What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.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 did 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 profitable internet businesses. Today, I am talking to Louis Nichols. Louis, welcome to the show. Gordon, thanks for having me, excited to be here. Excited to have you on. You are one of the oldest members of the Andy Hackers Forum. We were just talking about how you've been on the site for three years now. I've seen you launch several different projects and side projects and stuff. Today you're working on sales for founders. Tell us a little bit about what that is. Sure. So it's a online course,

which I've been putting together over the past couple of months, which kind of, as it says in the

name, teaches bootstrap founders how to do sales. And we focus mainly on the journey between

I'm a new bootstrapper and I have an idea,

or maybe I don't even have an idea yet, and all the way up to getting to somewhere around

the 10K and MRR mark, which is generally the thing that most founders seem to be working

towards.

Yeah, 10K and MRRR, that's well

beyond ramen profitability. That's all the way at the point where you can pretty much replace your

job, for example, as a full-time software engineer. That's a huge range to be walking people

through from zero dollars in revenue, the pre-ide phase all the way up to replace your job amounts

of revenue. How do you even conceptualize

what that roadmap looks like? Sure. So the reason I chose 10K and MRR, it's kind of arbitrary,

I guess, in the sense that all businesses are really different. But also, I think there are

basically kind of four stages that I've seen to sales and to building a business. And I think the first stage where

you're, you know, you're trying to find that idea, that product that you're even going to

build to sell to people, that's kind of the first challenge. And then the way you approach that

is very different to the way that you approach finding your first one, two, five, maybe even

10 customers. You know, you just have to get them

on board any way that you can. And then somewhere between 10 customers and about 10K and MRR,

you tend to change the way you do sales again. And you tend to put some kind of process, some kind

of structure in place. So that's kind of the cutoff point that I wanted to stop at, because after that,

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