Yesterday, I was interviewed for episode #33 of the Indie Hackers podcast. This was the first time I was ever interviewed about my work... a little stressed I was.
Just seconds after we finished recording, Courtland went on and said:
Really different interview ...
At that point, I'm like... hmmm... yes of course it was different, for an hour I couldn't articulate one coherent tip or lesson learned over 15 years of hacking around ideas and projects... given that every other Indie Hackers podcast episode I've listen to finishes with that climactic moment where the interviewee throws an amazing lesson learned (🎶). Yes, mine was different... mine finished with a long silence where I'm like "...hmmmm, I don't know... what did I learn? hmm... probably something right?"
But Courtland went on and added:
different... but in a good way.
I reflected on that and what he probably meant was that the interview will be perceived as authentic, because I mostly talked about my journey. So I warn you, do not expect to learn crazy tips to create and grow your business.
If I could redo the interview here is what I would probably end up with:
Entrepreneurship is a really really long journey, you need to pace yourself if you want to do it for the long term. It's never too late to learn something new. It's never too late to start something new. You should find joy in the process. Don't risk everything. You should be resolute (stubborn in a positive way)... success will come... in ways you never expected.
Here are the notes I sent Courtland before the interview to help him prepare, read this as a teaser to the episode.
I hope you enjoy my humble journey. :)
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I started playing with HTML at around 14 in '98. Funny story: I actually got into HTML when my mother started coding a website about our family genealogy and as a pretentious kid I laughed at her skills... Of course I said I could do better. She challenged me, and it worked. I got hooked.
The first website I built was hosted at multimania.fr, the GeoCities of the French world. It was a collection of free games for PC. Because there was no such website in french it instantly started to pick up some traffic, up to hundreds of visitors a day. For a kid like me it was pretty exciting. I became obsessed by it, wanted to grow the website.
I slowly built it from HTML to ASP/HTML then to PHP/HTML. And pickup my first domain name jeuxgratuits.net. (I don't own that website anymore, it was sold couple of years ago)
That’s when I started putting some ads up, at the time they were paying $0.25 CPC per click. It was crazy. Of course, I did what every kids would have done, I just started clicking on the ads myself! Of course I was kicked out and never saw any penny. :)
I slowly moved to other interests, games and sport, but the website was always growing. At one point I was the first result for ‘jeux’ in Google (‘games’ in French). And was receiving like 40 000 visitors a day.
Google Adsense got released. Wow. That’s when I started to make some real money, around 100-200$/day (sometimes more). At this point I was studying business management at university and I wasn’t really considering myself as a programmer. Given the money I was making, I thought about scaling the website to other languages and verticals. I wanted to create the youtube of online games. Not really knowing how to code all of this I hired someone from my university studying computer engineering. The deal was he would code it for cheap, but at the same time develop his own-vanilla-django-rails-a-like-framework in PHP.
At 40k visitors a day the new version was a total disaster. You can’t query the database thousands of times on every single page hit…. :) The code was not created with scale in mind, and scale the website had. As soon as the new version launched, everything crashed… and it crashed for weeks and months. Google penalized the ranking, and I lost 70% of my traffic. All of this was pretty enlightening, I realized that if I wanted to work in technology I should be able to speak the language. It should be my craft. You can’t delegate this to someone else.
So I bought an O'Reilly book about MySQL… and got to work. That was around 2004/5…. That’s when I really got hooked to coding for real.
Problem solving was so rewarding, it was in big contrast to school, which I found really boring.
Another lesson I learned was that when something works, you don't necessarily need to change it. You might cause more harm. Of course this is all relative, it’s not always the case. But this still stick with me today, I'm always weary of changing a winning recipe. It's kind of my Digg.com like story... you really can kill a successful product yourself.
I then finished university, jeuxgratuits.net was still good steady income. But I was not satisfied with my degree… I didn’t really want to work for a company like Procter & Gamble. I wanted to start my own thing, keep in mind that for me jeuxgratuits.net wasn’t a business. It was a project, and I wasn’t really that proud about it (for whatever stupid reason, right?). I wanted to work on something more noble. A big project. I wanted to start a game studio.
Not really knowing how to code games… I was thinking that I needed to meet game developers. So I started to lurk indie game forums and blogs. I became fascinated by the creativity of that space. It’s there I found out about game jams. Game jams is a concept where couple of people will in a given amount of time create games on a common theme. That’s where it clicked, I could create a game jam in my hometown where I could meet potential partners for my game studio.
I created the Bivouac Urbain game jam, which can be translated to “Urban campfire game jam”. The idea was that it would be held outside in big tops in downtown Quebec City. We decided to host it outside to WOW people not normally interested in things like a games and tech… that way it would promote Quebec tech culture in a cool way and we could get noticed by the city and Quebec province gov. So they would want to fund the event. It worked.
We did the Bivouac for 4 years, and the last year our budget was around $CAD 250 000. We had the game jam, live music shows, art displays, game companies exposing their games to the public… it was pretty cool.
- Second edition’s trailer
- Participant Juicy Beast studio presenting their game to the judges here (last edition).
After 3 successful editions, the only problem was that my main goal was never achieved… I never really got to meet fellow game developers. I was just too damn busy organizing and managing the event.
During those first 3 years I was more and more interested by creating experiments and coding, check some of them still online: (Open in Chrome… code might be broken in other browsers)
Before the fourth edition I thought… wait a minute… I could participate in the next edition instead of just organizing it… this would give me the motivation to go through all the pain of organizing it (raising money, finding partners, dealing with media, dealing with governments, etc.). I could finally experiment my own creation.
I asked people working at my co-working space (I opened the first co-working space in Quebec city, we can talk about this too) to join me and create a team for the next edition. As they were web developers we decided to go with web technology for our game.
Although really fun, this would be the last edition of the Bivouac, since I realized it was taking too much of my time.
Managing is not something I enjoyed that much, what I liked and still like the most is the process of creating.
This is not the end of the story though… when I wrapped up the last edition, I decided that I wanted to launch a web business. I really enjoy coding small experiments but I wasn’t seeing how it could pay the bills. Based on my experience managing and organizing the Bivouac… I though really hard about some of my pains… one was a simple universal problem faced by all event organizers…. printing the name badges. The process, the tools, everything sucked. But most importantly it sucks exactly at the time where you have no time for it… few hours before the start of your events.
THERE… that was it. I would create the Vista Print of name badges. I did not do any market research, I was my market research. I just started coding.
After 3 months I realized that I needed some help for the visuals, and the guys with whom I created my game at the Bivouac and worked at my co-working space were all brilliant front end engineers. I offered them to partner with me before launch. Which they did enthusiastically.
Then…. the luck, just few weeks before we launch, we received an email from Mitch Colleran at Eventbrite asking us if we were developing a name badge tool, he saw our requests to the dev mode version of their API, our app was named “Name Badges”. He was really excited about it…. because name badges was one of their users’ biggest pain. He told us that at launch he would promote us through Eventbrite’s newsletter, Twitter account and blog.
It took 2 weeks to get our first order, 4 weeks to reach 1k$ monthly revenue. At this point we applied to Y Combinator, got invited to the interview. And…. got totally destroyed. At the interview they cleverly brought the person responsible for printing name badges at YC events, and they asked us to convince her to use our product…. easy, right? Well she started by saying she uses mail merge to print the name badges. The problem is that we had absolutely no idea what mail merge was. From that moment the interview went downhill. We were not selected.
After a few more months I asked my partners if they wanted to go full time with me? They all said yes! But we would not only work on Conference Badge. We would also try to experiment with other ideas and projects.
Remember above when I said one lesson I learned with Jeuxgratuits.net was that you don’t need to change a winning recipe. That was our mantra with ConferenceBadge. We would give stellar customer support and fix the problems as they show up… but we wouldn’t try to expand in other verticals of the event business. It was just a damn great tool to create name badges.
At some point Etienne (one of my partners) came with the idea of a tool to help us draft emails as a team like a Google doc. We were all excited by the idea.
The more we built it, the more we used it, the more we realized first-hand the incredible impact a tool like Missive could have on our business. At that point, there was no coming back, Missive was our main mission.
Fast forward 3 years…. we now have good growth for Conference Badge, and Missive's customer base is growing at 25% month over month.
It took a really long time get to a point where Missive was competitive… but now after 3 years of labor… we are receiving amazing reviews and are really confident of the product future.
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Don't hesitate to follow me on twitter if you found the above interesting. Make sure to give Missive a try... it's the best email/chat client you can use to manage your business! And if you ever need name badges, you know where to get them! ✌️
I will hang around if you have questions for me.