What's up everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.

More people than ever are finding ways to build cool stuff on the internet and making a ton of money in the process.

And on this show, I talked to these indie hackers to learn about the latest ideas, trends, and strategies they're taking advantage of so the rest of us can do the same. If you've been enjoying the show, do me a favor and leave a quick rating for us on Apple Podcasts. It really helps other people discover the show as well. Today, I'm talking to David Shue. David is the founder of Retool, which helps companies build internal tools way faster without having to code them

from scratch.

What's really cool about David's story in particular is just how ambitious he is.

With the founding team, without hiring anybody, they were able to grow to about a million

dollars a year in revenue pretty quickly, and they didn't stop there.

They decided that their ambition was to change the way the people write code.

They've raised a boatload of money to accomplish that mission, and I think they might have a shot at actually doing it. Today, Retool is just a few years old, and they're already doing tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue. A big part of David and I's discussion revolves around how they're able to grow so quickly, but also how do you decide to go big as an ND hacker? What does that process look like and what are the tradeoffs involved?

Enjoy the episode.

David Shue, welcome to the ND hackers podcast.

Thanks for having me.

I've been really excited about this.

I was looking at our history over email to try to find out like, when was the very first time that we spoke?

And it was actually an email you sent me that I didn't respond to because at the time I thought it was automated, but now reading it, it seems like you almost typed it by hand. It was right after you launched retool on Hacker News, I saw it and I was like, oh, this is super cool. Like you can build these internal tools way faster. And I had been building tons of internal tools for myself to just give me more leverage and and be more efficient running any hackers. And so I was like, I should use this. So I signed up. And then I think two days later you send me an email. You're like, hey, it's Sunday night, but I'm working on retool and get any questions on the CEO. This is what I'm here for. And I just archived it and didn't respond. Yeah, that was like you said, right after we had launched a Hacker News, I think. Yeah. At that point, Retool was tiny. I think just a few of us. We had worked on it for a little bit. I think this must have been in 2018. Yeah, August 2018, almost exactly two years ago. Yeah. So that was, I think, a year after we'd already gone through YC. And then we worked on Retool, doing outbound sales and coding basically for a year until we finally launched it. And I was so excited when I saw that you signed up. Because, I mean, I had already been a fan of indie hackers for a while. The sort of whole indie hackers ethos, I mean, we were living that at the time, right? We were just, you know, a few of us coding away, selling away and stuff like that. So I was really excited to see you sign up. I was kind of sad you to respond, but excited to see you sign up. I was excited to sign up. And we eventually started talking quite a lot, because once I got end of the tool, I think you had like an intercom widget or something for feedback in the bottom right. And it was early days. So there were just features that were missing

at the time. And it was early days.

So there were just features that were missing at the time. And I was like, hey, you know, Retool team, can you build this? And you're super responsive. You would like reply and be like, yeah. And often you would within like the same day add a new feature or push like a bug fix or something. and this just like happened for probably like the first couple months I was on Retool

where I would just like make all these like the first couple months I was on Retool

where I would just like make all these suggestions and see all this stuff going on.

And like I know you were probably doing the same song and dance with a bunch of other early

adopter customers too.

Yeah, yeah.

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