What's up everybody?

This is Cortland from AndyHackers.com and you're listening to the EndieHackers 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 end hackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities,

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

All right, I'm here with Nathan Barry, the founder of an email marketing platform called

ConvertKit. It's what I use to send the Indie Hackers newsletter out to you about 80,000

subscribers three times a week. How's it going, Nathan? It's going well. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's been a long time since you've been on the show. I think you were, it's like May 2017 or something, you were doing seven million dollars a year and revenue with convert kit. Obviously things have changed in extreme degrees since then. I think you're at something like,

correct me if I'm wrong, $28 million a year and revenue today, which is nuts. Yeah, 27 and a half

million ARR. So it's definitely grown. You know, that's the magic of compound growth is that you

give it four or five years and a lot happens. It's absolutely crazy. And I bet you feel pretty different too. One thing I think that's interesting being in your position is that most people I talk to who are, like once they hit like a mill, two mill a year and revenue, they're kind of like, all right, I'm going to stop doing the whole transparency thing. Like, it's enough. I don't really want to feed my competitors this information.

I think in your situation, like the other big players in email marketing, they're not really that transparent. You know, I don't know their revenue numbers. I don't think anybody knows their revenue numbers. Yeah, well, it makes sense to me that a lot of people stop. I had two good friends of mine in the business space.

I think a lot of people in the Indy Hackers community would know at a conference who sat me down and was like, hey, Nathan, this is an intervention. You know, the public numbers were cool up to like 50,000 MR, 100,000, 200,000. I don't know what. But like, it's time to stop. You're giving your competitors way too much information. We actually had two different competitors at different times.

Me like, hey, thanks for, thanks for that.

That's super helpful.

They were basically saying, like, it doesn't serve you anymore.

Stop doing it.

And I think they had really good points.

From the business perspective, like the whole build and public thing, which is really

trendy and popular now, we've been doing that since the

beginning. And what ends up happening is the numbers get misconstrued in some way. They get quoted

in a way that isn't accurate. Like, I think Buffer stopped sharing their numbers like a public

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