Dan Kulkov - From 0 to $200,000 with side project marketing

Alex Llull 0:00 Okay, recording started Perfect. Okay, so I think we're good to go. Awesome. So yeah, let's just get started. Well, first of all, thanks, Dan, for being here and for taking the time to, to join us on today's podcast. How are you, man? Oh, good. Dan Kulkov 0:17 Excited to talk about marketing. Yes, Alex Llull 0:20 yes. The reason I brought you in is because you and as better or what have you, you are really, really good at what's known as side project marketing right? With your, you know, so can you? Can you just give us for people who are No, maybe not that familiar with the term? Can you give us like an overview of how would you describe, like southbridge side project marketing? Dan Kulkov 0:39 Yeah, I think the simplest definition is that you build tools, and most of them are free, that give value in a very simple way to your users and promote your paid product organically. So think of blog post articles, but you know, instead of just reading you play with something you use it to, and then you're like, okay, maybe I should check the paid product. Alex Llull 1:05 Yeah, I love that. How do you How did you stumbled upon this? Because I know that you have like your projects, you have maker books have founder Powell? I don't know if you have anything else going on? I know, you have like a bunch of things. But how did you decided that? Hey, maybe side project marketing is like, the channel for us to test, you know, versus like the typical hacker marketing channels like Twitter, or Product Hunt, you know? Dan Kulkov 1:32 Yeah, man, actually, I have no idea. Like, the first tool we launched one year ago, I, I started to think today before the podcast, like, how did I thought of side project marketing. And I have no clue. I just one year ago, the founder of Bell was completely different. It was generate 63 ideas in like five minutes. And we launched it, we got some sales, and then for some reason, and again, I don't remember the logic, I thought it would be cool to promote founder pal by launching the free tool, for example, to generate your personal positioning, like for Twitter, and then it will be like, you know, very organic to promote, found repelled in that format. And we launched it, it was complete piece of crap. We didn't even launch it to the poor hand on Twitter, we got like 100 website visitors. And again, I didn't even think about site project marketing, but for some reason, it was very organic solution, like, can we just take a piece of product and just share it for free and let users play with it? And then they can, you know, judge for themselves and maybe buy our paid product? Alex Llull 2:55 Yeah, that's, that's one of the things woke me up was the usual user journey. You know, when someone takes like one of your free products in this case, like, what do they do? Like do they first play? Then they give you the email? Do they? Do you ask for it? And then you pitch your product, like what's like the usual way of how that? Dan Kulkov 3:16 Yeah, so there are a few steps in the funnel. So first step is to let users lay with a free tool without any commitment on their site. A lot of companies they become greedy, they ask for an email upfront, but if you think from the user perspective, let's say you, you, you search for user persona generator, okay? You want to generate your ideal customer profile, you land on some tool, you don't know this tool, okay? You don't know the company, you don't know the results. How confident are you to give your email because you know, for sure, something will come to this email, it is not just just three email for them, you will get a few emails from them. And my, my philosophy is very simple. The first step should be less friction, we just asked for two input fields in most products, for example, your business description and your target audience just to you know, generate a result we need this basic information, we'll keep it super light, we give the result for free, there is no email, you can restart you can play as much as you want. But then in every product, we have a step when we say for example, okay, you got your user persona profile. But now, you can generate nine marketing ideas, how to attract and like sell to these user persona. And for this, we will ask for email. And you know, a person can still be very satisfied with the initial results they want go there and there will be no hard feelings from both sides. But some people will be like, Yeah, you know, I actually need these ideas. And that's how we get an email from them. After that step, the reason like, you know, if else situation. So some people, they will just leave an email and not check our products on the website, and we will send them a few emails in, if they read these emails, they will get additional value. And they will understand that we have paid products, and some users will stay on the website, they will discover more free tools, and then they will go and play with the product. But you know, we just tried to make as many touch points as possible just to build trust, because I think in AI space, especially, there are so many companies that just build crap products, and people, they got a lot of bad experiences when they buy and it's just crap. So we just tried to let them play with the product, let them understand that this is not a regular AI product. And that's enough. Alex Llull 6:09 Yeah, I think you're that's pretty smart, like giving, like, first without asking for anything. Because I think right now most of us are trained, even like to get like something nice, you need to give your emails, you know, so you're kind of going backwards to that and playing with a here's the fifth, you know, this is valuable alone. But if you want more, or you know, more insights more and more and more than give us our element, but the first step is like free, upfront. No, or anything. So I think that's pretty smart. And I think that's one of the reasons why you are like, so successful with this. I think I think that I would say that that's one of those like seeing from the outside, you know? So that's pretty cool that you do that. Dan Kulkov 6:48 Yeah, so it was, it was new, just like to give you an idea, all of the tools. If you go to Google on most of keywords that we rank for all of these tools, ask for an email. And, again, we can probably do that maybe we'll get even more emails, the question is, will we get more correct emails, because a person can just you know, give you an email, and you just spend your time, it will waste your ConvertKit bill in the end of the month. And yeah, Alex Llull 7:21 yeah, so it's not so much about quantity, but quality, you know, like, you want people who are like actual interested in your thing, and those are willing to be like, they will also be easier for them to turn into like paid customers, which is the ultimate goal. Right? So cool. So okay, now for example, I so what's what's the next step? You put them I understand in like in an automated sequence to upsell them to like the paid product? But do you have like, any you always use? Or is it like different for every product? You have, like different sequences or stuff like that? Dan Kulkov 7:55 Yeah, so we have, yeah, I think the one sequence because it's one tool, so the first email, and this is something we discovered, so let's say you left your email in some free tool, obviously, you understand that in some hours, you will get some marketing emails. And that's like, basic reaction. How can we as a company, you know, overcome this we can overcome by giving you even more free stuff. And the first touch point in email is like, we have a collection of free chargeability prompts, you can access them, they're super valuable for your use case, and like duplicate this database, or we will delete it soon. Something like this. And these call to action is better than just upselling our product, because again, the most of these people they don't know about us, they are not from Twitter, they are from Google, or some from Tiktok influencer, who recorded the video about our tool, then I think we have I'm not sure I think maybe one or two emails that just you know, describe the product, describe his story, why we built it. I'm not sure if we share testimonials. And then we'll have some like limited deal. Go and upgrade, we have this deal. But recently, we again, we made a huge switch. We always sell from the landing page, but now we have a free demo of a paid product so people can again sign up to you know, play with a product and now it's easier for us in emails because you can just say okay, go and create a free account. It's way easier to send this type of email compared to like go and buy $200 product, but this is the mail, email sequence. We don't overcomplicate this, all of these people who left an email we sent them once months, an email about new to resend the newsletter about marketing. And yeah, they can unsubscribe very easily. A lot of people unsubscribe because they, you know, they don't care. But this is proven method for us to get to get people outside of tech, Twitter, Twitter bubble. And these people still are interested, they are quite okay of receiving emails, if you keep them interesting, if you keep them short, if it's easy for them to unsubscribe, a lot of people enjoy getting emails that way. Alex Llull 10:35 Yeah, and yeah, I totally agree. And like how many right now on your, on your database for this, like, how many people have you managed to capture during doing these things? Dan Kulkov 10:46 We think we killed like 5k emails last month, but it's still like 25k right now. And, yeah, I mean, it's not like 100% open rate, for sure. But that's, you know, a comfortable number right now for us. But these approach in general led us to grow, I would say, around 700 500, to 700 net emails per week. So minus all unsubscribes people who are not willing to read emails, and I think that's quite a good metric. Because when I, you know, when I was doing Twitter giveaways, this was the number that you could do from a good Twitter giveaway, like 700 emails, for example, but you need to do a lot, you needed to have this annoying tweet, like, like, and retweet, and again, and, for example, SEO is not working for freebies a lot. So if you create, like some kind of ebook, it will not get ranked on Google really well. So this channel of like free tools and collecting emails is working super well, for us in terms of lead generation. Alex Llull 12:08 Definitely, because I saw that recently that you crossed, like 200k in total revenue, that like your projects, like MakerBot, and so on. So I mean, that's a testament of like, how well this is working for you guys, like these simple funnels, collect emails, put them, you know, send an email every now and then keep them engaged. So it doesn't you don't need to over things like most marketers to do. So. Dan Kulkov 12:33 Yeah. And this change actually doubled our revenue last year, last year, because one year ago, it was February, we were struggling a lot with revenue a lot, January and February. They were like the worst months, we were, it was hard for us to cross 4k revenue. Because we were trapped into this indie hacker. I think mindset of you need to launch something, you will promote it on Twitter, like launching products and promote on Twitter. But honestly, all of these products, they get a spike of sales, and then it's nothing, then it's like in two weeks, the sales are down to like 100 per week, maybe five hundreds if you're lucky. And that's when we changed a lot from this, like launch mindset to a marketing funnel. And this is basically the marketing funnel because I don't do anything to promote my old tools. Like we launched user persona generator last summer. So it's like, maybe eight months ago, I'm not doing anything. And I'm just looking for example, at this right now, today. 500 website visitors unique website, website, visitors, I haven't done a single thing. Yeah, but SEO is doing its thing. Emails are doing its thing and marketing funnel is just working and okay, maybe it won't bring me 20 sales per day. But if it brings me you know, one to three sales per day that's good enough to just have a baseline of sales that you're not doing. And that change. I'm super glad it happened. I need to just you know, give a shout out to Mike Cardona who pushed me to do email marketing and thanks to him these changes doubled our revenue there will be no revenue share Mike if you're listening to this just just nice. But ya know. Alex Llull 14:51 Yeah, Mike is also my gizmo solver and super, super smart like someone who knows a lot about this type of stuff. Mike Dan Kulkov 14:59 so you I think LinkedIn now, yeah, Alex Llull 15:01 I am too young to it's like the new promised land, let's you are convinced. So like, Okay, you have, like you mentioned, like a few channels like SEO is working really well for you. But I also saw you, on your products on different places. So you on on guy directories like this AI tool directories. I saw you sponsoring a few newsletters in like some of your products like sponsoring newsletters. So I'm curious, like, how much because I know you, as you said that you have this baseline that happens mostly stuff like that. But how, how have you run these experiments? Okay, let's let's try to sponsor like 5g later this month? What was the mindset behind these experiments? Fishing for new channels to see? Dan Kulkov 15:54 I think we spent the last year was a lot of experiments to understand what's marketing working for us. We tried Google ads, we're trying to sell sponsorships and a lot of stuff. So what is our go to right now? So first, and this is like, the thing that's the best. And you know, this is something I changed my mind last year is SEO. Because we don't do any, you know, usual SEO work, like a lot of technical optimization asking for backlinks not we just find really good keywords. And I spent some time on this. I tried to find a good keyword, then. We just tried to build a tool that is as good as we wanted ourselves. And then we don't do anything we don't do. We don't ask for backlinks. People just give us back things because the tool is good. And who is ongoing, this distribution loop that we can talk later about. And SEO is number one, because people just Google user persona generator, business ideas generator, and that's the first channel for us for funding fell right now. And something I continue to double down in 2024. So second thing, and this is way less predictable, but still, this is like tick tock influencers, that all new said influencers that give you a free shoutout, because if we talk about paid instead of sponsorships or paid tick tock influencers. Honestly, this is something that is not working really well, in my opinion, because paid newsletter sponsorships, I think I spent a few $1,000 on user sponsorships. And I can like, say very confidently. It's not efficient at all. Like yeah, it's it's, it's definitely for brand awareness. Like you saw something, you know, but it's not performance. It's not something you spend $500, you will get $1,000 in return now. So that's why we do it. We get it for free, because for example today, we launched a stolen generator recently, and today I woke up and I saw a free newsletter sponsor from I think superhuman AI it was today. Yeah, yeah. And other newsletters, they just feature it, we didn't do anything. But if we wanted to sponsor them, it would cost us you know, $1,000 per newsletter easily. So it's very expensive. We just, we only rely on free stuff. And it's working. And second category is like Tic TOCs. Again, if you go and you try to sponsor tiktoks, to you know, get a paid feature, man, the prices are crazy. Like people will charge you up to 1000 per video with without any guarantees, and you open their profile. It's like 1000 for us 5000. To us, it's nothing. It's like it's, you know, a casino you like chances out one to 100 to go viral, but you will pay like a lot. So we don't do paid there. We just do like free free stuff. So for us, it's mostly SEO, I think that we can control a thing that can predict. And second, a lot of features. But we don't do any work there because it's unpredictable, but it's working really well because again, influencers are interested in free tools. Because if they share free tools makes their account the newsletter more valuable to people. People will subscribe they will sell more ads. So these two channels are working this year. We are experimenting I think was two things. First is to shoot tiktoks ourselves, we started to do it ourselves. Sweater recorded like I think 20 meters. But we, we were stuck at some like 500 to 1000. For us, we just stuck at this level, nothing was going beyond, we are partnering, partnering up with tick tock girl from Philippines, she will record tic TOCs for us. And hopefully it will work for us. That's like our first, you know, contractor new experience. And that's probably a big experiment for this year. And I hope we can, you know, understand what type of videos we need to shoot to promote our free tools. And second, this is a big influence from Nico. I think I'm ready to try Facebook ads this year with his home. This could be a promotion of his Facebook ads course. But you know, not he's not that my best. So, yeah, I think Facebook ads still great. And I heard his results with top nose. I heard his results with Mark ship fast, and it's just too good to pass, you know, at least spend a few $1,000 to try. Maybe it will be you know, not the biggest ROI. But compared to newsletter sponsorships compared to tick tock influencers I think Facebook ads, that's something that sealed a king in the jungle. Alex Llull 21:36 Yeah, it is it is from what I hear too from other people like, definitely even it sounds like super outdated, right, like something that you did, like five or 10 years ago, but was still like doing any work. So I think there is a few things here like the first one is obviously get shared, because products otherwise they wouldn't get shared. Right? So that's the first thing. So even though like you know, make it free, whatever, like, yeah, make it free, but like it needs to be good. Otherwise people won't share it. So that's, that's like the first one I would say, you know, many people focus on all the marketing and business plans, but then they they make like a sheet. They forget that that's actually the first thing, you know, you should make like an actual good product. So yeah, that's the first one. And then the second one, SEO is so interesting, because for me, for me, like, I've never done SEO. So I'm like super. This sounds like too technical and too difficult. And like, you know, and I mean, you mentioned that you basically just target and you will like I understand that you will like the tool more or less that there's like an answer to that. Get that. But can you talk about that loop that you before? Because I think that's pretty interesting. I don't think that many people are into SEO? It doesn't sound sexy, you know, but apparently, it's really well. So can you tell us that? Dan Kulkov 22:54 Yeah, I was I was beefing a lot with SEO last year. And I think my main logic was like, you know, only boring people to like, my target audience is shiny is on Twitter. It's cool. But then things I learned. So first, most people that are active on Twitter will never buy your product. Like Alex, Alex never bought my products. You know, he's not my target audience. But you know, Instagram coach from Minnesota, this is my target audience that will buy now buy products. And if you think like when you think about Twitter, anything, okay, these people will bite not none of them will buy. I have maybe if you names from Twitter, who are my customers, but it's like it's less than 10 that I remember, this person bought something from me. You will sell mostly to regular people with no social media with no you know, presence online. Just regular people for these people don't know about Mr. screen shows, they don't know about pro Hunter, both as regular people just as you are a regular person in terms of like buying insurance. They are regular people in terms of buying SAS, you know, these people they go to, is to go and Google stuff or ask friends but mostly Google stuff because again, I Google stuff all the time. And this is like still one of the best channels I was on the site that charge he will kill it. But you know, if we look at Google updates of AI in search, it's safe to say that we have still a few years when charged up to kill search. So So what is SEO? You know, I'm not the biggest expert in SEO and a lot of things will not work if you for example, have an econ Murs with a lot of pages, that different tools. Okay, I have no idea what's happening there. I can talk about like, you have a content product or product test service, or maybe micro SAS, and you want to get people from Google. So the the biggest 8020, what you can do is to find a good keyword. So for example, if you go and you try to rank SEO agency, you will fail because first 100 pages of Google are already taken by big companies with a lot of backlinks. But if you go and find a really good keyword with decent traffic already, not too much, but decent, and no competition. Let me give you an example. For example, business ideas generator will fall, guys, if you listen to this, don't take this keyword I was taken. This is mine. Okay. Alex Llull 25:56 I finally Dan Kulkov 26:00 I saw this keyword, I see that every month, it has like around 3k monthly searches. That's good enough, it's good. But first page is a lot of irrelevant products that are not what happens and about generating business ideas, or products that will build 100 years ago, like for example, when I Googled it, it was a product from Peter levels. I think he launched it like a few years ago, it was like one random business idea from Chad GPT every day, and it was like just a random that product and other products like this. And I see that. And I see that I can win this keyword if I build something good because these products are not famous that they're not go to, they're just on the first page because there are no good alternatives. And that's your biggest focus to find a keyword in which you can win pretty easily. That's the first part. Then you build something you attribute heading one tag, you know, all of this technical stuff, which is somewhat important, but not really. And that's then the second thing, which is really important, which you should focus on. How can you get backlinks because backlinks. Basically Google needs to hear that not only you think that your page is, you know, cool and useful and should be on the first page, you need to show Google that other websites think that way. And you just need to understand how can you get backlinks. Okay, so there are a lot of ways you can go to directories, post your product, and other stuff. But mostly, that will not will be enough. If you just post it to, you know, indie hackers. And you know, there is an API for that and maybe other source, you need to find a way to get to more websites. There are different ways you can pay for it, you can outreach to people, but honestly, my idea is very simple. You just make the tool. So good. So easy to use. So free for users, that people influencers, bloggers, they can't ignore it, it's just too good to ignore it. And this approach is not you know, not bulletproof. Maybe in five tools, only one will work that way. But when you win it, you will get a lot of traffic. Okay. And yeah, that would be like, if I can summarize SEO, for marketing, two steps, find overlook keywords in which you can win pretty easily, and then find a way to get decent, like amount of backlinks to your new page. Alex Llull 29:02 Yeah, I love that. Because it's again, it's like super simple, like your other approaches in general. But it just like logical and makes a ton of sense. You know, just to try, okay, make a good thing. And make sure that people find it valuable enough that they share it everywhere. So Google understands like, Okay, this is like an actual interesting linguish Because people find anything interesting, you know, that's super simple. People are at the same time with SEO focused on like, and I need to do all of these crazy optimizations, and then I think here and name old images like that. And but the most important thing, which is like making this tool, useful article tool in this case, they forget about it, you know, so yeah, totally agree. Dan Kulkov 29:43 PageSpeed report by Google and reads like SEO, you know, score, and I have a if people follow me for some time, they know I joke a lot about developers who want to score 100 So I never did a PageSpeed report for founder Bill, I don't know numbers for founder, Bill, I have no idea. If you go right now I have maybe it's 30. Maybe it's 50. But I know for sure that founder pal will get more SEO traffic than, like any developer was 100 on PageSpeed report, because these technical things are important to some extent, but you know, the details, the most important thing is to people Google for it. And are you good enough to be on the first page, everything else? Is some words important, you can't forget about it. But it's just it's it's not the key. So the key of SEO and a lot of people focus on it, because it's easier if you're a developer, it's much easier to you know, optimize the page than to build something good and distribute it to get backlinks. Alex Llull 30:53 Yeah, yeah, totally. Okay, so we talked about, like distribution, we talked about, like, doing the product and all of that, but I am curious about like, the only, and I know that your vape products, but you are pretty big on like one time per payments versus like subscriptions. Right? So you are like an advocate I was, I would say for one thing, it means like, can you elaborate a bit on that? Because I know that a lot of people have doubts, especially with certain types of products like those, but also like even like content products from people like no, I want to do like a yearly membership or stuff like that. Is that a good idea or not? Dan Kulkov 31:29 Yeah, I think one time, payment beef is very fun to do. Honestly, one of my favorite thing to do is just to shitpost about once a payments. But if we talked about seriously, and I made a serious post about that topic. The thing that I advocate in a nutshell is, you as a solopreneur, need to get profitable faster, you need to get more traction faster, like you don't have a lot of time you don't you can't wait five years to get profitable, right? If you if you want to quit your job, if you want to focus full time, you need to get profitable faster. And what I say is, if you need five key revenue, for example, this is your own profitability. It's much easier to do with one time payments, then with Master subscription. I know some people that like because I think a good example is Dimitra from Twitter with screenshots, one, and he, I think he's doing it for two and a half years already. And then this point, he's like 4k MRR. And you know, it took him like almost three years to reach 5k MRR and if you want to do it in three months, Master descriptions are not for you. Building SAS is not for you, you need to pick an easier way. It can be digital products, it can be productized services, it can be a rappers, and these products are usually sold with one time payments. Because for example, Marcus was a generator product that I have found a pal. Okay, can I sell Marks and Spencer generator with subscription? Probably yes, there is a segment of people who you know, they need marketing strategy every week. Okay, maybe I can sell them for $39 per month. That's like probably the highest point I can think of for solopreneurs. Okay. There are a few questions here first, do I believe that they will be subscribed for six months? Plus, not really, the product is still early. Most importantly, not a lot of solopreneurs will be in business. After six months, you know, a lot of people will just go back to jobs or, you know, pause the thing? And secondly, is the question. Is my product just good enough right now. So I can expect it to deliver value every week. Also, no, I'm just being honest with myself. It's good. But it's not just that good. It's not that embedded into life of my user. And that's all leads that I can sell a one time payment in which I will price the cost and still get a lot of money upfront that I can then reuse to spend on marketing or something else. And that's why I suggest a lot of people to start with one time payments. Honestly, just to clarify this month's next month March, I want to launch moose finally from beta and this product will be with subscription and I want to get subscription revenue this year. Finally, some income with recurring revenue but it took me two years you know Oh, to build a foundation with one time payments in which I don't need to think about, about like, paying my bills, and then I can think, oh, I want to use some recurring revenue. And a lot of people are concerned, especially with separatist marking, especially with AI rappers, but then the coasts risk open AI API, and by a few things, first, let's be honest, open AI is is insanely cheap. Like, like the price for the API is inadequate. I hope nobody is listening to this podcast. Keep it that way. Guys, They recently launched a chat GPT 3.5. There is turbo, I think it's way cheaper. Charge a BT GPT four turbo also cheaper. It's not that expensive. Okay. And for most of solopreneurs, it won't be more than $100 per month, because they just won't have a lot of customers like this. Yeah, that's first thing. Second thing, you can always put limits, time limitations, okay, don't sell lifetime deal to your product sell a one year access for a fixed price. Okay, this will be like annual subscription, but without subscription part. And I think my again, my intention is make your life easier, get traction faster, and then try more challenging things. Because in the beginning, you just want wins, you want to get this, you know, broad set of rings every week, and you grow, go go go grow. And then Okay, now let's do something challenging. Alex Llull 36:51 You want to get the momentum, right, because otherwise, by the beginning, if you try to be like the big thing at the beginning, like a big size, whatever, it's so hard to get traction for that, right? You said like, one time payments on like simpler product. That's like, do people I would say, and as you say, as you said, you come by build that runway, and then you can do like bigger things if you want because you are likely also going to have like, more emails or more people to promote it to like a bigger if you are doing that, too. You know, like right now this is your friend Mark, who is like right now it's like the hottest indie hacker I would say in in the in the world. Like, he posted whatever product and everyone is, you know, going into like his tweets or whatever, so, but he has been building shit for like, how long video? So that's the other thing. So yeah, that's pretty. I would say I have one more thing that I want to discuss with you before we we end and it's your because I love following you on Twitter, because it's so fun how you make fun of like indie hackers and stuff like that. You're always jokes, and she's posting and like telling people to focus on your replies, which I think is super fun, honestly, because it's it's so again, what most indie hacker Twitter feels like, because sometimes it's like to, oh, I love your product, my friend and everything is like being and flowers. And, you know, but at the end of the day, most of them they don't make any money. But you are like now fuck you. Yeah, the ship products, you know, I mean, not like that. But you understand what I mean? So what's the I mean? It's not because you are like a bit of a format that you have that you are neither because you like you aren't you like it? You have fun with it. Where does that come from? Dan Kulkov 38:34 It's definitely just how I behave in life. Like if you speak to any person who knows me in real life, Marc Nico. I'm very straightforward. I like to joke. I like to be on this, like, you know, thin ice with some jokes. And that's just who I am. And I don't want to pretend on Twitter to be like, oh, you know, I'm very American. I will say all the nice things about you. But then in my head, I will think you're a piece of shit. But on Twitter, I will say nice things about you know, I tried to be as genuine as possible. And I completely okay with some people being mad about it. I saw a lot of people blocking me like, you know, sometimes I ask sweater all the time. Like, do you see people blocking you on Twitter? And she's like, No, no, no. And I see sometimes like, oh, you you're blocked here. I'm like, I don't know this person. But again, I guess I made a mess. And second thing is, again, I try not to be just you know, shitposting who will just say things to trigger people because I don't like these people too. I just want to say a useful thing in a way that people will hear because, you know, again, two years ago, I tried to have a different tone of voice. And I just saw it's not working I saw if you try to be tried to post useful content, but without challenging some status quo, you're just not going to be heard. Because people just don't want to hear it. But when you post something, you know, that is thought provoking. It will make some people mad, but most people will agree with it, they will just have like, first reaction. And then like they agree, that's something I want to do I want to post useful content, I think my content is, you know, a, sometimes it's a joke. Sometimes I like to post tweets, like six unique ideas for 2024. And all of them are just like, next Jas boilerplate and you know, chatting to us PDFs, and I see like, 200 bookmarks on this visa, I'm like, Okay, I'm probably a bad person, I will ruin this year for some people. But most of the time, I just want to cut through the noise. And you know, to get people because I think in the hacker community is super great is supporting, it's really non competing in many ways. Like, if you compare, let's say, I don't know, ecommerce, or some Instagram, education businesses, these people eat each other alive. You know, that's a regular thing, reason, no partnership, no community, everyone is on their own, our community's very unique in terms of like, we actually care a lot about other people in a way that you will spend some time to just help a person. And I enjoy it a lot. But the thing that I absolutely hate about our community that sometimes we go too much, we will say, Yeah, thing, just do, you know, not what we think not what we think is the best person to hear. But something like very lazy, okay, go for it. Well done. So inspirational. And, you know, sometimes I just want to go through it and say, like, for example, that launching product and seeing if it sticks or not, is a bad strategy. And some people will say, Oh, then you're a piece of shit. But some people will think, okay, maybe, maybe I need to rethink my strategy, maybe something is wrong, and this person will start getting challenging about his or her ideas. And that's, that's a good input, I think. And that's what I like to do. And of course, I like to share a lot on Twitter. Alex Llull 42:44 Yeah, I think the key is, like what you said, like thought provoking, you know, just like, avoid the bland content that in general, everywhere in the world, like, there's like so much bland content, and really challenging, like, the status quo and some of the ideas and I love that you do that. And it resonates with a lot of people. And when I see other creators do the same, like, you know, they have like an enemy, for example, like, Okay, I'm going against this thing with like a persona and be like a thing, you know, like, against the nine to five, for example, that they do pose like people, you know, like, you are right, and some people are like, Yeah, I fucking hate you. But at least they are like reacting to it. They are no like, like, okay, like and scroll, you know, which is what happens with 99% of content, probably. So I think that's pretty, pretty smart. Yeah. Dan Kulkov 43:32 Yeah, I don't see a point of posting another guide how to analyze your target audience because there were like, 1000s of them online. But if I can post something thought provoking that month, subscriptions are not the goal to have aspiring shouldn't be a go to aspiring solopreneurs okay, you know, it's, it's more challenging. It will make some people mad. Some people will read this content and think, Oh, what do you know, then you're just a marketing guru. You don't build anything. And let's pay, you know, I can take it, but some people will be like, okay, maybe I don't need to put subscription to because I have a like a guilty pleasure. I go to a lot of profiles of indie hackers, I click their products and so prolifically all of your products, like I see everything I analyze everything, when I see good products, good product ideas, but then I see like a complete irrelevant monetization. I can't help myself, but tweet something about it so people will make less mistakes. I don't want to go to this person and you know, ruin the day and say, like, Oh, you're wrong, you should try something else. But I will tweet something that will help this person if they will read them and other people. And yeah, just prefer Fleet what I think and not what is just, you know, good for business good for business. Alex Llull 45:06 Yeah, yeah. Dan Kulkov 45:07 I love that man. Alex Llull 45:08 That's a good call. Yeah, so more or less I That's it for today, where can people find more about you and your staff like Dan Kulkov 45:19 you if you prefer to get irritated on Twitter, just Google then cook off and you will find a really punchable person with a pink profile picture and that that will be me for sure. And if that's, you know, a shameless plug of this conversation, if you want to build a rappers to set project but probably you don't know how to go, you don't want to learn this. You can do it in bubble. And I have a very beautiful course that I made, how I built this side project marketing tools in bubble in a very short time. And you can find it in my bio links. So yeah, if that will be useful for you guys. Let me know. Alex Llull 46:02 Yeah, that's awesome. Thanks again for for being here else for listening. And Dan Kulkov 46:10 thank you, Alex. Bye, bye. Cool. Alex Llull 46:13 I'll stop recording now.