What's up everybody? This is Cortland from ndhackers.com and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online 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, opportunities and strategies they're taking advantage of so the rest of us can do the same. If you've been listening in and enjoying the show, do me a favor, leave a quick rating for us on Apple Podcasts. Today I'm talking to Chris Oliver. Chris is a solo

founder, an indie hacker. He recently passed a million dollars in revenue from his products,

which is super impressive, and he's kind of had a cool journey. At some point, he was recording

screencast and helping people learn Ruby on Rails, and he got to the point where he was literally working the four-hour work week. He would spend four hours putting together a screencast and then have nothing to do the rest of the week and he's making a full-time salary. So he decided to expand an entire suite of products. Now he's got a bunch of different business models, a bunch of different stuff he's built, and they're all kind of targeted at the same group of people, this little empire that he's

built for himself at his company, Go Rails.

Enjoy the episode.

So you're playing on Black Friday is to raise your prices.

Yeah, sort of like, I'm basically selling this Rails app template, but as time goes on, like there's a lot of maintenance to something like that to keep it up to date with the latest rails and everything.

Right.

Yeah, it seems like the logical time to be like, yeah, and part of our deal is prices go up after Black Friday.

So that should work pretty well.

Fingers crossed.

You said it was like what's the price before and after Black Friday?

It's $1.49 for single use and $449 for multiple use.

And what I'll be doing in the future is not including free updates every year.

So you'll subscribe like on a yearly plan, kind of like Sketch does, I think. What do you think about Black Friday in general? I keep seeing all these tweets. Like, what are your thoughts on Black Friday as a creator? What are your thoughts on Black Friday as a consumer? And people are so charged about this. People are like, it's mindless consumerism and it's terrible for the world. And other people are like, no, it's great. I get a lot of free or cheap stuff.

What do you think?

Yeah, it's interesting.

The stuff that I don't like is like Walmart making special TVs just for Black Friday

that are like slightly crappier, but they don't tell you that.

But as a business owner, it's great because that ends up being like a couple months of revenue over a weekend sometimes, which is awesome.

But you don't want to go too far with, it seems like a lot of people this year are doing like 50% off, which it is a pandemic year, which I understand.

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