12
Likes
8 Comments

"Definitely Not Trying to Fit In" with Tobias van Schneider

Episode #035

How do you get people to notice what you're doing and sign up in droves? If Tobias van Schneider is any indication, the last thing you should do is try to fit in. Learn how his history of counterintuitive decisions, going against the grain, and having zero expectations has led to a string of successful products, and some pretty spectacular failures as well.

  1. 6

    Wow. This is definitely one of the most wisely 2 hours I've spent on the internet so far. Thank you so much Tobias and Courtland for this podcast 🙏🏼

  2. 5

    Don't kill your momentum by making things overly complicated is really great advice @Tobias. My natural inclination is to spend too much time on the product and software. What I have isn't winning any beauty contests but it's enough to validate my idea.

    I stopped trying to overcomplicate things with too many features and am only focused on validating my core idea.

  3. 4

    That was such a great episode! I'd love to see more!

  4. 2

    My Main Takeaways:

    • Tobias dropped out of highschool and did an apprenticship in IT. Through this apprenticship he discovered his passion for Computer Science. And eventually went down the path of a UI/UX designer.

    • Tobias started off doing website design. Then the iOS App Store came out, and became what everybody was talking about, so he "followed the money" and just focused on apps.

    • Tobias didn't want to put himself "in a box" by being JUST a designer, or JUST a developer, he prefers to be a maker, a jack-of-all-trades.

    • Tobias likes to write because it helps him to think. He started writing for himself, and then decided to publish it.

    • Semplice was born out of a problem Tobias solved for himself. Tobias wanted to make a highly customised portofolio website, so he built a platform to do that, then people started asking how Tobias made his portfolio, and then Tobias eventually got the idea of making his portfolio platform an actual product.

    • Tobias never thought of making his portfolio platform a business, until friends kept on asking Tobias for a tool like it. It took Tobias 4 years to finally pull the trigger.

    • Tobias and his friend (now busines partner on Semplice) re-built this portfolio platform from scratch, and it took 1.5 years. During this time, Tobias says that he began thinking of it as a product, partly because he was also working on a product at Spotify.

    • Tobias and his friend had low expectations when launching what is now Semplice, they just wanted to make 100 sales, not get rich, that's it, and this was fine to them because they were "doing it for fun".

    • They didn't have it all figured out at the start.

    • Tobias says that we must keep side-projects simple and stupid.

    • If you have an idea, and someone does it before you and achieves some success, do not be discouraged. Rather, be encouraged because they validated your idea, so now you can go ahead and execute your own - with your own special twist ;)

    • Tobias made his simple weather app to make fun of all the other complex weather apps as a joke. He put it out there, it got surprisingly great feedback, so he started developing it charged about 1$ for it, and it blew up, getting a couple million downlods.

    • Tobias says that only 30% of his projects see the light of day. And an even smaller subset of those projects "do well"

    • Just put out ideas.

    • Tobias didn't want to grow Simplice too fast, he wanted to keep growth managable, and grow it slowly.

    • The first people that Tobias hired didn't have fixed roles, they were also designers but could do other things too, generalists.

    • In the early phases, Tobias was happy to take on freelance projects, or even a full-time job, to make ends meet while working on Simplice

    • If a project stops being fun, then Tobias kills it off or hires someone else to do that part.

    • Tobias had bad grades in school, he had problems with authority.

    • Tobias recommends that we find a project-partner, not simply for sharing tasks. But for motivating each other, keeping each other accountable, and bouncing ideas off of each other.

    • Tobias meets a lot of people who have mades of tonnes of projects but don't put anything out there!

    • If you show up CONSISTENTLY, people will recognise that. It's not necessarily about quality as much as it is about consistency.

    • Tobias slowed down on his podcast because he already had a lot of other things on his plate.

    • Failure - Tobias created a concept of a new email platform called dot mail, and grew an email list to over 100,000 people who were interested, only for the idea to fail due to technical constraints.

    • Tobias ensures that he is having fun working on all the things that he is working on.

    • Tobias says that he doesn't need to know EXACTLY where he wants to go as long as he knows where he does NOT want to go and avoids those areas.

  5. 2

    Great interview! Thanks for transcribing.

  6. 1

    Wow... That one has been one of my favorites. Amazing!

  7. 1

    This podcast really speaks to me - the podcasts here are always interesting but this one was pretty much sublime. Thanks Courtland & Tobias!

  8. 1

    A great podcast. Thanks for doing it and sharing it. It was fun :)