How an Indie Hacker Landed Enterprise Customers in Year One with Nadav Keyson of Riverside.fm

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 lot of money in the process. On this show, I sit down with these indie hackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of so the rest of us can do the same.

I'm here with Nadav Keyson, the founder of Riverside, a tool that allows you to record podcast episodes like we're doing right now. You just create a room, you send people the invite link and they join and you click record. That's pretty much it. At the end of it, you've got high-quality audio files and video files that are locally recorded for everybody. I love it. I've been using it for Indie Hackers for the last year. Nadav, welcome to the show.

Nadav Keyson: 49s

Thanks a lot.

Courtland Allen: 51s

A year ago, actually, I was just pulling up our chats. You were messaging me, pretty much every single day. Like, hey Courtland, when are you going to try Riverside? You know, I'm an indie hacker. I've been building this cool thing.

At the time, I think the way you described it was, it was a podcast recording tool. Wow. It's even longer than a year ago. October 2019, you said, Hi, Courtland, love your podcasts. I built a podcast recording tool where listeners can call in live and ask their questions to the host. Would you give it a try? And then I didn't respond to that first message, but you were relentless.

Nadav Keyson: 1m 20s

So the way, if I got all the way back, at the time when we were still experimenting, what were we really building, probably that's not even the right way, but I reached out to everyone who was inspiring me. Although actually, even if you think it’s cool, that doesn't mean anything. The market, at the end, depends whether it's going to work or not.

Courtland Allen: 1m 37s

Right. But you're super focused on trying to make me think it was cool. How much revenue are you doing back then, back in March 2020. Do you remember?

Nadav Keyson: 1m 44s

Probably we had one kind of paying customer who scammed us. We didn't have a payment system set up. We had just someone, we sent the invoice to that person, was an influencer on Instagram. She had like 500,000 followers. My girlfriend thought she could be interested in using our tool. We got her to use Riverside, but she never actually paid us.

We had her, and then we launched on Product Hunt, I think, around 14 March. Then we had potentially two paying customers but the payment system wasn't working well. We figured out the week later, so maybe we had a bit more, but we had two paying customers when we launched on Product Hunt.

That says a lot, even Product Hunt. It's cool for yourself. But it doesn't really, do much for certain products.

Courtland Allen: 2m 32s

I didn't know that, that you got scammed by your very first should have been paying customer.

Nadav Keyson: 2m 38s

She kept signing up for the free trial. We didn't really have a limitation at the point.

Courtland Allen: 2m 44s

How money are you making now, a year and 10 days later than your launch?

Nadav Keyson: 2m 49s

It doesn't really make sense for us to share our revenue numbers now. We raised money from Alexis Ohanian, a Series A round. So, definitely a lot more than two paying customers.

Courtland Allen: 2m 59s

Would it be okay if I say it's a lot? It's extreme.

Nadav Keyson: 3m 3s

I think it's a lot. It always depends on who you compared with. For me at this point, maybe it doesn't even feel that much, but that's me being spoiled. It's definitely something that would have never in my wildest dream I’ve imagined at the point where we’re at right now.

Courtland Allen: 3m 17s

Yeah, it's pretty crazy, cause I’ve talked to a lot of indie hackers who, they're working on stuff for years just to get to the point of ramen profitable or just to get to the point where they can survive. You guys, it’s you and your brother are the founders of Riverside, have just in a year, have blown that out of the water and gotten to the point where you're a pretty major company.

Your growth trajectory is insane. I know we haven't gotten into exactly how much money that is, but how would you say doing that has changed your life? Do you feel rich? Do you feel like you're eating caviar and stuff? What's somebody doing?

Nadav Keyson: 3m 52s

There's only one thing which I feel okay about doing, which is I order a lot of foods. Twice a day, I order food, which is ridiculous. But other than that, nothing really has changed.

It's also not the case. Right, okay, the company is making great money. But it's not like I'm personally having a huge salary or anything like that. In that sense, nothing has changed. Even more so, it's not like once you're there, you're not going to be like this is the end goal. The end goal hasn't been reached.

Courtland Allen: 4m 24s

Yeah. Yeah, I was talking to Sahil Lavingia from Gumroad and he's very public about his revenue numbers. They tweet out the revenue numbers all the time on Twitter. They have kind of a model where they help creators make money and then they take a cut.

I don't know exactly how much they're making, but it might be in the millions, I'm pretty sure, maybe even a month or something. It was just interesting to talk to him about it because Gumroad is making so much money, but he doesn't pay himself a huge salary and it's a valuable company, but for him to really see most of that, he would have to sell the company, which he's not really ready to do.

Nadav Keyson: 4m 52s

Yeah, I feel the same for you, right? Actually.

Courtland Allen: 4m 54s

Yeah, kind of the same for me. Well, Indie Hacker’s just never making anything like what you are you're making or what Gumroad is making. I think when I sold to Stripe, we were making like $7,000 a month and it was just me. But I think there's a misconception sometimes that if you have a really big company and you're doing however many millions or whatever in revenue, then you're probably just set for life.

The reality is, well, you're probably reinvesting in your company. You're paying for employees, you're paying for growth. You're paying for servers, you're paying to get bigger. You might just be living the same type of life that everybody else is living, kind of nervous that like, hey, it all might go to zero. It might not work out. You might not have some huge financial success despite the fact that your company itself had really great revenue numbers.

Nadav Keyson: 5m 35s

Initially when I started, I was even more optimistic than I'm now in a way, because now I have got a lot to lose. When I had nothing, I was just like, all right, let's get to $2,000 per month per person per founder.

So, me and my brother, if we have debt, holy shit, right then I can live off Riverside. Any paying customer would be amazing. Now I've got, of course, more paying customers. So, it's in a way, if you're less rich…

Courtland Allen: 6m 0s

Let's talk about how you got here because you and your brother had been working on stuff for a long time. You're both pretty young. I think you're 26.

Nadav Keyson: 6m 8s

26, yeah.

Courtland Allen: 6m 10s

And your brother is 22 and you guys have been working on projects for five years or something. He was a teenager and you're a 21-year-old. You guys were putting together some sort of debate platform. Walk me through how you guys got started being indie hackers.

Nadav Keyson: 6m 23s

Me and my brother were always building a lot of stuff. For example, we had this SAT course in high school where we didn't even do our own SATs. We hired teachers, stuff like that. That never really took off. The previous biggest project that we did together was the debating platform where politicians could debate with live video.

The idea there was we bring different-minded people together. Often it's just politicians and then people could watch these debates and interact with these politicians, ask the question directly to politicians. We got some pretty good politicians to debate on our platform, which that was my responsibility to get. So that's why, I've been relentless with you. I mastered that skill being relentless.

My brother basically built the whole tech around that whole debating platform. That was going quite well in a sense that we had some big politicians, but never really, let's say when we stopped that debating platform, no one ever asked us, hey, where is it?

So, there was kind of a wakeup call. Then we decided wouldn't it be cool to have a podcast situation where people can also call in during the podcast? So, a bit similar to Clubhouse. I wouldn't definitely not say we built Clubhouse cause otherwise it would have been Clubhouse. The idea was similar, execution was not.

We launched that to zero validation on, like many of your podcasts suggest you should do, which is Product Hunt, which is cool. We reached out to a bunch of people and then it, all things started to up from there basically.

Courtland Allen: 7m 53s

It's funny, you have this debating platform because when I was a kid, I read this sci-fi book. Have you've ever read “Ender's Game?” It's this cool sci-fi book. They made a movie that was pretty good, but not as good. It's about these child geniuses who ended up being groomed to fight these aliens or whatever. The main kid goes off and does that. His brother and his sister, who are also these child geniuses, they kind of start this online debating platform called The Nets or something. They're constantly debating politics and philosophy. They become super celebrities and eventually ended up, I just ruined the whole book for anyone who's listening, if you want to read “Ender's Game,” but they end up ruling the world basically because of this debating platform.

I remember being 12 years old and reading this, I was like, this is awesome. I’ve got to start my own, online debating platform that’s going to be super huge. So, it's cool to see that you actually did that. You actually got real politicians on there talking about meaningful issues.

Nadav Keyson: 8m 45s

No, that was definitely cool. That was the only validation we had that we got. We probably didn't have any viewers, but we had politicians debate each other.

Courtland Allen: 8m 53s

It's one of the, like with podcasting, for example, I want to do more debate episodes because there's just something really interesting about hearing people go at it. It's fine when people are constantly agreeing and you can learn some stuff.

It's the same effect on Hacker News, actually. The culture in Hacker News is that if you ever leave a comment, what you're supposed to do is disagree with the person who you're replying to. Anytime there's a story on Hacker News, the first comment disagrees with that, the next comment disagrees with that comment. So on and so forth. It's actually super interesting to read because you always get to see both sides and learn the most.

I'm surprised that more people didn't tune in to hear what was going on with these politicians debating, cause it's just naturally captivating.

Nadav Keyson: 9m 33s

No, I completely agree. Our generation maybe doesn't care as much of politics anymore, but I think personally, debates are super interesting. I don't really agree with someone like Ben Shapiro, but even just hearing him out, see what he has to say to sharpen my own thought process, I think is super interesting.

Actually, the idea was also what makes Twitter often fun is I think also if people are kind of fighting with each other as well, other than just agreeing, so the idea is bringing Twitter fights to the debating platform. That was also kind of the idea.

Courtland Allen: 10m 3s

I like that the perspective of you make yourself mentally sharper by hearing the other side. Cause there's also a lot of people who feel the exact opposite. That what you should do is you should tune out the other side in any situation and not listen to what they have to say, but I'm very much like you, I always want to hear what the other side has to say because how do I know that my own opinions and my own thinking are sharp if I'm not listening to someone like attack them and then go at them. It's not for everybody, but I also enjoy the occasional Twitter fight.

So, you eventually pivot to this idea where you're going to do podcasting, podcasts recording, but it was very live. It's come on and your fans can watch you recorded the thing live and they can ask questions. When you were pitching it to me a year ago, that was the entire pitch. It was all about doing a live podcast. That actually was what kind of turned me off because I was like, I don't care about live. I just want to record my podcasts. That's all I care about. I just want to record it and then put it out.

The reason why I thought that was because every time I'd ever done anything live in the past, it never got more than three or four or 5% of the viewers or listeners as the actual recording did. So, I might put out an episode of Indie Hackers and it might get like 30,000 downloads in six weeks. But if I do it live and I'm tweeting and I'm trying to get people to it and the room's got like eight people in it and I'm embarrassed. I'm like, ah, the show is much bigger.

I was pretty hesitant to do it. Then I think you and I ended up doing a Q&A or something that actually went pretty well and people did join and ask questions. It was people that I recognize, Justin Jackson joined and was asking questions. And I think Pieter Level's might've asked us…

Nadav Keyson: 11m 25s

Sahil as well.

Courtland Allen: 11m 27s

Yeah, Sahil was in there. So, it was actually really cool because you were able to get really interesting people to come watch.

Nadav Keyson: 11m 32s

I still think it’s cool, but it never really got validated by the market. Other than Clubhouse kind of nailed it, but I think it was cool that interactive elements, that's the cool thing about live. If you're just live and you're not really interacting, having people that are watching there's no point of doing it live.

I agree live is hard. It's all about synchronous, right? So, you need the right time and the right moment, people need to be tuning in. So, it's definitely more difficult.

It's also what we saw and why we moved away from that whole live element positioning on our platform and more of the technology platform where people just come to record pretty high-quality, audio and video.

Courtland Allen: 12m 5s

You had a vision, right? You were like, I think live is cool. This is going to work. Then you had reality, which was people don't necessarily think this is cool. How do you even recognize that they don't think it's cool? How did you make the decision to change?

Nadav Keyson: 12m 18s

The idea actually came from the debating platform. What was possible, people could interact live if it was politicians. Like I said, it was pretty cool. I could ask a question directly to a high-level politician and hey, what about this? That concept we thought, okay, we need to bring it to podcasts. So, we did that.

I started reaching out to a bunch of people, including you, some other people. People literally just told me, I don't give a shit about this live element. I care more about recording. It could have been that I didn't reach the right people as well, but that definitely, I kept hearing the feedback coming back to me.

That's what made us realize we should change the whole positioning on our websites more to recording. Because in my mind, I was like, yeah, well, you can also record and go live. What do you care? But the people felt, oh, no, Riverside, oh no, that's the livestream platform. But meanwhile, we had this great recording as well. So that's why we moved away from this whole livestream, live element as well.

Although I think it's still undervalued because imagine the two of us are recording right now and you just have backstage, some loyal listeners listening while we are recording. Afterwards we can still repurpose this recording in the same way you are doing right now. But that's personal, it’s not really validated.

Courtland Allen: 13m 31s

I think the same thing, honestly. Telegram came out with, Telegram’s a chat app similar to WhatsApp or Facebook messenger or something. You and I talk on Telegram all the time. They just came out with a sort of audio chat. You can have a group chat on Telegram, start an audio chat at the top of it, and then anyone in that group can just pop into the audio, chat, start talking, et cetera.

I talk to my brother and we do Indie Hackers planning like every day on this thing. We have a chat room with my mom in it, so she'll pop in and just listen. Then you and I are part of the Work in Progress chat group, so a couple of weeks ago we were in this audio chat thing.

When I saw this, I started getting really excited about live chat cause I was like, well, okay, what if I recorded my podcasts for Indie Hackers on Telegram, and then I had this group that was just all the coolest indie hackers, they were always in the group, so they would instantly be notified whenever I'm recording any podcast episode and they could pop in and listen and maybe ask questions. I thought that would be super cool.

Maybe the hard part for it is just that notification where on other platforms, like if I released something live, what I would have to do is tweet about it and try to advertise it and push it so that the live room isn't dead.

Whereas, if they have the sort of captive chat group it's already active and people were chatting and they just get a notification on their phone and it says, okay, there's a podcast going on or a call, maybe that would relieve me of the burden of having to sort of promote it.

Nadav Keyson: 14m 49s

No, I definitely agree. I think there's something there. It's a hybrid model. You're not only doing this whole live element and you're still engaging with people you like to engage with. Then afterwards still repurpose it. I definitely think Telegram, Twitter Spaces, Clubhouse, these are definitely interesting concepts.

Courtland Allen: 15m 6s

At some point you're like, all right, screw this live stuff. No one likes it. At least the way it's implemented right now, it's not growing the way we want. It's pretty easy at that point to just give up. I mean, a lot of people would be like, okay, well this is our vision. It's not working. Why did you decide to go into what you're doing now? Which is just to be a podcast recording tool.

Nadav Keyson: 15m 24s

There was one big difference with our previous projects. We had one customer who didn't really pay us, but we had a paying customer. That's like, holy shit, someone on the internet paid us to do something.

I also really, really, really believed about what we were doing. I thought there was something there. That was a huge difference this time, having that validation from this one paying customer, although there was only one, and my internal really conviction that this is really cool. It was also the newest thing we were working on.

Then we got really lucky, in a way it's bad, COVID hit. Then we really realized, wow, this remote recording might be really huge.

Courtland Allen: 16m 2s

There's a whole line of online podcast recording tools that at least I've used. When I started Indie Hackers, the podcast, maybe four years ago now, I was using a tool called Zencastr and Zencastr was super cool because it was browser-based, just like Riverside.

It's the same thing. Invite people to the room. They join. They don't have to have Zoom installed on their computer or anything like that. Then it will record local audio files, which means that, typically when you record something over Zoom or something, you're getting the audio that's coming over the internet.

So, if the person's internet connection is slow or really just the audio just gets degraded over the internet, no matter what, it's crappy quality. Whereas with Zencastr, it would record it on their computer, their audio record your audio on your computer, and then would upload both tracks automatically.

It was like magic. I was super happy about using Zencastr. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Then maybe a couple of years ago, another tool came out called SquadCast and SquadCast was identical to Zencastr, but it had video. You could actually look at the person you were talking to you, which makes it much less awkward, much cooler when you're having the conversations. I was like, okay, well I'm going hop, ship and go to SquadCast cause it's the same thing but I can see who I'm talking to you. I use that.

Then you were sort of the third iteration and we were like, we're not only going to let you see the video, but you can also record video with Riverside and it's the same way. I was like, oh, this is super cool cause what if I want to put my podcast on YouTube, et cetera. You convince me to jump ship from SquadCast and that's where I've been for the last year basically.

Nadav Keyson: 17m 29s

Yeah. I hope there's not going to be a fourth player. Riverside to the fourth player.

Courtland Allen: 17m 32s

You gotta be your own fourth player. You gotta disrupt yourself and be the next stage.

Nadav Keyson: 17m 37s

It's really interesting how this went. We were the first to record video on the internet up to 4k video. The way we got to this local video thought is we record the video from the internet and local audio. So, the audio is really good, but the video is not pretty good.

Then actually you were having problems with the internet video we were having. It was out of sync. It was not great. We felt, ah, shit, we need to fix this. We need to make sure Courtland’s getting good video.

That made us think, okay, we need to get the same concept for audio, for video as well, because it made no sense for us. Why not repurpose the content you're already recording in all areas, YouTube, Spotify, wherever you can put it out there? That's what really made us think, okay, we need to go all in on video.

Courtland Allen: 18m 20s

Yeah. It's interesting thinking about how competitive space is, cause you were just two indie hackers at the time, right? It's you and your brother and you were pioneering the first online platform to let you record high-quality video for podcasts and stuff.

No one else is doing it. Literally no one else had, either thought of it, you're just on the bleeding edge of technology. How was it that you two got there first? Why aren't big companies already doing this stuff?

Nadav Keyson: 18m 48s

I think it's a matter of focus and it's also quite difficult. It's my brother who figured it out to do it. Essentially what you're doing is you're recording really big files in the browser and uploading at the same time.

A company like zoom has a focus on having a great goal and not a great recording. So, it's a different focus angle. A company like Google Meet is also a different focus. They are making sure that it's reliable for a hundred people in the call.

We have a different focus. We have to focus, okay, it's all about the recording. Actually, right now, the call we're having now with Courtland, I can see it may be a bit fuzzy. It's not amazing, but afterwards, when I look at the recording, that's where we really stand out.

I think it's a matter of focus. It's also, truthfully, it's difficult to do this whole local recording and making it reliable. I think that's, that's the difficult part about it, making it also reliable.

Courtland Allen: 19m 34s

That's so smart that you just, cause you do sacrifice some things. When I pop into Riverside, it says, hey, the video quality might be a little fuzzy.

It's because you don't care. That's not, the purpose isn't for the live video to be amazing. It's for the recording to be amazing. The purpose isn't to sometimes work, the purpose is people are recording this, which means it needs to be a hundred percent reliable. I can't quit Riverside and say the call is done and then realized I lost all my recordings cause then I'm never going to use it again. I'm going to say bad things.

Your ability to basically not focus on other things and only do this kind of gave you, I guess superpowers in a way where two indie hackers could do something that no one else was doing.

Nadav Keyson: 20m 9s

Yeah, for sure. I think that's also a lesson to indie hackers. If you find that focus point, go double down on the focus, even though there may be competitors in the markets, you just need to have some kind of edge over competitors.

Courtland Allen: 20m 20s

There's also, there's this concept of moats, how do you build a business where n, one's going to catch up to you or the competition can't really eat your lunch or something.

There's all these different things that go into building a moat. It's really difficult to do, especially as an indie hacker. It usually doesn't even matter. If you're super small, you might as well just not even care about the competition, but you're getting to the point where your size is pretty big and the competition does matter in some respect.

I think, some of the normal modes, if you look at Indie Hackers, there's network effects, where if somebody wanted to build a clone of Indie Hackers, it would be very hard for them to do, because we have this community forum where the more people who join, the more valuable it gets. If someone else starts from scratch, like their community forums not gonna be as good as ours cause it's just too small.

Then you have things like economies of scale or the more money you make, the cheaper you can buy parts for something as you're buying more parts, and then you can make things cheaper than your competition and compete on price. That's an economy of scale.

There's also technological leaps where you just have some sort of technology that other people don't and for whatever reason, either can't build what you're doing, or they just don't build it. That's the one I always tell people don't worry about that, you're an indie hacker. You're not going to have that. It doesn't make any sense.

You're probably the only example of an indie hacker I know who just had that. You had that at like the right moment in time, the beginning of the pandemic, where lots and lots of people decided they wanted to start podcasts and they want upload their videos to YouTube or whatever. You're literally the only tool in the market that could do it. Is that what you would say led to most of the rapid growth that you've had since then?

Nadav Keyson: 21m 50s

Yeah, a hundred percent.

Our moat was definitely our technological moats and we doubled down on that and that's what’s brought us here. Now of course, competitors are trying to catch up, but then you already captured a big chunk of the markets and you’re ahead.

Courtland Allen: 22m 3s

Then you have to keep running because competitors are always going to be trying to catch up.

Nadav Keyson: 22m 8s

It never ends, right? But I think growth in itself is also a moat, luckily. If you are a productivity tool, I don't know, there's so many productivity tools out there and if you're just growing so fast, I think growing in itself is a big moat.

Courtland Allen: 22m 21s

Yeah. That's kind of one of the most amazing things about your company. You're just growing at an insane rate. We didn't say your revenue numbers, but they were quite substantial and it's only been a year.

At what point did you realize that your growth was abnormal?

Nadav Keyson: 22m 39s

It sounds maybe strange. I still don't really realize because I don't have a benchmark to tell the story. My brother and I, we were doing quite well, making some money and then we got this investor who invest in us. I also asked him at some point I was actually quite shy, but is it going well, what's the benchmark?

I don't really have a way. Of course, I have Indie Hackers, I can check out Indie Hackers. How much are they making? But I don't know. I had no idea how fast do people come to one, two a sort of numbers. So that definitely made me realize, okay, we are growing very fast, but I think it's cliche, but it's true. You never, you always want more.

Courtland Allen: 23m 18s

Yeah, there's kind of this dichotomy between your hopes and your expectations. Your hopes, probably you want them to be as high as possible. You hope Riverside is going to be making a billion dollars a year at some point, right? It's something crazy.

Then your expectations are what do you think is realistic. I think that's kind of the most, the more internal thing. Your hopes are what are you striving for. Your expectations are what makes you happy. I think if you fall short of your hopes but you meet your expectations, you can still be pretty happy. But if you fall short of expectations you probably won't feel that good.

An example might be with Indie Hackers when I started it, my hopes were that I can basically build something that could be huge and potentially world changing. But my expectations were that I just want to build something that makes me enough money to survive as an indie hacker. I want to pay my rent. I want to be able to buy food. I want to not to have to get a job.

I got to that point and I was super happy, even though I hadn't come anywhere near what I hoped and dreamed that I could eventually do. I still haven't gotten to the point where I'm quite there yet, but I think what's cool about you is that your hopes seem pretty high. The fact that you decided to raise money means that you were, you saw a lot of potential.

What I see with a lot of other indie hackers often, it's like, they're like, I'm just trying to get to a hundred dollars in recurring revenue by this time next year. It’s like, well, if you set the bar that low, you'll probably hit it, but also you probably won't get much more than that because you're not going to be doing the things that allow you to get really big. You're not going to be taking those swings because you're not really thinking about it.

Nadav Keyson: 24m 42s

I don't know, because I think it goes both ways. If you don't set the goal too high, it's also, it's also attainable and not discouraging. So, my goal was having, for example, $2,000 per month in recurring revenue. I think if you have an attainable goal, it can also be like, okay, if I'm there, holy shit, then, then it's amazing. I can go full time on it.

Whereas when you have a huge goal, it's like, oh, I'm never going to get there. I actually think it's better to just, first strategy, set a realistic goal and then take it from there. Once you hit that, of course it's evolving. So now I have a different goal and different expectations, but I wouldn't initially when you start off set that huge, huge goal for yourself and your expectations.

Courtland Allen: 25m 18s

Yeah. I like the stair-step sort of approach where you start small and then you keep hitting these goals. You keep getting bigger. What are your goals right now for Riverside? What do you want to do?

Nadav Keyson: 25m 26s

Yeah, I want to make a good another company. We really have impact in this whole market that we're in. Otherwise, we really thought about this carefully when the raised money, like, okay, what do we really want?

Even for me saying, this feels quite a little bit uncomfortable, but it's also good when I say it, I also start believing it.

At this point it doesn't really matter. Of course, I want to have the strategy, but it's for me, it's really about for us, it's really about impact having a big brand, having a name, have impact in the whole content creation is something we are striving for right now.

Courtland Allen: 25m 55s

There's a really good Paul Graham essay the other day. He was writing about what he learned. One of the chief lessons that he learned was that, the way you put it, he was basically saying, you don't really want to chase prestige. You want to chase kind of being the entry-level option that everybody can use.

I've talked to a bunch of people about this since then. Indie Hackers is kind of the entry-level option, lots and lots of different people who are brand new to entrepreneurship come to Indie Hackers and they hear you talking about how crazy your journey has been, et cetera. And they're like, okay, okay maybe I should do this.

So, how many people can Indie Hackers inspire to do that is kind of my north star. It mostly just comes down to the fact that I don't like being on the beaten path. And nor do you, right?

You could have just gone and gotten a job and I'm sure your brother is more than good enough developer to get a job somewhere. But you, probably something deep inside you made you say, I don't want to be on the beaten path. I think I can do it better myself. I think I can do more if I blaze my own trail.

I would like to see a world where many more people feel that way. I think we're headed to that world. The internet's been pretty crazy. Lots and lots of people are making lots of money doing things that don't even require them to code.

Maybe they have a Clubhouse room and they're funneling people to a paid community or maybe they're tweeting and then they're writing a paid newsletter or something. People are just getting more and more confidence about the fact that they can make a living on their own and they can chart their own course and they can create their own business that’s shaped in a way that lets them live a really good life.

If I can accelerate that to a significant degree, I'd love to. Maybe that means putting out a hundred times as many podcasts episodes and having a whole podcast network and having a much bigger community. Who knows, but that's kind of my goal with Indie Hackers and I've been at it for five years now and I don't expect to stop anytime soon.

Nadav Keyson: 27m 32s

Do you have a concrete goal in terms of audience size you want, or how many people you want to reach? How do you define that goal?

Courtland Allen: 27m 38s

We just look at, basically the number of conversations happening in the community and the number of listeners to the podcast.

When we joined Stripe, for example, our community was super tiny. We had a few hundred conversations a month, and now we're up to like 35,000 conversations a month. Our hope is, okay, a couple of years from now, it'll be 10 times bigger than that. That will just be massive impact and it would be massive reach.

It's kind of stressful because it's like, well, the things that got you from zero to 100 aren't going to get you from a hundred to a thousand. It's never guaranteed that you're going to be able to reach that next level. It just gets harder and harder to figure out like what you can do to get there, even though sometimes from the outside looking in, it seems inevitable.

Looking at Riverside, I'm like, oh, Nadav is growing so much. It's inevitable that he would have grown this much. But on the inside, you're probably sweating bullets figuring out what are we going to do. There's so many different options. How do I get there?

Nadav Keyson: 28m 23s

Yeah, exactly. That’s something we discussed sometimes. From the outside, everything looks like a clear line to a certain goal, but it's a bumpy ride.

Courtland Allen: 28m 32s

We were talking earlier, actually, about how I keep hopping from podcast recording tool to podcast recording tool. What are your thoughts? What's next? Who's going to be number four in line or how do you be number four in line?

Nadav Keyson: 28m 45s

Our future vision is we need to, it sounds maybe fake, but obviously when you share your officially becomes more scary, but our future vision is really to empower a power creators to very easily create content.

That means, for example, it's going to be creating a podcast. It can be creating videos. There's so much content being created and we want to be the company that's empowering these people creating all this content.

Courtland Allen: 29m 8s

That means presumably more than just recording, cause there's a whole bunch that goes into it.

Nadav Keyson: 29m 12s

Exactly. So, right now we also built a magic editor on Riverside. So, once you have those files on Riverside that you recorded, you can also very easily merge the files and actually go ahead and edit the files on Riverside itself. It becomes almost like a full-fledged platform to create content already.

Courtland Allen: 29m 28s

There's so much around this whole space. I mean, the sort of phrase that's been popular in the last six months or so, but much longer than that really. It's just you're building picks and shovels.

People are trying really hard to do stuff online. They're trying really hard to accomplish goals, to build a hit podcast, to build a hit YouTube show, to get big on social media. When people will have a dream that's spurring them to action, if you can just be a tool that helps them accomplish that dream and helps just make it a little bit easier than you're in a really good spot.

Everything about all the work I do for this podcast, it's not just this recording, right? There has to be an editing pass that it gets done over this. Someone's got to spice in the intro music and natural music. Someone's gotta write the show notes and the description and upload it to a transistor or a podcast host. Someone's gotta plan guest, it’s a million different things.

Pretty much, no one helps me with any of this. You helped me with recording and then literally all the rest of it, I have to like try to find someone to hire to do it. I'm not the only one doing this. There's a million people who have podcasts. So, it just feels kind of like a golden age where there's just so much opportunity and so little out there to help.

There's also, I think, the curious lack of enterprise customers. One of the first things you told me when I was going to use Riverside was we just got the NFL as a customer. They're going to use us for their podcast. This is in March of last year, you've just gotten started.

I was thinking about it at the time. Most companies can't sign the NFL as a client, especially like indie hackers, right? Because there's probably some other bigger SaaS company out there with an enterprise sales team that's taking them out to drinks and lunch and stuff.

What is it about the podcast space where that's not the case? Why is it that you're able to land such big clients? You've got Hillary Clinton on your homepage with this cool testimonial about Riverside. How are you landing these huge customers?

Nadav Keyson: 31m 10s

I think it's because there's such a strong, strong need for our product. They cannot use Zoom and they cannot use Google Meet. So, they need the platform.

Actually, the NFL was, well, we got NFL from Product Hunt. Some producers saw our launch. We did get some customer from Product Hunt, which is the NFL, which was pretty cool. They churned one week later, less cool.

Courtland Allen: 31m 31s

You called me on the one week of they were using, you told me about them.

Nadav Keyson: 31m 36s

I mean, Hillary Clinton is a really happy client. Our third client was a Dutch news website, which I read every day. So, having them as a client was like, holy shit. The fact that I can get them as a client, because I can really relate to that platform. It's something I read every day. It's not some American company. It's a Dutch company I read the news on every day and we got them as a customer and not because of some strong connection we have in that company, but people just because they saw our product and they were really surprised by the quality we are able to give them.

Courtland Allen: 32m 9s

Explain how you were actually getting a lot of these customers, because we've talked about the fact that you've had this cool technological breakthrough, but were you just hustling and recruiting people one-on-one the way you did with me. Or were you doing social media or SEO? How are people even finding out about Riverside?

Nadav Keyson: 32m 25s

It's mostly word of mouth actually, which is boring for the listeners, but because we are here in the interview, all of your guests see Riverside. That's the main growth driver for us initially. It was also me reaching out personally to people, but that was never really so effective.

I think it's more effective to validate that there's something there. If you have direct feedback, people will say, most people ignore you, which also tells you something about the product. And you have some people actually giving you feedback and saying what do they and what don’t they like. It's funny. For example, a guy we both know, I won't say his name, but I reached out to him. He blocked me because I reached out to him and later on, he unblocked me. He unblocked me because now I'm like, okay, he's not a spammer. He's just, he's part of us.

Courtland Allen: 33m 15s

Yeah. In the beginning, you're nobody. It's super hard. You don't have any credibility. I get a ton of messages from lots of people who, who knows, they could be super successful, super smart, amazing people, in six months from now. But right now, I don't know who you are.

You have to kind of push yourself through that. The point at which it's the hardest for anyone to take you seriously is the point at which it's probably the most important for you to constantly be reaching out to people.

Nadav Keyson: 33m 39s

Yeah, that's actually very true. Now it's not as important that I reach out to people, but I agree initially when you're starting off, you need to push for that.

That's came very natural to me also because of the politicians. Like I was saying, I literally would call the politicians and would say, for the debating platform, hey, you're speaking to the office of our debate feed, that was a name for websites. So, they already thought, oh, this is a big company, the office, like the head is calling.

So, I was always trying to wing it by getting these politicians on board. That really taught me I literally could get the Foreign Minister of the Netherlands on our platform without any connections, major scouting game, like saying, hey, do you want to debate against other politicians? Then they often would say yes, surprisingly.

Courtland Allen: 34m 23s

Yeah. It's kind of crazy once you realize how easy it is to get certain people on the phone who previously seemed completely inaccessible. It doesn't always work. But if you hustle and you contact enough people you'll get some yeses and then you can sort of parlay those yeses into more yeses.

Then suddenly you've got the NFL, you've got Hillary Clinton. What's the story behind Hillary Clinton, by the way? Cause her testimonial on your homepage, it almost seems like she did you a personal favor. Cause she's like a big thanks to Riverside FM. Just imagine, we needed a recording platform that could help us make a podcast during a pandemic and boy, did they step up.

That's the kind of testimonial that someone writes because you're like, hey Hillary, give me a good testimonial. How did you get her to do this?

Nadav Keyson: 35m 4s

Yeah, that's insane, right? Even when I think about it now, that's the fact that she did that. Her producer found out about Riverside and I gave her a pretty good service, help her with the setup.

I even met Hillary Clinton on the call, and I helped her with her mic set up, stuff like that. Afterwards I heard her one episode of her, I heard her thanking a bunch of people I heard, thanks to the producer or this and this and such, such, and such and such. And then I said, fuck, why did she not, if only she would thank me, you know?

So, I thought, okay, fuck it. I'll just go for it. Then ask the producer. Hey, do you mind, would it be possible if she would give us a thank on a podcast and yeah, sure enough. She thanked us and I couldn't believe it as well.

Courtland Allen: 35m 47s

That's crazy. Super nuts. This whole word-of-mouth thing is interesting because most companies, most founders want to grow via word of mouth. Wouldn't it be a dream if you could just build an app and put it out there and then people would just start using it and spreading it virally. But that's like 1% of the time, like literally never happens.

I want to talk about like the physics behind your word-of-mouth growth, though. You said something interesting, which is that when people use Riverside, you kind of don't use it by yourself. It's almost like a gift card. If I give somebody a Hallmark card, it's a product that's meant to be shared just in the normal usage of it.

I buy a card, I write a note in it and then I give it to someone else. And if they didn't know anything about Hallmark cards, now they do. I'm, as a customer, advertising the product and not in some cheesy hokey, weird way where, oh, we'll give you $5 if you send this to somebody. But a very natural usage of the product itself makes me advertise it.

It's exactly the same with podcasting and Riverside, because if podcasters love to do anything, it's to have other podcasters on their shows and go on each other's shows and try to grow their audience. If you're using Zoom or Zencastr or something and then you join someone else's show and they're hosting you on Riverside and you’re like, what is this? They tell you all about it then suddenly you're going to do it.

That to me seems probably the strongest force for why you're able to grow so rapidly through word-of-mouth.

Nadav Keyson: 37m 0s

Absolutely. It's exactly what you're saying. A lot of podcasters love coming on each other's podcasts, are often the guests on podcasts themselves. So, we saw perfect growth rule, basically.

Courtland Allen: 37m 11s

Yeah. I'm starting another podcast with my buddy Julian. It's not out yet, but we do these round table things. They're almost like a Clubhouse call and will always be four of us.

We did one on podcasting and the whole topic of the episode is podcasting and it was me, Julian, and then we got Shaan Puri from the My First Million podcast, and then we got Jason Calacanis who runs This Week in Startups and All In. And I was like, okay, we're going to do it in Riverside. Of course, the first thing we start talking about when we sit down and record the podcast is Riverside itself.

We're like, oh, what are you think of Riverside, blah, blah, blah. Jason was talking about potentially investing in Riverside and Shaan was talking about what he uses and then everyone’s just kind of assessing the tool, you know? It's so much harder for almost every other product to have that kind of natural virality, I guess.

Another cool thing about what you're doing is, is you're basically smack dab in the middle of this remote work trend. Obviously, we had a pandemic. Everyone had to work remote, but you and your brother, you're not situated in Silicon Valley, raising from investors in the heart of the tech industry.

I think you were in Amsterdam and now you're in Israel and you've always been remote. You're raising all this money from investors who basically have never met you in person, and then you're building a tool that's helping people collaborate remotely.

Nadav Keyson: 38m 19s

So even when Gideon, who's my brother, we were always working, I am still in Amsterdam, and he’s in Tel Aviv, we were always using our own platform as well as, as way of communicating and the way of testing our own system. His internet is horrible. Well, perfect. We can try and pull this up.

Courtland Allen: 38m 34s

What do think about the future of building remote teams and remote communication, cause I assume your whole team at this point, you've got employees, you got people working with you. They're also remote as well.

Nadav Keyson: 38m 42s

Yeah, I think remote is fine. We’ll probably keep on doing that, but I do think having some kind of core team of engineers in the same office, there’s still something for it. What we have noticed is that time zone, which is, I'm only learning but probably everyone knew it already, time zone is definitely an issue. Like, if someone in the US only starts working when it's 6:00 PM our time, it's just never ending. You're always working. The time zone’s I think the only really barrier with remote work.

Courtland Allen: 39m 8s

Yeah. What time was that work in progress chat that we were in Telegram the other day and I…

Nadav Keyson: 39m 15s

Oh my God, man. That's 5:00 AM for you.

Courtland Allen: 39m 17s

It was like 5:00 AM for me. I hadn't even gone to sleep. And it was the middle of the day for you.

Nadav Keyson: 39m 21s

Courtland, speaking about mental health. Meanwhile, I was awake at 5:00 AM.

Courtland Allen: 39m 24s

But yeah, you're a fun person to talk to about that kind of stuff, because you're very open about the fact that it's not all sunshine and rainbows to be a founder.

It's stressful. There's a lot of pressure. Even before you were raising a lot of money from investors, you were just like, I think you Telegramed me once, how do you deal with the pressure of hoping the growth continues and knowing you have to do all this kind of stuff.

I didn't have a lot of good answers. I was like, uh, you know, make sure you're around people who you like who you can talk to, try to make some friends outside of tech. But beyond that, it's kind of just a thing that you deal with. How has your environment evolved in that way? Do you still feel a lot of the pressure that used to?

Nadav Keyson: 39m 58s

Yeah. I still feel the same pressure, if not more. But I do really have this really strong feeling of gratitude. Like I said, I'm doing this together with my brother. We have this amazing business going, we raised money from Alexis Ohanian, I mean the founder of Reddit who would've thought in this dream that we would be able to speak to a guy like that.

That feeling of gratitude is always overpowering and makes me be able to deal with the pressure. And also, it's a lot of fun. Oftentimes, me and my brother are just online on Riverside and we're working together and having fun while we're doing it. It's not all as serious as it looks from the outside.

Courtland Allen: 40m 32s

I think having a brother also, I mean, obviously I work with my brother. We're talking every day basically. We're not only talking about work. We're talking about our personal lives and dating and then, just childhood.

We both just turned 34 on Monday, so our mom sent us cards and stuff. She's on the call with us talking about stuff. I think as I've been working on Indie Hackers it's just become much more, I’ve become much more grateful that, oh, this is a cool time in my life where I get to be this close with my brother and work with him on something meaningful.

Maybe the numbers aren't going the way we want them to this month or something, or maybe something else happens or something’s stressful. But if you have somebody that you actually want to endure that journey with, then the hard parts are much easier, I think.

Nadav Keyson: 41m 12s

Absolutely. Yeah. I agree. I’m even doing with our older brother as well. So, we have three brothers running the company. That makes it a lot of fun. Sometimes we have these team meetings and I started speaking, then my brother, then my other brother, now it's over to the team members. It's a bit strange, but…

Courtland Allen: 41m 31s

That's cool. So, your third brother is, was he a co-founder or did he join later?

Nadav Keyson: 41m 36s

No, he was not a co-founder. He's always been involved also with the debating platform. He was the moderator. He was the more mature guy who knew how to get the processes right. He was still working for this really cool startup and then I finally got to convince him to join Riverside.

Courtland Allen: 41m 55s

Very cool. Well, listen Nadav, I think what you're doing is pretty amazing and I'm inspired to see, I mean, you kind of made the transition from indie hacker, we hope this works, we hope it makes a couple thousand dollars a month to full blown, fully funded founder, we're trying to build a unicorn company.

What would you say is the biggest lesson that you've learned that's helped you get through all of this, that people who are, you know, maybe where you were a year ago could take away?

Nadav Keyson: 42m 20s

Don't let all these big companies discourage you to go all in on what you're wanting to do, because oftentimes it just starts with a very small project then it gets some traction. Having initial traction, that really gives so much motivation to keep going, at least for me. Having even one paying customer, it doesn't even really matter what you're doing, but having just a paying customer, I think that gives so much external motivation to keep going. You don't know where you're going to end.

Courtland Allen: 42m 43s

I love it. Start small. It's almost like a positive flywheel where whenever you get any sort of win, one paying customer, a little bit of traction, you can use that to increase your confidence and use that to push harder and increase your motivation and push harder and get the next thing. Before you know, it, you're a completely different person.

Can you let listeners know where they can go to learn more about what you're up to with Riverside and anything else you've got going on?

Nadav Keyson: 43m 6s

Yeah, they can follow me on Twitter at @nadavkeyson, N-A-D-A-V-K-E-Y-S-O-N.

Courtland Allen: 43m 12s

Nadav Keyson, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Nadav Keyson: 43m 18s

Yeah. Pleasure.