My guest today is James Traf who is the founder of Super which turns your Notion pages into websites. In this episode, we discuss the following: - What led Traf to the field of design - Why Traf's first ever design job only lasted for 3 months - Traf's experience doing freelance design work - How Traf finds freelance clients - Why Traf applied to Y Combinator - Traf's Y Combinator experience - How much do startups founders pay themselves in the bay area - Why Traf prefers building bootstrapped internet businesses over venture funded startups - Why Traf left the bay area - Why Traf created an iOS icon set - Traf's icon set goes viral and makes $100,000 in 6 days - Why Traf's success was 7 years in the making - Traf sends MKBHD an email - Why Traf wants to own his time - Why Traf decided to not join Uber, Airbnb as an employee - Why Traf started Super - How Traf met his Super cofounder Jason - How Traf communicates with his remote cofounder Jason - Traf's marketing plan for Super - Importance of associating yourself with a growing market - How Traf deals with internet trolls - Super revenue and user stats - Why hiring a customer support rep is only a stop gap fix for bootstrap business - Why Traf turned down VC funding for Super - How Traf juggles multiple side projects - Feature roadmap for Super - Traf's advice for designers - How to get in touch with Traf For show notes, guest bio, and more, please visit: www.designmba.show Level Up Your Design Career (Free Email Course): https://levelup.designmba.show/
James Traf is a designer & entrepreneur, building simple digital products. Previously he co-founded Spoil (YC-backed startup, raised $500k) and is now building small, profitable internet products like Super a simple way to turn your Notion pages into fast, functional websites. He is forever distracted with side projects.
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Namaste and welcome. This is Jayneil Dalal and you are listening to the design MBA. This podcast is a real-life MBA program for designers where we interview design hustlers and learn the skills, mindset necessary for a designer to launch a business venture. You can learn more. Find past episodes and stay updated at designMBA.show.
Jayneil Dalal: Today, I have an amazing guest with me who is known as Traf on the internet. If you're curious, his name is James Traf. So, who is Traf? Traf is a designer and entrepreneur building simple digital products. Previously he co-founded Spoil a YC-backed startup then ended up raising 5,00,000 dollars and now Traf is focusing on building small profitable internet products like Super which is a simple way to turn your notion pages into fast functional websites. Let me pause that for a second. If you are a designer, one of the biggest challenges we have is “Should I use Squarespace or should I use Webflow? What should I use, man?” but at the end of the day, what gets us hired is our thinking, the thought process. So, what if you can just use Notion to do it but then there's a problem. You can't use your own custom domain. That's where Super comes in. If you use Super, you can basically put in your own domain name on top of that. So, definitely check out Super. The links are going to be in the show notes. With that, Traf is forever distracted with side projects and I’m super excited to welcome him today.
Traf, welcome to the show, man.
James Traf: Thanks for having me, man.
Jayneil: So, I am curious, man, what was your childhood like growing up. Were you always into design or what was your earliest foray into getting into this field?
Traf: Yeah, I definitely was not always into design. I actually had a little bit of trouble in school just because I wasn't sure what it is I wanted to do. I didn't really fit into a nice little box in an area of a classroom and I didn't really know what I wanted to pursue. And so, I managed to make it through high school and did a few years of CEGEP. In Canada and Quebec, that’s basically you go through high school until grade 11 and then you have two years of CEGEP and then you want to decide if you want to go through university or not. And so, I basically did nothing in CEGEP. I practically didn't go and I just wanted to figure out what it is I wanted to do. And so, at that point, I don't even think many people know this, but I was about 19 when I moved to Vancouver and I found a very short sort of design-focused program in Vancouver. And so, I moved out there. I think it was just a year, it was a year-long program but it was very focused on the graphic design aspect, so very artsy, a little bit too artsy for me. I’m a horrible drawer.
Jayneil: No way!
Traf: I’m glad that I went through it because it sort of led me on a path but it was definitely a little bit too on the graphic side and less on the technical side which is what I’m interested in now.
Jayneil: Wow! I am also Canadian, by the way. I just stayed in Toronto for two years but I am a Canadian citizen. I also have been to Vancouver. Oh my God, it's amazing. Beautiful place.
Traf: Beautiful. Agreed.
Jayneil: So, you finished your course. And then what did you do? Did you take up your first job? What was your path after finishing up the course?
Traf: Yeah, that is when I had moved back to Montreal which is where I’m from. And then I did take a very short graphic design a job. And so, it was a very small studio, mostly like packaging design for several Fortune 500 companies. And that lasted about a month. I hated it. I’m just completely unemployable at this point.
Jayneil: What year was that?
Traf: Honestly, it's hard to say. Maybe 2012, 2013, who knows, but I’m grateful that I did that and I went through that just because it gave me a little taste of the employed life. It's okay for some people. Some people, they really enjoy what they do. For me, it just feels a little bit of a distraction since every day you go in and you're building products for another company or another person as opposed to products for yourself. And so, there's a little bit of a separation there for me.
Jayneil: So, would you say ownership was an issue like you're just doing this for someone else and taking orders?
Traf: For sure. Yeah, that was a big thing. And especially, it was also what I was doing. It was focused a lot on print design and packaging work and logos and things like that. And like I said, I’m really not an artsy style designer. I rather focus on like interface design and even some frontend development and coding and stuff. And so, I prefer that direction which is where I sort of ended up. After that, I was self-employed but I was still doing freelance work for other companies and companies that were a little bit smaller and more personal and even individuals, which felt a little better in terms of when you're dealing with someone who's building a product from the ground up, you can at least sort of relate to them and help them bring their vision to life as opposed to doing work for huge corporations that's never going to know your name.
Jayneil: So, you went to that course. I’m assuming that you had to pay the tuition and it was maybe not a free ride. So, there's probably some debt. So, were you not worried about it that “Hey, if I don't take a full-time job within a corporation, how am I going to pay this because now I’m going my freelance route?”
Traf: Yeah, it was definitely a concern. Obviously, my parents helped me out a lot with that, which is great and I’m grateful for that. And it wasn't like a tuition like it was with most colleges in the United States and things. It was really not that expensive. And so, there wasn't a lot of debt that came with it, thankfully. And so, after that, I basically started to take on small … I took on everything that I could. I said yes to everything that came along even if it were things that I didn't really enjoy just because at this point, I was working for myself, more or less. And so, it felt as though if I didn't take something on, I might regret it later in the future because of the uncertainty when it comes to freelancing. And so, I said yes to everything that came in, even things that I didn't really enjoy doing but with doing that, it sort of gave me the experience and pointed me into direction with the things that I do enjoy doing. So, when I did take on … Actually, one of the first website projects that I’ve taken on, I didn't know how to code anything and I just said yes for the sake of … I know if I say yes, I’ll have to figure out how to do it. And that just led me to the gateway of building websites.
Jayneil: And how were you finding these clients? Were you on Upwork or using a platform like that?
Traf: Yeah, I didn't use Upwork but I did share a lot of my design work on social platforms like Dribbble or Behance and even like early days of Instagram as well. And so, the first few clients found me through the work that I was sharing and putting out there. And then after a while, it just became sort of word of mouth happened quite a bit, people that I knew personally who knew other people. And then I got lucky enough that the more work that you put out there, the more proof that you have that you're a good designer and that more people will find you because of it. And so, I was lucky enough that clients were approaching me more than I was approaching them.
Jayneil: And were there any crazy stories because you're running everything? You're running the billing. You're running the whole accounting. You're running the design. So, were there any crazy stories where you had to learn something but you failed or any favorite failures that comes from that time?
Traf: Yeah, nothing really too crazy comes to mind just because at that point, I was still dealing with clients that were paying a few hundred bucks for things. And so, it was only later on after my experience with building out Spoil and going through Y Combinator, that's when I got into the thousands and then the tens of thousands for charging clients.
Jayneil: So, tell me about it. You're, at this point, doing this freelance stuff with clients. So, what made you think that “Oh, you know what? Maybe I should do my own startup and apply to YC?”
Traf: Yeah. So, it didn't actually go down that way exactly. I actually had been put in touch through a friend of a friend and it was a team, there were three guys and they were building a mobile app. And they needed a designer to sort of help bring some of their ideas to life. And so, they actually hired me. And so, I went and worked with them for a few months. And then one of us had this idea, I don't know how it came to be, but we thought it would be cool if you could send someone a gift and they had no idea what it was going to be and it was completely anonymous. So, if you're receiving it, you wouldn't know who had sent it to you. So, it was just this random cool idea. And we decided to just put up a landing page over a weekend. And we did like a really quick product hunt and pre-launch. And within the next two or three days, we've got more traction from that weekend project than the previous four or five or six months building this mobile app. So, that's when we decided what do we really want to focus on. And at that time, actually the Y Combinator applications had opened up and we had to make the decision where we were going to apply with this weekend project that we whipped up in a matter of hours versus this mobile app that we've been spending months trying to bring to life. And so, just for the sake that one of them had revenue and the other didn't, we just decided to go with the weekend project which was Spoil. And I think, to this day, we're still one of the earliest companies that had gotten into Y Combinator. I think we were just a few weeks old by the time we applied.
Jayneil: Wow! And what year was this?
Traf: This was 2015.
Jayneil: And then I’m assuming you kind of then moved out from Canada to San Francisco for the YC program.
Traf: Exactly. Yeah, we moved to Mountain View, California.
Jayneil: And what happened with Spoil afterwards? What was your journey going through YC and then trying to grow Spoil?
Traf: So, we moved out there and we were just focused on … This was all very, very new. And so, we didn't really know what it is we wanted to build with this. We had a vision in mind. We just weren't really sure how we wanted to get there. And so, we took a lot of advice from the partners at Y Combinator. We learned a lot from going in. And over the course of two or three years, we actually had eight or nine or maybe even 10 complete variations of the actual product just because, like I said, we weren't 100 sure how we were going to get there. None of us were really completely invested in the gifting sort of economy. And so, we had to learn a lot of it ourselves and we hired a few people and we tried a few things. And I think that the latest version of our product is what we were most successful with. Unfortunately, at that point, that's when we were lowest on funds. And so, we really had to make a decision, it’s like were we going to move back in with our parents, move back home, lower our cost of living and just rebuild this app from the ground up or did we just want to sort of abandon it. At the time, half of our team had families. And so, they had to get something a little bit more secure. And so, because of that, we just sort of like moved on from it but it was a really amazing experience. I mean, the last final product variation of Spoil was basically a mobile app that you can go through, you can order really low-cost gifts that you can easily give to anyone and it would be delivered the same day. We would uh use the Postmates’ API to leverage local suppliers for fulfillment and local delivery drivers and we sort of started to engineer a new behavior in giving and receiving just because our top Spoilers, which is what we call them, would be giving a few times per week rather than a few times per year.
Jayneil: Damn! Now, you had the 5,00,000 that YC and you raised. And you are, if I’m not mistaken, three co-founders. And then you're trying to hire people. So, obviously you want to pay the engineers and the people that you hire good salaries. So, how do the founders pay themselves because if you pay yourself a nice salary like “I’m going to pay myself 150 or 200,” how do you guys deal with that because you want to pay yourself too but then you also got to save money to hire other people?
Traf: Yeah. So, we were four founders total and we were really far from paying ourselves anything close to six figures. We just paid ourselves the absolute minimum we needed in order to pay our rent and buy some food. And so, for us, that was really inexpensive, it's like 30 grand, 40 grand maybe. And so, we actually had a few employees at that point and we paid them more than we paid ourselves just because attracting talent in the Bay Area is a little bit expensive.
Jayneil: Super competitive.
Traf: Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, we paid them more than we paid us. And so, because of that, we spent a lot of money on marketing, we spent a lot of money on employees and money was just sort of going out. And at this point, we weren't profitable because our margins were still quite low. And so, we ran out of money rather quickly. Ultimately, we just decided “Do we want to start from scratch or do we want to abandon this thing?” I think neither of us were really personally invested in building this out. We saw the opportunity, we saw that this could potentially be a billion-dollar company but to get there, I don't think any of us really knew what the path would look like and would be interested in actually pursuing. So, we just parted ways.
Jayneil: And that's a grueling path, man. I haven't done a startup with YC but I did attend the Y Combinator Startup School and something that stuck me was that there was this insanity like everybody had to go big or go bust. There was no talk about a boutique idea or a boutique shop or something like that. And you mentioned like having the passion to grind it out for 10 years on something that's just an idea in the hope that it becomes a billion-dollar thing, it was just very crazy to me and now I’m wondering did that leave some kind of impression on you like your thoughts on doing the next venture like should it be another startup you want to pursue or now you're going to focus just on building small-scale internet businesses?
Traf: Yeah, it for sure left an impression. I mean, that was the more traditional route of startups in Silicon Valley. You start something, you get an investment, you grow something and like you said, it's like go big or go home kind of thing. And I don't think that's the only way to do it. Now, I’m working on things that prove otherwise. So, traditionally, the biggest thing that I took away from it is that you don't really need a big team, you don't need a lot of money. When you think about taking VC money, you're inclined to spend it on things that directly cause your business to become harder and harder to manage. And so, you answer now to your employees and your investors and your landlord if you have an office. And when you're bootstrapping, it's really just you and the product and the customer. So, it's way more focused and you have to deal with less things. and the biggest thing also for me is just independence, so thinking about how dependent I was earlier on, on those things and on my co-founders and on these investors as opposed to now where it's really just me. And I still work with people, don't get me wrong, but you're way more closely tied to the customer and you can communicate directly with them and it feels as though it's like there's not a whole lot between you guys.
Jayneil: Absolutely. So, the day you said “All right, this is goodbye to my journey at Spoil,” now what's next? What did you end up doing after that?
Traf: The Bay Area is quite expensive. And so, immediately after, I basically just decided “I’m just going to go back home.” I moved back in with my parents at first.
Jayneil: 4500 for like a studio bedroom on SoMa street? I was looking that up.
Traf: Something like that. I actually found a great deal. I think it was like four grand for the basement of a house but it was like three bedrooms. And so, we all lived and worked in that basement at one point. So, it got a little bit hectic for sure. Yeah, I moved back with my parents. And then, eventually, when I started freelancing again, it sort of picked up the pace and got bigger and bigger clients and just built more and more experience surrounding building digital product, I found like a good niche. And that's when I decided to move out and now I have a roommate and we live in a great place, we’re by the waters. It's great.
Jayneil: Still in Canada?
Traf: Yeah.
Jayneil: Nice. So, you start growing your freelance business after this, just having your own independence. Tell me about what led you to create an icon set?
Traf: I was browsing Twitter one day and I had seen people posting screenshots of their iOS home screens. And this was a little bit different because years back, that was a common thing. I used to follow people who were customizing their iOS devices. The only difference was now people were doing it semi-natively with iOS with a new …
Jayneil: And I’m an android guy. So, I’ll be doing …
Traf: … doing it half the price sometime. Exactly. So, back in the day, that wasn't anything out of the ordinary because you would jailbreak your phone and you would get access to the studio store and then you would be able to customize your device that way but now, people are doing it in a way that is native to iOS because with iOS 14, I actually think you can do this on iOS 13 as well, but Apple decided to release a way on the Shortcuts app to upload custom icons for your home screen. And so, in a way, you could just customize your device and this is the first time you could do this on iOS. And so, sort of a big deal. So, that whole idea was starting to pick up. And so, I figured I have all this experience. I’ve been customizing my device for years on the Cydia store with my own icons. So, I decided to just try it the iOS way using the Siri Shortcuts app. I posted that screenshot on Twitter and it immediately started to go viral. And at that point, I noticed that a lot of people were starting to ask about the icons in the video. And this is not something I envisioned at first. I had no idea that I can monetize this in any sort of way but I thought “I have these icons here available. I may as well just publish them.” I uploaded them as a product to Gumroad. I created a really simple website using Notion and Super and I pushed that out to the world. And that point is when I just went to sleep, it was late at night and then the morning after, I woke up to six grand in sales.
Jayneil: Holy shit! And what caused such a huge uptick in the sales? Just because it was viral?
Traf: That's really it. It started with my single tweet showcasing my home screen. And then I had a second tweet which linked the icon set. And just from those two tweets really got enough traction to generate six grand in sales overnight.
Jayneil: Wow! And then I think it was a couple of days later that the famous youtuber MKBHD picked that up and then put that in one of his videos. Did he contact you that “I’m going to use your icon set in my video” or he just did it and then you found out?
Traf: So, that's when I realized I could maybe further capitalize on this. And so, I knew that a lot of people were going to be visiting my page through his video or through his Twitter. He also tweeted about this. I also had put out a story “Six Figures in Six Days.” Six days later I realized I made over a hundred grand in revenue from these.
Jayneil: From the first day you launched it to … just in six days, from the day you launched it to then, six days you made 100,000 dollars. Oh my God!
Traf: Yeah. And so, a lot of people would see that and right away they would say “That's an overnight success” but I really want to outline the fact that this whole thing was in a way seven years in the making because seven years ago, I had been tinkering with the whole jailbreak community, uploading custom icons to my device and creating icons and home screens at that time. And so, my actions seven years ago up until this point prepared me for this opportunity. And so, in a way, I got lucky in a whole bunch of ways and in other ways I would have been unable to capitalize on that luck if I didn't take those previous actions. And so, I wanted to outline that in the story to get people to understand that the actions you take now are going to have an affect years from now. And it might appear to other people that you'll get lucky or that something will just happen but it doesn't exactly work that way. And so, I just wanted to talk about the story. And so, I outlined that. He discovered that as well. He decided to tweet about it and tag me in the tweet. And so, at that point, I knew that there was going to be a whole bunch of people coming to visit my Twitter profile from his. So, I decided at that point I’d create an MKBHD themed edition icon set and further capitalize on this. It didn't sell too much. I think it's sold like two grand worth but I think people really enjoyed the whole idea of me putting together more content and that drove a little bit more traffic to my previous icon set as well.
Jayneil: Oh my God! And I’m just wondering what your notification might look like for those six days when you were making that “payment received,” “payment received,” “payment received.”
Traf: Yeah, few days after, it was just going crazy to the point where I just had to disable notifications. I couldn't focus on anything else. It was actually bad because I’ve got this dopamine machine to my brain every few seconds of the day and it's completely distractive. And so, I had to disable them but I knew it was still going on in the background. And so, every few hours, I would check and the numbers would just be mind blowing.
Jayneil: It's like a slot machine like every time you pull down, there's like “Dang! You hit the jackpot. You hit the jackpot.”
Traf: Exactly, exactly like that.
Jayneil: So, did you have a chat with MKBHD after that or was it just like “Hey, thank you for doing this” or did you guys get on a video call or something like that?
Traf: We did not really formally talk. I had sent him an email just because the link that he actually linked in his video, he linked to my instructions page instead of my actual home page of icon set. And so, I sent him a quick email because at this point I had his personal email because he was a customer on Gumroad and I just asked him if he would mind just changing the link and he replied right after saying that “Yeah, no problem at all.” So, that was the interaction that we had.
Jayneil: I mean, it's crazy, man. Two strangers on the internet just helping each other out is insane.
Traf: Exactly. Yeah, it was really great. And it's really leverage on leverage, if you think about it, where I put something out, content leverage, I built something in the matter of one to two hours, I put something out there and then it's just continually working for me. And then he did the same thing with his video. He spent a few minutes or an hour or two hours or however long it took to put together a video, he put that out there and over the course of days, it racked up millions and millions of views. And so, just a great example of content leverage over leverage and them working together to provide even further leverage for us both.
Jayneil: And then all this leverage to basically create a source of passive income like build the ones … I think I found in one of your tweets like “Build once and sell twice.”
Traf: Yeah, I think that's a Jack Butcher quote.
Jayneil: Yeah. So, I think one of the things that most people might miss out on that you pointed out as well in that article was the reason you were able to capitalize on all this like, first of all, I definitely agree that there are some actions you took a couple of years earlier that led to this point but even putting that aside, you chose to optimize for freedom in your career, in your life. So, if you were in a typical 9-to-5 job, you might be in a conference room listening to the meeting going on and you would not have had the time to just browse the Twitter and be like “Oh my God! This is popping. Let me spend two hours and create this icon set and launch it.”
Traf: That's exactly right, yeah. If I was bound by other tasks in any sort of capacity, especially with something like this, something that was going more and more viral every second, time is really of the essence for capitalizing on that. Thankfully, over the course of the few years that I’ve been freelancing, I’ve been taking on less and less clients but the clients that I would be taking on would provide more and more income for me. And so, I was having more and more control over my time going forward. And so, I still had at that point a few clients but some of them were really demanding my time at any specific time of the day. And so, I could really decide to work whenever I wanted to work and that provided me the opportunity to be able to capitalize on things like this as quickly as I can because I know with some things, not with everything, I’m building software on the side and with something like that, time is not really the essence because it's something that you're building for the long term versus with something that's going viral, you want to be able to capitalize on that. That's also why I decided to go with Gumroad and Notion and Super as my tech stack for this because I could have uploaded these to my personal website which is what I do with my Lightroom presets but because my personal website is all hand coded with HTML and CSS and some JavaScript, it would have taken me longer. And so, because of that, I just figured what's the quickest way for me to publish a website and sell these products and the answer was those three products.
Jayneil: And your article, that “six figure in six days,” I’m probably just going to call this episode the same thing like more leverage, but it really inspired me because I was at that moment … For reference, on June 20th, I left a nice paying job that paid me 120,000 dollars in corporate America to kind of like do my own thing, to kind of grow the podcast. And at that point, I still had some contacts reaching out like “Hey, do you want a contract job? We can get you up to 150,000.” And I was reading that article that you wrote at that time and something inside me clicked. So, now, my schedule is like I teach Monday to Thursday from like 1 p.m. to 10 p.m. So, before that time is mine, I can do interviews. And Friday, I just focus on podcast. So, I’m doing this interview with you. And it really hit me this power of owning your calendar. I think as long as I was in the 9-to-5 thing, I was at the mercy of the overlords in corporate America where if somebody set up a meeting with me on Friday, then I had to write an email or maybe call in a sick day and I did that but I ran out of excuses like “I have a bad stomach” like how many times you can keep using that.
Traf: Right.
Jayneil: So, I think that was extremely powerful. Did you at any point look at your friends who might be working at Google and Facebook and making bank and kind of like question yourself “Man, I should have gone that track” or maybe whatever it’d been like to join that track?
Traf: Yeah, I had thought about it. Back when we were moving on from Spoil and I was still in Silicon Valley, I had actually taken interviews with Uber and Airbnb and some of those companies. And I could have pursued a few of them if I actually wanted to but I looked back at the first job that I had and I realized a lot would be different but in a way a lot would be the same. When you think about now where you're building products with this goal of freedom, the thing that scares me is the alternative is extremely limiting. So, when you think about taking a career with another company or when you're employed, everything is limited. Your time is limited. Your income is limited. Your output is limited. And most importantly, your independence is limited. And so, you really only have full control over five or maybe six waking hours of every day. And by the time that comes, you don't want to do anything productive with it since you're basically intellectually drained from your day job. And so, to me, that's just not enough. Seeing this how time I find is our most valuable resource because it's one of the things that we can never get back and it's gone forever after it's spent, spending your time on things that buy you more time is always a good use of it, in my opinion.
Jayneil: Wow! That is insanely deep, man. I would have been learning from you. So, at what point did you decide that “Okay, I’ve used Notion. I like what they're doing there. I can build something better on top like Super.” So, how did you come up with the idea for Super
Traf: Yeah, it was a personal need. I had been using Notion for quite some time on internal docs and notes and tasks and things like that. And at one point, I wanted to share something with someone but I didn't want Notion’s logo to be plastered all over it. I didn't want their URL to be hugely long. And I wanted to have my own brand surrounding it in a way. And so, I figured, I want to keep the editing capabilities of Notion but I want sort of a publishing layer on top of that. And so, that's when I started to look around. There were other solutions. They were very hacky. You had to sort of go through Cloudflare workers and go into the code, copy and paste and there was no managed solution. And so, at this point, I had reached out to a developer that I knew. His name is Jason. And I reached out to him. He used Notion as well and he saw the use case right away and we just decided to build it. It took us about a month, maybe a month and a half. We just put it out there and we've been doing a pretty good job ever since properly integrating with the Notion community and the no-code community as well.
Jayneil: And did you have a prior working relationship with Jason because now this is almost like a venture you guys are doing together or was it just like “Well, I’ve worked with him a little bit. Let me just partner with them and see what happens.”
Traf: We did a few projects together, none of them that passed a certain stage. So, most of them were just pre-launched products that we figured would take a little bit too much work since we were both still employed in a way even though we were both self-employed. So, we figured we wanted something to work on that we can put out in a matter of a month. It's not going to take us six months to push out of E1. And so, this was the first thing that we had worked on that was one of those things. And so, we just decided … And I think I found he had created a cryptocurrency wallet back in 2017. And I reached out to him and I said “Listen, man, this is great.” I still love the idea of crypto and I love the idea of building products for cryptocurrencies. And so, I had wanted to build something at that point and I reached out to him saying “You're a developer. I’m a designer. We can build something great together. Let's do it.” So, ever since that time we've stayed in touch but we've never really worked too deeply with each other until Super.
Jayneil: And are you guys co-located right now in the same country or city or different parts of the world?
Traf: No, completely different parts of the world. He is in Israel right now, moving to Colorado.
Jayneil: Wow!
Traf: And I’m in Canada, obviously. So, Israel is a little bit difficult just because of the time zones. We only had really like three hours of real overlap but once he moves, it'll be a lot easier.
Jayneil: And how do you guys communicate? Do you guys just send each other emails or Slack or video calls?
Traf: We're on Slack most of the day and then whenever we have something that's more than just a message worth, we'll just jump on a quick video as well.
Jayneil: Wow! And how did you guys launch? Did you guys have like a crazy marketing strategy for launching Super aside from the product hunt launch?
Traf: We had no plans at all. Neither of us were really marketers in a sense but one thing that I learned from Spoil is that you can hire for a job when you work … and this is why I’m grateful that I went through the sort of startup experiences because you can hire for a job but it'll cost you time and money. Otherwise, you could just figure it out. And so, that's why a startup can sort of act as a skill multiplier. You just wear so many hats, you figure out the marketing, you figure out the product. That's how I learned a lot of mobile app design and website development is all through Spoil. And so, because of that, I just figured we have a product, we just need to figure out how to market it now. So, we just figured it out. Not to say we have everything figured out but I think we've been doing a pretty good job integrating ourselves within growing markets, which I think is crucial to growing your startup like the market you're in will define a whole lot of your success within that market.
Jayneil: So, can you elaborate that? What do you mean by associating yourself with the growing market?
Traf: Yeah. So, one of the biggest ones is the Notion ecosystem. So, Notion is growing like crazy. I think at this point, it’s million users or whatever it is. I could be wrong about that. And so, they're very active on certain communities like Reddit or Indie Hackers and communities like that. And so, if we're posting on communities like that, people are most likely to find us who also use Notion. Product Hunt was a big one too. We had a really successful Product Hunt launch and a lot of product hunters also use Notion. So, in a way, if you use Notion, you're a potential Super customer. And that got us to think a little bit on how we can market this. Another way, another avenue that has been working really well for us is the no-code community. So, we had a collaboration with Makerpad team and they put out great tutorial videos on how to build payment system with Notion and Super on Gumroad, how to build a community-driven business with Circle, how to build membership-focused businesses with Notion and Super and Member Space. And so, we're deeply integrated with a lot of these no-code tools who also have their own following and they're all sharing a lot of content surrounding this who are just driving more and more traffic to Super.
Jayneil: Quick thing about the Product Hunt launch. Did you either deal with trolls when you put it on Product Hunt and they're like “Oh, this should …”
Traf: That's inevitable, right? That's inevitable. If you share anything on the web and it gets to a certain point, you're always going to have them but without them, in a way, you wouldn't have the non-trolls, you wouldn't have the genuine customers. So, you just got to appreciate them. You got to treat them right. You got to make fun of the whole situation. There's always also going to be people complaining about your price. That's always going to be the case but I think I have a tweet that I put out that helps me remember this whole concept but whether you price your product at 5 dollars whether you price it at 5000 dollars, you'll always have people complaining about the price. And so, you just got to keep your head down and keep building and keep selling.
Jayneil: So, you just don't let it affect you personally.
Traf: Not at all. Actually, I tend to enjoy it now.
Jayneil: So, can you share some stats about Super now like how many maybe users you have and how much maybe revenue it's generated? I mean, now it's your main thing but initially, it started more of like a way to kind of build more passive income and buy more time and freedom.
Traf:Yeah, exactly. And so, we're actually just about to cross a thousand paying users which is a nice little milestone. So, our pricing is quite low. Our revenue per user is about 5 bucks because we have like a 4-dollar plan. And so, we're about 5K per month in revenue.
Jayneil: Holy cow! So, that's like bringing in literally 60 000 in just recurring income and growing further.
Traf:Yeah, exactly. The important part is that it's growing. So, our monthly recurring revenue three months from now is going to be at a completely different number, hopefully, if things keep going at the way that they're growing. And we're almost six months old at this point. So, we're still fairly new. And so, now, Jason and I decided that we should take this a little bit more seriously. We incorporated the company. We set up a business and we're getting on more consistent video calls now and just putting more and more effort and work into this because we actually have been spending a lot of time now on customer support. And so, now, I feel the need to buy more and more time that I’m spending on support into the product because, in a way, I have to buy it back because if not, I’m just an employee, I’m just a guy every day who's being held at gunpoint with my customers. Obviously, not that dramatic but, yeah, in a way. So, now, when people ask me how do I prioritize my time, I really just say the things that are demanding your attention, focus on solving their problems either through product or through tutorial videos, whatever it may be so that you can free up your time to work on the business as opposed to in the business.
Jayneil: And maybe that's a sign that maybe now is the right time to even think about hiring a customer support associate instead of just hiring it from the get-go.
Traf:Exactly. And if we were a startup and we had venture funding, that would be so easy to do. You just find someone, you pay them a bunch of money and they solve your temporary problem. The problem is you're not actually solving the problem. You're just finding someone to really cover it up and be there to solve your own problem which is time but you're not solving the product problem. If people are asking questions about the product, it means there's something that we could be doing better on the product side or there's tutorials that we could be creating that act as leverage that can speak for us when we're not available on live chat or email. And so, right now, that's what we're focused on. We're focused on providing solutions to people's most prominent questions either through product innovations and features and through content creation.
Jayneil: Wow! So, basically you're trying to stay bootstrapped as long as possible and really thinking like is this something you can do or is this something that you really need to hire someone that they can only do it.
Traf:Yeah, that's exactly right. We're at a point now where we're making money, not a crazy amount of money but we're profitable and that's what's important to us. And if we do end up taking money, it won't really be for the money. It'll be to have smart passionate people invested in the long-term future of Super.
Jayneil: Wow! So, they may not be your typical VC people. It might just be some of those people who believe [inaudible].
Traf: I would be avoiding those people. There have been people who reach out to me saying that they want to invest, for sure, and I’ve just been saying no.
Jayneil: And when you say no to these people who want to invest in that, is it because you see that profile as more of like a typical VC profile or maybe because they really don't understand the product, they just want to like throw some money at you.
Traf: Yeah, I think that's part of it. I think it's part of like they see something is working and they want to be a part of it as opposed to really being invested of the future of website publishing in regards to Super as brand. So, there are two people that come to mind, I won't name them, but they're founders of successful tech companies, they're well integrated into the tech community. They're really passionate about Super and the future of Notion and Super and website publishing as a whole. And so, people like that, I’m more compelled to say “Okay, I’m happy to take your money” because I know it's really not about money, not for us and not for them. Money is just sort of like a side effect of it all.
Jayneil: But then if let's say Super ends up becoming this boutique business which is like growing and maybe it brings in like a million dollars in revenue every year but now the fact that this person has invested money in it, does it not put a pressure that it’s got to scale even higher and higher to give crazy returns?
Traf: For sure, yeah. And I would make that clear when I’m talking with them. If I’m having someone invest in the business that's going to be requiring investor meetings every two weeks on every Friday saying like “What's the status update” like “How much money are you at? If you're not at 50% growth month over month, I want out” or whatever it is, I’m not interested in partnering with them. So, that's something that I’ll make clear. Obviously, we're all in the same boat in terms of we all want this thing to grow but we also want to make sure we're growing in a way that's controllable and that's scalable and that makes sense within the vision of the product that we're after. And so, I would just do my best at making sure that the investors we have are on board with our vision.
Jayneil: So, you're also not … I mean, obviously, as a founder, you also have hopes that this grows crazy big but you're also letting the market dictate where this needs to be at versus like the previous startup like just put it like “We got to grow it to a billion-dollar startup no matter what.”
Traf: Exactly, yeah. And I think that's one of the things I’ve been learning is that no matter how much you try and shove your product down people's throats, it’s like the market is going to define how big you are in a certain category. You can obviously do your part in terms of like integrating with other products and growing, word of mouth and building a superior product and integrating with products that have already pretty big audience. And so, all of those things will help but if your market is not growing, if Notion as a business wouldn't be growing and as a community wouldn't be growing, then we wouldn't be growing.
Jayneil: Yeah. Now, you have been for a long time obsessed with side projects. So, I know that now you're taking Super more seriously, there's more traction, there's more revenue. What if you come up with another side project? How do you prioritize that like “Oh, you know what? Now, I’m just committed to Super but then I have this other crazy idea on the side as well.”
Traf: Yeah, it's a great question. And I think it's probably going to be increasingly more and more challenging because I love tinkering with new projects. I’m building one right now on the side. And at this point, it's not to say that I’m going to abandon one for the other but still I’m really passionate about bringing simple digital products to life both on the brand side, on the digital design and product side. And so, I think I’ll keep doing that. And so, I really just have to decide how do I want to allocate my time. And like I said, really the biggest thing right now is Super just because it's demanding more and more of my time and attention but once we solve those issues and we build a lot of those into the product, then it'll free up more and more of my time to, like I said, work on the business as opposed to in the business. And so, when I build side projects, the idea isn't to spend a whole lot of time after launch on marketing them. I mostly build products in a way for myself. And so, even if it fails completely, I’m successful because I have at least one customer which is myself. I don't really have a great answer for this either just because I don't know how some of the other projects will do. So, it's hard to say if something I launched next weekend works better than Super has been launched in the last five months, then it's hard to say what direction I’m going to go but if I’m passionate about it, I’ll try and keep both.
Jayneil: I can relate to that train of thought because when I started the design MBA, it just started this year, I launched live on April of 2020 and this has not been a long time, if you really think about it, but I told myself like the biggest thing for me is that even if nobody gives a shit about it, there's no viewers, I am the customer, meaning like I care about learning from you. So, for me, that is what drives me and I say “Screw the vanity metrics.” I mean, they are important in their own sense but for me, just like you said, is this important that I get face face-to-face with people like you that can inspire me to think beyond my horizon and see like there's a different world there.
Traf: Absolutely. Well said.
Jayneil: What does the future roadmap look like, if you can share some of the things you're working on behind the scenes for upcoming releases for Super?
Traf: Yeah, we're really excited about the future of Notion as well as just outside of Notion, just the future of website publishing. When you think about what's the easiest way to get a website out, there are a ton of platforms. There's Hard which is probably the most easiest outside of things like Webflow and Squarespace and Wix and WordPress and all those but I think, with products, there's always an opportunity to make something easier to use and make it simpler and make it nicer. And so, we're really excited about that. Feature wise, we're excited to roll out official integrations to make integrating other software into your Super and Notion website super easy, no pun intended, and themes as well because one the questions that I got most from launching my Icons website is like “How is this done on Notion? It doesn't look like a Notion website.” And the answer is that I added some custom styling, I added my own navigation bar, I customized the look and feel. And so, we're building ways to make this easier for other people to do so that they can customize their websites to make it feel not like a Notion website. And content wise, we're also launching a Super Marketplace for themes and templates. So, for instance, we're building a podcast template which might be perfect for you and the design MBA. And so, we're building these templates in Notion. We're styling them with Super. And once we package them, we're going to be allowing other people to use these really, really easily.
Jayneil: And as a plan, maybe this is a question that you haven't figured out the answer to, maybe it's still a work in progress, is the idea to share those themes as a value add-on for everybody that's a paid subscriber or a paying member for Super or is it going to be like an add-on that they just pay for those themes?
Traf: Yeah, we're still thinking about that. We're thinking about doing it in sort of a way that's in a way a Super marketplace. And so, anyone would be able to upload their own themes and templates and sell them on Super. And so, in a way, when they're marketing their own templates, they're also marketing Super.
Jayneil: I see.
Traf: So, that's one direction we're going but to be discussed.
Jayneil: Got it. What final parting thoughts do you have for designers that maybe have this crazy idea to do their own thing but then they're tempted by the lure of 9-to-5, the stability and the status thing? What would you tell them?
Traf: I think it's important to really sit and think about what it is that you want and what it is that you're after. I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine and she's in that boat and she's happily in that boat. She has a job, she loves doing that job, she likes the people that she works with. And to her, that's comfortable and that works for her and that's great. So, I would say just really understand what it is that you want and what you're after in life. And whatever that is, you could just work backwards. It doesn't have to be a huge thing either. If you have the small idea that you want to bring to life, you don't need to quit your job, you don't need to get some sort of degree, you don't need to go back to school. You really just need an internet connection and some initiative and just put something out there. Some of the biggest products today started as a spreadsheet. And so, really what's the Version 0 or Version 0.01 of your product and think about how can that still provide value to others and just put it out there.
Jayneil: Amazing advice. How can people find you or follow you?
Traf: On Twitter, @Traf. And my personal website where I share all my projects is tr.af,easy to remember.
Jayneil: And one quick question. I am still very like new to the Twitter world. The only reason I had to do that was to just get in touch with you. I mean, I do share that but I noticed that you were very active on Twitter and then your DMs are open. So, don't you get just like random DMs from people like that if you just keep it open for everybody?
Traf: For sure, I do. A lot of the times, I just don't answer them. I think I’m fine with that but I do like the sort of serendipitous factor. If anyone can message you, then maybe one day someone will message you with a cool opportunity that you guys been able to take advantage of like you messaged me and now we're sitting here having a great conversation. So, that was serendipitous in a way and we both profited from it.
Jayneil: Got it. Thank you so much, Traf, for coming on the show.
Traf: My pleasure, man. It's been real.
Jayneil: Absolutely.
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