Demenstration Speaker: Alright before we get started i want to show you a couple of websites. The first is Tim Farensins blog. Have you seen this post? He says “No more excuses” He’s got a contest where if you finaly create an online store and you make more money then the other stores your going to earn a hundred thousand dollars from him in the next six months. Check out his site for details. The point is he is saying go to shopify.com, create a store, its easy. Even if you lose the contest and dont win the hundred thousand dollar jackpot and you started a business your ahead of the game becasue that business is going to build revinue for you. In fact, most people who are watching this have businesses. If you have a store in addition to your business your going to be able to bring in a different source of revinue for your business so check out shopify.com dead simple in a few seconds your going to have the store done and then you can start to see some revinue come in. The second site I want to show you is grasshopper. If you check out grasshopper.com the way I did you can get a phone number for yourself and its not just a phone number its one they can get you no matter where you are in the world. I have been traveling the phone keeps coming to me no matter where I am and also it has all the phone features and then some of the big robust phone services your used to seeing in big offices like extentions, redirects, lots of different voice mail options. Check out grasshopper.com and get your phone number the way that I did. Alright, here is the program.
Andrew Warner: Hi everybody this is Andrew Warner i am the founder of mixerg.com home of the ambitous upstart and you guys know the project I am working on right? Sort of like Napolein Hill A guy i amdmired years ago. Collin do you know Napolein Hill?
Conner: Yeah Yeah Yeah umm
Andrew Warner: I will refresh your memory
Conner: The guy from thinking grow rich?
Andrew Warnder: yeah thinking grow rich was his book but i will refresh everybodys memory on what he did. He went out and studied the most successful people of his day and he just found out what worked for them what they did right and he summed it up in a bunch of books to teach others how to follow in those successful peoples footsteps. I as a kid studied his books. I as an entrepuner was able to build a business based on what I learned from him and now in the second part of my life I am doing somehthing along the same lines i am studing as many internet entrepuners as i can find out what works for them, bring there ideas to every one most importantly to me because i am fascinated by what it takes to build a successfull company. And the guy that i got with me that i kind of introduced you to is named collin plumadid how did do with the pronounceation Collin
Collin: Perfect
Andrew: He is the guy who has got the number one ebook app. The number one paid ebook app in the app store over at apple and it is an important distintiction because people are actually paying to read your app. Whats the app called?
Collin: Free Books, and yeah it just got itunes number one right now.
Andrew: yeah and the idea is that people pay a buck ninty nine and after they pay that they have an ebook reader they can use to read how many books for free
Collin: 23469
Andrew: Wow 23000 and i cant remember 23469 books
Collin: Yeah
Andrew: I got the number right.
Colling: you got it
Andrew: ok and how many copies of this program have you guys sold
Colling: we have sold about 60000 so far and the thing is its been accelerating like crazy because if you are number fifteen or number twenty in the books catagory and you know that sales are different for every catagory but in books if your number 20 your doing maybe a 100 to 150 a day. if your in the top ten then you start getting about 300 a day but as you get into the top 4 all of sudden it starts going like crazy and you get about 500 a day and then when your number one i have seen about 700 to 900 a day. so its actually a pretty big difference depending on which rank you are
Andrew: Wow. So you told me before we started the interview that you have been number one for a week and a half right
Collin: right
Andrew: What did you guys do that shot you to number one?
Collin: Its been building up for a while. The biggest part was cause what we did in the early days was we didnt spend any money on marketing so this has been like absent marketing sort of the same way people do search engine marketing you really have to do absent marketing so you have that title and the title helps determine where you are in the search so when people search for books right now then they will see us at the top. but to begin with that wasnt true we didnt have any sales we didnt have any volume going on. So what happened is that we had no marketing we had nothing going in but we called it “Free Books” so we couldnt rank for books but we put it together Free Books and there is enough people searching that term and because it was the first two we got enough volume that we got into the top 100 books and then it just kind of snowballed and it just built up over time. for accelerating we got at about 20th place thats kind of when it the people your going against if your going from 44 dollars to 47 dollars that can actually get you a bunch of ranks
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Andrew: What do you mean by “44 dollars to 47 dollars”?…
Collin: uh… like position: 44 dollars a day to 47 dollars a day; like even a one sale difference can boost your rank if you’re like 70th place
Andrew: I see. So if you’re in 70th place and you go by your own app even you’re gonna shoot up a little bit
Collin: yea if you have your friends do it if you kind of make it… everyone is buying at the same time. It’s really important to have people buy it at the same time to get the volume in a single day
Andrew: ok…
Collin: but uh…yea…
Andrew: I wanna dig deeper into this but let me get people a sense of where we’re going with the conversation
Collin: sure
Andrew: we’re gonna talk specifically what you guys did right to rank. As anyone who is listening to us right now can tell it wasn’t a happenstance, it wasn’t like “hey we love free books, we’re gonna toss it up there to see what happens”. we’re really gonna get into what Collin did to boost up his business and how each step translated into results dollars and cents. the other thing we’re gonna talk about is: this wasn’t the first business, the first try, the product that Collin and his team created; we’re gonna talk about what he did before this and we gonna make the second section of the conversation… and finally the last section is: you’re living beyond this business you’re living a dream life. You and I could not do this interview I think a couple of weeks ago when I tried to because you were travelling… tell people where you were?
Collin: Well I was living on an island in Panama and you could actually rent most of the island for like 700 to 1500 a month
Andrew: 700 to 1500…?
Collin: dollars a month
Andrew: a month!
Collin: yep
Andrew: Wow that’s just my dining bills in Los Angeles for a week… alright so we’re gonna talk about how you travelled the world, did it at a reasonable price and used travelling the world to be your bootstrapping technique… ok but first let’s dig into all the things you did right here. If I did my math right you earn a 120,000 dollars from free books to iPhone app true?
Collin: that’s net revenue… oh um… that’s gross revenue so…
Andrew: that’s how much you earned before Apple took it…
Collin: Apple gets 30% cut… but that’s the gross revenue over how long… since we launched really really late June, sort of like June 24, so we got something like a 75 chec from Apple that month
Andrew: ok
Collin: and then we got like a 6,000 or 5,000 dollar check the next month. So it grew pretty quick but um… we were doing twenty bucks a day for the first month or so
Andrew: OK… The 80,000 that you net is split between you and one partner?
Collin: Yea Joulles who is my cofounder and he is out in Hungary and me actually built this… I flew there to Budapest so could finally work together in person, because we’ve been working virtually for… it was almost a year that we worked virtually. At one point point I was on an island in Thailand… I was all over place… then it got to the point where… I am getting ahead of myself so…
Andrew: Yeah you know what? let me do this let’s go back to what you said before I Introduced the table of contentsof this interview.
Collin: Yeah!
Andrew: So whta you were saying is that the name was important because people were searching for free books and finding you. But you also told us a moment ago that in the beginning you were only bringing about 20 bucks a day; you didn’t change the name, right? So the name alone isn’t enough to help you score…
Collin: Yea definitely not. I was playing with that description like two three ti becme a day, and the key was that at that point it a bit more Wild West than it is right now because if you put… it would search based on your description. So we did… there was a competitor that was doing the mostly the same thing called Eucaliptus. There were ten dollars, they were like in 50th place… so we didn’t know what the numbers were so we were like ” 50th place and still make it bank”
so… what we did is that… we add this little line towards the end of our description that was just “unlike some competetors… some people have asked us why we’re like a third or a fifth of the price of competitors like Eucaliptus. The answer is we don’t wanna gouge upon the public, we just feel that information to be free yada yada yada.”
What happened was then we would show up and some of us goes and searches for Eucaliptus. They would see Eucaliptus 20,000 books good to go, then Free Books 23,469 classics for $1.99.
Then we also made [Unintelligible 9:20] classice instead of books, because originally it was books. We changed to classics so that we would show up in search results for “classics” Which was being advertised on TV by Apple. So all of the sudden we’re showing up in results for these other applications. then that helped us grow. So it’s kind of a constant [unitelligible 9:42-45] day-to-day basis made to this description. There are so many factors you can’t isolate it to one, but you can make a few changes and then you can just kind of play with one of them, just try to isolate it figure out which one is working, then over time really just try to come out with the perfect description.
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Interviewee: Then throw it on to a new one. So it’s just a constant itteration.
Andrew: And you can iterate the description pretty quickly in the app, but you can’t it itterate on the app itself fast, right?
Interviewee: Oh, it’s an nightmare. Because, you know first off, the first verison we released, it was the first time they were doing an iPhone application. What we didn’t realize, was that, we built it against the newer version against the operative system 3.0. At the time there was 10% of people were running it. What we didn’t really realize, that with 90% people were still on the 2.2, and like even people upgraded the iPod touch users had to pay to upgrade. And that meant that the uptake was absolutely terrible. So that everyone who was doing 2.2 buyer application, pay their money, and then immediately crash. So we had absolutely trash reviews, because there’s absolutely now way of getting around it, that, people would pull it up and read seven pages and then it would crash and they had read seven pages and it would crash. And this as just constant and it took us two updates to get it fixed because we basically had to rewrite the entire application. Um, and this was all done as we’re growing through the ranks, so it was just really a balancing at between we need to be able to maintain sales, we need to be able to make it so we have enough money to keep redeveloping it. But at the same time we have to get this stable for people, while also getting out the features that are needed to grow sales more. So there was definitely a lot to that.
Andrew: Yeah, I see what you mean, I, I’ve actually seen compaints in the app store for that, for, that same probelm with other apps. People will complain that the app requires version 3.1 or version 3.whatever of the software for the iPhone. And now I understand why, people aren’t updating as quickly as they should. And then they get you’re program and they crash it. So you’ve got to wait for the update to really make it’s way through the majority of it’s users, in fact the vast majority of it’s users before you take advantage of it’s latest features for an app like yours.
Interviewee: Yep.
Andrew: Ok so, The name was one thing , the description you told us a little bit about that you were lookign for key words that people were going to be searching for based on what they heard in the Apple commercials based on who the top or who the app who was ahead you was using. What else did you do in the descpriotion, what other changes?
Interviewee: A lot of it was just phrasing in paragraphs. It’s just me personally, but I don’t like feature lists. I feel like they’re boring and it’s a checklist kind of approach. People don’t buy things based on checklists, they buy things based on stories. So I like a lot more to just take people through what it’s like using the application. With like an introduction. It should be more about communitcating and less about listing things. And so, I, we’re one of the only applications that I see that doesn’t have a list of features just beacuse I don’t think it’s going to sell the applciation. If we add something, and it’s a major thing, we’ll just add it to the story, the kind of like the walk through of what it’s like to use the app. And then at the end we also, you know, they’re things you need to mension, yes you know, this does infact this need wireless, no we’re not going to take over the entire things with books. But yeah, I think that the story part of it is important, and it doens’t mean you know, you’re making the next great American novel or something here, but you know, I think checklists are lazy and they’re just not a good way to sell something.
Andrew: See I’m surprised by that, I thought that people were just going to scan the descriptions and then go down and look at the pictures of the app and then decide if they want it. Maybe the last thing that they’d look at is how many stars other people gave it and then they’d go.
Intervieww: Yep
Andrew: Did you do any tests to see if a checklist would do better than a story or vice-versa?
Inervieww: No, never, we haven’t. And we’re going to at somepoint. Usually what happens, is, right now Freebooks is doing the application we have out the door, we’ve also launched it, we’ve also submitted it to the Palm Prix, we so we’re hoping to get it out the door. They’re also doing free audiobooks and that should be submitted in a week or so. But until we have a bit more applications, we don’t want to take too many risks with the things like the description. So when we’re making changes a this point, it’s more because it’s things that are absolutely necssary to increase sales or to maintain sales. There’s a give and take there.
Andrew: Ok, I know that another thing that you guys changed or at least that you thought of was the icon. Can you tell people how important that was?
Interviewee: Yeah, I mean, there’s, with all these different things, there’s no knowing which is the most imoprtant factor because they all play a part. But what we did is, we were origially working, we’d usually work from cafes, early apartment in Budapest. One day, it was the only day we worked from this a university in Budapest. I’m looking around, it’s totally just, if you think of what you would imagine what a communist university built. Its just like that.
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Interviewee: You know right now we have color schemes, we have resizable fonts. All it was, was you pull it up and there is a screen. You press the middle and a scroller comes up at the bottom. It was by far like the most basic E-reader in the market. But what we figured is that people weren’t going to be buying it because of E-reader of the month. They’re going to buy it because it’s 200 bucks and it’s easy. And that turned out to be true, to a large part. Yeah, it was just the absolutely most basic reader we could do. It also had an e-mail to computer action because originally, and well I guess we’ll talk about this later, we we’re going to be doing an application for kindle users, where kindle users could browse through a collection. And then, e-mail to themselves [unintelligible] So what it is, we took the core application and slapped that E-reader application once which was Freebooks. Kindle Link [sp] which was going to be named for Kindle One, it got stuck in a review and we only got an e-mail rejecting it a week ago.
Andrew: Oh wow! How long was it stuck in review?
Interviewee: Six months.
Andrew: Did they tell you why?
Interviewee: Kind of. What happened was… well first off, we were using Amazon’s messaging system which is really just for some individual users to email us some documents. So we’re taking this and we’re making it so that, you know, 10,000 people are emailing themselves Freebooks which isn’t exactly… I mean if you read the terms of service, it’s not disallowed, it’s not specifically allowed either. So Apple was concerned that Amazon will pull the plug because as this wasn’t really an outlined use of service which is totally a legitimate concern. But the problem was that we only got a call with that information four months after we submitted it. So it’s just really…
I think the biggest part with the iPhone review process is that you have to go into it purposely avoiding read flags. So if you are about to put down an update then it will either be easy, whether it’s just say stamp it, it’s you know, like a smiley face or whatever they use and all of the sudden you’re set. You’re life is easy. The alternative is that someone presses like the “It’s Complicated” button and it goes off to like a more thorough review site. And that then if that then becomes the… the complicated guy says it’s even more complicated. That’s when you’re [xx] because that’s when you’re going into this [xx] lot of other people and you start cycling into the review process and that’s where you can be lost indefinitely.
Andrew: I see. It’s hard to tell what’s going to raise a red flag. I talked to one app maker who I shouldn’t say his name but he released a couple of apps. They both have a word stalker in it in the description. One was allowed through, the other got stuck specifically because of the word stalker.
Interviewee: Right.
Andrew: So I think there’s an app called stalker.
Interviewee: Yeah. What do you do? So, in that case man I would run in the side of caution. I wouldn’t use stalker at all in any of the applications. And it seems like most… I mean everyone wants to get everything they can through. Everyone wants to be able to have like a bit of edge on the other folks but it’s not worth having your application laid three months. So you have to balance risk.
Andrew: So if you’re going to get an edge in the Apple store, what you’re telling me is, you’re better off having an edge by coming up with a better icon than coming up with a better feature set. That’s the way Apple set it up because if you try to add an extra feature that allowed people to connect your reader – Freebooks to the Kindle or allow it to connect to anything other than, you know, leave with it’s own environment. You could have gone into trouble, but changing the icon, changing the text, that’s fine.
Interviewee: Yeah. And you know it is what it is.
Andrew: Yeah.
Interviewee: And there’s a lot of Apple apps that’s similar. Apple, the way that [xx] and it’s really [xx] but if you look at the other people, they’re running it even worse.
Andrew: Yes.
Interviewee: So there’s [xx] competence with the incompetence. And people can [xx] about it and maybe that’s productive but I would rather cut on updates to make money. So, I think that we are looking at… if there’s a 10 percent chance that something you’re adding [unintelligible] is going to lead your application going into an update cue for three months, skip it, ship the rest of it and then ship it in its own update.
Andrew: I see. Okay. Alright, let’s go back to marketing. I’m so fascinated by what it takes to get people to download programs. You hinted that maybe you are sending your friends out all at once to download your apps so that it would rise up in the ranking.
Interviewee: Right. In a really limited capacity. The more important part was asking friends to review it. You know, that’s not asking, I mean it’s not necessarily go leave a five star for us. They’re going to review the app, check it out, say what they want. But from travelling I knew people from a bunch of different countries.
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Interviewee: So we were able to get reviews in a lot of different countries, and what I’ve noticed is that if, so if we were in Australia, and we have like maybe three sales a day, three sales a day, maybe five sales a day, but it’s really small. I get an Australian friend of mine to go and leave a quick review, and all of a sudden it jumps up to like forty sales a day. So as soon as there’s a single review on it, all of a sudden people are like “OK, so someone has actually downloaded it, so I’m safe”. So you have to have that minimum of one review or you don’t exist, so it’s really, really crucial.
Andrew: Interesting, OK. You know what, it’s true. If I don’t see a review I’m going to wait until someone else goes an downloads the app and then review it and then I’ll decide if it’s worth my time.
Interviewee: Exactly. Its also really cool, there’s something called, a developer thing called “Appirator”, which is just a little piece of code that you add to your application where it actually checks out when someone has used the application for ten days, and is on their tenth session with the application. So basically, once someone’s using it regularly, then you have the option of asking them to review it. So we did, we knew from our, kind of our basic metrics that the fall out is really high in the first day. So, like, people pull out the first day and then only twenty percent of people pull out the second day. And a lot of that issue was like we were crashing a lot of folks. But even despite this, even with the older versions, we would still have, after like thirty days, we would have like three hundred users still using it regularly. But the time per session went from two minutes in the first day to forty-five minutes. All of a sudden we have the really, really hard core using it on oil-rigs and people who are using it on, like, mission trips to Africa, and like crazy stuff. And so when we put out our software and the new update, we were waiting and we were waiting and we were waiting for the reviews to come in. Then day ten hits, and all of a sudden, we get twenty-five or so reviews. And this is also when we started to get into first place, because we were two and a half stars. When we crossed to three stars, it’s no longer that you’re below average, at the very least you’re average, so it’s worth taking a look. And that’s when sales went through the roof.
Andrew: I see. I’ve actually seen only one other app do that to me. When you log in, you get a pop-up that says “Would you like to review?” and you can click OK, and then you’re taken right into the app store, right to the place where you’re supposed to review. I wonder why other app makers don’t use it. Do you think that they don’t know that it exists?
Interviewee: I think that they don’t know that it exists, because I think that it’s that they don’t know you can send someone a link directly too it. Because when you press that button, it literally takes you, you know, you get a little keyboard, you jot something down and you’re good to go. I think people don’t realise how easy they can make it.
Andrew: I see, and so if anyone wants to do it, what do they need to do to make this happen?
Interviewee: You go to Appirator (A-P-P-I-R-A-T-O-R) – just Google it – and the other reason that people aren’t doing it is because if you spell it out it looks like App Pirater, so they couldn’t have picked a worse name.
Andrew: That’s awesome! OK, one other thing about marketing, what else did you do to market?
Interviewee: Let’s see, about three weeks ago we, there’s a company called Appency, that does, they basically do focus groups for iPhone Apps, where basically plenty of people buy it and they’ll leave reviews. And it definitely does that, we definitely got some threes and twos from them. But if your application is actually good, then you can get some review volume coming in. And that’s $350 for 50 reviews. So you’re guaranteed that they’ll download it, you’re guaranteed that they’ll leave a review. The actual contents of the review would definitely differ from person to person. So a lot of people will pull it up and they’ll go, they’ll just go, like, this application has had trialing and it sucks. Like every single time. And I’ll get emails like that every other day, and I’m like, for Lord of the Rings, you know – you guys don’t have Lord of the Rings. So, it really depends, but, we definitely got some reviews from them. We haven’t got the full fifty yet. So I wouldn’t vouch for them quite yet, but it’s something worth looking into. I’ll definitely write them a blog post about it when I’m done.
Andrew: It’s $350, and what’s the name of the company?
Interviewee: Appency, it’s like kind of, App marketing agency.
Andrew: I see, Appency. And the way it works is they make sure that the people who they’re working with will download your app. How do they know that they’ve downloaded your app properly? They look?
Interviewee: What happens is there’s something, you can also use this as another good thing for developers because app store, like appsto.re, and what that is it gives you a little link where they measure each time it clicks, and then Apple then gives them an Affiliate fee, you know, like five percent or something, that’s how they make their money. But then they tell you what your conversion rate is, based on that link. You can attach a kind of little, like, say this is a click from the home page or click from a marketing campaign, so you can get some metrics from that. SO they use the same thing to make sure that people are downloading it. But again, I don’t think we’ve gotten the full amount of reviews from them yet.
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Interviewee: But again, I don’t think we’ve gotten the full amount of reviews from them yet, so we’re definitely, um…I’m not sure how they are. And we haven’t gotten the actual focus requirement back yet.
Andrew: Okay, so the benefit is, you’re hopefully, and we’ll know for sure after you’ve gone through the process, getting people to actually download your app, actually write a review, not necessarily a positive, er…not necessarily a positive review, but at least you’re getting a review, which helps you stand out in the store and gets you feedback, hopefully, in the end.
Interviewee: Yeah, yeah, exactly, and if you have five reviews, you’re going to do [that many] more sales than somebody who has one review. Well I mean if they’re all one stars then you’re screwed either way, but you know, if you actually have some good reviews on there, you’re going to be getting some sales, because they’ll affect your conversion rate so much.
Andrew: Alright, these are awesome, do you have one more, one more thing that could help increase sales?
Interviewee: Screen shots. You know, just make it so you that can get a good idea of the entire application from the screen shots. Like some people will have screen shots where you have…I don’t even know, it’ll be the picture of the splash screen. You know, it’s like, no one wants to see your splash screen, like you know, show what the application’s like. And then the title, if your title is not, like, self-descriptive enough, if your title, if you’re trying to build a brand through your title, you should have the money to market a brand. If you’re trying to build a product, then you need to describe the product. And I feel like people don’t make the decision for themselves, if they’re going to be building a product or if they’re going to be building a brand, because those are two very, very different things. So if you have a start-up that’s building a brand, you know, a start-up…
Andrew: An example is Gowalla. Gowalla, right? You wouldn’t understand what it was on its own, but what they’re trying to do is build up a brand, and they have the money and the backing and the time to build it up, but if they didn’t have all that, they would’ve wanted to call themselves, maybe, Location-Based Games or Location-Based Hunt or something.
Interviewee: Another good example of that is, they used to be called Gyminee, they…Daily Burn, Daily Burns, they changed their name, they have their main application called Daily Burn, they have a second application called Food Scanner, You don’t need to know their brand to know what Food Scanner’s gonna do, totally self-descriptive, so people go get it, they they’re getting introduced to the brand. So I think it’s good to differentiate between a product and a brand.
Andrew: I see. Okay, alright, and you gave us numbers earlier that I want to go over, just to make sure that the transcribers who transcribe all of my interviews are getting it right. You said that, right now, because you’re number one in that section of the store, the paid book section of the app store, you’re seeing 700 to 900 downloads a day, can you run through what you were saying before?
Interviewee: Oh sorry, that’s dollars, dollars–
Andrew: –700 to 900 dollars a day, that means half of that…
Interviewee: …that revenue, I almost don’t pay attention to—I don’t even pay attention to gross revenue numbers, because that doesn’t matter to me, basically if you’re on there after apps are gonna take their cuts, so it’s not a very useful number.
Andrew: So when we say 700 to 900 dollars, that means seven to nine hundred dollars to you.
Interviewee: Right, yeah.
Andrew: Gotcha. And before that…
Interviewee: Right, about 500 sales or so?
Andrew: Okay.
Interviewee: Yeah, it’s about $1.40 per sale. And if you are…on the weekends you have way way higher sales. Like about 30% higher on Saturdays and Sundays than the rest of the week. We’ve found that to be true really really consistently, at least over the last month or so. To two months. You have to have enough volume, though, that it’s noticeable, not just…you have to get above the point where your sales are moving around so much day to day that you can’t tell the difference. But once you’re actually doing about $300, then you can actually start to [unintelligible]. Before that, you know, it just depends on the day.
Andrew: Once you’re doing $300, you can do what? I’m sorry.
Interviewee: You can actually start to see some trends with your sales. Before that, it looks random, you kind of have a range where it’s going up and down between. Once you get to about 300 it starts to be a bit more stable.
Andrew: Okay, um—
Interviewee: Just kind of mentioning it, this is all based under the books category. It will be completely different depending on where you are, but the top 100 is a total crapshoot. The people that are in the top 100, for the most part, are spending a lot of money on marketing. They’re either being featured by Apple, or they are being pushed by an existing brand, or they are doing absolutely phenomenally, I mean Red Laser for example. Their application’s awesome, it looks amazing, and they have great techn—it’s basically everything you could possibly do right in one package, and so they are—they’re a top 100 application, naturally. The whole remaining set of applications, they’re paying like $3,000 to $5,000 a day in marketing. They’re buying volume, basically. Because the halo effecting makes so it’s profitable for them, but there’s been enough stories in Business Week about people getting rich that I think there’s too many people looking for the hundred thousand dollars a month, when the $15,000 a month to even the $8,000 a month is a much more attainable starting point.
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Interviewee: when the $15,000 a month to our even $8000 a month is a much more attainable starting point. Oh, and then also categories. The most, like you…it’s really hard to get into the top 100 overall but individual categories are very, very attainable to get into the top ten. Or even the top 25. Because if you look at the iPhone screen, if you are looking at the apps store…you have…it’s like a list of 25. You scroll down to the bottom and then at the bottom you can do like “show me 25 more”. Okay. So if you’re beyond 25 you don’t exist for 90% of the people. You know, by the same token, the volumes are low enough that’s it’s much easier to move up after the top 25. But once you’re in that top area, you need to be in the top four because that’s where the visibility is. Because it’s just based on the size of the iPhone screen which is completely random. That’s what dictates everything. The fifth application is obscured for the most part. You can only see half of it if you look at your screen. The top four you can see the entire application. You can see the entire icon, you can see all the information. So sales will go up significantly from fifth to fourth place.
Andrew: I see. And how much more sales do you have to have in order to get from fifth to fourth in your category? Do you know?
Interviewee: Yeah, yeah. In books? I usually pay attention to the net. It’s I’d say about 50 to 100.
Andrew: Fifty to 100 daily sales?
Interviewee: Dollars.
Andrew: Dollars. Okay. Why didn’t you create a second version of your app, almost exactly the same as the current one and offer it for free plus advertising with a different name? Or did you try that?
Interviewee: Awesome question. The reason is is because if you look in the books category, in the apps store in general, if you are in the paid section you’re non-competitive with Kindle and Stanza and everything in free. Because if they’re free you have to tap a tab over. Well, okay that’s enough work that you’re not competitive with them. So if we put out a free application we would be competitive with those guys. I’d rather focus on the paid side and not worry about all of the free apps. So I’m sure –
Andrew: …guys aren’t competing in the free apps – in the paid app section now?
Interviewee: Exactly. So you know, we can get to $20,000 a month on the paid side but if you’re looking at the free side then you’re going up against Amazon. There’s a lot of value in going up against Amazon if that’s what your focus is. But our focus is on making money and not just driving like eyeballs. So I don’t see the value in that. And also I think it would dilute the…I think that we can get away with having like, it’s free books but you’re basically paying for the reader, paying for the interface. If we have a free version, I don’t think we would have the uptake because the value is in browsing. And downloading. Most people aren’t’ going to download like ten books. They’re just going to download a couple. So any way that you’re going to limit it is going to detract enough from the value that’s really not worth it. So that have enough limitations, that it’s worth upgrading. The app’s going to be useless. So I think it’s really that…we’re purposefully choosing not to play in that area. Once we get audio books out, once we get the Palm Pre-version out, we’re going to start experimenting a bit more free books to see if can increase revenue. We’re going to do some Twitter-Facebook integration stuff.
Andrew: Why is Palm Pre next platform that you’re going for? What Palm and not Android?
Interviewee: Android, it doesn’t make money. If you’re looking at…and we were guessing at the time, but if you’re looking at Android users, for the most part the early adopters are open source guys. You know, it’s like the graveyard of sales is targeting Linux. People don’t buy stuff so the early adopters were open source guys. So even if you spend time and interface stuff it’s not going to make a difference. Whereas with Palm, even though it has a very tiny minuscule market share, it focuses on small business users. It focuses on the audience that’s much more like the iPhones and much more likely to actually buy stuff. And it turned out that…you know, the statistics about it only came out about three to four weeks ago. But it turns out that the top pre-paid applications are making like 5,000 a month. Which is respectable compared to Android where it’s more like 500 to 1,000.
Andrew: All right. We’ve got a question that came in a lot earlier from Chris Dritt that I think it’s time to ask. He was asking where are you getting all these free books that people are downloading?
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Interviewee: Sure. There’s a lot of different sources online. Project Guttenberg’s a primary one. But then…
Andrew: Project Guttenberg, yeah. That’s been around forever. I love them.
Interviewee: Yeah. They’re great. And there’s some that do like founding father articles in books and… There’s a lot of people out there that are really, really passionate about converting public domain content and making it available digitally. So in general – I think this is actually true for a lot of content. Is that one of the big changes in the last ten years is there’s lots and lots of free content. Because I mean, even if you’re just looking at Twitter, I mean that’s free content. That’s why Tweety’s making money.
Andrew: And what are you doing with the book before you allow people to download it? Are you pulling it into your servers? Are you repackaging it in any way?
Interviewee: Oh yeah, we host it on our servers because we don’t want to be dependent on anyone else’s servers. So it’s a minimal cost. You’re looking at Amazon AWS, you’re paying 15 cents a gig. You know, books…a huge book, like the CIA World Fact book, enormous like volume kind of deal, it’s like 2 megs. So if you’re paying 15 cents a gigabyte and people are paying $1.99 for your application you don’t even need to think about it. The same’s true for pretty much everything but music. And pictures.
Andrew: That…because they’re so big they…because they’re such big files it’s expensive to host and serve.
Interviewee: Right. Yeah. Exactly. And you know the same… Twitter. I mean, that is text content and there are images you can associate with it but it’s mostly hosted on Twitter servers. If you’re looking at Yelp, that’s text content. There’s a lot of free text content out there that you can manipulate in interesting ways, make an awesome interface around it. Make it interesting or new in some way and then make money off of that. So I think there’s a lot of value in searching out free content and figuring out ways to make money off of it.
Andrew: All right. And your second app is going to be base on free audio books that are already online, right?
Interviewee: Right. There’s a site called Liberty Vox which does that. And it’s basically just volunteers reading out audio books in their free time and putting them into the public domain. So in the beginning of every single audio book it then kind of talks about you know, “This is a Liberty Vox recording…” and that kind of stuff. But still I’m…it’s free public domain content and you can do whatever you want with it.
Andrew: Okay. All right. Let’s go back then. I think we’ve got a good sense of how you marketed your app, how it’s doing well, how much money it’s making. Let’s go back to how you got here. Why is your company called…what’s the company name?
Interviewee: Spread Song. It’s because we were going to do a music start up. What could possibly go wrong? And the basic idea was we were going to make music free and free music profitable. And if you’re looking around at all the different music companies out there the thing that they have in common, for the most part, is that they focus on…they see trying to like go out to the music industry and trying to kind of wrench away some like really limited rights and then pay crazy licensing fees. So we were looking at just more focusing on creative commons music, music that’s freely available. Music from like kind of…you have bands on MySpace that are putting out their music for free that. People are downloading. And that’s a lot to that and there’s a lot to being able to download content and have it on your iPod Shuffle or what have you. The problem was that we didn’t have the funding or the manpower or the background or you know, [INAUDIBLE]. It wasn’t the right idea at the right time. I still think it’s a really cool idea but it didn’t make sense. And…
Andrew: Why would you need funding for that?
Andrew: I see.
Interviewee: Yeah. And basically success is lots of people listening to music.
Andrew: And lots of people listening to music is expensive to serve up?
Interviewee: Right. So success is expensive. And so when we’re talking about what we’re going to build, what kind of products we want to do, right now we’re just basically doing things that we think are buildable in like two to three months. Things that are going to be profitable. Things that you can’t lose money on. Now you can lose money on the development costs. You can’t lose money on the idea itself. So you know, that’s not the approach everyone takes. There’s a lot a lot of start ups out there that have companies where success will kill them. So if success is going to kill you that means you need funding and if you don’t get funding you get killed. What I’d rather do is build up to a million a year in revenue and then based on that, then maybe start going after some more expensive opportunities. But I look at it more…if…if you could really think about this stuff, if you’re’ starting a company and you’re in like your twenties, you’re going to be working for the next like 50, 60 years. I mean, it’s not like you’re going to be, “Oh cool! I had one success. I’m retired now. I’m going to go to Fiji.” You’re going to keep on working. Now I mean, a lot of people and what they’ll do is that they’ll start companies and then they’ll…you do a great job. You sell it, now you’re rich.
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Interviewee: Then you go start a new company, hire people all over again; you start the whole cycle back. I like the virgin model which is that, he starts one company and then when great opportunities come up you can invest in that, you can invest in new opportunity, you can invest in new market.
Andrew: The money from the successful first business.
Interviewee: Yeah, exactly!
Andrew: Ok, so you launched Spreadsong, and it was you and was it 3 guys’ total? You and two partners…
Interviewee: Yeah, yeah Jolt my co-founder and then also another guy that we brought on that we met him on hacker news originally,
Andrew: Get out! You met him on hacker news!
Interviewee: Yeah!
Andrew: Ok!
Interviewee: I was sending these original emails like, hey you know we were may be thinking about doing something that you might be interested in, may be we should join up. I actually sent that email from [co tal Thailand] Kind of a little internet café on the island and at first it was really really great and after a bit it just became clear that there wasn’t really… I think you must have a much much better fit for obviously you know you are hiring people, founding a company before the revenue, then even when you are hiring like employees or contractors, I mean you just need to have an amazing fit and we really didn’t have an amazing fit, so between that and kind of like mis-prioritizing things across the board I was really like my first time I was trying to kind of really manage what’s the next priority, like what’s the next thing. So there was lots and lots of mistakes in kind of the early days and so it just didn’t work so then what happened was he decided that he’s going to leave and then from there and then an email sending he’s going to leave and you guys are welcome to use the Co that I wrote except that of course I’ll be using it also. I read that I’m freaking out because it’s like we were all kind of co founders, and company haven’t been founded yet but everyone is investing in it a degree too, you know a guy another entrepreneur I met got introduced to I’m a partner at a law firm, talk it thorough get incorporated and eventually clear back with him so that we don’t have any worries about it, but the problem wasn’t that it didn’t work, the problem wasn’t that it didn’t fit well, the problem wasn’t even that screwing up prioritization, screwing up the management of the project, the problem was that we didn’t have a structure for success and we didn’t have a structure for failure.
Andrew: You did not have a structure for failure, you are saying.
Interviewee: We didn’t have a structure for success or failure, if we succeeded, then if there is no written contract between people then you are still in trouble because someone will say I should get more, you fail and you are in more trouble, so even just like a quick really sketch written contract outlining the investing would have been amazing.
Andrew: But you did at least invest in, at least you didn’t all have share in the business on day one and if he left he wouldn’t have been able to take your shares and go home, he had to stay with you for a while before he earned his share of the business.
Interviewee: [inaudible], well one year [clash?] with which you know, if you are investing over four years then may be you getting 30% of the company so then you are getting a quarter of that every year, but to get any shares at all you had to stay around for one year and if you leave before that one years up then you get no shares at all. So that especially when you are at that early stage its definitely going to be a year before you get any success at all, so having it just reduces risk for everyone involved. If someone wants to leave, lets them leave without throwing everything out of whack and be afraid of leaving, if it succeeds then everyone know that everyone’s in it, so there is no reason really not to do it.
Andrew: From what I understand, U had this whole agreement over instant message right? Instant messenger. Is it not enough to have written on instant messenger?
Interviewee: When we went back to the actual phrasing of it, it was just vague enough that it wouldn’t have, it probably wouldn’t have been possibly enforceable.
Andrew: I see.
Interviewee: In just the vagueness of it, because we were just talking on IM and you are not going to be as specific as when you are writing, even just like a really quick draft on ether pad or whatever, you’ll be a lot more specific so there would have been an 80% chance that it was enforceable but at that point you are like Oh, we are going to get funding and you know that whole thing… and that you can’t really have an IP caught even for that 20%, so it just wasn’t acceptable.
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Interviewee: So it just wasn’t an acceptable risk.
Andrew: So then how did you break up if you didn’t have the paper agreement?
Interviewee: What was that?
Andrew: So, what happened? How did you guys separate if you didn’t have a contract?
Intervieww: That was by email. Because he said I’m in my vesting and stuff now but I’m going to like, use the code. And that’s –
Andrew: So he accepted the vesting. He accepted that he did invest, he just said, I’m going to take my code and I’m going to be able to use it.
Interviewee: Right, and we could have been more specific about that. That was definitely the intention but it wasn’t spelled out specifically enough.
Andrew: Did he end up doing that?
Interviewee: What was that?
Andrew: Did he end up doing that, or did he not?
Interviewee: No, well we worked it out later.
Andrew: How did you work it out, what kind of agreement?
Interviewee: Well we worked it out, but it ate up about a month and a half where that was what I was thinking about-
Andrew: At a time where you can’t.
Interviewee: So the opportunity cost was massive.
Andrew: Okay, let’s move on from there. So we heard about the music business that you wanted to start, and why your company is called SpreadSong, we heard about the deal with the partnership and how you recovered from it,. You then launched some other apps, right or some other products. What were the other products?
Interviewee: Well basically once, in April of last year we decided that [inaudible] we’d better start working together because we knew we would be able to work a lot faster together, even if it was a bit more expensive, it would make a lot more sense. So I flew over, and the first time we go on a pub crawl through Budapest, and good times. And in the second – around like two p.m.- we were finally talking it through and were looking at it and there’s just kind of this realization that the numbers aren’t going to work. You know it’s kind of, you’re looking at the burn rate, you’re looking at it and it’s kind of like it doesn’t matter how you massage the numbers, it’s not going to work. So at that point, okay so what can we do? And it was mostly it’s either web apps, facebook apps or iphone apps. iPhone apps are probably easily the most monetizable. So the first thing that we did was that we pitched a bunch of ideas, one of them was like a blog book that we basically take blogs and it’s basically an RSS reader but you reverse the order of it presented as a book and [inaudible] a book.
Andrew: A paper book or an electronic book?
Interviewee: Electronic book, like on an iPhone.
Andrew: You know what, I’ve got to say, I wish somebody would do that, there are a few blogs out there that I just want to read back to back to back, and I can’t do it by clicking here, clicking there, I want to be able to scroll through kind of like I do a book on my iPhone.
Interviewee: Yeah, exactly.
Andrew: So why didn’t you guys pursue that?
Interviewee: We started- basically that was what we did when we started doing the really basic iPhone SDK stuff where okay we have a table going, we can scroll, awesome. That was the idea but then you actually go into Ikea to get an office desk talking it through and it was like, it doesn’t matter how well we do it, it’s not going to be able to make money fast enough because there’s no existing audience for it. So that means it’s going to take three or four months to build our audience for it. And we don’t have time for that. So instead what can we do with the same general idea, which is we need to get a good free content and build a reader somehow. And then it was just like, I have a Kindle, I absolutely love the thing. And this was before Amazon started offering so many free books on it, but we decided we would do Kindling, which would just be you can basically browse your [inaudible]and then you tap one of them, you do send to Kindle, you can choose whether you want it sent wirelessly for ten cents, and that’s what Amazon charges, not us.
Andrew: And you were going to send it wirelessly to the Kindle device, or to the the Kindle app on the iPhone or both?
Interviewee: The kindle application- the Kindle device itself. So Amazon gives every single Kindle user an email address, so I [inaudible] you know it’s like call in at Kindle.com or whatever, and then it’s automatically wirelessly delivered to my Kindle-
Andrew: So the person who bought from you this app, the Kindling app, would have had to own an iPhone and the Kindle reader.
Interviewee: Right, Well actually I don’t think that’s that unreasonable, because if someone has already dropped 200 bucks and 100 a month for an iPhone 3GS or an iPhone 3G, they’re definitely in the demographic for a Kindle.
Andrew: Still, it’s a much more limited audience than one that’s just iPhone.
Interviewee: Yeah, and that’s why we were going to charge like five bucks, because we figured if someone has a Kindle they probably have more money to spend. The problem is the limited audience. And that’s why we built Kindling, it worked, we shipped it- it worked on the platforms we tested it on- and then we started doing free books. And when we were first talking about doing it it wasn’t really clear if it would make sense to do. Because we’re looking around, you have classics, which it’s been featured on an Apple on like a nationwide television campaign, you have Eucalyptus which is an incredibly polished ten dollar book reading application, you have a slough of book collections. So it wasn’t- oops did we just lose-
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Colin Plamondon: So it wasn’t…oops! Did we just lose…?
Andrew Warner: Okay, good. I hope we didn’t lose my video. I think we’re okay.
Colin Plamondon: I can see your video now. Are we good?
Andrew Warner: Good.
Colin Plamondon: Okay. So, we were looking at the market for FreeBooks. And it wasn’t clear if it would actually be big enough relative to the competition. Because we’re looking at Stanza, we’re looking at Amazon.
We’re looking at–and at the time they were two separate applications. And we’re looking at all of the paid competition. And it’s not really clear if there would be a decent market for the whole thing.
So what we did was we just did some back-of-napkin math. And it was just…we pulled up the Kindle application and looked at the amount of reviews that it had. Like, all-time reviews.
Then we went up to Classics. And they’d published some sales figures on their website. So we go and figure out what their ratio of reviews to downloads was at that point in time.
And then we go and figure that out for a bunch of different applications. And what we figured was that there have been somewhere between two and five million downloads of the Kindle application for iPhone. Now, that’s backed by Amazon. But that means that a lot of people–at least one in eight–are interested in e-readers on the iPhone.
Based on that, even if we’re just getting a little bit–and it’s definitely a one percent kind of thing. One percent of five million.
But, I think that’s valuable just to know that there are people that are willing to spend money on something. And if they’re willing to spend money on someone else’s something, they might be willing to spend money on your something.
And especially because of the $1.99 pricing, as much as people that complained about, you know, how you can’t really do a quality application with it, the truth of the matter is that people–
It’s not zero sum. If I buy the productivity program–which is amazing and everyone should get it–Things, by Cultured Code I’m not going to go and buy another productivity manager.
I’m not gonna try multiple ones. Because it’s, like, 30 bucks.
So I’m gonna demo it. I’m gonna try it for a month. And then I’m gonna buy it. I’m not gonna go and then have two of them running side by side and just kind of experiment with both of them.
With the iPhone, you’re paying $1.99. So people will sample multiple applications. So if you look at our competition, you’ll go and you’ll see “People who bought this application also bought FreeBooks.”
If you look at FreeBooks, you’ll see, “People who bought FreeBooks also bought,” you know, “competition here.”
So, there’s less competition in that way. You have to compete for volume. But you’re competing for volume on a certain day. You’re not competing for the market as much. It’s not like you have a percentage of the market.
Andrew Warner: I see.
Colin Plamondon: It’s just that–who gets as much volume and who gets as much rank.
Andrew Warner: Okay. All right. Let’s move on to the third section of the interview.
Colin Plamondon: Yeah.
Andrew Warner: Will Lamb is asking you, he’s saying, “Out of curiosity, Colin, did you read ‘The Four Hour Workweek’ by Tim Ferris?” [PHONETIC]
Colin Plamondon: Yeah. It’s awesome. I love it.
Andrew Warner: So, you’ve traveled. Is that based on what you’ve read in that book?
Colin Plamondon: No. it was more at the time before–I was originally planning on traveling around Europe because–
I was living in San Francisco. And I was working for a company called Ingenio [PHONETIC] that–later got sold to AT&T.
But the basic business was, basically they had psychics and phone sex operators on the telephone. And then they would sell–
They had a whole system where people would be connected. And they didn’t know each other’s numbers, which was obviously a plus. And then charge automatically.
And I was doing customer service for those guys. And it was an awesome company and–really great, smart people. It was run by an ex-Amazoner, Zack.
But it was definitely–I’d always tended to the business side. Like, kind of starting a company. At the time I just needed money. So I got–and I had a salary, I had benefits, all that kind of stuff.
But answering customer service calls from psychics who are wondering if– They are getting less calls, so it must be because Mercury’s in retrograde. It’s just weird stuff.
And so I saved a bunch of money from that job and booked a ticket originally to Europe. And I was just gonna travel around. And during nights while I was working there I was trying to learn some basic web development stuff.
And I figured that I knew enough that I could probably make my way to Eastern Europe. And just kind of travel around a bit.
And then even just on Elance. Really cheap jobs. Make enough and improve my skills over time that it’d be like–you know, it’ll work. And I was talking to a friend of mine. He was like, “dude you should go to Argentina instead. It’s warm there.”
Because at the time it was summer in Argentina. It was like, that’s a really good point. So I canceled the ticket to Europe and booked it to Argentina. And then later one, someone pointed out that, “Oh, it’s the same thing in ‘Four Hour Workweek.'”
“Oh, you’re right!” You know.
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Interviewee: Do the ideas from it definitely influence the way I was looking at [inaudible 1:00:04.4]? The main part of it is just simply that, you know, you book a ticket. It’s not rocket science, even if you have a house, even if you have a mortgage, you know, here’s some things that you can do that can make it make sense. The bigger part is that you just look at it, and here’s a step-by-step guide how you can do something that most people wouldn’t consider. Yeah?
Andrew: Let’s dig in a little bit more here. I see that we’ve already exceeded the time that we allocated for the interview…
Interviewee: Oh.
Andrew: … but I’m dying of curiosity here partially because I’m traveling, partially because I’m seeing that others, now that I’m out here in Buenos Aires, I see other people breeze in and out of the city while they’re working on their laptops…
Interviewee: Yeah.
Andrew: … and they’re here one day, a couple of weeks later they’re in a whole other country and they’re continuing to work, and it’s like nothing changed. So how many countries have you been to or how may different cities have you been to? Want to name out…want to…
Interviewee: Yeah, definitely. Oh, Argentina and Buenos Aires, and I went to Mendoza, I went to Montevideo [SP], then back to San Francisco and we actually interviewed with [inaudible 1:01:05.9] there which is a long story in and of itself, and then went to Kowtow [SP] Thailand, and then from there New York for a little bit, and then Budapest. So it’s kind of all over the place.
Andrew: And you were working the whole…and then of course there was the island that you told us about.
Interviewee: Right, and I usually stay somewhere at least three months.
Andrew: And you were working from all these different cities, right?
Interviewee: Yeah. I don’t like…well, I only visited Montevideo and Mendoza. But I like getting an apartment somewhere, I like being somewhere for a while. I don’t like…I forget, is the phrase binge travel for firework week?
Andrew: No.
Interviewee: Or is that something else?
Andrew: Maybe, I never heard it before.
Interviewee: I love though. I’d rather actually be somewhere for a decent amount of time instead of having that kind of like, “Oh, yeah. I’m going to see this kind of like generic architectural wonder of the world tomorrow at 3:00 p.m., and then I’m going to get in my train at 6:00 p.m.” It’s just not that interesting. So I’d rather, you know, it’ll take longer to see the world but it’s a lot more interesting.
Andrew: And you figured you could get jobs on Elance, and then you decided that you were going to become an entrepreneur?
Interviewee: Yeah, yeah and I wound up in Argentina and then I met another guy who was also trying to do the same thing basically. It’s like, oh, we used to work together, and then that led to, you know, trying to do like an apartment hunting startup based on having trouble finding one in Argentina which led to needing money which led to me working with [unintelligible 1:02:33.8 sounds like Joe] on like a side project for…what was it originally…it was just kind of one day CMS, take like a [inaudible 1:02:42.1] Management System, and then you turn a normal web site into something that’s editable in a day, and we got like a bunch. Everybody knows about it. But one of the ones was like someone asking us if we’d be interested in a $50,000 contract instead.
Andrew: Oh, okay.
Interviewee: I guess we needed like a legal structure, I guess we needed higher up, and we decided to turn them down because they were just going to…it was going to move too fast because we wouldn’t have given it the milestones staffing up starting company that quickly. But there is people willing to pay us money for the things that we build based on the emails that we send, based on the way that we come across, and that means that there’s clearly something that we can work on together here. At the same time, the apartment hunting started up. It was like, “Okay, this isn’t really going to work because we’re going”…it kept on expanding until we were competing with [inaudible 1:03:31.9]. See, someone’s going to do that eventually, but that’s not what you should be doing when you need to bring money in. So what it was, it was just kind of two years of just running around the world kind of staying one step ahead of the bank account, and…
Andrew: How expensive is it?
Interviewee: Yeah.
Andrew: People keep saying…I’ve done several interviews here with people who consider themselves digital nomads, and they say that it’s cheap to travel, and it’s cheap to live in some of these countries, and you can still stay wired. So the first question I’ve got along those lines is is it as cheap as they say?
Interviewee: Yeah. I should expand on that, $1,500 a month and you’re set in most places.
Andrew: Including food, and rent, and everything else that you need?
Interviewee: Yeah. Argentina definitely, Thailand absolutely. I mean you definitely have to pick and choose your country. You shouldn’t be living in New York, you shouldn’t be living in San Francisco, you know, Moscow, London, you know, probably not.
Andrew: I got to say, I’m in Buenos Aires by the way. I think my rent is…I think that’s about my rent. I think it depends on how you live. We ended up with…
Interviewee: Earnest vacation kind of home, right?
Andrew: Yeah, we have…yeah, exactly.
Interviewee: Right, and that’s like it’s more if you are looking at ones that are marketed toward people who live in the country then you can cut that to a third.
Andrew: But then don’t you have to be a citizen in those countries to get those apartments?
Interviewee: Well, in Argentina everything is
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Interviewee: There’s no legal agreements for pretty much anything.
Andrew: I see, and then you end up with an unfurnished place. So what do you do?
Interviewee: I got it furnished when I was in Argentina, and it was like $500 a month which all of my friends from like staying at a hostel, that was crazy expensive. There’s awesome, it’s like [inaudible 1:05:17.4] and amazing view, Florida ceiling windows. It was really, really nice.
Andrew: And also what year were you here?
Interviewee: It was two years ago.
Andrew: So things were a little cheaper then. But I got to say still extremely cheap over here. What I read in the four-hour work week holds up.
Interviewee: Yep.
Andrew: It’s cheap here, there’s great food here. On the way in to work, I have a new experience. You know, yesterday I figured out the subway stations here. Today, I thought I was the master of walking through the system.
Interviewee: Yeah, yeah.
Andrew: You know, and you go out at night and you end up at a new restaurant with food that you never tasted before. You get the check, you look down, it’s like $7.00. What is this?
Interviewee: Yeah.
Andrew: But here’s the thing, I also have an extremely good Internet here because I pay…I think I pay $1,000 for this office. I shouldn’t say it out loud, I don’t know what anyone else pays because I wanted the dependable Internet so that I could connect to you. When you’re traveling can you count on having such a good Internet connection? No.
Interviewee: Yeah. So in Panama, we were staying on island that’s actually called Coco Vivo, Coco, so does Google, Coco Vivo, C-O-C-O V-I-V-O, Coco Vivo and, you know, it’s like you would have lunch down by this house by the water. You go snorkeling, you know, and there’d be fish everywhere because there’s a reef right next to the dock. But, you know, Internet, you’re maybe doing like 80k, 100k down, kb in total and you’re dividing that between three people, and it works. I mean, you know, you can pull up web sites. You can kind of like update pages. You don’t need to work remotely on servers a lot more, but the way that you work with that kind of connection is very, very different than the way you work with like a 15 [inaudible 1:07:01.9]. I think it’s worth it when you’re bootstrapping because it’s so much cheaper that you can, I mean you can essentially survive for a lot longer and that’s what the key is, you know. What kills you is running out of money. Even if you’re less productive, that’s okay. But in the end, I mean I think that you’re more productive in somewhere like that because it’s so beautiful, and because there’s so much new stuff going on, and it’s just an amazing place to be.
Andrew: And…
Interviewee: I don’t know if you like…yeah.
Andrew: … and fewer distractions.
Interviewee: [inaudible 1:07:31.7]. You ever check out pictures of that?
Andrew: [inaudible 1:07:35.2].
Interviewee: Over on the [inaudible 1:07:37.0] so it’s Google [inaudible 1:07:38.9] clicker, and it’ll come right up.
Andrew: I saw some of those pictures. It’s like a picture of a laptop and then this beautiful island right in front of it.
Interviewee: Yeah.
Andrew: And aspiring to have that, there are fewer distractions when you’re traveling. I don’t mean to be doing the interview on your behalf, but it’s a great way to live if you can do it, and it sounds like it’s possible.
Interviewee: How did you find the office that you’re at in Argentina?
Andrew: I put it out, and I found some pretty cheap office space here. I mean, I could really get a nice office for $150, $200. But I wanted an office where I could have solid Internet connection and not share it with anybody. This is my own personal connection. Everyone in here could be using bit [inaudible 1:08:18.8] all day…
Interviewee: Yeah.
Andrew: … it doesn’t influence me where I’ve got like Montay [SP] right here for me because I got…
Interviewee: [inaudible 1:08:24.3].
Andrew: … Montay. I knew they’d have it, you know.
Interviewee: Living the life, man.
Andrew: Yeah. I’ve got no interest in looking out and seeing an island in front of me. I mean, that would be fun for a short amount of time.
Interviewee: Right.
Andrew: For me, I just want a nice office.
Interviewee: That’s really [inaudible 1:08:37.7].
Andrew: That to me is productivity.
Interviewee: I usually just do cafes, but an office sounds really nice.
Andrew: Because of the video. If I didn’t have the video, if I didn’t need to do video like this, I could have a much cheaper office space, I could work out of coffee shops when I needed to, and I think for most people that’s the way to work. Live your work [inaudible 1:08:54.0].
Interviewee: Do you get a second monitor when you’re in other countries or when you’re traveling, or do you stick with your laptop?
Andrew: I stick with my laptop. In fact, I have other cameras but I just use the camera on the laptop. I want to keep it simple.
Interviewee: Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Andrew: All right, cool. I wish that we could do a whole interview just on travel, and maybe what I’ll do some time in the future is do a whole week of interviews with entrepreneurs who are bootstrapping by traveling, who are…
Interviewee: That’s good.
Andrew: Isn’t it? There are lots of people who are doing this, who are keeping their costs low, who are enriching their lives as they’re building up their businesses, and then they end up coming up with more creative ideas because they’re outside of the country. They’re outside of their rut. They’re influenced by new ideas every day.
Interviewee: What you should do instead is like…I mean like that’s something that would be amazing to do, but like even just now put together like a resource guide for a couple of different countries based on the people you’ve interviewed already. For Argentina, for like even Thailand, I mean anywhere. There’s good cafes to work from, you know, like the office space you were mentioning. I didn’t know you could do that. That’s amazing. So I think just a resource guide would be really, really helpful.
Andrew: Yeah, that’s a good idea actually.
