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

IndieHackers 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 endy hackers to discuss the ideas,

the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of.

So the rest of us can do the same. So MakerPad, for people who don't know, is really the best place to learn how to build apps and websites without code.

So if you have no idea how to code, you could go to MakerPad. And I don't know how long it would take you to learn but

you would eventually be able to build something like I don't know your own like Airbnb clone

without knowing anything about how to code is that right yeah yeah that's one way to put it yeah

you can do it in minutes you can learn how to do something a quick automation to save you

hours of work or building website building Airbnb clone clone, build an app, that sort of stuff. Which is obviously world changing because I don't know how many people in my life who've been like, Cortland, if only you will build me this app, you know, I can, you know, achieve this vision or make this much money, et cetera. I'm like, sorry, like it's cost a lot of money and I'm not going to do it for free. But now those people don't have to bug me. They can just go to MakerPad and learn how to do it on their own. And I think when I talked to you, you would, you'd run a MakerPad for like, I don't know, like six months or something, solo founder and you'd already done like $100,000 in revenue. And your expenses were like nothing. It was like 5% expenses or something. And so it was like 95% profit and you were super happy to you and you hadn hadn't even quit your job yet. You're like, I'm still waiting to quit my job. I think you quit like maybe a month or two after the podcast. Now, less than two years later, maybe like a year and a half later, you are at a $400,000 revenue run rate. You've got multiple employees. And you just recently announced that your company was bought by Zapier,

which is kind of the premier no code tool that people use to automate tasks and connect

different apps between each other on the web. So congratulations. That's a lot of progress and

very little time. Yeah, yeah. It's been a bit of a roller coaster. I don't think it feels like

that at the time. It doesn't feel like, oh, this is all going really quick. But yeah, when you look back on it, yeah, it was like 18 months of me actually going full time. And yeah, we've been acquired and couldn't be more excited with the outcome, really. I think it's huge and obviously we'll get into all the

wise and the details and stuff, but it's just like a credit to the movement in general has

been growing and growing and we've been lucky that we've sort of been at the forefront of that

community. There's something about being like the entry level option. Paul Graham wrote a good blog post

recently and talking about kind of like different things that he's learned from things that he worked on. And he said, there's this idea that the low end eats the high end and that it's good to be the entry level option, even though that's less prestigious than being the high end option. Because if you're not the entry level option, somebody else will be, and they will eventually squash you against the ceiling,

which means that you should be kind of like wary about prestige. And when I think about MakerPad, like, you're the entry level option.

Someone knows zero about no code. They know nothing. They're going to go to you. And that means like you have a lot of power because like that's where the most people are.

And like you can kind of sort of direct them. You can say, hey, you should go use Zapier. You should go use Airtable.

And it makes a lot of sense for a company like Zapier to want to like own MakerPad because they want to be the entry level option. They want to be able to direct brand new people to where they want to go ideally to Zapier. So it's kind of cool strategically to look at like how that's worked for you. And Paul Graham said that was kind of the biggest lesson that he learned that helped him start Ycombinator and VioWeb, his company before that. Like Y Combinator is like the entry level option for startup founders. And like yeah, Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz might be more prestigious. But at the end of the day, like if YC like disinvited them from Demo Day or something, it would be kind of crappy for them because they wouldn't be able to take a look at all these really cool early stage companies. And so you're in a lot of ways like the YC for NoC. So when I was first doing MakePad, it was like, oh, just finding out about these tools and just figuring out what you could do, like pushing it to an Airbnb Eathlone or whatever. And I sort of made a mistake of thinking that everyone was learning at the pace that I was

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