What's up everyone?

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 did they get to where they are today? How did they make decisions, both with 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 show and you want an easy way to support it, please leave a review on iTunes.

It's probably the best way to help others find the show, and I really appreciate it.

In today's episode, I sat down with longtime indie hacker Drew Riley.

Drew is a creator behind Trends.VC, a newsletter where he shares the latest trends in tech, business, and startups.

It's super popular.

I'm subscribed along with many others, and he's doing tens of thousands of dollars a month and revenue from his newsletter. But it took Drew quite a while to get here. In fact, it took him multiple years after quitting his job to get to the point where he started this email newsletter. And many months after that, to get to the point where he was actually charging money and growing his description base. So I think there's a lot to learn from Drew about perseverance and just

figuring out the right idea to work on. Enjoy the episode. You made one of the more interesting

posts that I've seen on Andy hackers. I think in part because your story resonated with me,

and it was when you were talking about how you had quit your job in 2017 and you're

very transparent. You said you'd work for three years. He saved up 250K, which is a ridiculous

amount of money. And he just lived for three years off your savings, building projects, trying to be

an indie hacker, and not making literally a single dime in that entire time until I think May

of this year with Trends.VC.

What was that like working for so many years and not finding any success?

I wasn't working the whole time.

Like I was traveling.

I picked up Jiu-Jitsu, did some improv.

You said something in your comment on that post that really resonated and I think about it at least once a week about how time, I guess our urgency like matches the amount of time that we have. And as I was running out of money, I got really serious. I was learning and like building, but not with a sense of urgency until I'm like, okay, I can see the end of the tunnel and it's back to working for the man if I don't figure something out. Yeah, so it was a really short post that didn't leave room for a lot of nuance. So I wasn't like working trying to make something happen the whole time. I have projects here and there, but like towards the end of 2019, up until trends started, there were probably like six projects back to back, just trying to build the airplane as I was falling down. Yeah, on your personal website, you've got, I think, 12 different projects that you've worked on over the years. And there's a huge variety. Some of them are hackathon. Some of them are SaaS products that you built. More recently, there's a lot of, like, newsletters and content businesses. But it's pretty clear you've been trying a lot of stuff. And I think this idea that work expands to fill the time allotted

is true on so many levels. It's true individually with like a particular task that you've been

...