How do you find your first paying customers?

How do you come up with good ideas?

And then how do you pick the right one to work on?

How do you create compelling content that drives tens of thousands of customers to your website?

I'm Corlin Allen, and this is the Indie Hackers podcast,

and today I'll be

talking to Chris Chen about all of these topics. Chris is the founder of Instapainting.com,

where you can upload a photo, and in a few weeks, you'll get a hand-painted canvas in the mail

done by a real artist. I did a text-based interview with Chris back when I launched Indie Hackers

in August, and it was one of the first interviews to really explode in popularity on the site. It was number one on Hacker News for a day or two on October, and shortly afterwards Chris and I sat down to record this episode. The reason Chris's interview was so popular was that he was a great example of someone finding creative ways to overcome what are some of the bigger challenges that anti-hackers commonly struggle with. Chris is a super scrappy guy, and just to give you an example,

he was in debt before he started instapainting,

and then he created his business as a means of getting himself out of debt.

Two and a half years later, he's averaging $32,000 a month in revenue as a one-man operation.

I'm really excited to have him on for this episode of the Andy Hacker's podcast, and I hope

you guys enjoy it.

Just wanted to give a quick shout out to Product Manager HQ.

If you're an Andy Hacker, who's looking to build better products that people actually want

to buy, go join the world's largest product manager community on Slack over at product managerhq.com.

The community has thousands of product people around the world chatting daily about best

practices for building amazing products.

Once again, that's Product Manager HQ.

What's up, Chris?

...