Hello, everybody. By popular demand, I am bringing back the intro to the show. So this is

Cortland Allen with NDHackers.com and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast. It's been so long since I've

said that. 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 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 internet businesses. Today I'm talking to Justin Mayors. He's the founder of Kettle and Fire. Justin, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Excited to be here. Yeah, I'm excited to have you on and ask you all sorts of questions. You know a lot about growing businesses. You work as a head of growth for a company called Exceptional, which is acquired by a Rackspace. You've started multiple businesses that you've grown from scratch to tens of millions of dollars in revenue, including kettle and fire.

And you also literally wrote the book on growth. It's called Traction, how any startup can achieve

explosive customer growth. So why don't we start there? From a high level, how should founders

be thinking if they want their startups to achieve explosive customer growth, Justin?

Sweet. Just jumping right into it.

Yeah, let's do it.

So, yeah, so I think that one of the things, you know, we wrote traction, my co-author,

Gabriel Weinberg, who started Duck, Duck, Go. He and I wrote traction about five years ago now.

And kind of what we saw at the time and what we still unfortunately see today is that

if you're a founder, in general, you are putting in two to five times as much effort into

product development, product, you know, that kind of stuff.

Then you are into marketing and into traction.

And the reality is that like almost all great valuable businesses,

not only do they have a product innovation, but they also have a distribution innovation. And so

we think like, and what we talk about in traction is that building and developing that

distribution innovation, figuring out how to get traction is almost as important, possibly more important

than figuring out how to make the perfect product. I know this is something that a lot of people

will disagree with me on, but I think if you almost certainly have heard of or found multiple

products that you're like, this is just kind of a shitty product. Like, how did this

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