What's up, everybody?

This is Cortland from NDHackers.com, and you're listening to the NDHackers 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 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'm talking to Tyler Trinkis, the founder of Ernest Capital. Tyler, welcome to the show. Why don't you tell us a little bit about what Ernest is?

Yeah, so Ernest Capital is basically we call it funding for bootstrappers. And, you know, it's a little bit paradoxical, which usually gets folks asking follow-up questions, which is good. But it really

is that, you know, it's funding for entrepreneurs, founders, basically indie hackers, folks

building businesses that are outside

of the traditional kind of venture capital model and strategy and ecosystem that want to be

profitable and sustainable. But they need a little bit of capital to sort of get started.

And we invest everywhere from very early stage. So writing the check that

lets you go from side hustle to work in full time on your business, all the way up to kind of

growth capital for businesses doing maybe up to a million dollars a year in revenue. That's kind of

the whole range we play in. We do things a little bit differently. So we invest with a financing structure called a shared

earnings agreement that we kind of invented collaboratively with a lot of folks in this community.

It's just kind of better aligned for folks who want to build the next base camp or wild bit and

maybe don't necessarily want to sell the business or ever raise other rounds of funding.

And then we try to do more than just write checks. So we have a community of mentors. A lot of

them are pretty well-known CEOs, founders, operators in the space that are kind of on hand

to just provide mentorship and obviously a community of awesome founders, including the 11

companies that we've invested in so far. Very cool. I talked to a lot of founders. And by far,

for people who haven't gotten started, the hardest hurdle for them to get over is the fact that

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