Episode 61
· 43:12
Hello. Hello. Hello. Welcome to product people. It's Thursday, and you know what that means.
Speaker 1:It's time for a new episode. Justin Jackson here. And I don't know if you can hear that in the background, but it is storming like crazy here in Vernon, British Columbia. Lots of rain, lots of hail, some thunder, some lightning. Alright.
Speaker 1:A few things I wanna tell you about. First, I'm releasing a new course based on my sold out workshops called build your own audience. I did two workshops. They both sold out. A lot of people asked if there could be, like, a self paced course.
Speaker 1:That's what I'm working on right now. You'll be able to get more information on that at justinjackson.ca/audience, and that should be out July 29. That's a Tuesday. I'd appreciate it. If you're into that, join my mailing list, justin jackson dot c a slash newsletter because you'll get it early on July 25.
Speaker 1:That's tomorrow. Man, that's tomorrow. I got a lot of work to do still. Second thing is productpeople.club. I'm hoping to release some screenshots soon.
Speaker 1:I have a bunch of them ready. But in the meantime, go to productpeople.club, sign up for the waiting list, and I will let you know as soon as that is ready. Okay. Today's interview is with one of my favorite people on the Internet. It's with Nate Cotney.
Speaker 1:He is the guy behind draftin.com. That's draftin.com. Amazing writer, amazing entrepreneur, amazing product person, and he's doing it all by himself. He is a solo developer, solo product person building this app, Draftin, that helps you to write better. And I use it for all my drafts on my blog.
Speaker 1:I've used it for the drafts of my book amplification. And he's just a good dude. He blogs at ninjasandrobots.com. I think you're gonna really like him, especially if you're trying to figure out how to get into writing and how to increase the awareness of what you're doing, how to kind of amplify your work. Alright?
Speaker 1:So let's listen to some Stryker, and then we'll get into the interview. Stryker-metal.com. Here we go. Alright. So I am live.
Speaker 1:This is Justin Jackson here and I'm live with Nate how do you pronounce your last name? Kontney?
Speaker 2:Kotney. It's it's like the it's like the first n is silent. Kotney. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:K o t n y. You could get by pronouncing it. Though some people also pronounce the n. My family pronounces it both ways.
Speaker 1:Gotcha. Gotcha. So I'm here with Nate Cotney, and Nate has a great app that I use all the time called Draft at draughtin.com. And today, we're gonna talk about how do you find a good business idea? How do you validate that idea?
Speaker 1:Like, how do you know that it's actually something people will buy? And then also, do you manage the marketing? How do you let people know about this thing that you've built? So, Nate, why don't we start? I know you've had some previous companies and some previous products.
Speaker 1:Why don't you tell us about those and how those came to be and what happened? Sure.
Speaker 2:So I mean, my background is, you know, I've been doing startup stuff for the last over eight years now, almost maybe nine years. I started my first business with Y Combinator back at the 2005, 2006. Oh, wow. A company called Inkling at inklingmarkets.com. It's still around today, still doing very well today.
Speaker 2:Does prediction markets, like wisdom of crowds kind of stuff, you know, you set up a market where you, you know they just did the Oscars this last weekend or whatever, so, you know, you can put a bunch of questions out there, kind of like who's gonna win best actor, right, in a movie at the Oscars, and then you can place little bets on who's gonna win. I think we got 17 out of 18 of them correct this Sunday. But mostly that's just fun stuff. Right? I mean, we don't we don't make our money at Inkling doing stuff with the Oscars.
Speaker 2:We make it selling selling, you know, the software to companies like you see there like Procter and Gamble and Ford and Lockheed Martin who's got, you know, big projects and there's hundreds of tens of thousands, if not even hundreds of thousands of employees at these companies who they wanna kinda collect the wisdom of what they're kind of thinking about or planning. So that was my first business. That's what I did with Y Combinator back in 02/2006. We were in the second batch of Y Combinator, the first batch that they did in Silicon Valley. Some of our batchmates were like Wufoo.
Speaker 2:So it goes quite back a ways. But anyway, that's that's my background and then I wanted to do another startup and so I I did I I went through Y Combinator again in 02/2011, the 2011, and that went awful. That was terrible. We we really sucked it up, and so yeah, I I ended up yeah, I mean, we did Y Combinator. Was still a good experience, but we we really kinda failed at that project.
Speaker 2:So I took a break, did the Obama campaign for six months, got out of the Obama campaign and and started draft. That's that's a little bit about my background of of working with products. I've I've done it good, I screwed up, and now it seems like I'm doing it good again.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wow. Okay. So you're still you're still running Inkling Markets?
Speaker 2:No. It's my partner and some other employees. No. I I stepped away to to start that second company. I I kinda just yeah.
Speaker 2:Took a took a break. Didn't didn't wanna do Inkling's mature. Inkling's a very mature piece of software, and it does stuff with with large companies, and it's it's kinda gotten away from something I can really relate to anymore. Yeah. You know, it's like when I started Inkling, I wanted it to be the software that that met a personal need of kind of, you know, gathering the wisdom from friends and other people.
Speaker 2:That's kind of what I intended it to be, but really quickly we realized it's very useful for large companies. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's just my interests are like to try and create software I can use every day and that I have like a personal need for. Yeah. So I wanted to to to do something new.
Speaker 2:And and so in 02/2011, you know, we had been doing Inkling already for like five, six years. So no, I I don't work in Inkling anymore.
Speaker 1:Gotcha. That's an actually an interesting thing because we talked about we just talked about like you need an idea that's gonna work. You need, you know, a market that's actually gonna buy it. But you just introduced the third thing which is you have to actually like it.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Totally.
Speaker 1:So I think
Speaker 2:We can talk about more about that, but I think marketing and liking the idea go hand in hand. It's really hard to market things you don't like. And if and if and as you do these things, I mean, is this kinda gets into your third point. We can go into more detail about this later, but I'm a big believer in even just blogging and writing and and teaching to get the word out about your idea and I know a lot of people resist doing that. They feel like they're not good teachers or they're not good writers, but I think what often happens with a lot of people is not so much that they don't feel like they're good writers, they just don't have any interest in what they're writing about.
Speaker 2:You know, like they sell a product but then they get so bored writing about it, but that's like a huge red flag because it's like, woah woah woah. Writing about it is actually should be the easy part. If you think you then if you can't write about this once a week or every day and publish a blog post every week about the subject matter you're kind of starting a business in, how are you gonna keep getting up every day five years from now when business is gonna go through its ups and downs like a roller coaster? Yeah. And and it doesn't dawn on people like that that's what life is like running these startups.
Speaker 2:And so it's like, if you if you don't have this kind of drive or passion to be writing about it, I don't think you have it in you to kind of continue on running this business in the long term.
Speaker 1:That's a good takeaway right there. I think we should talk about this now. Sure. Because this is something that comes up quite a bit. You know, I have an email list and actually one thing I keep telling people is that I think the best thing I ever did was start an email list that was kind of focused on a certain group of people and then I just started emailing them even when it was five and then 20, and then a 100.
Speaker 1:And the responses that I get back are what kind of inform what I'm gonna do moving forward. The the whole kind of reason I'm doing a book called Marketing for Developers is I figured out about 60% of the people on my mailing list were software developers. I was like, oh, why are you following me? Like, why are you interested in what I have to say? And a lot of them said, well, we're following you because you seem to understand about marketing.
Speaker 1:But one of the things I keep getting back in emails, and I'm sure you've seen this too, is people say, I want to start, I'm a developer and I'm going to start a business for real estate agents. I say, well, do you know about real estate? And I said, not really anything, but it just seems like a good market. So why do you think that's dangerous? Why do you think, you know, why shouldn't a developer just build an application for real estate agents?
Speaker 2:Right. So it works out for people sometimes, right? And like, I I do see examples of it working, and and some people can pull it off. Mhmm. There's no there is no black and white in this.
Speaker 2:I think so whatever I say, I mean, it's all prefaced with like, you can totally do the opposite of what I'm telling you, and you'll likely also be successful if you do keep doing it and getting better at it and practicing it. Mhmm. But there's there's a there's a Austin Kleon is a is a guy who writes a book. I think it's his first book was like, Steal Like an Artist or something like that. The guy writes some really great books, but he's got this really great quote in a manifesto of like, tell live the story.
Speaker 2:Write the story that you wanna read. Sing the song you wanna hear. You know, basically live the life that you kinda wanna talk about or the story you wanna tell. So for me, I don't know. Like, if I'm gonna live this life, I mean, it's short.
Speaker 2:You know, I'm only 36, and already I kinda feel old, and things are happening, and like, I don't wanna wake up and feel like I've spent my whole life working on something that I really don't care about. I wanna in the end, the story I wanna tell is like, I got to work on something that like got me excited and that I that I really enjoy using. Anyway, that that's kind of a tangent, but I think a big a big red flag, a big problem of working, say, as a developer on real estate software is if you don't like real estate software, there are so many bad things that are gonna happen to you as you run this company. I guarantee you there's gonna be bad things. I don't care how successful you are.
Speaker 2:Look at like the guys running like Airbnb. Right? The guys running Airbnb, super successful. They've got millions of dollars. Their business is worth billions of dollars and then bad things happen to them.
Speaker 2:Right? I don't know if you remember like it was like a year ago or two years ago where like it was a huge press problem where like a house got like, I don't know, robbed some meth addicts were like, you know, basically destroy the house that they rented. Yeah. And it became a big deal. People started like worrying, that is going to happen to you.
Speaker 2:Like some terrible thing is going to happen in your business and in your life as you run this business. And if you don't care enough, if you're just like in the real estate business, just to be in the real estate business, but you don't care about it, it's gonna be really hard to get through those moments. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:What happened with your second company? Like, you mentioned that it didn't work out. What didn't work out with that second company?
Speaker 2:So this is kind of why I'm I'm kind of passionate about this topic. So with Inkling, Inkling came from a place where it was very much I was very interested in in creating kind of software to kind of gather the wisdom of friends and and and helping make decisions using kind of the wisdom of the crowds and and tap into, like, even the friends I have around me. So CityPosh was the second company that I did in 2011 with Y Combinator. You you can't even get to it right now at cityposh dot com, even though my email you can still get me on email, but the the website doesn't even work anymore. But CityPosh was this thing when I created because I got interested in games, and I was very interested in like, I've doing Inkling, it's very much like a game.
Speaker 2:Right? It's like a virtual stock exchange. There's a lot of kind of game mechanics in play, and we were doing this before game mechanics were even like a word anybody was using. We just wanted to create this thing and really quickly, it's just I mean, the stock market play is like a game. Right?
Speaker 2:Like you're placing bets, trying to win things, you know, you're trying to score more points than another person. It just naturally kind of becomes a game. So I started getting really good at kind of just thinking about game mechanics and getting people interested in this stuff. So it just I just naturally was just interested in like, well, what more can I do with games? And so I just started making games, and and just kind of being interested in games, and just So I started fooling around with creating my own games, and I started looking at like, you know, what Zynga was doing, and what other people were doing with games, you know, popular games on Facebook.
Speaker 2:I just started kind of exploring this topic and like, I saw that a lot of people were playing Bejewel on Facebook, right? Yeah. The game where you're kind of matching jewels and you you know, you I think candy crushes a lot like this game. You you match a lot of these things and then the row disappears. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I was curious, like, I make one of these myself and can I not do it in Flash? Can I make this just with HTML five? And I did it. And I'm like, oh, this is really cool technology.
Speaker 2:Maybe I can apply this to a business. And so we basically just started applying this to business. We created this whole suite of branded games. So we took like Bejeweled, this this my version and made it so that you could stick your own images of whatever you wanted in it. So we could go to a company like The Gap and be like, give us images of your shirts and sweaters and dresses this season and we will stick them in our version of Bejeweled or Candy Crush.
Speaker 2:So instead of playing with candy all day, people are gonna be playing with images of your sweaters, hopefully giving you some kind of brand awareness. But so I've I don't know if you've been listening, you've been listening, but like a lot of little bits I've been saying here are basically the problem. Like, I started with a technology, like I was just interested in games, it was just exploring games.
Speaker 1:I just wrote that down actually when you said that. That was like one of the things I was like, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I didn't even tell you I really enjoy playing games. Like, I was just telling you, I was I was just looking at cool technology. Right? I was looking at like, how do people create games?
Speaker 2:Can I make my own game out of HTML five? All of this stuff is very interesting intellectually. Right? As a developer, we're drawn to these challenges. Like, can I make my own version of Bejeweled in HTML?
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And I did it. Like, was neat. It felt good to do it. I made a neat version of it.
Speaker 2:There were people that liked playing it, but like, in the end, if you go back to all this, like, I don't play Bejeweled. I don't like playing Bejeweled. I don't like playing Candy Crush. No I I don't I don't mean to offend anybody that plays these games. I know people get enjoyment out of this stuff.
Speaker 2:But for me, like, I think they're a waste of time in many ways. I know people who people that I met doing this were playing hours a day. There's better things you can do with your life in hours a day than just play Candy Crush or play Bejeweled. If if you're playing it as a distraction and you're you're trying to wind down from a hard day, obviously, I I do a lot of stuff like that too, but when you are playing a game like Candy Crush for two hours a day on and on and on and on, something is tipped and you gotta be doing something more productive with your time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So you
Speaker 2:had two things there. And this is another thing we talked about. So why don't you think you Why can't you just take a really cool technology and make a company out of it? What's the danger there? So with City Postures, we made this really cool technology.
Speaker 2:We had all these games. It was very interesting and it made people's eyes pick up because no one had ever seen something. It's kind of like Groupon two point o. It was like, woah. It was like, instead of sending people an email with a Groupon, they would run these, basically, these contests using all of our games.
Speaker 2:People would play Bejeweled and we had our own version of other games, like instead of Sudoku, you know, you're matching the numbers, or one, two, three, four, 56789, or whatever in the squares, we had our own version of Sudoku using images, so you could like be, you know, the gap. And so instead of trying to get one, two, three, four, five, it was like images. You can only have this sweater in this one box kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So it's very interesting and when we would go to people, they were like, oh, this is very novel, very innovative. But then like but again, like, because we're just creating something without even understanding the problem that the gap has, without understanding like what we're actually trying to solve, when they would run these contests, at the end of the contest, we would have people playing these games. On average, something like two hours a day. People were getting very excited. People were sharing this a ton on Facebook, on Twitter.
Speaker 2:What problem did we solve? Nobody knows. Like, hey, ran these contests for lots of people, like ABC Television. We ran these contests for them to promote some of their new television shows that were coming out in 2011 that fall. Things like Revenge was a new show, I believe then.
Speaker 2:So they were running, instead of gap images, they were like pictures of all the actors in Revenge. But then at the end of the day, you couldn't go to Nobody knew like, well, how many people did we encourage to go watch Revenge? You know? What was the ROI on this? You know?
Speaker 2:How can we then, what problem do we solve by this that you can't then just do that with a, you know, Facebook advertising or, you know, Twitter advertising sticking images inside people's stream of actors from revenge? Does that do anything? We couldn't answer those things because and we weren't coming from a place where we understood ABC's problems promoting a show. We came from a place like, here's some cool technology, ABC. Does this prove do anything for you?
Speaker 2:And that's not a terrible place to go if the technology can be built really quickly, you can work with ABC, throw it away, create something new for them, but for us, it was like we spent a lot of time creating a really sophisticated suite of games and technology, so then when it didn't work out and they don't need it, it's like a giant waste of time, a giant loss of time. So in the end, I mean, we we made money, people were using it, but it was all just experimental. We couldn't find people who wanted to use it over and over and over again because it didn't solve any problem that they had.
Speaker 1:And is that eventually what happened to the company? You had to just stop doing it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it as we were doing it, we were we were able to make sales, but they weren't enough repeat sales. The sales were very difficult. It was like, you know, please do this. I mean, you know, your typical sales calls, we would do the the a contest with all of our games, and then at the end of the day, after it was done, it was like, well, did that work out for you?
Speaker 2:And a lot of people were like, I don't know. I don't know. And then so it was very hard to get a follow-up deal. I mean, if you can't get repetitive business, and you're only selling these one off experimentations to people, your business is gonna be you're gonna it's not you're not gonna have enough runway to keep going forever. Not gonna keep finding enough people to just always keep experimenting one time.
Speaker 2:You have to come up with something that these people wanna use again and again and again.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And so after that, you went to the Obama campaign. Was that because you were you kinda burnt out at that point?
Speaker 2:Yes. So I I tried a couple other things. I started fooling around with more stuff around promotions and contests. I started trying to kind of understand, you know, I I kinda realized my big problem was like spending too much time on a bunch of technology looking for problems. So I ended up trying to spend some more time kind of looking for problems.
Speaker 2:I ended up doing a little all sorts of little one off things. Like I ended up helping a girl run her Shopify store. I just found her on Craigslist. I charged her, I forgot, like $25 an hour or something. And all I was doing was like resizing images.
Speaker 2:I took this job on not because I needed money. I mean, I already had some money in the bank from investors kind of, you know, wanting me to do this next thing, but like I was just taking a really crappy job. I mean, it's no it's not a good job to just be resizing images for somebody for their Shopify store. I mean, it's very, you know, it's maybe a good job for someone in high school or just out of high school, like it's to understand this business, but I was doing it just to understand the problem someone has running a Shopify store. And trying to understand her business, like what makes her tick.
Speaker 2:And she has so many more problems than running a promotion. You know, like her her her business problems were things like just getting managing events and selling stuff in Shopify, and then tying this stuff all together. Very far from her mind was actually doing anything innovative with and novel with promotions. So it was like feedback like that and working with people like that where I was like, alright, screw it. I'm trying to find problems in the promotion industry and I just, I'm not enjoying it.
Speaker 2:I don't think the people I wanna help need have these problems enough like I think they do. And so I was just, yeah, I got burnt out kind of thinking about it. Got and I Harper Reed, the CTO of of the Obama campaign, is a friend of mine, he asked me to come help kind of just at the right time where I was like, kinda still trying to think about like what's next. I'm like, you know what, I have no idea what's next. So I'll take a break from trying to make money and come up with the next thing and I'll just work for the campaign.
Speaker 2:It was nice. It was a nice break from the startup life, even though it was very hard to work for the Obama campaign.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, that's interesting because I think people people get really stressed out about this stuff. Yeah. Like, it's it's something that I think because there is kind of and who knows how long this gold rush has been going on, but there's this kind of this feeling like I just got to build something. I got to get in on this now.
Speaker 1:I might miss it. And there's a lot of people putting a lot of pressure on themselves. And it sounds like you took a break, and did the break help? Like was it
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, so it's weird to talk about this stuff, right? Like, and I don't even totally understand the psychology of it. I mean, I'm a blessed individual, you know, like I've been given many, many opportunities, and a lot of it is because I'm working hard, but I realized like I I've been in Y Combinator two times, know. Like I I I have this network of people that like a lot of people don't have.
Speaker 2:Like I realize how lucky I am to have some of these things that I have. But when I do something and I make something and I put it out there in the world and it's not working, it feels awful. Yeah. Like, I mean, I wasn't the most happy individual when this stuff was going on. Like, it didn't doesn't feel good to also be trying to do I'm trying to do my second startup where like, I I think I've succeeded my first time.
Speaker 2:I've created a business that's still around, it's profitable, that's growing, that pays people's salaries and careers, and I can't do it again. That sucks. There's something very, I don't know, gut wrenching about it that I don't know how to explain. Like, there's many worse problems in the world. I read the news like everybody else.
Speaker 2:Like, I realize I'm in a very blessed location and there's very good things happening to me, but when I can't put stuff together, it doesn't feel good. It feels awful. Mhmm. I remember I was really in a bad I I was just, you know, just really I say depressed, but I'm not clinically depressed. I mean, you know, being depressed is a much bigger important topic than this, but I really wasn't very happy when I actually, we did demo day for Y Combinator with the stuff we're doing with Citi Posh.
Speaker 2:Nobody gave a shit. I got to meet Ashton Kutcher that day. Went up to Ashton Kutcher, talked to him about this business, he just didn't care. And so here's my opportunity to like meet someone who's like investing in startups. Right?
Speaker 2:Like I I definitely made a big deal out of this thinking like, man, Ashton will get this. Nope. He doesn't care. Nobody cared what we're doing. We were a big bomb on demo day during during that Y Combinator.
Speaker 2:Feels like shit. Yeah. So no. Going, taking a break, working on the Obama campaign where I don't have to worry about my own ideas anymore. I just kinda got to build cool stuff that people told me to build, and I just got to worry about like more more kind of product development tasks, you know, like someone would be like, hey Nate, we need a quick way of of kind of make like showing we've, you know, contacted this this, you know, Obama supporter.
Speaker 2:Because I was working on kind of like kind of like a CRM tool for the campaign and so they needed like, we need a way to make, you know, show that this person's been contacted or this person has been flagged for a follow-up. And so like people would tell me their problems and I would just be like, oh, does this work? And I I in a day, I would turn some software around and show it to them. It's nice to work on software like that again, where it's like people are just kind of telling me their problems and they want me to help them and make software to help them and I just do it. I don't have to go looking for problems, I don't have to worry about making money from it, I just work on solving people's problems with software.
Speaker 2:It was a really great break.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is an interesting arc and I think it's good to kind of explore all of that because that's all kind of real, you know, and some people have been battling for a long time and are still struggling and still waiting for the first break. Some people I've heard that a lot. A lot of people get their first break and then they go to do something else and there's so much pressure.
Speaker 1:Like, they just and I think the sometimes what gets mixed missed in all of this is the real life context. Like this there's real life. We're real human beings and this does affect us. Like if you bomb on demo day, that really hurts.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It
Speaker 1:I think there's we need to have an allowance for being just human.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think So something I've been reading about lately that like I think helps put this a little bit more into perspective is So everybody's familiar with Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers book, right? I mean that like everything Malcolm Gladwell puts out, it's very well known it seems. And so everybody, I think, even if you haven't read Outliers, is very familiar with this rule now of ten years or ten thousand hours, and I think people are missing the point of it and they they they just kind of hear about ten thousand hours and they just think, okay, I've gotta put in a lot of a lot of work, but there's there's more evidence. I don't think Malcolm went into this.
Speaker 2:I think it's based on some of the stuff Malcolm was touching on in his book. I'm not quite sure he talked about it or if more people have kind of gone off and done the research, but there's a really great book I've been reading about. Talent is Overrated is the name of the book. And it looks at research about practice and deliberate practice. Specifically, it's not so much that you've put in ten thousand hours, it's that you've put in ten thousand hours of grueling freaking hard work.
Speaker 2:Tiger Woods isn't a phenom at golf because he was just born that way. The guy's been like golfing since he was two and a half years old and not like just playing golf. He doesn't just go play golf. Like, he just doesn't go out every Saturday. The guy does rigorous practice since he was like two and a half years old.
Speaker 2:You know, his father was like a golf his golf coach and a teacher and and basically just trained him and trained him and trained him. So when Tiger Woods practices, it's unlike anyone else practices. Right? Like, he doesn't just go play around a golf like most people do when they have some free time on a Saturday. Tiger Woods will hit hundreds of balls in a sand trap and he will work on the hardest possible form of it.
Speaker 2:He'll like step on the golf ball, jam it into the sand to see if he can knock a 100 of these things back onto the green. Right? He forces himself in a really shitty terrible situation. That's how you get better. Right?
Speaker 2:And so like, I know working on startups, we go through these moments where we don't feel good, but like a lot of this stuff is just really practice. Like, I am just practicing my and you know, some of it's kind of grueling and it doesn't feel good and I'm making mistakes, but like that's how like when you're working at something and you're trying to get better, it doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel good to go to the gym and try and do pull ups and you can't do any. You know, you're embarrassed and like, I remember when I was a kid in high school, I couldn't do a pull up. I remember even as recent as like a few years ago, three, four years ago, I couldn't do any pull ups at the gym and it's embarrassing, right, trying to do it and you're just struggling and you can't do it.
Speaker 2:And eventually, you do this long enough and you embarrass yourself long enough and now you can do pull ups and you can do one and you show up again and you don't think you can do two. You can't do two. It's so hard. You do one and then the second one is embarrassing and then you can do two. Now I can do dozens of pull ups only because I've embarrassed myself enough at the gym and I look, you know, I'm moaning at home using a pull up bar, but that's life.
Speaker 2:Like, that's how these startups work. It's not easy. It's grueling. It doesn't feel good. It's embarrassing, But eventually, I get better and better and better just doing it more.
Speaker 2:That's how, yeah, that's how I feel I about
Speaker 1:think probably one thing that people would be concerned about though, is that they might gruel forever doing the wrong things. So maybe in the second part here, let's talk about you're finishing the Obama campaign. What of what was the trigger to starting draft? How did that happen?
Speaker 2:So when I got done with the campaign, I was still back in the same spot, right? I didn't know what I was gonna do. I did know though it couldn't be like CityPosh, like it couldn't just create cool technology for technology's sake. So it was a lot of things now like looking back, like what worked at Inkling, what didn't work at CityPosh with these games, and also knowing, like, I still want to be creating software that's meaningful to me and I realized, like, I mean, Inkling came from a place, again, that was meaningful for me. CityPosh didn't.
Speaker 2:I mean, CityPosh was just trying to tackle interesting technology problems, but I don't even play games all that much. I couldn't repeat that. Right? I mean, that was like a lesson learned. I'm not gonna do it again.
Speaker 2:So like, just started really looking in my life, like, what what's important to me? And and one of the things that was most important to me was just writing. I love writing. I love blogging. I I had taken a break from writing years ago when kind of startup life was getting hard and and when CityPosh wasn't going very well and when I was kinda getting sick of of working in Inkling.
Speaker 2:I was I stopped blogging and it was a big mistake. And and in the last couple years, I've been spending a lot of time writing at a blog Ninjas and Robots. It's been very important to me. And just through that, like realizing how much I love doing it, I just started spending time. Like, well, you know, I should spend more time just writing software solutions to writing on this blog.
Speaker 2:And so just through the fact that I've been writing this blog through the last couple years, even through the Obama campaign, now with my newfound time, I just started creating solutions to problems I had here. So with these posts you read, I try and practice becoming a better writer. So like I I go through many different variations of a blog post and I I found myself like saving like really crazy drafts off to Evernote so that I wouldn't lose all that old work. You know, using something like version control system like Git was way too much work. So I would copy and paste into an Evernote document.
Speaker 2:That was awful. So it's just like, well, what can I do just to make it really simple to like save major versions of my work? That was like the first version of draft and it was done in a couple days. And I was using it immediately to start, you know, writing my next blog post. My next thing was like I I like to send my wife things to edit.
Speaker 2:She's really great at like making my writing more concise and and just kind of telling me if if she's confused. But as I would watch her operate, I would send her a link to a blog post and then she would copy and paste it all into Microsoft Word and then she would do her stuff, then she would send me a Word document back over email. I have to open up Word now which, you know, or Pages or something on my Mac which was awful and then now I have to copy and paste whatever she had done back into a text editor or whatever. So it was just like here is like eight steps or whatever I just labeled that's like too many steps. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So was like the next thing was just like, can I just send a link to my wife and she edits this thing and though I love her and she's really great at it, I don't accept all of her changes? Like sometimes and and so how do I manage that? You know, with using Git or version control, it's usually like merge everything or or if you use Google Docs, I can send her a link, but then she's writing on top of my stuff and so it's just like she's altering everything and I can't easily go back and say like, well, like what you did here, but I don't like this part. So that was my just solving that problem. Like, can I send her a link?
Speaker 2:She can change stuff, and then I can just hit accept on the individual pieces that I want. That's it. Just started doing that. And just over and over again, every every day, every couple weeks, like I just keep coming up with a new problem I'm trying to solve in my own writing, on my own blog. I try and fix it, put it in draft, and then tell people about it.
Speaker 2:That's it. That's that's kind of the secret. And it just started snowballing from there. Yep. How did
Speaker 1:How did you know that was gonna be a a good idea for other people? Like, how did you know that was gonna work as something other people would even want or did you?
Speaker 2:Well, so now it's like, I don't even really care. Right? It's like, when it was with City Posh, it was like, it had to be something other people were interested in or it won't make any money then and it's just a waste of time and it turned out nobody really cared enough about it, so it was a waste of time and money. With draft, it's like, it doesn't even matter if nobody likes it. I like it and it solves all my problems.
Speaker 2:So it's like, God forbid anything happens, so Draft is doing really well right now, but it's like the core of the product fixes tons of problems I have in a way that no other software does. So if Draft can't if if nobody else liked it, that's going to still it's gonna suck, but at its core, I still have a product that makes my life better.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And maybe I'm the only user, that's fine. It still makes my life better. And so I think a lot of people have to just keep practicing solving their problems and you don't know if this stuff is going to kind of blow up. But if you get better at kind of solving your problems, it's very likely, if if you pay attention to the world, you have similar problems to other people. You are not the unique snowflake that you think you are.
Speaker 2:If you have problem writing or blogging, there's other people that have a writing that problem writing and blogging.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Why did you choose this though as opposed to I'm just thinking even about your life. Like, could have chose marital management software. You could have chose I think you do you have a dog?
Speaker 2:Yep. Dog, cat. Yep.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you could have you could have chose pet pet feeding management software. You know, why there must have been something about this that you knew would be at least better than something else.
Speaker 2:That's true. So like I said with CityPosh, like, it was like I guess it was like hurting from creating something that like I don't care about, and then no one else cares about. So again, with with draft, I wanted to create something that I cared about deeply, that I am going to open up and use myself every day, and that I really enjoy using, and that that was like the core priority. I mean, that's like the top priority. So you know, with dog feeding software again, I mean, it's again something that's like, I don't, you know, I don't care enough about it.
Speaker 2:I think you're yeah. Like, mean, I think a lot of this stuff, it's like, I don't know, dog feeding, you know. Yeah. Like, I I have actually a problem reminding myself my dog gets medicine in the morning and at night. So And like I try and use alarms on this thing to tell me to give it to her and it's not ideal.
Speaker 2:Like it's not a great reminder system because it's like, if I hit snooze or if I accidentally turn it off, like it's too easy to accidentally turn it off, I could have focused on creating like an alarm system, but it's just like, I don't care enough about it. With with writing, like I for some reason, it's like one of those things. It's like, it's one of the top things on the things I think about. I'm constantly trying to become a better writer, and so it's just a natural fit to like make software that was so close to something I cared so much about. And then I practice.
Speaker 2:A buddy of mine, Adrian Holovatti, he's, you know, a lot of people in the Python community know Adrian. He he created the Django Python framework. He's a very famous guitar player too in the Django jazz music community, also on YouTube. The guy is brilliant. He he's he's he makes a product called SoundSlice that's the the coolest thing ever.
Speaker 2:It like it's like the future of sheet music and guitar tab. Pay attention to it. The guy is doing brilliant things with music. He he clued me in on this. I think it comes from the guy who makes Dilbert.
Speaker 2:Is it Scott Adams who writes Dilbert? Yeah. The Dilbert comic? So it's basically, Adrian picked this off from Scott. Merge two things in your life that, like, you're pretty good at.
Speaker 2:Like, you don't have to be an expert at it. Like, and Scott Adams talks about like writing Dilbert. He's not a great cartoonist. He's not a great storyteller, but he's okay. He's good.
Speaker 2:He's good or mediocre to good at these tasks. But when you combine a couple of them together, now all of a sudden, no one else has that combination. And so he was doing this with drawing and storytelling in such a way that like, no one is, you know, putting these things together. He's not, you know, an expert at any one of them. And so with software, it's like I'm not I'm not like the expert at making software.
Speaker 2:I'm not I'm not like so well known in the software community. I'm not so good. I'm not the the the you're not gonna find me in the top 50 blog list, but like I'm pretty good at writing software. I'm pretty good at writing. If I start merging a couple of these things together now, all of a sudden, I've created something that's like stands out, you know.
Speaker 2:There's there's not there's a lot of people making writing software who you don't they don't write. They don't they don't don't practice getting better at writing. You don't read their blog. They don't care about writing. They're just making writing software.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm doing better than them because I'm doing multiple good things together. So with the dog software, think the the core thing there is like, it's yeah, you can write software for dogs, but it's just that one thing. You're just trying to make software again. It doesn't really merge in anything that you're trying to get better at, that you care about, that you're trying to get good at.
Speaker 2:I think when you start merging things together, like Adrian's doing what sounds like he's good at music and he's good at writing software. He's colliding those things together. SoundSlice is unlike anything you've ever seen before. Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Take take a couple things. Take two or three things in your life that you're that mean something to you, that you're getting good at, that you're practicing, start merging them together. And I think you're you're gonna end up making cool stuff that way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's well said. That's well said, Nate. Let's leave it there. Sure.
Speaker 1:If if you folks wanna check out Nate, he's at ninjasandrobots.com, Nate Cotney on Twitter, and then drafton.com. Thanks so much for spending
Speaker 2:your Thank you. Sure. Of course. Love talking. Yep.
Speaker 2:Cool.
Speaker 1:Alright. Wasn't Nate great? He is full of wisdom. Really enjoyed my conversation with him. Please, if you are interested in becoming a better writer, go to drafton.com and sign up and just start writing on there.
Speaker 1:Use some of the features. They have some built in editing features where you can submit drafts to professional editors and they'll reply back. And reach out to Nate on Twitter. He's been really great at giving me good advice for my blog, justinjackson.ca. Like I've mentioned before, this was only half of our interview.
Speaker 1:And on productpeople.club, I'll be releasing the full length video interviews for all of the new episodes, including this one with Nate Cottney, where he goes into even more detail on how he's built and grown draft. If you like the show, this show right here, Product People, and you're listening on your iPod or your iPhone or on the computer, go to iTunes, search for Product People, and give us a nice review. It really helps the show get noticed. And the more people that know about the show, the more people that are listening to the show, the more product people will have building cool stuff. You can also follow the show on Twitter at product people TV, And you can follow me, Justin Jackson, on Twitter at m I Justin, the letter m, the letter I, Justin, and Justin Jackson dot c a slash newsletter.
Speaker 1:Thanks again for listening. See you next week.
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