What's up, everybody?

This is Cortland from NDHackers.com and you're listening to the NDHackers podcast.

More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a ton of money in the process.

And on this show, I interviewed these endy hackers to learn about the ideas, the strategies, and the opportunities they're taking advantage of so the rest of us can do the process. And on this show, I interviewed these indie hackers to learn about the ideas,

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Today, I'm talking to Tyler King, the creator of less annoying CRM. How's it going, Tyler? Good. How are you? Excellent. It's good to have you back on the show. You were here last October in episode number 128. I recommend people go check that one out. You talked about how you spent 10 years building your SaaS product, less annoying CRM, which as people can probably guess from the name, is a less annoying CRM tool. And you got to the point where you had 22,000 paying customers. You

hit $2.6 million in annual recurring revenue. What are you up to nowadays? We are just almost

at 3 million ARR. So we're trying to hit that, if not for this pandemic. We'd be there by now,

but we had a couple rough months, but things kind of bounced back around this summer. Yeah, that's a pretty cool progress, Miles sent a report regardless. And I think what I like about your company in particular is that you're sort of building it to last. You know, you're not trying to flip it. You're not trying to sell it. You're not trying to figure out the new thing to work on. you're thinking about how you can still be here doing kind of the same thing

and the next 20 or 30 years. You have a whole podcast devoted to that called Start Up to Last that we're kind of going to talk about later on. Yeah, absolutely. You know, we're getting like 10 to 15% growth year over year, which if you're trying to exit in two years is pretty pathetic. and if you're like we're going to be here 30 years from now, you're like, okay, that compounding can really add up over that time span. So if people want to hear a story, I recommend they go check out that episode. Today we're going to talk about something completely different, which is this topic that you brought up to me a few times in recent weeks, which is bundling. And I think kind of the trigger for this was the

Slack acquisition by Salesforce. So first of all, let's start there. What do you think about

Slack getting bought by Salesforce? Yeah, it's huge in SaaS, because Slack was arguably the biggest

success of the most recent generation. And them getting acquired is sort of viewed as a failure.

I mean, it's obviously a financial success.

It was $27 billion, but everyone's saying the reason they had to sell

is because they couldn't cut it as a standalone company.

Yeah, I've seen a lot of negative press that's basically Slack had to sell

because of the pressure from Microsoft Teams.

You know, Microsoft's got this Teams product. It's competitive. A lot of people are using it.

I talked to my mom. She doesn't know what Slack is, but she's on Microsoft Teams at her company, using that every day.

And she doesn't like it, but she's using it. And that's kind of what matters in terms of revenue.

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