Building a $38k/Month SaaS Business as a Solo Founder with Jordan O'Connor of Closet Tools

Courtland Allen: 0s

What's up everybody. This is Courtland from IndieHackers.com and you're listening to the Indie Hackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a ton of money in the process. And on this show, I talk to these Indie Hackers to learn about the ideas, the strategies, and the opportunities they're taking advantage of to get ahead so the rest of us can do the same.

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In today's episode, I'm talking to Jordan, O'Connor the founder of Closet Tools. Jordan is one of the more successful solo founders I've ever had on the show. We dive into the mechanics of how his business works. In addition to that, one of the recurring themes that came up during our conversation was how important it is to realize that as a founder, not only can your business help people, but your business has to help people if you really want to have any shot at succeeding. Enjoy the episode.

You are the self-proclaimed winner of Indie Hackers. You tweeted about this earlier this year, that if you go to the Indie Hackers directory of products and you sort by highest revenue first and then filter so it only includes solo founders who have no employees and who have their revenue numbers actually verified by Stripe, you come up at the top with your company Closet Tools. So, first of all, how much revenue are you generating?

Jordan O'Connor: 1m 19s

Yeah, actually it's pretty similar probably back to when I posted that to it, it's probably around 35 K but it's up to like 38 K a month now

Courtland Allen: 1m 26s

38 K a month. Okay. So that's crazy. That's $450,000 a year.

That is by far more than you can make at a normal job. And again, this is you by yourself. You have no co-founders you have no employees. I'm just picturing you in your living room, in your underwear, just coding away.

Jordan O'Connor: 1m 38s

Yeah, I think the most wild thing is that just back in May, it was like 18 K. I started taking paternity leave in June, and then we bought a new house in the end of August.

So, I didn't do any code over the summer and the business doubled, and I think that's probably the most crazy part of it. I did do a lot of work before baby number three was born. And I think that kind of led to it. Like I did a lot of things that I knew was a lot of low-hanging fruit that was going to draw a lot of word-of-mouth kind of stuff. So, I deployed all that right before we had baby. Then I just did email support, which is like a half hour a day or something like that. And just put it on the back burner and yeah, it was, it's pretty crazy.

But to the point of this tweet, of course there's Pieter Levels, right? He's got two products that are like number two and four or something like that. So, his combined efforts are way, much larger than mine, but I just thought it was funny at that time.

Going back a couple of years ago, I put out a post on Indie Hackers asking how to integrate Stripe with my product and I got some help from some users on there and to go from zero, not even knowing how to integrate payments into my app, to being, the top solo product, basically, on Indie Hackers is pretty, it's a pretty wild story.

Courtland Allen: 2m 51s

Yeah. And you mentioned, baby, number three, we're going to get into this, but it's not like you did this with all the advantages and all the free time in the world.

You did this while you had a bunch of kids and a wife, a job. But before we talk about that, I want to talk about time because it's pretty inspirational that you're able to like double your revenue this year, while you're on paternity leave, while you really just weren't working that many hours.

I think this is one of the things that makes being an Indie Hacker such a big dream for a lot of people, which is that your time is disconnected from your output. So, if you imagine an employee, it's hard for any sort of employer to measure, like how valuable you really are for them. If somebody is a software engineer at Google, like how much money are they making Google, they can't really tell. So, they're just going to default to paying you for your time. But if you're an indie hacker, that means you're selling directly to your customers, and your customers don't care at all how much time you're spending.

No one's like, “Hey Jordan, how many hours did you work today?” That's how much I'm gonna pay for your product. Now they're looking at the value that your product is providing them and they pay you accordingly. And it's just super straightforward, which means that your time doesn't matter anymore.

You can build something and a day that does really well and makes a lot of money. I just talked to James Traff a few episodes ago. He's made like $400,000 on a set of icons he built, it wasn't that hard for him to make these icons. But on the flipside, you can also spend a whole year building something that ends up not being valuable or helpful to others and make $0.

So as an Indie Hacker, it really is a true test. How much value are you actually creating for other people? And how much of that are you capturing?

Jordan O'Connor: 4m 10s

Yeah, a hundred percent, I think that is the thing. I think, a lot o, the majority of Americans are employed and that is the default mentality is that, “Oh, my time is what matters is the time I spend on this thing is what matters. That's, what's valuable.”

Really the value is not the time you spend turning the screw, but I think, the cliche is, your value is knowing which screw to turn. The value is the value you provide. Not the time you spend on it. I agree. A hundred percent.

Courtland Allen: 4m 34s

So you also gave a talk recently. I watched a video that you posted to Indie Hackers about this talk and you were talking to people about how they can get started and maybe do what you've done. And you said that starting a business comes down to three things.

Number one, focus on what you're interested in. Number two, build valuable skills and number three, help people. I want to talk about that last one, because that last one is exactly what you're referring to when you say, “What screw do you turn? How do you actually be valuable to others?” But I think even that framework itself, I think is unintuitive to a lot of people because most people would say that being a business owner is a selfish thing, you're in it for yourself.

Why do you think they're being helpful and being valuable others is so crucial?

Jordan O'Connor: 5m 9s

Being valuable to other people, that's just how you get paid in general. If you don't actually provide any value, like nobody's actually gonna pay you, that’s ground level. But I think ultimately, that's any business, if you look at it from a pure standpoint, it is helpful.

As much as Amazon gets flack for being this capitalistic monopoly or whatever, it's pretty helpful that you can get anything you want in the world in two days for free shipping at your doorstep, like that's insane. The value that provides is just shrouded in this Amazon's a monopoly, but the value is just insane. Ultimately, that's what business is, providing great value for people. So, if you don't come at it from that perspective, you just coming from a perspective of I need to make money and I have this skill and I'm going to spend a bunch of time doing it. That's like the wrong approach.

The right approach is to figure out what people actually need and figure out what actually is helpful to them and do that. And I think the actually helpful thing is something that a lot of people get wrong because they try to be helpful but a lot of times, they just end up doing work that's not actually valuable to that person. They'll try to fix complaints, but they're not actually solving like real deep, fundamental problems with, with their skills. So yeah, I think it's an interesting topic for sure.

Courtland Allen: 6m 28s

And I think it applies to more than just business.

It's pretty much anything where you want to interact with others, or you want something from others. There's a post on Indie Hackers recently. And there was somebody sort of complaining about not being able to get engagement on the Indie Hackers forum. This post gets made. It has to be made like once a month for the last three years where someone says, “Hey, I'm making posts, I'm not getting responses. What's going on?” And they always take the time to look back through that person's recent posts and it's almost always the same thing. Their posts aren't helpful to other people. They're just asking for help. “Hey, can I get a review on this? Hey, can I launched on Product Hunt can I get an an upvote?”

Of course, that's not going to help because people are busy. They've got stuff going on in their lives. They're not going to just go out of their way all the time reliably to just like freely give you help. You got to think about how you're going to give them something of value and you'll get something in return.

I'm not talking about any sort of karmic, put out good vibes into the universe and then the universe will just magically open up its arms. I think you’ve got to be clever about it and figure out how you can help other people in a way that helps you.

So, what you're talking about is you just do something that's extremely valuable for people to the point where they'll give you money for that thing. That's a, win-win, you've helped them and they've helped you and it works. Or you can be like more indirect about it, like this podcast.

People can listen to this podcast and they can learn a whole bunch of business lessons for free and hear interesting stories and that's great for them. Even though I'm not getting paid, like it's valuable for me because like I get to build an audience, I get more traffic to Indie Hackers. I get to meet cool people like you and talk to you. It's a win-win there too. I think it's not just business. The core part of any sort of interactions with other people is thinking about how you can help them but do it in a way where you're going to be helped also as a side effect.

Jordan O'Connor: 8m 1s

Yeah. A hundred percent I think like that talk, you mentioned, that, that was my core point is like you helping other, people's also building your skills and your experience as well.

So, I think if you just default to I'm going to help other people, you are building yourself up, too. You get a lot of benefit out of it even if they don't pay you, even if it's not like a direct, like one-to-one, you spent this many hours, they paid for this many hours, like just indirectly, you're going to grow and you're going to figure out what you like to do, what you don't like to do, what's the best way to do this, what's the wrong way to do this? That type of stuff.

Courtland Allen: 8m 30s

Yeah. And I think this is such a rare skill really. It's like a way of looking at the world and business in particular, where you take the blinders off. We all have these kind of blinders on where we have acclimated to the value that we get from others.

We all have running water, but we're not blown away constantly by the fact that we have running water, we just expect it. We all fly on airplanes. We're not blown away by the fact that airplanes can fly as places. We just complain about the slight inconveniences.

But if you really focus on the full exchange and you don't, you take the blinders off, you don't like, let yourself acclimate to the kind of the value that you're getting, the world's amazing. And we're constantly interacting with all these different businesses, which are really just groups of people out there who are working really hard to make our lives better.

I think you need to be able to see the world this way if you want to be a founder, because otherwise you're going to start like a really selfish business and you're not going to focus enough on helping other people and providing value to them. And you're not gonna understand why nobody wants your thing.

Jordan O'Connor: 9m 25s

Yeah. I think, it's the same thing for Closet Tools, right? The core selling point, at least initially was, “Hey this is going to save you a few hours a day.” That's the core tool, basically automate sharing items and we can get into the, how the product works and stuff like that.

It's going to save you a few hours a day and is a $30 a month product saving a few hours a day worth a dollar a day? Sure, of course it is. It's an easy sell, the product pretty much sells itself because that's pretty much the basic fundamental help that it's providing for people.

So, they can spend their time, with their kids or doing other things. There's a lot of other aspects of selling on Poshmark, shipping out items, you're interacting with buyers, you're negotiating, stuff like that. To have all your time tied up in sharing, which is what Closet Tools automates, you're spending a lot of time doing things that aren't necessarily directly productive.

That core cell is just so valuable. People would probably pay, if you're just thinking of dollars per hour, like if you were paid, very low, $10 an hour, that's worth, three hours would be 30 bucks a day, and that's the upper limit of what this tool provides and I charge a dollar a day.

And it's no brainer. It's an easy sign up. So that's, that's part of the reason why it does so well.

Courtland Allen: 10m 34s

Okay. So, let's get into the story behind how you started it, because I think, in addition to illustrating how you can provide something of value to people who are going to pay you for it, your story also lays out a path for how to do this as somebody who feels like the deck is stacked against you.

When you don't have any time, you don't have any experience, we don't have any money, how do you make it work regardless and become and Indie Hacker. And the reason I say this is because you graduated from school with a lot of debt, and then you got married, you had kids young, you said you're on baby number three, you had a full-time job. I not even sure you knew how to code when you started doing this.

Give me this story here of like how you decided to go from all those disadvantages and to become an Indie Hacker rather than taking the path that I think most people will take, which is just to work a full-time job for the next 30 years and try to pay off your debt and just go the normal route.

Jordan O'Connor: 11m 19s

Yeah, so I did know how to code, but I didn't know anything about web development. I knew how to code in C. So, I actually graduated as an electrical engineer and essentially you could wrap it up as like robotics code. I did a lot of moving motors. At my employment I interfaced with lasers and did a whole bunch of data analysis and stuff like that. That was the field I was in.

To your point, I spent the first three years of quote unquote indie hacking, just learning and practicing new skills. I did not make a single dollar for three years. I learned web development. I learned SEO. I did SEO for other people. I made websites for other people. I made it a full fledge back-end front-end app for somebody that had a trucking business, did it all for free, and I used all of those kinds of stages, mostly just helping other people for free to learn these skills.

It got to the point, like you said I had a ton of debt. It was ridiculous. I was the only person employed; my wife stayed home with the kids. Just off the single income, my debt combined with her debt was taking up over half of our income. So, we were just like breaking even basically every month.

I was like, this is not going to work. So, I either need to get like a second job or, I got to figure out something that works. This is three years in. I get to this point where I'm like, I need some extra money or I'm going to be in this situation, like you said, for the next 30 years.

If you back up a little bit, I was mostly just like we talked about earlier, just being helpful. My wife actually jumped on Poshmark and she's selling clothes and stuff like that. She starts spending a bunch of time sharing and interacting on the platform. I had just learned some web code and I was like, “Hey, I think I can automate some of that. I can free up some of your time.”

I did it, I wrote like a 30-line script and I made a bookmarklet. In Chrome or something, you can actually put JavaScript in the bookmark and you just click it and it executes the JavaScript. So, I made that and I made it for my wife and all of her friends who sold on Poshmark, too.

That's actually how she started on it. And so, I gave it to all of them and they thought it was the coolest thing since sliced bread, because it was like, they can now click this one button and it did save them like a half hour. It wasn't smart. It wasn't like totally automatic. It wasn't smart at all, but, at a minimum, it saved them some time and they thought it was super cool.

During the time that whole three years where I was learning new skills and stuff like that, I was just documenting the journey on my blog, my personal website. I wrote a blog post titled Poshmark automation or something like that, Poshmark script or something like that. After about a month or two Google picked it up and started ranking it for some terms related to Poshmark bots. I started getting emails from people saying, “Hey, what is this? Like, how does it work? How do I use it? How do I, how do I, get it working on my closet” and stuff like that.

Even at that point, I was still so much in the help mode that I didn't realize that this was like a business. I was just like, “Oh, this is cool. Here's how it works, like here's how you get it working.” And it was, it was probably after a good five to 10 people emailed me and, the combination of that and then getting to the point where I was like, okay, I need to do something that makes money. That was when a bulb went on, “Oh, this I can actually probably sell this thing.”

It was February 2018, I put a post up on the Poshmark subreddit and I said, “Hey, here's this script, it's free. Here's how you use it.” I actually built a landing page where you just put in your email and then a redirected to a page where it gave you the instructions on how to install it. So, I got all these people's emails and in exchange, I was like, “Hey, give me feedback for what you would want to see this thing do for you.”

From that one post, I got 200 signups for the free script. That was within like a day or two. People tried it out for a few days and they were super excited and they gave me a bunch of feedback like, “Hey, I want you to do this. I want to do this.”

Then for the next month I built out a front end for it. I integrated Stripe, which was actually probably the most difficult thing because I didn't even know how web hooks worked. I didn't know how the web worked. I didn't know how any of that stuff works. I had to figure all this stuff out in a month. Then when I launched it I had 10 paying customers for out of the gate and it's kinda just slowly grown from there. That’s the origin story.

Courtland Allen: 15m 28s

So let's talk about this helpful phase where you were just doing nothing but learning and helping other people. I know a lot of people who want to learn how to code. I know a lot of people want to learn how to pick up these different internet skills.

They want to learn how to write. They want to learn how to build an audience, how to tweet, how to make YouTube videos or whatever. Usually when I talk to people who want to learn these things, they're focused on how fast is it going to be? It's going to take me six months, learn how to code? It's going to take me a year? How long can it take? You spent three years just doing the stuff. What was motivating you to actually do that? Because most people will give up after just a few months.

Jordan O'Connor: 15m 56s

Yeah. So, it was interesting. When I first had this switch flip where it was like, I want to do something different, I don't want to be in this job forever. Day one, I was like, I know I want to make some sort of app. I want it to be like tech oriented. So, I knew that. And so that's when I took a Unity course and I learned basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I did that for three months.

For some reason I knew about Hacker News back then I was on hacker news and a post comes up and basically the core premises is code is the easy part, you need to learn how to do marketing. That's actually the hard part. If you're trying to build something that you're trying to sell. Then I was like, “Oh, I need to learn how to do marketing.”

During the process of doing this, I was exposed to SEO. Like I said, from the Closet Tools origin story, I didn't really know a lot about SEO at that point. So, I was like, “Oh I'm already doing this. I'm going to go down the SEO route I took a course from ViperChill on Twitter. His course helped me tremendously.

That's the pattern that I followed was I learned something and then I executed on it. I learned something about taking the course, executed on it, did it for free for other people, and then by the time I got to the point where I was like, dangerous enough, I learned that “Oh, there's more pieces to this puzzle.”

So, then I would go learn the next thing. And then I would get to the point where I was dangerous enough. And I was like, “Oh, wait a minute. I need to know how to like, actually launch a product.” And I actually did that. I launched a physical product and Kickstarter, which wasn't successful. I went through those different phases and then it, got, by the time I got to Closet Tools, I had all these skills.

I just put them all together and it was, not really that big of a task, it just came naturally. But I think the core driver was, I think I had a big chip on my shoulder, like you said, that the huge student loans, I got kids and I want them to have a really good life.

Now having gone over that hurdle and, like we said at the beginning and making 38 K a month, that chip is largely gone, so I definitely don't have that massive drive anymore. The the level that I work at today is much less than that at that beginning. So yeah, I think that was a huge driver, for sure.

Courtland Allen: 18m 1s

Say you had to do this all over again, but with the benefit of hindsight, you know, okay, this was helpful to do, this wasn't helpful to do because a lot of people are trying to pick up all these skills. And they don't necessarily have the patience to go through it for three years. What would it be like your recommended path to pick up kind of the stack of skills you need to be a successful indie hacker?

Jordan O'Connor: 18m 20s

I think the course route is underrated. I think a lot of people don't have the confidence to bet on themselves to be able to capitalize on what would be the cost of a course. Like the SEO course I took. It was a stupid decision, but I maxed out a credit card on it. I put $2,500 down on a credit card and paid for it.

At the time I was hiding in shame. What did you just do? Now I'm to the point where I've made a hundred X on that investment. I think the course route is definitely a shortcut.

I think the other thing is taking action and actually practicing the skills, doing the skills for free for people helps you figure out what you'd like to do and what you don't like to do, or like what works for you and what doesn't work for you because learning what doesn't work for you is actually just, almost more important than what you'd like to do. Cause when I first started out, like I knew I wanted to make apps, so I know I knew I wanted to learn how to code.

That was easy. But then when I started making websites for people as a service, then some of the nuances came in where people are like, “Oh, I don't the way you designed it this way. I want this.” In the back of my mind. I'm like, “Well, I know what I'm doing. You don't. This is the way I want to do it.”

You laugh, but I did that like three times where even with SEO, it was like, here you go. I want to do SEO this way. And they're like, “No, let's do it like this.” And I'm like, “You have no idea what you're doing. I know what I'm doing.” I had to go down that road a few times before I was like, “Oh, I need to do a product where I make it and if you want to buy it, you can buy it. But if you don't want to buy it, then you don't have to buy it and I can make it exactly how I want it.” So, I had to go through that experience a few times before I really learned what, what was going to actually work for me.

There's plenty of people that a product doesn't work and the service works really well. They just love working with people. They just want to do what they want. That’s just not me. Yeah. I think that action of going out and doing the work for people can help you figure that out. I think people don't try things because they don't know if they're going to like it or not like it when really the opposite is what you should do.

You should try it. Even if you hate it, even if it's the worst thing you should at least commit to it and do it. And that's going to help you figure out the path that you actually should take.

Courtland Allen: 20m 35s

I had a stint in college where I was doing a lot of web design for people just “Hey, you need a website built. Okay, I'm going to make it for you.” I had the exact same frustration where I got really good at it. I would make really good-looking websites for people after a while and the people who had no design sense whatsoever would start making all these suggestions about how to change it and just make it ugly. I literally don't want to put this on my portfolio because it's embarrassing and it's not fun.

It's a whole class of activities or skills where people like don't know that they don't know what they're doing. If you ask somebody to fly a fighter jet, like a hundred percent of people will be like, I don't know what I'm doing and I would crash. Or if you have somebody, there's complex math equations, like a hundred percent of people who don't know it would be like, I don't, I'm not good at math, but when it comes to design, for some reason, everybody thinks they’re an expert product designer and that they have the best taste in the world. And it's no, if you haven't practiced this, your design taste is garbage. So, I understand your frustration.

You also mentioned the course route being the way to go. This also arouses some strong feelings in me where I think there's a post on Hacker News if you had, it was called recently, but it's indicative of almost like a wider belief that people have that teaching other people is somehow a disreputable thing to do. That it's this huge circular sort of thing. Or if you're teaching somebody what to do, instead of doing it yourself, like you must be a shyster et cetera. It's a scam almost for anyone to buy any sort of courses online and that everybody is some sort of core selling guru and no one's building real products, but it's so dumb because it's like, there's a reason why people were willing to pay $2,500 for a course.

There's a reason why people are willing to pay $40,000 to go to college. I don't think that trade-off is usually worth it, but it's because people are actually envisioning how these things, like how this knowledge can improve their lives. In other words, how these things are valuable, which we talked about at the top of the show and for you, you're a textbook case of why it worked.

You took this course on SEO and then you learn skills that made you a lot of money many, many times over. I think for both sides of the equation, should you pay for courses? Absolutely. If you think that like you're going to use this course and like it's actually valuable and you know how you're gonna make money as a result of it. Absolutely.

Should you sell courses or do other sorts of businesses that are educational? Indie Hackers is not a course business, but, and in effect it's the same value to people. The whole point of the website is to educate and inspire people. Maybe not through a traditional course, but through interviews and podcasts and a forum. If you can help people and be on that side of the equation, I think it's super valuable.

So, I like that your recommendation for how to go is just buy courses. Really smart people have put out information and they've explicitly tailored it to teach you how to pick up skills, the easy way, rather than spending like four or five years of your own learning them. If you can just buy that and skip ahead four or five years, why not do that?

Jordan O'Connor: 23m 10s

Yep, exactly. I think one caveat I would say is another thing that the action and work does for you is it leads you to what courses you actually should take. Some people might go out there and just start buying up a bunch of courses. “Hey, I'm going to learn all of this stuff”, but unless you actually take action on it, like I said, you don't know what you like to do, what you don't like to do, but also like you don't have any problems to solve with that thing.

So, like, when I got to the SEO part, I had already learned web design and you know how to make websites, but now I don't know how to market this thing. I've got to figure out how to market as this thing. So, then I learned SEO. So, I do think the action piece is just so crucial to learning new skills.

Courtland Allen: 23m 47s

It's almost like learning to code. I think a lot of people try to learn to code in a vacuum where they're just like, “I just want to abstractly learn to code.” There’s a million different languages and frameworks and how do you know what parts of coding to learn if you’re not trying to build something?

Whereas people who were are pulled along, they have a very specific vision, they want to build this website or this landing page and they're only trying to learn how to code to do that one specific thing. Yeah. They have all this hacky crappy code at the beginning, but they ended up learning the right things, because they're just looking up, “Oh, I need to put a form. How do I put a form on here? Oh, need to be able to submit, like, how do I do that? Oh, it needs a database, et cetera.”

That's the best possible starting place, because not only are you gonna learn the specific things that you need, but you're also going to be motivated to keep going because you actually have some goal in mind for something you're trying to finish.

Jordan O'Connor: 24m 31s

Yep and you also figure out what doesn't work because you try it and it doesn't work.

Courtland Allen: 24m 36s

Exactly. Anyway, you get to this point where you've built up all these skills, you're taking the courses, your wife is selling a lot of clothes on Poshmark to help pay the bills and you realize this is something that you can help with.

Going back to this theme, you figured out a problem that somebody had, you figured out how you could be helpful and provide value to them, and you did it. What you got in return was basically a bunch of email addresses where you ask people,” Hey, if you put your email address in here, I'll give you this tool. But like first you got to give me your email address.”

What did you end up doing with all those emails?

Jordan O'Connor: 25m 6s

Not much, actually. I just threw them on an email list, I think it was, I don't know what list that was using. I use one called Button Down right now. I just emailed them, Ithink it was over the course of four weeks. I may have emailed them like two or three times. The first one was like, “Hey, give me feedback.”

The next one was, “Here's all the feedback you guys gave and this is the plan.” The last email was like, “Hey, I implemented it. You can buy it here.” From there, I've kept that email list and that email list has actually only been people that have signed up for the app.

I don't have any, content-based sign up here for updates kind of thing. It's purely just people that have tried the app or at least installed it and made an account. From there the first couple of months, I'd still did use that Poshmark subreddit for another month or two, I would launch a new feature and I would put it on there and be like, “Hey, you can automatically do this now, go check it out.” But then the Poshmarkers of Reddit started not liking me cause I was just doing a bunch of self-promotion so they kicked me out so I couldn't use that anymore. Luckily, the need was pretty drastic and it's a very cliquey tight knit group and there was a lot of word of mouth. I didn't need a huge list to start getting that traction and people telling other people about it because it provided good value.

Courtland Allen: 26m 21s

When I think about business, I think of it is having four crucial parts and the order that you look at those parts matters a lot. So, most people want to start with the solution, whatever product or service or building. But what you really want to start with is the problem, which is, who has this problem? What is the problem? How valuable is it to them? What are they doing to solve it today? Do they care enough to pay for it, et cetera, et cetera? And after that, you've got like the distribution channel, how do they find you?

In your case that was like Reddit and SEO and word of mouth. But if you look at the problem kind of space here, which is these people are trying to sell clothes on Poshmark and they need tools to help them. I think that's crucial to understanding why your business worked. So why don't we talk about Poshmark for a minute, which is a very cool business.

I didn't know anything about it until very recently. Crunchbase describes it as the largest social marketplace for fashion where anybody can buy, sell, and share their style with others. So, what does that mean to share your style? Is that just like a fancy way of saying clothes?

Jordan O'Connor: 27m 13s

Yep. Yeah, a hundred percent.

I think they've done the best they can to make the platform a lot like social media. It's also, it's very picture oriented, so you can almost compare it to like Instagram and similar to Instagram, your closet tends to have some sort of vibe or style of fashion, and so that, that's what they push basically.

Courtland Allen: 27m 31s

So you're basically taking photos of clothes in your closet, or maybe you are wearing your clothes. And these are used clothes and you sell them to other people who are trying to get a discount on clothes. Cause maybe they don't wanna pay like three, $400 for these designer shoes if they can get them for like a hundred bucks from somebody else on Poshmark.

Jordan O'Connor: 27m 47s

Exactly. And that's what it primarily started out as, and they've expanded to boutiques where they're actually selling new clothes, but it's not designer brand name prices, and they also expanded to wholesale as well. You can actually sign up for Poshmark wholesale and buy from Poshmark and then sell for a little bit more, but yeah.

Yeah. So that's it. The way they built the platform is really unique, too. Basically, just like social media, you follow other closets and you have this main feed just like you would have on Twitter or Instagram and if you're a seller, if you don't share your items, the items don't show up in your followers feeds.

Poshmark has designed this engagement model where it keeps people on the platform. People have to come back to see their feed updates, to see if there's any new items or something like that. And the sellers have to stay on the platform to share their items and interact with buyers and stuff like that.

Another thing they do is they have parties. So, there's actually real time parties where rather than sharing to your followers, you share to this party and there's a party feed. Everybody's in there, checking out what people are selling and obviously the sellers are sharing to it. They're trying to get their items seen.

So, they do all of these little things to get people in the app real time. That’s the reason why there's this arbitrage where you can cut that time out for people. I can automate certain things that allows them to make it seem like they're engaging with the platform, but they're actually not, they're doing something else. The computer's engaging with the platform.

That's why the tool is very unique to Poshmark. I don't think this works on eBay or something like that, where it's not like that. Even though it's a similar thing where you're selling products on a website, so that, that piece is what makes it unique for Poshmark.

I think Closet Tools could easily be reproduced as some sort of engagement tool for other social media platforms, like a Twitter bot or something that, get going through and liking items and stuff like that. You're liking, posting something, that type of thing. That's definitely more what it's like.

Courtland Allen: 29m 48s

Poshmark is doing the thing that pretty much every major social network does, which is it pulls out every bag, every trick in its bag of tricks to try to ramp up engagement, get people on the platform as long as possible, which is annoying to you as a seller because you're really just trying to start your clothes. You just want to put your clothes up and then go do other things. But now you've got to come back and do all the sharing and join a party or whatever it is you described. That just sucks. That's a lot of time. So, what Closet Tools does is it's a browser extension and you install it and it basically does all this sharing for you?

Jordan O'Connor: 30m 20s

Yeah. Initially, and still largely, it started out as literally just clicking elements on the page. So, there's a certain order that you have to click items to share them. There's like a share button and then you have to share it to your followers or share to a party kind of thing. So, there's two clicks per item. There's sellers that have 1,000 to 2,000 items and it would take them a half hour to an hour to just go through once and share all of their items once to their feed. That’s literally what Closet Tools did. The very first iteration was just grab all of the items put them in an array and go through it and click the elements one, two, one, two, and then, that's what it did. And it worked, it helped them a lot.

Poshmark has some limitations in place that make it so that you can't abuse the platform. There's certain share numbers that if you cross over them, then you're at risk of getting your closet shut down and stuff like that, because you're basically just spamming things.

So, that's something to keep in mind. That's a lot of what I have to do as a developer is educating my users like, “Hey, this is how you use this tool. You can't just go ham with it”, but it does really well for them. It makes, if there's certain people, like I said, those people with 1,000, 2,000 items on the platform, they're making thousands a month on Poshmark. Tt's a full-time income for them and the tool helps them make even way more than that, which is just a huge value for them. So, not only is it saving them time, but it's making them more money. That's part of the reason why it's been so sticky for a lot of customers because they just can't imagine living without it.

Courtland Allen: 31m 48s

There are very few sort of problems you can start a business to solve that are more lucrative than the problem with people want to make more money and something is holding them back. And if you can get in there and figure out how to make them more money, you are in a great situation because you can take usually some fractional percentage of that.

I dunno what you charge for Closet Tools, but if somebody is making, five, 10, 20 K a month on Poshmark, which I assume some people are doing, and you can charge them like a hundred bucks or something like that's nothing, that's a drop in the bucket. They won't even notice that.

Jordan O'Connor: 32m 16s

Yeah, I charge 30 bucks a month.

I've actually never changed the price. I charged 30 bucks a month from the beginning and now it's a huge deal. Back then I didn't really know the value it was providing. So, I went based on the time thing, like a dollar a day type stuff. But now, yeah, you're right.

I could charge hundreds of dollars. There’s one of my customers I know makes 50 K a month selling high-end purses on Poshmark but he uses my little $30 a month app. That's all he has to do, so yeah. It's kinda nuts.

Courtland Allen: 32m 48s

I've seen so many tweets and blog posts from people who buy and flip companies and the number one thing I see across all these things is, “Yeah, I bought a company from this guy and I just tripled the prices in the first week. Now we're making three times as a bunch of money.”

Jordan O'Connor: 33m 1s

Yeah. You could easily do that with my business and I don't know, the thing for me is I like the number it’s at now, and I think what I will do coming up probably in the next half year or so is I'll introduce some more seamless automation. The way it's built now, it has pieces of automation where it does one task at one time kind of thing, but I can almost build out some sort of like scripting type automation where it's like, hey, do this thing and then do this thing. Then if this happens, do this stuff. So, it's more of an intelligent observing app that can respond to different events. I'll probably charge more for that.

Courtland Allen: 33m 39s

What I love about this in general is you have a customer who's making 50 grand a month. There's gotta be like hundreds, thousands of other people out there who are doing something similar, just making a ton of money off Poshmark.

Whenever you have people who are that motivated, there's probably forums all over the internet and Facebook groups where people are sharing tips and tricks with each other about like, how do you make more money on Poshmark? How do you take a photo of your clothes from the perfect angle?

All sorts of little things that people are trying to do to get ahead. I think there's this trend that some people may or may not be aware of called like the creator economy, where you just have these platforms like Poshmark, like YouTube, like Substack, where they are creating just an easier way for people to be Indie Hackers that having to build anything.

You can create a YouTube account. You don't have to build some sort of video hosting platform. You just make videos and you can make money off ads. Or you can have a closet full of clothes and you don't have to build some sort of clothes buying application. You can just join Poshmark and do that.

I think the opportunity here for other Indie Hackers who can build stuff is these platforms are usually never really like that great on their own. They're always missing tools. They're always missing, the little ancillary features that you can come in as an indie hacker and build. And if you don't know what to build, you can just go to these forums or the people on these platforms who are trying to share tips and tricks and they're complaining about problems and why they can't make more money.

Just go look at what they're saying. And they're probably, at some point before your app, Closet Tools, was a or like a Facebook group with a bunch of people complaining about how long it takes them to share their stuff on Poshmark and how to share faster, et cetera. And if someone had found that, maybe they would have come to the same idea that you ran into when your wife complained that it was taking her too long to share all this stuff.

Jordan O'Connor: 35m 13s

Yeah. It's interesting. To take a couple steps back, so bots and automation is actually technically not allowed on Poshmark.

That brings up a couple interesting things about the way the tool came about. In the community guidelines for Poshmark. It says if you use automation, if you're caught using automation, then Pathmark, technically can terminate your account. It's mostly a scare tactic. I think if you were to formally ask Poshmark, they would say, yeah, you can't use bots, but they also aren't going to do anything about it because it's giving them a ton more revenue because people are making more sales. So, that kind of thing exists. I've had a lot of, I would say several, acquisition requests of Closet Tools. They are like, “Hey, this is cool. You're making a ton of money.” And then I tell them that and they're like, “Oh, we're not going to get on the bad side of Poshmark. See you later.” So, there's that thing. That's almost unsellable.

But the other thing, is to the SEO point, SEO as a marketing tactic is so powerful because these people aren't in forums talking about how they can't spend all day sharing because there's a taboo against it where people are like, “Hey, if you use automation, you're cheating. You're not the tried-and-true Poshmark seller.”

So, it's actually the opposite: people aren't talking about it, but they're searching for it. You're getting these people that are in incognito mode, I need a Poshmark bot kind of thing. That's why SEO has been so invaluable to the tool, because it's not a, from a social perspective, it's not something that people are talking about, but they're very interested in and they're going to search it and they're going to find something at the top.

And I actually talked about that a lot and we can talk about competitors and stuff like that, but that's primarily what they do, too, because I say it works.

Courtland Allen: 36m 53s

Yeah, let's talk about competitors actually, because my model for this would be: Let's say you want to take this principle. You want to go to some sort of marketplace where lots of people are making money. They've got problems that are valuable to probably pay for stuff and you want to solve their problems. If you go to something like Shopify, well, Shopify has like a very explicit marketplace and there's a ton of competition there.

Everybody's competing to fill up every single little niche in the Shopify app store. It doesn't mean there's not room, but it doesn't mean there's a lot of competition because it's just so easy and so obvious that you can build some sort of supporting tools for Shopify.

Whereas, if you go to something like Poshmark where not only is there no Poshmark app store, but it's explicitly banned, you're not allowed to build things on top of the Poshmark API or scrape their website.

Jordan O'Connor: 37m 35s

There is no API.

Courtland Allen: 37m 36s

There is no API. Great. So, it’s hard as possible for somebody to compete with you and to serve the Poshmark audience. Yeah. That seems like the perfect place to, if you're willing to stomach that platform risk, where they could just shut you down, to make something that other people haven't made. So, what are, what else are you seeing in the Poshmark space?

Do you have a lot of competitors? Are people building other sorts of tools?

Jordan O'Connor: 37m 55s

I definitely have other people building the same thing that I'm building. They're mostly just following what I'm doing. So yeah, there's a lot of clones and, actually I've had people steal my code and that was before I did any scrubbing or obfuscating and stuff like that.

But, I think, like you said, there's room in the market. I think there's 20 million daily active sellers on Poshmark and I have 1,500 customers. There's plenty of room in the market for people that want to make some extra money on Poshmark.

So that's part of the reason why I'm not even like remotely concerned about it. There's some other arbitrage. Arbitrages, I guess would be the word, on the platform where a lot of these people consider themselves resellers. So, if the customer that I'm serving is a reseller where they're basically finding items, finding clothing items for cheap and they're flipping them for more. These resellers don't just sell on Poshmark. They sell on eBay; they sell on an app called Mercari. They sell on Facebook marketplace. They sell on all these different platforms.

There's been a really large rise in automated reselling apps that actually automatically list your items across multiple different platforms. It keeps track of like where it's sold and you can update the price and it updates all of them. That's actually been a very legitimate tech solution to that problem so that the sellers can get maximum exposure for their things that they’re trying to sell.

Courtland Allen: 39m 16s

If you want to figure out a business idea, just go to places where money is changing hands.

If you're not sure what people think is valuable, look at what they're already paying a lot of money to do. Look where people are making a lot of money and just hang around, look at some of the apps and some of the problems people have. I think that's usually a good way to not only figure out a good business idea that people will probably pay money for, but also figure out distribution channels.

Because whenever you find people sharing this information, that's usually a good distribution channel. For me with Indie Hackers, that was Hacker News. People were sharing all this information by the thousands in this one place. That's where I'm going to distribute my product. And for you, and maybe it was a little bit less obvious because you had to go with SEO and there was no real easy way for you to just guess that people were searching for bots on Poshmark.

But when your wife told you that, that was a good lead in for you to say, okay people are making money here and she has this problem, potentially this is a problem that other people have too.

Jordan O'Connor: 40m 7s

Yeah. I think from the beginning, we go back to the beginning where it was like, I was just trying to be helpful.

I didn't know there was really any money in it. My entire intention was to make a couple of hundred extra bucks a month. That was it. If I did that, I was riding off into the sunset. I was like, this is the coolest thing. So, I tell people, getting to a thousand MRR was a complete accident, but getting to 38 K MRR was definitely on purpose. I think once I got past the point where I was like, “Oh, this is actually bigger than I thought it was going to be.” That's when I took it more seriously and actually doubled down on it.

Courtland Allen: 40m 38s

So what are some of them were like impactful, purposeful decisions you can take to grow from, $1K MRR to close to $40 where you're at now?

Jordan O'Connor: 40m 45s

Largely most of the work I've done is education, documentation. Not necessarily marketing, but just being helpful to the right people, the people that actually matter to your customers. I think that has such more, a lot more of an impact on people than your product alone.

Somebody just installs my app today; they probably don't know how to use it. They don't know the best way to use it. They don't know how to actually track, directly impact their sales using the tool. So, they can flounder a bit and they might not actually stick around because they don't know how it works and they don't know how to, do anything with it.

So, a lot of the work I've done is writing documentation, making videos, showing people how to maximize it. And a lot of that has doubled as a SEO content where it's like, “Hey, this is the best way to use a bot for Poshmark.” It happens to do well on SEO. I think that kind of combination of education and content combined helps double as marketing and as a churn reducer, because people actually know how to use the app. They actually are making money using the app. And that helps the whole thing just trend upwards, basically.

Courtland Allen: 41m 56s

Yeah. I love that point that just because you put something out there and just because it's helpful doesn't mean that everybody's going to figure out how helpful it is and know exactly how to use it.

There are people of different competency levels. There's this whole idea of the early adopters, these are the most savvy people where you could give them a stapler and a paperweight and they’ll figure out how to get out of any situation using that.

You give them a tool like closet tools and they're going to figure how to crush it. But most people like want to spend that much time. Most people aren't going to think of every possible use case for your product. And so, if you can really educate people, what I found works really well is sharing success stories tend to be very motivational.

So, if you can say okay here's how much money someone's making on Poshmark, money talks, people see that and they're like, “Oh man, like I want to make that much money on Poshmark. How are they doing it?” If the answer is your tool, closet tools, then people are gonna be like, “Oh shit. Maybe I should be on this Closet Tools thing” and then if you're gonna have success stories of people who really using that, that works well. But also, just like you said, documentation guides, et cetera, customers support all super helpful.

How are you doing all this? Given that you've got a family and given that you had, a full-time job when you first started and given that you had a bunch of loans and debt and other worries of life, how do you structure and prioritize your life since you can be productive as a solo founder without any employees?

Jordan O'Connor: 43m 11s

Yeah. I think it's really interesting. I don't know. I really think I did it on purpose. I kind of did and I kind of didn't. I didn't really know why I was doing what I was doing, but I did it. So, basically when I first started, you go back all the way to the beginning, you're talking like five years ago, I started getting up earlier.

I knew that I had kids, or I had a kid coming and I knew that I did not want to spend my evenings working. I had a wife; I had a kid coming. I was like, I don't want to be away from my family. I'm a family-oriented guy and I'm like, I want to be able to get deep, concentrated work done and not spend time away from my family. And it turns out the only time that happens is between 4:00 and 7:00 AM when everybody else is sleeping and they weren't going to be awake anyways. So, you're not taking time away from them, but it also works really well as just a productive time, because nobody else is awake and distracting you.

So that's what I did. It was mostly like 5:00 to 7:00 AM. For just about every day for about three years, I was up working on something. I was learning, taking a course. I was practicing. I was helping somebody. And then when it came to Closet Tools, once that app launched, then I just transitioned all of my efforts into that.

I was spending one or two hours a day in deep work executing on the app. I was doing support emails. A huge reason why I've been able to do a lot of it is mostly because of automation. I use automation as a broad term, going back to what we just talked about, where it's you have content that works for you, you have education tools that work for you.

When I start getting a repetitive question of Hey, how do I use this or whatever, if I didn't make a piece of content that answered that question, I would be writing out every email one by one saying “Oh, it works like this. And if you do this happens, yada yada.” Whereas if I make that piece of content, instead of me having to write out all that in emails, honestly, people just find it.

I don't even have to get the email in the first place. So that takes away a lot of the time burden of having to help customers, because you already are helping them. They found the help they needed and they didn't even have to bother you. That's always been this core philosophy for me is if I'm getting a bunch of email supports for it, I need to automate that thing.

Very early on, it's just something so little, but I didn't have a password recovery for the tool. I started getting emails from people like, “Hey, I made an account, but I don't know what my password is.” I would have to go into my Firebase back-end then I have to send them a password reset email, and sometimes they wouldn't get it, yada, yada.

As I started getting those emails I was like, you know what, I'm going to build this. So, I took a couple of days and I built it out and I haven't had a single email since about password resets because I made it obvious in the tool. If you need to reset your password, this is what you do.

That kind of just underlying automation principle, I think, has helped make the app itself sustainable for one person to handle it. I think that also helps restrict what I do because I don't spend my time necessarily selling every day. I'm not like out on social media trying to engage with people and get them to sign up for my app and stuff like that.

I have this very deliberate process of ranking for SEO. The SEO is working for me in the background. I've got this content working for me, the education working for me. Just automating all of those different things makes it so that at the end of the day, the only manual tasks that I have to do is support emails and stuff like that.

It ends up being not very many support emails cause I've already automated most of the things that people ask for. That is something that I did on accident. I think it's more core to my personality, rather than it being like a deliberate decision. I'm mostly just really lazy and I don't want to be doing things.

I don't want to be doing things over and over again. So, I had to automate those things so that I didn't do that. It ended up being this really blissful “Oh, now I don't have any work that I have to do.” And so, any work that I actually do is actually just additives, at the beginning of podcast, I talked about how the business doubled over the summer, all of that work I did before that was just additive.

Nobody asked for it. Nobody was beating down the door for me to do it, but I added a ton more value to the app and people talked about it cause it was really cool. And that has worked really well, I think.

Courtland Allen: 47m 24s

What are you doing with all this free time now that you've got? Everything's pretty much automated. The app's growing without you spending much time on it. We talked last week and you were just hanging up Christmas lights in the middle of the day and just chilling. You seem pretty relaxed. What now, what comes after this phase of being in an Indie Hacker and getting a business to the point where it's earned you your freedom, you quit your job and you’re kinda just on your own.

Jordan O'Connor: 47m 44s

Yeah. I think that is a huge part is, like I said, I'm a family guy and I've got three kids now and we actually plan on having a few more. I think, while the kids are young, I think it's so crucial to be a huge part of their lives, to be able to train them up to be productive and be educated members of society. And, I don't think I have to be there for their entire 18 years necessarily every day interacting with them. But very early on, I think it's almost a night and day difference. Just being able to be there with the kids and, help them grow and help them learn and give them the context for how to behave in life.

So that, that is a lot of what I'm doing. And so, the way I've structured my days now is my block of time to work is basically 6:00 AM to noon. Most days I've been getting up on time and I'm actually working, three, four hours during that time, I'm doing some reading and sometimes some exercise, but if I don't get up early, I still had that block so I'm still done by noon. If I got up at nine, I'm still done by noon. And so that kind of helps structure our day where the kids understand that okay, like noon Dad's available we're gonna go play or we're going to do some activity or something like that.

So, I structure my day around making sure that happens. The work is actually almost secondary. I've had to actually drum up a lot more discipline just to be able to continue to get up early and actually provide more value for people. Because like I said earlier, like I don't really have that huge chip on my shoulder anymore where it's you're poor and you have a lot of student loans.

Now it's your finances are great and you're not poor anymore. So, really, there's just me focusing on the family and stuff like that. I think the point you're alluding I came up with this idea that I call the deep year and I think people think that's more impressive than it actually is.

But basically, it's just me of toying around with the idea of going deep on a brand-new topic. For a whole year and just learning all I can about it and going back to what I did five years ago, where I was learning a new skill except taking it a couple steps further where, I'm not just learning enough to be dangerous with it.

I'm actually learning enough to make a profit off of it. I'm learning enough to not only use the tools or the skills that I learned to then make money for myself, but I can also make money educating people on how to do the same thing for themselves. That’s something I've been toying around with recently as more of a long-term approach to my Indie Hacking journey. I say long-term because for me, because for me Closet Tools has always been a short-term thing, I don't think I'm going to be doing this 30 years from now. So, I've in the back of my mind, I've always been thinking, “What am I going to do long-term? What are the skills I'm going to learn for a long-term approach to income and your legacy and the value you provide for other people?”

So, the deep year makes that a little bit of a reality because I constricted to a year where it's like, “Hey, if this works in a year, great, I'm going to keep going with it because it's a long-term thing. But if it doesn't work in a year, okay, next year I can try something else.” And I have a couple of years to try a few things and figure out what I really want to be doing long-term.

Courtland Allen: 50m 47s

Yeah. I love hearing about the results of Closet Tools cause it's basically everybody whose life it touched got better. So, it's better for your kids because they get to spend more time with you. They’re going to have better lives. It might be better life outcomes because you did this. It's better for you cause you could spend more time with your family and your friends and doing hobbies and just chilling.

It's good for your customers because now they're making more money on Poshmark than they would if your app didn't exist. It's better for literally every, it's like a win-win situation where you've just created this thing in the world where it's just like positive value. If there's anything I would want people to get out of this it's people who are skeptical of businesses, people who are super skeptical of capitalism, it's like you can make something usually technology that just improves literally everybody's life and nobody is worse off for it. Your story is as a perfect example of that.

I think the sort of way that you're going down, you have this extra freedom to do this sort of deep year you call it. You tweeted about it. You said I'm obsessed with this idea. I'm going to pick a niche that I'm interested in. I'm going to write and study daily about this topic, write a hundred articles in a year, get some SEO, traffic, build an email list and then ask these people what they want and build it for them and then sell digital or physical products.

That's super inspirational. That sounds like a really fun way to spend your life. You just get to learn about something that you're interested in and then also repeat this process of doing something that just makes the world a better place. I'm super excited about it cause I just think that there are a lot of people like you, not all of them are in the Indie Hackers product directory, not all of them are super public and only talk about the revenue numbers, but there are a lot of people like you who are figuring out how to build these businesses as just solo individuals and who are going to keep doing it and keep making the world better.

The more people who do this, the more people who can do it, because you end up sharing your stories and your knowledge, and also building helpful tools for everybody. So, it's this ever-accelerating self-sustaining cycle where, hopefully 10 years from now, the number one thing anybody wants to do with their life is to be an Indie Hacker because it's just so cool and so valuable at the same time to do.

Jordan O'Connor: 52m 39s

Yeah. I love just hearing that from you. You're right. It is just a win for everyone. I think that's such an attractive place to be. I think if there was any aspect of it that it was not a win, then it would not feel nearly as good. It wouldn't perform nearly as well, but you think you're right.

Any good foundational business operates like that. It's just a win for everyone. I think that any business that doesn't operate like that isn't a long-term thing, is going to be disrupted by something that is a win for everyone. I think that's such a good long-term framework of just providing value for others.

When all of the wins are up, that's a great value for everyone, and that comes back to the first thing we were talking about where you don't have to think about yourself because as long as you're providing a win for everyone, you're going to get what you deserve. You're going to get what you, the value you provide for other people, or at least a fraction of it.

That’s why there's such a huge emphasis on just being valuable to other people for sure.

Courtland Allen: 53m 35s

It's so unnatural to a degree because we mostly go around our days thinking about ourselves, we're like, “I'm hungry, and someone said this mean thing to me, how am I going to get back at them? Or I'm cold, I'm tired.” We just think about I, I, me, me.

But to be a business owner, you really have to deliberately step outside of your shoes and in other people's shoes and think about, “Okay, what about them? What do they want?” That's just not a normal exercise that most people go through life doing because usually there's just there's no point to doing that. I like that starting businesses is forcing people to be a little bit more selfless. I think it's a skill you have to practice.

I'm curious how you're doing it with your deep year. How do you decide what you're going to go deep on? How do you decide, what's worth learning about, and what's your framework for doing that? Because I'm sure a lot of people listening probably also want to do the same thing, start a business that's actually going to work because it's doing something valuable to people that they're willing to pay for it.

Jordan O'Connor: 54m 23s

Yeah. I mean like this first year I kinda decided on algorithmic trading as my deep year project. Algorithmic trading is something that people have figured out and it is also tends to be more of a solo venture. It's not a huge company that is doing this.

It's some guys that try out some code and it works and they make a bunch of money type of thing. But I think the way that I learn it in public, the way that I'm doing things is I'm studying this topic, I'm writing about it. I'm helping educate other people about it.

I'm publishing my findings. I’m publishing the wins, the losses, the things that I figure out and that kind of just congregation of just value ends up being pretty big. That's how I can make an impact on other people is just helping them understand how this whole thing works from first principles, not relying on other people's attitudes towards it.

I just want to figure it out for myself. Just a side point, when I posted on Twitter “Hey, I'm going to do algorithmic trading”. Everybody's like, “Oh, here's all the resources you need to look at. And here's all the people you need to follow.”

I followed absolutely zero of them and I looked at absolutely zero of those resources because I don't want to frame my opinions and my learnings off of what other people do. I want to figure it out for myself. That's the point of the deep year and that's the point of learning skills to begin with because if you're just doing what other people do, you're not actually figuring out why they did that. That's something, like I said, it's just a side point.

I think the whole point of it is to do it all in public and help other people do the same thing. And then when it gets to the point, if it's a year from now, I've written a bunch of SEO, it goes, it's getting some traffic and I've got this email list and I can ask them like, “Hey do you want a book? Do you want a course on like how it did this? Do you want just access to the algorithms that I've developed? Do you want me to make a hedge fund where this thing makes a hundred percent return on investment every year and you just want to pump money into it.?” That thing then becomes a helpful product that they can pay for but the returns on that payment for their product gives them exponential value. And so that's a way that I can take a cut of the value and actually provide huge value for other people.

Courtland Allen: 56m 35s

I love it. Especially the idea that you're going to start from scratch and you’re going to learn everything there is to know about this new field, because a lot of people underestimate learning.

People don't understand how far you can go on something you have zero experience with if you're just a dedicated student of the craft. You're not going to be just learning on nights and weekends an hour a day or something like that. You have pretty much all day every day to expect to spend on this because you've earned your freedom with Closet Tools.

Now you can go do this algorithmic trading stuff. And maybe you'll learn enough to know you don't want to do it, or maybe you'll learn a ton and you'd be able to like help a lot of other people learn what you know, and maybe find a really cool product to build as a result of it. I'm excited to see what you end up doing this year.

I'm excited to see what your future projects are going to be in. I think your whole story as a whole is just really inspirational. To close out here, what's your parting advice for aspiring Indie Hackers who are thinking about getting started? Maybe they have an idea, maybe they don't. What do you think should take away from your story and your learnings?

Jordan O'Connor: 57m 28s

I think there's just so much value in getting your time right and learning valuable skills. I think the fact that I have the skills that I have, like I said, web development, SEO, copywriting, all of these different things. I can take those to any venture that I want to do at any time in the future.

If you actually take the time to learn those skills deeply and actually do them valuably, you're going to have a prosperous future. There's no way you can't. I think it’s super critical to get your time, and just stop wasting a bunch of your time so that you can get a little bit of time to actually just learn new skills.

Even if you have a full-time job, even if you have kids, figure out how to get that hour, two, three a day, to be able to execute and learn new skills. And then once you've developed the skills, then you have time to execute on them and actually make an income from it. I think that's totally underestimated and I would advise that to anyone.

Courtland Allen: 58m 24s

And I think it's one of the most overlooked advantages to starting a company, which is that you have to learn a ton of new skills. Even if your companies fail, even if you spent years making stuff that doesn't work and you come out the other side, you're going to have way more skills than you probably would've had if you just worked a full-time job that whole time.

I got so much better at developing, designing servers, marketing, like literally everything in five or six years of me running businesses that didn't go anywhere. I think a lot of people are afraid to invest the time, but realize that you're not just trying to succeed, but also along the way you're networking, you're meeting people, you're learning stuff. You're getting better at different things that can help you in the future. All right, Jordan. This was fun. Thanks a ton for coming on the show.

Jordan O'Connor: 59m 3s

Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me.

Courtland Allen: 59m 4s

You can let us know where we can go to learn more about what you're up to online?

Jordan O'Connor: 59m 8s

Yeah, I'd say mostly just follow me on Twitter. It's @jdnoc. That's where I post most of my stuff. My personal blog is jdnoc.com. But yeah, Twitter is where most of the stuff's happening.

Courtland Allen: 59m 19s

All right. Thanks again, Jordan.

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