#032 Scaling Down to Scale Up with Alex Suzuki

[00:00:00] I think it was in the wintertime, it was a quiet period. You start thinking like, are there alternatives to what I'm doing yet? And what's my trajectory going to look like in the next couple of years? If we're successful, we're probably going to add even more people and it's going to add even more stress to me. And I started to really think about what kind of work makes me happy.

[00:00:26] And I'm just a builder. I love to program. I love to build stuff. And yeah, that's when I realized that I'm on a trajectory to building less and doing less of what I love. And that's when I made the decision to extract myself from the company. Hi, and welcome to the Code and Conquer podcast. Today our guest is Alex Suzuki, creator of Strich.io, a barcode scanning library that helps developers add scanning capabilities to the code.

[00:00:56] And we're going to bring it to their web applications. Alex shares this journey from running a successful agency to deliberately leaving that business to become a solo developer once more, choosing to focus on what he loves most, building and coding. We discuss the complexities of developing barcode scanning technology, working with enterprise customers and finding happiness in building a sustainable business that also allows time for family and creative work.

[00:01:25] Alex shares his learning on balancing technical depth with business growth and why sometimes taking the slower path can lead to better outcomes. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Let's jump right in. And welcome to the, and I can't remember at this point, I think the 32nd episode of the Code and Conquer podcast it is now. And today my guest is Alex Suzuki. Hi, Alex. How are you doing? Hi, Alex. Thanks. I'm doing fine.

[00:01:54] I was very interested in talking to you because you are an, I would say, pretty well-known indie hacker and the indie hacker space on Twitter and now Blue Sky. And you're doing a product called Strich. Strich? I-O. What would be the English pronunciation here? Because we're both German or Swiss, we would pronounce it differently, I think.

[00:02:11] Yeah, correct pronunciation would be Strich. When I started with the product, I thought it was such a clever name because it's about barcodes and Strich means like a line and barcodes are like lines in a row. And wow, this is such a cool name and there was a domain available.

[00:02:35] And as it turned out, like most of my customers are English speaking and I've just gotten used to them calling it Strich. And I even typosquat the domain S-T-R-I-T-C-H.io. Yeah, that was probably a clever idea. So what does, I'm just going to say it in German, sorry. What does Strich.io, what's the product that you're trying to sell?

[00:03:03] Basically, it's a JavaScript library that you can plug into your app. These are usually mobile apps running access via smartphone. And it just provides your app with an easy way to scan 1D and 2D barcodes. So 1D barcode could be barcodes printed on a Coca-Cola bottle or a pack of cereal.

[00:03:31] QR codes are two-dimensional codes. And in both 1D and 2D codes, there are like a billion different variations that you can support. And yeah, basically it's just a tool that you can integrate into your web app if your web app wants to do barcode scanning. And it turns out that quite a few apps want to do that.

[00:03:54] Like especially business apps, line of business apps, apps that are being used in-house for logistics purposes, like tracking incoming shipments, outgoing shipments, doing inventory on all kinds of things, like just scan something and type like we have 20 of this item and then scan the next and we have 30 of this item.

[00:04:20] I have customers that use it for checking admissions to concerts, like where the guest shows a printed ticket with a barcode on it or a barcode that he's added to the Apple wallet or the Google wallet. And you can validate the tickets with that. There's like a lot of use cases at this intersection of you have something physical

[00:04:46] and you want to associate it with some entity in the cloud or in the digital world. And these barcodes or QR codes are just one way of doing that. And I have a very specific question here because as I was going through your website and the product website and stuff like that, I was curious, since you are an SDK and you're writing that the most, like the thing that you usually integrate with are a switcher, single page applications.

[00:05:14] We're going to be a little technical here for a second. Sure. So what you're not doing, like you're doing this for web apps, but you're not doing it for native apps. That's what I understood from the website. You can do it. You can have a native app and put a web view into it and then load the web app in your native app. So basically what all these hybrid frameworks are doing.

[00:05:37] But it was like a conscious decision to target exclusively the web because I started out as a solo and I intend to keep it that way. And just starting to support iOS and Android natively would be within my capabilities because I did a lot of native mobile development in the past. But I just don't have the bandwidth to, and I don't want to support all of that at once.

[00:06:05] I want to focus on just the web platform. And I think that's where I can also better compete with my competitors. How did the idea for Strich come on? So I know that we will talk more about your career because it's been very interesting. But how did you get started with this? Because obviously you already mentioned that there are like 10, 20, 30 different barcode types. How did this idea get started at the beginning?

[00:06:37] Yeah, so that's a funny story. Like maybe five or six years ago, I had absolutely no clue about barcodes. And we were still an agency back then. So we were doing software development for customers, custom apps. And we had a project where the customer wanted to build a barcode scanning app. And they already had a contact with one of my competitors. They wanted to use that product.

[00:07:04] And then we basically built this app for them and integrated barcode scanning. And that was like the first time that I realized, oh, okay, this is actually a thing that you can, you want to scan barcodes with your mobile phone. And there are like tons of workflows that are enabled by that. And that's when I started realizing or where I started to get to know the domain a little bit.

[00:07:31] I was in a position where I could evaluate a competitor's product. I got a feeling for how they designed their API, for instance, what was nice to work with and what didn't work so well. And it went that way for a really long time. So we were, we even had a, as an agency, we even had an integration partnership with this firm that is my, now my competitor.

[00:08:00] So yeah, that's a bit of a difficult part of the story. But nevertheless, at some point, one of my, one of our customers, so one of the people who we built the apps for, they approached me and said, look, we're building a new app. And so, yeah, that's the product that we use for barcode scanning works really well, but it's really expensive. And we don't know yet if this new app that we're building will even take off.

[00:08:28] And we don't want to invest a lot of money into it. It's more like of an experiment. Can you check the landscape of, are there open source alternatives? Are there like cheaper alternatives to that product? And then I basically was doing market research for my then non-existent product. I mean, that is for this customer. And, you know, I had a look at the open source line and tried them out.

[00:08:57] I got to know them and I got to know the limitations better. And then at some point I was like, okay, it seems like there's a gap between what you can get for free on the internet, which is pretty cool stuff, but it's unmaintained and you don't get commercial support for it. And it's limited and all these things that you're basically on your own. And it's great because it's free.

[00:09:21] And then on the other hand, you have these two or three large companies that are selling these really mature professional high-end products, which have a gazillion features that most customers don't actually need. And they're just really expensive. And it's not that none of them have a pricing page. It's all, okay, we're so great. And we have all these industry showcases. And here's this talk to sales button. And you just know it's going to be really expensive.

[00:09:51] And what I was missing at that point was something like, okay, it looks good. It looks like it's alive. It's supported. And I can just start a trial and just start using it. And yeah, that's where the genesis of the idea happened. At this point, we might actually have to talk a little bit about what your career looked like before that.

[00:10:16] You've already published a blog post about this that I read that goes into great detail how your career formed out. It's a very interesting time that you started to be a computer scientist. So I think back in the 90s was your official start, right? Oh, with tinkering and creating web pages on geocities and stuff like that, maybe. But professionally, I started around 2003, 2004.

[00:10:44] So when I was studying computer science, I had side jobs that I was doing, programming Python for the tax department of Zurich and stuff like that. And then later, I got a job as a software engineer, like a real job. Yeah. Do you want me to go into more detail on that?

[00:11:06] I think the interesting thing with your career path was that a lot of people have done the way from studying to becoming an employee and then becoming your own boss for your own company. But what you have done is actually scaling down a company to go back to where you are now, being an indie hacker and being alone. And I thought that was an interesting path to go to. Like you went from one to two people, then to a team and then going back to one. How did that play out?

[00:11:37] Yeah. Yeah. I was like a regular employee for five or six years maybe. And then at some point there was this break in the company and a lot of people left and some people that I really admired and respected. And I just decided on a whim that, okay, if you guys are leaving, then I'm going to leave too, because it's probably not going to be as much fun.

[00:12:00] And what I did then for five years or so is basically freelancing, contracting, selling my time and mobile expertise for money. And that worked really well. It was also a time where the skill set that I had was in very high demand. And I never had to actively look for projects.

[00:12:26] This was always handed to me and people were always grateful that they had somebody with a bit of experience to help them. But after five years or so, I decided, okay, it's becoming a bit boring, a bit repetitive. And you're always jumping from one project and one customer to the next. And at some point they need you and then at some point they don't need you anymore. And then you go to the next thing.

[00:12:53] And it felt a bit like you never get to see the lasting impact of what you're doing. And then I teamed up, asked a friend of mine who was a really long time employee, a software engineer, if he would be interested in basically terminating his employment and joining me. And so we could work as a team. And as soon as you go from one to two and more, you have access to other kinds of opportunities.

[00:13:21] You can confidently go to a company and say, hey, we can do this whole project for you guys. We'll talk about requirements with you. We'll design the prototype. We'll build it for you. And we'll operate it for you. We'll maintain it for you. And that was something I wanted at that time because I wanted to just, yeah, basically what I said, have more of a say in what we build and how we build it.

[00:13:51] And have more ownership over what we build. And that went pretty well too. But that's when for me, things got a bit more complicated because the one side, now you have a business partner who is also a friend, which is like a whole other can of worms. Something that I personally, like people told me, are you sure you want to do this with a friend?

[00:14:20] And I'm like, I know it's not optimal. At least it's somebody that I can fully trust not to go behind my back and somehow screw me. And I also know that they're like a super competent engineer. And yeah, I wish it were some random person which doesn't have like a friendship relationship with me, which we can then proceed to destroy because we become business partners.

[00:14:50] But that's just not how it happened. And I don't regret that. But what kind of happened is we were successful and we started to think, oh, this customer, this project is starting to grow. I think maybe we should hire somebody so we can basically make more money and do more things. And then we hired somebody and then we hired the next person.

[00:15:13] And yeah, that's when like my responsibilities started shifting a little bit from being basically the lead developer and like boss of the company, but still with a really large developing role to also a kind of like administrative, administration role and people management role. Which some people love to do that.

[00:15:40] I think I can talk well with people, get along. But when you have to manage people and when you have software engineers and they're building stuff and you put your name on it, then it can be stressful. If maybe you have maybe a junior who doesn't yet know what the database migration is and what happens if you don't migrate data.

[00:16:09] Or maybe you have people who don't have the same kind of quality mindset than you. Then you just start this code. You start seeing this code being generated like all over the place and you start to lose control. And like I had like nightmares because I knew I saw some of the stuff that we were doing and I was like, I'm not really okay with that.

[00:16:37] And when you decide to leave the company at some point, all of that stuff will come back to me and I will have to maintain it. And that was definitely something that started stressing me out a little bit. What happened as well was the pandemic, which was like for us, it was a time where we had still a pretty solid pipeline of projects. But we were all suddenly disconnected from each other. We were working from home.

[00:17:06] We were doing like an awkward nine o'clock in the morning Slack meeting. And that's also when some of us or I guess me started questioning a little bit. Am I really happy doing what we do here? And what is just a way was I think it was in the wintertime also. It was quiet period.

[00:17:32] You start thinking like, are there alternatives to what I'm doing yet? And what's my trajectory going to look like in the next couple of years? If we're successful, we're probably going to add even more people. And it's going to add even more stress to me. And I started to really think about what kind of work makes me happy. And I'm just a builder. I love to program. I love to build stuff.

[00:18:00] And yeah, that's when I realized that I'm on a trajectory to building less and doing less of what I love. And that's when I made the decision to extract myself from the company. And I think what happened then was that your business partner also decided that he didn't want to do it without you. Correct? That's something I read on your blog post. Yeah, yeah. In my ideal world, we met.

[00:18:26] He was actually in Sweden with his family back then, escaping the lockdowns and the mask mandates from COVID in Switzerland. And I talked with him. I was completely open about my thinking and why I want to change that. And like with a one year transition period, I offered him basically half of the shares of the company to just for the same amount of money.

[00:18:54] Like that was like half of our bank account balance. And I was like, look, if you want to continue the company without me, that would be like awesome. And I will support you in doing that. But in the end, he decided that he's not the kind of person who wants to do that. And he's actually a builder too. He's a really, really great engineer.

[00:19:20] And he decided that, oh no, I'm not going to pretend I know what his thinking was. But I understand that he decided against it. So in the end, you both had to become builders once again and to keep you both happy. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And then after you like scaled that business down and now it doesn't exist anymore, I think it's in the last steps to not exist anymore. You then went back to indie hacking.

[00:19:48] How like it was Strich like the first thing you already thought about? Was that something that came from a company from the agency and then grew from there? Yeah. So basically, I didn't switch from one day to another, from the agency to indie hacking. What I did was we basically divided up the projects from the agency that we were like personally invested in.

[00:20:15] Because if you're small, then there's always like the project always belongs to somebody. I had two customers that I decided, okay, I want to keep these guys on if they're willing to do that. And they were extremely happy to. I basically created a new company and started doing mostly the same for them as I did before, but starting to build Strich on the side. I had a working prototype, but it was super rough.

[00:20:42] So it took me about another year or so to get it into a shape where I could release it. So you weren't the indie hacker that pushed everything live after four days of developing and was at like 20k MR in three months of time. No, it's pretty much the exact opposite of that. I see all these people on Twitter and social media.

[00:21:07] And you mentioned at the beginning that I'm one of the better known indie hackers. I would highly doubt that, to be honest. No, it's not something that you build in a weekend. It's just too broad of a topic because when you think about these barcodes and QR codes, that they're like 50 different types.

[00:21:26] Even, it's no use just supporting one barcode because nobody wants your product if it doesn't support at least like a minimum set of barcodes. And what I did at the beginning is for certain barcode types, I used open source libraries that were the license allowed to do that. And I basically wrapped them so they fit into my web-based product.

[00:21:56] But yeah, in the end, it's just a lot of work to get it to run smoothly. And this customer that I mentioned at the beginning, the ones that asked me to find an alternative to this product that they were using, they were really great. I just had the best experience with them. It's the Swiss Railways. And that's like a huge company. But in these huge companies, you have like sub-organizations and sub-sections. And in the end, it's just one person that I was dealing with.

[00:22:26] And he had two or three internal apps. And he was willing to basically allow me to test drive the SDK in one of his apps. And it was like really smooth because it was using like my competitor's product before. And they had a switch where you could switch basically the barcode scanning implementation on a per-user basis.

[00:22:51] So what he did is he found a couple of early adopters internally who were willing to give my alternative product a try. And it went that way for almost half a year. That's where that was really great for battle testing the products, finding bugs, fixing crashes, weird camera issues on certain browsers, like all that.

[00:23:19] So he really helped me productize the product. So when I decided it was time to launch, I was really confident the product is not going to suck really badly. But so like the first company that you worked with, the Swiss Railways, did they also already pay for the product at that point? No, they didn't. So it was like win. But they eventually switched from fully from the competitor's product to mine.

[00:23:46] And that was a bit of a difficult situation because we got that customer through a contact of my competitor. So like the completely correct thing for me to do would have been like calling the competitor and telling them, look, this customer is really not happy with the pricing of your product. And they're asking me to find an alternative. Can you do that?

[00:24:16] That's where you have even the slightest entrepreneurial inclination. And that's just something that you're not going to do because you have to be opportunistic in these situations. And I had like angry phone calls from them. It's not like it's a huge customer for them, not at all, but they felt hurt. And I agree it was like not the nicest thing of me to do, but in the end, I did it.

[00:24:44] And I can sleep well because it was the customer who initiated this conversation. They came to me and asked me, is there an alternative? Can you find something that better suits our needs and our budget? And instead of finding just something else, I built something else. And I'm also like, my first thought would be, let's just say that product costs like 3,000 euros a month, for example.

[00:25:12] They probably wouldn't have done it for a third of the price. Absolutely. And then you would still be like cheaper. So how realistic would that have been that they would land on a price that would work for them? Yeah. Yeah, maybe they would have adapted slightly downward. But the thing is, I call them my competitors, but that's really a tall order for me because they're like companies. They have a valuation, like a nine-figure valuation.

[00:25:41] They have a ton of PhDs, computer vision people who are total experts in what they're doing. And they don't cater to the 99 bucks a month folks. So I don't really see them as a competitor. I'm in this niche where it's not attractive for them to sell their product. But at the same time, it's a price point that some companies are willing to pay for a robust and supported solution.

[00:26:10] But what do your customers look like? Because for me, looking outside onto your product was like, okay, this guy seems to have the most enterprise-y customers that I have seen in the indie hacking space. I wrote as a topic for today, I wrote indie hacking, but also going hardcore enterprise B2B. Because from the outside, it looks like you're very deep into enterprise territory with your product. At least that's how it looks like from the outside.

[00:26:40] I guess that has probably partly to do with the product itself, because you're not going to find an indie hacker in the bubble who can get excited about barcode scanning. It's like a capability. It's like spreadsheets or something like that. It's not that exciting, but there's a real business need for that. And that's why I also said that my customers, they're not on social media.

[00:27:04] So I don't have a huge social media presence and I don't use it as a marketing channel because indie hackers are not going to use my product. And that's fine. The thing that I thought about or why I had that thought of you being very enterprise-y was that you also have, I'm not sure what it is, a partnership with a government industry association called GS1. Can you talk a little about that? How did you get that set up and how much does it really help with the business now?

[00:27:33] Sure. That's a very recent development. That organization, GS1, is an organization that sets standards in the barcode area amongst others. They're basically an organization that tries to make supply chains, businesses more efficient by setting some standards that people can rely on. And from the outside, it's like the most enterprise-y looking thing that you can imagine.

[00:28:05] And I actually have a solution partner program. It's basically just you can join them for a yearly fee and they will list you on their website. That's a good backlink to have. But then you can also use this very enterprise-y logo on your website and say, I'm a certified GS1 partner.

[00:28:29] And when I get these sales emails requests for quotes, then that's just something that you can add and makes you a bit more credible for these companies. It doesn't mean anything in the terms like the product is better because of this certification. Not at all, but I feel that when you're like a solo or tiny, it can be difficult to build credibility when you're trying to sell to larger companies.

[00:28:57] And even knowing that something like GS1 exists and showing the willingness to participate in something like that and paying money even. I think it just shows that you're serious about this. And yeah, that's why I did it. Governments, I don't have any government partnerships, but I have a government customer.

[00:29:23] I wasn't sure what GS1 is because like you said, it's the most enterprise-y thing ever and you can't really say what it is from the website. I'm sorry about that. Yeah, they have some kind of image problem, I think. So that's obviously one thing you do for marketing stuff. You're a builder, so you have the issue of most indie hackers that you would rather build stuff than market. But what are your other ways of marketing this product?

[00:29:50] What works well for me is sponsoring developer newsletters because it's usually developers who are evaluating these SDKs and libraries and building awareness of the product through these mailing lists. I think it works. I don't really, people are going to scratch their heads and say, what? I don't do conversion tracking.

[00:30:15] So I use like plausible analytics because I don't want to show a cookie banner on the homepage. That's why I used it as well, yeah. And one of the consequences is basically you can't really measure stuff reliably. But you can at least correlate, oh, okay, I had an ad in that newsletter and I saw some signups in the following weeks. Then I think it works.

[00:30:43] But that's my level of measuring and it's like totally unprofessional, but it works for me and I really hate cookie banners. I hate them as well. And I'm also like, I would love to have plausible as a sponsor of the podcast. I would do this that like in a second because I love them and I love that I don't have to provide any fucking cookie banner to my users if they are on my webpage. So I'm 100% on that with you.

[00:31:08] The thing with the, I have a question in my mind for the last half hour, which is if there is a company that is your competitor per se, because they're obviously catering to other businesses, but they have people with PhDs and image recognition and stuff like that on this problem. And I already saw you talking on Blue Sky about faded prints, about QR codes that are printed on a mug. So they're round for an image that is taken with the camera.

[00:31:36] What's the kind of work you have to do to get all of these working? I can't really imagine that because I've never worked with something like that. Yeah. I read a lot of research papers and it's active. There's like a lot of people concerned with this topic, like reading codes, 2D codes more efficiently or when they're blurry or whatever. I have a look at a lot of these research papers because the information is basically there in the open.

[00:32:05] And some of those approaches that they use, they're not really suitable for my product because it's running in a web browser and you don't have access to like a machine learning acceleration framework or something like that. But sometimes I see stuff and approaches and I try them out. Most of the time I build a prototype of whatever aspect they're trying to address and improve.

[00:32:35] Usually it was Python and image libraries, like OpenCV or Scikit, NumPy. And then I get a feeling of, okay, this approach is going to improve the product or not. I have a really large data set of images containing R codes and QR codes, stuff like that. And I can benchmark my solutions against this data set.

[00:33:02] And when I see like a significant improvement, okay, we have increased the coverage of this data set by 5% or 10%. Then that's an approach that I'm going to look at. And yeah, eventually you start to convert the Python code to C plus, actually the language that I use to write the library as most of the library. It's like the core recognition stuff. And then that's compiled to WebAssembly.

[00:33:28] I'm not sure if that's something that a lot of indie hackers are aware of, but you can take C, C plus plus code. You can do Rust, even other languages, and you can compile them down to a binary format called WebAssembly. And then you can load that via JavaScript. And that has some pretty good properties. It's fast. And that's important when you're processing images from the camera because that just takes a lot of time. It's a lot of pixels that you have to look at.

[00:33:58] And then you want to be as fast as possible. And the other thing that's really handy about this is that it obfuscates a lot of your code. Because if you're building like a pure JavaScript library, you can minify it. You can uglify it so that every variable name is just one character or something. And there's no white space, whatever. But you can still run it through a formatter. And there are other tools where you can pretty easily reverse engineer what's happening.

[00:34:26] And with WebAssembly, you have to throw it into a decompiler and a lot of information is lost. So that makes it a little bit harder to copy the library. That's something I was wondering about because obviously, as I understand it, like the whole SDK actually runs in the browser. There's no like API call to a backend to do something.

[00:34:53] Everything that you do is actually running in the browser, correct? Yeah. Or 99% correct. It does phone home to a license service. At the beginning, you get the license key and it basically checks this license key. Yeah, sure. Online or offline. And then after that, everything happens in the browser. That's true. And then you have the issue of exactly that. Like how do you, if the customer basically has all the code on their computer right now,

[00:35:22] how do I make sure that it's not being reverse engineered and I have 10 competitors or my old competitor comes back and revenges me and takes the code? Yeah, for sure. It's like when I launched, I posted it on Hacker News. It was like 2022. 2022. And it went to the top spot. I couldn't believe it. I still have a screenshot of the Hacker News site and they printed it out and it's framed it. It's on the wall.

[00:35:52] And that crowd is really tough. There were like the obvious comments regarding, oh, I don't, this runs on my computer. Why should I pay like a subscription for it? And stuff like that. And then somebody said, oh, it's just checking a license key. Like you can just extract this code snippet and remove that pass and stuff. And then you can use it for free. And I was like, oh man, I didn't spend a lot of time to do that.

[00:36:20] But I didn't imagine that somebody would basically reverse engineer it that quickly. But at the same time, the people who are willing to do that, they're not my customers. They would have never paid anyway. And the intellectual property, it's obfuscated. But even if you were able to reverse engineer that, it's not the PhD level rocket science

[00:36:48] stuff that other people are doing. It's just, I don't know, it's just some practices that work in this browser setting. It's not magic, but I still don't want it out in the open. Yeah, the people that say stuff like, I could build this in a weekend. I've just talked to, before you were my guest, the last guest, the episode is not live, but will be, is Dimit Rukasun, who's doing an API product as well.

[00:37:14] And there were always people like, say like, I can build this in a weekend. And they usually don't grasp how complex something can be, even though it might be boring or easy in the beginning. He just told me like on, on Blue Sky that he just talked to someone that told him that he's going to be a competitor to him. So he was like having a friendly conversation with someone who thought about building something similar. And he was like, I talked to him for an hour.

[00:37:42] I tried to convince him that it's not that easy, but I didn't get anywhere. Yeah. And that's, that's what I always expect from Hacker News, right? There's this one comment. I can build this myself in a week. There's everything in open source work. You could, you don't need this. And there are never the people who would have paid for it in the end. Totally. And even if there were like, if there was like an exact copy of my product, somebody has to maintain it and support it.

[00:38:06] And that's what the, my customers or at least the larger ones really care about. If they have a problem, they want to create a support ticket and they want a human that talks to them and holds their hand while they figure out what the issue is and we find a solution together. And it's not just about the technology. It just, it's for those companies.

[00:38:31] It's also about having somebody who tells them that everything's going to be fine. You can, I'm here to support you. We have a contract together, all those things. So for all the customers that you have, like the enterprise ones, you're also doing like real contracts with them to ensure them that they feel like you're going to work on this for longer. Like the main question is, and you also did a tweet about this, is what happens when you don't want to build this anymore?

[00:39:00] What happens when you quit? Is that something that comes up with those customers? Yeah. Usually I avoid sign in addition to, with the customer, in addition to the license terms that I have. But some want to sign NDAs. Some just recently I had a company from Sweden that wanted to buy the product. And it usually starts like really friendly. Like some person evaluates the product and they see, oh, this is, this works for us.

[00:39:30] This is pretty cool. And maybe they have some product related questions first and you answer them to their satisfaction. And then it's okay. We'll be in touch. And then a month or two months later, you have to deal with the procurement department. And last time with these guys, they're cool and stuff, but I almost died because they sent

[00:39:51] me in the first email, they sent me 13 Word documents and all of the total of three or 400 pages of contract, of contracts and like declarations that you're sourcing ethically and you're advancing climate change. And for the weirdest scenarios, there were like some clauses in there and that I told them,

[00:40:19] look, you're going to pay 8,000 euros per year for this product. And I can't afford to, or this quickly becomes really, really not attractive anymore to me if I have to really go over those documents and involve even my lawyer. So, and what I did is I told them, look, I think companies of your size, my competitor would be better suited for you.

[00:40:45] I told them that out of the box and they just persisted and persisted. And I told them like three times, this is like a David versus Goliath situation. It's just, I want to work with you, but it's just, I can't sign all those documents. And those documents, they didn't even apply for most of the, they were like tailored for

[00:41:09] like these project companies who would build like a huge software solution for them and operate it and provide SLAs and stuff like that. And none of that applied to my product. And in the end, we just settled on me signing a declaration that I basically source all of my subcontracting ethically and I don't have any subcontracting. So yeah, I was completely comfortable signing that.

[00:41:39] And then we like finally proceeded to the purchase order and stuff like that. But dealing with these companies is a bit, it's a bit tedious, but I think it's also worth it because once you're in, you may have to go through these vendor registration things, but once you're in and you have a supplier ID, some magic number that's, that you can tell, Oh, I'm supplier number 550,000.

[00:42:07] And they're like, Oh, you're an approved supplier. Oh, that's going to make things easier. And actually that customer has already approached me because a different team inside, same customer is building another app. And they're like, Oh, you guys are using this product for your app. And basically I got referred internally to this new team and all being already an approved vendor is going to make that process so much smoother.

[00:42:36] If one of those guys pays like $8,000 and then the other team pays them maybe as well again, then you're basically doing minimum wage with two customers already, right? It's per year, not per month. Yeah. Yeah. I know. In Switzerland, maybe minimum wage is a little higher there. Yeah. Actually they're going to just extend the existing license probably, but still it's no, it's, it works. Yeah.

[00:43:01] And then if that goes on for like years, maybe the whole pain of having to deal with them in the beginning was worth it. Yeah. That's my, my. Yeah. I saw your tweet about this, that you have to like register yourself as a supplier in SAP Ariba or whatever it's called. Yeah. And being a approved supplier and stuff like that. It's still an indie hacker at that point. Yeah. I don't really know what the definition of an indie hacker is, to be honest.

[00:43:29] I don't refer to myself as an indie hacker, but I'm just a solo software developer, software entrepreneur. Yeah. It was also just, I was just joking because I thought, I think you're still fitting the indie hacker label, even if you don't identify with it yourself. But it's just at some certain point, we just created a company in Germany because we needed it to talk to Lemon Squeezy about our payment process. And there you are like, you just want to do some software.

[00:43:58] Just want to build a simple SaaS product. And in Germany as well, you have the issue of then the first time, like the first 10 cents that you make with the product need to already be in the correct spreadsheet at the correct time with our techs offices and stuff. And it's all very fun. And you're like, am I still an indie hacker at this point or am I already a company? But things like Paddle and Lemon Squeezy, they simplify that to a certain extent, right?

[00:44:28] Even in Germany. Yeah. Actually, our techs accountant, because our company is two people, me and my partner, and our techs accountant actually said, if you go with Stripe, you go without me because he just can't do that. Like we're a very small customer of his because we're not making millions, right? They have enterprise companies as their customers.

[00:44:52] And if you come with a spreadsheet of 32 countries that you would then sold one license to, they have a week of work for in the end revenue of a few thousand maybe. And he said, if you go with Stripe, I can't do that with you. If you go with something like Pebble or, sorry, Paddle or Lemon Squeezy, then we can work together. So that was actually the only way we could do it because otherwise you would lose the best techs accountant that Germany has.

[00:45:22] We're really happy with him. So we want to keep him on. It's funny because for me, it was exactly the same. I have been with the same accountant for more than 10 years now, like with the old company. And then I mentioned to her what I'm going to do with the new company. And then she said, oh, but you're going to sell that around the world. And I'm like, yeah. And she was like, okay, but you have to be a bit careful with the taxes and the registrations and stuff. And she's not an expert at all. She has no idea who Paddle is or Lemon Squeezy.

[00:45:52] But she told me, maybe you can look for somebody who handles that with you because it's the same situation. I have more than 100 customers who pay like 99 bucks per month. And that's 12 times a year. That's like a lot of transactions. And it's just unmanageable for an accountant. It would take, and it's also not enjoyable work for them. If you don't like the work, then probably they aren't going to like it either. Yeah.

[00:46:22] And the way like Lemon Squeezy and all of them are doing it is like in the end, you have probably 12 real invoices in your system because 12 months, right? So that's making it a lot easier if you have just one customer on your sheet at least and just take all of this away. And I love that. I love that so many indie hackers just don't care about that. They're like, I'm just going to use Stripe. I'm just going to not pay the different taxes in different countries. And it's going to work out, right?

[00:46:50] You can do this after you are like on a serious level with MRR. And my German blood boils and I just can't work that way. And I'm 100% okay with Lemon Squeezy taking part of my money for handling all of that and making it very easy for me to have a company in my country. Absolutely. I'm not doing an advertisement for Paddle or anything, but I was just thinking if you

[00:47:15] take 5% and even with Stripe, you have, I don't know, 2.5 or 2.9 or whatever percent just payment fees. If you take a little bit more from me and I don't have to care about this, it's just such a no-brainer for me as a solo builder because all of that time that you save is going to be, you can spend it on other things that actually move the product forward and which

[00:47:43] actually aren't like soul crushing activities, trying to register as an entity for taxation in some strange country that has like really strange websites and stuff like that. Yeah. No, thank you. I will just give away 2.5% of my revenue for that. Yeah. Yeah. And if at some point I'm doing like 1 million ARR and I can afford an accountant, then yeah,

[00:48:13] maybe at that point we'll change, but I'll never do it myself. It's just like such a bad way to invest your time. Yeah. I don't think that's actually worth it. I'm going to try to tag Lemon Squeezy in the tweet about this episode and see if they can come on as a sponsor because I'm already doing all the sponsor work. I think Paddle is sponsoring Arvid Karl's podcast, right? Oh, maybe I have to reach out there as well. Maybe they want to sponsor you too. Yeah.

[00:48:42] That's going to be fun. One thing that I wanted to ask you because you're, I don't want to impose, but you're one of the more experienced older indie hackers that we had on the podcast and you also already thought about this in a blog post that you published. What does the future for you look like now? Like how, where do you want to put, do you want to like just maintain strich and make it bigger? Do you plan on doing other stuff as well?

[00:49:08] What's your thoughts on your development after having given up an agency and now going back solo? I have two kids and they're aged five and nine. So they're like at a phase in their life where they can really benefit from having a parent like present and interested in them and has time to, to yeah, spend time with them.

[00:49:33] And right now I'm just really happy that I can have a setup that allows me to follow my passions of, of building stuff and earning a living from that. And at the same time being in a situation where I can still have a lot of time or maybe not a lot, but enough time to, to be present as a parent. And to be honest, I don't want any, I don't see a reason why that should change.

[00:50:01] And I, right now I have so many things that I want to do with the product. I mean, like even this thing that you mentioned, like the reading the QR codes off of curved surfaces, I've been working on that for on and off for two months now. And you think that's crazy because like people are shipping in five, five days or so, but it's, there's a really, there's a lot of stuff that you can go really deep into. And I enjoy that.

[00:50:28] And it also makes me super proud because when my product can do that and like a competitor's product or, or an open source product can't do that. And there's like just a pretty cool feeling that you have this code running in the browser and it's just, it's, it beeps as my product is because it's detected the code and just nothing happens in the other product. It's just, it's just like really satisfying. All in all, I'm really happy with the way it is right now.

[00:50:58] You can always have more money, of course, but I'm already living in Switzerland with my family. And it's like one of the most expensive countries in the world. And we can, I can feed the family and we can have a nice life and not, I'm not buying a Porsche or a pool or something like that, but it's enough. And what's more important for me is that I have these freedoms and this just that I can spend the time with stuff that I like doing.

[00:51:25] So if I had a choice, I'd rather work less hours, enjoy them more because I have some friends who, they, they, they are like really workaholics working for Apple and for Google and they earn like these crazy, crazy salaries, but they're like always, my day is full of meetings. I have like back to back meetings from eight to nine and I have to work on the weekends or

[00:51:52] evenings when I want to get anything done and it's so frustrating and blah. And I'm like, that's, that world has become so, so foreign for me. And I really enjoyed that part of the builder's life. Yeah. I think I can't go back to that path as well. I think it's just building for someone else becomes very tedious at some point. It's even still a problem with freelancing, which I do still on this, which is my main income

[00:52:19] for now, but going back to being told what to do, being in a company, even if you would be paid very well, it's just something I'm not. That's the door is closed for us forever. Yeah. I think it's that Pandora spoke once you've been a business owner yourself, you're like, nope, not going back to the other thing. By the way, I also still do some freelancing contract work and, but I try to keep it at

[00:52:44] the minimum, some of those old customers from the agency days, they still rely on me for maintenance stuff. And I enjoy doing that as like a side on the side, like maybe not even one day per week, maybe half a day per week. Because sometimes when you're working on your own product or on the same product for weeks or months, then it's just relaxing to just being able to switch to something where you're

[00:53:12] just coding some functionality that's not going to, it's not going to break, melt your brain or something. It's just, I know exactly what I have to do. And then I can write up, oh, that I've worked eight hours on this today and I'm going to bill it at the end of the month. And it's, things are simple, right? So there's like an immediate impact, like money for your time. That's something I have a pretty good relationship with contracting in general, but it doesn't scale to after a certain point. Yeah.

[00:53:41] I also think that if something like if, even if we podcast the product I'm currently working on would make enough money, if somebody came up to me and was like, this is a very interesting freelance project, we want to do it. I would probably still do it just not five days a week. Like I would just do it for two or three, maybe if it's something I would really enjoy. I'm not like a hundred percent opposed to it. It's just having the freedom to choose is something that immensely gratifying. Absolutely. Yeah. We're on the end of the podcast, pretty much.

[00:54:11] I have one question that I always ask everyone at the end of the podcast episode, which is if you would give advice to someone who would just start out as indie hacker or as bootstrapper or whatever, as solopreneur, what would be the advice you would give to these people? Okay. I would probably tell them to take it slow. What, when you read on Twitter and Blue Sky, like I quit my nine to five because I'm going all in on my AI rapper.

[00:54:39] Then I'm like, okay, is this engagement bait or what? It's just, it just seems like such an incredibly bad idea. Yeah. I am a bit biased because I think I found a good way to transition from like steady, stable income to, to like indie hacking or product income. But if you can do that gradually, like start working part-time other instead of full-time

[00:55:06] or still having a contracting or a freelancing business on the side that you slowly start to scale down. When you see that your product starts taking off, that it has like a product market fit or whatever, or serious, it generates some serious revenue. That's when you switch. That's, that would be my recommendation. Otherwise, I think it's just like for me, but it's, I think it might be different because

[00:55:36] I have family. It's not something that, that I would have felt comfortable with, like just jumping in, going all in without having at least some residual income on the side. I think it would stress me out because then there is this, unless you have like millions in the bank or, and you can take it easy. But when you have this pressure to succeed financially immediately, I think that's, that limits your

[00:56:03] your freedom to create the product that you, that you really want to build. And, and you just, which just basically you're behind on, on day one. And that's not a, that's not a good feeling. Yeah. I don't know what to think. If you have any kind of runway that is like less than two or three years because you've worked at Google before that, and now you have millions in the bank, right? Then you might be able to do that.

[00:56:28] But if anyone like had a normal job and now has like a deadline, like in six months, this product needs to make like most of my income. I think that's insane. I think that's not a sustainable way of building a business. As someone who has scratched that burnout a few times now, I don't think that's the right mindset to be in, to build something. Because if, even if you look at the most successful indie hackers, if you look at Peter levels,

[00:56:56] he has already had this important famous tweet where he said he has like 72 projects and four made money. So expecting that your first idea will work is insane. Absolutely. Yeah. And what I tell people also is that like when you, when we in the indie hacker bubble think of a nine to five job or some even about contracting, they think it's like a dirty thing. It's like something that's not that cool.

[00:57:25] But what they don't see is besides the stable income is that it's hugely beneficial to create connections. Because I think I have a pretty good professional network that I built up over the years, but those were years that I was either employed or contracting for different companies. And every company I contracted for, you get to know people.

[00:57:50] Pre-COVID, you even went there, had a desk and you got to meet all these people and they got to know you. And those connections, they're so valuable. They're just like way more valuable than your, I'm sorry to be so blunt, but your followers on Twitter. Yeah. They're real people. And maybe someday they're going to be, they're going to recommend you because it did great work for them.

[00:58:18] Maybe they're even going to buy your product. It has actually happened. And when you're going on the indie hacker journey and you basically only have your Twitter bubble, then that can become lonely and you don't get to make these professional connections anymore. And those are really valuable, I think. Yeah. For me as well. Like the moment, I already had a good network because I worked for three or four companies before I went freelance.

[00:58:46] And then if you are in freelance project with other freelancers from other companies that are not your own, you will have so many contacts and it will be coming more and more with every year that you're doing freelancing. Yeah. To the point where I know a lot of people that have done freelancing longer than me. To the point where even now, when we're in a recession in Germany, it's becoming easier to find new work for you because you have a large network that you can depend on if you need it. Absolutely.

[00:59:15] And you recommend people, like if somebody asked me for an embedded developer, I'm not an embedded developer by any case, but I have someone in my network that I would then recommend to. So you're doing the same for all of the people in your network. And that's just so good for you to always find work and just also recommend work to the people that you might not be able to serve. Yeah. That's so... 100%. It's just a good idea to have done this sometime in your career. Absolutely. Yeah.

[00:59:43] Alex, if somebody wants to learn more about your product or if they want to read the blog post that I mentioned, where do they find you and your product on the internet? Under strich.io or you can find me on Blue Sky. There's a link there in my bio to my personal homepage, alexsuzuki.com. Like all AD hackers, we are such vain people that we have our own .com demands. I used to write a lot more, but I stopped doing it.

[01:00:13] Something that I want to do more often in the future. But right now I'm just so absorbed in the product work that I rarely do anything else. But I really enjoyed the blog post. It helped with this podcast, this preparation. So if anyone wants to find that, they can find it on alexsuzuki.com. And you can always find all the links always in the subscription if you can't.

[01:00:37] Sorry, in the description, not the subscription of this podcast episode and just click there to find it. Alex, thank you for taking the time to being on the podcast. And yeah, thank you for sharing your journey and your product with us. Thank you so much for having me. It was great fun. Thank you so much. Bye. And that's our episode. Thank you for sticking with us to the end. You can find me on Twitter with the username icebellabs.

[01:01:07] That's I-C-E-B-E-A-R-L-A-B-S. We have a website you can check out. Go to codeandconquer.fm to find out more. You can find this podcast on Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram with the handle codeconquerpod and can write us an email at hello at codeandconquer.fm. If you're one of the people who listen to this podcast on either the Apple Podcast platform or Spotify, please consider rating us. It lets other people discover this podcast and helps us grow this even bigger. Thank you so much for listening. Till next time.