t scared of getting sick. I should have been, probably, but I wasn’t. I think I was much more scared about whether my company would survive this. I don’t have that much control over not getting sick.

I’m going to follow best practices even though, of course, the CDC seemed to change best practices day to day. But we did our best. This is something where I actually have agency and control so I’m going to stress over this instead of this scary, big thing which I don’t even know how to wrap my head around.

Courtland Allen: 4m 57s

I think the challenge with that is, if you don’t know exactly what the effects will be on the economy and society and just the way we move around, how do you prepare your company for something like that as a founder?

You know we have a tech company, we’re helping connect job seekers and developers to tech companies who are hiring them but there’s this pandemic. What’s going to happen? Is this going to affect our business?

Maybe it will help our business. Maybe everybody will become a software engineer, and everybody will want to hire software engineers. Or maybe the opposite. At what point did you start making plans for your company?

Aline Lerner: 5m 27s

I don’t know if you’re this way too. You’re a founder, too. Sometimes you can’t trust your own brain because there’s this reality distortion field. One thing that my brain does a lot, which is very tempting to do is come up with scenarios in which case COVID is going to be the key to solving all of our problems and somehow it’s going to make us win over all our competitors and get all this new market share.

That may completely not be grounded in reality but that’s one of the first places where my head went. One of the tensions in our business is we have this recruiting marketplace. On one side you have software engineers that are potentially looking for jobs. On the other side you have companies that potentially want to hire them.

I’ve always enjoyed the part of our business more that dealt with software engineers rather than – so it was like a B2C2B (ph). I like the B2C part a lot more than the B2B. One of the main reasons I didn’t like the B2B as much is, I always felt like we had to sell to in-house recruiters rather than engineering managers. There are some amazing recruiters out there but most of them are terrible. It sucks to feel cynical and full of hate about a good chunk of your customer base.

Generally, what happens is engineering managers are very incentivized to make hires because either their political power in their company is tied to their headcount or shit, they just need to get things done and they need the headcount to do that, or any number of reasons, but they’re motivated.

In-house recruiters are on the spectrum of very motivated to very unmotivated because they’re not always incentivized to make hires as much as they are incentivized to keep their job. It’s one of the differences between selling to a profit center and a cost center, right?

In a profit center, if you’re selling to them, they just want tools to make them better at their jobs and to make more money. There’s this very direct positive feedback loop. When you sell to a cost center it’s muddled and you end up being more incentivized to create tools that make people look like they’re good at their jobs.

Even more directly, in a lot of companies in-house recruiters are compensated in part on commission and they get commission for candidates that they bring in but they don’t get commission for candidates that they get through what are, in a broad swath, painted as agencies. Because if a company is already paying a third party some finder’s fee to bring in a candidate, they’re not also going to pay a finder’s fee to the recruiter.

So in-house recruiters have this love-hate relationship with tools and agencies because on one hand they are never making the hires they need to make so they need somebody to help. On the other hand, that tool can make them look bad or can cut into their livelihood.

Long story short, I used to be a recruiter as well. I have this complicated relationship with recruiters. But one of my first thoughts was, “Well, when COVID hits potentially there will be fewer recruiters and then maybe it’ll be easier for us to do business.”

Or “When COVID hits,” and this is what ended up happening, “we can potentially unlock a new revenue stream, because pre-COVID engineers had all the leverage in the labor market.” There’s such an engineering shortage that if you’re a marketplace that wants engineers in your ecosystem, you can’t have any friction to getting them in the door.

If you try to put up a paywall, they’re going to laugh at you and all the best people will leave. It’s kind of why Facebook didn’t want to do ads for a long time and they certainly don’t want to charge their users because the users are the product and they don’t have to use you, they can use any number of other things.

So Interviewing.io was always free. Then I thought, “Well, post-COVID maybe we will actually be able” – I didn’t want to charge users but I thought, “Well, maybe we’ll actually be able to charge and then this might set us up for success because other recruiting marketplaces can’t charge users because they don’t offer them anything of value other than jobs.”

Courtland Allen: 9m 35s

Right. Yeah, there’s this big switch from running a business in times where the economy is booming versus times where you’re just fighting for survival during a recession or you’ve lost a significant chunk of your business, where you have to question a lot of your assumptions.

In your case that assumption was, “We can’t charge developers because they have so many other places to go.” And it turns out that actually you probably can. Because as you said, you’re providing real value to them in a way other platforms aren’t. You’re not a commodity. You’re actually something people care about.

But when we spoke last year it was pretty clear that Interviewing.io wasn’t some heartless business effort where you found a gap in the market that you could exploit to make money. It’s a very meaningful, mission-driven business.

You have so many strong opinions from when you worked as a developer and a recruiter about how hiring is broken and how it doesn’t really reflect the realities of who has the power and which engineer should be considered for which jobs.

When you started Interviewing.io – and for people who aren’t familiar with her story I recommend they go back and listen to the last episode we did because it’s great, such a cool story.

It was very much your attempt to fix the broken industry and do some good in the world and you ended up hitting a revenue run rate of millions of dollars a year in the process, which is pretty cool when you can have both of those things. But obviously COVID destroyed your business model as it existed.

Aline Lerner: 10m 50s

Completely. We used to make all our money from employers, so companies would pay us. Despite me complaining about recruiters, in many cases they were great to work with and they were kind enough to pay us money and we’d make tens of thousands of dollars per hire in many cases; or our larger customers would pay us six-figure subscriptions for, say, a year of candidate flow.

Then – and I love this because I don’t want to charge engineers. I’m trying to fix their lives and companies are paying for it and everybody thought that was OK. Then all of a sudden COVID hits and all of these employers that have big subscriptions with us come to us and they’re like, “Hey, we’re just going to pause.” It wasn’t even, “Hey, our renewal is coming up in six months. Let’s use up what we have and we don’t know if we’re going to renew.” It was just, “We’re just not going to use you for a while, and we don’t know when we’ll be back.”

And 75% of our revenue came from these deals, so that was already extremely alarming. It became pretty clear that we would not be able to renew these on schedule, if ever.

The remaining 25% of our revenue came from smaller companies that didn’t have the budget to come into these large deals or have the head count to need the amount of volume we were serving, but still used us serendipitously for hires when they needed them and there they’d pay us this 15%, typically, finder’s fee.

And the small companies were, I think, hit harder in a lot of ways than the large ones, because in some ways they had less runway, they had less certainty. It was like this normal distribution. First there was this trickle of very apologetic pausing and maybe we’re getting one every few days and we’re girding our loins because we know a big spike is coming.

Then all of the sudden companies are cancelling multiple times a day and in a matter of weeks we went from millions of dollars to basically zero. All of our big customers paused and then we had a few left on contingency but those, you don’t know when they’re going to make a hire. You can’t really build a business around that.

So it was very, very scary. It was probably the most stressful time professionally in my entire life.

Courtland Allen: 13m 9s

I had a conversation with Vincent which you listened to a few weeks back and we talked about what motivates founders, kind of on the negative side. What are you worried about? Who do you feel obligated to?

A lot of people will become founders because they think, “Oh, it’s just going to be this big, happy journey of total freedom. I don’t answer to anybody. I’m my own boss.” But the reality is you answer to your employees, your customers, your partners, and co-founders. You may even have investors you don’t want to let down. Of course, you have your own expectations for yourself. You’re like, “Hey Aline, you said you’re going to do this and it’s going to succeed.”

Then suddenly, out of nowhere, you’re staring at the potential end of your company. What do you think or who do you think it was that you were the most worried about letting down and the most worried about Interviewing.io failing?

Aline Lerner: 13m 55s

It was hard because normally you have – if you’re not doing well, you have some amount of time to adjust to the new reality, and everything was sped up. This is maybe not an apt comparison, but I’ll do it anyway: when a loved one dies in a car accident versus from a drawn out, terminal disease.

Both are horrific, but in one you’re completely blindsided and in the other you have time to practice grieving. Here it was much more like the car accident. I’ve been doing this, doing this company for over five years, but I’ve been angry at recruiting and hiring and how the status quo works for much longer than that.

I was a recruiter. I ran my own firm and was head of hiring at a few companies. I’ve been in this space for almost a decade and that’s been my whole life. I think the person or entity I was most afraid of disappointing was myself because I was scared to look through the other side and be like, “Ok, well, I don’t have this. Who am I now without this company?”

I saw this comment on Hacker News where somebody was talking about this company shutting down and one of the top comments was, “Well, maybe they were doing shitty before this and COVID is just a convenient excuse for everybody to save face.”

And I started thinking, “Well, what if everybody thinks that about Interviewing.io?” And then, more broadly, I’ve always believed that hiring should be about connecting smart people at scale. It shouldn’t be about middlemen, it shouldn’t be about resumes, all these things that I think a lot of your listeners probably viscerally find frustrating and why hiring feels like it sucks.

I believe, axiomatically, that if we can fix a few things then it’s going to work. Then I’m like, “Well, what if we never get to fix these things or what if my whole world view is wrong or what if I never get the chance to prove it, because market forces are now against me and a lot of success is about timing?”

Definitely me; after that, my employees. A lot of them are – the engineers, I thought, they will have the easiest time finding another job, but maybe not. We didn’t know what a post-COVID economy would look like. Some of these people have kids, some of these people have mortgages.

I didn’t know how I could look them in the eye. Some of them, for non-engineers finding a new job tends to be a little harder. That was horrific. My investors I was kind of least worried about. I figured they’d understand. And one thing you learn as a founder – at first, you’re like, “Oh, my god, all these people gave me money and now it’s on me not to lose it.”

Then you realize they give a lot of people money and most of those people lose their money, so they’re probably OK with it. Not to be too cavalier but not as worried about them as my own identity and mental health and certainly the livelihood of my employees.

Courtland Allen: 16m 46s

Your investors are rich. They’ll be fine.

Aline Lerner: 16m 47s

They’ll be OK. Well, I mean, again, post-COVID a lot of these things we assume. In the early days it’s, “Well, is this going to be the Great Depression? Is it going to be worse than the Great Depression? Is it going to be like that show on HBO I’ve never seen where some portion of the population is raptured?” Could be any of those. (Laughter.)

Courtland Allen: 17m 8s

Could be anything. Who knows? I think in situations like that the fear of the unknown is so much worse than the actual pain. You don’t know where the bottom is. You just construct all sorts of mental simulation of, “OK, what could go wrong?” Whereas the situation you’re facing today in this instance might not be nearly that bad.

What kind of timescale was happening in your mind for when the end might come for Interviewing.io?

Aline Lerner: 17m 31s

The beauty of these things: Unlike in life, in most cases with running a company you know exactly when you’re dead because you know how much money you have left.

Courtland Allen: 17m 40s

Hopefully.

Aline Lerner: 17m 42s

Hopefully, as a human you could be dead at any – I could drop dead in the middle of this interview. Probably won’t, but it’s possible. Let’s hope I don’t.

Courtland Allen: 17m 51s

I would mourn you, Aline.

Aline Lerner: 17m 52s

Thank you. You’d be one of the few.

Courtland Allen: 17m 54s

I’d still publish, though. (Laughter.)

Aline Lerner: 17m 56s

I hope you would.

Courtland Allen: 17m 58s

Can you imagine what that would do for my download numbers?

Aline Lerner: 18m 0s

I think it would be better if it were somebody famous.

Courtland Allen: 18m 6s

All right, this is getting dark.

Aline Lerner: 18m 7s

Too dark. We knew when we’d be out of cash. When you think about your runway, there’s, “Well, here’s our runway. If we keep on bringing roughly the same amount of money we have been, assuming you’re not profitable,” which many startups are not. We were not. Then there’s your oh-my-god-we’re-fucked runway, where there is no more cash as of today. That is a lot shorter than the runway you generally think about because you make some assumptions about how the world will be. I won’t mention exact numbers because I probably shouldn’t, but it wasn’t good. It wasn’t good.

Fortunately, in our case it wasn’t that hard to think of what we could do, because we did have this valuable thing we were offering people. So I think anybody in our situation would have thought, “OK, what do we have that we can sell? OK, we have these free, anonymous mock interviews with engineers from top companies. This is the reason people are using our product.”

But it was easy to make that decision because we had no other choice. We would have shut our doors, and then nobody would get interview practice of any kind, or at least not at the caliber that we were giving it. But it was hard thing to tell our users and it was also a hard thing to accept. You do a lot of things out of necessity, but that doesn’t mean you’re happy about them or that you’re proud of them.

Courtland Allen: 19m 37s

Before we get into the exact details of what you did, let’s remind listeners of how Interveiwing.io works. We touched on it earlier, but as a developer what’s your experience when you come into Interviewing.io?

Aline Lerner: 19m 48s

Most of our users come to us because they’re either in the midst of a job search or they’re thinking about their next job search. And across the board they’re disgusted and terrified in equal measure of undergoing a standard, algorithmic technical interview.

A lot of our users are maybe senior engineers and they just haven’t done this stuff in a while because it’s not what you do at work. Some of them are juniors; maybe this is their first exposure to technical interviews.

Either way, whether you’re junior or senior, you’re like, “Oh, my god, I have to reverse a binary tree. Fuck, what do I do?” Some of our users go on LeapCode first and muck around on there a little bit and then they come to us because talking to another human and having another human breathe down your neck while you’re doing the aforementioned binary tree reversal is a very different experience.

If you’re one of our users, get on the platform. And before COVID, you set up a pseudonym because everything is anonymous and then you just see a bunch times and you click a time and then when you show up, let’s say on Wednesday at noon, there’s going to be an engineer from a FAANG or comparable company.

We have some non-FAANG interviewers like Dropbox and Slack and Uber and Lyft, but their bar is comparable. Then you meet that person in a version of CoderPad inside our product and they run you through a very realistic algorithmic word systems design interview.

You can’t see them, but you can hear them. Then at the end they give you actionable feedback and also tell you where you stack up. For a lot of people it’s a way of getting your feet wet, but either way you know what you need to work on, and you break the seal, and you keep practicing.

Then if you do well in practice – it’s a bit of a moving goal post, but some top percent of our users then, instead of having to apply online or talk to recruiters or update your resume or get a friend to refer you, which is potentially dicey and also doesn’t help you that much, you can just click a button and have an interview with any number of great companies as early as the next day, which is also anonymous.

If you screw that up the company doesn’t know who you are. And if you do well, you get fast-tracked and go to onsite.

Courtland Allen: 22m 9s

Which is just so smart because as engineers I think those emotions are very real. In the same way that your identity as a founder is tied to your company, as an engineer it sucks to go into an interview and have people know who you are and just completely bomb it and feel like a failure and this thing you’d been studying for, practicing for years, you’re not good enough. Someone tells you you’re not good enough.

Aline Lerner: 22m 30s

It’s awful.

Courtland Allen: 22m 30s

So you have a site where you can practice and practice anonymously and get better in a low-stakes situation is so smart. When you launched this thing, well, really when you launched this landing page for it because you hadn’t built it yet, you had something like 7,000 signups in one day on Hacker News because people really, really wanted what you were building.

Aline Lerner: 22m 51s

Yeah. I didn’t think it would do anything and then that happened. Then I was like, “All right, time to quit my dumb recruiting job and actually start this company.”

So I think we do add a lot of value for engineers. For some of them it’s the practice piece, for some of them it’s just getting fast tracked to employers. That’s what we used to do. As I mentioned earlier, it was completely free for engineers.

We did limit how many interviews people could do because we still had to pay our interviewers, but you got at least three, generally. And potentially, you could unlock more by doing various things on the site. Then employers paid us for hires. Post-COVID all of that changed very, very fast.

Courtland Allen: 23m 35s

Yes, you had to become almost like a brand-new founder, a brand-new Indie Hacker where you’re like, “Our business model no longer works because the people paying us money are no longer hiring or paying any money whatsoever. What are we going to do?”

I’m curious about how you approached this because a lot of people listening in are trying to figure out how to come up with an idea and they may not have the same advantages that you had. You already had a huge user base. You already had a lot of momentum, you already had a team.

Still, it’s not immediately obvious, 100% clear what idea is going to work once your old business model stops working. How did you approach figuring out how to save the company when you realized that you didn’t have a lot of runway and you weren’t going to be able to make money the way you always had?

Aline Lerner: 24m 17s

A few things. One of the first things I did was – and this was maybe not the first thing I should have done but this was something I knew could work. I went to one of our engineers and I was like, “Can you just look at Stripe this weekend and see how it works? We’re going to need payments. You figure that out and while you figure that out, I’m just going to email our users.”

The way Interviewing.io worked before is we had a good amount, tens of thousands of users but then we had a very, very long waitlist. Our waitlist consisted of folks that were either outside the U.S. because we were generally operating in the U.S. or engineers that we didn’t think we could place.

The reason for that is we’re paying for their interviews so we had to have some reasonable expectation that we could make that money back. Many other players would say these are people that didn’t go to top schools or top companies. We didn’t look at that at all, we didn’t care what their LinkedIn or their resume looked like.

Instead, what we cared about was, “Are they senior and are they actually a software engineer?” Those were the main things. That means that we had a lot of juniors on our waitlist. We also had folks that weren’t in our target markets on our waitlists.

I started going through some of our waitlisted users and asking them if they would like to get off the waitlist if they could potentially pay for interviews? And this email took me – the first draft took me so long because I felt like I wanted to pour my heart out and apologize to them and explain that we are fucked in the wake of COVID and we have to do something.

The whole team helped me edit it and we got it down to something manageable. I would just start sending out these emails to folks on our waitlist while – we still continued to let people on because we didn’t know how long this would last and I didn’t want to just stop our candidate flow to the companies that were still hiring, so we’re still hemorrhaging money on one side but we’re testing out this thing.

So just emailing users and just offering them different price points. I just started a spread sheet and tracked email open rates, email response rates. We did this very janky thing, and some users are like, “Are you a person? Are you scamming us?”

Because we literally just had a PayPal link. It was like PayPal.me/Interviewing.io. We’re like, “OK, great you want to get off the waitlist and you’re willing to pay. Cool, send money here.” We saw if they’d actually send money there, and they did. We thought if people are willing to trust us and send money to this janky link then probably if we built payments and this wasn’t all over email, it’s not a crazy assumption that this would work.

We tried a few different price points. We had no idea what to charge. We kind of knew what market rates were for some of these things but that felt a little too expensive, so we tried any number of things.

One of the interesting things we discovered in the process was that our users tended to be kind of bimodal in their approach. There are some portion of people for whom paying between $100 and $200-some an interview, depending on what the interview was, was no problem and they would buy multiples. That’s one hump in the curve. Then the other one was users that are all the way at the other end and at most they’ll pay $10 or $20. There weren’t that many people in the middle.

Every morning I’d wake up and be like, “Who signed up? Who got waitlisted? Who can I reach out to?” Eventually we stopped doing free interviews entirely because we realized COVID wasn’t a blip and this is our new reality. Then we emailed everybody that signed up basically the day before that was in the U.S. saying, “Hey, we have a waitlist. Do you want to skip the waitlist? This is how much it costs per interview.”

Then we started trying different offerings. We saw that a lot of our users wanted not just a practice interview but a practice interview with a Googler or with an engineer from Facebook or with an engineer from Amazon, either because they already had interviews at those companies or because aspirationally that’s where they wanted to be.

Courtland Allen: 28m 37s

So much good stuff there that I want to ask you about. But this scrappy process you’re going through where you’re the founder and you’re actually taking time to email users and send them this janky PayPal link because nothing is set up, that’s what I mean about to square one and becoming like a brand-new Indie Hacker even though you had a mature business.

And I’m curious: How did you do that when you had a team behind you? How aware was your team of how dire the situation was? Were they worried or was this just sort of you doing this all by yourself and hoping your team doesn’t find out you might be screwed?

Aline Lerner: 29m 9s

No, they knew. One of the things I think founders can underestimate just in talking to founder friends of mine is how perceptive and plugged in employees are. They can tell. They can tell your mood, they can tell everything that is going on, so I’ve taken an approach where I tell my team what is going on, because if not they’ll know.

I’ve made some missteps in the past where I haven’t told them what was going on and then some grand plan that I had didn’t work out and it ended up affecting them and it blew up in all our faces. So after learning the hard way, I just stopped and I just tell everybody.

We have a graph where I shared this with the whole company. I’m like, “This is our burn, this is how much money is coming in, these are our projections, these are the assumptions I’m making in these projections. You can see exactly the month in which we’re going to run out of cash, and then you can also see how our revenue numbers are changing as we try different things.” Not everybody spent time looking at it. Some people did, but this way it’s all out there.

My ops team was really helpful in doing some of these. As I figured out – the first iterations I did myself because I had no idea what I was doing. So I wanted to get a feel for how to do this before delegating it to others, but people helped with copy.

And then as we jumped in, the rest of the team also helped with testing in parallel. Engineer got Stripe working which wasn’t hard (ph). Then after that we started – even before I knew we needed it for sure, we started building a prototype for paid interviews.

In some ways we were lucky because we already had a lot of product built, but there were a lot of UI changes that we needed to make and UX changes that we needed to make.

How do we explain to users that this is our new model in the UI without writing a giant essay? How do we show them all of these different options? Do we roll our own order management system, or do we use something like Shopify? There are all of these – and I need help with projections. Reasonably, how much revenue can we expect from this in the best case?

So it was, after I found my sea legs a little bit, it was definitely a team effort. And some folks on the team had much more experience with consumer businesses than I did and pricing than I did. So it was critical to lean on them. I think I would have done the company a disservice had I tried to go it alone.

Courtland Allen: 31m 41s

I can’t imagine it was easy to decide on this business model where you’re going to charge your developers because --

Aline Lerner: 31m 48s

They are the product.

Courtland Allen: 31m 50s

Yeah, maybe that’s the obvious – yeah, they’re the product. Maybe that was the obvious approach because you have all these developers who are getting all this value for free, but you literally used to say at the top of your website, “Practice interviewing with engineers from Google, Facebook, etc. It’s free and always will be.”

Aline Lerner: 32m 4s

Yep.

Courtland Allen: 32m 4s

In a way that’s a promise to your customers like, “Hey, we will not charge you.”

Aline Lerner: 32m 8s

Yeah, if you go to the Wayback Machine you’ll see it’s there.

Courtland Allen: 32m 12s

I’m looking at it right now.

Aline Lerner: 32m 14s

We inadvertently lied. The guy that started on the day of the quarantine, I think his first – the first sort of on-boarding test that every engineer, I think everybody at the company does, is we have this corpus of pseudonyms where we have an adjective and a noun and then it just puts them together so you can be like monstrous-penguin, or nihilistic-defenestration which was my handle for a long time. Your first commit is usually adding to that corpus, so you add a funny adjective and you add a funny noun.

So after that one, his first commit was, “Hey, find all references to ‘free’ and can you remove them,” – (laughter) – which was really – it felt so shitty. It felt shitty for me. It felt shitty for the team, but I think we all knew that it was either this or we’re dead. “So I guess we’re going to do this and we’re just going to try to be honest about it and own what we’re doing and hope that our users forgive us.”

Courtland Allen: 33m 17s

This is another difference between starting a company in booming economic times and a time of recession and just fighting for survival. The booming times are like, “Hey we’re offering all this value but it’s free, and here are all these promises that we don’t need to make but we’re going to make and everything is good.”

Then the hard times are like, “This promise is rescinded. We are charging. It is x dollars a month. Take it or leave it. We need to actually survive.”

That’s what you have to do as a founder, because if your company shuts down you can’t even keep your original promise. You can’t provide a free service if your company doesn’t exist.

But were you afraid of how your users might take that, because people on the internet are sort of, especially developers, can be ornery? They’re not usually excited when companies charge money for things that were previously free?

Aline Lerner: 34m 1s

Yes, extremely afraid. I think I was afraid of two things. I was afraid, one, of just people hating us and then also hating me. A lot of what I love about my job is that it is awesome building for engineers. They are the best users because you admire them.

You’re like, wow, these people are building things themselves and it’s cool to build things for builders and they are insightful. They are solving a lot of the same problems at work that you’re solving. So in some ways they have a lot of empathy for – they’re like, “Oh, I see you guys are AB testing this thing.” They get it.

They peel back the curtain and they kind of understand what is going on. And they have strong opinions and they’ll tell you, and the bug reports people submit are beautiful because they are super detailed.

I love building for these users. And one of the things I love about my job is that engineers like us, generally. They, by extension, like me. Then I was like, “What if this is it? What if this is the blow from which we will never recover?”

Part of me thought, “As long as you’re still adding value, some portion of people will use it because it doesn’t matter if people love you or your brand. At the end of the day what matters is: Are you giving them something that they want? And no matter how great of a brand that you have, if you’re not doing that, that’s temporary. They’re going to leave.”

That was scary because I expected a lot of blowback. In some ways what sucked too is that I had sold a lot of people on this vision of how hiring should be. I kind of alluded to that earlier. And was this a big capitulation? “No, actually, hiring isn’t going to be the way we want, and we have to charge these people that we never wanted to charge.”

So, it was really scary. Like I said, the whole team jumped in and helped me edit this almost tearful email to the community about what was going on and it was extremely well received. I was so grateful. I was shocked, first and foremost, but then I was extremely grateful that people understood.

One of the things that made it better was that we decided, even if we are charging, we’re still going to have some kind of free tier. And we, to this day, have a tier where you can interview other users and they’ll interview you so it’s this peer-to-peer thing.

I think that helped soften the blow a little bit, but also it helped us kind of continue this mission of: If someone can’t pay, they should still be able to get some help. So we did that and that made me sleep better at night and I think it helped some portion of our users that would have been probably upset otherwise, even if the quality of those interviews is more up and down and less predictable than a professional interviewer.

Courtland Allen: 36m 41s

I think when people – maybe the analog I know that’s closest is just raising prices. Often founders have similar fears as yours. “People are going to hate me if we raise prices and we’ve always charged x dollars a month. How can we really justify charging twice as much?” And then people do it.

Every now and then you get some hate emails and some negative reactions and some angry tweets. But by and large if you are providing value to people and it’s worth the cost and people understand why you’re doing it – you’re not just trying to squeeze some extra money out of the, like you are facing certain death and a global pandemic or if you’ve hired more people and are providing more features, so now you need to charge more and support the team – I think usually customers understand.

When it comes to making a promise as explicitly as you did, “It’s free and always will be,” I was thinking about a quote from Reid Hoffman recently where he said, “The only promise to customers you can’t break is giving them the value that they need for a price that they can afford.”

Aline Lerner: 37m 27s

That’s a really good quote.

Courtland Allen: 37m 28s

Ultimately – yeah, I think it’s so true. Obviously, it worked out in your favor. Things have sort of turned around.

How well are you doing now? You were millions in revenue before, you lost pretty much all of it practically overnight. How well did this new change work?

Aline Lerner: 37m 43s

What was crazy is, we shipped the first version of Paid Interviews in a real way where it wasn’t me just emailing people saying, “Please, sir, can I have some money at this PayPal link?” We shifted in (ph) May and I think in a matter of six weeks we went from nothing to a million-dollar run rate, which --

Courtland Allen: 38m 2s

Crazy.

Aline Lerner: 38m 3s

Unreal. I’m still shocked that that happened and I’m so grateful that our users were willing to do that.

We also had to change – we used to pay our interviewers more than we’re paying them now, so I’m very grateful that they were kind of willing to take that hit and that there were more people that were willing to be interviewers. But that was unreal.

I didn’t really sleep well for months. Then I remember when we got kind of close to a million, which we are still not profitable but once we got there, I had the first good sleep I had in a long time.

We are now close to where we used to be and we’re growing pretty steadily month over month. Some months are crazy high, some months it’s just a little bit of growth, but every month is better than the last.

Courtland Allen: 38m 52s

That’s crazy how fast you had that turnaround. That just goes to show how much unlocked potential you had sitting there on your waiting list pretty much this whole time. Is there any part of you that regrets not doing this earlier? Like last year pre-pandemic, if you could go back in time, would you have charged developers?

Aline Lerner: 39m 9s

That is a really good question. The answer is that I don’t know. In fact, our data scientists came to me with this very well-thought-out presentation where he was like, “Look, we clearly have product-market fit on the practice side. Companies – yeah, we’re making more money than we probably would be from candidates, but it doesn’t feel like a machine. We should charge.” And I disagreed with him. Of course once this happened, I went to him kind of apology, hat in hand being like, “Hey, dude I think you may have been right about this.”

But the fact is I don’t know. Because so much of our behavior is shaped by market forces and I think one of the reasons people are more willing to – maybe they’re not. I think some portion of our users would always have paid.

But I think the hardest thing when I thought about it before was: How do we decide who is going to get the service for free and whom we’re going to charge? And that didn’t seem like a question that had a good answer.

Very pragmatically speaking, if we were to charge before, we’d say, “OK, candidates that have no trouble getting jobs and have a lot of network and have friends with whom they can practice and already have a good job, we can give this to them for free. And people that really need this, we should charge them.”

But that felt gross and I just didn’t want to do that. And then if we charge everybody, we would probably scare away the users whom we needed most. A lot of misconceptions around Interviewing.io are that our whole platform is junior engineers. And even – now it’s really hard for juniors.

Pre-COVID it was extra hard for juniors to get jobs. And when we went to sell to employers they’d always say, “Well, we don’t want to pay for junior engineers.” Then we’d be like, “Wait, wait, no, no, no. Our average years of experience is around seven. Most of our engineers are senior. About 60% of them are already at top companies. About 40% of them you probably wouldn’t hire based on their resume and our value is in getting you those candidates and then making you feel bad that you previously rejected them.” But if we tried to charge, a lot of our users I think would just not pay.

But post-COVID, as I mentioned earlier, the sad thing is there are more candidates competing for fewer jobs and that has changed the dynamic. I don’t feel so great about that, but one of the ways I’ve tried to resolve charging people in the time that they need help the most is we’ve created some scholarships and some fellowships which I hope we can expand. As long as we stay alive, I will always do what I can to make sure we are not unfairly treating people who can’t pay us.

Courtland Allen: 41m 52s

Figuring out who to charge and how much to charge them is just another problem that I think Indie Hackers run in to when they first start their businesses. And with you, you had this interesting dynamic where it seemed like some people, as you said over email, were willing to pay hundreds of dollars to find a job and some people really didn’t want to pay that much to do interview practice.

I think one of the cool things about the whole space that you’re in and the whole hiring space is that there is just so much money changing hands, which is indicative of how much value there is. I tell founders all the time if you’re not sure which industry to be in, ideally, pick an industry that is at the intersection of something that you love and also something where people clearly find things valuable because they are paying lots of money.

With you it’s on both sides. Companies pay software engineers so much money per year to hire them. It’s like their lifeblood to have talented software engineers and so they are willing to pay recruiters or companies like yours a lot of money to help them hire.

But also people who are learning to code or people who are trying to get jobs, that’s a transformative event to get a job at a company that is going to pay you a high salary as a software engineer. So if there is a platform that helps you do that, if I’m going to get a job that is going to pay me six figures, I’ll probably be willing to shell out hundreds if not thousands of dollars to make that process more guaranteed.

So I guess what I am curious about is: What was the difference between the people who were willing to pay you two-hundred dollars a month or whatever it was for interview practice versus the people who were only willing to pay like, 20 bucks a month?

Aline Lerner: 43m 10s

It’s not per-month, it’s per interview. So you just pay as you go.

Courtland Allen: 43m 16s

Even better.

Aline Lerner: 43m 17s

Yeah, right? You just use what you want, and you don’t use what you don’t want.

I think that there is definitely – at a high level, senior engineers tend to be more willing to pay than juniors and people who still have a job are more willing to pay than people who have been laid off.

So if you just cut the audience that way, you’re probably going to get 80% of the truth. There are some skeptics. There are some users whom I talked to when I was doing user research and they were like, “Yes, I have the money. I just don’t know if I want to spend it on this.”

So one of the things that we started thinking about was, “Well, how we can de-risk this purchase? How can we make it so that people do the practice that they need and then pay us once they get a job?”

We actually rolled out a v1 of what we call “financial aid” recently where you can defer payments until you find a job, and as long as it takes you is that’s as long as it takes.

One of the things I found really surprising in my user research is people were like, “Yeah, I would totally pay for this.” Like, “Yeah, it’s amazing, I can practice with a Googler. I’d pay 50 bucks a month for that and maybe I can get three interviews.” I’m like, “Do you know how much an hour of a Googler’s time is worth?”

Courtland Allen: 44m 30s

A lot more than that.

Aline Lerner: 44m 31s

A lot more than that. There is definitely that mismatch, but I think it’s pretty cut and dry. If you have a steady income and it’s a high amount because you’ve been in this industry for years, you’ll pay. And if not, then maybe – some college students can pay a lot of money. Some can’t. Most can’t.

Courtland Allen: 44m 50s

What do you think was your biggest uncertainty after you unveiled this new plan and users seemed like, “You know what? This is OK, we’ll pay for this.” What was your remaining uncertainty that this might not work?

Aline Lerner: 45m 4s

It was easy. I mean, not easy, but we were able to get some portion of our users paying immediately. Right now the thing we are struggling with is growth. So, how do we get more than x% of users to buy something? The more you do this, the harder it gets because you’ve exhausted some of the lower-hanging fruit.

One of the cool things about this, actually, is that it has turned our culture into much more of a culture of experimentation. Before when we made changes to our product, our North Star was, “How many hires are we making?”

The latency between an engineer signing up for Interviewing.io and an engineer can get a job is significant, so 3-6 months on average. Running any kind of AB test or new offerings for users wasn’t very expedient because it took forever to see any kind of result.

The other reason is it’s a funnel. So by the time – no matter how many users you have at the top, by the time you get to the point where people are finding jobs through you, there are a lot fewer which means that it takes longer to see results if things are close.

Now the feedback loop is much tighter because somebody gets on the platform and then they buy something or don’t, typically in a day or two. Most people buy the first day they’re on. We can start doing all sorts of weird stuff and running experiments and seeing what is going to work and what’s not, but it does get harder. Once you’ve sort of maxed out on the low-hanging fruit, what do you do next?

One of the things we are going to start thinking about is growth. Our unit economics are pretty good now, so how do we get more people in at the top? Maybe funnel hacking is not the right thing to do anymore and we just need more people. But that is a tension we are dealing with internally.

Courtland Allen: 46m 51s

Yes, user acquisition, I think, often people see these graphs of Facebook’s growths or any Rocket Ship Startups growth and it’s just up and to the right, a perfectly smooth curve. The reality is often there are plateaus. You figure out things that work and then you sort of exhaust that channel and you’ve got to go back to the drawing board and figure it out again.

Aline Lerner: 47m 9s

A lot of the time, you also – looking at those graphs you don’t know where that growth came from. You don’t know if it’s ROI-positive growth. Not to be super cynical, but when we did paid marketing for a time, our growth numbers went through the roof. But that is not necessarily a win because are you making money per user or not?

And sometimes when you are running a startup it doesn’t matter because people just care about engagement metrics. But in this climate we are all about revenue, so we have to be a lot more careful with things like paid marketing even though we are probably going to start doing that soon. But when you see those graphs, there is generally a lot more going on under the hood than first meets the eye.

Courtland Allen: 47m 51s

I think that just speaks of the times. Recession-Aline has got to think about revenue and got to think about keeping expenses low.

When we spoke last year you were telling me about how you spend your day as a CEO and you said you spend a lot of time thinking and a lot of time hiring, a lot of time writing. How has that changed this year?

Aline Lerner: 48m 11s

Oh, to be pre-recession-Aline again. Well, these days I spend a lot more time in spreadsheets and looking at revenue and projections and also looking at AB test results. I’m in a much more product analyst role than I used to be before.

I definitely am not spending much time on hiring. The team is the way it is and it’s lean and we’re going to work our asses off and stay the way we are until we hit profitability.

I think the writing thing is still important. I’ve written a couple of things since the pandemic started and I’m working on another piece. I think content marketing for us has always been such a great thing. And now more than ever I find myself wanting to communicate with our users because I want them to understand where we are coming from and why we are doing the things that we are doing, especially now that they are kind enough to give us money to do it.

Courtland Allen: 49m 12s

I think now more than ever, people are hungry to read things. That’s been a kind of recurring theme on the podcast this year. Number one, how much money people are making just by writing on the internet.

Paid newsletters have just sort of blown up. People are getting subscribers faster than ever, and it’s become almost a trendy thing to become a thought leader and publish your own podcast and your own paid newsletter, etc.

But you’ve been doing this forever. Even before you started Interviewing.io, you were doing lots of research on what stands out on a resume and it’s been tremendously popular because it’s just a space where the stakes are high and people really want to know what works and what doesn’t.

Aline Lerner: 49m 45s

I also think it’s a space where most other writers don’t share data and graphs. I think the reason people like my writing – it’s not necessarily the writing is that good necessarily. It’s the fact that I am willing to peel back the curtain and do these painstaking experiments which I love doing.

I think writing also gives you a nice mental break from – at least with writing, it’s something I can control. I know that if put in 40 hours I will have something that is decent at the end. I’ve done this long enough now to have a repeatable process.

With some of the other stuff we are doing on the product side and selling, it is completely non-deterministic. You could spend so much time on a feature and then it doesn’t work. We’ve had a few losses like that where I was sure this was going to be the thing that changes everything.

I’ve learned not to think that way anymore because it’s naive and there’s never a thing that changes everything. But writing, at least, I’m like, “Hey, if I spend 40 hours on this, I know this many people will read it and some of them will like it enough to share it.”

Courtland Allen: 50m 49s

Give me an example of how you might put out something that you’ve written and why you are so certain that it will succeed and contrast that with an example of a feature that you thought about building and you were so confident about and it turns out it didn’t go down the way that you planned.

Aline Lerner: 51m 3s

I’ll use an example of something that we wrote a while ago. Or no, I’ll even talk about the thing that kind of put me on the map. This was many years ago but even then, when I hadn’t written much I kind of knew this would kind of resonate.

I was a software engineer for a time, then I switched to being a recruiter. And on my first recruiting job, I decided that I would try to create the be-all and end-all logistic regression to predict which resumes are going to end up as offers. What does a winning resume look like?

I fed it with the resumes of everybody we had interviewed the year I was there and also with the resumes of people who had joined the company previously. I thought that this would be easy.

I think one mistake engineers make a lot when working in a space that isn’t engineering is, “Hey, if we just make the tech good, everything else will be great. We just need to optimize this thing. If we could just have lower latency, something or other, we’d have better government (ph).” It’s like, “No, that’s actually not – the engineering is not the hard part.”

And I fell into that. It was hard to really get that much signal out of it, but I realized that one of the things that did carry signal was how many typos and grammatical errors a resume had and of course the fewer the better. It didn’t matter where people went to school, it didn’t matter how senior they were.

So I did this big study kind of saying a lot of the things we look at on resumes don’t actually mean anything, and here are the few things that mean something. I published that, submitted it to Hacker News.

I had a good feeling that that would do well because so many people are frustrated by the way hiring works. I felt like if I could arm people with a little bit of data that backed up some of these intuitive things they’ve been feeling and thinking then it would be a win.

In fact, that has been the formula in my mind for succeeding with an engineering audience, is you think about: What do people believe but that’s controversial but don’t necessarily have the evidence to back up?

If you can tell that story and just arm them with hopefully meaningful, real, thorough data about why their intuition was right, then they will respond to it. That is different than feature development because features don’t care.

Courtland Allen: 53m 29s

A few different strong insights kind of power your company. Your content marketing is understanding that people want these insights and that you have the data to provide them. With your product, it’s understanding on both sides that companies are looking for unfair advantages in hiring.

If there is some overlooked group of developers who they can hire who are actually really good, then that is great for them; and developers who are just looking for practice in a safe way where they’re not going to risk their ego or their reputation and they can actually get practice.

But out of all three of those, it seems like the content one is probably the one that you are the least doubled down on. It seems to be you who is writing the content. Have you ever thought about building out a team and making this a function of something that you do?

Aline Lerner: 54m 6s

Yeah. We’ve had a few guest posts and our data scientist has written a few things that have been much more in-depth and I think rigorous than anything I have ever written. Mine tend to be a little more off the cuff where I’m like, “Yeah, that’s good enough.” Not so in his.

We actually have very likely our first guest post in a while coming up soon because I think content is such a powerful machine. Historically, it hasn’t been the most high-priority thing on my list and we haven’t had the resources to grow a team around it.

But now where it’s becoming very, very clear that our product works, our unit economics work, and we probably just need more people to come in at the top, all of a sudden content marketing is a bigger and bigger part of that strategy. It’s something we’ve thought about. Haven’t done it yet, but it’s something we’re toying with.

One of the things that has been hard about finding a content person is there aren’t that many people that write well and also have the domain expertise to have the right tone for the audience that we are trying to attract.

I’ve talked to some content people and the last thing I want is “Top Ten Things Engineers Do Wrong in Interviews” or “One Weird Trick to Make Your Penis Bigger and Make You Better at Algorithmic Interviews.” (Laughter.)

Courtland Allen: 55m 27s

Developers hate that stuff.

Aline Lerner: 55m 28s

Developers hate it. I take a lot of this for granted because I am part of the community and I used to be one and there are a lot of people that don’t – they’re like, “OK, what programming language is” – nobody cares, nobody cares. You need to have something much more subtle and much more thoughtful and like the second- third-order stuff.

So maybe I’m being a little bit too prescriptive, but it’s been hard to find someone. But I met somebody on the internets recently that I think is a great writer and he’s probably going to do some stuff for us, so we’ll see how it pans out.

Courtland Allen: 56m 3s

I’ve dealt with kind of the same challenge at Indie Hackers but in reverse where I find people who have domain expertise but then they’re not the best writers, because they are developers and founders and that doesn’t necessarily make you great at expressing your ideas and telling a story in a way that readers actually care about. So I’ve been trying to work through this problem too.

Aline Lerner: 56m 21s

What have you learned? Do you have any tips for me?

Courtland Allen: 56m 24s

I’ve been talking to a lot of people about it and just working through with Indie Hackers and I think a lot of it, number one, just comes down to editing and sort of pairing people up.

So you might not have one person who is good at both skills but if you prioritize the domain expertise and you pair them with someone who’s like, “Okay, well, I know how to tell a story, etc., and work with them,” which in Indie Hackers’s case often is me or my brother, I think that can often produce better, more entertaining stories and things that actually resonate and are meaningful rather than are cheap, like some cheap listicle or that are overly – they’re sufficiently technical but are just not – are just a drudge to read through. So that’s kind of where I’m at.

Aline Lerner: 57m 1s

That’s smart.

Courtland Allen: 57m 2s

I like talking about this stuff because it’s very much a work in progress. I don’t know what the answer is, and you don’t know what the answer is.

Aline Lerner: 57m 7s

No idea.

Courtland Allen: 57m 8s

I think what is cool for listeners is most of them are in a place where they don’t know how to grow their companies either necessarily.

I’m curious, how do you model this whole challenge in your mind? Or are you more of a, “I need to find out what is working for another company to copy them or I need to find out what’s worked for us in the past and extend that”? How do you know out of all the millions of possibilities what to even investigate as to how interviewing can grow in the future?

Aline Lerner: 57m 29s

I’ve generally been a fan of just trying stuff quickly and seeing if it works. There are so few cases where other people’s advice has worked for me. Mostly I think because advice, unless it’s somebody that really, really knows your situation, is going to be this first-order thing. Like reading advice blogs isn’t that useful most of the time. And even some of our investors who are kind enough to give us some advice don’t have the full grasp of what we’re doing. So I think the best thing is just to try stuff yourself.

One other thing back to the subject of content marketing that actually was surprising to me that I learned and helped me a lot is last year I wrote a few chapters in a book about recruiting. That was one of the first times I worked with a professional editor. And man, oh man is that a gift.

Courtland Allen: 58m 21s

They’re amazing.

Aline Lerner: 58m 22s

They’re amazing. I’ve since used her on and off for my writing because I can just vomit out a few drunken pages, clean them up a little, like make sure the date is correct once I sober up, and then I can just pass it to her and she’s like, “Hey, let’s reorganize it this way, did you mean this” and cuts it down.

I don’t know if that is useful for the audience but that is one of those things that I just – I didn’t – for some reason I had no faith that editors were good. I don’t know why I thought this. I think I am just cynical about everything and I think that holds me back. Because I should probably take other people’s advice more. This is one of those situations where like, “Oh, yeah, this is why this whole industry exists. OK cool.”

Courtland Allen: 59m 2s

I think if you’re a founder, in general, you’re someone who is pretty confident about your skills. You’re someone who is obviously pretty talented and it’s just the whole dilemma of hiring in general is you’ve got to find someone to do the thing that you are already good at.

You’ve already written a bunch of hit, viral blog posts. And how can you really put trust or faith in someone else to take part of what you know how to do really well and do it in your place? And a lot of it is just kind of try it and dive in and ideally find someone who is great.

The opposite can happen too. I’ve talked to so many founders who made a bunch of bad hires, and that solidified in their mind that you can’t hire, that you can’t outsource, you’ve got to do it all yourself. But man, when you work with someone really good, it really changes your thinking about how capable other people can be.

Aline Lerner: 59m 43s

Yes, and it’s easier in some domains than others. So I trust our eng’ team implicitly because I was a decent engineer. I was never great, and I haven’t written code for this company for, I don’t know, like five years. I wrote some at the beginning and then I handed – I’m not going to meddle in what they are doing. I trust them. They’ve shown over and over that I don’t need to meddle and they know exactly what they’re doing. But it’s harder when it’s something that you know how to do.

One of my friend’s always used to say it’s shitty being a designer in some ways because design is one of those things everybody thinks they know how to do because it’s approachable; unlike coding (inaudible) don’t know it, you don’t know it. Great, the engineers get left in peace.

Courtland Allen: 1h 0m 27s

Yes, there are a lot of topics like that where people think they are experts, and they aren’t. And there’s really no way to convince them that their design isn’t good or that their thoughts on the economy violate all the rules of economics that we know about or lots of stuff like that.

But anyway, Aline, you’ve had quite a journey. You’ve faced basically certain death. You somehow managed to turn it around.

Aline Lerner: 1h 0m 48s

I’ve stared into the abyss.

Courtland Allen: 1h 0m 50s

Stared into the abyss and you’ve returned safely and you’re on the up and up. I know you said that your approach is that other people’s advice hasn’t worked out for you.

But I think that is perhaps my favorite prompt to ask you the question: What is your advice for people listening in? You think people shouldn’t necessarily take others’ advice, and yet you’ve got a lot of experience where probably some of the advice that you would share would be very helpful to some people listening in.

So if someone is an Indie Hackers and they’re trying to figure out how to survive during the recession or maybe come up with an idea from scratch, what do you think they could take away from your journey, Aline?

Aline Lerner: 1h 1m 21s

I guess strategic advice is better than tactical. Broad strokes are less likely to be wrong. I think the best thing that, in hindsight – and we’re not out of the woods yet. We’re on the up and up. I hope we make it. We’re growing but let’s hope we keep it that way.

But I think it’s too early for me to rest on my laurels and say, “Well, just do what Aline did and everything is going to be great.” We did escape certain death and we did have a pretty crazy redemption period.

If there’s anything I learned from this, I think it’s make decisions fast. I am so glad that we started looking into people paying for interviews even before it was clear that COVID was here to stay. That gave us, I think, a month head start in some ways. And if we hadn’t done that, we might have been much closer to running out of money. So make decisions fast.

I think the other thing is do your best to test things quickly. Do it cheaply. Maybe it’s emails, maybe it’s something else. Just figure out what is the best way I can get signal on whatever this question is if you’re just starting a company.

In our case when we first started, we threw up a really crappy marketing site and put it on Hacker News and that was the test. But don’t worry about the details. Just figure out what is the most basic question you can ask and try to get validation and an answer for that as soon as you can.

In some ways maybe this whole thing is a blessing because it really forces you to build a much more sustainable business than you could otherwise. And just because it is hard for you doesn’t mean it’s not hard for other people. This is hard.

This is what I remind myself: This is really, really hard for everybody right now with the exception of maybe a few war profiteers whom I respect. But for the most part everybody is struggling.

Courtland Allen: 1h 3m 17s

Everybody is struggling, and I love the advice that you gave because it parallels what you actually did. You were scrappy when you first launched Interviewing.io on Hacker News with just a landing page and no real product behind it.

You’re scrappy even now when you had millions in revenue and a dozen employees. You were still just sending out these scrappy PayPal links and you hadn’t built anything yet. I think way too many founders wait for their thing to be perfect before they launch or perfect before they release.

But if you can iterate quickly and cheaply and make decisions fast, then I think you’ll be much more likely to catch errors in your thinking and get on the right track sooner rather than later.

Aline, thanks for --

Aline Lerner: 1h 3m 48s

Nothing can be uglier than the emails we sent out. So take heart, friends.

Courtland Allen: 1h 3m 56s

That’s the bar.

Aline Lerner: 1h 3m 57s

That’s the bar.

Courtland Allen: 1h 3m 58s

You can be as ugly as the emails that Aline sent out.

Aline, thank you so much for coming on the show. Can you tell listeners where they can go to find what you are doing at Interviewing.io?

Aline Lerner: 1h 4m 4s

Just go to Interviewing.io.

Courtland Allen: 1h 4m 9s

It’s so easy when your company name is your domain name.

Aline Lerner: 1h 4m 12s

It’s a blessing and a curse. Thank you, Courtland.

Courtland Allen: 1h 4m 15s

All right. Thanks, Aline.

Aline Lerner: 1h 4m 17s

Later.

Courtland Allen: 1h 4m 18s

Bye.

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Probably the fastest way to get there if you’re on a Mac is to visit IndieHackers.com/reviews. I really appreciate your support and I read pretty much all the reviews you leave over there. Thank you so much for listening, and as always I will see you next time.