What's up, everybody?

This is Cortland from EndiHackers.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 did 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. If you've been enjoying the podcast and you want an easy way to support it, you should leave a review on Apple Podcasts. The easiest way to do that if you're on a Mac is to go to NDHackers.com slash review. Today I'm talking to Nathan Laka. Nathan's a polarizing figure to say the least, and he's a really tough guy to describe. He runs multiple businesses that have done millions of revenue. And I think I would describe him as an ND hacker with an emphasis on the word hacker. It always feels like Nathan is hacking systems to figure out how to get things cheaper,

faster, easier, and more exclusively than he really has any right to do.

And it's fascinating just looking at the way that Nathan approaches problems

because he just figures out how to get the most bang for his buck in pretty much every situation.

Nathan is also a strong believer in

media first, distribution first. He believes you should build out an audience and build out a channel

to reach that audience before you build your product. I think there's a lot to learn from his approach,

so enjoy Nathan's story. You've got a lot going on right now. You've got a podcast with millions of

downloads. You've got a magazine that you of downloads. You've got a magazine that

you're publishing. You've got your subscription business, Founder Path, and a bunch of other

products that you've released in the past. And you've made a ton of money doing all this stuff

and generated your fair share of controversy at the same time. So I guess right from the top,

why do any of this? Why not just go get a normal job

somewhere like a normal person? I would just be very bored, I think, right? I mean, my first job was at Target during high school. I would work as much as I can over the weekends. And I just remember I'd get so bored. So my supervisor came over and said, Nathan, one of the things that I really need to do and our boss is we need to sell more target credit cards. So if you can start figuring out ways to upsell

these target credit cards, when people are checking out like their candy and their gum and their

milk, that's something fun for you to do. But I still even got bored with that. So the answer

that question is, I really enjoy

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