Marc Köhlbrugge on Web 3, launching Pay Game, and building profitable businesses

Indie Hacker: Marc Kohlbrugge
Founded: Work In Progress, Startup.Jobs, BetaList, Pay Game, Build In Public
Sphere of Genius: Determination

If you're familiar with bootstrapping, you've almost certainly heard of Marc Köhlbrugge.

He's the founder of Beta List, a community of makers and early adopters showcasing their startups and exchanging feedback, and most recently Pay Game, a pay-to-pay game in which players earn NFTs by playing.

You can read Marc's writing here. Below is my interview with him.

You mentioned you grew up in the Netherlands?

Marc: Yeah. So I went back for the holidays. I'll be here for a month, and then I'll fly maybe to Thailand or somewhere warm again. Pretty much all my family and some of my older friends from school are still there in the Netherlands so it's nice to see them. But it's really cold here. What about you? Where are you calling from?

I'm calling from Boston, Massachusetts. I think it's great to go back to your hometown.

Marc: Right. I feel my personality is slightly different when I'm back in the Netherlands versus being abroad. Even between speaking Dutch or speaking English, there's a slight difference in my personality, which is interesting to be aware of.

Anyways, the first coding you did was hacking yourself to the top of a leaderboard as a kid? Is that correct?

Marc: Yeah. I don't know if I would consider that, or if other people would consider that programming, but I think it's definitely in that same mindset where you're hacking the system and trying to understand the computer, how it operates.

You got this idea and you try to make the computer do something that you want it to do. And then, it works and you're amazed by it.

And to me, that's kind of what programming is like. It's actually funny that you brought it up. I don't know if you saw this because this was just a few days ago, but I launched a new gaming project - Pay Game which is just a copy of my other project, but with only Ethereum on the blockchain. Pay Game is a leaderboard where you simply pay any amount you like. The amount becomes your score. It's the ultimate pay-to-play game.

Do you often reuse the code from previous projects so you can move faster?

Marc: It's a good question, but actually with Pay Game, the code was totally different from other projects. Normally for me, it's not about learning new technology. It's about creating a product and doing something conceptually new.

And then if I can reuse existing code, then I can just move faster, right? So some of my product decisions might be informed by what I can ship the quickest.
You don't want to do that for every feature, because you want to make sure that you build a product that people want and it works. But for some things, it doesn't really matter whether you do A or B as long as you do one of those.

And often that's something that I've already done before. So I might copy the code, or maybe I would re-implement it, but I know the edge cases to think about, et cetera. So, you don't want to reinvent the wheel.

But with Pay Game, the whole point was to learn Solidity and to learn a new technology. And so I figured, "Okay, in this case, let's keep the concept the same, but do it with totally new technology." So it's kind of flipped from what I normally do.

But I figured that I didn't want to learn a new programming language and new concepts, and also come up with a totally different idea and figure that out. It would be too many new things all at once.

Did the recent buzz around Blockchain entice you build a project with the technology?

Marc: Totally. I think the best way to learn something is to dive right in. So that's what I decided to do.

I've been intrigued by Blockchain development for a few years, but the learning curve was too steep. But more recently there have been useful resources popping up, so it's become a lot more approachable.

But five years ago it was too early for me anyway. I didn't have the interest to really dive into Solidity programming because there were very few resources, if there were any at all.

And nowadays I think there are plenty of resources available that make the whole process easier.

Switching gears - Web 3 has obviously been a big topic amongst indie hackers, what are your general feelings and attitudes towards it?

Marc: So I was in Lisbon a few days ago for a few months. It was Blockchain week with all these events and there were people flying in from all over the world to go to these events.

Meeting those people and being at those events, I felt the same excitement as I felt in the early days of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is when we got the rounded corners, we got the gradients, but we also got these social features, profiles, news feeds, buttons etc. where the page became more interactive.

While there is a lot of money flowing into crypto, it's clear to me that people are really interested in the underlying technology and the cultural impact it will have. It's very similar to the early days of Web 2.0

And that excitement, I felt at these blockchain events as well. Most people were more interested in the technology, the underlying technology, and the philosophical concepts behind it, the decentralization of existing institutions like government and finance.

What excites you most about Web 3?

Marc: There's a lot happening right now, but I think there's a few things that are quite clear, that are quite interesting, like controlling your own profile. You just register once and you own it and everywhere you go.

And any avatar or NFTs you might have, they are yours and they cannot be taken away.

The great thing about Web 3, and the blockchain is that all those NFTs, all those artworks, are stored on the Blockchain. That's one example of where Web 3 really shines, that there's no one entity controlling the data. You control your own wallet. You control your own destiny.

With Web 2.0, one of the promises was APIs, being able to grab data from one service and combine it with data from another service. And over time, it has become more gated and closed off as companies became more commercial and they charged for the API, but Web 3 is open by default.

The data is on a chain by default and it's public. People can build on top of each other's platforms. There was this one example, if someone launches an NFT or a project, you can build on top of that if you want, without their permission necessarily, because you can see what NFT someone has in a wallet and you can say like, "Okay, anyone that has this NFT also gets access to my websites."

I don't know why you would want to do that, but that's possible. We're still figuring out as a community what's possible. One other thing you probably have seen is the decentralized autonomous organization, the DAO, that wanted to buy the constitution.

Definitely.

Marc: The technology that makes it possible for people to raise funds within a few days, set up a decentralized organization and, as a community, raise a lot of cash and make certain actions happen without much overhead. Yeah.

In Web 3 there isn't a central organization restricting people's ability to communicate with the underlying software.

Marc: Right, except it's not just that there is no centralized owner of that data.

You are the owner yourself. Or a company can be owned by its users. So there can still be the company, but the users get their own share on it. Of course, we're still figuring out the legality of everything. Tech moves faster than the law.

For example, with Pay Game, I considered giving part of the profits, or the revenue, to the players, or maybe to the top three players, for example. But then maybe it's a Ponzi scheme, or I don't know if it's legal to do that.

So I decided against it, but technically it's quite feasible to do those things, to program the way money flows. And now it's not just money.

I see some people doing membership NFTs, kind of holding a pass to get access to a website or maybe to meetups, in real life meetups even.

If you have some technical ability, if you're able to program websites, then learning about Solidity, for example, it's not that difficult and it's still so new that you can still be the one that comes up with a new idea.

I find that really exciting.

Are Beta List users starting to experiment with Web 3 projects?

Marc: The majority on Betalist and WIP are still "traditional" startups i.e SaaS-based businesses. But especially on WIP, I do see more and more interest in Web 3. So it's getting more popular.

I do think it's still a little bit hard to figure out how to make a sustainable business in Web 3. With Web 2.0, just building a SaaS for businesses, that's the go-to way for bootstrappers, figuring business problems and solving it for them and charging a monthly fee, the proven model.

And so the people that are trying to build a profitable business, I think they're mostly focused on the traditional startups for now.

But then people on the side are learning about Solidity or maybe Rust for Solana. There's all these programming languages and different ways of working with the Web 3 technology. There's also some people really trying to build a business on top of it, but I think right now that's a minority.

I think the people that do build a business on top of it, they're building regular SaaS but targeting people active in Web 3, i.e a tool to check NFT rarity traits.
I know there's one person that's building a metaverse game on Solana.

That's awesome.

Marc: You have a character and can walk around in your own apartment or other people's apartments, with other players, and you can put your own NFTs as art on the wall.

It's called The Portals, like portals, but with "the." The Portals. And I think they recently raised money from Solana itself.

Are you familiar with any "metaverse" coins and the run they've been on recently?

Marc: I haven't looked into that much. A few months ago I looked into buying land NFTs. I think there's a game called Sandbox, which was selling lands, but everything sold out immediately.

It was so complicated that I didn't feel comfortable investing money without doing proper research, and I just didn't have the time to do the proper research.

And it's still quite a risky investment because you don't know which game is going to win. Or maybe multiple are going to win, but it felt like one of those bets would be too big for me, but it's definitely something to keep an eye on.

And maybe as a creator, it's less about like buying land and hoping it increases the value, and more about like seeing what people use and what they value and then kind of creating something more creative rather than just buying something and selling it, flipping it.

I read your series Zero to One, how do you think those writings that you made then would apply today?

Marc: Zero to One was my graduation thesis, and I originally wrote it in 2009 and so when people heard the title Zero to One, they might think that I copied it from the book from Peter Thiel, but my thesis came out before his book, many years before.

Peter's got to give you some credits there.

Marc: Anyways, back then I struggled executing on my ideas. I was one of those people, I'm still one of those people that has new ideas every day. And I would be very excited and tell my friends, "I got this new idea for a website or an app or a movie idea."

I really loved my ideas and thinking about them and having my like little notebook with my pen and being creative. But eventually just having the ideas was not good enough anymore. I actually wanted to see them in the real world, actually invent them and execute on them.

And I struggled with that because anytime I would start pursuing an idea, within a few weeks or maybe a few months, I would lose interest in it and come up with a new, better idea.

And so I never really put the full focus on something to really ship it. And I was annoyed with myself. So I started researching "Why does this happen?" If you never finish an idea, why even come up with new ideas if you're not going to do anything with it?

So I started researching it and ways to overcome that because it's quite a common problem that people run into, and there's many books written about it. Some of my conclusions were that there's no distinction really between an idea and in the execution. It's more a granular or gradual process.

Even when you write down an idea, you're already making it a little bit more concrete than it was in your head.

You choose which words to use. Maybe you make a little wire frame or a sketch. And I think executing on an idea is just making it more and more concrete, so it goes from something very fleeting, abstract, in your head, to something more concrete. Maybe at some point it becomes code and then it becomes a working website.

So for me, I realized that you don't have to turn an idea into reality. It's more of a gradual process, and you can just iterate step by step. For some reason that was a helpful thought. Just see what you have right now and make that more concrete and focus on the here and now.

At some point you will look back and you're like, "Oh, I started with an idea, and now it's a real business," maybe.

What's the newest lesson you’ve taken to heart recently?

Marc: You need feedback in order to know which direction to iterate on, because anything you do without feedback or without data is based on assumptions, guesswork basically. And you're probably worse at guessing than you think you are. So just get it out there and get real data, get real feedback, and then quickly iterate on that.

The longer I wait, the harder it gets to ship because I'm more invested emotionally and maybe even financially to make it successful. If you ship it from day one, ideally maybe, if it's possible, then it's clear to you and it's clear to other people that it's not a finished product.

How long do you typically take to ship products?

Marc: I try to ship a working prototype within a few days. But the actual full press launch might take 2 months total. You don't need to feel ashamed that it's still buggy or that it looks ugly. It's fine because it's clear that it's a prototype. But if you ship after three months and then it looks unpolished, then people might mistake the lack of polish as a lack of design sense.

And so it's this vicious circle where it gets harder and harder to ship. And maybe if you don't ship within, I don't know, three months, you're never going to ship. I don't know what the time frame is, probably different per person.

With Pay Game, I made a lot of progress in the first week or two weeks. I basically had a prototype ready. And then I started polishing it, and then ultimately it took maybe two months because I have videos for the NFTs and I wanted to have it loop repeatedly.

So it should be seamless looping with the coins falling, which was difficult to do right, and I wanted this CRT effect where it kind of looks like an old screen. And I wanted to optimize the gas usage. If you put something on the Ethereum blockchain, it will cost money anytime someone wants to interact with the contract.

And depending on how you program the contract, it might cost more or less gas like a transaction fee. And so I started optimizing that, but it was a rabbit hole.
And so I fell again for the same trap where I tried to make it perfect before I shipped it.

You can find Marc's Medium page here.