Grief & Pizza

Ben: 00:02

You're listening to Grief and Pizza, a podcast exploring the highs and lows at the intersection of business and emotional well-being. In today's conversation, spoke with Alex Hillman, a cofounding member of Indy Hall, which is one of the first co working spaces in The United States. Together, we discussed the importance of community building, relationships, and iterative learning in entrepreneurship.

Marie: 00:21

Alex, I've I've followed your work again, like, over a decade, so I feel like I kind of knew you through the 30x500 universe and I bought your tiny MBA book. I didn't even know about the sort of co working side of things. I sort of always saw you as like internet product creator. For anyone that doesn't know you, maybe you could walk us through what some of these milestones of your internet businesses and how you got to Indy Hall today, even how your time is divided amongst these different initiatives. Maybe you could walk us through your journey.

Alex: 00:51

Totally. That last one, that might be the entire rest of the conversation. How do you run multi I would say like, don't is the advice. But there's a lot to talk about there. So yes, I'm so excited to talk to you too.

Alex: 01:06

Is going be great. Timeline wise, I'll give you the speed run. So mid 2000s, I get an agency job while I'm still in college learning how to make things on the internet. And I was like, this is definitely what I want to do. And then I realized that working for an agency is the worst version of it.

Alex: 01:27

So I got out of my own to be a freelancer, building websites and stuff like that. And I loved everything about it that I feel like draws us to this stuff. The flexibility, the autonomy. I get to choose who I work with and when I work and all those kinds of things. But I really missed having coworkers.

Alex: 01:46

I was super lucky to have an agency job where I actually liked my coworkers. And then I had an agency job where I really hated my coworkers and some of them were the same coworkers. So proof that the environment and leadership matters right. With the good version, it was having people who you could go to when you had a question or knew that you could just watch whatever they were doing and learn something. So it was like a lot of knowledge exchange and people actually looked after each other, which is not true in every job.

Alex: 02:15

So seeking that out is what led me to try to find a community of other self employed freelancers and entrepreneurs in Philadelphia. This is 02/2006, '2 thousand and '7. There's no meetup.com. Twitter was brand spanking new. And so even that era of social media was very emergent.

Alex: 02:38

It was just not easy to find people who wanted an alternative to a day job, whatever it is, all these things that we've done. And as I slowly met those people one by one in Philadelphia, eventually I started introducing them to each other. That led to us hanging out more, doing pop up events, pop up coworking in borrowed spaces, and eventually somebody saying, what if we had a place to do this anytime we wanted it to? And that led to us launching one of the first coworking spaces, not just in America, but in the world. It was the first in Philadelphia, One of the first dozen or so places to use that term to describe what we were doing in The States and around the world, which meant like figuring out a membership model for a business that up to that point hadn't really existed and all these other things.

Alex: 03:27

At that point I had this really interesting inflection point where I was spending more time working on sort of community building and business side of Indy Hall and less time as a web developer. And those skills atrophy quickly and the world changes around you really quickly. And I saw myself kind of slipping behind. And I said, am I going to stay a really good web developer or am I going to become a really good business person and community builder? And I decided the latter.

Alex: 03:53

And the rest of that in Andy Hall is history. And then a couple of years later, met my business partner and my close friend Amy Hoy. And we started trading notes about the ways that I started Andy Hall and she had started her software business with her husband and realized that the common theme between them was building relationships and trust through community and ecosystem and sharing and teaching and trading knowledge and all those things. And that made us that on day one where we had a thing, we knew it's what they wanted and we knew they were willing to pay for it. And they had some stake in it because they helped us get to that point.

Alex: 04:34

And that led to Amy and I teaming up to share that knowledge in what would eventually become 30x500, stacking the bricks, tiny MBA, and all of those things. That's kind of how I feel like it's one of those histories that only makes sense in reverse. That was not like a plan or a roadmap. But I look back and I go, Oh, each of these things definitely left me like a bridge to the next one.

Ben: 04:59

That's really interesting because I would have just looking at your body of work, I would have assumed it was the other way around

Marie: 05:05

that Same.

Ben: 05:05

Really? The coworking stuff kinda like came out of all this collaborative stuff. But like it's really interesting that that's like the community and the development of the community is essentially the starting point for all of these other amazing things. And I guess that's your manifesto, if you will. You've got this 10 ks independence manifesto, the idea that if we get the right people in the right place that we can actually drive forwards and build businesses out of these communities versus trying to build communities around a business, so to speak.

Alex: 05:38

That's absolutely right. And it's really, I think, an important reframing. I think the thread through all of it is people and relationships have always been not just the technique or the tactic, but the reason to be. It's what gets me up in the morning. It's what I figured out I was really good at.

Alex: 06:00

And what I also figured out is a lot of people benefit from. So the invisible labor of community building in a lot of ways is very similar to a lot of the other kinds of invisible labor that goes into the relational sides of business or collaboration or any of those things. But by getting good at that, one, I was telling people like, I have a couple very small number of tricks that I'm just really, really good at. And that's really what's I think at the center of it.

Marie: 06:32

That makes so much sense to me because I think of you as just such a prolific marketer. Like all of your ideas just have legs and it feels like any of your ideas, they occupy this mindshare. I've just always thought of you as this really powerful marketer, but it makes sense that at the end of the day, it's all about relationships and people and helping people find what they're looking for. Yeah, it just makes so much sense to me that that's your gift.

Alex: 06:56

I mean, enormous compliment, genuinely. Thank you. But you're also super right. I don't know, there's something, again, whole other conversation we had about work and identities. And the idea I've never had marketer as a title and I've never sought marketer as a title.

Alex: 07:16

And I know that I'm a good communicator. I think that's a skill that I've worked really hard to hone. And then I kind of jockey that up against the hits. And I mean, to be fair, not everything's a hit. Hope that's crystal clear.

Alex: 07:33

But the things that are hits, I think aren't hits by accident. And it's because they come from And people will say, Where did that idea come from? And I go, Not me. I just paid real close attention for a while and figured out a pattern. And then before going all in on it, how do you make sure that what I'm reading is correct, is accurate, and then evolve from there?

Alex: 07:56

And then by the time you're doing what I think I don't know, the concrete parts of marketing. When I think of marketing, what are the acts of marketing, so to speak? That's the stuff that to me feels natural because I'm not trying to back into some persuasive technique or something like that. And actually one of the really interesting parts is all the stuff that Amy and I had to then figure out how to teach in a lot of ways was reverse engineering those subtle instincts and going, all right, what's obvious to me or you or both of us that we just do it that way because it's the only obvious way? And it's not enough to tell people, We'll do it my way and it works.

Alex: 08:35

But sort of unpacking and understanding those pieces and teaching people that understanding layer A is a higher bar to clear when it comes to being a teacher, but the effects have been profound. And so I feel like apart from the community building and communication stuff, the work with Amy, I mean, I feel like I benefited from Amy's passion for learning design and being a phenomenal educator and just made me want to level up and be really awesome too. Of things that I consider my craft, designing the experience around learning or communicating or whatever it is, or just being together. That's the art for me.

Marie: 09:23

And can you share a little bit more about what that process was like to even begin a new collaboration together, going through this reverse engineering, figure out what that shared pool of knowledge is and even figuring out what the product was going to be or what this educational thing looked like? I'd love to hear more about how that grew and became a thing.

Alex: 09:42

It's such a fun story because the starting point looks so different from what people think of as the end point. So for us, most people know us for 38 by 500. I was a couple of days ago in prep, so to speak. I was like, Oh, you guys talked to Joel back in November. And so Joel Hooks was an alumni and a friend.

Alex: 10:07

Joel wasn't there at the very beginning, but I feel like Joel was one of the few people that's been a part of this for the whole arc for them to see all the evolution. The very first version before I even got involved was Amy offering effectively a paid conference call, old school dial in style, where she's like, For the last year on Fridays, I've been working with my husband and a couple of friends to launch a software product. We had paying customers on day one. Anybody want to learn how we did it for $100 you can show up and I'm just going to monologue for three hours because I'm Amy Ahoy and I can do that. And she did and nine people signed up.

Alex: 10:55

And at the end of those three hours, the overwhelming response was, This is so much more useful than all the other stuff that I'm seeing on blogs and whatever.

Ben: 11:04

And

Alex: 11:05

again, era we're talking here is February. And so early on the curve of the mid to late 2000s venture capital tech bubble, I mean, it was not a bubble yet, but it was always a bubble. And people were hopping from full time job they hated to a venture funded startup they hated back. Just hearing something that was in between to us seemed obvious, but for them was revolutionary in a lot of ways in their own words. And so Amy came back from that and said, The thing that's obvious to us, people are really hungry for.

Alex: 11:46

And actually I was going to spend Christmas in Vienna with her and Thomas. I think it was my first time in Vienna with them. And at some point during that trip, we decided to pull out the Post it notes in old school Kanban style layout. What would somebody need to know in order to launch a product so that on day one they had paying customers? Just kind of work backwards from that objective and what are all the things that people do wrong or that they waste time on or that they skip and avoid or they only do like once but not consistently and just kind of work backwards and build that out.

Alex: 12:23

And that became the very first version of a course that if I remember it, we called Zero to Launch. And early, like some real garbage WordPress plugin courseware and everything about it was bad, but the pitch and the offer I think was such a breath of fresh air in that space of people launching things that they thought were good ideas. Lean Startup was still pretty early, but that validation concept of have an idea and then go out and beat people over the head with it until somebody says yes. That was the closest thing to evolution of what do I make and how do I make money from my things that I make. And so that breath of fresh air really, I don't know, drew folks to us and say like, this is a different style, this is a different approach.

Alex: 13:18

That course turned into an email drip course that we ran over Google Groups. I also don't recommend that. That turned into a two day bootcamp where the mission was let's take what we've been teaching as effectively like a semester long course. And what would it look like if you had to drop everything you couldn't teach in two six hour days? What are just the essentials to accomplish that same goal of on launch day you've got customers?

Alex: 13:48

And then from the recordings and experience of teaching that for a few years that led to the sort of off the shelf Courseware driven videos, exercises, all those kinds of things that we have and at this point is almost ten years old. The latest version of that story is ten years old to show how long we've been doing this. But I feel like the biggest inflection point that changed the direction of this is teaching people what we know to we're going to dedicate ourselves to this craft was realizing that when we told people, Hey, you're going to go out and you're going to find people on the internet, in communities, in chat rooms, in subreddits, you're going to watch what they're talking about. And you're going to take some notes and you're going to bring them back, and then we're going to show you how to translate those notes, synthesize those notes into insights about what the problems are, what you should make, what you should create for content, all those things, people would come back and not do it. And we realized, oh, these well educated, talented people, it's either been so long that they were in college or they weren't a very good student in college.

Alex: 14:59

And so note taking wasn't a skill that they actively used and applied to their work. And so one of the first big changes in 30x500 was teaching people how to take notes. And believe it or not, teaching people how to notes is what evolved into the Sales Safari technique that is sort of the cornerstone of 3zero fifty five and so much of what we teach where it's sort of the intersection of not just how to take notes, but what to look for, how to structure those notes and all of those kinds of things so that when you go sit down to do the synthesis step, your notes are ready for you. But if you told me going into you're going teach people how to start businesses that the first big thing you're going have to figure out how to do is teach them that taking notes is important and worth it and you should do it. And we're going to give you a step by step process for how to do it.

Alex: 15:48

Even now it sounds wild to say that out loud, but it's absolutely true. And then adding in layers of Kathy Sierra level learning design and working with a research assistant to cull through all the chat transcripts from the two day bootcamp version to say, where do people succeed and where do they struggle and how do we account for that in the prerecorded material? How do we make them feel like whatever they're feeling positive or negative is anticipated so they don't freak out and run away? It's stuff that we only would have even considered trying, let alone invest so heavily in if we hadn't watched people live go through all those permutations of instruction live, semi live, so on and so forth.

Ben: 16:36

Yeah. It feels like a lesson that we learn over and over again with every new product that we create. We have a similar situation in our program, and we had a SaaS before this that we ran that was an online course platform. And we we figured out that the core challenge that people had was not signing up and not the technical side of things because we we provide the solution for that, but it was actually the creating the course part of it. So we realized that we actually had to be a content company in order to make that product successful, and that wasn't, like, what we were interested in doing.

Ben: 17:11

And so we, like, shuttered it. And the same thing happened with Notion Mastery where you've got all the technical know how, but it turns out that people actually struggle with the adaptive challenges, which is how to how to understand what kind of workload they have on the go. And so we had to sort of reverse engineer that process and we've made a whole new little mini course that sits in front of our course now that has you go through this capacity planning challenge to actually understand what it is that's causing you to be have, like, productivity dysfunction. It's not the it's not the task tracking software. That's that's

Marie: 17:43

It's the challenge before the challenge.

Alex: 17:45

That's right.

Ben: 17:46

Yeah. Yeah. So so the it sounds like though you've had this sort of iterative process through the whole journey where it's like, oh, what's the real challenge here? Okay. We figured that out.

Ben: 17:55

And then what's the real challenge there? So you kind of just are, like, looping back on these cycles of iteration and and each new thing, presents a new adaptive challenge that has to be surmounted.

Alex: 18:05

A %. And I imagine this is similar and maybe even shows up more in your work because of the nature of the way people use Notion and even manage tasks and workflows and stuff like that, is the habit side of things. And that was another layer. It's like BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits program we made pretty early on. We went from, Hey, you should do this five day course.

Alex: 18:32

It'll help you to, You should actually do the five day course even if it feels silly. And there are alumni that we have who tell us that the most valuable they think they got out of 3,500 was us basically making them take a free course they could have signed up for otherwise because it had impact not just on this business or professional goal they had, but in other areas of their life where they did not have the skills to establish a new habit or it had been so long since they did it that they would internalize the early discomfort or failings as a problem with them rather than just being a newbie.

Marie: 19:09

I absolutely believe that for sure. I imagine there's something really magical about your sort of educating and sharing this with your people and then they're reporting back. So then you guys as the educators are even learning from what people are reporting back and you're able to be like, Here's what we're seeing works, here's what doesn't work. You're kind of able to see all those trends and you just keep leveling up your own expertise as an educator. I imagine as someone who's running coworking spaces and really values relationships, I imagine that just must have been a really valuable part of the whole experience.

Marie: 19:46

You're always learning and you're always giving back to your community. There's this just beautiful cycle.

Alex: 19:50

Yeah. Again, think of it as reps. Again, whether we're talking about the learning side of 3,500 or, at this point, the thousands of people that have been a part of Indy Hall, you go from that early version where everything feels like every move needs to be thought out to the point where you slowly develop some heuristics. And it's like the difference between the first time you get on a bike to the fifth time you get on a bike to the tenth time you get on a bike. An analogy I use with our students all the time is learning to play an instrument or drive a car.

Alex: 20:26

If you actually had to think about all the things you do every time you get in a car, you would never get in a car again. But we do it long enough that the vast majority of those micro decisions and micro movements become what we think of as second nature for better and for worse. But people forget that we have the capacity to do that in other areas of our life, in new skills and other things that don't necessarily feel skill based. And I think for a lot of people, there's a resistance to the idea of business and marketing being a skill based thing. I think that that's just not true.

Alex: 21:02

It's a learnable thing like so many others.

Marie: 21:05

Another question I have about that is as you're learning from your people and you're making these iterations, I'm not sure what format 30x500 was if it was these launches and everyone's going through things at the same time. How much are the people that are in your courses seeing your changes in real time and being like, Oh, now I see that that content has changed or now they're recommending this? Because I imagine that's modeling for them that their first product doesn't have to be perfect. You're just getting a version out there and learning and then you can iterate. So how much are you letting the people in on this iteration process?

Alex: 21:40

That's such a good observation. And I think especially in the early days where things were evolving, sometimes between iterations and launches. When we were running that semester long version that we did through Google Groups, I think there was a time where over the course of a year we wrote all the material, then we rewrote it, but we literally reversed it. We just changed the order, but they required actual rewriting and then somehow turned it inside out. We're like, Oh, the stuff in the middle is actually what needs to be Crazy stuff like that.

Alex: 22:17

And a thing that we committed to early on because we were figuring this out as we went and felt like every version was improving, not just a little bit, but significantly, was every There was infinite retakes of the course. So even if there was a live component, after the first one, was basically always a mix of people that were signing up to take it for the first time, as well as returning students. And I think that that was an accident to do with more of a promise of like, this is going to get better as we learn. I think the accidental outcome that we wouldn't have planned for is the fact that people seeing other people return to the material, to your point, establishes that returning to this material is something that is worth doing and that people approach it in different timelines and things like that. I think one of the hardest things is when we were running it as more cohort Like right now we do enrollment in cohorts, but people are not Because it's not as interactive with us live, they don't get to see as much of the active work.

Alex: 23:25

And a thing that is still wild to me, but I think is interesting and makes sense is that people would watch other people work at different paces. And if they felt like they were behind, which was always so relative, it could be like, I'm one step behind to I'm 10 steps behind to I just signed up and got busy and now I'm half the semester behind, that would shut people down. So like, Oh, there's never any way to catch up. And there was always this comparison between each other. In the learning environment, parts stacking the bricks and 3,500, something we've always been mindful of is when you're putting people in the learning experience together, how do you make sure that they are focused on their own work and they're not using other people's progress as a distraction or an excuse is a weird tricky thing to counter with all the benefits of the potential for momentum in a cohort based course.

Alex: 24:23

But in all of those versions, I think people seeing that evolution. And when we did the transition from live cohorts in the bootcamp to the version we have right now, and we still run this to this day, anyone who took any version of the course in the past can come back. At this point, it's not for free because the course has been overhauled so dramatically, but it's like a 75% discount. Basically make it clear, you want to be back, we want to make it worth it to you to be back. The return rate of our alumni.

Alex: 24:57

And I think that might even be one of the most interesting things is people who took previous versions a long time ago, maybe applied it as some part of their work or their job, if not to create their own product. And now they're coming back and they're like, all right, I want to re up. And they go, Wow, this has evolved so much. You filled in so many Actually, when people say things like, You found the thing that made me stop the first time and you not only corrected it, but you called out why I would have stopped. Obviously, took what previously shut me down, you turned it into an opportunity to be seen and feel like, Oh, it's not just me.

Alex: 25:34

This was a problem for a lot of people and they actually found a solution for it, is kind of one of the things that Amy says all the time. And she talks about it mostly in the sales environment, but I think it's a good example of how we draw from the education, I don't know, design patterns into everything we do is good sales makes the person feel like they're being cradled through the experience. That somebody is there to anticipate their needs and to handhold them and say, You're good. You've got a question. I'm anticipating that question.

Alex: 26:04

Concierge style is very comforting and people respond really well to it. And I think most of the practice we got in that comes more from the education and community side than from the sales and marketing side, which is why I think it maybe feels different in part because it's authentic, but also because we got our practice in a different environment.

Marie: 26:24

Love it. I'm really curious, obviously in the beginning, this would have taken up quite a bit of your time as you guys are evolving the curriculum constantly. We mentioned this could be a whole other conversation around how we divide our time across all these different projects. Knowing that the course is still available today but it's not as sort of hands on, what does the commitment look like today and where does your time divvy up across all of these different projects? And what are the different commitments look like for you now?

Alex: 26:53

Yeah. And it ebbs and flows over the years and over the time. And there's another factor in here, which is Amy has and manages not just one, but a whole constellation of chronic illnesses. And so we'll start now and then maybe talk about a couple of the other variations on the scenario. Right now, 30 by 500 gets probably the least of Actually, Stacking the Bricks as an ecosystem gets the least of my time and generates the majority of my income, which feels like a gift from past me and past us.

Alex: 27:30

Outside of the launches themselves, which right now and for the last, basically since 2019, so five years, those launches are kind of pre built, prepackaged. Seasonally, I update them, I rewrite them, not entirely, but go through and beyond updating dates. Like do we have new examples? Do we have new things that I can pull from our chat conversations and new case studies to fold in and things like that? But generally speaking, launches, might spend a week tuning up a launch for it to run for the two to two and a half weeks that it runs.

Alex: 28:09

And we do that once a quarter. So not a lot of time. Outside of that, the majority of the time on 30 by 500 is on our chat room student support. We make ourselves available as we can be on average fifteen to thirty minutes a day, I'd say. Not a whole lot.

Alex: 28:28

There's highs and lows. The big thing for 3,500 and I think how it got to that point was in part because we'd gone through all of those very high touch iterations to get to this point. And then in 2019, Amy was at the intersection of professional burnout, some health related burnout as well. And she's like, I need to take some time off. And up to that point, we had never reused a single launch email.

Alex: 28:51

We had written, couldn't tell you how many, it was a lot. And there were some bangers in there. And so she decided in December to take some time off. And I said, Cool, when we run our January launch, I'm gonna take a crack at doing greatest hits. I'm going to go back through some of our best performing launches and I'm going to think like I'm making a mixtape for someone that I love.

Alex: 29:18

How do I weave some of the best parts through, find the cohesive theme, and without completely writing a launch from scratch, what can I do? And it was our best performing launch revenue wise in history by like 50%. It wasn't like a small, it was enormous. And I was like- Were you shocked? So shocked.

Alex: 29:38

I couldn't believe it. And again, this is worth saying, Amy is very much the face of this business and has been from the start. And so for me to take mostly her writing and then apply this kind of editorial remix process to it and get something that performed even better, I was like, let me see if I can do it again. And so the next quarter I went through the archives and I put together a different mixtape, another banger. And I was like, all right, we're going to do this until I can't do it anymore.

Alex: 30:07

And so ended up creating, I think I've got like five or six core launches that model on themes related to specific pain points. There's the launch that's geared towards the person who's in a job that they like the work, but they can't stand their boss. And the boss is grinding them. So the motivation to start the thing on their own is the freedom to make their own decisions in their work. There's the one where it's like, I'm struggling with my income level.

Alex: 30:40

And if I could add just another 10 or 20 ks a year on the side, I can actually take my family on the vacation they deserve. And there's the ones that's like, I know how to make stuff, the stuff I make no one wants to buy. Or there's the, I know how to make stuff, but I know how to start but not finish. And so each of these is a slightly different core pain where the outcome is through the process based approach that we teach and the research based approach that we teach, any one of them solves. The product doesn't change.

Alex: 31:14

And I've been remixing those basically since 2019. This is currently 2025.

Marie: 31:19

And you do a lot of segmentation there, right? So you're not sending the same people the same sequences. Are you tailoring it based on which of those archetypes people are?

Alex: 31:28

So I'm going share a dirty little secret. And people assume that's true, especially because Brennan Dunn is a Star alum. We have that segmentation data. We do not use it. The whole list, the only segmentation that we currently do is a very, very rudimentary People who are explicitly on the waiting list for 30 by 100 get an opportunity to buy early at a slight discount, basically like capture our most motivated buyers and help them take action with a little bit of a discount.

Alex: 31:57

And then a couple weeks later, we run the full length launch to the entire listing. Basically, people get launched to twice in that window. That's a pattern we've been doing, again, since 2019. Again, candidly diminishing returns both in terms of repeat material with Amy only really getting involved in the business again in the last year. Our top of funnel is also so much weaker than it used to be.

Alex: 32:26

We were really riding the coattails of past work in terms of that inbound stuff. But until not even nine months ago, Amy was still really too sick to work. And when it was time for her to come back, putting her into product work where the feedback loop is the slowest, actually was kind of the wrong spot to be. And so while we both want to There's so much headroom to grow 35,000 again, it's so exciting to have my friend and my business partner back in action. In terms of best use of time right now, at least near term, we made this counterintuitive decision to do consulting work that was more about implementing the stuff that we teach for some of our friends, collaborators, people like Joel Hooks, alumni, as a way to kind of the confidence.

Alex: 33:23

When you've been out of things for a while, if you don't have that fast feedback loop, it's easy to kind of doubt your ability, do I still have it? And it's been really fun for both of us to get back in the saddle and then work with people like Joel as such a great example, who have done their own excellent job of implementing what they learned from us. They also trust us to come in and say, here's the opportunities and here's what we can do to help you do that better, has been rewarding in a way that I used to joke that the only reason I'd go back and do a consulting project was because it was interesting enough to catch my attention and that I would say yes to it because I needed a periodic reminder of why I don't do consulting work. And then I do three projects with Joel and more specifically with some of the folks that he works with like Matt Pocock and Kensey Dodds and these just incredible creators where we get to kind of wrap our magic around their magic and do something that We're adding to each other's skills in a way that I haven't experienced maybe since Amy and I teamed up in the first place.

Alex: 34:35

You know what I mean? And to rejuvenate our working relationship through that and to get her back into the groove and excited to work on our own independent stuff again, which is where she is now, Not a path that I necessarily would have seemed obvious, but it's worked super well and it's been a lot of fun. I guess at the end of the day, it's most awesome to just have my thinking partner back because we're both good at what we do, but the stuff we do together is so much better.

Marie: 35:09

It's like a multiplier. And it seems like you've gotten to the point now where you've just earned so much trust with your peers that you're getting to do consulting with people whose work you love and they love your work. So it's a totally different experience than sort of stranger coming in cold. Think Ben and I can agree that it's always better when we already know the person and we have a relationship together.

Alex: 35:31

Totally. Well, again, back to the beginning is like the thing that I the reason Indie Hall exists is because I was lucky enough to have a series of experiences that taught me that the relationships you have with the people that you work with matter more than the thing you're working on. And I've learned that to be true every time. If something is off, it's probably not the project's fault as something is off with the relationship. And if things are working well, it's probably not the idea.

Alex: 35:58

It's something to do with your relationship. Or maybe both. It's a cool chapter and I'm excited to see what we're able to There's a ton of people in this ecosystem, yourselves included, that I've gotten to watch as well and be like, I consider all these people potential collaborators. We could do so much cool stuff together. So in that way, it's fun to see the ecosystem that we can't take any credit for growing, but being early movers in and seeing just the caliber and quality of the people that have filled in the space behind us has been really, really amazing.

Alex: 36:35

So it's cool.

Marie: 36:36

Yeah, feel like so many of the masterminds that I was joining kind of early on in my career, the other participants had always been in 30x500, and they were just such awesome people. Even just by association, was like, Oh yeah, all the coolest people that I follow have done 30x500. You're hearing those like the pain safari and the sort of, I I don't if that was the phrase or whatever, but I feel like I'd hear these little terms that you guys had coined all the time and it just kind of seeped into my subconscious a little bit.

Alex: 37:06

It's really nice to hear. Mean, honestly, again, I think of the highest compliments in all of my work. People say that Indy Hall is such a beautiful space, and I go, Yeah, but the people are better. And the same thing with this is like, I'm proud of the work that we've done, but I'm so much prouder of the people who have learned from us. And whether they have out earned us, and we've got enough of those that I'm plenty proud of, but it's not even about the amount that they earned.

Alex: 37:36

It's the fact that people have taken what they learned from us and it's allowed them to embed themselves and or in some cases create entire new ecosystems and communities. I don't know. There's some kind of superpower of feeling like you're in rooms without being in those rooms. I like the way that one feels.

Marie: 37:56

That's super cool. One of the questions I have for you is around maybe some of the, I don't know, awkward missteps or failures. We've talked a lot about the success of 35,500 and what are just some of those really interesting lessons that you've learned along the way or things you would do differently, even the lessons learned from publishing a book or certain mediums that really have given you traction and others that haven't worked? I don't know, what are the big ones for you that have really stuck with you as part of your learning?

Alex: 38:24

I mean, the big one that comes to mind is there was a I don't remember exactly which it was one of the versions of 30 by May where there was a lot of writing involved. And I think it was while we were still running at the Google Group. And we had just run a launch and it was a pretty solid one. We had at that point, we were doing a lot of sell a launch before we do all the rewriting. And then we're doing the rewriting on the fly since it's being dripped out over time and all of that stress and pressure, you know what I'm talking about.

Alex: 38:56

And as we've discussed, I worked on a number of other projects. We've got Stack in the Bricks, I've got Andy Hall, and sometimes other consulting projects. And I had, in no complicated terms, overcommitted myself. And I was not holding up my end of the bargain. And I had to go to Amy at one point and be like, I fucked up.

Alex: 39:17

I can't contribute to this. And, like, I don't feel good about any of that. I'm not really sure what to do. And we had a productive conversation about that. And I ended up deciding to give her back my entire share of the finances from that launch because I was like, I'm not earning it.

Alex: 39:38

And actually she brought Brennan in. Think it was I think she did that launch on her own and then the subsequent one brought Brennan in to help run it. And then it was probably another year or so before things stabilized a bit for me. And I was like, If you'll have me, I'd like to be back. And the response was basically like, If you hadn't given the money back, it probably would be a no, but you did a thing that I don't think people normally do.

Alex: 40:05

It still ended up making the right call there, but that over I feel like even the stuff that we're going through right now where I feel most overwhelmed and overcommitted, I think the hard part is figuring out how to communicate to the person I've overcommitted to in a way where I'm going to blow this up right now and take responsibility for whatever mistake I made here in the hopes that if there's ever an opportunity to work together again, if I care enough about that, that's why I'm having this conversation so that we might work together again in the future. And I look for that a lot in the folks that come to us for collaboration, the people we work with, the other community builders work with on events and people other communities that call Lindy Hall home. Like, there's a how how you own your commitments that I feel like I've had to learn the hard way a bunch of times. And maybe the flip side of that is, like, I hold other people to an expectation or at least a desire that like, it's totally cool to make a mistake. Just don't let me be the last one to know.

Alex: 41:07

I feel like Amy and I have the most healthy version of a friend relationship at work. Whereas like, I have a newer business with my best friend from college who is so good and so smart and so talented. He's a sommelier. And so we've got a business in the wine industry. And it's in a lot of ways been the opposite where our working relationship has been really freaking hard.

Alex: 41:32

If I have to self analyze what are my own commitments to the pain that I'm feeling? How much of my pain am I responsible for here? He's made plenty of his own mistakes. And I think the biggest one is maybe giving him more rope than I would the average collaborator because we have such a long standing relationship versus being like, No, this is not okay. So much of the work being relational, I think there's a single right answer to any of those.

Alex: 42:03

I think there's just a small number of wrong answers. And the most common wrong answer is don't talk about it. It's like the most universal wrong answer is don't talk about it.

Marie: 42:12

It's such a gift when you find the right people. I think it's quite rare even to find the relationship that you found with Amy where you can be good friends and work together and be able to sort through conflict together. It's so rare to be able to do that. And so try and almost do that multiple times, you're like, Oh, this will be great with my other friend and this other friend. And you're like, Oh, wait.

Marie: 42:33

Different personalities bring out a different side of you, different communication. Running teams and working with people is hard. It's so hard.

Alex: 42:41

I also I mean, I haven't thought a whole lot about this other than just the general truth of mortality. Amy and I met when I was in my early to mid 20s and started working together then. Whereas Eric, my best friend that I met, actually, I was even younger, but we started working together at different age levels, maturity levels, experience levels, and stuff like that. And in some interesting ways, Amy and I started as unlikely peers and grew together as peers. Whereas I've got this other person that I have a very strong, deep peer relationship with, more than just peers, obviously, like one of my closest friends, but we didn't mature together professionally.

Alex: 43:29

And so there's all kinds of unspoken expectations and habits. I'm not speaking out of turn. This is nothing I haven't said to him. Him having come up in as a successful person in the service industry and restaurants and wine service, there's an inherent reactivity where being good at being reactive and doing whatever kind of disassociation you need to be in order to maintain that is a power move. And whether that's as a floor server or a manager or in his case these days as a consultant working with really high end restaurants or wine producers or some of his clients are extraordinarily wealthy people.

Alex: 44:13

There's this service end and reactivity that I think is just so deeply ingrained in his worldview and how he approaches all of his work that if things aren't on fire, there's nothing for him to be of service for, which is like this weird kind of Stockholm syndrome where I'm like, for most of my career, I've been trying to make it so that I have no deadlines. I want as little reactivity as possible. I want space to think. And if something shows up, I want time to process and make an intentional decision. And to have the contrast of those two, makes sense why those worldviews would frustrate the daylights out of each other because I'm trying to slow him down and he's just trying to put out whatever fires in front of him and he doesn't like it when I tell him, you don't get points for putting out the fire when you started the fire and stuff like that.

Alex: 45:09

And so those kinds of interactions, even when it's not your best friend, to your point, Marie, they're compatibility issues, but they're also, they require the meta skill of self awareness. And sometimes outside support, which it took me a really long time to convince him. Was like, a management coach would actually help you a ton. And it's not because you're an unskilled manager. You're very skilled at a certain kind of managing.

Alex: 45:37

Managing yourself and this kind of stuff, I think you would agree. If you were good at it, it wouldn't hurt so much.

Marie: 45:44

Oh, I love that. Okay. I'm curious too, have you had your own business coaches or influences or therapists? Even what structures do you have in place, whether with Amy, whether it's quarterly? I'm curious what are the ways that you underpin the relationship to make sure you guys are having those tough conversations?

Alex: 46:05

There's no one thing that I have been religiously consistent with, but I consider it a toolbox that I'll grab. And talk therapy, absolutely one of them. I have a coach that I started working with in 2020, initially specifically because of the 10,000 Independence Project that you brought up earlier, Ben, I was like, this is an organization that I think needs some If I follow my instincts, I'll create another Indie Hall. And I've got an Indie Hall. I don't need two of them.

Alex: 46:38

So I need somebody who's got the organizational design lens, but also the leadership management lens who can help me catch myself before I'm just following my instincts and be intentional about creating the organization for that project. And because of the pandemic ended up not using her very I mean, we some work together on that that I'm very proud of. But the thing that Tara ended up being most useful for me ended up being the interpersonal relationship stuff. And at that time, it was mostly between myself and my, at this point effectively, my business partner, but my number two at Indy Hall, my lieutenant Adam, where I was like, I need help because I'm the first to admit I'm not a good manager because I manage the way that I want to be managed, which is not at all. And I've come to realize that that doesn't work for most people, even if they say that's what they want.

Marie: 47:36

So So relatable.

Alex: 47:37

Right. So I was like, Can you both teach me how to be a better manager, but also teach him how to manage himself better? Because if I teach him how to manage himself the way I manage myself, I'm going to drive him insane. And so the relationship became Kara and I were doing once or twice a month for quite a while. Her and Adam were doing once or twice a month.

Alex: 48:00

And once a quarter we would get together as a team and she would act as a facilitator where I would essentially say, Here's a North Star for the quarter. Design something to get us out of the day to day and into that headspace so that we're on the same page about where we want to be a quarter from now. Really all the two of us need in order to be aligned and then continue working with individually. She and I have not been working together as much for the last year or so, but her and Adam continue working together once or twice a month. The transformation that he's gone through as someone who I think really struggling with self management.

Alex: 48:36

Again, I was struggling with his self management or lack thereof. So I was like, I can't give you the tools, but I can find somebody who can help you discover the ones that make sense for you. And I feel like Cara's real magic is that she doesn't bring just one set approach. She'll really take the time to get to know the person and be like And also, among her strengths is creating these tools and systems or helping people learn these tools and systems who are somewhere in the realm of neurodivergency. And so she's like, all right, so all the management tools and books in the world expect you to think and act a certain way.

Alex: 49:14

Your brain doesn't work that way. Whether you know that or not, it doesn't. So let's figure out how your brain does work and learn how to experiment with some tools that actually better map to your brain. I think the two of you would, as both deep systems thinkers, would love. Her name is Carol Lindstrom.

Alex: 49:32

She's based here in Philly. I would encourage you to have a chat with her. Feel like you'd drive real hard. And yeah, that relationship, having the ability to tap her as we need, but also have the ongoing relationship. And again, the through line here is trust.

Alex: 49:45

I went to her because I was like, I know you from other stuff in Philadelphia, I've always liked the way you think. Is there a way you can help me build this organization? Serendipitously, she's like, Oh yeah, I actually just quit my job at the university to go out and consult. And I was like, Great, what are your rates? You're hired.

Alex: 50:01

And then five years later, still in the mix.

Ben: 50:04

It's amazing. I'm curious about 10,000 Independence Project and this idea of like, you're talking about interpersonal design, almost like cultural design between you. But how do you how are what's the next step on scaling that up in terms of coworking and creating, that unifying cultural thing that allows, you know, people to flourish under more loosely held loosely defined cultural paradigms? Like, what's what's the first step towards creating 10,000 jobs for independence, especially in Philadelphia, I guess, to start and then expanding out from there.

Alex: 50:40

Totally. Totally. Part of the thing that we figured out as people responded to the initial manifesto is you put that I I'm sure you both have experienced it. You put a thing out there and one of the wildest experiences watching two really different people respond to something the same way or two people respond to the same thing wildly different ways. Mean, All right, that's very interesting.

Alex: 51:05

Someone's going to get my gears turning. It's that, right? And one of the things that we noticed in talking to folks about the entrepreneurial resources that exist, especially in this case, it's a very regional focus. One of the really interesting unspoken truths of the project is most of the people that I think this has resonated deeply with are not internet business folks like us. It's way more real world, whether it's creative consulting, events, fitness.

Alex: 51:39

But the internet side of the business, the lens that I see most often is people trying to understand how to do the thing that they want to do or already do on the internet. So the internet is like the cherry on top rather than the foundation in so many ways, which is just different from the way I came up. And so I was like, all right, we're just coming at this from a different place. But the way that we thought about scaling here is that in a lot of ways, myself or even my co founder are often not the right person to be in the room delivering a message either to a specific community that we are not already a part of or on behalf of a specific community we're part of. There's a meta community we're all part of, these small, mostly solo businesses, mostly services, some products, some on the internet.

Alex: 52:34

I would love to meet more internet product people in Philadelphia. If you're listening, please say hi. It's weird that in this city there's creative culture that's incredible and some startup culture, but this version of our community, can't seem to find in our own city. And I've resigned myself to not starting new communities. To get back to your question, Ben, it's finding trusted community leaders within their niches.

Alex: 53:03

So if there is an ecosystem of people who make their living vending at markets and street festivals and pop ups where they do not have their own brick and mortar. Maybe that's a goal, maybe it's not. Regardless of that, their storefront, so to speak, is mobile, right? The people who run events either for themselves or commercially. Who are the trusted community leaders in each of those ecosystems?

Alex: 53:34

And we put our initial focus on meeting them where they are, watching what they do, what's working, what's not, how people respond to them. And basically framing it up as like, look, you don't even know it yet, but you're a part of something bigger. There are other people doing what you do. Do you know other people who do what you do? The answer almost universally no.

Alex: 53:56

Cool. I'm here to help you know that A, you're not alone. There are other people. I'm one of them, but I'm not the only one. And because of that, I also know that it's hard and you're putting a lot of yourself into other people in your professional community.

Alex: 54:13

You're pouring a lot of yourself into that. I just want you to know that we're here to pour into you if we can. And so if there's a thing you're doing that we can help you do more of, or if there's a thing that us doing it together and giving you a little extra visibility or platform or just would be fun to do not on your own, we want to do that with no expectations. And showing up for those people and then subsequently their communities, the currency of that trust that we've earned is what allows us to then go to them and say, hey, we're working with a partner on an ecosystem survey. If I were to email those people, I'm a stranger.

Alex: 54:50

They're not going to open that email. They're not going to click that link. They're certainly not going to tell me their personal information in the survey. But if that comes from a person they already trust who says, hey, that group, that 10 ks thing that you've heard me talking about, or maybe they came and participated in an event, we're working with them on this. Them willing to go to bat and say these folks are trustworthy because we earned it, not because of any monetary exchange or sponsorships.

Alex: 55:17

We showed up and helped. We'll probably do it again, is kind of the move to scale because in that way I only have to really scale the first layer of management. And then the other piece, and this is more of a forward thinking move, which is one of the things that I've I know I've heard in Philadelphia and I'm always curious if it comes up in other regional business communities is the needdesire for some sort of concierge or wayfinding. I'm a small business. It would be really nice if there was a place I could go where like, I don't expect the person to solve my problem, but they can point me to the right resource or person that can help me solve that problem.

Alex: 55:58

And I've heard a million times, like all the way up to our local commerce department talks about it. And I was like, I just don't think you understand the ecosystem that you serve well enough or the ecosystem at the level you see it is too generalized, right? The 500 person service agency and the one person vendor at a flea market are effectively the same operationally for you. They need really different things. And if you show up to them the same way, one of them is not going to trust you.

Alex: 56:30

Maybe both of them won't trust you. And so by focusing on this early trust building in the ecosystem, the goal is to get to a point where we can be that concierge, which raises the question as like, well, if it's just the couple of us, how do you scale all the inbound to then match with the outbound? And I say, well, that's what the community is for. And so if we can systematize the way I think about it is this is a process that actually exists right now where we sit down with a person and the goal is to get to know enough about themselves, their business, and their goals today. Not the whole life story, but it's enough to help them make a next decision.

Alex: 57:10

It's not Actually, I take it back. It's not to make the next decision, it's to connect them with something that will help them make the next decision or move whatever it is. Sometimes it's a link to an article, a book, a course, an in person resource, an event, a consultant, whatever it is, the goal is to send them home with two resources so that if one is not the right one, at least we get a second chance. And then follow-up with them and say, did you talk to that consultant? Did you read that book?

Alex: 57:38

And if not, is it because I made the wrong match? Whatever it is. That's all very manual and very hands on and very interpersonal, therefore doesn't scale well. Our goal for 10 is to turn it into what I think might be the first, and if it's not the first, I don't care about the superlative, I'm more amazed that it hasn't happened yet, a member owned business association. Every region that's got a chamber of commerce operates as a nonprofit, but the ones that are successful tend to centralize power and end up serving the bigger businesses who pay more than the smaller businesses for the membership dues, you end up with the power imbalance that we experience in all these other things in economics and so on.

Alex: 58:22

So our thought is, what if we're a chamber of commerce for self employed people? Because that currently doesn't exist. And if it's member owned, we have a mechanism for keeping that balance of power long term. But also I think about if you join a food co op, don't just pay your annual dues to shop at the grocery store, you also work shifts. So you get trained on checkout or bagging or restocking or inventory or receiving or whatever it is.

Alex: 58:48

And they're all those little operationalized jobs. And it's a way for you to feel like you contributed, but also to ultimately help with the operational scale of the thing. So this is where things get hypothetical. If we figure out how to teach people, and I've got some useful skills for figuring out how to teach people, how to sit down with that entrepreneur and not just run a script, but actually run a proper interrogation of that person, help them answer the questions behind the questions, figure out what questions to ask, all those kinds of things. That's a learnable shift, right?

Alex: 59:25

And then another learnable skill is the matchmaking. All right, based on the input of that, who in our database could be good matches? Oh, we found somebody who doesn't. Well, then there's the third skill, which is go find new match partners distill down and also get that answer to the database. And if we can basically make it a situation whereas you as a member of the community, instead of sitting down with somebody who has paid a full time salary, to sit down with an entrepreneur and help understand their problem, which I'm like, has always felt a little off to me.

Alex: 59:54

The person you're sitting down with is a literal peer even if they're from a different industry. And I would argue in some cases coming from a different industry brings some interesting and unique advantages. And each person you interact with through that entire process is a fellow business owner and a fellow member owner of the organization that's providing the service. I think the relationship and the opportunity starts feeling like very, I don't know, multiplicative and combinatory. And the output of that and the scalability of that is so much more interesting to me than how do I automate it, honestly.

Alex: 01:00:30

There's tiny pieces of automation that will glue all of this together and make sure that it happens consistently and there's necessary feedback loops. But we can use the automations to help humans do more human stuff, which is ultimately kind of stuff that gets me really stoked. So I think the vision for ten ks ends up there as this is a membership resource. Anyone can get help without being a member. There's additional help you can get with being a member.

Alex: 01:00:57

And being a member is a combination of a dues paying financial relationship, but also an actual contributory of your time, knowledge, experience to make the ecosystem richer and more diverse and help make sure that people are getting help from people who actually understand their problem versus running whatever script is coming out of the small business centralized database this year.

Ben: 01:01:25

Yeah. I can imagine this would be really powerful. You know, when you talk about going to the commerce, you know, you're speaking almost like a unionized collective bargaining type of thing where you can bring the power of, you know, 5,000 businesses, small businesses, and that collective bargaining type of thing that everybody has sort of participated in this process. We know that they have a collective goal or something like that within Philadelphia.

Alex: 01:01:48

Yeah. Well, and I mean, the manifesto that I wrote was originally a response to the Amazon HQ two

Ben: 01:01:53

Right.

Alex: 01:01:54

Nonsense back in I think it was 2017 or so. I mean, a, this is another one. I was like, ideas that just wouldn't die and Yeah. I can't help myself. But also, if you told 2017 me that this was going to lead to conversations about union organizing, never would have believed you.

Alex: 01:02:11

And yet watching that kind of organizing grow in popularity and in success really, especially since 2020. I'm all here for empowered labor, and I think this is just another workforce that would benefit from it. So being a union organizer of any kind was not on my bingo card. But if you ask anybody who really knows me from the outside, they'd probably say, Yeah, it was. That's awesome.

Marie: 01:02:37

Yeah. I don't know if it's off topic at all, but given that the tariffs went in place today between Canada and US, I'm curious just if some madness that's happening in The US political climate right now, there's obviously going to be a lot of uncertainty. People are losing jobs, things are changing. Do you foresee an interesting opportunity here? Are there some fears around this?

Marie: 01:03:02

I'm just curious what your perspective is. I'm thinking about protests are going be happening. People are going to be banding together. I'm just wondering what this is going to mean.

Alex: 01:03:12

I mean, your guess is as good as mine. It's it's such a roller coaster, and this one I keep going back and forth between, like, we've been here before and but not like this, if that makes sense. Trying to not let the uncertainty affect our decision making is probably one of the hardest parts of existing right now, little bit running a business. But I think it's extra hard in a business because you're so dependent on other people's decision making. And so I feel like we have not had an era that was without uncertainty in the last four or five years.

Alex: 01:03:50

And I've memory hold most of Trump's last presidency. But the pattern I keep coming back to is, again, like I said, I only have a couple of tricks. I'm just really good at them. When there is uncertainty, the opportunity is to help people find the thing to hold on to that keeps them grounded in reality. Help them recenter.

Alex: 01:04:11

And we did that with stacking the bricks during quarantine. There was the course boom. We benefited from that as well. But I also think that we benefited from helping keep our entrepreneur audience who was not necessarily course builders just like process what's going on here? What are ways that Whose other worldview could I potentially be learning from and modeling is I think something we were able to help with.

Alex: 01:04:40

This very second, we're not doing anything specific. The closest thing to seizing the moment is that with Indy Hall, we're seeing both within our membership and therefore it's definitely echoing outside, especially people in tech who are still dealing with layoffs, extended unemployment, and those kinds of things. And asking ourselves the question, is this an opportunity to invest in those people? Not financially necessarily, but what does it look like in their most challenging, uncertain, and lonely periods to say, Hey, financially affording a place to go and work on your job hunt or your portfolio or whatever it is that's going to help you get the next thing that you need to do professionally. If being around other people is going to do that and us reducing our rates short term means that there's some reciprocity there long term.

Alex: 01:05:36

And again, people ebb and flow over time. A thing that Indy Hall was not designed for explicitly, but makes some sense that why it is the way that it is, is for professional and personal transitions. People come there to work on a thing. And being in community with other people that are also working on their thing, their next thing on the side of whatever their main thing is, in an environment where you don't have your friends and family who think they're looking out for you and saying, but what about this risky part? And doesn't that seem kind of dangerous?

Alex: 01:06:08

And you're going to spend all that money on what? To instead be around people who were stoked for you and maybe went through something similar and they're going to cheer you on. Not sugarcoat a bad decision necessarily, but they're there with a better understanding. I wish people benefit from that, get to the other side of whatever the transition is, maybe even vanish from the community for a little while. And the really fun part is at some point in the future when they show up again.

Alex: 01:06:33

And I'm like, well, what transition are we going through this time? Because you felt safe and trusted enough last time for this to feel like a place you'd want to come back to when it's time to a gamble on yourself. So Adam and I really struggle with the word opportunity because I don't want to seem opportunistic. But I think viewing it through the lens of if we help people now when they need it, our odds are better down the road for them to pay it forward to somebody else at the minimum, possibly even the person who you never know how a person's going to end up being a contributor. Financially, it might not even be the most valuable way for them to be a contributor.

Alex: 01:07:11

With stacking the bricks, when we have material we've gone back to over and over, which is Amy and I both started our businesses in the 'seven, 'eight recession. We have a number of other friends that have done the same thing. It's not that this is the best time to start a business, but there's some unique advantages. Know, can you use the fact that all the big wasteful Basically, like a lot of people who benefit from people who are spending other people's money and waste and the free flowing money of the good times, if those people go away, those people still need help with stuff. They still need tools.

Alex: 01:07:56

And if you can be a better option for budget, better meet the need, better meet the moment, it might still be a hard time to build a business. But as the world improves, you get to kind of ride that up. And so those are the trade offs to consider. I don't feel a sense of responsibility to convince people that now is a good time to be an entrepreneur. I think that's kind of like a tricky, borderline dangerous message.

Alex: 01:08:25

But if there's people who are already in it and are thinking, Oh, shoot, I need to buckle down and get safe now, I think there's a more nuanced conversation to be had between, well, entrepreneurship is actually in some ways safer than a job that can terminate you with no recourse next, you know, all those kinds of I think that's real. But I don't know. I think if we were to talk more about the current moment, it would be less of a focus on why this is a good time to start a business and more sharing, I think, just some of the more again, of these unlikely decisions that we made recently. Like, hey, if you're thinking about products, that's a slow build. Maybe now is not a great time to launch a product business, but great time to maybe do some consulting.

Alex: 01:09:16

And if that's a thing you're open to, we've got some lessons we can share related to that. So I think it is more about adapting and shaping to kind of find the intersection of what we're doing for our own reasons that may or may not be related to I mean, this case, we're not doing these because of the climate. We're doing them because Amy's been sick for five years. And going, all right, based on the stuff we've learned there for our own reasons, for the person who's considering going out on their own or is already out on their own, they're like, but the product thing's not making enough, do I have to go back and get a job? We can remind them, hey, doing some strategic consulting would be a good way to windfall some cash, buy yourself some runway, and be able to operate from a position where you're not worried about the shrinking savings or the fact that your SaaS is not paying you the salary, the job that you quit yet and all of those kinds of things.

Alex: 01:10:15

I was just finding ways to help reframe people's short term goals to match the short term reality a little bit better.

Ben: 01:10:24

You had a statement on your website about success not being about scale, it's being about independence and I often have the feeling that it's not even about independence actually, it's about elasticity. And I often talk about the the, people often see not having success with a product as a failure, but it's really like a a learning experience and that, you know, if you need to go back, like, in 2020 or 2019, I went and got a full time job as a software developer again. I just wasn't enjoying being a product person for that time and that the two years going back to that was so informative about, like, what I wanted to do for my next product. And I always feel like it's okay to go back and get a full time gig if you need to recoup and try a different tactic and what can you bring from that full time gig back to the product and vice versa is is the most important thing. And I feel like what you this this idea of the 10,000 manifesto and creating like 10,000 jobs, it's still pretty radical in a time where more and more of our services are becoming monoliths and in control over by one or two people within The US and the globe and you know Silicon Valley.

Ben: 01:11:34

The idea of unionization and organizing independence underneath, shared ideals is very, very powerful right now. So I think that that's the thing that you could probably do the most in the face of uncertainty is to organize and to collectively bargain and to collectively like, you know, we underestimate our power in in our in as collective organized groups. Right? So I feel like that's probably the best thing that you can do in uncertainty is to find people that are similar to you. And and when you can't do consulting or you need a consulting lead to to float float by for a month or two, you can lean in.

Ben: 01:12:12

You can flex into that. You can be elastic and do a little consulting then go back to the product and that ebb and flow is what actually creates meaningful progress more than the just hard line, I'm only going to do this thing for five years and this is the only thing I'm going to do. It creates more resilient systems, more resilient communities, and that kind of thing. So I admire you for what the what what the 10,000 ideology in the manifesto says about the future of independence being more loosely defined.

Alex: 01:12:43

Thank you. Especially the more time I spend with organizers. The thing that I'm reminded of is how few people it takes if they are coordinated to seem like a lot of people. And especially when we're talking about mean, was first just talking about the city of Philadelphia. To be able to organize even a dozen people to give testimony in front of a city council, for instance, on a bill or an issue that's related to them, the scale It's not about the scale of the impact, it's the scale of the council.

Alex: 01:13:16

The assumption I think from people like us is the people in power to us, therefore they feel big to them. And that we as the constituents feel small to us and therefore we feel small to them. I think the truth is it takes remarkably small amount of coordination to flip that around and make the individuals feel bigger than the powerful people to the powerful people, which is the most important part. It's not about how it feels for us. I mean, it is.

Alex: 01:13:48

I think that there's psychological elements of bonding that come through that and our collective effort and enthusiasm. But if the goal is to show up bigger than ourselves to someone in power, it doesn't take think it's part because people are so bad at organizing and coordinating a message.

Ben: 01:14:05

It's very difficult.

Alex: 01:14:06

Handful of people saying their own version of the same thing sounds like everyone is on the same page in the same way that our filter bubbles on social media is like, Oh, everyone's talking about this, so everyone must be talking about this. And that's obviously not

Ben: 01:14:22

true.

Alex: 01:14:23

It's fascinating work. And it's also really rewarding to have the work recognized. When we were doing some organizing work during the last mayor's race in Philadelphia, basically used the fact that every single we had a very crowded mayor's race, like eight candidates. Very strange. And every single one of them is talking about how they support small business.

Alex: 01:14:49

And so as an organized effort, we would show up to as many conversations as possible and say, When you say small business, who do you mean? Not as a call out, as call in. It's like, I know that you mean service agencies, I know you mean brick and mortar shops and restaurants and commercial quarters, but do you know about the people that are working from a dining room table or a spare bedroom on an e commerce site or on an app or on a course or whatever it is that are making a pretty solid income. And they're like, what are you talking about? We are invisible to them.

Alex: 01:15:30

And so to be able to do that bit of coordination, have those conversations and show up not at every single event, but just enough of them, some of the local foundations that heavily fund political organizing in the city started asking us, Who was funding us? And I said, Nobody. It's me and two friends. Wow. And they're like, That's impossible.

Alex: 01:15:58

And I'm like, Nope, that's really it.

Marie: 01:16:02

Let me show you how.

Alex: 01:16:03

Yeah. And that became the next conversation, which is like, This is what we do on a shoestring budget. These are the people with the skills that we bring in and why and those kinds of things. So down the road, I think Opio and I have talked about with ten ks is like our primary focus is on Philadelphia, but we've not written off like there should be a consulting arm where it's like our style of organizing is something that other industries and organizations want. And if they like our approach to it, we've now got some really great case study material for it.

Alex: 01:16:37

And if that consulting work underwrites some of the other things that are slower funding or that gives us the cash runway to then go after some bigger grants that we just wouldn't have the

Marie: 01:16:47

Stacking the bricks.

Alex: 01:16:48

Like I said, I only have a couple of tricks. Was just really good at them. But it

Marie: 01:16:52

works so well.

Alex: 01:16:55

That's exactly right. Now, I'll say this. My mom's very proud. My mom was a political organizer in my tiny little hometown in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania. And so like, won't say I'm doing it for her, but I will acknowledge the lessons I learned from her without even realizing that I was learning them.

Alex: 01:17:17

She stopped asking when I'm gonna go back and finish my degree. So this apparently initiating the like, all right,

Marie: 01:17:23

he's good. He's

Alex: 01:17:23

good. It's fun. The political work specifically is some of the stuff that I learned I'm really good at and I absolutely hate doing. I hate the way it makes me feel. I hate the way people treat each other.

Alex: 01:17:40

I spent my entire career creating environments where people are generally thoughtful and good and kind to each other, broadly speaking. And to go to a place where everyone is default opposite, like they'll stab you in the back just to prove to the other person that you're capable of stabbing them in the back. Like just the craziest adult behavior I've ever seen has all been in the realm of local politics. And so that piece of it is really, really hard for me to come back every time and be like, Why am I doing this again? I hate everything.

Alex: 01:18:15

I'm spending so much time and money and this makes me feel like garbage. Oh, right. It's important. Back to work we go.

Marie: 01:18:21

It's like gotta have the things that fill your cup so you can do the hard stuff.

Alex: 01:18:25

Yeah. That year of 2023 working on that campaign definitely ground me down. I was like, I know that I'm good at it. I know that I can do it. I'm going to find my space in it and figure out what my boundaries are.

Alex: 01:18:40

It can't be that again. We'll do this work again because I think we'll do it very well. But it can't be like that.

Ben: 01:18:48

Yeah. Well, we admire you for

Alex: 01:18:50

your work. We appreciate all the work that

Ben: 01:18:52

you do.

Alex: 01:18:52

Appreciate it.

Ben: 01:18:53

Thanks for hanging out with us.

Alex: 01:18:54

My pleasure.

Marie: 01:18:55

Yeah. What's the best best way for people to kind of, you know, find out more about your work? What's the best website or or sort of platform to discover more about your work?

Alex: 01:19:03

I'm in a weird relationship with social media right now. I think Blue Sky is where you'll find me most. That's where I see most of the two of So I know that's where you hang out. So I'll say that first. If you search for alexhilman.com, you'll find me on Blue Sky.

Alex: 01:19:16

Websites, indyhall.org, stackingthebricks Com, tiny. Mba for my book, and 10 ks, the number 10, the letter K, .city for the 10,000 Independence Project covers most of what I'm working on. I mentioned the wine company. I may as well drop that as well. Unfortunately, we don't ship outside The Americas.

Alex: 01:19:39

But it's a wine club for sort of high end wine drinkers that is goodsam.com. And my best friend Eric Cyclebaum is an incredible sommelier. So his complaint about wine clubs is they're all about selling you five bottles of wine in a box every month for as cheap as possible. He's got clientele that is willing to pay lots of money for his curation, his selection, his access. And so we built a wine club model around that, that the way he says it is most wine clubs start and end with your box of five wines.

Alex: 01:20:17

Ours just starts with your box of five wines and continues with education, community, and all of those kinds of things. So once again, not a lot of tricks, but good somm is the latest expression of that.

Marie: 01:20:29

Love that.

Alex: 01:20:29

Awesome. Cool. Great to chat with you both. Yeah. Thanks so much.

Alex: 01:20:32

Hope we get to do this again maybe in person at some point.

Marie: 01:20:34

Yeah. For sure. Would love that. One day.

Alex: 01:20:36

If you ever have a reason to be in Philadelphia, you know, you got a place to crash with us.

Marie: 01:20:41

Awesome. Amazing. Thanks so much.