What's up everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.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 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.

All right, I'm here with Rob Walling, the creator of Tiny Seed, the startup accelerator designed for bootstrappers, and the creator of MicroConf.

How's it going, Rob?

Pretty good, man. It's good to be back in the show. We're here on Riverside recording this,

where they are the primary competitors to your portfolio company Squadcast, who I also used in love.

I almost rejected your calendar invite and said, I'm sorry. Here's my Squadcast link. Let's record it.

I could have booted up my Squadcast account and recorded it with that. It's all, uh, it's all on Stripes time. So like whatever, I'll pay for two, I'll pay for two podcasts recording tools. I haven't used Riverside yet. So this is a treat to be able to, you know, because I have, we used to use Zencaster for the startups for the rest of us. And then it's obviously switched to squadcast and so this is is my first experience with Riverside. Yeah. Well, this is it. Get a spy on the competition. Feed whatever learnings you get back to the squadcast guys. What are you using for your podcast? I assume squadcast. Are you doing video? Are you doing? Doing a little bit of video, just toying with it, actually, over the past few weeks. And so I hired an assistant producer named Aaron,

and he's, I love it. He's got the get up and go. You know, he's just like, let's try this, let's try that. And I'm like the old guy now. And I'm like, is this really worth the time? Is it really worth it? But it's cool because he's spurring me on to like experiment with things. So instead of just recording audio now since squadcast supports video native, I've been recording like the first five to 10 minutes

of an interview or a conversation in video and then just switching to audio. See, I like audio only.

And we've had good luck with it with microconf already. I think we have 300-ish videos. We went from zero subscribers

a year ago to 7,500 now. And it's been a mix of promoting to our audience, you know, like

emailing, hey, new videos up, and then just this organic reach. And I'll admit, I'd always heard

YouTube is the second largest search engine compared to Google, but it didn't sink into me just the sheer volume of, right?

Yeah. And this is one of those things where it's that investment and it's asymmetric risk of like, we're going to pay Aaron every week to create more of these and how many clips can we get out of it. And we're going to get nothing back for probably months. And then we'll get one hit. And for MicroConf, the one that flipped us was the Jason Cohen designing the ideal bootstrap business talk from 2012, I believe. And that got on Hacker News. And I think like Paddyo 11 tweeted it. And just a bunch of stuff happened. And that went to tens of thousands of views overnight. And that got a bunch of subscribers to the microcom channel and once you get there it's a signal to YouTube that you should start ranking for other things and that's I think what I'm going to try with the startups for the rest of us is when can we get to that point where we get that flip and the channel becomes I'm making this up like I didn't I just imagining there's a domain you know there's domain authority. It's like there has to be channel authority in their For sure, for sure. this up, like I didn't, I just imagining there's a domain, you know,

there's domain authority. It's like, there has to be channel authority in their album. For sure,

for sure. And it's like, they've got the search engine, which is one way to be found. And they've got the recommended videos. So you end a video that pop up other videos as videos in the sidebar. It's just super good for discovery. And people would just be like, that looks interesting, click versus like a podcast player. I don't know. Podcast discovery seems really terrible.

And maybe it's a problem that no one cares about except

for podcast hosts. We were like, we wish you was easy to this good approach. Yeah, me too.

But I think one of the cool things about YouTube is that essentially even if you don't

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