Hi! I'm AJ, maker of Carrd + other stuff. AMA!
HELLO IH!@#!!
Per the title, I'm AJ (aka "ajlkn" on Twitter), the guy behind an assortment of www projects, most recently/notably Carrd (carrd.co), a one-page site builder for pretty much anything.
Here to answer your questions about Carrd, making stuff, myself, and the rising threat of kpop.
PS: Thank you Courtland + Channing for inviting me to do this!
How do you decide pricing for your product?
(same question as @danielgg so I'll answer here)
Detailed info here (👉 https://themakingof.carrd.co/#build-paid), but it basically came down to looking at what Carrd offered relative to other competing products and picking a price that a) felt reasonable given the additional features you'd get, and b) was low/affordable enough to entice folks on the free plan to upgrade to the paid one. The $19/year Pro plan I settled on felt like it struck a good balance, and while I've added a ton of new features since launch I've avoided having to raise this by simply shifting more advanced features to new plan tiers (like the $49/year Pro Plus plan).
Thanks for doing this, AJ! What's on your 2018 roadmap, and how did you decide on it?
Hey, thank you for having me! 🙏🙏🙏
So, half my roadmap is pretty much just features/upgrades I couldn't get to last year, like:
New elements (mobile-style menu thing, image carousel, etc)
More integrations with third-party services
Numerous builder improvements/niceties to make things less annoying
More templates!
The other half is slightly less defined, but pretty much comes down to dealing with the crazy growth I've seen over the last 6-9 months. That includes, among other things, scaling up my infrastructure (which you and I have talked about a bit), building better management/administrative tools, and doing a deep dive into how/why people use Carrd so I can plan out the next wave of features/upgrades (which I guess answers the second half of your question; that is, much of what goes on my roadmap has, and will likely continue to be, based heavily on user feedback/requests).
Hey AJ,
Have you ever considered just straight up embracing the huge k-pop community that uses carrd and pivoting to an exclusively k-pop website builder. :)
2018 roadmap is 90% kpop
what the hell happened here?
You tell me man: 👉 https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=carrd OR carrd.co&src=typd
lmfao wow?! what the hell i see 4 carrd websites in the last hour wow! are these kids bringing home the bacon?
Ah, and that's the thing: I haven't seen all that many upgrade to Pro, so while they're good for metrics like users and sites, not so much for revenue .... yet
wow, heard the k-pop thing mentioned before but didn't realize the extent of it until looking at that search. That is actually amazing.
No kidding! Kind of came out of nowhere.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic but I think there's a lot of things you can do there (＾ｖ＾)
Mostly sarcastic :) But you do raise an interesting point, and it's actually something I've had to think about since all this kpop stuff began: how do I cater to these huge (and hugely diverse) parts of my userbase without going too far in a particular direction that my already-niche product becomes even more of a niche product?
Per my reply to @csallen, that's half of my challenge for 2018.
Why not pivot? If these people are paying then it's a huge market , you could get like a million+ users then sell?
Ah, that's the thing: they're not for the most part -- which is fine (Carrd is meant to be a free service w/paid upgrades), but it does mean I need to do some research into what these folks want and what they're willing to pay for that they're not seeing in the Pro offerings (if anything).
When are you planning to do an identity reveal?
Don't tell me it's non-important again 👀
It's non-important
AGAIN
🔥🔥🔥
How long did it take you to build and launch Carrd? How did you support yourself while you were building it?
Hmmmm let's see:
Start = June/July of 2015
Private Alpha = December 2015
Beta = Jan/Feb 2016
Launch = 2016
... soooo about 9 months in all.
As to how I supported myself: basically my other gig (HTML5 UP + Pixelarity) and some other random side projects I had kicking around.
@aj How about before your side projects started generating revenue? Were you working on part-time gigs or you had a full-time job to support you?
So I actually got lucky and fell into revenue-generating side projecting halfway through college. Decided to just stick with it after graduating in lieu of getting a "real" job and I've been doing that ever since.
nice! :)
Hey! Great AMA. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions:
How old are you, at least an interval ?
I am trying to build a similar service like you, a builder for specific industry and therefore would like to ask you how do go about serving and storing assets(images mostly) ? Do you upload it to CDN? Do you hardcode the links in the templates directly?
Also - there's a cool framework that might be of your interest http://grapesjs.com/
Cheers!
18-35 :)
No CDN yet, but that's likely in the future given how fast things are growing
Hey AJ!
Huge fan of everything you do. I'm a big Pixelarity/HTML5 Up user and owe a lot of my learning and education to your templates back in my early days. Carrd felt like the next logical step in your work!
Do you have any planned updates for Pixelarity or HTML5 Up in the future or are you mainly focused on Carrd?
Yup. HTML5 UP has (out of necessity) been put on the back burner since around the middle of last year as things really began to pick up with Carrd, but both it and Pixelarity will see updates relatively soon.
In the case of Pixelarity, my business partner (another designer/dev I've worked with for years) will begin managing its workflow so we can push out updates on a much more regular basis while I transition to essentially full time work on Carrd.
Awesome, that makes sense! Thanks for the reply :)
👍
Hey AJ, are you ever going to reveal your true identity?
Or will your powers be diminished if you take that mask thing off?
Nah, I just don't want people knowing I'm actually a character @levelsio rolled for a D&D campaign that got a little out of control
Serious answer: eh, probably. I mean it's not like I'm actively hiding who I am or anything. I just want my work to be the focus, not me.
(and no, @amrith, I'm not Keanu)
@ajlkn So do you play D&D?
Not actively. More of a Shadowrun kind of guy
What's a D&D campaign?
A simulation inside this simulation
Do you really live in Nashville? I'm in the area too.
Hey, we should totally have a Nashville indie hacker meetup! We can do it in the form of a masquerade for AJs sake.
oops. old thread.
Yup! Grew up here
Hey AJ, I love the product congrats man.
A couple of questions.
How did you come up with the pricing plans?
Have you done any testing of the plan so far?
(answered in my reply to @Keyul)
Are you going to do a podcast episode next?
Yeah I just need to find a good voice changer
Maybe there’s a Darth Vader one somewhere!!
Love your work over at carrd.co! Couldn't recommend it more as a valuable tool for an MVP (Project Board was something I built overnight and got validated).
What motivated you to build this?
Also, allowing users to drag and drop images into the uploading section would be super helpful.
Best of luck ✌️
Nice job on Project Board! 👍
Motivation = Really needed to do something new/more challenging than what was pretty much my full time gig up until I began work on Carrd (site template/theme design stuff). Of course, figuring out that "something" was a challenge in itself 😅
Drag and drop to upload = For sure. On my to-do now :)
What is the technology stack behind the product? Did you basically create dynamic, reusable UI components that could be "plugged" into whatever the user needs?
Full details here (👉 https://themakingof.carrd.co/#build), but sort of. What users actually create in Carrd's builder are effectively just JSON definitions for each of their elements (which the builder/generator then translate into static HTML, CSS, and JS).
Was the entire building/shipping process for Carrd easier or harder than expected?
Also, do you have any advice for people working on their own web projects or ideas? Thanks! 🙏
Kinda followed a bell curve. The first 10% (planning, figuring stuff out) and last 10% (copy, polish, shipping) felt way more difficult than the 80% in between (the actual build). I guess once you know what you're building it's easy to make huge leaps forward (until you near the finishing line and realize fuuuuu I have to write boring marketing copy now).
As for advice: if you're building a project on the scale of Carrd, chunk it up into smaller projects you can tackle in the span of a week or two (as opposed to months). Those small wins really keep you motivated.
What do you listen to, if anything, when working?
Depends on the kind of work:
Design = pretty much anything, even videos/TV shows
Code = electronica/edm/nothing with lyrics
Solving a complex problem or planning = absolute silence
When's the EmailOctopus integration coming!?
Nah, seriously. Big fan of Carrd and used it to host a lander for one of my side-projects last year. How'd you come up with the name though, and do you ever worry about the memorability aspect of it? I'm always forgetting whether it's Caard, Carrd or Cardd.
Email me if you haven't already!
As to the name: that was ... ugh. Details here (👉 https://themakingof.carrd.co/#plan-name), but naming this thing presented a unique challenge because it had to be both brandable and low key so it wouldn't stick out too much in user URLs. Oh, AND the domain had to be available :) "Carrd" was literally the best I could come up with, and while the caard/carrd/cardd thing definitely concerned me early on I think it's getting to the point where it's not as big of an issue.
Would love to see some less flexible, out-of-the-box components, like testimonials, hero, pricing table, so i can drag and drop edit some texts and boom it ready. Today i find my self adjusting elements on a too basic level
Might be planning something along these lines :)
Hello AJ.. I'm Cragary.. Really loved carrd.. pure and clean design.. Big up
Thank you 🙏
Do you know @levelsio IRL or are just internet friends?
Do you feel you would have been as successful with carrd.co if you didn’t already have a following for your other templates?
What tools do you use?
Will you follow me on Twitter :P? @willpower_iam if you do want to
AJ is just an alias?
Is there anything that the users of carrd.co can do to support you?
Internet friends! But I'm sure I'll run into him at some point.
Nope! Well, maybe. The following I had definitely gave me some good starting traction I'd otherwise not have.
Sublime Text + Photoshop. Basically it really.
I'll give that some thought!
Nope!
Keep sending feedback, bug reports, suggestions, etc. so I can keep making it better!
Next time I'm in Nashville, beer at Santa’s?
Appreciate the offer but that would require manifesting in physical form. That's a lot of PLA.
Where/How did you first learn to code? What language?
How do you learn now?
First language = Basic (10 GOTO 10 looooooooool), then I eventually discovered C and kind of went down the path of C-style languages.
Where/how = Self-taught, although I started as a kid w/o Internet access so mostly by modifying existing demo programs and seeing what happened (or rather, what didn't happen cause I had no idea what I was doing).
Learning now = On the job :)
Builder is js app, but how about generator that turns json to html? Is that build using js/node or some other language?
It's a mix, but yeah node definitely comes into play on the backend.
Hey AJ, I've been super impressed by Carrd and your story (I read your lengthy history of making it).
(My carrd site is https://robotowl.co )
Here's what's a bit mystifying to me: I don't really understand why I'm a Carrd user. (!)
I've used Squarespace and Wix, and while I have a few specific complaints about them, I never seriously considered using them for something I cared about. Then I saw how @bramk was using Carrd -- particularly how easy it was to insert Airtable tables -- and it just clicked.
The low pricing is part of it, for sure -- it just felt like less of a commitment. I nearly immediately upgraded to one of the intermediate plans.
Why do you think people are using Carrd?
Wow, thanks for working through that :)
To answer your question: aside from the usual stuff (price, ease of use, etc), I think this:
... is probably a subtle but very big part of it. Something I consciously did while planning Carrd was at least attempt to avoid doing things that might annoy users, and IMO one of the biggest is forcing them to commit to stuff before they're sure they want to jump in. That's why you don't have to create an account just to try it out (just open https://carrd.co/build and have at it), you don't have to upgrade to Pro if you don't need its features (just keep using it for free; I'm not going to nag you to upgrade), and if you do decide to upgrade, you don't even have to hand over a CC for automatic billing (just pay as you go).
Yeah, looking back, I think the natural easing into the pricing was done superbly. By the time Carrd prompted me to pay more, I was already totally convinced, and the price that was being asked was eminently reasonable. I really never considered not paying.
As opposed to Squarespace, which I hesitate to recommend to people because it's really unreasonably expensive. Also, my guess is that Squarespace is better now, but when I first tried it it took me half an hour just to replace the stock text site name with a custom image. I just feel like throughout your design of Carrd, everything is lower friction and more intuitive.
Really, really well done. Paying for it is one of the easiest bills I pay now.
A low friction experience was indeed what I was going for, so I'm certainly glad to hear that's been your experience with it (but of course, if there are any rough edges I may have missed, do let me know :)
Sorry for bumping an older post of yours, but how is Bram using Carrd exactly? You said you saw it, so I'm curious what in particular you are referencing. Thanks bud!
bramk made like a dozen MVPs (really, they were just teaser sites for nonexistent MVPs, which is a great idea in and of itself) using mostly just Carrd and Airtable.
Here's one link where he talks about using Carrd:
https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/ask-ih-feedback-on-my-course-landing-page-concept--KraXWs_P43R2HEPlbkJ
Thank you. Funny enough I found all off his and ben tossell’s Posts about the quick mvps over the last few days and have read and analyzed them all
Oh, I'm realizing I may have confused Tossell and Kanstein! Both former Product Hunt community managers...
What did you think of all the mvp's?
WHO R U? I WANT A REVEAL.
https://media.giphy.com/media/dikZBPXTbjhGo/giphy.gif
https://media.giphy.com/media/W912Gu0vgfdO8/giphy.gif
AJ, Absolutely GREAT job in the creation of Carrd! Thanks for giving us a hint at your 2018 roadmap to make Carrd even better. Any thoughts on providing a forum for us "Heavy" users to be able to help provide support and share ideas, best practices, etc. as it pertains to the use of Carrd?
Hmm you know, I could see doing something like that now that it's kind of evolving into its own ecosystem. Will give this some thought.
What is one thing you believe (about being an Indie Hacker) that is an "unpopular" opinion or deemed controversial?
Unpopular among indie hackers, or unpopular among people in general?
amongst indie hackers.
something you think about being an indie hacker (which the majority of indie hackers don't think)
Hmm, tough one cause I think being an "indie hacker" isn't something we necessarily planned to be, but rather ended up becoming as a result of the beliefs/attitudes we all share.
That said, if I had to pick one thing that might be a little controversial, it's my view that anyone doing this should acquire at least some programming education (in algorithms, data structures, logic, etc.) whether it's through self teaching or formal education. IMO you can get pretty far with trial and error, but knowing efficient ways to do stuff can save you a TON of time and give you the tools to tackle even bigger, more complex problems you'd otherwise deem impossible.
hmm interesting. thanks man!
ive decent at javascript / node / react but have never looked past that into 'algos, data structures' etc ...
Any recommendations? Playlists / tutorials?
Huh you know, I haven't looked in a while but I'll dig through YouTube and tweet something out (and post back here as well :)
I just want to know about the Tech Stack behind the Dashboard / Login / Custom Domain, Publishing stuff?
Is it Node.js ?
How do you handle customer support as Carrd scales? Have you reached a point where you can't handle all of the support questions?
Not yet! Partly (I think) because Carrd is simple enough to be largely self-explanatory, and partly because I have a lot of experience rapidly working through support emails (thanks to Pixelarity).
Hi AJ! I'm late to the AMA. I use skel on projects whenever possible. Are you still using it on anything? Is there a different lightweight alternative you know about or recommend?
And I'm late to responding (sorry!)
Yes and no. Yes in that some of my current stuff still uses it, and no in that Skel will soon be deprecated in favor of a more stripped down, lightweight thing called Responsive Tools (creative I know). Already in use within some of my projects (eg. the main Carrd site), and should be up on GitHub in the coming weeks.
Basically, HTML grid systems are largely obsolete at this point, but a lot of the other stuff in Skel (eg. breakpoint handling, events, etc) were and still are super useful so I wanted to extract just those features and put them in a new, even less intrusive package.
Excellent work!
Hey AJ,
Love Carrd. Would like to know if password-protected, full-screen containers are anywhere close on the roadmap :). Also, any possibility of having an RSS feed coming out of a Carrd website?
Thanks for the great product!
Full screen containers = yes (once I figure out a good workaround for iOS's handling of 100vh).
Password-protected containers = ??? Unless you just mean password protected sites, in which case I'm giving this some thought.
RSS = Hmm, dunno if that's really needed since Carrd's not really meant for blog/article-style content.
Thanks!
Just commenting to say I love your product. Im on a pro plan and it’s allowed me to validate ideas so quickly, already have 3 failed ideas which I’ve been able to go through so fast on Carrd.
Thank you for using it!
(and hopefully idea #4 will be a success :)
Could you please share what were your steps and/or strategy to validate quickly? Admittedly I haven't looked into Carrd yet, but will right after this post. What I can say with certainty is that you need, at a minimum, a static content webpage/lander to get people to see what your idea is all about, and some metric to validate that the idea is worthwhile, such as capturing email addresses.
Does Carrd provide the email-capture piece? If not, it seems like quite a bit of work to run through an idea landing page AND email capture three times! You're definitely persistent...
Heya, so I should clarify, I use Carrd for side projects not my main project.
Yes Carrd has both a static lander and captures email addresses either by just sending you subscribers or by integrating your MailChimp account.
My steps are quite lengthy outside of Carrd, so I can create quick web pages that communicate my idea and capture any interest but I also go and find people and lead them to my site, so all my traffic is driven organically which is quite a bit of work, but my criteria for Failure is different than usual, failure to me can mean when an idea pivots too much and becomes more complex, usually this is amazing but anything that takes too much time from my main project I have to abandon, if the idea doesn't gain any traction at all, then I abandon, and I move quite quickly through different ideas. I'm only persistent because it's fun, small stuff not anything too hard.
Hope this clarifies.
How many projects did you try before Carrd that failed? What were your most important learnings?
Hmm, haven't really had any major failures/flops but I did have some older projects that died out because I became too complacent with their success and kind of just expected them to keep going forever.
So I guess to answer your second question: don't get too comfortable cause things can literally change overnight :)
Back in the day, for your first product, how did you find your first customers?
Pretty much this 👇
Make something people want
Release it for free!
Build a following/audience on the strength of that
Eventually create an (entirely optional) premium version people can pay for to support your work
Profit! (hopefully)
Not always applicable, but it's exactly what ended up happening with HTML5 UP (unintentionally, as I only conceived of a paid version of this after like a ton of user requests) and Carrd (deliberately, only this time free/paid is combined into a single product).
Awesome product, I'm a huge fan.
What was the hardest/unexpectedly difficult part of building Carrd?
By far the part that literally makes the money -- handling plan upgrades, processing renewals (and auto-renewals), coordinating with a certain payment processor that isn't Stripe ...
How many hours did you program before you launched carrd.co pro (so not programming for carrd, no from your first line of code)?
Wait, like how many hours had I been programming prior to starting work on Carrd?
exactly :)
What's next?
Maaaan I haven't even figured out what's now
But seriously, more Carrd :)
What’s the hardest thing about being a solo founder? Is being based out of an atypical location (Tennessee) even a factor?
Woops, missed this:
For the work itself, no. I can build and run my stuff from anywhere with at least some semblance of an internet connection.
For stuff peripheral to the work, probably. Being outside SF/etc. obviously means missing out on the cultural/social/networking stuff I'd otherwise have access to, but that could very well change/decentralize if the nomad thing continues to take off.
Definitely the sheer number of plates you have to spin since you're basically responsible for everything (from infrastructure to customer support). Of course, as you grow and bring in people to share the load, it'll IMO morph from the hardest thing into the best(est?) thing because you now know how everything works (having done every job yourself) and can delegate the right tasks to the right people.
(at least, that's what I like to tell myself :P)
What is your favorite color?
#666666
I know so edgy right?
It's so #BADA55!
Okay this one is way more edgy
Hey AJ, Any special plans for HTML5Up now that Carrd is working so well. Do you think creating a builder for those templates/themes would work?
Probably, but it'd be a much more complex product at that point. Big part of what made Carrd feasible for me to build alone was its limited scope.
Of course, given how much the thing has evolved over the last two years it's entirely possible it'll evolve to the point where it can make HTML5 UP-ish designs :)
Hey thanks for the reply. Yeah that makes sense.
I took the liberty of slicing up one your HTML5Up themes to see if I could make it work it in the web builder I am making (http://cicerone.co). There is a lot that doesn't work yet, but otherwise it looks promising.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/cc-deploy-test/uploads/cc-html5up-demo-opt.gif
It's early days for Cicerone but I want to talk to theme/template designers to see if they would want to adapt their work, and what they need most from a 3rd party builder like Cicerone. If interested LMK.
Good for now, but feel free to use the HTML5 UP stuff man. Looking good! 👍
No problem, thanks AJ. Keep up the good stuff!
I like this. Look simple and stylish!
Thanks!
A fantastic product i am using. Thank you very much for releasing it.
Thank you!
Hi AJ. I love Carrd. I plan on using it quite a bit. Any way you can add a feature that allows for a pop up Word/PDF form?
Hmm, point me to an example of this and I'll check it out.
I have a service based business that requires my clients to print out a shipping label and Word doc form in which they fill out with the items they're sending me.
Here's my site that I want to move over to Carrd (http://www.fivestarhandpiecerepair.com/dental-handpiece-repair-shipping/)
In the middle of the page is a packing slip and mailing label my clients print out.
Does Carrd have this capability?
Greetings Vez, I happened to see your post to AJ about Carrd. I use it quite extensively myself. While Carrd does not currently have a file embed element, it's quite simple to store Word docs or PDFs in the cloud on Google Drive and then create shared URL links that you can link to a button or text link to reproduce what you have on your site.
Hey @Carbonsquare thanks for the input. I might just try it. I hope @ajlkn continues to add small features like he's been doing. I love it and plan on using Carrd for a lot of different projects.
Hey yeah! Sorry I missed your post, but what @Carbonsquare pointed out is exactly the answer I would have given :)
Here is a question, What is your suggestion, if somebody wants to start a same service like you ? :) :) :)
Go for it! :) Just be sure to put your own spin on it so it stands out as its own, unique thing.
I love this! When successful entrepreneurs encourage others to dive in, even if it’s a direct competitor.
Abundance mindset. There’s room for everyone!
Exactly! There's a reason why there are like 23942893582 site builders and everyone seems to have users/customers
This comment was deleted 8 months ago.
How dare you
FFS @amrith I was about to reply to myself in the past