This Indie Life

[00:00:00]

Dagobert: Hey guys, welcome to a new episode of This Indie Life. In this episode, I am joined by Marie of Llamalife. co. we actually became friends after, you know, supporting each other over Twitter and WhatsApp for the past couple of years.

Dagobert: She started working on her app called Llama Life three years ago. It's a nicer productivity app. And I'm actually one of the first users of the app because I never managed to stick with productivity tools usually, because there's too complex and I have like even more burden in my head of like, okay, I need to manage every new tool that I use, but with LlamaLife.

Dagobert: It's so simple, doesn't add any burden to my life and I can just use it whenever I want. So that's what I love about her product. I kept talking about it on Twitter, you know, since I use it. And so it kind of like brought us closer with Marie. But so now let's jump into the conversation. Just be aware that we just started rambling about our personal life and [00:01:00] like, you know, just having a nice chat between friends.

Dagobert: But obviously after the first couple of minutes, we start going into the deeper topics of startup burnout and you know, all of the dark stuff that we don't usually talk about when building startups. Once again, please give me your feedback under the tweets or in comments to the YouTube video.

Speaker 3: I really hope you enjoy it, and now, let's jump into the conversation.

[00:01:27] Informal intro
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Dagobert: I put like some black stickers on my wall to kind of like make it more serious, but I'm not even sure I'm going to keep it. Cause I'm like, it doesn't fucking matter. You know, like the setup, like it doesn't like, we're just wanting to have cool conversations, you know?

Marie: Exactly. I first thought that might've been like a blackboard behind you, or is it just a to draw on? No, just like a

Dagobert: No, it's just like the cheapest wall sticker I could find. And I, and like, I didn't put it properly. You can see here, like, it's like this little gap. I need to fill [00:02:00] it somehow,

Dagobert: uh,

Dagobert: you know, but you know, it doesn't matter.

Dagobert: I might just take it off. Because you know why? So yeah, so yeah, we can see like, what can we see behind you? Are these like, socks, underwear? What is, what is behind you?

Marie: Do you want to know something funny? Okay, so just because we're being real, I'll show you what I did. I actually pushed aside like this chair.

Marie: It's got like clothes on it. I'm being like super. Oh,

Dagobert: the infamous share with clothes. We all have, I have one right there with like my, my semi dirty clothes that I can still wear until I need to wash them. You know,

Marie: since working from home and that's, that's what I do. I just, you know, they're half worn. So they have to go somewhere.

Dagobert: I have a basket for like, dirty, I need a basket for half worn, like, there should be a place for half worn clothes.

Marie: I have a chair for half worn. Yeah,

Dagobert: but like, chair isn't like clean, like it's [00:03:00] like, it's kind of like a mess. So I'm like, where can we put it in a way that's tidy?

Marie: Uh,

Dagobert: yeah.

[00:03:05] Styling yourself like an indie hacker
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Marie: Anyway,

Marie: the black behind you looks good because it kind of accentuates your hair. Like there's more contrast between the black and the pink. And I think you should stay pink. I like the pink a lot.

Dagobert: You like pink?

Marie: I like the pink a lot. Yeah, I've always wanted to do it. But because my hair is black, Um, I think you have to go like, yeah, it's a lot harder and you have to, you have to fully strip it of its color, like

Dagobert: fully bleach.

Dagobert: Even me, like they, they bleach it, but since it's not black, it's kind of like brownish,

Dagobert: then

Dagobert: it's, uh, I think in the bleach works in like one and a half hours or something, and then it's fully white and you know, so, cause I was blonde for a while too, but like, that was the same thing.

Marie: Yeah.

Dagobert: So, yeah. So, thanks.

Dagobert: Actually, next thing is, I'm going to get earrings. Like, I want crazy earrings, like, everywhere. I'm just trying. I'm having fun, basically. I'm [00:04:00] having some fun.

Marie: Go for it. I used to, I used to have, um, my tragus pierced. It's that, it's the hard bit, like, right there.

Dagobert: That must be painful.

Marie: Yeah, I could, I couldn't really heal it.

Marie: I tried twice. I tried once on this side and then, then I tried the other side. But it's a, it's a really tough one to heal because if you just bump it a little bit, it just flares up. And every time I got my hair cut.

Dagobert: Oh yeah, I don't want

Dagobert: to do that.

Marie: Yeah, basically I got it almost healed and every time I got my hair cut, they would just accidentally just, knock it and it just blow up again.

Marie: So I just gave up after a while.

Dagobert: That sounds painful. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I just want to do like the, the easy part, you know, just like about there. Yeah. But yeah, awesome.

Marie: Next

Marie: time we see you, we'll, we'll, we'll see like an evolving Dago on Twitter. I saw your post the other day where it's like, When you first started, like you see this young, fresh picture, and then you've got like now.

Dagobert: And you know, it's funny [00:05:00] because, uh, what I'm going to say is going to sound very crazy, but like, I now have a stylist. Okay.

Dagobert: Really?

Dagobert: Yeah. I do. What do you mean? Like a personal stylist? Yeah. Like when I had my job, I was like, you know, I mean, having a job is so kind of like chill compared to like doing like indie or building a startup.

Dagobert: I was like, you know, I wanted to do something for fun and I was kind of like recovering from my burnout. So like, you know what? I make this money from my job. There's no pressure. I'm going to hire this guy, you know? And like, like this guy has like a fashion brand. he does like the fashion week.

Dagobert: Like sometimes like he's like. It's a really awesome dude.

Dagobert: Oh wow.

Dagobert: So, yeah, so I got this personal stylist and he came to my place and like, we talked about, you know, what I wanted to do, my goals, and he helped me kind of like figure things out.

Dagobert: And eventually he told me, I've got some clients like you in the past and I know, you know, what's happening. And he basically told me, you know, [00:06:00] you burnt out, you had this dream that you followed and it didn't pan out. And now you're in this new phase of your life, which is the, I don't give a fuck phase.

Dagobert: And he like,

Dagobert: he told me like, this is the phase you're entering. And like, and I'm like, yeah, this is pretty much it. You know, pink hair might get jewelry. Like really, like, the reason I did pink is like, you cannot get hired at a bank with this. You cannot, like, they're not going to hire you.

Dagobert: Like, so like, and there's this thing of like, fuck you, you know, that I wanted to kind of like say, that's kind of like the reasons, like, you know, fuck, fuck this.

Marie: That, that,

Marie: that was the exact time I was thinking of getting pink hair is when I quit my job and then I'm like, well, it's just me, so I can do whatever I want.

Marie: But I didn't, I still didn't do it. One day I'll do it. One day you'll see me post on Twitter and you'd be like,

Dagobert: oh yeah, I want to see that. So, yeah, I think that that's actually, you know, tied to like, Wanting to be free, wanting to do whatever the fuck we want. And, you know, I feel kind of like a pirate or like a weird look and I want [00:07:00] to get even weirder.

Dagobert: Uh, I thought of getting a face tattoo. That might be too much.

Dagobert: That

Dagobert: might be like, I might need to wait until I'm sure. Cause like that's, that's a lot.

Marie: Get it, get a fake, get a temporary fake, like sort of face one first. If you, if you want to do

Marie: that. I

Marie: think some people can pull it off, you know, like, um, Oh, who am I thinking of?

Marie: Who's that guy? What am I blanking on? His name?

Dagobert: Ah,

Dagobert: give me, give me clues. Give me clues.

Marie: He did a song for the Spider-Man. Soundtrack Post. Post Malone. Post Malone.

Dagobert: Oh yeah. This guy. Yeah.

Marie: Yeah. He's so talented and I, he, he can kind of pull off the face tattoo. It kind of fits. He pulled, yeah, I think he pulled it off.

Marie: I think,

Dagobert: yeah. I think it's really, the way to pull it off is like. you really need to own it. Like you cannot be hesitant. You cannot be like, Oh yeah, I did a face tattoo. I'm not sure. It's like, you need to be a hundred percent. I do not give a [00:08:00] shit. And that is, and that is going to be something people feel and then it's okay.

[00:08:05] Marie calling Dago at 10pm
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Dagobert: So, yeah. But yeah, anyway, so. You know, I wanted to have you on the show. Actually, I think you made me want to pivot this show

Marie: because,

Dagobert: you know, that was, I think, three weeks ago that you sent me a DM because you were starting to feel like you might be burning out.

Marie: Yeah. Yeah.

Dagobert: And we ended up like talking for one hour.

Marie: Yeah.

Dagobert: And I was like, wow, this should be, this is interesting, this should be a podcast. And then since then I started talking to other founders, like I did three interviews since then and I noticed like it's everywhere, you know, everybody has shit basically. Yeah. At least, you know.

Marie: Yeah, for sure.

Marie: Cause we've kind of, well, we've kind of known each other for a while on Twitter, just, you know, DMs here and there and then a couple of WhatsApp messages and stuff.

Marie: And I don't know, it was really weird. So that [00:09:00] night that you're talking about, about three weeks ago, because we'd kind of had a few messages back and forth, I kind of felt like I knew you a little bit and you're obviously a Llama Life customer. You were one of like the early, early Llama Life customers.

Marie: Yeah.

Dagobert: Yeah.

Marie: And. I don't know. I was having a really low moment that night and it kind of started with, I don't know, I see, I was like, I wasn't, I was actually crying, I was actually in tears and I was just kind of feeling really, it was like eight o'clock at night or no, actually it was later. It was about 10 o'clock at night and I was feeling super upset.

Marie: And then for some reason I thought I'll text you. Just random, like super random. I was like, Oh, I'll text Dago because I feel like I'm burning out. I think I just texted you something like, Oh, I, I think I just said, literally, I think I'm burning out.

Dagobert: Yeah. That was very simple. I remember.

Marie: And you, you wrote back

Marie: immediately and you were, you were like.

Marie: Do you want to chat? And I'm sort of here like, you know, Oh, I don't know. Like I'm looking like really horrible. You're like,

Dagobert: Oh, I'm going to feel [00:10:00] like self conscious. Yeah, I look like crap

Marie: right now. And you know, my eyes probably all puffy and stuff. And you're like, no, we just get on WhatsApp. And I'm like, and then I didn't reply for about 10 minutes.

Marie: Cause like, I don't know, I was going back and forth if I, if I wanted to do it. And I was like, I'll screw it. You know. And then we did a WhatsApp for, I don't know, maybe an hour. And that was really, that was great. Like, and I just felt, I felt like I knew you, like known you for a while, even though that was the first time we were chatting, it was just very easy and, you know, Relatable and stuff, what you'd gone through.

Dagobert: Yeah. I might rename this podcast Founder's Therapy because I did a few episodes and that was kind of like the same thing. What is it?

Marie: You should totally do that.

Marie: I love that, man. Because like this indie life's good, but it doesn't really, it's, it's not specific enough, whereas if you, if you do want to talk about sort of the dark side and being [00:11:00] real, um, Founder Therapy sounds good.

Marie: Anyway, think about it.

Dagobert: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see what people have to say about it. If you have like feedback on it. Uh, so yeah.

[00:11:13] Marie's burnout story
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Dagobert: What was that about? Like this, how did you feel back then? Like what was happening?

Marie: It's not like, it wasn't an overnight thing. I think it just kind of built up over time. Right. And I have been in that situation before.

Marie: So I've kind of felt like I could feel it. I could feel it building. I could feel it coming on. And I was thinking. I, I'm not going to let myself get to that point. Like I know what it is. I know what it is. And it just creeps up on you. Right. It just creeps up on you. And then one day this, I think all your emotions are on the surface, so it doesn't take much to kind of push you over.

Marie: And then it might not even be one specific thing. It might just be a lot of little things. And then at some point you'll just, you're just so close to the surface, like your emotions that you just. You just tip [00:12:00] over and I was kind of feeling that that night like I'm not I'm not the sort of person that usually cries like I'm very don't don't cry very often right and I was just feeling like super bad that night and Just too much to do stuff that I didn't really want to do Yeah,

Dagobert: that's often that because like what you said earlier was like, yeah, it builds up and it made me think So that means you can't stop,

Dagobert: We can't take breaks. And so that might be why, you know, so that was I've been

Marie: trying to take breaks more often. I started slowly with, like, I used to work all the way through the weekend. And then I started to not work on Sunday.

Marie: Except for the, you know, the super, you know, time sensitive things, maybe customer service or something like that. And now I'm trying not to work on Saturday as well, but I try, I do Saturday morning because in Australia, I'm in Australia, so Saturday here is still Friday in the U S and our [00:13:00] customers, our customer base is in the U S mostly.

Marie: It's like about 75 percent of it. So we still have people needing support on my Saturday morning, but after that, I try and stop. But it's, it's super hard because I don't know, it's almost like an addiction. You know, you kind of want to keep, keep it going, keep the momentum.

Dagobert: Yeah.

Marie: I love working

Marie: on my product.

Marie: Like,

Dagobert: I

Marie: don't dislike that at all. Um, what, what I was struggling with was more admin tasks, you know, like accounting or just things that I find super boring and that was building up and building up and I was like, I have to take care of it.

Dagobert: Cause *the boring things. You have to, like, you have to kind of like force yourself to do them.*

Dagobert: And that is what takes energy. That is what is like exhausting. It's like, you can do one hour of something you don't want to do. It's going to take so much from you than like 10 hours of something you enjoy doing. You know, like it's always like this.

[00:13:56] Sponsor - LoopHQ from Greg
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Dagobert: Just taking a small break from this conversation to talk about this [00:14:00] week's sponsor. Now, again, I know you hate sponsors. I hate sponsors too. But this guy is a fellow indie maker. I've known him for years. And he wanted to support the show. And his product is actually quite fascinating and ambitious. So I wanted to tell you about it.

Dagobert: This guy is called Greg Fragin. And I met him, I think, three years ago, back when I was part of the Indie Worldwide community by Anthony Castrio. And on this community, there was something really awesome that was happening, is that every week, you would get matched by another founder from the community.

Dagobert: And you would like just get on a Zoom call together to, you know, meet each other and make connections. That was when I was at the very beginning of my Twitter days. And I met probably 10 or 15 founders this way. And this was awesome. So thanks Anthony for inventing that, you know, years ago on Indie Worldwide.

Dagobert: But that's how I met Greg. And Greg is the founder of LoopHQ. com. [00:15:00] Usually indie products, we try to not be too ambitious. We are careful not to add too many features. We are careful of like, you know, keeping something neat and manageable on our own. But Greg, this crazy guy, he started working on this seven or eight years ago.

Dagobert: You know, he's a pretty experienced guy. Like you can see this guy knows his shit. He knows business. And what LoopHQ does is it wants to be a unified inbox. Anywhere online, basically where somebody, you know, can talk to you, you can bring it into his app and handle from one single place. So for example, one use case that I found very cool is let's say you have a job and you have all these ways that your colleagues or employers can contact you.

Dagobert: So you need to be aware on LinkedIn. You have a couple Slack channels and you have specific email [00:16:00] addresses. You might even have Asana, Trello, Notion, and all these productivity apps. So the way this app work is actually super simple. You sign up, you actually get a free trial, not even need to add your credit card.

Dagobert: You just go to loophq. com, sign up in seconds. And then you simply be like, okay, I'm going to connect my Gmail. You can connect like as many inboxes as you want. You can connect like five Gmails, like three Hotmails account, whatever you need. You can connect Slack channels. You can connect LinkedIn account.

Dagobert: You can connect WhatsApp. You can connect, you know, everything that you can think of Twitter, Slack, Notion, Dropbox, you can just connect everything to this. And from then on, every message you get. You will see it in your unified inbox and you can reply from this inbox. And for the people receiving the replies, they don't see it.

Dagobert: It's like a completely native similar experience. Like I tried it earlier. Somebody wrote to me on WhatsApp and I went on loop. I [00:17:00] responded to them and it was instant. They got the message on WhatsApp as if I was myself on WhatsApp. So, you know, to be honest, it's the kind of product that is so ambitious.

Dagobert: So big that I don't even understand how he does it. I don't, I don't even understand how he keeps going after all this time. So if you have a need for that, like, let's say you're like in sales or in marketing and like, you want to keep all of these inboxes and messages with people very tidy and, you know, cleaned up.

Dagobert: And maybe for example, not mess up with like between your personal accounts and your professional accounts, because for example, me. If I'm going to tweet all day, I'm going to use the Twitter app directly. There is no need for me to use a third party app like loop. But if I like manage brand accounts and I want to keep everything tidy, I could keep like my Twitter brand account, LinkedIn brand account.

Dagobert: Slack channel that I use for this professional thing. And I can just set everything in one place together. And I think that would be super useful. So if you guys want to check out this product [00:18:00] by fellow maker, Greg, who is like running it for seven years now, you go to loophq. com. And you can actually get a free trial if you want, but he also gave us 30 percent off the annual subscription.

Dagobert: So if you use code INDIELIFE, all caps, I N D I E L I F E, for the annual subscription, you will get it at 30 percent off. So go check out loophq. com. IndieLife coupon code if you need it, and let me know what you think. Also, Greg is super responsive to feedback, so you can go in the chat box and give him feedback if you had any.

Dagobert: For example, earlier today, there was a small bug with the LinkedIn integration. So I asked him about it and he fixed it immediately. So thank you again, Greg, for sponsoring this episode. And now let's go back to our conversation.

[00:18:49] Working around the clock even with employees
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Dagobert: So didn't you say, I mean, you told me, I think, in a prior conversation, like, didn't you say you had someone for support?

Dagobert: Because then I'm wondering why you're doing [00:19:00] support, uh, on the morning, if you have someone.

Dagobert: Well, I mean, I, I have, yeah, I guess just to put some context around it. So, so Llama Life is three people. So it's me. I started off by myself. Um, and then now I have two other people that I work with. So one person does, uh, she does like content community.

Dagobert: Partnerships and sort of manages the, the customer support is kind of part of our community. Yeah. And I have one other dev, he focuses on like mobile development, the mobile app development. And then I focus on the web product development. Um, so I do the dev on the website of things, and then I do all of like the business admin, the accounting.

Dagobert: Um, I do some marketing stuff as well. And. Yeah. So for the most part, someone else is helping me with customer service, but she's not working on the weekends. So she's Monday to Friday. Right.

Dagobert: So they're employees. So they're Monday to

Marie: Friday, nine to five, nine to five, 30 ish. But I cover around the [00:20:00] clock. So last couple of nights I was working until about 10, 11 o'clock just because there's still stuff going on, you know,

Dagobert: that's like probably a unique challenge also from being in Australia, where

Marie: Exactly. Like you're so far

Dagobert: away from like the customer base, which is usually the US for most people. And like, Oh yeah. Cause like for me, like where I'm at in France, you know, the US, uh, there's not like if you take West coast, it's nine hours, which is the furthest.

Dagobert: People are not gonna bother you at like 6:00 PM like on a Friday. Yeah. So as long as you are here until like 9:00 PM you know, after, after that, you know, you don't have to really worry about it. Mm-Hmm. . Mm-Hmm. . So,

Dagobert: and there's many founders in Australia actually.

Dagobert: I noticed. Like a lot of people, like there's

Marie: quite a few now there's quite a

Dagobert: community in Australia.

Marie: Yeah. Yeah. We, um. We don't have an official group or anything, but every now and again, you know, there'll be like some bad weather or something and I'll like DM them. These are all just Twitter friends.

Marie: I'll just DM them. I'm [00:21:00] like, Oh my gosh, this weather, you know, like we have crazy weather in Melbourne. It's, it's four seasons in one day.

Marie: So you can start off and it'll be, you know, sunny and then in the, in the afternoon, it'd just be like raining.

Marie: And sometimes it just, it's just. Back and forth, back and forth. And

Dagobert: okay. All the time. Okay.

Marie: Yeah. So sometimes there'll be like an occasional, like, Oh my God, it's got so cold, you know, just random stuff like that. Yeah.

Dagobert: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of like bonding between Australians. Yeah. Yeah.

Marie: It's good.

Marie: It's good. But, um, yeah, *going back to what you were saying before about sort of, you know, the support at all hours of the day*. You can kind of, like, logically, logically your mind goes, you just have to turn off, right? And you have to draw a line. And we all know this, like, you have to draw a line. Okay, maybe after seven o'clock, I'm not going to answer emails.

Marie: Like, you know that logically. But emotionally, something is, So there's something inside, which is like, Oh, I'm just going to go check. Oh, what if they need me? Oh, what if somebody, but they don't like the product that we're working [00:22:00] on as much as we want to be instant with our support, like nobody's going to die because we didn't *answer an email about, you know, some feature or something,* but, but this is urge inside me to do it as soon as possible.

Marie: And I know logically that's. I don't need to do that, but it's very hard to, to turn that off for some reason.

Dagobert: And it's kind of like a switch that, because I think at the beginning when you're like really trying to get your first customers, it's awesome to be like, you know, I had like set up a live chat on Logology and you're just like, anybody sending me something, I'm just replying instantly.

Dagobert: It's like, you feel like you want to get the ball rolling. So like every time there's somebody you kind of like do that. Those live chats

Marie: is. I was going to say those live chats, in a way they're bad because they go average response time and it'll, it'll tell you. And I look at that figure, I'm like, Oh, it's like eight hours or something.

Marie: It's like, that's cause I was asleep. You know, like stuff like that. [00:23:00]

Dagobert: I think it's cool. I think the good thing is to let people know, but like eight hours is acceptable, I think. But yeah, I think, you know what you said about working on saturday, cause I'm like, Yeah. It's cool to tell yourself, yeah, I don't have to reply to customers, but if you, if you think, yeah, but this guy is like Friday at noon and he's asking me something and I'm waiting until Monday morning to reply to him, that's like three days and that's like, oh, he might like shop around for other products and you know, that's like, that's the fear, you know?

[00:23:30] Burnout warning signs: flu-like symptoms
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Dagobert: And so, yeah, you know, I remember like, I think that was one year before my actual burnout And now looking back, I'm like, this was clearly a warning sign. Uh, and we were taking a weekend off with Lucie, which was, who was my wife and co founder, and we took, I think, four days off, but that wasn't off. That was just like elsewhere.

Dagobert: Like, but like, I was basically working in my [00:24:00] head, like all the time. We were going to the beach. We were like doing stuff, but like, and I remember I was doing customer support at like 11 PM.

Dagobert: And

Dagobert: I was stressed about it. We were actually doing early access, uh, for like a new product idea that we had, like, and so I was trying to pre sell it to this guy and I did.

Dagobert: Uh, and then

Dagobert: I felt like physically I started like

Dagobert: being very sick. Like suddenly, very sudden, like, like I had the flu or something, something bad, like, it was like COVID day. So I thought I used to blame COVID for a lot of this. And actually that wasn't that, but, and I was literally like all night. I think.

Dagobert: I had fever. I was sweating, like really, like really bad physical symptoms, like out of nowhere. So I thought I, we thought we blame like the [00:25:00] restaurant that we went to, like maybe the food was like something with the food or I got cold, like the place we were at were pretty humid and not, not, not that, not that bad.

Dagobert: Healthy in terms of like the location, like it wasn't that good. Like the Airbnb we, we were staying in, but then yeah, eventually I slept and eventually the next morning I was all better, but that was just because the support thing was solved and I didn't really, you know, I had some thinking about it, but it didn't worry me that much because I hadn't did a big burnout in my life back then.

Dagobert:

[00:25:33] The pressure we put ourselves under is much stronger than at a job
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Dagobert: I think the worst thing is like, *when you have a job, you can blame. The job for, Oh, they want me to do this thing. Oh, they want me to do this. You know,* fuck that, you know? So it's kind of like easier emotionally because when you're your own thing, you have nothing, nobody to blame.

Dagobert: You don't have like any escape. You're just like feeling pressure to do it. For a little bit, like it's internal pressure. And I will always [00:26:00] remember, like, once I, I left my previous job and I went to do logology. So that was six years ago. First couple of months were like, Oh, that's awesome. I'm free. I'm so happy.

Dagobert: And then eventually realized that the pressure was coming from inside now. And this pressure that's coming from you instead of somebody else, I mean, it's like 10 times worse.

Marie: We're our own worst enemy. Um, yeah. I, I totally feel that. And the funny thing is the, we just put, I, I think expectations that, like our own expectations need to kind of get reset. And I've, I, this happens to us all the time, right?

[00:26:41] Being too hard on yourself after missing estimates
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Marie: So I, I guess if we talk about maybe, um, like say you're developing a, a feature.

Marie: For your product and realistically, like that feature is going to take two weeks, say, say, in reality, it takes two weeks to do this feature, like fact you've, you've done it. It took two weeks.

Dagobert: Okay. [00:27:00]

Marie: As you're going into that, the problem is like, and I do this all the time. I just underestimate. I just underestimate things all the time and I'll go in and I'll be like, okay, I'm going to get this done in a week, guys.

Marie: Like I'm good. Like we'll have done in a week. And then when a week goes by and it's not done, I feel awful. And I put all this pressure on myself and then I'm stressing out about it. And then I get it done and it's two weeks, right? And I feel horrible that I was super slow. If I'd gone into that and I, and I thought, Hey, um, okay, this is going to take three weeks.

Marie: And I'm like, yeah, cool. It'll be three weeks and I'll still work hard at it and stuff. And then I finished it in two weeks. So nothing's changed. Two weeks, it's still two weeks. I would feel amazing about that. I'd be like, yeah, it's, it's my, my expectations of myself are just all wrong. And if I went in going, yeah, three weeks, but you know, I did it faster.

Marie: I did it in two weeks. Amazing. Good job. We smashed that. That was amazing. [00:28:00] I would just have a completely different mindset. Feeling of accomplishment and nothing actually changed in reality. Like it was in reality, it was two weeks. What, what was off was the expectation that I'd do it faster or slower.

Marie: And based on my own expectation, I feel good or bad. And that's something I'm trying to work on because I always, always, always. Way too much pressure on myself and it's not realistic and then when I can't meet my own expectation, I feel really bad So that's

Dagobert: and

[00:28:32] Monitoring your heart-rate just in case
---

Marie: you know, and like you said there's a physical like reaction to it sometimes

Dagobert: Yeah,

Marie: like your body just has like a physical reaction whether it's heart rate or whatever and what you said that sounded awful But I haven't had what you said But I've definitely had like a heart like a heart sort of thing where I feel like my heart's going to explode Going a little fast, you know, that kind of thing.

Marie: Yeah, yeah,

Dagobert: yeah, you feel it, yeah.

Marie: I've used like fitness trackers and stuff just to kind of keep track of that [00:29:00] stuff. Just make

Dagobert: Yeah, I got an Apple watch for that. You got the Apple watch, yeah, I remember you

Marie: doing that. I have the Aura ring, which I've had for, I think I've had it for about four years.

Marie: I've had it quite a long time, but I don't know. It's weird. I was going to stop wearing it. About a week ago, and then, and I, and I skipped a couple of days wearing it. Cause I was like, Oh, nothing's, it doesn't motivate me much anymore. And I don't feel like I'm making any changes by, by wearing it. But then when I didn't wear it for a few days, I was like, Hmm, I wonder if my heart's all right.

Marie: Like I just had this kind of fear. I was like, I wonder if my, if it's okay. Like I can't see, even, even though in four years it's been like pretty stable. Like occasional ups and downs. I'm like, Oh, I just want to know, like, I want to know if it's okay. And so I'm wearing it again.

Dagobert: Yeah. I think you're right.

Dagobert: Cause like it's, uh, and you never know what can trigger it. So yeah.

Marie: Yeah.

Dagobert: [00:30:00] you were talking about expectations and I don't know how it is for you, but I noticed for myself. I think the reason why it's so hard to set, to, to, to give good estimate of like how long things going to take is that we're not, at least for me, it's not, I'm not a hundred percent, like purely giving an estimate.

Dagobert: I am mostly setting a goal. You know, it's not the same. It's not like, okay, objectively with like eight hours of my day or like whatever, like objectively, this is how long this should take. And like, this is not what I'm doing. Like, this is more like how long I want this to take. If I perform at my best, if everything goes well.

Dagobert: And like, I'm on fire every day and like, because I have other things I want to do the week after that. And so you end up like, kind of like pressuring yourself and like, but it's not really an estimate. It's more like fantasy goal of like, I want this to be so, so fast, you know, it feels bad to feel like [00:31:00] if you say to yourself, it's going to take three weeks.

Dagobert: You're like, yeah, but like, I have, you have this fear maybe that comes up like, Oh, I have all these things I want to do, three weeks is too long, you know? And so you're like convincing yourself unconsciously, yeah, I can do this in one week, you know, but yeah. Yeah.

[00:31:15] Stuff going wrong and wrecking your whole schedule
---

Marie: I think we also don't really anticipate stuff going that wrong or other things coming up.

Marie: Like we actually had this, this problem this week. Like we thought, okay, yeah, cool. This week. So every, every week we meet on Mondays and we're like, okay, what are we going to do this week? Um, we've got like a whole Trello board. There's like a massive backlog, but we still make it a point to go, okay, this week, let's just, let's check the board again and reprioritize stuff if we have to, and then we're like, okay, cool.

Marie: This is what we're going to do this week. And we all kind of have our roles and we're all very good at just like, we've got like a really good team. Like we all kind of fill all the gaps. Everyone can kind of fill. The gap and so we're like, yeah, cool. Let's go. We're all good. And then, so we finish our, our

Marie: Monday sort of meeting.[00:32:00]

Marie: And then, yeah, straight away, like something just like, something just went wrong. So we had like all these customer support things where we just released a new version of the app and something weird was happening. Like pretty bad, actually. Like basically someone, um, like basically like data was getting overwritten, like someone would pay and then it would like wipe the, wipe the payment sort of data.

Marie: So it's like they haven't paid. Yeah. We had, we've had this really. Frustrating caching, it's a cache issue. It's so much harder than people think. Like having a phone and a web, like an iOS and a web platform, like the two were just like messing with each other. And so everyone's like asking for live sync and stuff like that.

Marie: And just the fact that they were syncing, like they were, people were in offline mode or no reception, and they were just like, Really messing with each other. And we had to jump on a call, like all three of us. So that's three people's time, right? [00:33:00] So if you're, if you're on a one hour call and there's three people, that's like three hours of time

Marie: that

Marie: could be used somewhere else.

Marie: So we're like, no, no, we all, we have to do this together because we, we all have a role to play in this because I'm looking after the web, my other guy's looking after the app, and then. Um, somebody else is looking after like getting back to the customer and liaising. So we're like, let's just do it together.

Marie: We all had to do that. And it was kind of like, okay, well that just, it's not just the time doing that. It's like afterwards as well. Like afterwards you spend so much time like trying to fix something like in the moment and live. Like I, my energy was just drained. And so it wasn't just the one hour for me.

Marie: It was like, after that,

Dagobert: after that, I was like,

Marie: I feel like I need a break. I'm just going to go get some food or something. And I need time to recharge, recharge a little bit after that.

[00:33:52] Battery savings mode for founders
---

Marie: And I think what happens with burnout sometimes is like, you don't let yourself recharge. Like you're kind of just running your fuel tank is kind of just on empty.

Dagobert: Oh yeah, [00:34:00] exactly. And

Marie: then at some point, like, you know, with a car, right? Like, you're not supposed to have. You're not really supposed to run it on a really low fuel tank, because there's like dirt and stuff at the bottom. Like it's not, at the bottom of a fuel tank is kind of disgusting apparently, and it's not, you're just getting like really dirty kind of fuel.

Dagobert: And it's kind of like your, your, your phone battery, like it's better to have your phone between 20 and 80.

Marie: 80, yeah, yeah. It's kind of like that. And then, and when you're about to burn out, I feel like you're kind of hovering above, like just above 20 percent. And or like you've got, you're at the bottom of your fuel tank and it's kind of It's disgusting down there, but you're like, I can just make it a little bit longer before I have to fill up.

Dagobert: Yeah. And every day that you spend at this level, like you're actually using kind of like background,

Dagobert: Backup generator. That's it. Yeah. You're using your backup generator. And eventually when you. I think when you burn out is when you don't even have the backup generator anymore. You exhausted the backup generator and now you're, you're fucked. That's [00:35:00] how it felt for me.

Marie: Since we're doing like sort of bad analogies, it's with the phone.

Marie: Say you're on 20

Dagobert: think this

Dagobert: was a good analogy, Marie. Please.

Marie: But I was just thinking like on the phone, right. When you're down to 20 percent battery saver mode kicks in and you know, obviously with battery saver mode, it's not, you don't get all your features, you know, it's limited, so

Dagobert: you're

Marie: kind of just running on battery saver mode and you're like, okay, I can make it.

Marie: through this day, but what I'm putting out is going to be not as good quality or I'm going to make mistakes or I just don't have like my full capacity because I'm tired. Yeah. And then you go for

Dagobert: founders. Yeah. Wow. I like that. Or like on the watch, like when it's like empty, like it's basically just showing the time and literally nothing else.

Marie: Oh yeah. That's, that's what a watch is for.

Dagobert: But like, it's cool. That should be like, basically the only thing you keep doing is like maybe. you only do like product or you only do like one thing or maybe [00:36:00] some coding and you cannot do anything else.

Marie: Do something you love

Marie: doing, whatever that is, whether it's coding or writing or something. But, um, yeah, that's so sad that the watch thing's so sad. It's like, I have no power to do anything else, but I'll do my bare minimum, which is what I'm designed for, which is. Here's the time in black and white.

Speaker 4: It's so sad that it's like, oh, poor watch, it's really dying.

Speaker 4: Like, I'm going to give you the time.

Marie: Always on display, not off. That's so bad. That's like my Kindle. I have, I have a Kindle. It's kind of like the watch, right? Where, when the battery runs out and it's even more dire, because Kindle uses E Ink, right? And E Ink doesn't draw power when it's off. It's sort of, it can stay on.

Marie: The

Dagobert: last thing forever.

Marie: Yeah, but, but I killed mine. Like I, I, I, I'm a really bad reader. I'm really bad at reading. I struggle like a lot with reading. But I, but I still try. And so I have a Kindle, but I hadn't [00:37:00] used it for so long because I just hadn't, right? And it was so dead that, you know, after a while I was like, okay, it's going to die.

Marie: And it showed the battery thing on it.

Marie: But then it got so dead that it's like completely off. And that's a kindle.

Dagobert: Yeah, yeah. No, yeah. Oh, yeah, my kindle kindle as well, yeah. Because I leave, I let it idle for like months, so eventually it just dies. Yeah, yeah.

Marie: Yeah. Yeah.

Marie: Yeah. Well, that's how it is, but I'm, I'm trying really hard with the expectation thing and I'm also trying to, um, I,

[00:37:36] Activities that drain vs fill your energy
---

Marie: I think just be more aware of my energy levels as well.

Dagobert: Yeah.

Marie: Because, yeah, I just feel like they fluctuate a lot depending on what I'm doing. And I know I only have a finite amount and I'm not sort of talking about energy as in getting up and running and being all like excited during the day.

Marie: I'm just talking about like mental, I'm talking about mental energy, my mental [00:38:00] energy to do some, not, not physical energy. My mental energy gets drained really quickly, especially if I'm doing something that I don't want to do. Like creativity and like

Dagobert: inspiration and like wanting to do things.

Marie: Yeah,

Marie: yeah, yeah, yeah.

Marie: But

Dagobert:

[00:38:12] Losing motivation
---

Dagobert: I was always someone who was so motivated, more motivated than most of the people I knew. And so when I did Logology the first two years, I was very motivated and I never thought in my life that this could stop, that I could stop being motivated. And so I burnt out after five years, but after two years, I remember feeling, Oh wow, I don't have this kind of like infinite motivation that I used to have that was very weird to me and scary.

Dagobert: You know, I was like. Oh, okay. Like a part of me is like, kind of like exhausted cause it's not, you know, succeeding as I wanted. And so after like hitting a wall, like repeatedly, eventually I lost motivation, you know? And, and then it, and it required way more kind of like energy. To [00:39:00] just work, because it wasn't the same kind of like, honeymoon motivation of like, just easy and just like, it's just very easy at the beginning, you know, and I didn't realize it would stop.

Dagobert: You know.

Marie: Do you

Marie: think, do you think we see this play out a little bit with, with, um, a lot of the indie makers online where, you know how people, sometimes people jump from project to project, like maybe they lose motivation on one project. Excitement.

Dagobert: Yeah,

Marie: because, cause you're right. There's this honeymoon period at the beginning.

Marie: I had it on Llama Life too. I was like, I don't, I still love working on Llama Life. I really do. But it's not the same as like the beginning. The beginning was like crazy exciting. And the first customer is like crazy exciting. You're like, who is this person? Do I know them? You're like looking up everything.

Marie: You're like, do I know this person? Oh, I don't know them. They're like my first real customer. That's super exciting. But then. Um, I don't know, like it's a different challenge now. Like I think I'm in a slightly [00:40:00] different, cause I've been working on it for maybe three years now. Um, so I'm definitely over the honeymoon period, but I'm, I stick with one product, but I see a lot of people and you stuck with one product.

Marie: You had Logology, but I see a lot of people just jumping around to different things and you know, there's. That's it. There's no one right way to do it. But I'm wondering if part of it is like, maybe they lost motivation on one thing or they got bored with one thing and they're like, okay, I'm going to go do another thing now and jump to that to recreate that, that excitement or that motivation.

Dagobert: It

Dagobert: may be kind of like, you know, some people are extroverts, some people are introverts, you know, maybe something like that.

[00:40:42] Focusing on one project vs multiple
---

Dagobert: You know, I wonder, I wonder if there's a best way or if it's just like different because you see a lot of like the successful founders on Twitter, they tend to be of the jump from one idea to the next category, at least that's my perception, but I [00:41:00] don't know if it's just because they're very, they're usually also talking about it a lot.

Dagobert: And like, so like, you see it a lot But at the same time, you also see people who like making just like a good living, not like huge, but like a good living with just one product, you know, they stick with for years.

Dagobert: Yeah, so I don't,

Marie: I don't think there's a right or wrong way. I think it's, I think you've got to find the right way for you. Like if you can jump around from product to product and that works for you. And when I say works for you, you're happy doing it and you'll make a business out of it, right? Because I'll

Dagobert: be happy doing it.

Dagobert: Yeah, I think so. Yeah,

Marie: but it's also the business part too. So if someone is able to make a business by running 10 small products and they're happy with that and that's their goal. And they're not working crazy hours. Like if that's their goal, that's great. I reckon that's great. But then there might be another type of maker where, um, they've got one product and they're making a business out of that.

Marie: Like the key is like you have to make a business and they're happy doing that and they like working on one. That's, that's fine as well. I don't really think there's [00:42:00] one way. It's more, um, it's more like what is your goal and if, what, what does it take to get to your goal? And that has to include like running a business, like proper business that's bringing in like enough to sustain you.

Dagobert: Then like, I think

Dagobert: there's also like a dark side to, to each, like, for example, the problem I had is that I did not, I was too invested in one product. Like I went too far, like, I think eventually we should have like, took a step back and be like, okay, logos. Not really a good market.

Dagobert: Let's pivot, you know, to some other design kind of like thing. And we kind of like, no, no, we're going to make logo work. We're going to like, really trying to like make this very specific thing work,

Dagobert: you know, and I

Dagobert: think that was too much. And that was kind of like, you know. Uh, not healthy, but I think on the other side of people doing way too many products, you [00:43:00] also see people who just like spend two weeks on one thing or like one weekend, they launch it.

Dagobert: It's obviously not, uh, very advanced or polished because it's just a weekend. Or like a couple of weeks. They launch it, it fails and they're like, Oh, fuck this. And they move on and they just keep repeating that and they very rarely find something. So I feel like there's like a way to be kind of like, you can fail, you know, with both things.

Dagobert: Oh,

Marie: completely. Yeah, completely. I think, I think, um. I a hundred percent agree. Like there's definitely balance. I think what I was meaning before was like, in terms of the approach of like multiple products or one product, it's whatever is right for you that allows you to build a sustainable business and fits your lifestyle, but what you're saying is kind of, I think what you're saying is like for both.

Marie: Over those approaches, there's challenges and exactly what you said, like you can get too invested in one product and not really see like, Oh, this isn't becoming a business where it's taking too long to become a [00:44:00] business or I'm not changing what I'm doing. And then that's for one product. But then on the other side, when you do multiple, yeah, I think, I think maybe sometimes people scratch the surface and they don't go deep enough.

Marie: Or they just give up a little too quickly and it's like, well, did you, did you dig like deep enough? And that doesn't mean you have to spend like two years on it, but maybe spend more than like a month.

Dagobert: Maybe spend three months. You know, maybe spend three or six months. A month

Marie: might not be enough. A lot of people go 12 projects in 12 months.

Marie: I'm like, is that enough? Like,

Dagobert: I don't know. It's funny. You're very good with, you're very good with analogies. Is that, you just said like about digging and I'm thinking, imagine there's like some You know, gold thing in the ground, like at, let's say at like 10 feet underground.

Dagobert: And some people are going to

Dagobert: dig like 30 feet.

Dagobert: So I went

Dagobert: way beyond it and there's nothing to find because like, it's too far. Some people, they just go two feet. And they just like go two feet everywhere and it just went 30 feet. I [00:45:00] was at the right spot, but I was 30 feet. So that wasn't good. And so people just go two feet everywhere. And so you had to go 10 feet, you know, so it's kind of like.

Dagobert: You just have to go a little

Marie: further, but it's kind of hard. Cause you're like, well, how far, how far do I go? Like when you're in it, it's really hard. When you step back and reflect, like when you finished Logology and you step back and you reflected. It's

Dagobert: obvious now, but yeah.

Marie: You can kind of see, like, I read your tweet when you, when you closed it and was like, all these reflections, they were really great.

Marie: And, but it's so hard to see all of that when you're like in it.

Dagobert: Oh yeah. Yeah.

[00:45:35] Listen to customers to know if it's worth continuing
---

Marie: And sometimes it's your baby too, right? Like I sometimes, I try and catch myself cause I'm kind of, I'm pretty emotionally attached to Llama Life as well. But I try not to be like, I know that I'm like, I'm really like this, like doing this, but I think if you really want to do something like that, there are, there are other ways to make it work as well.

Marie: So we haven't talked about this yet, but when you work on one product, like say Llama [00:46:00] Life, if it's not working as quickly as you want it to, but you know, you have something, which is basically the situation I was in, we have really strong, like Um, we have really strong, like customer fit, like we get so many emails from customers saying they love it.

Marie: It's changed their life. Like crazy. Like I've, I've done other startups before, nothing like this. Like people are crazy. Like this is amazing. Like they're just gushing over it. Yeah. We get so many emails. The price point is really low and we're in the productivity category. It's like 5

Dagobert: a month or something.

Marie: It's now 6 US per month or 39 per year. So yeah, it's B2C, you have to, and you have to sell like a lot in B2C to make it. And yeah. Even though we have this really strong, like customer fit, we don't fully have product market fit yet because product market fit includes like the business side too. And

Dagobert: well, the market, the market, right.

Dagobert: Overall market. Exactly. People focus on product [00:47:00] only, but like that's really the market side.

Marie: So for me, like, you know, with my calculations, I was bootstrapping it and I was like, I'm going to run out of money. Before I can make this work, but I know this is going to work. Like I have a really strong feeling and I've got data and I've got customers saying how much they love this.

Marie: I just need more time to like make it work. And it's not just to

Dagobert: know people love it. Yeah. Cause we had that with Logology is we knew people loved it, but we didn't have the market. And so, and so what you, what you say, what you're saying is like, you also know that you also have the market side of things that it's just about, you need to reach it, but you know, it's there.

Marie: Yeah.

[00:47:36] Building a product for people with ADHD
---

Marie: So for our market. We've changed this a few times, but we've, we've figured out like, and it's kind of, you know, in retrospect, there's no surprise because our biggest sort of customer group, um, are people with ADHD and focus challenges. And it's no surprise like looking back because like I have ADHD and I made the product for myself.

Marie: And so all the features that were put into LamaLife in the early [00:48:00] days. We're all kind of geared that way. Now we do have people who do not have ADHD who love the product too.

Dagobert: What kind of feature, like what's the first feature you're thinking of when you're saying that?

Marie: Oh yeah. So there's, there's so many little ones, but I guess one really obvious one is it's called Chimes.

Marie: And what it does is like. I don't even know if people know what Llama Life is, but basically what it is, is like a, it's um, it's kind of like a to do list, except that every task has a countdown timer attached to it. And when the timer is running, you're meant to focus on try and do one thing at a time and just that thing.

Marie: Um, so it's meant to really hone your focus and keep you aware of like how much time you're spending on stuff. And while the timer is running, there is also a chime that will play at an interval of your choice. And that's it. So say I have a 30 minute timer and during my 30 minutes, I'm trying to focus on this one task, but maybe I got distracted and maybe I started looking at like Wikipedia or like looking up some movie [00:49:00] or something.

Marie: And I went down a rabbit hole, the chimes like will play. Every five minutes or 10 minutes or whatever you want. And it'll just play like a little sound in the background. And when that plays, you're like, Oh crap, I'm supposed to be doing this other thing. And it's meant to bring you back. It's meant to actually break your focus, funny enough, ironically, and bring you back to what you're supposed to focus on.

Marie: So that was one feature and. All our customers with ADHD are like, I love that chimes feature. So I guess where I was going with this was we kind of found like the market and there are like 350 million adults or something like that with ADHD in the U. S. It's pretty crazy. So the market's big, but I couldn't,

Dagobert: how many, how many did you say,

Marie: 350 million I think is the stat.

Dagobert: 350 million is basically the entire U. S. population.

Marie: Maybe it's globally, maybe it's globally. Yeah, you're right. Cause it's about 400 million. Yeah, yeah. It's globally, globally, but that's still a pretty big market, right?

Dagobert: [00:50:00] That's a big enough market. It's big

Marie: enough market. And we keep getting told that our tools like really unique.

Marie: This is from customers and I've never found anything like it.

[00:50:08] Getting funding to boost her efforts
---

Marie: So we definitely have something, but. We just didn't have time based on my personal savings. So where I was going with all of this was like, there is another route, which is you can maybe raise a little bit of money. Um, there's many ways to do that.

Marie: It could be crowdfunding. It could be like a small angel investment. It could be like calm fund. Um, so it doesn't have to be VCs, right. Or you could go the VC route as well, but that's. That's obviously got different challenges as well, but the point I was trying to make was there's different ways to get to your goal.

Marie: And with me, I kind of looked at my personal situation was like, I can't make it unless there's some funds coming in to give it a boost and give me that little bit of extra time. So I kind of went that route after bootstrapping for, I think about a year, and then I raised a little bit of money. I went through like an accelerator program as well, and they give you money to go through the accelerator program.[00:51:00]

Marie: And that bought me a little bit of time. And obviously it let me hire like two other people as well. So there are some folks that can bootstrap it and do that. And that's like amazing that they can get to profitability to hire and all that stuff. But with Llama Life, we couldn't get there. So we. So I decided to, to raise a little bit of money to get that up front so I could try and get there.

Dagobert: And you know, what I like about this is that it kind of like helps you also stay out of your fantasy because I think like,

Dagobert: You're really like taking the step and be like, okay, I want this to be a real business. I'm hiring a couple people. I'm going to do this. We'll see if this works out.

[00:51:43] Having too much runway is dangerous
---

Dagobert: And I feel like, for example, on my end, the kind of like good and bad thing that happened is that a couple months after we started Logology, my mother passed away.

Dagobert: So that was very tough, like emotionally.

Marie: Yeah.

Dagobert: But [00:52:00] like after like a couple months, uh, I got like money from that. Not that much, but like, basically we went from like two years runway to five based on our savings. And I think at first I saw, I saw it as a good thing. And it's obviously, you know, there's a positive in that, but like,

Dagobert: it kind of like allowed us

Dagobert: to fuck around, you know?

Dagobert: for the first two or four, two or three years, I was literally not worried because we had like all these savings.

Dagobert: And I was like, yeah, we can just like fuck around. And I was spending so much time on useless shit. And so that was kind of like a blessing and a curse. I think what I like about what you're saying is like, it forces you to be like, okay, this is a business. This is just, this is just not us playing around, having fun, building a little product instead of like building a business.

Dagobert: *and I remember people told us like, other entrepreneurs told us, maybe you should like do *[00:53:00] *this accelerator program and get some money. We're like, yeah. We didn't want to do it, but it's also because you didn't want to like, I think unconsciously, we didn't want to do a business.*

Dagobert: * didn't want to have to do this shit. We just want it to be, do our nice little product, have fun. You know, my wife just wanted to do logos, you know, wanted to design cute logos all day and I wanted to like do a cool product. And so, you know what I mean? Like, it wasn't like the, we didn't do this. We didn't set out to build a business.*

Dagobert: *We set out to have fun building a product we love. Yeah, yeah. And that is a completely different thing. *

Marie: Yep. Yep. Yeah, I can relate to that. Cause when I, Llama Life is actually not my first attempt. It was, I think like my fourth attempt. So after I quit my job, I had that same feeling as you. I was like, yay, I'm free.

Marie: I can do whatever I want. I have, you know, I've, I actually was like, I have two years of savings.

Dagobert: Yeah.

Marie: Same thing. It's too much. Right. And, and I was like, I should have done two years, but [00:54:00] I should have like cut it in half and said, I'm putting that aside. You can't touch that second year. That's your savings.

Marie: Leave it alone. But I was like, no, I have two years. I'm good. And like my first day, I'm like, I'm good. I'm just going to go for a walk, whatever. And yeah, the urgency.

Dagobert: Yeah.

Marie: The urgency is not, not there. And I'm like, I want to have fun. I'm going to, you know, do this and learn to do that. And it was so silly.

Marie: It was like, Oh, I'm gonna get the whiteboard out. Let me, I was playing startup, but I wasn't doing startup. I was playing. I was

Dagobert: like,

Marie: Oh, I've got all these ideas. Which one am I going to do? Oh, let me like try and figure out, you know, validate that idea. But. And look, some people do this really well, but I know I'm talking about me personally.

Marie: I was definitely playing startup. I was like, I'm going to MVP, whatever. And I'm like, okay, cool. Then, you know, one year goes by and this is not even with LlamaLife. It's like one year goes by, I had some other ideas. They didn't work. And I was really unhappy. And I'm like, why am I doing this? I'm not earning enough and I'm just destroying my savings.

Marie: And then another year went by and then [00:55:00] COVID hit. And I'm like, Oh my God, I can't even get a job if I wanted to. Like it's like full on in middle of COVID. And so

Dagobert: urgency just slapped you in the face, like woke you up.

Marie: And then I was like, that's when I was, that's when I learned to code and I'm like, I'm going to learn to code.

Marie: Then I can just make whatever I want.

Dagobert: And

Marie: I might as well do something like that during lockdown or whatever. Um, but yeah, it's like, I didn't have that urgency at the start, even though I was eating into my own savings and some, but some people might, I think it's just depends on the individual, but for me, I just didn't have that urgency.

Marie: I was still like, yeah, I still got this, still got this money.

[00:55:39] Having investors helps with accountability
---

Marie: But the thing that the investors have done for me and look, I don't like doing this, but like every month I have to do an investor report, like, yeah. You're taking money, somebody's money. And it's, it's not like, okay. So we didn't raise like a massive amount to put it in context.

Marie: We raised [00:56:00] 680, 000, which is still a pretty big chunk, but it's not like we raised like 10 million or something like that. We raised what we could and what I thought we needed to kind of get us through what I said before, which like get us through that, that, that stage where we can be. Profitable and stuff and hire

Dagobert: people and have like a good product market fit and

Marie: stuff.

Marie: Um, but it's still not nothing. So you've just taken this big chunk of money. You can't, you can't just be like, I'm going to do whatever. Like you, you have freedom to do what you want, but you have to be accountable. So every month I have to write an investor report. It's not very long. It's just an email, but the email has a certain structure.

Marie: We talk about our numbers. We look at churn, we look at growth. We look at what we've done, what worked, what didn't. The good thing about that for me is there's some structure and it really holds me accountable every month. I'm looking at these numbers going, okay. Are we doing the right thing? Like, do we need to reprioritize?

Marie: Like, what [00:57:00] direction do we need to go? Like, was that, you know, did that work? It didn't work. You can't

Dagobert: bullshit too much. No, you can't bullshit yourself. They're just

Marie: the numbers, right? Like, you can't change the numbers. The numbers are the numbers. So you're like, okay, well, these numbers weren't great this month.

Marie: Why? And. It's okay if they weren't great, but you've got to do something different. You can't just keep going if they're not great. But I think if I was by myself, I would be more likely to be like, this is not going well, but that's okay. I'll keep going.

Dagobert: Yeah. That's my

Marie: personality. I'm like, okay, I'll just keep,

Dagobert: I would, that would be the same.

Dagobert: I'd be like, you know, eventually it's going to turn around, you know, it's going to be fine. Yeah.

Marie: But because I got to write this report and, and actually I have to do it this weekend. It's supposed to go out on the first of the month, but I always, I always I'm like, the first weekend of the month is okay.

Marie: So I have to do it this weekend and I'm not looking forward to it, but it will, it will make me go, yeah, okay, what's happening now and do we need to change some stuff? And the funny thing is after I write it, I'm always very happy [00:58:00] at what we've done. Like it feels great. Like, Oh, we accomplished so much stuff.

Marie: It's a review. Yeah. It's great because we say, here's what we did for the product. Here's what we did for marketing. So the, so the structure is like product, marketing and team. And so

Dagobert: every

Marie: month and then like other metrics and stuff, but the other sort of what did you do kind of section is like product, then marketing and team.

Marie: And so. Yeah, I know a lot of indie makers struggle with marketing. Marketing is really hard. I can't leave that section blank. I have to put stuff in there.

Dagobert: That's why I

Dagobert: said that was awesome. I'm like, okay, product marketing team sounds perfect. Like that's everything you need.

Marie: And we talk about the team, like what good stuff happened with the team?

Marie: You know, like any challenges, do people get sick? Usually like stuff like, Oh, I got COVID or whatever. It's like, okay, well the team was down like for half the month because. Two of us got COVID, like stuff like that, but it [00:59:00] really does kind of hold you accountable to building a business, serious, like sort of, is this a business?

Marie: And if it's not, then, well, that can happen sometimes, but that's definitely not our goal. Like that's not the intention. Like we want to keep going.

Dagobert: And that might be bringing like an interesting balance because I feel like

Dagobert: like when you have a job, you're like a hundred percent accountable to someone else. But like, when you're indie, you're not accountable to anybody.

Dagobert: And like, I feel like, you know, we want to run away from this, from this accountability in a way. Not just the accountability, it's, it's not why we leave, but like, it's a part of it. And I feel like it might be a nice balance to be like an entrepreneur, but maybe have some accountability by like you did, you know, this gives you some accountability and this might bring a nice balance to like, so it doesn't go in all directions all the time.

Dagobert: You know, it gets a bit more.

Marie: I'm just speaking personally, like [01:00:00] what it's done for me, but I think there's like, I do see other, I see successful indie makers who completely bootstrapped, completely disciplined, you know, it can be done. Yeah, it can be done. It just depends on

Dagobert: the person.

Marie: It depends on the person, but it also depends on the product that you're making.

Marie: Like what does that product need? Or what does that problem need? And I mentioned before that LLamaLife in the productivity category, it's like the worst category to be in, right? It's the most crowded category. Everyone knows productivity tools are, it's very hard to be successful with a productivity tool, but that's the product I want to make.

Marie: Because I see it's making a difference. Like when we get these emails, like I see it makes a difference. So I'm motivated by that. I'm not, I'm actually less motivated by money. Like, obviously I want to have a certain amount so I can live, but I'm not as motivated to get rich or anything like that. I just, I want to just make this product.

[01:00:59] Working on your startup like it's your life's work
---

Dagobert: so now the [01:01:00] motivation is because you see it help people and you really feel like, kind of like a mission that you feel that you have. Yeah.

Marie: Yeah. Yeah. I kind of feel like this sounds like a little bit like in the clouds, but like, I kind of feel like it's my life, like my life's work. Like I really feel like this is what I was born to do. Put here to do like this product and I've tried several other products. Like I feel really like this is my, this is the product, like this is the thing I'm supposed to be doing.

Dagobert: Yeah.

Marie: And yeah. Okay. Yeah. Seeing it help people, like we actually got an email from someone the other day and they were like, you know, I'm sending you this because there's something like, I'm sending you this because like, if you feel like you're having challenging time, whatever, just know that it's worth it.

Marie: Like you're really helping people and it was like a really nice, really nice email. I tweeted about it a few days ago and he said something like, I hope you hope you frame this or something for when, like you have some. Challenging times. And I was like, I'm not framing it, but I did take a screenshot.

Dagobert: What a narcissist

Dagobert: [01:02:00] customer.

Dagobert: I'm kidding, but I hope you frame my email. Okay.

Marie: Something

Marie: like that, you know, but I definitely saved it and I, um, I will, yeah, I do, we, we have, we have all the customer emails cause they're just in like our Gmail inbox, but yeah, they, I would say like 99 percent of them are like super nice and super grateful.

Marie: it's kind of hard to put into words because like I've never had something like that before. It sounds almost fake, but like they are so grateful and just feeling it, you know? So that keeps me going a lot

[01:02:37] Enjoying building a nice UI
---

Marie: and I genuinely like working on the product. It's like, I like doing the UI stuff.

Marie: I like creating like funny. Little Easter eggs and silly things in the app. And apparently our audience liked that too.

Dagobert: Yeah. It's very cool. It's cute. I don't,

Marie: I don't actually, I actually don't think I could work at like a big tech company who I don't, first of all, I don't [01:03:00] think I have the skills, like I would totally fail like some coding exam, but I don't think I'd be able to work on the stuff I want to, which is like these mic, I like we're working on like micro experiences, like micro like interactions or UX stuff.

Dagobert: Yeah, it does. Yeah. There's also a lot of sounds in Llama Life. Oh yeah, yeah. There is. There's sound attached to events, like, when I do, because I use it, and when I duplicate a task, it makes a little, it makes a little, like, bubble noise or something. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's really nice.

Marie: There's some Easter eggs with the sounds as well.

Marie: Like some of the sounds are, I can't remember which one. One of them's actually a plunger. Like a toilet plunger or something.

Dagobert: Okay. I haven't heard that one. But I,

Marie: but the, but the level of the sound is turned down. So you can't really tell, right? Like there's all this, I'm not a sound expert, but I just mess with it.

Marie: Like

Dagobert: you're putting some, yeah, you're polishing it. You're making like an experience. Yeah. That's yeah.

Marie: That's

Dagobert: awesome. Yeah. That's funny.

[01:03:58] How hard it is to build a good todo list app
---

Dagobert: I was talking last [01:04:00] week with Lukas Hermann who does stage timer. Yeah. Yeah. And I was asking him, how the fuck do you. Do you have to dev for three years on the fucking timer and I was kidding him and I feel like with llama life it's the same like it looks so simple like and I and that's like that's the thing like these things look so simple but yet like you're always working on it so can you tell us you know what's happening?

Marie: It's funny you say that with, with Lukas. So yeah, Lukas and I, we, we, we've had chats and stuff before. And the funny thing is like his product and Llama Life are actually like fundamentally like at the core, like the core mechanism is the same. Like they're both timers, they're actually really, really similar.

Marie: They're both timers, they have the countdown, you can set multiple timers, there's breaks, there's like different. Like it's, it's really uncanny. They're the same product. I didn't

Dagobert: even think about it. Yeah.

Dagobert: completely different

Marie: audience, completely different market, [01:05:00] completely different design, but the core is the same.

Marie: Like. And, and sometimes when he sees me put out features or vice versa, I'm like, Oh yeah, we've been thinking about that too. Or I'll be like, Oh yeah, we've had this exact problem. And it's so frustrating dealing with time and time zones. And he's like, Oh my God, like we have the same problems, like, and the same features, but just a different audience, a different look.

Marie: Everything's different. Um, everything else is different, but the core is kind of very similar.

Marie: Well, it's funny because, So when I was first interviewing for this dev role, interviewing people to join Llama Life for a dev role, yeah, we had some devs going, Oh, Oh, your, your little app or something. Some guy made a comment like, Oh yeah, your little, your little app. And I was like, so offended. I was like, what do you mean little?

Marie: Yeah,

Dagobert: I was like, you're out. Yeah, you're out. This is over.

Marie: I was like, you know, it looks simple on the surface, but there's, I think that probably, okay, we'll do another analogy [01:06:00] since we're on that roll. But I think the easiest analogy is, um, so, you know, meditation apps, right? So what is it, what is it, what happens when you listen to a meditation?

Marie: Like, what is that at its core? It's just an MP3, right? At its core, you listen to an MP3 for 10 minutes. That's your meditation content, right? There are apps like Calm and Headspace and other meditation apps as well. Who have taken basically a playlist of mp3s and they've made like a whole business around it.

Marie: Like they've made it an experience. They've made a cool UI and a user, uh, UX as well. They've built a community around it. They've built a brand. That's kind of how I see the timer. Cause some people go, Oh, it's just the timer. Well. Yeah, you can go and get another timer if you want that does a similar thing, but you won't get the same experience.

Marie: And with a productivity tool, you need a good experience or you're not coming back to use that productivity tool, right? You could have something that's exactly [01:07:00] like Lama Life, but it hasn't got the same UI. You might not come back to use it because it's just too boring for you. And that's kind of where I see it's the same as a meditation app.

Marie: I could have a list of MP3s and I could just play that. I'll be good. Yeah. Yeah. But that's not going to track my streaks. It's not going to track, track, like edu, it's not going to give me educational content. It's not going to play nice sounds like to get me warmed up. It's not going to, you know, it's not going to play a sound toward the end of my meditation and get me out of the zone or get me into the zone.

Marie: There's all this stuff around it. And that's kind of how I feel Lama life is. And we're constantly like improving that stuff while at the same time, to your point, like we don't want to just throw everything at it because then it just, then it doesn't become simple anymore. So we kind of. I'm trying to balance like simplicity with like the whole experience.

[01:07:45] Building a community around your product by being real
---

Marie: And I think the, the place we go next is more like build community. So we build, we're building brand, we're building community as well around the core tool. So that's what we've been, community is something huge for us. [01:08:00] Like. That's, we have one person, I mean, she does multiple things, but one thing that she does is community.

Marie: Like we try and support the community, like get feedback from the community. Just it's, it's, it's hard to describe. It's so intangible. We definitely focus on community and do content and newsletters and stuff like that for the community.

Dagobert: You know, uh, this reminds me, uh, this might be completely stupid idea, but I was working.

Dagobert: There's a friend of mine who's like a productivity coach in San Francisco Bay area that I know for like 10 years ago. And he had built back then just for his clients, a tiny Ruby on Rails app that was a lot like Llama Life actually. it was called the action game and everything, and you had to create actions and an action is a 25 minutes, you know, task.

Dagobert: And then what it did is, but the timer was the same for everyone. So that means an action started [01:09:00] at, you know, You know, noon, and then the second one at noon, 30, like every 30 minutes was like an action. You couldn't change the start of the action

Marie: and

Dagobert: you had to kind of like catch the train. That was something that I really enjoyed.

Dagobert: Uh, and then you had, and then after the 25 minutes, you had to spend the five minutes, like you had to review what happened. Like you had to kind of like think about it and be like, okay, what did I do good? What did I do wrong? You know, how did I feel? You know? So once you, I was so focused on productivity back then I used to do like 20 actions a day.

Dagobert: So after a while you stop reflecting because it's so intense, especially when you're mindful, like it's so intense.

Dagobert: Yeah. Yeah.

Dagobert: What I was getting at is that eventually he had it kind of like a community side to it. And what happened is. You could like, you know, connect with other people using it and see what other people were working on it.

Dagobert: And since everybody [01:10:00] was starting at the same times, that just made me think of that when you said community, because I imagine. Like imagine all these founders who like, don't want to do marketing, but maybe on Lamalife every Thursday is marketing morning for founders.

Dagobert: And then everybody's doing marketing tasks and we're like motivating each other. They just had this crazy idea, you know,

Marie: I like the, I like the, you know, everything's at the same time. It reminds me also of that app called be real where everyone's going to take a photo at the same time. It doesn't matter whatever you're doing, just take a photo of what you're doing right now.

Marie: It's kind of reminds me of

Dagobert: that. Yeah. Something with that.

Marie: Yeah. Yeah. That's a super cool idea. Maybe we'll do something like that.

Dagobert: So, so what is it going to look like? Like, what are you going to do to build that?

Marie: For community? Um, so we do, so we do like a lot of newsletters. We do kind of a monthly newsletter and then we have like a tips and tricks newsletter.

Marie: We just, we just started like a new campaign actually. It's, it just like started a week ago, like a, kind of like an onboarding thing where every day we send [01:11:00] people a very short email with some, with a meme about productivity

Dagobert: and

Marie: then, um, just some tips and tricks. So it's that kind of thing. And people respond to it.

Marie: One thing we do is like, we don't hide behind the products. Like we're very, we put our names everywhere. Like people know who's working on

Dagobert: the product.

Marie: So when we write a newsletter, it's not just like from Llama Life, it's from Marie, like Guille and Nhi that they're the two other people that work with. Like we just put our names there. We'll put our faces sometimes, like we, we like working together. So sometimes we go do silly things. Like we had a team event where, um, it sounds so funny saying team event, like a corporate thing, but.

Marie: But it's not, it's not like that. Basically we live, two of us are in Melbourne and one of us is like a little bit further away, so we flew him, flew him down and we just like hung out for three days and like just did stuff together and just put the content on social media, like we did an escape room. And we, we like smashed it.

Marie: We [01:12:00] got out like with 15 minutes to spare or 16 minutes or something.

Dagobert: And, you know, we just

Marie: kind of, I guess just kind of be real. Like we try and just be real, like this is who we are. Like, and that helps build community. Cause we're not fake. It's not like a faceless product. Like we're, you see the people working on the product.

Marie: And you can see that they're, you know, working hard on the product and passionate about the product, that kind of thing. And I think people can relate to that.

Dagobert: There's this other founder that I, I like, you know, Dashiel, uh, Dash Bark-Huss.

Marie: Oh yeah, I know Dashiel. Yeah, yeah,

Marie: yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Dagobert: Uh, and she, uh, So she does a product.

Marie: She's really

Marie: good at community. Yeah. Yeah.

Dagobert: Oh, she's really good at like

Marie: a lot of things building shit.

Dagobert: She's really, yeah, she's really good.

Marie: Yeah. Yeah.

Dagobert: Uh, I can't speak about it 'cause she doesn't want me to, but like, yeah, she's really good. Like she's, you don't, you don't know because you don't see on Twitter, like everything.

Dagobert: [01:13:00] Yeah. Yeah. She's very, like, she's going through a very good time.

Marie: I know, I know what you're thinking. Like we've, we, her, we've had a few dms and stuff, so I can't. Yeah, no, she's doing, doing good stuff, doing good stuff. And yeah, she's not talking about it heaps. And that's the thing, like sometimes there are, there's a lot of people who are doing like super well at stuff and they're

Dagobert: not,

Marie: not necessarily building in public and you know, whatever, like whatever works.

Marie: I think if you like building in public, build in public. If you don't want to build in public, don't build in public, just do whatever you want to do. Like there's so many arguments. I see people like fighting on Twitter all the time. Like building public is crap for, you know. Do whatever you want. Like, no one, no one cares.

Dagobert: she was talking to me about it. It's like, initially she got kind of like, she grew on Twitter because she was building in public initially.

Marie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then

Dagobert: she kind of stopped because like, you know, she was, I think, growing a bit too much. And so eventually, you know, it's not really useful to build in public.

Dagobert: Yeah,

Marie: yeah.

Dagobert: And it's kind of like attract the wrong kind of attention. And then, But what [01:14:00] I was going to say is that in terms of community, she, you know, really puts her face on it and she's doing a product, you know, for, uh, adult content creators. wishlist that's called Wish Tender. It's like a wishlist for OnlyFans creators.

Dagobert: Um, and that's very simple products, you know, like pretty cute. I mean, it looks simple, you know, but it's probably very complicated. and I think it's kind of like similar to you is that at least in her space, I mean, it's so shady, there's so many bad things and she's just like very fresh, very genuine and like, yeah, let's do an indie app, you know, to help.

Dagobert: You know, only fans, creators. And it's like, and she's putting her face and she's talking like directly with customers. Like when there's a problem, she, even like when she gets called out for something, she acknowledges it and she talks about it. Yeah. I think it's just being real. Like just, yeah, she's being real.

Dagobert: And I kind of like you, like you're like in productivity space, you're going to see all these LinkedIn B2B [01:15:00] type, uh, approaches and you're just coming in, you know, as yourself, you're real and you're just like, yeah. that's very attractive.

Dagobert: and I think it's similar to like wish tenders, like there's like a nice UI, like it's kind of like welcoming.

Dagobert: Yeah. Yeah.

Dagobert: And it's like a, kind of like a new vibe of like, we're going to do very polished UX, very welcoming and then be real with people, be authentic.

Dagobert: I mean, it's, it's a great way to stand out compared to like the more established and more like, we're like a big company and, but like, they're like colder and less human. Yeah.

Marie: I think for me, like it wasn't at the beginning, it wasn't really a conscious decision.

Marie:

[01:15:38] Accidentally deleting user's tasks on the production database
---

Marie: I'll give you an example recently, like we had this massive, I made like a crazy mistake and basically I deleted some data from production, which I got told afterwards, every dev has their moment where they delete something from production. And, but this was my moment, this was my first moment and it was, man, [01:16:00] I was devastated, like seriously devastated, right?

Marie: It was bad. Why did you delete?

Dagobert: What happened?

Marie: I deleted people's tasks. Which is basically like,

Dagobert: that's the product, right? That's the core of the product. That's the product.

Marie: Yeah. Yeah. So we were, we were trying to create some efficiencies because some, you know, people say, Hey, I want to delete my account.

Marie: And we were manually doing that. So I was trying to write a script to, Delete accounts, dangerous stuff. That's just dangerous. Right. And as part of writing the script, I was just trying to test, I was actually trying to prevent deleting tasks. And I was testing like, okay, what would happen if I do this thing?

Marie: Because, um, I'm trying to prevent that. And I got to like, make sure I code something to protect that. And. I didn't realize, I just, my env, my environment variables were just like messed up and I was pointing to production. So you weren't in

Dagobert: the dev environment, you were just in production and you just did your test.

Dagobert: And I

Marie: just hit, and I [01:17:00] tried this thing and I'm like, then I'm looking in the dev. We have a dev database for testing. So I'm looking in the database going, Oh yeah, it's good. It doesn't, it's great. It doesn't affect it. Great. And I was like, great. And then I was like, I'm going to go for a walk. Yeah, great.

Marie: And I went for a walk and then my phone starts going off. Like I start getting all these emails from customers going, my tasks are gone. My tasks are gone. How I ran, I think my face just went like white and* I just like. I knew exactly what had to happen and I just, I ran, I ran so fast back to the house.*

Marie: And then the girl I work with, her name's Nhi, she's like messaging me. I saw the emails, I saw the emails and I'm like, Oh my God. So like we get on a call together, the three of us and like, basically, yeah, it was completely my mistake. Like I completely effed up. And so we had, this is a seven o'clock at night as well.

Marie: And we're just like, okay, here's what we're going to do. And we all went and did our thing and we fixed it. But then I had to write [01:18:00] this massive apology note to the customers. I think I remember

Dagobert: that. I haven't been affected, but I remember that.

Marie: So not everyone was affected. Oh, actually. I think everyone was affected, but I guess not everyone cared.

Marie: Um, maybe they weren't like active users or something, but I sent an email out to like,

Dagobert: 20, because I think I have tasks, but then I don't have pending tasks. Like I just put them for the day. I don't like pre planned. That was the saving

Marie: grace because we're more like a day tool, like a day planning tool, people don't plan a whole project on us.

Marie: That's just users for the day and that's it.

Dagobert: Yeah.

Marie: So I sent this email out to like 20, 000 people and I'm like, I'm like, Uh, I just completely, I just said what, what the truth, right. I was like, I messed up and I'm devastated and I'm really sorry this happened. And it's on Twitter somewhere, but I wrote this email and it was crazy.

Marie: People wrote back, that was so nice. Like, I think we got like a hundred emails. Uh, a hundred emails back [01:19:00] and they were like fully, there was maybe two people that were not nasty, but just sort of more like, so, so like, you know, neutral. But like, yeah, make

Dagobert: sure this doesn't happen again or something like that.

Marie: Not even, not, not that, but more just like, um, just upset that their thing was gone, which fair, fair point. Like fair enough. Right. But most of the emails we got back were like. Oh, don't worry about it. Like, you know, just it happens like, okay. And some people were devs and they're like, it happens if you're a dev, like this would happen and some people were like, don't beat yourself up over it.

Marie: Like, I hope you don't lose sleep over it and just really supportive. But I think the reason they're supportive is because. Like they know there's a real person behind this, that had already

Dagobert: been in, you know, they got the emails, they feel with the UX, the UX and the UI, they feel that, you know, some care about it.

Dagobert: And so they connect with you. They know

Marie: that I genuinely like, I care. Like I was, I was so devastated, man. I was just like, I was so upset [01:20:00] that night, but then, but then I went to bed and I was okay because we got like all these nice emails. So I actually slept okay that night. Oh, that's so nice. It's kind of like when you

Dagobert: delegate something the first time and you realize it's okay, it's kind of like, you know, like people, like you can trust people.

Dagobert: You don't have to worry, like you can trust your customers. You don't have to be perfect. You can like, your customers will love you. It's okay. That is awesome.

Marie: And, you know, obviously we did stuff to prevent that happening again. We've got like new procedures around it and backups and things like that. And.

Marie: So that was also communicated. I was, I'm a little bit scarred by that still, like every time as a team, sometimes we talk about the deletion event, like it's a thing now. We're like, remember the deletion event?

Dagobert: Yeah.

Marie: So we learned from it and, you know, but, but I guess the point was more about community and like, you might not see it in the, like as you're doing it, but this was an example where I think if we didn't have that [01:21:00] community, it could be very different.

Dagobert: Like if we didn't have the

Marie: community knowing us, like that would be very different. Like. Oh, you deleted my stuff. Like that's kind of a big deal, you know?

Dagobert: Because like, yeah, because I think what happens is that if you don't have the connection as a customer, you're just scared that people don't care about you.

Dagobert: for this company, I'm just like a number or something and they don't care. So like, this is the fear. But once you're connected with someone, you know, they care.

Dagobert: So it's like, okay, it's all good because you have the trust Uh, you know, that is established and it's the beautiful thing. You know, when you open yourself and you're authentic, when you have this community bonding, you have trust. And once you have trust, you know, everything is easier. So yeah, I feel like it's really about that.

Marie: Oh, awesome. I, I, I have to, I'm so sorry, but I have to go soon. I'm actually, I was good. I was going to wrap it

Dagobert: up. I was going to wrap it up. Okay, cool, cool, cool.

Marie: But you edit this, right? Or you could leave it in or whatever.

Dagobert: It's like Friday

Marie: night here and I originally didn't have plans, [01:22:00] but then someone messaged me like, Hey, you want to go meet like this? Um, yes. I'm going to go out and grab a drink somewhere.

Dagobert: Yeah. So let me wrap it up.

Marie: Yeah, cool. Go for it.

Dagobert: Yeah. So that was awesome.

[01:22:12] Getting gifted the perfect twitter handle
---

Dagobert: Uh, do you have like a couple of places where people can find you, you know, before we wrap this up?

Marie: Yeah. Um, so I'm very active on Twitter. I'm at three hour coffee spelled out like three hour and coffee on Twitter. And I think that's probably the easiest place. And then Llama Life obviously is like at Llama Life. We managed to get at Llama Life, which is a whole nother crazy story, but we didn't start with that.

Marie: And then someone just gave it to us. I, I don't know if this is a community thing as well. I think you had

Dagobert: like, you had at llama life app and then. We had at

Marie: llama life co, because the websites are co and the person that had at llama life literally, like I woke up one morning. And they just was like, Hey, you want this?

Marie: And I was

Dagobert: like, what? You never hear about this, [01:23:00] you never hear about this kind of stuff. That's awesome.

Marie: Didn't ask for any money or anything. Just, it's like, I, I literally wake up and he was like, Hey, you know, this account, this handle doesn't really mean anything to me. Um, do you guys want it? Like, I love what you're doing.

Marie: If you want it, you can have it. And then he goes, He just completely did everything. Like he was like, Oh, and by the way, I've, um, I've changed the email on it to this. And he created a new Gmail and he goes, here's the, here's the Gmail attached to it. Here's the password. It's yours. I literally woke up and he'd done this and I'm like, What?

Marie: I was like, my head was, cause I'd just woken up too, and I was like, what just happened? I was like, what? Did this happen? Really happen? That is

Dagobert: so nice. Yeah. So

Marie: crazy.

Dagobert: that's like the opposite of people who like buy domain names and like, then try to sell it to you and they're just like, you know, yeah.

Dagobert: Here's just like "have it". Nasty. Yeah. So, yeah.

Marie: So at three hour coffee on Twitter and at Llama Life on Twitter. Awesome. Awesome. [01:24:00]

Dagobert: Awesome. Well, thanks Marie, that was awesome having you here on Founder's Therapy. Maybe we'll rename the podcast. Founder's Therapy. That sounds pretty good, you know, that sounds pretty good.

Marie: It does sound good. We'll see. We'll see. Yeah. This is where it was, you know, created, crafted.

Dagobert: All right. Well, you have a

Marie: good, you have a good day then. Cause, um, it's daytime for you, night time for me, but yeah, have a good. Yeah. So, um, I'm going to leave you guys like this, uh, for the rest of your day and yeah.

Marie: Thank you.

Dagobert: Thank you. Cheers.

Marie: Just one sec before you leave, guys, I just wanted to remind you that I've recently opened the Indie Hotline. So this means you can now send me your submissions about some difficult times or you know experiences that you have with your startup. I will then read it during an episode and react to it with my guests.

Dagobert: And this can even be anonymous if you want to. So just go to IndieLifePod. com, then click on Indie Hotline to send me your submissions. My goal with this is to make [01:25:00] us all see that we're all in this together and it's normal to have difficult times. There is nothing wrong about feeling depressed or feeling down when you embark on this journey because it's actually way more difficult than most of us imagine.

Dagobert: And I actually got a few submissions already that you will hear about in the next following episodes. So that's it for me, and I'll see you in the next episode.