CEOInterviews.AIHow Buy Me A Coffee grew to millions of users - Jijo Sunny

J

Joseph Sunny0:01

As makers, I think we have this moral obligation of sorts to sort of give it to the world, because otherwise nobody might actually do it, right?

H

Host0:08

Hello and welcome back to Indie Bites, the podcast serving stories of fellow indie hackers in 15 minutes or less. Today I'm joined by Joseph Sunny, who is the co-founder of Buy Me a Coffee, one of the most popular donation and membership platforms on the internet. They process tens of millions for creators and have built a 26-strong team since founding Buy Me a Coffee. Joseph has dabbled in all sorts of projects including a stint in YC for a podcasting app that has since been sunsetted. Now though, Joseph is back building a new product, Voice Notes, a voice-driven AI note-taking app in which he spent $20,000 on a domain for. But before we get into this chat, I would like to thank my sponsor Email Octopus, an email platform focused on affordability and ease of use with a very generous free plan. Head to emailoctopus.com or hit the link in the show notes. This was actually a one-hour recording where we talk about how Joseph founded his company with his brothers, how he made thousands of dollars as a teenager, how he got rejected from YC four times before getting in, and why he thinks a lot of AI apps are just fluff. I published a full conversation on the Indie Bites membership at indiebites.com/membership.

Let's get into it. GJ, welcome to the Pod. How are you doing?

J

Joseph Sunny1:34

Thanks, man. I'm good. How are you?

H

Host1:36

I'm very good, and this is a long time coming because we have been chatting for years and years since you did that podcasting app from YC. I've been a user of Buy Me a Coffee. So let's talk about your background. You grew up in India. I think there are quite a few indie hackers and tech founders that have grown up in India. When was your first experience of making money, startups, doing this indie thing?

J

Joseph Sunny2:00

So I started making money from ads, writing articles for other people. The first product was something called Ad Intel, which is an ad network which I built when I was 15 years old. It was in 2010. It lasted for like six months, man. I had to shut it down after six months because I spent all the money that I made from selling these ebooks on the startup and it wasn't working and I had to shut it down. And then I didn't even use my computer for like an entire year or something.

H

Host2:26

And where in the timeline does Buy Me a Coffee come in? Because this is the thing that a lot of people know you for. It's such a great product. Now where did that come and what was the initial idea for it?

J

Joseph Sunny2:37

So I was in the UK and I used my money which I was supposed to pay for rent to buy this domain, buymeacoffee.com, right? I think it was like 1,600 or something, man. But it was actually this one small module of this project I was doing called Publisher, and people were already using the term 'buy me a coffee' everywhere on blogs. So to see that the domain was available, I saw the full picture of how it should look like, how it should feel like, that every single transaction is someone showing gratitude, or everything comes from a place of love. That felt surreal for me to make that happen.

H

Host3:13

So I did not know that you spent 1,600 bucks on a domain. Did you buy this domain before you built the product?

J

Joseph Sunny3:21

Obviously that's the way it should be, right?

H

Host3:24

I know, but people buy $10 domains, not 1,600. I'm just joking. I'm just joking. I don't know if I would even recommend, but that's I guess how...

J

Joseph Sunny3:30

I always did it, right? It gives you that push. You're down 2K, you might as well do it, right?

H

Host3:37

How did you grow it at the start? Because it's a commission-based model and you need quite a large amount of user adoption to make money from this, because the donation amounts are small and you're only taking a percentage of that amount. So what were you doing to get users in those early days, GJ?

J

Joseph Sunny3:55

We got really lucky with the launch. I mean, we almost immediately went viral, I think. So we had a really lucky launch on Product Hunt and on Hacker News. The product was so simple that people could try it in like a couple of taps. After we launched, we had thousands of creators using Buy Me a Coffee. And the thing about a product like Buy Me a Coffee is that the more users we have, they are actually sharing their links everywhere so that they can make money, which sort of results in your product actually growing with them. But we still made super low revenue, man. I mean, 5% is nothing. So you have to process millions every month to actually make any meaningful income to run a company. So it took some time.

H

Host4:36

Exactly right. So you can have a good launch and you can get thousands of users, but in order to make a 5% commission work and be successful, you've got to have more and more and more and keep new users going. And also your creators need to be successful enough to receive the donations. So what were the challenges there for you and how are you overcoming those? Or was it a case of you've got this set up, you're going to keep it running in the background, and you're going to sort of move on to other things?

J

Joseph Sunny5:07

I really don't know what I was thinking back then, but I really like the product. I just want to keep it running. It wasn't making enough money, so I was supporting it with my other money-making stuff that I was doing on the side. Really, that's the honest answer. But it took some time. It's not because I had a ton of patience, it's just because I didn't want to shut it down because people were loving the product. The people that I looked up to were using it as well and that was very inspiring. So I just want to keep it running.

H

Host5:35

Simple product, cheap to run, and it had a good amount of users, so there was no real reason to shut it down. What do you think of this multiple projects thing where you see lots of people starting lots of different things? Because this is kind of what you've done throughout your entrepreneurial career.

J

Joseph Sunny5:52

I don't know if I would recommend it, because you can only do one thing really well at a time. So if you're doing one thing then you are not giving your 100% to this other thing. But then again, I guess if you're a maker, right? Like let's say you are a designer who knows how to code and has some taste in good products, and you come across this problem that you really know, you have a clarity on what a solution would look like and you are energized by it and you want to just sort of do it, then why not just do it, right? Like what's stopping us from doing it? As makers, I think we have this moral obligation of sorts to sort of give it to the world, because otherwise nobody might actually do it, right?

H

Host6:34

I agree. I do think makers, if they have the talent to make, should put their products out into the world. But I think a lot of people do struggle with making money. And so if they're making ideas that consistently don't make economic sense, that's kind of hard. You do need to have your money driver at this point. What was driving your income? Because you're living in London, it's not cheap to live in London. Buy Me a Coffee is not making tons of money. Were you contracting?

J

Joseph Sunny7:01

We touched on this briefly before. All of my projects are super cheap to run. So bio.link, which is now used by over a million creators, do you know how much it costs to run? Like less than $3,000 a month. It has like three times the traffic of Buy Me a Coffee, but any logical person would have shut it down because it doesn't make a ton of money.

H

Host7:20

Can you give us a sense of the size of Buy Me a Coffee now? Because we've been talking about it as something that is really well known, that's been going for six, eight years at this point.

J

Joseph Sunny7:30

We process tens of millions of dollars and we don't share the exact numbers publicly, but yeah, it's doing well and it's supporting a really good team.

H

Host7:37

How big is your team?

J

Joseph Sunny7:40

26.

H

Host7:43

Wow. And what's the future look like for Buy Me a Coffee? Where do you take it?

J

Joseph Sunny7:45

Well, we want to build the best possible product that we can and the most beautiful thing for creators. We don't have any projections internally or some revenue targets or something like that. It is so fun working on Buy Me a Coffee because the first thing that I do when I wake up in the morning is going to check out the recent transactions on Buy Me a Coffee. And you would see these transactions in the last few seconds, and all of them with these very kind comments that makes my day, right? It's like this different kind of commerce that we are facilitating and we want to do more of that.

H

Host8:18

I love that. So no plans to sell it? I'm sure you've had offers and interest. You just want to carry on running it as it is.

J

Joseph Sunny8:25

Just, I didn't want to run it like the end of my life, right? Man, I don't want to retire.

H

Host8:29

Why don't you sell it and cash in?

J

Joseph Sunny8:31

If I enjoy doing something, why should we stop doing it, right? I mean, if you asked me like two years ago when I wouldn't have much money, I couldn't take a proper salary, then yes, 100%, I would just sort of sell it and sort of do something else. But now I can take a decent amount of salary, I enjoy doing it, why should I sell it?

H

Host8:48

Hey, you're quite right. You put me in my place there, GJ. The amount of people I speak to who have sold a product and they end up feeling a bit lost because the one thing that they had so much identity in has now gone. If you can get a massive exit, then sure, because then you can have a ton of money and go and start the same thing again or do something different. But right now it seems good that you're enjoying it and you also have the freedom to start new things, GJ, as you do, as we keep seeing you launch things. Most recently, voicenotes.com. This is an AI-powered note-taking app. But I've got to ask about the domain. We've spoken about domains. Voicenotes.com, was that an expensive one for you?

J

Joseph Sunny9:34

Yeah, it was. We had to use our money, right? It's not a Buy Me a Coffee company, so we had to use our own personal money. So it was 21K.

H

Host9:42

Okay, so why invest 21,000 in a domain, GJ? What were you thinking here?

J

Joseph Sunny9:50

It's a really cool domain, right? I would do it again, right? When I do a new project, I was like, I would sort of allocate X amount of money. Like for Voice Notes, I was thinking maybe, hey, we would spend 100K over the next two years. And domain is not just the site that you enter on the browser. It's also the real estate, but also the name of the product, really. So I thought it made sense to sort of allocate 20%.

H

Host10:17

So talk to me about Voice Notes. What is it? Why did you want to build it? And touch on that sort of troubling personal story that pushed you to build it.

J

Joseph Sunny10:25

So Voice Notes wasn't really an ambitious startup project idea that I had. It was something that my wife and I wanted to use and we decided to do it during a really tough period in our life. It was our first pregnancy and we sort of learned that we miscarried and we had a down few weeks. And so my brother and I had this idea of, the one thing that keeps Alicia occupied is sort of coding, so we thought if we can get her excited to build something, that would be the perfect distraction, really. And I had this idea for over a while that just like we have ChatGPT, we should have a ChatGPT for our personal lives, where we record stuff and we talk to it. Because I think our personal information is 100x more interesting than general public information. So I wanted to make it accessible and also wanted to get people to take notes effortlessly. So I had this idea for over a year and we designed a basic thing on Figma and shared it with Alicia. She wasn't very excited at first, but we got her excited and did a prototype in like a week, and then we knew it was so much fun to use.

H

Host12:11

It's interesting how something as challenging and personally disruptive as a miscarriage can, the way you can get out of that is being creative, building something as an engineer, but also building something that doesn't have much pressure. It's let's build something for fun, do what we want to build. Because when you're building features for Buy Me a Coffee, it is a job at the end of the day. You've got a lot of users, there is pressure there. But building something like Voice Notes where you can be creative and get really stuck into something without much consequence is quite freedom.

J

Joseph Sunny12:14

Was very different, yeah. Building Voice Notes, and I love note-taking. So my main set of tools are like Roam, Roam Research. Roam has this, I wouldn't call it entry barrier, but it doesn't fit most people. And I really wanted more people to take notes and I think that was one of the motivations to do Voice Notes, really, because Voice Notes makes it super easy for anyone to capture notes and go back to them. And that's the important bit. If you take a ton of notes and if you don't go back to them and use it, it's basically useless. And you won't take notes for a long time. But I've always figured out some way to enjoy the past notes and Roam makes it easy. And I think Voice Notes makes it easy because you can simply ask on your Voice Notes like, 'Hey, which was that restaurant that I mentioned that I really enjoyed going for breakfast?' And I think everyone should take notes, man.

H

Host12:59

Yeah, hey GJ, I'm on board with this. I love note-taking, but I never quite got into the Roam Research thing because I like taking down my notes, but I could never figure out how to resurface it. I always felt like you had to put in a lot of work to build a system that would enable that thing to resurface when you want. And I can see how Voice Notes sort of removes the barrier to a lot of that. Getting your phone out and typing, whereas we voice note people more often on WhatsApp if they've got a quick thought or a slightly longer thought that's going to take a while to tap out. But then how is your app going to resurface that? Is that where AI comes in? Is it a new way of being able to do it that I'm not quite understanding?

J

Joseph Sunny13:43

Yes, so AI has 100% complete context of whatever you wrote, so you can simply ask it things like, 'Hey, what made me upset last month?' or 'What made me happy last month?' But with Roam or any tool, I guess the tools really are just a medium. Just use whatever you want.

H

Host14:01

GJ, thank you so much for coming on and sharing the story of Buy Me a Coffee and some of the other products you started. I'll put you on the spot here. I was thinking through these years of building successful, kind of mass adoption products. Are there any things you've learned that you could give as advice to people coming in who want to start products like Buy Me a Coffee, bio.link, and now Voice Notes?

J

Joseph Sunny14:29

So most of my projects didn't succeed, so I just want to start with that. I tried a bunch of things that failed. I have more failed projects than the ones that succeeded. And even the ones that you would call success, bio.link is technically a failure in the economic sense of it, right? Doesn't make a ton of money. So the only thing that made any actual money is Buy Me a Coffee. I think having a breadth of experience in a ton of stuff helps. And I would say we over-romanticize tech founders and sort of underappreciate design-led companies. And I really hope to see more beautiful products in the world. And we as a team believe that everything starts and ends with the design. So everything starts with writing something down and designing a basic wireframe and having that clear picture before you even start of what the end would look like, and then sort of building it. And then having that sense of, yeah, this is not too bad to share. Again, a design sense really helps. So yeah, spend more time on Figma, I guess.

H

Host15:29

So what I'm sort of getting from this is design and simplicity are really important for you, because if you look at all the products you've done, even the ones that you've sunsetted look really good and they're simple. A lot of them have some sort of product-led growth mechanism, some sort of viral mechanism built into them, and a good domain.

J

Joseph Sunny15:53

Exactly right, yeah.

H

Host15:56

Exactly. I end the episode on three recommendations: a book, a podcast, and an indie hacker.

J

Joseph Sunny16:02

Book: this book called Friendly Ambitious Nerd. Podcast: I really enjoy Dithering by the writer of Stratechery, Ben Thompson, and John Gruber. And indie hacker, I would say Danny Postma of Hotpot. You recently met, he was nice, yeah.

H

Host16:20

GJ, thank you so much for joining me on this episode of Indie Bites.

J

Joseph Sunny16:22

Oh, thanks for having me, man. I appreciate it.

H

Host16:25

Thank you for listening to this episode of Indie Bites. Don't forget you can get access to the full conversation on the Indie Bites membership by hitting the link in the show notes. And a thank you again to my sponsor Email Octopus for making the show happen. That's all from me. See you in the next episode.