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, both of 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 online businesses. Today, I am sitting down with Derek Anderson and David Spinks. Derek is the co-founder of Startup Grind, a global community of entrepreneurs meeting each other

in person and at conferences.

And today he runs a business called Bevy, which allows companies to host and run thousands

of real-world community events like he did with Startup Grind.

David is the VP of Community at Derek's company, Bevy.

He's also the founder of CMX, which is a business he built after realizing the ironic fact that there are thousands of people like myself all over the world who are building and organizing communities, but none of them are actually talking to each other because they're not part of a community themselves. So he built CMX to fix that. David, Derek, welcome to the Andyackers podcast. It is a pleasure to have you both on here. Thank you so much. Derek, all right, we're going to run a tight ship here. Derek, welcome to the Antiochers podcast. It is a pleasure to have you both on here.

Thank you so much.

Derek, all right, we're going to run a tight ship here.

Derek, you go first.

David, you follow up.

Excited to be here.

All right, you go.

Excited to be here.

Thanks for having us.

So there's a lot of similarities between the three of us. Probably the most striking one is that we've all started communities. But specifically, I started a community, Andy Hackers. I ran it as a business until it was bought by a bigger company, Stripe, where I work today. And David, you did the same thing. You recently sold your community, CMX, to Derek's company,

Bevi. So we're really similar in that respect. This show is usually about people who are doing things the other way around, people who quit their jobs as employees to strike it out and

become founders. What's it like going in the opposite direction and no longer being a founder?

It's definitely a lot of change, different expectations, different pressures.

I think as a founder, you're constantly thinking about how are we getting to that next stage.

Are we going in the right direction? You feel a lot of the weight on your shoulders to make all those

kinds of directional decisions. And so no longer being a founder, definitely feeling a weight lifted

that it's not all on my shoulders. It's mostly on Derek's shoulders. Yeah, it's his responsibility

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