Business Books, Coaches, and "Getting Rich" with John Doherty of Credo

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 John Doherty of Credo. Welcome back to the show, John.

John Doherty: 33s

Thanks for having me, Courtland. It’s good to be here, man. It's been a while.

Courtland Allen: 35s

It's been a long, I think you were on episode number 59, which was in 2018. So, it's been a very long while.

On that episode, I think you walked me through basically the kind of creation of your company Credo and how you got to where you were then. I think you were at like $20,000 a month in revenue from Credo then.

John Doherty: 54s

Yeah. We have basically doubled, but to be completely frank with you, that doubling has happened in the last year.

Courtland Allen: 1m 1s

Let me do my best attempt to describe what Credo is, or at least what it was the last time we spoke, and you correct me where I'm wrong.

Credo is kind of an ideal way to find an agency to help you market your website. So, if you need someone to do writing for you or to build your website for you, or to run your Facebook or Google ads for you, or to do SEO for you, but you're not sure how to find the best people or the right people for you, you go to Credo.

You guys are experts at this. You have extremely deep connections with everybody in the industry. You know exactly who's good, who's bad, who's right for what job. I kind of go through you, you find me the right person. Then you take a cut of that relationship.

Is that an accurate description of how Credo works?

John Doherty: 1m 40s

Credo helps companies find and hire the right pre-vetted digital marketing firm. Then we're actually paid by the agencies. Agencies pay us for consistent monthly sales pipeline. We’re a two-sided business. We have the buyer side, and we have the agency side.

So, if I'm talking to someone, that's looking for an SEO firm, I say we help companies find and hire the right pre-vetted digital marketing and SEO firms. If I'm talking to an agency, I say we help agencies get more qualified prospects in their sales pipeline so they can grow their agency.

Courtland Allen: 2m 6s

So, in your situation, I think what's interesting about your story is that I've had a few people on the podcast recently who were like the pandemic hit and we crushed it. We're now making $10 million a year. We just started our business last January, which is cool. It's nice.

Some people are doing well, but the pandemic really did a number on you guys. Describe to me, what you were doing before sort of your current iteration of Credo and why that didn't work in the pandemic.

John Doherty: 2m 31s

Yeah. We, in about the start of 2019, started building out a full marketplace. Basically, the vision here was that clients don't, buyers, don't know how to run the hiring process well. And agencies are kind of all over the place when it comes to pitching and they don't often give reporting like they should.

Basically, I had these Ideals of this is what a good agency does. You can go the one side of educating and saying, this is what a good agency should do. Trying to teach the agencies to do it, trying to teach the buyers to look for it. But then sometimes people don't follow through.

I was like, we can build software that just requires it, and the agency is not getting paid until they report. They send through proposals, it's there within the system, the client can review it in one place. Cause otherwise it's all over the place.

We built out this full marketplace, launched it in September 2019. I started moving agencies over to it. Basically, we got, we had a small kind of annual fee for agencies that we were referring work to. Then when an agency closed, we would then, the client would then pay the agency through our system.

They'd pay them in escrow. Say Stripe agreed to hire an SEO agency for $2,500 a month through Credo. At the time you would then fund that first month. You hired them now, you're starting in June. You would fund June in Credo, Agency would do the work, report to you within five days of the end of the month, the start of the next month. Then once that was all good and they did what they said they were going to do, then we would pay out to the agency on your behalf, and we took a cut of that.

Basically, in about six months’ time, we went from processing no money through that system to processing six figures a month through that system, paying out to agencies. We took, it averaged out to about 15 percent. But it was really operationally heavy.

Clients pushing back and being like, well, why should I pay anything now? You're not actually paying, you're putting it in escrow. If they don't deliver, you don't end up paying anything and we give it back to you, that kind of thing.

It was a lot of support. It was super operationally heavy. Because we took a percentage of work that was being billed through the system, basically, Courtland, we did not have control over our own revenue because we weren't the ones retaining them. The agency was.

That was a terrible business to run. So, hard lesson learned, I've learned it a couple of times now, but we had this idea of arbitration where if an agency didn't deliver, we would basically work out something in between the two.

It's like, okay, they did half the work they get paid half. Client, are you good with that? Agency, or agency basically had to take it, right? Because they're the ones that screwed it up. But then I was, I realized, I was literally spending time to make less money, which doesn't really make sense.

Courtland Allen: 5m 24s

It's also not fun to do any sort of arbitration. This would happen on Indie Hackers sometimes. People would have arguments, like you published this interview, my co-founder and I disagree about this thing. Then it's like, he said, she said, and then I would go into these, back in the past, and try to investigate.

Every single time, like this is why we have the legal system. This is ridiculously difficult. It's not fun. There's a huge waste of time. I'm just taking it down.

John Doherty: 5m 45s

Right. I had a process for doing it, but I mean, dude, I remember it happened. It was New Year's Eve 2019 going into 2020. I get this person that I could tell was going to be a pain from the start. They are claiming this agency didn't deliver, et cetera, et cetera.

It's New Year's Eve and I'm arbitrating this thing, spending my time to make less money. I just ended up refunding them, telling the agency you screwed this up. I'm sorry. It was like 6:00 PM on New Year's Eve. I was at our cabin by Breckenridge and was just so annoyed and was like, why am I doing this? It was terrible. I did hire someone to do that sort of thing, but it still just wasn't worth it. Then I was paying someone else for us to make less money. Just overall did not make sense.

Basically, what happened, long story short, Courtland, is COVID hit. We were up, we had been dominating our numbers beginning of 2020, number of leads we needed to get in order to hit our numbers, et cetera. Things were growing. It was hard, but things were growing.

Basically, the week that COVID hit, we went from being 120% above our goal for the month to being at 75% of our goal for the month. Lead numbers just got decimated, clients fired their agency.

We took about a 20% revenue haircut, and we were basically operating at breakeven at that point. Targeting, we were going to be quite profitable within six, eight months. But we were basically breakeven. Then we went into the red. We had a cash buffer, but we still went into the red and I was like, this is not sustainable. My business partner, CTO, Ali, and I, we sat down and were like, what do we do?

I basically just started asking agencies is this part of the product offering you any value, basically from the intro on. They're like, not really, I kind of hate it. And I'm like, you just called my baby ugly. And they're like, yeah, exactly. I'm like, thank you.

I heard this five times in a row and was like, all right, I know what we're going to do. We're going to cut the project in half. We're going to stop requiring proposals and everything come through the system. We're not even going to let that come through anymore.

We're basically going to charge agencies on a subscription basis, but we're going to tell them how much this lead is potentially worth. We vetted it out. We know how much they're spending. We know what they're looking for. We know from our historical data how much they're probably going to spend.

I pitched it to a couple of agencies, and I was like, would you pay this? They're like, absolutely. I'm like, okay, cool. Next one, I went a little bit higher. Would you pay this? They're like, absolutely. Found the cap and that's what we started charging people at.

So, we flipped the switch on that in July. It was April, May that we decided to trial it. In 13 days, we had made the changes to the product and got five agencies signed up and the revenue already surpassed the monthly revenue we'd been making with the marketplace.

It took me way quicker to get to way more revenue. Then we’re like, all right, we're just going all in on this. Sunsetted the second half of the product moved everyone over to the subscription product. We've doubled since last July.

Courtland Allen: 8m 34s

How did it feel to have people, as you said, call your baby ugly? Maybe in the middle of a crisis, when things aren't working, I can imagine it's like, okay, I'm going to take you seriously. But let's say they had done that in 2019 when things didn't seem to be working, would you have taken their feedback as seriously?

John Doherty: 8m 49s

No, I wouldn't have. It felt relieving for them to call my baby ugly because that was kind of what I thought it was, and it's kind of what I needed to hear at the time. You know, we don't really go, you don't really go looking for feedback like that when you're not ready to hear it. When you are ready to hear it, you're kind of looking for the validation that it is.

So, it actually felt really good because it made it a very easy decision. If someone, if half had been like, it's great and half had been like, I don't like this specific other thing. Then it's like, well, who do you listen to?

But everyone was like, yeah, this part is adding no value to my business. It's actually bifurcating things and making my life worse. It was like, all right, fair enough. This is clear.

What do you want? We want qualified leads on our calendars. Okay, cool. We're going to stop requiring all this other thing. We're going to bring you onto the project and we're going to schedule them with you so that they're not, so they're much less likely to ghost on you. They're like, that's amazing.

So, we're kind of an outsource SDR service in a way for marketing, for marketing agencies. But it works and they get a lot of value from it. We have agencies that have closed over a million dollars in the last year. One that's closed close to $2 million of work in the last year from Credo.

Courtland Allen: 9m 58s

Yeah. When your business is in trouble, the best thing you could possibly do is figure out what the problem is. And the challenge is there's almost always like five or 10 different variables, different levers you could pull, different things you could change, that might be the culprit.

It might be because you're not working hard enough on marketing. It might be because it's just a temporary phase in the pandemic and things are gonna come to a groundswell if you just waited out a couple months. It might be because your pricing is off, it could be anything.

If you can find consistent feedback from your customers who are all saying, no, it's this one thing we really don't like, it’s such a weight off your shoulders from having to do this sort of wild goose hunt, and just hope that you've guessed or that you figured out what the right thing is to fix.

John Doherty: 10m 37s

And the way that I like to do it when I'm building is that I often ask myself, I paid close attention to my own kind of reaction to the business. I'm like, why do things feel hard? Or why am I just frustrated all the time right now or whatever is going on.

Usually, I can kind of trace it back and be like, I was feeling annoyed at this time. Or a client sent us an email at this time. They were unhappy when this happened. And if I, and I actually note it down, I put it into Trello, kind of have a running list of things. If someone just tells us something once, or we see something once put on the list. If we see it twice, start looking for it. If we see it a third time, then it's time to deal with it.

Then I kind of go through a whole rubric of is this causing customers to churn? Is it hurting revenue? That kind of thing and kind of what, and that makes it pretty obvious what the thing is that we should work on then.

We run pretty typical two-week sprints. We do try to focus on specific metrics undertakings for the quarter. This quarter has been success. So, how do we help more agencies close more work? How do we help more buyers find the right agency? That is our overall theme.

But you know, within that it’s this hurting revenue is, could this grow revenue and kind of making those tradeoffs there. We never get it completely right, but at least allows us to focus and know why we're doing it as opposed to like, hope this thing works. Which is kind of what we did with the marketplace, and we see how that worked out.

Courtland Allen: 11m 57s

Yeah. You did an AMA on Indie Hackers, I think maybe a month ago. You had some really good questions that people asked you and you had some interesting answers.

One of the questions that people asked was kind of about finding a business partner, who's not your co-founder because you're saying we, who is Credo, who you're working with? How big is your team? Cause I think when we, I interviewed you three years ago, you didn't have a co-founder, you were kind of doing this by yourself.

John Doherty: 12m 21s

Yeah, I still don't have a co-founder. I have a business partner. There are six of us that actively work on the business and with contractors and such, there's like, including a couple of agencies that we work with for our own marketing, kind of nine or 10 different entities that touch the business.

I mean, full transparency, we cracked the half million revenue mark back in February and we've grown more since then. We're doing okay these days. We're consistently profitable. I actually met my now business partner and my CTO, Ali, I had a post on LinkedIn in September 2017.

It was the two-year anniversary of me getting laid off. I did a post kind of like a broetry, one sentence per line post on LinkedIn, and it went viral. It got over 10 million views, almost a hundred thousand likes, thousands of comments and a VP of sales at Trustpilot saw it. He's in Denver, reached out, we had coffee, told him what he was doing.

He's like, you need to meet my friend Ali, who I used to work with. He introduced Ali and I, we met up at a local brewery for a beer, both ended up having three or four, couldn’t drive home. It went really well.

I wanted to redo my marketing site. So, I basically hired Ali to do that. We kind of partnered up on doing that. Then when I wanted to go into building the marketplace, I kind of pitched him on it. So, he's basically become a minority partner in the business.

He's kinda my business soulmate in a lot of ways. We think very well together. We actually have formed a parent company to launch some other businesses as well. Some other software businesses. We're 50-50 partners in that. I'm the majority owner of Credo for sure. He also has his own WordPress development agency and platform. It was honestly fate, but we got along really well.

What I would tell people that are looking for this is a) work on something interesting, b) network with others who may know those people, ask for those introductions and then work on something together, right. Something lightweight. Don't bring them on as a 50-50 co-founder or something like that if you don't know them.

Ideally you already have something working that has revenue. We were at, when I met Ali, I think we were probably at $18 to $20K a month, something like that. So, I had some revenue, I could pay him to build out the site, that kind of thing. And we just kind of stair stepped into it.

Courtland Allen: 14m 30s

Yeah. The person who asked you this question, I think he had like a business doing three or $400,000 a year in revenue. He was trying to figure out how do I bring on a partner? Cause he didn't really want to pay San Francisco prices and spend, you know, half of his revenue on a partner.

And I think the way that you and Ali did it, I think as he's working on the business, he's sort of getting paid more, like earning his way into the position. That just makes a lot of sense.

John Doherty: 14m 54s

That's exactly what we do here. It's worked out well. Yeah. I mean, we pay him, he's paid as a W2. He's not full-time on Credo, he's half time. We kind of pay him half of what we pay someone full-time. And then every quarter he's vesting in, it's four year vesting with the one-year cliff, pretty standard in the tech world.

Courtland Allen: 15m 12s

You also gave the advice that you don't think anyone should really ever give up equity in almost any situation. You recommended this book called “How to Get Rich”, which is literally the cheesiest title of any book.

But I added it to my reading list immediately because you're not the first person I've heard recommend this. My buddy, Sam who runs the newsletter of the hustle has also recommended this book. In fact, he said, it's one of the best business books he's ever read, or best books he's ever read period.

He treats it almost like a reference book for him. He goes back to it sort of relearn these lessons and every time Sam’s recommended a book, it's been good. So, to see him recommend it and you'd recommend it, it was pretty cool.

So, I looked at it, I looked it up basically when you did your AMA. And I was like, okay, how to get rich. Am I really going to buy this book on how to get rich? Even the cover is kind of bad. It's this cheesy, typical business book cover. This guy you've never seen or heard of before on the top. It says one of the world's greatest entrepreneurs shares his secrets and it's got like a gold sticker on it and stuff.

John Doherty: 16m 6s

Oh, it's fantastic. Sam is a way better entrepreneur than I am by the way. But you know, the fact that he recommended as well, got the recommendation from Dan Martell.

I tell people as well, it's super cheesy. It’s a super cheesy title, but it's really, really actionable. Basically, long story short, Felix Dennis started Dennis Publishing in the UK. They started Maxim magazine. They've done insanely well.

This dude is really, really well-known and it was basically just like a ton of war stories. I would almost say a British version of “The Hard Thing about Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz. Because he talks about starting off in this crappy apartment that basically didn't have a roof to owning private islands and jets.

It's a really fascinating story, but he basically talks about how the way to actually get wealthy is to own things. He says find the right people. If you need to give them some ownership, make them earn it. But they also actually need to earn it. Not just like I've been around for a while, I would like to have some of the business, but they are substantially adding to it. You could even like groom them up to take over from you. That's the kind of person that you should give it to.

Otherwise pay them well, give them bonus incentive structures. But most people are not motivated by that ownership, nor do they know how to properly value it. They've just heard that maybe they should want it when actually what they want is they want to be paid more, that kind of thing.

Then you have to decide, are they paid reasonably, should they get a pay raise? Or do you just say, you know what, I get it, but I can't pay you any more for this role, so I I'll help you find the next thing and I'll find something to replace you.

Which is kind of cold and calculated in a way. But it's also how business works. You can't pay someone more money for the same work just because they want it just because they've asked for it. You need to pay them for what they're doing.

Courtland Allen: 17m 50s

Yeah. There's sort of an article that Derek Sivers did on this book. He does book notes on all the best books that he's read. And he gave this one an eight out of 10. He has a section that just says ownership, ownership, ownership. It says to become rich, you must be an owner and you must try to own it all. You must strive with every fiber of your being while recognizing the idiocy of your behavior to own and retain control always near to 100% of any companies you can. It's pretty extreme, pretty extreme position, but it's clear cut.

John Doherty: 18m 16s

is. But I definitely highlighted that on my Kindle. I definitely highlighted that. It was just clear as day. I totally, I totally get it.

Courtland Allen: 18m 25s

I checked the Wikipedia article on the guy behind it. Cause I'd never heard of him. His name's Felix Dennis. He apparently died six or seven years ago, but he certainly sounds like a crazy guy.

He created the publishing company that owned Maxim magazine. He was worth like $750 million when he died and just donated it all to charity. He spent like a bunch of time as a poet and has like five books of poetry.

Then in the books, he talks about how he blew through over a hundred million dollars, which he spent on drugs and women apparently. It’s just like he lived a very full, controversial life to say the least. To hear him, give business advice seems, it seems like it would be an entertaining read if not a useful one, for sure.

John Doherty: 19m 4s

You know, and its interesting cause we had talked about coaches. I have a couple of coaches. I work with Dan Martell in SaaS Academy and then Chris Lema, who's VP of Product Innovation at Liquid Web and Nexus, the hosting company. And I've worked with another coach before as well.

It's funny that you mentioned that about Felix Dennis, because one of the things that I've noticed over the years, working with coaches, I’ve spent over six figures on coaches over the last four years. One of the things I look for in a coach is, a) do they have, have they been a coach before? I don't want to hire someone that doesn't know how to coach someone else.

Do they have the experience growing the kind of business that I'm growing? Dan started clarityFM, grown some other software businesses, kind of high ticket stuff. Chris has done a lot of that stuff as well.

Then the really important one for me, that a lot of people miss, is do I want to have the kind of life that they have and that they are building for themselves? Because if someone who's just building businesses to get seemingly rich and to have a hedonistic lifestyle and they're twice divorced, and their kids hate them…

Courtland Allen: 20m 10s

Which is a lot of people I know.

John Doherty: 20m 12s

Yeah. I have zero interest in that. Chris has been married for almost 20 years, has two awesome teenagers. Dan, his wife, Renee is fantastic. They have two boys, who are great. They’re both super driven, but they're also big about their family and love their family. So that's super important to me is that kind of cultural alignment there.

Dennis, his stuff is really interesting, but I also take it with a grain of salt. I mean, and he straight up says in that book, and I commend him for saying this is, he's like, if you want to get rich and, in his mind, it's like 50 mil plus net worth, and obviously he was worth way more than that. He was like, basically you have to sacrifice everything else to do that.

He's like, you're going to sacrifice relationships. You're gonna sacrifice marriages. You're gonna sacrifice your health and your sanity and that kind of thing. And I sat back and said, maybe I don't want to be rich.

Maybe that's not worth it. I don't want to be that level of wealthy, maybe just because of what it might require from me. I'm not willing to make those tradeoffs.

Courtland Allen: 21m 10s

Yeah, he talks about it. I found a quote from him that talks about the two priorities he has for being rich. This is after he had lived a life of debauchery and lots of pain and drug addiction, and he was addicted to crack cocaine. It's crazy this guy made as much money as he did.

He talks about being rich enough to buy the only two things apart from health and love that are worth fussing about in life. Number one is he says time. Number two was the option of not having to be in any particular place on any particular day, doing any particular thing in order to pay the rent or the mortgage, which is really just freedom. I think both of those things are just rich enough to have freedom.

You need significantly less than $50 million to have the freedom to do that. You could survive on a hundred times less than that and be completely fine and be free and happy and basically spend your life doing whatever it is you want to do.

John Doherty: 21m 55s

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I respected that about the book as well, and I think that's a really good way to think about, kind of building a business, building a life is like, is this actually giving me the freedom that I, that I want, whatever that means for you. For some, it's going to require, 10 million for others, it's going to require 1 million. Others is gonna require $150,000.

Courtland Allen: 22m 15s

What is that for you when you're working on Credo and you're working towards a goal, what kind of life do you want to live? Or are you already living that life?

John Doherty: 22m 21s

Getting close, getting closer for sure. I'm married. I have a two-year-old. I get to kind of choose what I work on most days. If I want to clear my schedule and not do any meetings that day, I can ping my assistant and she'll clear my schedule and reschedule everything for me. I have that.

I haven't worked a full Friday in then probably about two years. I work about four to four and a half days a week. I never, I almost never worked past really 4:30 PM. I start around nine. I'm not burning the midnight oil. I'm not working a lot of weekends. I haven't checked work email probably on weekends in probably three years.

There are still some like lifestyle things that I would like. My wife and purchased land up by Breckenridge last summer. We're looking at building a house up there, and it would be nice to not have to make some of the tradeoffs to keep it within budget.

I do read a lot of financial independence stuff, the financial independence subreddit, and, and that sort of thing. I saw Ramit Sethi. I mean, I really Ramit’s kind of take on a rich life, pushed me to think about what mine would be. He said something, he tweeted something the other day about how would you, what point have you reached where money doesn't matter?

A lot of people talked about, I don't look at prices on a menu anymore. That's when it, when it felt good. I'm there, but my goal is to really be like, plane, ticket, fly. I could book a ticket to anywhere in the world and not think twice about it. As travel opens back up, traveled a ton pre-pandemic, have a bunch of trips already planned this year after getting vaccinated.

That's kinda my goal. I don't think I'm ever going to be satisfied just because you can always have more. Other people always have more, but I feel pretty good about it at this point.

Courtland Allen: 24m 1s

What about your business life? Cause I think about it in terms of, okay. I want my personal life to be super financially secure and free. I don't want to have to look at the price of a meal when I go to a restaurant. That feels good, not having to do that.

But also, it's more than just about cost savings and being able to not feel anxiety, but also positives you can bring to your life. I think a lot about with Indie Hackers, how do I structure Indie Hackers such that it maybe not forces me, but at the very least pushes me or nudges me in the direction to do things that I'm going to find very fulfilling and entertaining and worthwhile.

Having this podcast is great because I can just have conversations like this. In fact, I have to have conversations like this two or three times a week. It’s literally my job to do a thing that I like to do, but I might not do otherwise. Cause I might be a little lazy, you know?

I want to go to the gym regularly; I don't do it. But I would love to, if I had a job that forced me to go to the gym. if I was a motivational speaker on personal training, I would have to go work out in order to look good and be able to do my job.

I wonder what that is for you. Do you think about how you structure Credo as a business such that it's actually enjoyable to run and do you have some sort of dream future where it's amazing to run and it makes your life even better than without?

John Doherty: 25m 10s

That's a good, it's a really good question. I would say a lot of the decisions that we've actually made with the business, there's a lot of different directions that we could go with it, but we've made the decision to kind of focus on agencies doing X amount of money per year, X number of people simply because we are expressly not a freelancer platform because people looking to hire freelancers usually have lower budgets. They also want a lot of attention. They need a lot of advice, et cetera, and they can't pay for it.

I value my time very highly, as you can tell. I work nine to four every day and I never do calls on Fridays. I value my time and my freedom very highly. We've just made the choice to not do a lot of things that would just make the business a lot more complicated. We might make more money, but we're not hurting for money for sure. We've made those tradeoffs.

For me, what gets me out of bed in the morning is and what gets me excited is seeing agencies winning and seeing good people winning. We've had some agencies on Credo before that turned out they actually weren't a great partner. Not that they were bad people, but they couldn't close, and they were kind of needy for, had questions. They never kind of got the system and how it worked, and they couldn't close work.

Versus we have some agencies that have been with us for years, that we've added millions of dollars to their bottom line. They're great people and become some of my closest friends in the industry. People like that, where they get a close and I'm like, dang, we just helped this agency make another a hundred thousand dollars this year. Which means that they can hire more people. They can deliver more value, that kind of thing.

Courtland Allen: 26m 53s

I've got my formula for starting a business that you love. Sometimes it says, it sounds cheesy when you're talking about, I'm making my customers happy and I'm making them a lot of money that way. That's what feels good. I think to me, before I started a business, I was like, that sounds cheesy. Why would that make me feel super good?

But the reality is, you probably spend more time thinking about your customers and talking to your customers than you do anyone else when you're running a business. If you want to start a business that you enjoy, I think the first thing you should do is you should identify a group of people that you really enjoy being around; people who actually bring you joy.

Then learn what they pay for and make them your customers. Then hire other people like you, who also love these same people. Then do the rest of it. It's that same habits, guard your time, be patient, cause it's probably going to take a long time and try to enjoy the journey or set things up so you do enjoy the journey so you're not just constantly stressed about getting to some milestone that you may or may not hit. If you could do all those things, I think you're probably gonna start a business that you like.

John Doherty: 27m 46s

The interesting thing is even now, I could work on anything I want to work on. I could say, you know what, today I'm not working on Credo, I'm working on this other thing. I could do that. I have that freedom and actually, Courtland, we all have that freedom to a point. Making that choice is going to mean, will mean different things for different people.

But at the end of the day, we do all have that choice. We're just telling ourselves that we don't. It might not be worth it to make the choice. If not working on it means you can't feed your family, you probably shouldn't make that choice. But the point is you can, anyone can say at any time, I don't want to be doing this thing.

I think once you kind of accept that and realize that I am choosing today to work on this thing, then even when you're in the tough parts, the slough, the slow SaaS ramp of death, or you're trying to get those first 10 customers or something like that can keep you going.

It's kept me going on hard days where it's like, okay, it's a hard day, but I’m still choosing to work on this thing. I'm still choosing to go to work, AKA step into my office at home. I think having that mindset can really help us out, as we're building businesses.

Then as I was saying at the start, realizing what are the things that are constantly kind of annoying me. For me, what wasn't worth about the marketplace was I was spending my time, which I value very highly, to make less money. I care about my time, and I care about supporting my family and I care about doing well myself.

My wife works as well. It's not all on me, but those are the things that I care about. So, I was making tradeoffs that just were not worth it to me anymore. I think we need to realize that and also that it's perfectly okay to fire customers. Build for the right people but you are going to have customers that are not the right fit.

It's perfectly okay to get them off of your plate. I learned that from Tim Ferris 13 years ago, when I read “The Four Hour Work Week” for the first time. That’s just made a world of difference in business.

Courtland Allen: 29m 35s

Tell me about some of these side projects that you've started and launched. What's your main one?

John Doherty: 29m 40s

Oh man, two main ones. One is completely not related at all to what I do day to day it's related to my hobbies, singlegeared.com, which is basically an outdoor gear reviews website. I basically built it.

It's WordPress and WooCommerce, and I basically built it because I wanted to learn how to build an e-commerce site. I built it, purely affiliate driven, does a couple of grand a year in revenue, something like that. Basically, pays for the software licenses I have to use to let it run on autopilot and buys me some new gear every year.

I'm a big skier, mountain biker, et cetera. So, it's fun if I wanted to get out of tech and go into the outdoor industry, I can just use that and be like I’m founder of Single Geared.

Courtland Allen: 30m 17s

Yeah. And it makes sense cause it actually kind of dovetails with your skill set. If you're doing affiliate marketing, you're not spending a ton of time building the product. The products are basically created and sold by other people. So, really what you need to figure out is just how you're going to get people in the door and you’re a professional marketer, professional SEO. You're playing to your strengths here.

John Doherty: 30m 39s

So there's that one. Then the one that I've been pushing harder on recently is editorninja.com. Basically, if you know Design Pickle, think Design Pickle for copy editing and proofreading.

Courtland Allen: 30m 50s

Okay, so Design Pickle’s design, no matter how many graphics you want designed.

John Doherty: 30m 55s

For one monthly fee, exactly. That same sort of model and it's still early traction where I'm cranking up the blog content, driving traffic to it, reaching out to people.

Honestly, I'm still trying to find the first 10 customers. But it's a side project. I have some ideas for other ways to kind of get traction on there as well. It's a subscription business. It's high-ticket subscription, which I've realized is kind of my jam is connecting up the two sides.

It's hard to find good editors and people make bad copy and typos kill conversions. So, if that can be cleaned up, people are going to make more money.

I like two-sided businesses. They're hard, but two-sided productized businesses whereas these people have a need, these people offer the thing, how can we bring them together and make it work for everybody?

Courtland Allen: 31m 38s

What do you think is the most important thing to do to get a two-sided marketplace or a two-sided business to work?

I mean, you've got two different customer sets. You got to get them both theoretically at the same time. Even if you're really good at finding one set, doesn't necessarily mean the other people are going to be here. Even if you find really good copy editors, it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to find a bunch of people who need stuff to be copy edited who are willing to pay three or $400 a month for the service?

John Doherty: 32m 1s

The way that I did it with Credo, the way I'm doing it with Editor Ninja, the way I've done it with others, to where I've seen other people do it is you need to see that initial supply. So, the supply side, the people kind of delivering the service and then you just focus on demand. It's super easy to get supply. Even if you get 15 people on the supply side and someone needs something specific, right?

If it's someone, if an author came to me and they're like, I need help finding an editor. It wouldn't be hard to find an editor because I'm literally selling them money. Here's a person that needs this. I need you to give me 15%. They mark up their price a little bit to make the margin work, and we're good to go.

For the two-sided business, build out that initial supply, get them in however you can, just get them in for free, do stuff for free. Do a little bit of vetting. Make sure they're good, so either looking at their work, if you're qualified to look at their work or just getting someone that you trust to kind of vouch for them.

Then you just have to focus on the demand side. That is the only thing that you focus on, because if you can grow demand, if you can bring in demand, you can always find supply. You're always going to be able to keep supply happy.

Courtland Allen: 32m 58s

Yeah, it's kind of how I feel about Indie Hackers sometimes, where in a way we're a community that's a bunch of people helping each other out. It's kind of this nebulous, amorphous blob of people so it’s not so clearly divided into demand side and supply side, but you really do have readers and writers.

You have some people who will literally never write a single post on Indie Hackers. And you have some people who basically make a career out of writing posts on Indie Hackers all the time. The more of those people we can bring onto the site and the more we can attract, the more useful it is for readers.

They're basically the supply side and then they're much easier to find, pretty much everybody I have on the podcast could be a contributor to Indie Hackers, or we could go out and literally just hire writers, maybe through your site professional writers and say, okay, help us.

Our journalists help us tell stories, help us write articles, and then just focus completely on the marketing to get the demand side up, completely on finding new entrepreneurs and founders to come read the forum and take part and see what everybody's posting.

John Doherty: 33m 50s

That initial traction is definitely tough. I would just say, do it for free. The first people I had on Credo, I listed them on the site for free and basically took a percentage when they closed. I've done that model a couple of times. I will not do it again. If I try to do it again, somebody slapped me, because it's just a bad business.

But if you're getting a job board off the ground, you have the people hiring and you have the people looking to be hired. You're not gonna be able to charge people to list their jobs if you don't have anyone looking for jobs.

Post it for free, let them post it for free, do whatever you can to get them in there. We actually had a job board, a full-time job board on Credo for a while. I would find people that were looking to hire. I would email them, asking them if I could post it on our job board as well and would do the whole thing for them. Then we were driving in the demand side, people looking to hire.

I tried at first getting people to pay because we have tens of thousands of people a month coming to the site, and they still wouldn't do it because they hadn't seen it work.

So, the model should be list it for free. People are coming through, show how much traffic you have, and then let those who want to promote their posts, pay to promote their job listing above everybody.

Courtland Allen: 35m 2s

Or if you're doing something like a community like I did with Indie Hackers, you can literally be the entire supply side yourself and you can do it for free.

I was just on there doing a ton of interviews, sending out email newsletters every week with new interviews and then just posting a ton on the forum. That was enough to get the first, five, 10, 50 users on the website. I didn't need other people to take part.

That's kind of the easy part of starting your company is, you don't have to be that clever. You just have to sort of work hard and push through it. Then later as you get bigger, you do need to be clever. You're trying to bring in your 10,000th user or your one hundred thousandth user, you probably need to be an expert marketer or be super.

I mean, even you, you're not only good at SEO, but you're pretty good at doing the podcast circuit. Doing the show is going to be helpful for your business, hopefully. You've got other tricks up your sleeve to sort of get to the next level. Once you're at $500K in revenue, it's pretty hard to get to $1 million or $5 million or $10 million.

John Doherty: 35m 51s

I always think back to the, I heard Will Reynolds from Sierra Interactive, a marketing agency out of Philadelphia. I remember he wrote a blog post back in 2012 where he was quoting one of his mentors who said, Will was like, why is it so hard to get from five people to 20 people or something like that? His mentor was like, Will, what got you here won't get you there.

The things that you did to kind of hack into initial engagement, or get initial leads or whatever initial users, that's not going to scale to get you to, you might get 10, but it's not going to get you to a hundred.

If you're smart enough and work hard enough to get to 10, you can do the same thing to get to a hundred, just the strategies and tactics are going to change. But if you're just getting started, you don't really need to worry about that cause you'll get there and you'll realize I've hit a ceiling, now what?

That's why I like having coaches cause then they're like, you need this framework, you need to do this thing. I'm like, oh, okay, cool and then go and do.

Courtland Allen: 36m 43s

that. Very cool. Well, listen, John, it's been cool catching up with you and figuring out what's going on with Credo. I always ask at the end of the show, what's one lesson, one takeaway that you think fledgling, beginning indie hackers can take away from your journey and what you've learned so far?

John Doherty: 36m 56s

This one actually comes from, I don't know who it originated with, I actually heard it, on “The Empire Show,” where Bedros says how you do anything is how you do everything. I think about that fairly often. Also, when I walk up to my room, I listened to a Lewis Howes podcast years ago, where he talked about one way to be productive is to make sure that you make your bed every day.

I walk up into my room, and I hear Louis' voice in my head saying, make your bed. It's kind of weird, Bedros’ how you do anything is how you do everything, if I'm whatever, putting something away and I take it halfway, right when I could just as easily take it all the way and just put it where it should be instead of creating myself future work. I'm like how you do anything is how you do everything. Okay, cool. Let's do this well.

Courtland Allen: 37m 40s

I love that because if you get in the habit of basically doing everything well, your brain is always going to be in that mode where like I'm extremely hardworking or extremely detail-oriented. I finish things and I see them through to the end and you're going to carry that with you everywhere.

Whereas if you get into the habit of being sort of lazy with things, you can get into kind of a negative mental cycle. Then when it comes time for you to work on your business, that's probably going to carry over and maybe you can push through that and change it but is that a battle you want to have to fight every single day? Probably not.

John Doherty: 38m 6s

You got it. Yep. All maps back to your identity and identity drives everything else.

Courtland Allen: 38m 11s

It's been a super great time. Can you let listeners know where they can go to find out more about what you're up to with Credo?

John Doherty: 38m 15s

For sure. The website is getcredo.com. Best place to kind of connect with me personally and what I'm doing and thinking about is Twitter, @dohertyjf.

Courtland Allen: 38m 28s

All right later, John.