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Indie Hackers

#204 – The Simplest $250K ARR Startup You've Ever Heard Of with Collin Waldoch

Indie Hackers

Courtland Allen and Channing Allen

Startups, Entrepreneurship, Makers, Indie, Bootstrapping, Online, Technology, Business, Founders, Bootstrappers, Ideas, Tech, Indiehackers, Hackers

4.9606 Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2021

⏱️ 39 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Over the past two years, I’ve been getting emails from Collin Waldoch. The first was in 2019 when he told me his startup Water Cooler Trivia was making $10K ARR. That was followed a few months later by him telling me he was making $50k, then $100K, and most recently $250K. I want you to hear how simple the product is that he built and why he’s not seeing any churn.

Transcript

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0:00.0

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

0:10.5

NDHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money

0:15.2

in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these indie hackers to discuss the ideas,

0:19.2

the opportunities, and the strategies

0:21.0

they're taking advantage of, so the rest of us can do the same.

0:28.2

So we're going to talk about water cool, trivia. You've been emailing me for like a year and a half,

0:33.5

and I almost never invite anybody on the show who comes up for email every now and then.

0:37.7

But here you are.

0:39.4

And it's because of the way your emails progressed.

0:41.2

It was like 2019. Hey, Coralind, just did an interview on any hackers making like, you know, $10,000 a year. I think it'd be good for the podcast. I was like, I'll wait a little bit. And then like every few months after that, it was like up to $50,000 a year, up to $100,000 a year.

0:38.1

What was the last email you sent me?

0:39.1

I think you're like 200.

0:40.5

Probably 200 or 250.

0:41.6

I don't know what I think. every few months after that. It was like up to $50,000 a year, up to $100,000 a year.

0:58.3

What was the last email you sent me? I think you're like 200 or 250. I don't know when I sent you the email. But yeah. Yeah, yeah, $250,000 a year. So I was like, oh, Jesus,

1:02.0

Colin's crushing it. I don't know what happened during the pandemic, but like your app is

1:04.7

blowing up. What is water cooler trivia? So waterer trivia is a weekly trivia app. It's basically that simple. I love that I feel like I can explain it to my grandma because my grandma gets my monthly investor letters and reads them and always gives me feedback, which is lovely. But we send a weekly trivia quiz to work teams. And so it's typically over email or it's over Slack or Microsoft Teams. And you answer 10 questions or more or less, depends how you customize it. And then the next day, the results come out. So it's sort of asynchronous. Fill it out during the day Monday. Results come Tuesday. And there's a leaderboard over time and it's just something that's fun and easy. I think that's not a chore. And so people have latched onto it on to it and it happens to work really good in both

1:44.2

virtual or physical or hybrid virtual physical or whatever we're going to call it moving forward

1:49.0

but it was just a random idea that was what we really called beer money idea like bootstrapped it for

1:55.0

two years with friends two and a half years before any of us took a full-time leap yeah it is super cool

2:00.6

i'm on your website right now.

2:01.6

Like, the description really is as simple as you make it. It says your team's new favorite weekly ritual. You choose the trivia schedule and categories. We write the questions and we grade the results. It's all automated. It's asynchronous. Couldn't be easier. And you've got like some pretty cool customers on here. on here. You've got Straba, Amazon as a customer, Impossible Foods, the Dallas Mavericks. I'm just imagining basketball players playing trivia, but I'm sure it's the back office. I wish it was actually like Luca Donchich and Mark Cuban, but this is one of their marketing teams. I have to confess. Yeah. I mean, you've got Nike on here, Warby

...

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