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aresant

@Pud can undeniably build products that are laser focused and useful.

And his minimalist approach to company building is epic and I am a fan.

But it's sort of disingenuous to play David Vs. Goliath here like his line about launching:

"I figured only a small number of smart people would somehow find us among the masses."

He's just like the rest of us - just build a great product and be lean guys!

But oh wait he launched DistroKid on the back of the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of registered musicians already using his other site - Fandalism - founded years before.(1)

EDIT - why I am a fan of pud is in the children to this comment he brings a data-gun to a knife fight and sorts out my impression w some facts.

(1) https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/06/philip-kaplan-fandalism/

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A similar situation: Jason Grishkoff built and grew his music submission site SubmitHub[1] "on the back of" his popular music blog Indie Shuffle. People said it therefore must have been easy, but that's not actually the case. He spent 4 backbreaking months sending over 1000 personalized emails to sign up the initial collaborators he needed to make the SubmitHub marketplace possible. The moral of the story is to be wary of succumbing to availability bias[2] and underestimating the work that goes on behind the scenes.

The other lesson is, as Pud said in reply to you, always be parlaying. Spending years building up an audience that you can market to might sound like "cheating" to those of us without such an audience... but then again, spending years acquiring programming skills before starting an online business might sound like "cheating" to non-developers. In reality, it's simply a smart idea, no more and no less, to leverage existing advantages like a unique skillset, valuable knowledge, an audiences, personal connections, etc.

Specifically, building an audience is a great precursor to launching an online business. Growth is hard, and starting from zero makes it harder. And anyone can build an audience! I recommend checking out Ben Gelsey's analysis of Product Hunt's rise.[3]

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/submithub

[2] http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/availability-bi...

[3] https://medium.com/@theunixbeard/product-hunt-s-rise-d49249a...

This response only addresses the extreme criticisms about saying they had a blog so it "must have been easy" or "it's cheating".

I don't think it was easy nor cheating. Both of the founders mentioned here are smart, capable, and engineered whatever advantage they had.

Another perspective on self-promotional articles (not an inherently bad thing) like these is they downplay or omit the influence another venture had on building their current one. The SubmitHub article has a specific question about 'what have been your biggest advantages' and it surprised me that "running a high traffic blog in my target industry with a large email list" wasn't mentioned there. That seems like a huge advantage.

This is a sentiment I've seen in many of the comments here and in the HN comments about your SubmitHub writeup.

It's not meant as a personal attack at you, Jason, or Distrokid's founder. You're all doing great things! It's about breaking down what were likely the major factors in success so that information can be applied in one's own ventures.

Totally agree with you. I know this is a nitpick, but in Jason's response to "What have been your biggest advantages", he actually does talk about running Indie Shuffle:

> As mentioned before, being "part of the problem" provided the best advantage possible. There were a few competitors trying to solve similar problems, but none of them were actually part of the equation. As such, they struggled to convince others to sign up, and didn't have a steady funnel of users to push their way.

Specifically, the knowledge he gained from running Indie Shuffle ("being part of the problem") and the "steady funnel of users" really helped him out.

On 2nd glance, you're right. It could have been more clear ("running my music website was a huge advantage because..."), but it was indirectly acknowledged. Thanks for calling it out.

Not everyone on indie hackers needed to build a community to succeed. In the area of music you need a community to succeed but in other areas like the AI based logo design, it was driven by the developer's work experience, and then he flipped that into a novel product, but he didn't start a a blogger he just found a novel application for machine learning to automate himself out of business as it were.

For an example outside of the music industry, StackOverflow was launched via the blogs of its two founders, Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood. I signed up right away because I was an avid reader of both of them. Without that jumpstart the site never would have built up the critical mass of questions and answers and subject matter experts that made it useful even at the beginning.

Hate to be this guy, but, by definition, sending emails cannot be "backbreaking", unless, of course, you develop serious posture problems.

Hyperbole is occasionally used in the English language.

Never.

This is the worst response to a message I've ever seen on HN

This is the response to the worst message I've ever seen on HN

You're literally Hitler

I regret starting this reddit-style oneup chain, my bad.

Literally never.

This is the best response to a message I've ever seen on HN

Where are you getting the 4 months & 1000 personalized emails from?

I recorded a podcast episode[1] with Jason where he talked a lot more in-depth about how he got SubmitHub off the ground. Here's what he said:

> To launch SubmitHub I hand-tailored more than 1000 emails to blogs. It took me about 4-5 months of doing it everyday to get through this list. It didn't just launch overnight, there weren't people banging at my door. I had to go and email these guys, and they didn't respond. So I would tweet them, I'd Facebook message them, I'd send SoundCloud messages, I'd send another email, then I'd try to find another contact... Those 250 blogs and labels didn't come overnight.

I've consistently found it to be the case that there's a lot more information lurking under the surface when you sit down and talk to someone about what they did. What you can surmise from reading a short post or interview really only scratches the surface... which is why it's easy to underestimate how difficult it was for people to launch their successful businesses.

A related anecdote: In Jason's podcast episode he talks about how someone read his Indie Hackers interview, thought "This idea is so easy!", and cloned the look and feel of his site. Of course their clone went nowhere. They didn't do any of the hustling, marketing, selling, etc, because all of that was behind-the-scenes stuff. It was invisible to them, so they failed to factor it in, and instead gave too much weight to the obvious parts.

[1] Shameless plug: The Indie Hackers podcast launches tomorrow morning at https://IndieHackers.com/podcast! It'll be three episodes to start, 1 hour each, and Jason's is #1.

Fandalism was bootstrapped too (and didn't much affect DistroKid's growth; at least not as much as I would have hoped).

> But oh wait he launched DistroKid on the back of the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of registered musicians already using his other site - Fandalism - founded years before

I think it's valid to say that's how his product gained traction quickly, but I doubt that's why DistroKid is a successful company (guess, I'm not in the know).

Did I miss where that's against the rules of legitimacy? Or am I misunderstanding what you're implying?

I am not implying his built in audience was the reason for the success.

DistroKid is successful because pud is a badass entrepreneur and a passionate musician that understood the pain point and executed beautifully.

But at the same time you can't underestimate - or edit the story to not include - the value of early traction and a built in "free" source of eyeballs while you're tweaking product market fit over four years.

The price of Pud hitting #1 on HN w/a piece of start-up content marketing is a little sort out - for the rest of us in the comments section here - about what lessons to take away from the content, and what else to consider.

He is also a good marketer. Thats the key.

Its sometimes interpreted as cheating if you leverage any other thing you may have developed. Like an audience or previous product.

^ This is always amusing to me, because people who get really successful do it by compounding earlier wins over decades. I'm reminded of @pmarca's advice for startup founders who want to meet VCs:

> The best way to develop contacts with VCs, in my opinion, is to work at a venture-backed startup, kick butt, get promoted, and network the whole way.

> If you can't get hired by a venture-backed startup right now, work at a well-regarded large tech company that employs a lot of people like Google or Apple, gain experience, and then go to work at a venture-backed startup, kick butt, get promoted, and network the whole way.

> And if you can't get hired by a well-regarded large tech company, go get a bachelor's or master's degree at a major research university from which well-regarded large tech companies regularly recruit, then work at a well-regarded large tech company that employs a lot of people like Google or Apple, gain experience, and then go to work at a venture-backed startup, kick butt, get promoted, and network the whole way.

> I sound like I'm joking, but I'm completely serious -- this is the path taken by many venture-backed entrepreneurs I know.

– http://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part3.html

> ^ This is always amusing to me, because people who get really successful do it by compounding earlier wins over decades.

The weird thing is how someone who does this is lauded for it, but if it's a family rather than an individual that compounds earlier wins, suddenly it's 'wealth inequality' and terribly unfair.

Because it demotivates people.

The thing about capitalism, which I feel is not widely understood, it's that as a participant, you're meant to compete, but you're not meant to win. The need for money to sustain your lifestyle is what drives people to productive work; competition is what drives companies to optimize. But the moment someone wins - a person becomes rich, a company becomes a monopoly - they actually become a problem. At best, they're no longer working and optimizing. At worst, they can disrupt lives of a lot of people.

The promise of great wealth is phony by design.

You are supposed to win, but then adjust your goals, i.e. aim higher. This is a different thing.

No; in designing a robust system, you can't rely on what people are "supposed to do" out of their own initiative. As it is on the market, the moment you win and the external incentives pushing you to "aim higher" disappear, you become a wildcard - i.e. a problem.

> out of their own initiative

aiming higher is human nature. The system is based on this evolutionary fact (sometimes called 'greed', or self-interest), not on directing human behaviour.

The market is also based on mutual self-interest. There are no 'external incentives' other than access to higher/more expensive goals.

> There are no 'external incentives' other than access to higher/more expensive goals.

There are - living in a market economy requires nontrivial amount of work just to maintain what you have. Both individuals and companies have to work to balance out their operational (living) expenses; moreover, in case of companies, competition forces you to "aim higher" because not doing so will make your profit fall with time.

When you "win" in the market game, those incentives diminish or disappear completely.

> living in a market economy requires nontrivial amount of work just to maintain what you have

This is not external, but natural.

Humans need a constant supply of food/energy, food spoils etc. Tell me what kind of economy works otherwise.

I'm also talking more about life goals e.g. getting a better job, as opposed to working at all.

> competition forces you to "aim higher" because not doing so will make your profit fall with time.

This is dependant on a lot of things. There are plenty businesses that have survived being less than innovative. But I'd argue whether being competitive counts as "aiming higher"; competition doesn't always grow, sometimes there is constant competition, and innovation is part of business.

Thinking about it, the real problem is that the market is finite in size. In an infinite market, being a monopoly is impossible (although anticompetitive behaviour should still be discouraged). The problem comes when one fish gets too big for the pond.

I can't really imagine an "infinite" market. The biggest one I can imagine is an ultra-global one, where every living human anywhere can buy anything from anywhere and get it reasonably quickly. In such a market, monopolies would be global monopolies.

Actually, come to think of it, the market for digital services is quite "ultra-global" already.

Either way, whatever the market size is, monopolies in a given market is the the victory condition - the goal - for the monopolist, and a failure mode for the entire market. Hence how it works is that the idea of "the win" is dangled in front of you so that you work, but it's meant to be snatched away in the last moment, so that you never reach it.

Kantian categorical imperative: if everyone does the former, we all win. If everyone does the latter, we stagnate.

Maybe because most virtues make sense from an individual perspective rather than a group.

Not cheating -- no-one is making a moral claim here -- but to leave running Fandalism out of your description of your success feels like you're eliding crucial information. Like possessing a great marketing channel. And good for Pud for building it and using it!

I read these sort of success threads as basically case studies, and that marketing channel is probably relevant.

When you're self reporting how you think you accomplished something and you leave information out, it's not cheating, it's leaving information out. It doesn't mean it's intentional, but not being intentional doesn't make the left out information irrelevant.

I found DistroKid through here, not Fandalism. Actually, of all the sites I follow, I can't say I actually recall visiting that one on the regular (ex: versus Billboard Biz or Complete Music Update).

ABP - Always Be Parlaying.

I just made that up. Maybe it'll become a thing.

Why not tweak out the "Our secret:" part of article to include the whole "capture a community" thing?

Or, fuck that, since this article is awesome self-admitted wantrepreneur wrapped marketing I'm just personally curious - how important was fandalism to (1) launch and (2) tipping yourself into current hockey stick mode?

There are two DistroKid banners on Fandalism.com.

According to our tracking URL, the main one has been clicked 57,543 times, converting into 207 customers.

You didn't e-mail your list? I certainly imagine that would have made your life a little easier?

True. Every Fandalism user does get 1 email, from Fandalism, about DistroKid.

Did you collect stats from that as well?

Bam. Added edit to my comment. Look forward to more posts and would love to see more on the "how we grew" side.

Thanks for keeping me highly entertained with FC back in the day!

Cumulative Advantage!

He is a good marketer. Good marketers are always building audiences and brands. Turns out that the audience for a failed brand can support a new one. So what if he uses previous audiences? The question is: why aren't you? (unless you are happy to be an anonymous employee (which is totally ok)).

> But it's sort of disingenuous to play David Vs. Goliath here like his line about launching:

Maybe not, people misunderstand David vs. Goliath as David being the underdog when David was a significantly a lot more skilled and was an archer[1]. @Pud was better, executed better and is beating the competition.

[1] - https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_the_unheard_story...

A young man with no military experience vs. a giant who's killed every soldier in the army who's attempted to fight him qualifies as an underdog story in my book. Also I'd assume archery skill doesn't really transfer very much to using a sling

I heard an interesting segment on NPR one or two years ago that delve into "David vs Goliath" and they made the point that we have the situation completely backwards.

Some scholars believe that Goliath suffered from a genetic disorder that may have left him rather "simple" in intellect. And slingers during that era were vicious killers capable of hitting birds in flight along with other examples of their prodigious skills and lethality.

The segment made the case that David vs Goliath was a stone-cold killer against a relative 'innocent,' it just happened to be David who had the distinct advantage.

David being classified an underdog doesn't necessarily mean he wasn't actually at an advantage compared to Goliath in some ways, just that it appeared that way. In fact if you read the biblical passage it seems to paint the picture that David was actually extremely skilled, and he claims to have killed bears and lions before while defending his sheep. It's the fact that it's a shepherd boy taking on a warrior giant that makes in an underdog story, not the skill with which David wielded his weapon.

I am reminded of Indiana Jones against the swords wielding fanatic. :)

Malcolm Gladwell's book David and Goliath talks about that example (among others). It's a pretty interesting read.

But he entirely bootstrapped fandalism too. So his argument is completely legit. Any one of those competitors could have built a fandalism for customer acquisition too. Anyway, his point is he did this stuff all as a one man shop with no funding. Nobody can dispute that. He is David.

Which is amazing but irrelevant - if the lesson is "build something obsessively for years until you have an audience to then, also over the course of 4 years, monetize on another project - assuming you get both of these things exactly right even though they're both unbelievably hard" there's no lesson.

I know this from experience. I helped build a site used by millions of people in a particular demographic, and some of my collaborators on that project have been building products to help that demographic in deeper ways. The problem? It's still hard to get that right! 2 years into that effort they're still just starting to find product market fit for the second products.

We hit the absolute lottery to somehow get 5 million users for the original product, and they'll be hitting the lottery again if they get profitable on the second product to that audience. It's hard. Having money helps.

Why do you presume these were two separate projects? He built fandalism, then realized from running it that his users wanted something like distrokid. It is one big company called Pud Inc.

Helps that DK is one of the very few services out there worth paying for. I can build most things myself.

The lesson here in the 'hey I did it' (and the implication) you can too! No you can't. You need some edge. Not you're smart, skills, or idea. That won't cut it. Way too many wanna be moguls out there already working on your idea. Bringing a built in audience, that's an edge. DK a great service however.

Nice phrase - "brings a data-gun to a knife fight" - that encapsulated the idea quite well!

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