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 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. I have interviewed hundreds of founders on this podcast and many hundreds more on indie hackers.com.

And I think it's clear that the idea you choose to work on matters. In fact, the big decisions

that you make in the early days might be the most important factor and whether or not you can

actually build a profitable side project and turn it into a business that supports your vision

for your life. So today I'm bringing on two previous podcast guests to have a discussion about how to make

some of these big decisions, specifically how do you choose what to work on?

Justin Jackson is the founder of Transistor, a podcast hosting service that's recently taken

off in a big way.

He first came onto the show back in September to share Transition's story.

Justin, welcome back to the show. Hey, thanks. Good to be here. I had to miss a good skiing day for today, so... I know, I feel so bad. It's got to be worth it. That's up to you. I guess up to me, too. Tyler Tringis is the founder of Ernest Capital, where he provides early stage funding for bootstrappers and Andy hackers who are trying to build profitable, sustainable tech businesses.

Tyler, this is your third time on the podcast, so welcome back.

Thanks for having me back. Does that make me the record holder?

I think you might be the record holder. I think we've had someone else who's been on here twice.

So yeah, you're officially in the lead if we're keeping track of the sort of thing.

That's the crown I'm after.

So the reason I wanted to bring both of you onto the show is primarily because of a blog post that you wrote, Justin.

It's called The Main Thing. What would you say is the point you're trying to get across

in that blog post, Justin, and also what motivated you to write it? Oh, that post there is me kind of

following my curiosity. It was just me pulling on a thread and going, oh, that's kind of interesting.

I was talking to Nathan Bashas, and yeah, I was just kind of pulling on this

thread of, it's interesting how sometimes, you know, in certain categories, the main thing

kind of swallows up most of the value in that value chain or in that category. And then I thought of this metaphor of eating out. And,

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