What's up, everybody?

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

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

And on this show, I sit down with these indie hackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of, so the rest of us can do the same. Today I'm talking to Kevin Lee, the founder of Emmy. Kevin is a good friend of mine. The way that Kevin and I met was that he messaged me about my ads for indie hackers. And he was like, hey, Cortland, I love what you're doing, but you're charging way too little. And I was like, well, if you think that's the case, then why don't you be the first person to pay the prices that you think I should be charging for ads? And he agreed. So if you go back to episode two of the podcast, you can actually hear Kevin's ads in the show. Kevin's a super talented founder. He has run the premier community for product managers

online and now he's working on something brand new. So in this episode, we just get personal.

We talk about our own health and wellness. We talk about looking back from your deathbed,

literally, and trying to make sure that you live the life where you worked on the things that actually brought you joy and you didn't just do the things that society told you you should work on. We talked about dealing with the haters and the naysayers and the people who tell you that your product literally isn't going to make it and we won't talk to you at conferences and it won't give you the time of day because Kevin's had to deal with quite a lot of that with this new venture. And we just catch up as friends. I've been thinking that I should bring a lot more myself to the episodes, just be a little bit more personal on the podcast. And so I did a lot of that in this episode. If you like it, ping me on Twitter and let me know. And if you don't like it and you don't want to hear about me. You should also ping me on Twitter and let me know. I promise I won't take offense. Enjoy the episode. I subscribed to a whole bunch of substacks. I had this crazy phase last year. I was like, I'm going to subscribe to every substack and just read everything. And then I ended up like funneling into this new email address. I thought it was so smart. I'm like, I'm going to make an email address and get an iPad and I'm only going to have my substacks on that Gmail. And it turns out none of the stuff I subscribed to you was important enough for me to ever even open that email address. So I had to like redirect all of it to my normal email that I actually check. And I just incidentally see it when I'm checking like my real actual important email. And one of the ones I subscribe to is the Jungle Jim newsletter, which I'm sure you're intimately familiar with. Yeah, yeah. I open up the email and I literally just see like your face smiling back at me, like a huge portion of just your face right at the top of the email. And I'm like, oh shit, it's Kevin Like, what's Kevin been up to you? I have to tell Nick that because I remember too that after he published that you DM me, I texted Nick and I was like, dude, your newsletter has powers. Like I just reconnected with Cortland and like I'm going on the podcast and like another thing came out of it. They pilot that accounting software. I'm doing like a fireside chat with their CEO.

Really? Someone saw the Jungle Gym newsletter and then reached out. And so I was like, wow, like more people should be featured on his newsletter. It's good, man. It's like super personal. Again, like literally your face is right at the beginning of it. So there's like, there's no question who this is about because like the vast majority of these things I just archive like honestly if I read the subject I would and that was it like I would

have just archived it like if your face wasn't there and I didn't recognize you, there's no way I would have read the email. Well, I'm so flattered. Thank you for him. Speaking of which, are you doing anything tonight at 7 p.m.? Because Nick is actually doing a talk, or not talk. He's doing a Clubhouse? He's doing a clubhouse. I knew you were going to say a clubhouse. It was a clubhouse thing. Yeah. It's called audience as a career mode. Every time in the last two weeks, anyone has any sentence that starts with, what are you doing later tonight? The rest of those sentences, 100% of the time, there's a clubhouse talk going on. It's like Julian Shapiro is actually supposed to do it. I don't know if you can make it, but it's Justin Mares, Julian. And it's called audience as a career mode, which kind of feels like it's straight up your alley. Yeah, yeah. I talk to Julian literally every single day because we're starting a new podcast. And we are, we literally just recorded our fourth episode yesterday. It's mostly about audience building, but it's mostly just about like bringing on people who are really good at things. Like we won't have a huge variety of topics. And we've got a talk show format. So every episode is going to be me, Julian, and then two other people who we think would just be really interesting to put in the same room together and just see what they say about a topic.

So we did, you know, Sam Parr who runs the hustle.

Yeah.

That guy is like super opinionated, super fun.

And like he'll ask anybody, any question completely shamelessly.

And then we got Ayla, who's like this only fan's creator from Twitter, who's got like 70,000 followers.

And she's super like personal and authentic and she'll share anything. I mean, she's literally a porn star. So we put them in a first episode and we're like talking about audience building. Or we've got one coming up with Jason Kalakhanis and Sean Peary from My First Million about podcasting. And like they're both like super cool personalities. It'll be fun to talk to you. These are great guests. Yeah, it's super good. Every episode is going to be great guests.

Heavy hitters who like are not afraid to be brutally honest about things. That's the exact formula. Only people who are honest. The name of the show is going to be an honest conversation. And it's like if you're not honest, if you're not willing to like share embarrassing information, like we don't want you on the show.

Oh, man, that's awesome.

Hopefully it'll turn out well.

It might be a dud, but at the very least, it's like, it's super fun.

And it's a good excuse for me and Julian to like hang out every day pretty much. Yeah, I was in like Julian's small writing group for a while. He was doing like this writing experiment thing. It was really hard, but anyway, I love hanging. Did you learn to write? I had this writing phase where like Saul Hill and I would spend like every morning for like three hours and just sit on a Zoom quietly and just like write together. But he was actually writing like a book at the time and he had like a bunch of things going on and I was just writing for fun. And then after I stopped that like Julian ping me and he was like, hey, I'm doing a small writing group and I'm like, okay, let's keep the train going. It's hard. It's hard to do like a company and then write proactively. You really have to prioritize the time. So yeah. It's a so hell's an interesting guy. It's always fascinating to me like how much free time he has to just sit around. He, he engineered that though.. I think he's like, it's beautiful.

The way he's like created the company, like with like no meetings and all that stuff, he has definitely designed his life. So he was on our podcast yesterday. And like right after the podcast ended, Julian had a bunch of stuff he had to run and do. Jack had a bunch of stuff he wanted to do. And then me and Sawhill just had nothing to do. So we talked for like an hour and a half.

Nice.

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