What's up, everyone? This is Cortland from NDHackers.com and you're listening to the

IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talked 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 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 internet businesses. Joining me today is Chad Pytel, the CEO of Thoughtbot. In addition to being an entrepreneur, Chad is a designer and a developer

himself, which is appropriate because Thoughtbot is a design and development consultancy. Chad started

Thoughtbot in 2003 with a small team of five people, and today he's grown that into a team of 100

people and six cities, and they are on track across $20 million in annual revenue this year, which is insane.

So, Chad, I'm super excited to have you here. Got so much to talk about and thank you for coming on the show. Oh, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. So tell us a little bit about how thought bot works. I guess it's somewhat self-explanatory, your consultancy, but what do you guys do, who are your customers and how do you make money? So we specialize in creating products that people love to use.

And so the majority of what we do is help people go from that first concept that either

a brand new startup has or a much larger company for wanting to do something new and refining

that concept and then rapidly designing and developing it and bringing it to market.

So almost everything we do launches the first version within 12 weeks.

And we go on to iterate from there for startups that typically involves raising a larger funding round

at that point and building a team of their own. And we work alongside of that team, training

them in how we work and what we've done and then backing away when they're ready. For more

established companies, that typically means bringing it in house at that point in doing the same

thing. So that's great. You guys specialize in building products that are actually good. Yes. Products that people want to use, which is great because we've got a ton of people listening in who have ideas or maybe don't and want to learn how to build products that people actually want to use. You are technically, I think, a first-time founder because ThoughtBot is your first company, but you've been working on it for 15 years. And during that time, I can imagine that you

have taken hundreds of products from idea to launch. And that's a pretty cool perspective to

have. You've seen a lot more than most people. So you're not really a first-time founder.

What are some of the bigger lessons that you think you've learned as a result of having

such a broad perspective and seeing so many different products?

The biggest one is it's really surprising how few people actually really talk to customers

...