What's up, everybody?

This is Cortland, bringing you another episode of the Indie Hackers podcast.

And today I'll be sitting down with Bryce Roberts, a venture capitalist and a partner at NDVC.

And you might be thinking, Cortland, you run NDHackers.com, where you talk to founders about bootstrapping their businesses and about focusing on revenue from day one.

So why the hell are you talking to a venture capitalist?

Well, NDVC is not your average venture capital firm.

In fact, they have a pretty revolutionary investment thesis that focuses on investing in companies that have a focus on profitability ingrained

into their DNA from early on. And I'll let Bryce talk about it because he can explain it better than I

can. But you might recognize them from their posts on Hacker News from their website, which for the

longest time featured a looping video of a burning unicorn head on the homepage. So obviously we're not talking to

someone who's a very stereotypical venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. I think by the end of

this conversation, you have a much better understanding of how the common VC narrative has

become so popular and so dominant in Silicon Valley. And you'll also understand more about the

tradeoffs that you make when you raise venture capital and why it makes sense in a lot of cases to build the Indie Hacker route and focus on revenue from day one. So I'm very excited to bring you this conversation that I have with Bryce, and I hope you guys enjoy it as much as I did. Before we get started, let me tell you about a group of guys that I got to know a couple of months ago. They reached out to me as fellow MIT alums, and I ended up interviewing them about one of their profitable side projects on NDHackers.com. Dixon and Moe is a boutique digital agency. They're technical designers with a focus on business and marketing, and they specialize in helping bootstrapped founders grow their products. They're based in San Francisco, and they work with founders from all over the world, and they're big advocates of the indie hacker movement, both as participants, having made several revenue-generating projects in-house, and as design and development consultants who work with an array of founders and products. For example, they helped the founder of Wisepops grow his revenue from $10,000 to $50,000 a month, and quit his job at Amazon to go full-time on a side project. They helped Alex from Groove HQ, who, by the way, has David Hauser as his loan investor, to reposition his help desk software from a scrappy app for startups to a professional tool used by companies big and small. He's now making $500,000 a month. Dixon and Moe are looking to take on two new projects this year and would love to see where they can help. You can chat with them over email or phone about any design, development, or marketing problem that you're struggling with. Reach out to Mo, that's M-O-E, at Mo at Dixon and Mo.com. That's D-I-X-O-N and Mo.com. And make sure to tell them that Cortland from Andy Hacker sent you. Hi, everybody. This is Cortland Allen from Indie Hackers, and I'm sitting down today with Bryce Roberts from NDVC. How you doing, Bryce? I'm doing great. Thanks for asking, and thanks for having me on the podcast. It's really good to actually be able to talk to you again because we first met back in October. I went down to your office and San Francisco and we talked for about an hour, just about investing, adventure capital, bootstrapping, companies, Indie Hackers, and it's cool to be able to do it on the air now and talk about some of the same things we talked about then. Yeah, no, I mean, we've been a huge fan of what you're trying to do with Indie hackers from the-go. I think, you know, as soon as you launched, it was on our radar, and we've just been, the content you're putting out, the conversations you're having, the stories you're telling, we just think it's fantastic. So we're happy to, I was glad we got a chance to meet and just, you know, free flow for an hour or so. It was a I still remember it was a great conversation. Yeah, and I'm a big fan of what you guys are doing at NDVC too.

I think I free flow for an hour or so. I still remember it was a great conversation.

Yeah, and I'm a big fan of what you guys are doing in NDVC too.

I think I first read about it on Hacker News about two years ago when you guys launched,

and it was kind of like this cryptic, mysterious launch.

In fact, it was two years ago this month.

It was January 1, 2015.

It was exactly two years ago, Wow. And it was wild because

I was flipping through my time hop and I remember, you know, this year, the screenshot of when we'd been,

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