314: Nicolai Klemke - Switching Lanes: Physics PhD to Indie Hacker

Arvid Kahl
Welcome to the Bootstrap founder. Today I'm talking to Nikolaj Klemke, PhD. PhD in indie hacking. Well, almost. This guy left academia to become an indie hacker, and he's building an AI product for musicians.

Pretty interesting journey. You'll hear all about it. This episode is sponsored by acquire.com. More about that later. Now here's Nikolai Niko.

Welcome to the show. It is not often that someone with a PhD in physics goes into indie hacking, or let alone being able to build a business to the point of, like, mid five figure revenue, which is super impressive. What made you switch tracks? Well, avid. First of all, thanks a lot for having me on.

Nikolaj Klemke
Great pleasure to be here. Yeah, I mean, I studied physics and I was always. I mean, I studied physics in Berlin, right? And it was never really my true 100% passion, I have to say. I was kind of making music on the side and was always putting the priority to music a little bit.

But then after my masters, I didn't really know what to do and applied for some jobs. They also sounded a bit boring, thought maybe I should do full time music, but didn't have the guts to do it and then did a PhD. So I ended up in that position. I kind of liked the PhD, I have to say. I did some cool research, but then fell in love with programming while doing so.

So I did some measurements and then did some simulations for these measurements. And why do these simulations? I discovered that I really, really love programming. And so after my PhD, it was clear to me that, okay, physics, I did this long enough without, like. Without having my true passion there somehow.

Although I love what I do. Yeah. But I felt like there was something else to do for me. And then there was the whole programming side that I really started to like. And simultaneously there was this whole AI trend going on somehow.

This was, I guess, in 2019 or something. There was already quite some movement in the back. Then it was called deep learning space, and now it's called AI. Right? So I got more and more into this topic and tried it with a normal job for a year, got also a bit bored by it.

And then end of 2022, I played around with stable diffusion. Stable diffusion had just come out basically three, four months ago, and there was a technique that people use stable diffusion for to generate animations. So basically wrapping the image to image, functionality of stable diffusion into a loop. And then you get image to image to image to image to image, and then you can get animations, and it's very trippy, weird, cool animations. And I just kind of played around with it on my gaming pc.

And actually it was, I think, the best use of my gaming pc back then. I didn't use it for much afterwards, but that was actually really cool to have the GPU at home. And then, I mean, this was, I wrote this in a Jupyter notebook in Python, and I was really impressed by the animations that I was able to get with it somehow. And back then there was no tool to create these types of animations. And so I thought it would be really cool to build a tool for that.

And so I started what I wanted to do since a long time, somehow build my own thing, even though I wouldn't have called it a business back then, really, it was more like a project.

And then launched in January last year, 2023. And since then it's on a constant. Constant, yeah, it's kicked off a really, really cool journey that is a lot of fun and keeps me busy. It sounds like you got super lucky in a way, that your first project, if it is your first project, took that kind of trajectory. But it also sounds like you are a person that just constantly explores things that they find interesting.

Arvid Kahl
I don't think it's very much surprising to see both of these things happen at the same time. That is amazing. That's very true. I mean, I did a lot of things also before. Somehow you're right.

Nikolaj Klemke
I explore. I do like to explore, and I think there's a lot of value in it. I became obsessed with astrophotography for a while. I became obsessed. I had a project where I had a camera on my balcony and filming the crows that came to visit us, and there was a Twitter mod that uploaded videos and stuff like that.

I think out of boredom with my job and my PhD, I always did things on the side, but now I kind of like, okay, let's try to find something that people actually could use. And I got totally lucky. That is funny. Yeah. Honestly, I very much relate to this.

Arvid Kahl
I got a collection of cameras and lenses for the exact same purpose. I was taking pictures of the stars and the birds in our backyard. Really? Yeah. I got one of these sports photo lenses, these extremely super long, super, you know, like, you can take pictures of things very far just for the birds.

Like for that thing alone, I spent like thousands of dollars on that stupid heads. That was not a smart choice, but it was a fun one. So I get the, the excitement of new projects. That is really cool. I'm super glad to see, actually, that you stuck it through like that.

You actually stuck with the project to a point where it's making that much revenue, like mid five figures. That is quite impressive. Honestly, I think a lot of indie hackers have trouble with like, actually sticking with these projects. So what is keeping you with this? What makes you want to continue working on this project instead of chasing another dream that you may have?

Nikolaj Klemke
Yeah, that's a cool question. So, I mean, in the beginning, it was really an obsession with the topic. Just, I thought, this is so cool to build something like that. I also had a lot of fun just building it, the programming side of things. And then I guess, so I had, very early on a hacker news post that was quite successful and also a Reddit post that was quite successful and that kind of kicked things off.

And then, like, I would have been stupid to stop doing it somehow because there was a constant interest in it. Actually. No, actually, that's not true. I had a point in March last year where it was a bit slow somehow, and the side got it. I felt I had hit a bit of a dead end.

But then I had a revelation that, okay, actually the product needs to look different. It needs to be more like a. I don't know if we want to talk about what the product actually is, but it's like a video generation tool, right? And back then it was very, very simplistic. It was also my first react project ever.

So I had no idea what I had done. But then I had an insight that it should actually look differently. It should look more like Adobe Premiere or something like this, like a proper video editor. And then I took it offline, wrote an apologetic email to all the subscribers and rebuilt it basically in seven intense weeks. Launched then and then since.

I think this is also what. So back then I had probably a point where I could have switched it off, but I still believed very much in the product somehow. And then the new redesign helped. Then I got some people really interested in the product who were also creating cool videos on it. And this is just the best thing, man.

I wake up and look through the videos. What did users create on the platform? It's like, wow, that's so cool. And now there's an active discord community and a lot of people, like power users who love the product. And it's very rewarding to do that, even though now I'm not coding so much anymore.

So this site somehow goes away a little bit. Yeah. There's so much in here. Like, I hear you have communities of people. I hear you're trying to kind of delegate work a little bit more.

Arvid Kahl
You also mentioned the pivot is very interesting, the way you did it, like, actually stopping the product to be able to focus on something new. There's so much interesting stuff. Let's try to get to all of this, because I think in each one of these choices that you made, there is a valuable lesson. Now, I kind of want to start with the one where you said, this is not the right product for the right people anymore. I have to do something about it.

Because it is a moment where you could just say, no, I'm done. I wanted to build this. It doesn't seem to work as well as I did. Let's do something completely different. But you chose to do something about the product, not just to throw the product away.

The epiphany that you had in that moment, that it needs to look different. I would like to drill into this because I wonder, does it have to do with the kind of customer that you actually wanted to reach with this product? Was there something? But where does the epiphany come from? What sourced this change of thinking there for you?

Nikolaj Klemke
Yeah, that's such a great question. I never really asked myself. I was traveling the world at that time with my girlfriend. We were in Colombia, Medellin, and I just actually, I built another product based on the same technology that failed. It was kind of avatar AI, but with videos.

I never. I don't know. I thought I would be. Would be a nice scheme to go viral, but it didn't. Indie hacking, it could have been right.

But also, that's also the point in indie hacking, right? You got to stick. Like, it won't. Like, with everything in life, also in music, like, if you do something and you just assume the word waited for you, this is not how it works. Right?

You need to, like, beat the drums. Yeah, I'm here. Here's the product. This is what you can use it for. And this just makes a way.

And this product didn't. Yeah, whatever. But I did this. It didn't work out also, because I wasn't. So.

I didn't believe so much in it. And then, I don't know, I thought, hmm, what else can I do? Would be cool to build renewable frames in a new way somehow. And then it just came to me. And long story short, I'm not 100% sure where the idea came from, to be honest.

It just, you know, ideas just come. And then it was also, I didn't really know what else to do. I like, or maybe that's also not true. I don't know. Avid isn't that the thing that is such an indie hacker problem.

Arvid Kahl
Like, we make these choices, and in retrospect, they make a lot of sense, or they don't. It depends on the outcome, I guess. But you never really have the time to even reflect where these choices come from. Like, every single day, this is a problem. Okay, I gotta fix this, I guess, and then, okay, the thing that was a problem four days ago is back.

Now you gotta fix it again. Like, we never really have time to reflect. Honestly, it would be really nice if there was just mandated therapy for eniackers, because we could benefit from just having somebody connect the dots and pull us out and pull us back in. That is something that I've personally been doing over the last couple of weeks. Just getting into therapy for everything, not just for business, but for many things beyond it, because it's just so much more helpful to have somebody very warmly and kindly listen to your things that just give you time to reflect on them.

Then in our community, where everybody's just motivated, let's do it, let's do it. The hustle, the grind, right? It's hard to. To find time to reflect. But I ask this question in particular, because I kind of expected something like this on your first indie hacker journey.

Everything is new. Everything is crazy. Everything is lucky. Everything is just an experiment along the way. And sometimes we have good reasons to do things, and sometimes we just do things because that's what we could potentially do.

And then it happens or it doesn't. So it's nice to hear that. There wasn't much reflection, but there was a moment where you just thought, I need to make a change, and that is enough for that. In particular, did this change in your product actually impact not just how many customers you got, or how many video frames you generated, but also who those customers were? Yes.

Nikolaj Klemke
Well, initially I think it was similar ones, but then very quickly, I niched down on smart people, told me I should niche down onto some. I think there's also something that your audience will appreciate, maybe. So I really. I bid the product with text to video for everybody. Why do I need a use case?

This is cool technology. But then smart people told me, it's going to be much easier to sell if you have a customer in mind, right? And there were people, all kinds of people, using this product. They were like people that wanted to visualize the dreams, musicians that wanted to make music videos, book authors that want to visualize stories and stuff like that. But then I picked the use case that I know best, which is music videos, right?

Because I did music in the past, which is also like, things came together somehow, and that helped a lot because now I had a customer's Persona, I could build features for these customers only. And then, of course, more and more musicians came in and appreciated the product. That is cool. I love this. I love the fact that your own musician history kind of pulled all of these things together.

Arvid Kahl
I think in a way, working with AI system probably is AI system such as stable diffusion and the many different things that you have to put into place for this to work. That is a very cerebral or very intellectual exercise to get these things right. Very logical. That to me sounds like you're physicist side, that the person that understands these complex things. But then you also had, obviously, the artistic side of you being a musician as well.

I love this. I love this kind of mix of two very opposing forces into a product that combines them both. That is really cool. And that in particular is an interesting field, like creating video for music. I'm thinking of Sora being the big video AI thing that happened.

And even this. What is the most recent thing? Sona AI? Is that the name of Suno? See, the names of these things, they are so confusingly similar that I mix them up already.

There's a lot of development in the generative fields beyond just the text medium of GPTBT and something. How do you deal with this? How do you deal with the speed of development in these fields? Yeah, it's absolutely crazy. And it's also the hardest, I guess it's one of the hardest aspects somehow, because there's so much movement in the space, and what's true today is probably not true in six months.

Nikolaj Klemke
And we don't even know how six months from here is going to look like you had an episode about that with this fast moving, and it's like, there's always a new shiny thing that one could implement, and it's really hard to do so, or to decide against it and see competitors doing it. You know, there's a new feature for stable diffusion, and one competitor of mine implements it. Do I also implement that? Should I? Or is this actually not really serving the customer Persona that I have?

You know, so my. How I deal with it is I have. I try to formulate a role. Like, I try to formulate a vision for what this product should be. It should be a nice tool for musicians that want to dig into the technology a little bit to create these types of trippy animations.

And I think this helps a little bit because it puts you like, okay, does this really, does this new feature actually help these people or not? And this is how I try to deal with it. But of course. Is this still good in one year from now? I have no idea.

Arvid Kahl
Well, I hope that musicians are still going to be around one year from now, right? You kind of have to think about your market. Is your market going to be completely replaced by AI? I certainly don't think so. I hope with artists, at least they will have the little, always the resistance to technology that they always had and keep that.

But it is an interesting point. It's your ideal customer Persona today. Even gonna be around in a couple years in this. In this field. Very interesting.

Do you think, what do you think about this? Like, what is your perspective on the viability of being a full time musician over the last couple. Over the next couple of years? Wow. I just had a discussion this morning about this, actually.

Nikolaj Klemke
So, I mean, there's so much so. No, there will always be. I think I deeply believe there will always be artists and musicians and actors and these type of people, because somebody said this, right? Chess. Chess computers are better than the greatest chess grandmaster.

But anyway, still, people watch chess, people playing against each other. We want to connect to humans. But of course, there's also a lot of occasions where you just put on a Spotify playlist, lo fi beats or whatever, and it runs in the background and you actually don't care if it's made by a human or not. So in these cases, I guess, yeah, there will be some disruption happening. I see it also from the other side, though.

I have also a lot of people that are no musicians who make their own music with Suno AI now and make music videos for these songs. Like, this is a completely new customer Persona that also didn't exist before, but that's. Right. Yeah. You're literally enabling people to do things that they could never have done before this technology existed, which is cool about AI tools, right?

Arvid Kahl
Not only are you serving the existing market to do things better, you're also creating whole new markets. Even just in deploying the tools for these jobs. That's kind of nice in a way, right? You're facilitating somebody's career into music. In a way.

Or into, I don't know, filmography for music, maybe that's the first step, and then they buy a camera, and then they try to make these things themselves in the real world or whatever, right? Like, you could argue that you are allowing people to get into an industry with this. That is a very interesting field, and it's a very interesting observation that you're serving a group of people that hopefully will never die out, and you're facilitating something for new artists as well. Are you ever going to go beyond artists? We talked about this niching because it's a nice way to scope your business and scope what features need to be built and whatnot.

But do you see that there might be a ceiling for this at some point, and you need to go beyond that? Yeah, great question. Avid. Certainly there's a ceiling. I have no idea where it is.

Nikolaj Klemke
With every day where the revenue is the same as the month before, I always think, okay, I hit the ceiling. Like, you know, like it's this constant journey, too obsessed with the stripe dashboard. So it might be here, it might be at four times the revenue. I don't know.

And of course, there's a lot of products around the same technology. One could build for a different type of customer. So that is certainly something I'm thinking about. But for now, I still have a backlog so big for exactly these products that I would like to get around to. Yeah, and then there's another ceiling.

Arvid Kahl
And I think we should definitely talk not just about what the industry is doing, but what you are doing and how much capacity you have to do the work. You're now at a point, I think, where hiring people makes a lot of sense. Right. How are you going about this? I would assume right now you're kind of at a solopreneur stage still, or do you already have?

Nikolaj Klemke
I actually started, so actually in October last year, 2023, I started hiring people. I was kind of at the point where I thought, okay, I can try to ride this wave as long as I can, and then most likely burn out. Honestly, I mean, you talk about this a lot also, or I try to play this game now and try to make this an actual company. And so I started doing that in October. I hired customer support first.

Best decision ever. And I hired also a community in social media, but then also hired now front end developer, and there's going to be two more developers joining and stuff. And. Yeah, so I'm above that. I'm beyond that point.

Trying to build a team, trying to scale a team, running into completely new problems I never had in my life. Also, like how to manifest a culture. Yeah, it's.

I don't know, it's really something that occupies me at the moment, because once you hire people, you have people that maybe don't do their job properly or they do something else that you wanted, but they also do great work better than you could ever have done. But also you're in problems. Like I'm hiring, I tried to hire like a cloud engineer or something, right? And I never worked in the cloud, I never worked in the software company. So I don't even know, like partly I don't even know what the jobs even are called.

You know what I mean? I don't even know what I'm looking for. And then how do I assess the technical requirements? Like how do I assess the technical capability of these people, right? I mean, it's hard.

Sometimes I wish I had a co founder for this kind of stuff also. But it's also cool. I'm learning so much. It's incredible, right? Yeah.

Arvid Kahl
And for somebody who loves to learn new things and figure things out as they do it, I think that's the perfectly fine way to do it. But it is stressful. I very much, I feel that like from my own experience, particularly the jump from technical to non technical or like from technical to technical plus non technical, maybe that's the better phrase, right? That is like management is hard, understanding human beings is hard. I think computers and maybe even physics in many ways, right?

It's fundamental laws that work like that all the time, right? If something is weird, it's probably quantum physics, but everything else is fairly stable and reliable. And humans are not. Humans are the exact, humans are the quarks and the string theory things, right? That's what humans are.

You never really know. But I get that. I get that building a culture in the company, building a culture also of communication, not just whatever ping pong tables or whatever culture may mean to some people. Just building a process among people that is so complicated. And if you don't have anybody who did this before, you just have to experiment the same way.

Do you have any kind of particular issues that you've run into? Maybe some that you even challenges that have solved already that you can share with me. My newest bet is I'm trying to get people I'm hired hiring because that's additionally remote only company. It's even harder to do hiring, right? That's right.

Nikolaj Klemke
So now I'm trying to go for motivation instead of hard skills, because my assumption is hard skills people can learn, but soft skills maybe not so much, right? So I'm trying to get people who want, really want to work on this not only as a source of income, but who really like the idea of this. This is my working hypothesis. Now I can talk in one year again if this is worked out or something, but so far, I mean, I'm really great. I'm really, I had a few mishires, I would say, but I'm overall, I'm very, very glad.

And these are not there anymore, but over with the team we are now. It's fucking fantastic. I love it. I mean, you work with people that just, that do the job. We had teamed together, we have calls together.

You know, we met on the conference also last two weeks ago in Las Vegas. So it's really nice. Yeah. Little, little team building conference. That's nice.

Arvid Kahl
So where did you find those people? One of the biggest things that I struggle with is, like, finding even just the locations to look for the right people to hire. How did you get. I mean, you, you have an advantage. You have a massive audience, right.

Nikolaj Klemke
So I think this is the best point, like ask. I found a couple of people via power users of mine, like, I made public that I'm looking for somebody, let's say, in customer support. And then the power user reached out and I know they will have my best interest somehow because they want the platform to become better. And they offered a really cool customer support person, Liz, who does an awesome job and saves my life in multiple ways. So that's a good source then.

I mean, I tried LinkedIn and that's tough. I did. I mean, our front end engineer comes from there. So that was also luckily successful. But there, it's much harder to assess because you don't know these people.

Yeah. So for that, it really helps to have an audience or to have a product that already has some users that like you. Yeah. Have you ever considered the, like the fractional CTO or the hack? The fractional, you know, like a hiring director or something?

Arvid Kahl
Like just hiring somebody out for a couple hours a month or a week to work on these things. Has that ever crossed your mind? I mean, yeah, I worked with recruiters, let's say, so far, not really successfully. Those are also very expensive. Fractional?

Nikolaj Klemke
No, not. I mean, yeah, it would be cool to have, like, somebody for operate. What I sometimes think now is it would be cool to have somebody for operations more, you know, for like dealing, navigating, all these hirings and meetings and stuff like that. Yeah. Isn't it funny that you need.

But for bootstrappers. Yeah, but, but for bootstrappers, I mean, it's also always like, okay, do I hire an engineer or do I have somebody to help me hiring? I don't know. Probably an engineer is better, right? Yeah.

Arvid Kahl
Yeah. You have to make pretty tough choices when the budget is like, not in the hundreds or millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands or millions. Yeah. Of. I mean, that's just the challenge of building something new, right?

If you had a business that had been running for ten years and you had 400 people, doesn't really matter how. If you hire, like, the 401st as somebody to hire the 402nd, or you hire two people right there in your roles, that would make a big difference. But you're at a stage now, like, it sounds like you have, like, what is it, like, roughly five, four or five people. How many people are in the business right now? Yeah.

Nikolaj Klemke
Yeah. So we are, yeah. It depends a bit on how you count. Some people are like freelancers who have multiple. Multiple clients also, we have like four to six, depending on how you count.

Arvid Kahl
How big do you want it to be?

Nikolaj Klemke
As big as it needs to be, I would say not bigger. I would like to, like. I would like to have it, maybe. I don't know.

Arvid Kahl
That's a legitimate answer. That's as big as it needs to be. At the moment, there's nobody for back end. So I definitely need a backend engineer. Maybe two, but then maybe not five at the moment.

Nikolaj Klemke
You know what I mean? That would be a risk with also raising money. I thought also about raising money, maybe. But then, like, I need to hire, what, 20 people suddenly, and I don't even know. I already have now problems to find, like job positions, like to find the names for the roads.

I need to. Well, that's. I mean, there's no easy solution to any of this, but I mean, being surrounded by people who know about these things. Things. But also, you don't have to pay or that are not necessarily part of your business really helps.

Arvid Kahl
I'm thinking about peer groups, like founder peer groups, like mentors, just masterminds, these kind of things. It's hard to find the right people for this because you kind of want to be open and vulnerable with them, so you kind of have to trust them as well. And it's hard to trust people that are in a capitalist interest group. There's always kind of the idea of, well, can I use this information for my own? But most organized groups of peers, like the kind of mastermind groups that I think the Microconf community, they potentially put people together that are in the same MRR brackets, for example, in their community, and they have, like, a buy in.

You pay like $1,000 or depending on how much you make as a business, to even be able to join this kind of thing, to make sure that only people who will and want to afford this can be part of it. This is not sponsored. I'm just saying there are groups of people that. That come together and talk about these things and help each other because we all start from very different points. Right?

Nikolaj Klemke
I don't know if this is. If this. Sorry for interrupting. I'm very sorry. I don't know if this is too personal.

Are you in such a group? No. I've been holding out on this for. I don't know why. For the longest time I've been with potskin in particular.

Arvid Kahl
Now that I'm building this business, I'm like, I need to find people in this. This kind of field. Like, I need to talk to SaaS entrepreneurs. That would be kind of the business therapy side of things. Not just the personal therapy, but the actual, like, is, are you making sane business choices?

I don't need like a psychologist for that. I need a SAS founder for that. So I'm actively going to try and find these people. I'm going to be at the. Probably around the time that this comes out in two weeks from now is the microconf US conference in Atlanta.

I might be right there, right there, right now and try to find people to actually, you know, build this group with and join the group. So that is. That is what I'm gonna be doing. But I should have done this much earlier. It's one of these things, you know, as an indie hacker, you have 2000 things on your plate.

And this would be number 2001. So you kind of have it somewhere in the backlog. That's where this is. So, no, I don't. Other than the DM's that I have on Twitter, which is plentiful.

Like, I talk to a lot of people from my field, from the industry, all the time in DM's and on this podcast for that matter. That is kind of my public accountability group to get things going. But no, not yet. I mean, maybe that's already enough, right? Yeah, maybe.

It's kind of hard to talk about, and we talked about this leading into the call. It's kind of hard to talk about hard numbers in this field. Like how much money you make, exactly how many people you hired exactly for that role, like, how much funding did you get, exactly that. A lot of people make assumptions from those numbers that are detrimental to your productivity, detrimental to the truth, and you have to defend it and you have to correct them. And, you know, it doesn't really make much sense.

It just steals time. So it would be nice to have a group where you can privately communicate this and have actual feedback that is not done through a camera lens or, you know, not done from a stage, but actually from a couch and, you know, of peers. That's. That's how I see these groups. It's like you hang out with your buddies, it's just you don't talk sports, you talk SaaS.

That's kind of what that is. Next product. Yeah, right. Next product. That's the thing.

It probably is a lot of value in this, but it's also something that probably happens more natural than it can be kind of forced or organized in a way. But I hope that I find a good group. I hope you find a good group. Maybe we're going to end up in the same group. Who knows?

Maybe there's a group for Germans that are just trying to build remote businesses and hang out. I wouldn't be surprised. I bet there's for dutch people. So many dutch people already organized in these groups. It must be a jail group, too.

But yeah. Isn't it nice to think about how we are looking for connection here, both of us at this point, we just really want to help other people with the things we know, and we need help from other people with the things that they know. I kind of like this. It's nice that founders actually strive for that. And that's also something I find interesting about this whole founders journey somehow, because there's a lot of people that I think for you, it must be the same for any solo, or for every founder probably for that matter.

Nikolaj Klemke
Like early customers, they reach out to you, and actually I reached out to them also in many cases. And you meet a lot of amazing people and people that are very willing to help oftentimes also. Right. So now I'm doing what I was supposed to do probably my whole life, somehow, building a network. And now it's all over the world and with people, like minded people in a similar space or something, which is very powerful because as I said, you can find employees to that, right?

You can, I don't know, somebody might work at a magazine and you get a news article there or something. So I think this is also very valuable to speak to as many people as possible because you never know, like, who this person is going to be. Oh, interesting. Do you still do this personally? Do you talk to your customers a lot?

Not as much. I should do it more. So in the beginning, I sent with every sign, with every, I think, purchase. I had an automated email with a calendly link, and that was a massive hack. Honestly, I would recommend this to anybody because as I said, I had no idea of the use cases exactly.

And then I learned of all these people and what they were doing, of what they wanted to do and what they were missing also and what they loved. Now I'm not doing it as much, but I'm actually planning to do it again. Also, something you could hire for, right? Like that is something that somebody else could be doing on your part. Particularly if you find some power user from your tool that understands what it can do, but also understands that there might be other people out there with other purposes.

Arvid Kahl
I don't want to turn this into a consulting session. I just thought about this. If you have, that's the great thing about this network you just described the networking opportunities. They go beyond job searches or whatever, they can be connectors. People can connect you to the right people for the right reason.

And that's really, really powerful that you're just, you just have to tell somebody, hey, talk to these people and then all of a sudden something cool happens and you just facilitated it in a very simple way. It's that, that is what I think that's what business is like. Business is just helping people help themselves or helping people help other people in many ways. That's what a service is. And if you understand that and lean into this connection part of it.

Yeah, you're right, it's a hack. I do the same thing. I send out this email whenever somebody signs up calendar link in there. That is called I think like Podscan, early adopters, the best. That's just the URL because I know that people know who they are, they know the context in which they use the product.

So I got a lot of really interesting conversations from that and all over the place too, from people that actually need to use it because their boss told them to do a thing and they thought this would be a good tool, which is great because that's where budget is and from people who just have a cool idea and they think this might work with that idea. So there's this kind of explorational part too where people want to build a new business and maybe this is something cool that they could use along the way. There's a whole spectrum and if you never ask people about what they need it for, what that job to be done is, if you never ask this, you will never know what's out there. It is so crazy. Like the different kinds of use case for products like ours.

Nikolaj Klemke
I would even go so far like it is almost impossible to build a real business without that. So you really need to understand your customers because what you, I see, I have some friends who are building a product and they want to launch and then they're bidding feature after feature after feature before launch. They don't even know who's going to use the product. And that's really what you should not do, right. You should launch as early as possible with as just barely enough that it somehow kind of works and then speak to as many people as possible somehow and then learn and move the product there.

Arvid Kahl
Did you launch noraframes? Are you still launching it? Is it a constant launch? Is it going to be launched? Like, how is that working for you?

Nikolaj Klemke
I don't really believe in launches. I think Peter Levitz wrote this in his book. Like for us there's everyday, like, I mean, every day is a launch. I mean, now we are, we are building a bigger version of the product somehow. Probably there will be something like we probably try to get some like, oh, yeah, newer frames launched, the new whatever version, two of the video editor probably I would try to get something like that.

But also, I mean, the launch is also very scary because to get a launch, right, with a running customer base, it needs to work like, you know, you need to do some proper QA for that. So I think I will, I think my launches are very subtle. I find out who complains about what and then fix things and then make a tweet about it or whatever. Micro launching all the time. Right.

Arvid Kahl
That's really what it is. I prefer that too. I'm not a big fan. And it depends, like if you build a product that is so hyper viral and that is supposed to be like, it's supposed to just really be there for that moment and explode and then you move on to the next. I can see this, I can see that being good enough reason to just really put energy into the launch.

It's kind of adding kindling to a fire before you start it, right? Like putting the weird little chemical there, the fire ignition thing. And then it just goes up and then it just goes back down and then you move on to whatever next thing you do. But I think the business that you want to build and the business that most people want to build is a consistent resilient, like slowly maybe growing, but growing like a sustainable thing. And a sustainable thing doesn't need the big flame, right.

It just needs the constant simmering. Let's go to technical terms here. And it just needs to keep going. That's the idea. A launch breaks that up.

Interesting point. With the scalability issue of it, with the QA requirements of it. If you launch, it better be good. It better be, be done and ready. And when is our stuff ever done and ready?

Let's be honest, right? Software never is. So do you think inversions, is that like where you are at the stage of your business now that you know this is now a new version? Maybe push that a bit more? Or do you just see your software still as a continuously growing blob of everything?

Nikolaj Klemke
It's a continuous growing blob of everything. We will actually. So, I mean, we approach to production every other day with some new tiny features, something so like. No, I don't really think inversions. However, as I said, we are kind of revamping the whole video editor and that will be somewhat a new, we call this internally v two.

So yeah, I guess it's a new version. It might also be an expectation, right? Like some of your customers, like the bigger you get, the more enterprise it gets. That is their expectation of how software works too. Right?

So, but it's interesting because that's what I also found, what a lot of users appreciate. And this is our advantage as indie or solopreneur or like small bootstrap companies. Somebody says something in discord that they want, they're missing something or whatever. And I mean, I can bid this in a day and in many cases I have. And I mean, this is the greatest thing that could ever happen to a customer.

You request something and then later that day it's there. And of course for me it's also great because I learn, like if somebody requests something, that's awesome, right? We're learning, we're improving. So for quite kind of a while, I would say for a year or so, I was really trying to do these things in very high frequency to launch tiny micro features very quickly. And this is what people appreciated about neural frames also.

And like big, big teams cannot do that because they have sprints, they have sprint plannings, you know, they have like products, things they're working on. So in that case, it's very good to stand in. Did you, did you ever say no to any of these requests or how often? Most of them, I mean, yeah, most of them are not bidding, of course, like this. Yeah, but how do you make the choice?

You got to prioritize heavily. And it's the same with the new shiny features somehow, right? And that's also something I learned is like everything you build increases the complexity of the product. In the beginning, you don't feel it as much. But then you add thing after thing.

You feel it, right? So, yeah, it gets more complicated to build new things after a while. Yeah. And technical debt is really hard to pay back. If you have a really small team and you need to hire, they already have workload of the things you need to build right now that you don't get to.

Arvid Kahl
Like, it's even harder to write tests or to make sure that the code base is clean or that edge cases are properly dealt with. Oh, I know that feeling. I think that's the last like 15 years of my life is this constantly. No time for that. So it's just reality for us.

And how lucky are the few of us that get to a point where they do have the financial breathing room to hire enough people to deal with this kind of stuff, right. In many ways, that is the sign of a maturing business is that they can deal with the kind of the backlog of issues instead of having to constantly gasp for air and even building the things they need to stay afloat with. So that is really cool. Where's neoframes going? What are the next steps for the product for you?

Nikolaj Klemke
So we are, at the moment, there's all kinds of AI video tools. We are, however, unique in the sense that we offer the most control to create a certain type of animations in an audio reactive fashion. So you can upload a song and you get like the different components of the song extracted and then can make the animation reactive to whatever, the kick drum or the bass or whatever. And it feels a little bit like we call it the visual synthesizer.

Speaking about targeting musicians. Right. Visually synthesizer. And my goal is to build the best possible product for this type of very niche application, you know, so, like, it's, it's a bit for nerds that like to tinker. Synthesizers are also not for everybody, you know, like, it's for people that like to play with knobs and stuff.

So it gives the users a lot of control, but also, yeah, it gives use a lot of control, which, which has, means there's a certain learning curve connected to it, but also it gives a lot of control, so people can do whatever they want. And I, my vision is to just move further in this direction somehow and make it smoother. So since I built this myself and this was now my first and second react project, I mean, the front end is a bit clunky, and now the front end engineer works on making everything nicer. And I think this will help a lot also. Yeah, very cool.

Arvid Kahl
I love this. I love that you have a vision for like specifically who this is for. And there are so many engineering adjacent musicians that love, like synthesizers to me is a very, it's a field that I'm somewhat interested in. Like I, I'm not a musician per se, but I do enjoy playing around with it. So, you know, I have a couple synthesizers at home as well for that reason.

Just because the complexity of these machines is just so funny. It's just fun to be able to impact the signal in a way like this is really cool. So seeing you going into that direction, that also makes it absolutely clear who this is for and who it's not for. That is so important. I think that is really, really cool to know and to make that choice.

Too many people want their thing to be useful for everyone and they end up building something that nobody can really use. I'm glad to see that you're the opposite of this. You're building something that is specific. Yeah, that's so interesting, because now, of course, the question is, is there a way to expand this? Because there's a lot of people coming to the site who are disappointed also that it's too complex for them.

Nikolaj Klemke
Yeah. I also think about how to. Maybe there's a way to combine the two things somehow to have the complex side, but then also have an easy side site somehow, which is very hard to do from a UX perspective. But I would also like to implement that somehow. Wouldn't that be the best?

Right? Wouldn't that be nice? The holy grail of user interface and even product design is to make it accessible and expert level, even if you look at instruments. Let's stick with this. If you get a controller, like a MIDI controller for an Arturia something, one of these rather basic things, the essential package has a couple knobs and a couple sliders and a couple pads or whatever, and it's already complicated.

Arvid Kahl
It's not a keyboard, just a keyboard with keys. It's a keyboard with a lot of stuff and you don't really even know how to operate it. And then you get into the MK three, the bigger one, and all of a sudden you have 40 knobs, 40 things to twist around and you don't really know. This is scary. You don't even want to touch the instrument.

Like, it's not very accessible. It can do everything, but a beginner will be scared to even get started. I think if you go back to software businesses, if you looked at Adobe's product line, same problem. It's not easy to use Adobe Premiere Pro or even their audio product, like the audition product, these things are expert tools, and it's hard to use them as a beginner. There is no easy way to use this.

There's no easy mode for that. And I think that generally is a problem and hard to. Other than building two distinct products, I don't think it's an easy one to solve. Yeah, I have some ideas, but it's too small team at the moment to build. Challenge accepted, I guess.

Nikolaj Klemke
Yeah. And that is great, too. If you are so deep in your niche and you know the people in it and you know, like, how much you can actually throw at them and they won't run away. Right. They will still try it.

Arvid Kahl
That is valuable. That is cool. That is good to know. That allows you to build more things than somebody like Adobe who has to build for everybody at the same time. So being in the niche, probably a good idea, and I hope you get to build something that is more expansible over the time that you can put into other niches as well.

But right now, you have your hands full, as we say already with what you got. Right. So that's really cool. Yeah, I'm having a blast. Yeah, I can tell.

Nikolaj Klemke
It's kind of like a computer game, you know, you play and there's money coming in and there's money going out and. Okay, whatever. I mean, I love that. And I love that you're building a team, you're building a serious business, which, you know, that is. It's not just a project.

Arvid Kahl
It is something that really material, materially impacts the lives of others, which is really cool. I'm so glad you're talking to me about this. I think you are on a journey that a lot of people, a lot of indie entrepreneurs, indie hackers in the making, would like to be on. They are in some field that they are maybe a little bit disillusioned with a field that they were supposed to be in and now find themselves, like, looking over on the other side of the fence and you took the step. You taught yourself coding, you taught yourself the AI stuff, and you just built something and people really resonated with it.

I think that's an inspiring story, and I'm glad you're sharing it. Thank you so much. It's really cool. Thank you. Always a pleasure.

Let's maybe tell these people that are on hopefully that journey where they can find out more about yourself and your work and the business and all of that. Where should they go? Sure. Yeah. I mean, my main platform, I would say, is Twitter.

Nikolaj Klemke
Nikolaj Klemke. Just my first name, last name. There's of course also neuroframes. Neuroframes.com comma neuroframes YouTube channel, neoframes Twitter account, all these things. But I try to share things of my journey on my Twitter account and so I would encourage people to follow there if they're interested.

Arvid Kahl
Yes, I would encourage them just the same. Thank you so much for talking to me today, Nikolay. That was awesome. Thank you, Arvid, thank you. And that's it for today.

I will now briefly thank my sponsor, acquire.com. Imagine this, you're a founder who's built a really solid SaaS product. You acquired all those customers and everything is generating really consistent monthly recurring revenue. That's the dream of every SaaS founder. Right?

Problem is, you're not growing for whatever reason. Maybe it's lack of skill or lack of focus or apply in lack of interest. You don't know. You just feel stuck in your business, with your business. What should you do?

Well, the story that I would like to hear is that you buckled down, you reignited the fire, and you started working on the business, not just in the business. And all those things you did, like audience building and marketing and sales and outreach, they really helped you to go down this road. Six months down the road making all that money, you tripled your revenue and you have this hyper successful business. That is the dream. The reality, unfortunately, is not as simple as this.

And the situation that you might find yourself in is looking different for every single founder who is facing this crossroad. This problem is common, but it looks different every time. But what doesn't look different every time is the story that here just ends up being one of inaction and stagnation because the business becomes less and less valuable over time and then eventually completely worthless if you don't do anything. So if you find yourself here already at this point, or you think your story is likely headed down a similar road, I would consider a third option. And that is selling a business on acquire.com.

Because you capitalizing on the value of your time today is a pretty smart move. It's certainly better than not doing anything. And acquire.com is free to list. They've helped hundreds of founders already. Just go check it out at try dot acquire.com arvid, and see for yourself if this is the right option for you, your business at this time.

You might just want to wait a bit and see if it works out half a year from now or a year from now. Just check it out. It's always good to be in the know. Thank you for listening to the Bootstrap founder today. I really appreciate that you can find me on Twitter at avedkar a r v Eddie Kahl and you find my books and my twitter course tattoo.

If you want to support me and this show, please subscribe to my YouTube channel. Get the podcast in your podcast player of choice, whatever that might be. Do let me know. Would be interesting to see and leave a rating and a review by going to ratethispodcast.com founder. It really makes a big difference if you show up there because then this podcast shows up in other people's feeds and that's, I think, where we all would like it to be.

Just helping other people learn and see and understand new things. Any of this will help the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day and bye.

314: Nicolai Klemke - Switching Lanes: Physics PhD to Indie Hacker

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1. Introduction to Nicolai's Journey

2. Building the AI Tool

3. Business Growth and Customer Interaction

4. Future Directions and Reflections

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