Shit You Don't Learn in School

“I intentionally call them projects, not products, but to create things that they just want to see exist in the world. Sometimes they make no money. Sometimes they make very little money. And sometimes they do make a surprising amount of money. But that velocity of being able to just say, I wanna create this, and maybe I'll keep working on it, but also maybe I won't, is what I've seen work for so many of these kind of indie makers.”

“I think the tiered pricing is really helpful here. If any creators are unsure of what to price it at, you can think of tiered pricing as the market helping you decide. It was helpful for me in several of the products I launched to start really low at a point where many people got in real early. I have friends now who I met through Internet pipes who joined at $30, who have joined several events, who didn't even know there were events when they purchased it.”

“I just want a product to probably be underpriced so that when people buy it, especially in those early stages, they just feel awesome about their purchase. And by the way, there are marketing reasons for this too. Because then they're more likely to go and share it. But, genuinely, as a creator, I care about that from more of the psychological reputation perspective where people are just like, oh, I know that if Steph put something out there, it's hopefully going to surpass my expectations.”

“Something that people do wrong sometimes, and I actually did this wrong with a bunch of my early projects, is I made a big launch out of something to start. And the problem with that is that it's really hard to see the signal from the noise around, are people paying attention? But in this case, what I had done is I've just kind of put it right at the end, which meant that someone had to stick with the podcast all the way through. And then there was probably a twenty second call out being like, hey, if you think this is interesting, go check it out here.”

“Honestly, you don't, which is why for most of my projects, I just have a time deadline, and that's it. And it's this constant fight between this pretty ambitious, probably crazy deadline. If I had another month, it would have been the same product. In fact, I think it could have been a worse product. That time constraint helped me stay focused.”

“Let's actually talk through that slippery slope. It's like, oh, tweets about trends, and then people say they want it. So then you go and create a product about trends. And then because of that, you test events. And then because those go semi well, you expand them. Then you go, wow, this is going really well. It's now time to quit my job. Time to hire a community manager. Oh, no. Now this community manager costs more than I expected, so therefore I need to increase prices. Oh, now that prices have increased, less people are buying. You can see how that spirals.”

“People don't get destroyed because they do something that's, like, so bad for any human. They get destroyed because whatever action they took was counter to the way that people interpreted them. So even at this dinner, we talked about MKBHD with his panels app and, like, is launching an app for screensavers all that bad? Absolutely not. If another creator did it, no one would care. It was just because it was counter to the way that people had interpreted him.”

“A lot of people get that wrong. They hear that I sold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of doing content right, and they think, oh, of course, you have over a 100,000 followers on Twitter. No. At that point, I had around 5,000 followers on Twitter, and it was actually the product that yielded attention that drove more followers. They think, let me build up the audience, and that'll yield customers for my product. But the things that have built my audience the most are actually these products.”

“A couple years ago, I said something along the lines of I finally felt financially secure, and it wasn't because of any number in a spreadsheet or a banking app. It was because I finally felt like I could build things. That was why I learned to code in the first place. You could wipe my audience and, yes, I would be sad. But I also would still feel just as, quote, rich because I feel like I can come up with an idea that I wanna see in the world and make it.”

“So we started with the kitchen table with a specific goal of having at least six people fit comfortably, but that naturally led to everything else. Like, the next step clearly after that was, okay. So what chairs do we get? And starting with one thing that you concretely know you want to change and optimize for is really helpful.”

“If I gave a tip for space optimization, my recommendation would be for people to walk around their house, sort of notice these problems like the build up places or as you're cooking, what's really annoying that keeps happening to you. Just literally pay attention. Go to the container store and walk every single aisle and you'll see things like, oh, I can't really organize my pots and pans without rejiggering it constantly.”

“Because it was a new skill for me and I don't have any interior designer friends, I ended up using ChatGPT a lot and it ended up being like an interior designer for me, but also a buddy to bounce ideas off of. And so practically speaking, what I would do is I would make some changes, and I would take a picture, and then I would upload it and be like, hey, what do you think about the space? Like, what are some improvements that I could make? And it was actually shockingly good at pointing out things I could do differently.”

“I ended up doing most of this on my own, partially because it was me who really wanted to get it done. But in the beginning, I was checking with you on a lot of things. Hey, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? And over time, you're just like, I trust you to make the decision. And I think that that was a really important part of actually making it happen in a short period of time because without that, we would just get into decision paralysis.”

“As I thought of different pieces, there was this important thing of, am I optimizing for the space or am I getting a forever piece? And if I'm just optimizing for the space, which is the case of something like we got a media console that was smaller than I probably would have in a different space, I'm not going to go balls to the wall in terms of how much I spend on this. Even if there are nicer ones that may look better, I'm actually going to trade off on price here because I may not want this piece in the future.”

“One of the things that struck me most about our trip to Japan was the way in which Japanese restaurants actually present food. They often have little ceramics for each little dish, and it kind of keeps your eating experience very clean, but also pleasant. And I think overall I came away with the idea that the way that you present your food or deliver it to people, including yourself, actually changes the eating experience and your perception of it.”

“As people are taking stock of their home and what's maybe broken, where things are accumulating, also take stock of the areas of your house where you spend no time. And there's a reason for it almost always, and it's probably because there's a TV and you don't watch TV or it's like there's a couch, but it's really uncomfortable. Use that as an opportunity to maybe override the sunk cost.”

“I think what we did probably could have taken three or four months, and it would have been less hectic. Though there's something about getting obsessed with something for a short period of time. This project only took a month. So I know a lot of home optimizations or changes can take months and years. In this case, it was very, very siloed. Once you got into it, you're like, I wanna just do it all now.”

“We have these little name card holders that are kinda cool in and of themselves. But what I do before guests come to dinner is I use my typewriter, and I write someone's name. You basically give them really funny, clever, only a close friend would refer to them as labels. When I started getting into CGMs, you're like, Steph Smith something something wearing a CGM. It's just funny or clever jokes where someone's like, I feel seen, but also you're kind of, in some cases, as a friend would, making fun of them.”

“Frugal staff ended up coming in and saying, hey, why don't we go to the West Elm outlet tomorrow and just see what they have? And so I had bought this couch online and I'm like, oh God, it's an hour and a half away, but Okay, let's do it. And by the grace of the gods, the universe, whatever you wanna call it, the couch that we bought was actually there. It had arrived the night before, and we ended up getting it for, like, $900 cheaper and having it delivered that quickly.”