What's up, everyone? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com and you are listening to the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet businesses and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How do they get to where they are today?

How do they make decisions at their companies and in their personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn

from their examples and go on to build our own successful businesses. In today's episode,

I'm excited to be talking to you the talented, the mysterious AJ.

AJ is the creator of a number of very successful projects.

Almost a decade ago, he created HTML5 up.

And to this day, if you search for free HTML templates,

AJ's site is right there in the first page of Google.

And his templates have been downloaded something like 12 million times.

He is the creator of Pix pixelarity, a similar website,

but where instead of just giving his templates away for free, he actually sold them for money.

And most famously, AJ is the creator of card, which allows you to easily create a beautiful one-page website for pretty much anything your heart desires. So AJ, welcome to the show.

Hey, Corlin, thanks for having me on. It's good to have you.

I've been trying to get you on here for, man, it feels like years at this point. So it really warms my heart to finally have you on here. Yeah, sorry it took so long. I've just, I don't know, something about trying to get the right microphone and trying to, who knows, I'm not going to make excuses. I'm here now. Let's get this going.

You're a busy guy, AJ. You always have a good excuse. I mean, you are working on card.

Card is amazing. In fact, before we jump into things, why don't we give people a sense of the level of card success?

You're generating something close to $30,000 a month in revenue now. Every month, almost 20,000 new users sign up and create over

40,000 websites using card. And what's amazing is that you've built this thing by yourself in just a few

years as a solo founder and a solo developer. I think that's crazy. Does that seem crazy to you?

Are you ever amazed by what you've

done? Well, I mean, when you put it that way, it does sound a little bit crazy. But I think when it,

when you build something like that incrementally, it's easy to look back and say, oh, wow,

...