Riley Chase, welcome to the anti-hackers podcast.

Hey, thanks for having me. Riley, you are a software engineer living in Michigan. You are the founder of a company called Hostify, and you recently had a pretty cool milestone with your business. You hit $100,000 and annual recurring revenue just last week. That's a super healthy number, so congratulations. How's it feel? Thanks. Definitely feels good. I'm very surprised

that, you know, I've made it here in just a little over a year. One of your very first milestones

that you posted to your product page on Indie Hackers is, I'm reading it now, June 1st, 2018,

one paying customer, $5 and monthly recurring revenue. So that was the very beginning. And under

that you explained that host device first customer signed up from 4,000 miles revenue. So that was the very beginning. And under that, you

explained that Hostify's first customer signed up from 4,000 miles away. So you seem to know

exactly who it was and where they lived. Tell me about getting to that point of earning your

very first dollar for Hostify. First of all, that customer, actually, I didn't know who they

were and I knew that they signed up from the Netherlands because Stripe told me that.

But I'll always remember like when I got that first customer. I remember where I was.

I was in my truck driving to work and I saw a little notification pop up on my phone that

Stripe had a $5 payment. And it was like an awesome feeling, you know, when you get your first

customer, first time I sold anything online really of my own like software product. Very cool. Yeah, so, like, getting to that point was several months of,

like, struggling. I never worked as, like, as a software engineer, like, in a software role,

I was mainly, like, a network engineer, like a phone system engineer kind of guy. So I knew I'd learned programming, like a little bit of Python.

I'd made little projects here and there for a couple years.

But I'd never built like a website really that had like authentication and like billing

and like all these things.

So it actually took me like several months to that was the hardest part.

It was like figuring out, you know, that was the hardest part was like figuring out,

you know, the checkout process and the user dashboard, like what the software actually does.

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